Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 69 - Loop Hole

If Becca managed to step through the wormhole space between two black holes, there was yet another possibility of what might happen. Given Gerard’t Hooft’s holographic principle, which reveals potentially hidden connections in space-time and the nature of the universe itself, she could very well step back into the exact moment she’d triggered the original second black hole.

In other words, if things went exceptionally and very poorly, Becca Watts might not only be responsible for first hurtling the world’s populace back to 1986, but if she tried to rectify this grievous crime against time and space, she may accidentally step out of one black hole and right back into the original one she created in the lab, thereby creating an infinite time loop and endless additional havoc.

Becca had no idea if she’d even be aware if that scenario came to pass. It was possible, she supposed, that in an infinite time loop, she and everyone else might very well be rendered incoherent and neutralized forever as the world kept pulling in on itself for all eternity, looping back and forth in a circle from 1986 to what was once the present, and back again.

The other possibility is that given that she’d be the lone adventurer in this newest plan to step into a wormhole, she would remain fully aware and conscious as she watched herself stuck in the loophole, traversing the exact moment forever.

This horrid conjecture was based solely upon Becca’s limited understanding of Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso’s string-theory interpretations of Hooft’s original principles, which was cobbled from a series of string theories revolving around a property of quantum gravity itself that suggested that a volume of space - a specific place and time, such as the place and time that existed in between the original two black holes that caused this whole mess - were encoded on a boundary to a particular region. In other words, that space and time between those two black holes are forever stuck in that place and time in space and could theoretically be reached again. So, traveling from that space could very well carry a person right smack dab back to that same time and space.

However, given that she had an actual, tangible way of encoding a specific time in the first place, the fact that everyone ended up in 1986 was a wholly randomized outcome. For all Becca could have predicted, they could have ended up in the Stone Age. But then again, it was never Becca’s actual goal to go back in time on that night. It was only her goal to see if the wormhole would be evident, and from there, she’d decide what to do next.

Now, she knew it was possible but never had the chance to plan her next steps.

But if 1986 was somehow encoded in the time and space of the original two black holes that opened up the wormhole, then the question was if the point in time in which she started this whole fiasco was the two-dimensional point on the cosmological horizon where all information was gathered and stored for all eternity or if that point was held in 1986.

If it was the former, there was a chance she and she alone would end up back in the laboratory before any of this mess happened. She could move forward as the only one to remember anything that had happened. This, of course, was the optimal outcome.

But if the latter scenario came to play, she’d most likely destroy the world or be stuck in the time loop forever.

And again, whether she’d be conscious of her then-imprisonment was left to be seen.

“Focus on the best case,” Becca kept whispering as she went back down the caverns as quickly as possible without stomping her feet.

She estimated that the primary warehouse laboratory was now directly two stories above her, with the floor immediately above consisting of the cavernous network of antiquated 1986 data servers and power generator rooms. Another two hundred yards down, the entire length of two complete football fields, at least, was the far end of the office spaces she was now walking past. These spaces were on the lowest level to serve as individual research labs and homes to ENH’s in-house legal and accounting departments and the legion of IT staffers who programmed the homegrown technology that would one day power the underground LHC.

A service elevator and staircase stopped just one floor beneath the ground level at the end of all the offices. For security reasons and the utmost top-secret nature of ENH’s research, there was no access to these lower levels from the ground floor or above. However, from this lowest level, it was possible to access any research levels from either the north or south quadrants.

By navigating from one end to the other from this lowest level, Becca presumed, she’d be able to bypass any other explorers who may have been responsible for snapping the lock at the access gate outside. By avoiding them, she’d exit not into the central warehouse laboratory but into the smaller two-room laboratory where she spent most of her experimental hours, which happened to be the same laboratory where she’d made the second black hole pulse into life.

Photo by Giordano Rossoni on Unsplash