Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 67 - Disorganized

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The calamity that had sent the floors vibrating beneath her feet and the sound of rumbling thunder bursting through the tunnels above subsided as suddenly as it started. Now, the concrete corridor was eerily silent, unsettling. Becca stopped mid-stride, suddenly gripped with apprehension, an unexplainable regret and dread similar to what she’d feel whenever she and Frankie would abruptly end an argument with the slam of a door.

She wasn’t sure what she was doing, making up her plan as she went along, which went against every methodology she followed. Yet, for weeks now, she repeatedly made the same mistake: impulsivity. Impulsivity worked against her. It had no place in her life or that of any reputable scientist.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t capable of being spontaneous. It’s just that her attempts at spontaneity were rife with ramifications. If the last few weeks had proven anything, she was more than capable of switching plans, doing what was needed to propel things forward. That’s what she excelled at. She’d plan and plan, but when plans moved too slowly, often because other people wedged in with their ulterior motives, she formulated adjustments that would accelerate her objectives exponentially.

And when that spontaneity would explode and destroy the world around her like a piece of paper held too close to a flame, she’d deflect blame by avoidance. Avoid Frankie’s phone calls and voicemail messages. Avoid confrontations. Run to Florida. Run back to Chicago.

The problem in her planning was the failure to anticipate the dire need for contingency plans. What was her plan when she made the second black hole appear, which opened the world into the calamity it now operated? Nothing. No plan. But in the following weeks, she’d developed a new plan as she navigated this overly familiar world occupied by a hideously dressed populace clad in what seemed like nothing but pastel-colored clothes and bad haircuts. It was a long shot that the original Becca Watts of 1986 would have riddled with bullet holes while pointing out the myriad flaws.

But it was something, and the desperate Becca Watts from the future was now willing to try anything because, well, honestly, it didn’t matter.

When Frankie threatened - and followed through - with taking their dogs, Frodo and Sam, she knew there was no more waiting if she’d hoped to recalibrate their relationship - their marriage. She pushed things forward. She perhaps went in the wrong direction, but she moved the ball forward. She did it.

When she learned of the black holes appearing in Key West - before they started appearing everywhere else — she moved. She didn’t need to plan. She moved forward, knowing a plan would become evident if she took charge and did what she believed needed to be done.

In this new world, did her marriage even matter anymore? She’d avoided Frankie from the outset of this whole mess, escaping the city the moment she was conscious enough to realize what had happened and leaving without a trace. Upon returning to their apartment earlier that day with Gordon, the missing gun and small wad of emergency cash indicated that Frankie had also absconded.

So why try to fix anything, then? Why be here? Why not slip into some routine somewhere, anonymous, and move on?

Above, again, the sound of another sudden rumbling boom rattled the thick concrete walls, causing the lights that lined the lengthy corridor to momentarily flicker.

Just ahead, she turned right, down a narrow corridor lined with close-set doors, and headed towards the ones at the far end of the hall, across from the restrooms and drinking fountain. Extracting the keys from her purse once more, she opened the door and turned on the lights, all secondhand movements and muscle memory, even though this had not been her office now for many years. But the hours spent in this small square workplace were uncountable — too many to track — the late nights sequestered in this room, the arguments with her colleagues. The arguments over the telephone with Frankie were on the very phone sitting on the front right corner of that wooden desk.

She quickly closed the windowless door and dropped her purse onto the spare chair in the corner before slipping on the white lab coat that hung from a coat rack next to it. All of it was secondhand, but it was so much a part of her, part of her life.

Taking her place behind the messy oak desk, she surveyed the landscape of sticky notes and journals with their tattered and worn edges, filled with messages, theories, and hastily-made calculations she’d scrawled out as cryptic messages to herself decades prior. Most of it was now garbage and proven worthless. Still, amongst the refuse were fragments of truth and usefulness that, over time, led to so much of what she eventually would accomplish.

The walls of the office were blank, lined from corner to corner with three-drawer filing cabinets, most of which were filled with more random notes that she’d shoved into manilla folders before cramming them into the first space found in any one of the cabinets as she told herself that she’d spend time doing proper filing on another date. That she’d get around to it. That she was so close. So close. She was always so close that everything else could be delayed, put on hold until she figured out the next important thing that needed figuring.

But then there was always something else to follow — some other unsolved quandary, some unknown variable in their research.

She now knew the problem —the latest unsolved quandary—was that she’d made too big of a wormhole, and it was obviously too volatile. She’d failed to create a safeguard contingency plan. But really, did she have any other choice but to act as quickly as she did?

Aware now that she was most likely not alone in the building but most likely not to be discovered any time soon, she nevertheless set about working quickly, stacking the notebooks scattered across her desk into a neat pile, looking at the front page of each one for the space in the upper corner where she always wrote the date when she began using that particular book.

Under the rabble of papers, she finally extracted the notebook she’d been searching for. It was a thick hardcover journal with a red spine and black cover. A matching red elastic band held the book shut. Snapping off the band, she nostalgically flipped through the tome, like an alumnus searching through an old yearbook, recognizing handwriting and long-forgotten memos scrawled out in longhand.

The pages were filled with ink-blotted musings and calculations, notes on quantum mechanics and black hole event horizons, the merging of black holes as a process where the actual laws of thermodynamics are upheld, quantum gravity, and the early basic ideas of the holographic principle, which in turn are all tied into early versions of string theory hypotheses.

In this notebook, she wrestled with some of her most significant intellectual challenges, allowing her mind to freely wander and explore theories that the scientific world — and even Becca herself — would ordinarily discount as preposterous. Yet, this free association of thoughts and ideas was directly responsible for most of ENH’s breakthroughs and propelling their research in LHC technologies.

The core ideas she’d scribbled out years before in multi-colored pens - mostly red, black, blue, and purple - were all primarily centered around the potential manipulation of the gravitational core of two or more black holes.

Black holes, of course, were enormous centers of gravitational pull. That’s always the bare-bones way she’d explain it to someone. What goes in doesn’t come out. As she’d earlier proven, what’s important to note is that gravitational pull impacts other — nearly invisible — things, like dust floating in the air around us. Looking into the smudged grease stains of the inside of a fast food bag just weeks before, Becca had realized that what was needed was oppositional gravitational forces - in essence, two separate black holes - to manipulate the space in time between them.

Unfortunately, in addition to manipulating that space in between, she also inadvertently fed the black holes so much energy that they built upon themselves and ended up destroying everything within their place in space.

And now, from Florida to Chicago and everywhere in between, black holes were randomly appearing, drawn to any energy source before seemingly snuffing themselves out for lack of significant kinetic energy, such as was created by the propulsion system provided by the now absent Large Hadron Collider. Now, Becca could use the lack of technology to her benefit.

If she could somehow capture and hold two of these randomly generated black holes in stasis without the particle accelerator generating energy to sustain them - and possibly making them inadvertently grow - she should theoretically capture the space between two of those black holes and generate a space not big enough to swallow the world once again, but just big enough for one person to enter.

Just one.

Given the current volatility of the black holes - of the power surges, sudden appearances, and growing destruction - Becca told herself that whatever would happen after someone entered the randomized space between two isolated black holes certainly couldn’t be any worse than the world she’d had already ruined.

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