Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 56 - Foundation

Photo by David East on Unsplash

“Good grief,” Tony said, peering into the seemingly unending darkness.  “How long does this whole thing go, anyway?”

“We’ve cordoned off twenty miles,” James said. “And still, there are tunnels off to the sides both above and below that we’ve sanctioned for power supplies, generators, and whatnot — the less interesting stuff. Then there’s the main control room above us, too, of course.”

“So this is it,” Frankie said, slowly rubbing a hand down the length of a long metal pipe, at least four feet in diameter, all bolts and rubber gasket seals and bright blue paint, curving down the center of the endless cavern and draped on the far right side with several smaller lengths of piping bolted to the rounded wall.  “I’ll admit, given what I know about this thing, that I’m still surprised it’s quite as big as it is now that I see it.”

“But it doesn’t work now?” Tony asked.

“No,” James said.  “At this point, we were still a few years off.”

“The first public test of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider wasn’t until 2008,” Tabitha said.  “That was at the facility in Geneva.  Our first test here wasn’t for a few years more.”

“2008?” Olivia said.  “That’s when my twins were born.”

“How could you hide something this huge without anyone knowing?” Tony asked.  “How’d you even build the tunnel?”

“That’s the clever thing,” Frankie said.  “I’ve built skyscrapers all through this city, and any architect worth his salt knows that ignoring the fact that Chicago has an unseen infrastructure under the streets is to do so at your peril.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” Olivia asked.

“Just under the Loop itself, there are at least six different sets of tunnels,” Frankie said.  

“Maybe more,” Tabitha added.

“Most people walking upstairs think they’re just traipsing above a single tube that runs from their toilet to the ocean,” Frankie said.  “Some tunnels aren’t even in use, just old remnants of ancient architecture.  Forgotten curiosities from a forgotten history.  But every time a new building goes up and towers over the Windy City, it’s built upon a maze of tunnels that the builders are best to remember, or it’ll all collapse down on their heads.”

“Why’d they even build the tunnels, then?” Tony asked.

“Different things,” Frankie said.  “Abandoned subway projects, which eventually gave way to the L trains.  Freight tunnels that run for sixty miles are buried more than forty feet underground.  Water tunnels.  Another is a pedestrian walkway that connects over fifty office buildings in the Loop.”

“That’s the second time you said that,” Olivia said.  “The Loop.”

“The central business district,” Tony explained. “Downtown Chicago.  All the restaurants and high-rises and whatnot.  It used to be for the loop cable cars that ran around the city back in the 1800s.”

Olivia shuddered, and an ominous chill swept over her entire body.  

“Thank God this thing didn’t zap us back to then,” she said.

“If only people alive in 1986 made it back,” Tabitha said, “none of us would be here right now if it did.”  

Olivia shuddered again as she thought of her children, saw their faces, and heard their voices.

“I still don’t understand why anyone would want to make something to cause all of this in the first place,” Olivia said, an edge of anger brimming just below the surface, memories of what had been lost intermixed with the overwhelming cauldron of sixteen-year-old raging estrogen.

“Scientific advancement,” Tabitha said plainly as if that justified everything and explained away the fact that the world had been tossed into a blender and spat back out, confused and off-kilter, tilted and wrong.

“That’s not much of an answer,” Tony said.  “Care to elaborate?”

Tabitha scoffed, annoyed, which made Frankie chuckle amusedly.

“If a comet headed our way,” Tabitha said, “knowing what it was made of, if it could be deflected perhaps, that would all be good, wouldn’t you agree?”

“A comet?” Olivia asked, aware of the disbelief in her voice. It was ironic given the preposterousness of their current situation, with randomly generated black holes popping up over Lake Michigan and who knew where else.  If that could happen, why not a comet?

“That’s just one example,” James interjected.  “Our colleagues in Geneva eventually used their Large Hadron Collider to discover something called the Higgs boson.”

“So what?” Tony said.

“The Higgs boson is now part of the Standard Model of physics,” Tabitha said, again expecting her answer, void of detail, to supplicate the non-physicists amongst them.

“And then there’s the potential discovery of dark matter and the potential use of that technology for transgalactic travel,” James said.

“I suppose to scientists, this is meaningful,” Tony said.

“It was to my wife,” Frankie said. “She gushed like a prom queen when they did it and was as jealous as the runner-up.”

“That wasn’t just winning some beauty pageant,” Tabitha said, still annoyed.  “The Higgs boson discovery proved the existence of an invisible process that gives all other particles substance.  That gives them mass.  It’s at the core of everything.”

“But at what cost?” Olivia asked.  “I mean, look at you.  You’re a little girl now.  What were you before?  Fifty?”

“Yes,” Tabitha said and sheepishly smoothed out the creases of her dress.

“And this is worth it?” Olivia asked.  “The world turned upside down?”

“This isn’t what we intended to do,” James said defensively. 

“This was all Becca,” Frankie said and looked at Tabitha. Her cheeks, ears, and neck were now a blazing pink.  “Wasn’t it?”

Tabitha and James averted their eyes as they stared down into the endlessness of the tunnel, down the smooth concrete walls and the trail of orange lights that lined the edges near the curved ceiling.

“Becca always knew the potential,” Frankie continued. “It wasn’t just the light-speed travel or the search for what holds everything together.  She wanted it under her control.  It wasn’t enough to make history.  She wanted to change it.”

“So that’s it, then,” Tony said.  “This is the thing that made this whole time jump happen?” Tony asked.

“Well, this is just the tunnel where the particles themselves are smashed together at near-light speed,” Tabitha clarified.  “So this is only part of what made it possible.”

“The rest is down there,” James said, flicking a switch on the wall. A loud hum emanated from within the large blue pipe running down the entire length of the tunnel. “Follow me.”

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash