Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 79 - Buttons

Photo by Herbert Goetsch on Unsplash

Everything always seemed to come down to merely flipping a switch, simple and unassuming, nothing more than simply pressing a magical red button that set everything into action.

The countdown to launching a nuclear weapon.

Lighting a stick of dynamite.

Generating a black hole.

Of course, countless hours preceded these events: the calculations and hypotheses, eliminating obstacles and errant paths mired with loose ends and unknown factors. It took three solid years alone just to replicate the Casimir vacuum based on Miguel Alcubierre’s configurable energy-density field theories, and that was only a minuscule part of the overarching technological triumphs that had been accomplished in this very room.

Before merely pressing a button, everything else had to be figured out. All scenarios had to be accounted for. Contingencies upon contingencies must be mapped, planned, and prepared for execution. Safeguards and fail-safes needed to be put into place — these last were most often ignored, as had been the case when Becca initiated that second black hole. All that would be left to do was flip that switch and let everything fall into a scientifically predictable place.

By the time she reached that point, it was no more complicated than cooking a potato in a microwave oven.

Yet here and now, she was dealing with more chaos theory than known and proven pathways. The technology she needed - and had once already used — was now years away, as yet uninvented. And with black holes appearing seemingly at random, making calculated operational plans depended more on the vagaries of luck than knowledge and scenarios that could be repeated and replicated with exact results.

But the one commonality she could decipher was that all the black hole anomalies were somehow attracted and found their original form through an influx of electrical current. And it had to be an influx, more than just the standard lighting of a room like where she now stood. How much more was still to be determined. She could understand how lightning over the Gulf of Mexico, storms brewing near Lake Michigan, or even as little as a sudden surge from certain electrical appliances could generate the needed energy. She’d heard the tales of sudden black holes swallowing people whole while watching television repeated from gas station attendants as she and Gordon had trekked there from Florida.

Gordon.

She thought of him in a flicker of memory that she extinguished from her mind as if snuffing out a match. He was now lying, hurt, in the stairwell above her, but he’d be fine once she did this, like a reset button. The same with Frankie. Maybe she’d even be able to see their dogs again, Sam and Frodo. She was so close.

Through the glass observatory window that peered into the larger laboratory space, she gazed upon multiple electric instruments—the large-scale spectrometer at least ten meters in diameter, the atom trap trace analysis system, and more. To operate all this equipment, a minimum of 6.1 kilowatt hours of electricity were required, at least double the amount of electricity it took simply to light the room over a twenty-four-hour period.

In this lab alone, there were more than enough conveyances to generate the electrical surge that Becca hypothesized would attract an anomaly. Even in the infancy of ENH, it was known that their first significant challenge would be harnessing enough electricity to eventually power an LHC, even if the Large Hadron Collider was still years from being realized. The entire room was an electrical current now laid dormant.

All it needed was the press of a button.

Becca stared through the glass and mentally mapped out her steps, so much of it admittedly hypothetical and relying on more chance than she was anywhere near comfortable. But again, she told herself, the plan was surprisingly simple. She’d switch on as much equipment as possible and walk through the shielded lead door separating the smaller workshop room from the primary laboratory space. Assuming her theory was correct, via the string theory principle of time and space being held in stasis at a confined point in that same time and space, she’d hopefully either find herself back where she started at the moment before the second black hole appeared in this very spot or she’d disappear forever. This all depended on a black hole anomaly appearing — and she was banking everything on the fact it would.

While the second option of being snuffed out of existence was admittedly not her preferred course, she was more than prepared to accept that outcome. She took comfort in the fact that — considering she would fail to exist still — she would not have to find peace with her failures as, instead, she would have been sucked into an eternal space of nothingness.

Below the glass facing into the larger experimental laboratory room was a plain-faced control panel laid upon an unprofessionally cobbled together linoleum countertop, no more than a fancied up makeshift card table that had once been appropriated and dragged into the room and then not replaced for several years when the legs finally gave out. Atop the table was a series of switches, each marked with masking tape and hastily scrawled black letters scribbled out in the sloppy handwriting of various astrophysicists. Even now, she recognized the handwriting of many colleagues who had begrudgingly worked alongside her. James Harbash’s handwriting was thin and jagged with letters that leaned far leftward. Her handwriting, messy and rushed, was pressed down upon two pieces of slapped-on tape. She also recognized Francis McCumber’s slant print style and Robert Jacobs’s jittery characters. And there was Dr. Tabitha Small’s exact, precise print, much like her architect husband’s. A few other printed labels with handwriting she didn’t quite recognize stuck on tape underneath switches and knobs.

There were over a dozen of them, at least, lined up in a row and hastily attached to a long wooden panel board with black-tipped screws, frequently not even drilled in thoroughly, just enough to keep the switches in place.

No safeties were in place, but none were needed among her peers. They were a typically cautious lot, methodical and calculating. Mistakes were rarely made, even if some of their handiwork appeared slipshod. Before a switch was ever flipped, the scientists usually would hover nearby in clusters, agonizing over mental and written checklists before, as a collective group, they’d agree to press a button. It always infuriated Becca how long it took to get her peers to initiate a simple experiment.

If they were here now, they’d be talking incessantly. How was this right, and that was wrong? And what if, instead of this, we implemented that? Their chitterchatter over-analysis and talking.

Becca closed her eyes and sucked in a slow breath through her nose. She exhaled slowly, snuffing them all from her mind, like blowing out a candle.

Opening her eyes again, she reached forward and began to flick the switches one by one.