Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 9 - In the Bag

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Despite her brilliance, Dr. Becca Watts had unknowingly adopted the erroneous maxim that complex scenarios required the most difficult paths.  As a result, she’d unintentionally delayed greatness in her career due to her propensity for doing things the hard way.

Had she flipped that paradigm years before, she may have come to understand complex scenarios could also be deciphered by the clearest and simplest means.  

Instead, ever since graduate school she was convinced that throughout history, it was hard work and difficult pathways that made possible what was once considered impossible and proved naysayers wrong in the face of undeniable science.  

The world is flat?  

False.

The sun revolves around the earth? 

Ridiculous.  

It’s possible to create a man-made black hole?

You must be insane.

Becca firmly believed that through risk and daring, even the most hard-set facts could break from their foundations.  It had been done before and would be done time and again in the future.  

Fire.  The wheel. Nautical exploration. Transcontinental settlements. Steam trains. Combustion engines. Two brothers taking flight in Kitty Hawk. Men on the moon. Personal computers. Video conferencing and every cat photo ever taken, stored on a device you could slip right into your back pocket.

So why not this? Why not a black hole and all the potential it contained?  

Why not sub-light and intergalactic travel?  Why not reverse time?

She had a fleeting memory of sitting on the beach with Frankie decades before as she presented these same dreams to him all those years ago.   

To the line of questions she always asked, now she had another to add to the list:

Why not the hypothesis that was found that evening at the bottom of a grease-stained paper bag?

Again, because Becca took the hard path.  She expected solutions to require great stretches of time, enormous intellect, and countless failures before they could be discovered.  In both marriage and work, Dr. Becca Watts always took the most difficult path.  It was usually too late before she learned the path she’d taken was the wrong one.

As a result, when she discovered the missing key to unlocking time travel, the last place she expected to find it was at the bottom of a grease-stained McDonald’s bag.

It was the grease stains themselves that suddenly made everything perfectly clear. After decades of searching, and hours lost in laboratories, the solution was discovered not under a microscope, but covered by a stack of napkins and ketchup packets. 

The problem for Becca was that the solution was too simple, and yet — undeniably — there it was.

After decades of elusiveness, the answer was evident so suddenly that to doubt it would be idiotic.  

“I’m an idiot,” she said to herself as if to confirm what was in her head. 

Still, in disbelief, she continued staring into the fast food bag that Sam and Drake had delivered to her office just minutes after Frankie had hung up on her.

Inside the bag, she saw a singularity, a place in the universe where the laws of physics simply break down.  This particular singularity was in the form of a lone french fry, which, by merely touching two opposite sides of the sack, allowed its particles to change the very structure of the bag itself.  

Grease, salt, hydrogen, oxygen, minuscule levels of gaseous material.  

On each spot where the fry came into contact with the bag, not only on both sides where it currently touched but also in every space where the fry had rolled back and forth in an unpredictable trajectory on its way from the restaurant to her office, it created new singularities born from the original.  New grease stains. In other words, the singularity created a plurality. 

The key was that even after the singularity - the fry - was removed, the grease stains, if they connected to other matter, would continue to taint the inside of the bag, creating other grease stains.  Other singularities. 

All it took was a single catalyst — that first fry — to create multiple singularities. 

After more than four decades of searching, that was the realization that changed everything, courtesy of a stupid cold slice of potato. 

Similarly, in regards to transtemporal experimentation, even if a black hole no longer existed or simply couldn’t be found, any wormholes and other effects of any such black holes would still exist and even potentially promulgate each other, just like grease stains that formed other grease stains inside the bag. 

Becca suddenly realized that within the confines of that bag, the grease stains already moved within an unexplored microscopic world.  Inside the bag, that lone french fry touched two opposite sides of the bag at the same time. 

In this case, the two ends of that single french fry created individual singularities in the form of grease stains on the opposing sides of the bag.  Furthermore, the points where those two grease stains had started as simple points of contact, expanded and grew into much larger stains, each of which then had the further potential to touch other parts of the bag and create even more new singularities.  

The fry created the two stains.  But developing a wormhole requires not one black hole, but two.  

In plain terms: through their experimental Large Hadron Collider, one of the primary goals of ENH’s leadership was to generate what was essentially a microscopic black hole.  

At that moment, looking into the bag, Becca believed she finally knew how to do that.

But with that realization came an even more surprising understanding.  If she created not just one black hole, but another, with the second black hole having a reverse rotation from the first, then Becca believed that the two would pull and expand whatever singularities — whatever invisible french fries — were floating between them within a fixed place in time.  Once the black holes were pulled away from each other as they spun opposite gravitational orbits, theoretically the original singularity would expand, thereby exposing not only the wormhole but both ends of the wormhole that existed within two different points in time.  In other words, Becca could travel in time. 

She knew this was risky, and she knew exactly the people at ENH who would resist even considering such a tempestuous experiment. She also knew that the only way to make her new discovery a reality was to tackle that challenge head-on. 

She looked at her watch.  It was ten o’clock at night.  She quickly typed out two memos, one announcing an emergency meeting first thing the next morning, the next sending home the staff currently on hand.  She waited thirty minutes for the building to clear and headed to the elevator that would take her to the warehouse laboratory ten levels below ground. 

Within twenty-four hours, Becca believed, everything would change.

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The next morning she was standing at a podium before an all-hands employee meeting.  Behind her was an enormous placard with the ENH Initiative logo emblazoned upon it like a giant tacky billboard.

“My friends,” she said, her voice echoing through the room. “We’ve had a breakthrough.”

She paused to take in the incredulous looks from her colleagues throughout the conference room.

“As you all know,” she began and then stopped a moment.  She cleared her throat and took a quick sip of water before starting again. 

“As you all know,” she repeated,  “this has been a major component of our work here from the outset before many of you were even born.  Stephen Hawking once announced early in his career his own hypothesis that black holes are not entirely black, not entirely consuming, and that minuscule and nearly imperceptible levels of radiation could potentially escape a black hole’s gravitational pull, thereby creating what came to be known as the information paradox. Since the formation of ENH, this theory has been foundational in our research. It’s the very premise on which we’ve built a mountain of scientific theory.”

In the audience, Dr. Sam Hollander pretended to scrawl notes on the small pad he held in his hand.  In reality, he never took his eyes off Dr. Becca Watts.

“The problem is that until now,” Becca continued, “We’ve been unable to replicate a black hole within a laboratory so as to challenge and test Hawking’s theories.”

Throughout the room, a murmur sifted among those gathered like a steadily growing wind.  

“And so our assumptions prior had stayed exactly that. Assumptions. But in the last five years, many of our assumptions have become facts.  And that culmination of facts brings us to the next and most important step in our evolutionary development of quantum mechanics.”

In the crowd, Sam and Drake turned to each other with quizzical looks on their faces.  Tabitha continued to stare straight ahead. 

“As you know,” Becca continued.  “using exact temperature controls over a collection of rubidium atoms so as to force them to act as a unified and liquid-like quantum object, ENH has developed methodologies using laser light to exact specific control over the speed of the atoms.  This alone, as I’ve no need to tell you, has been of significant scientific importance.”

Of all the illusive quandaries about which Becca and her competitors within the scientific community set their focus, the penultimate of unanswered questions was whether information, encoded within radiation, would disappear forever once it slipped into a black hole, never to be seen again. 

Heads nodded in affirmation throughout the room.  Most of humanity found greater fascination within pop culture crossword puzzles on the back page of gossip magazines and couldn’t care less about controlling atoms at this level.

But Becca and her colleagues understood that such control provided the potential for more knowledge and power that could then be extracted and extrapolated into other previously insurmountable scientific discoveries. 

“So what is the breakthrough we’ve had?” Becca asked.  “Given the long-term and stabilized level of control we’ve managed to exert over these atoms, last night I discovered that by exerting enough force upon them, they’ll reverse upon themselves.”

Becca paused and looked out upon the room.  No one moved.

“In other words, last night ENH Industries created the first ever laboratory-generated black hole.”

Another gasp shot through the room, followed by rousing applause.  Sam and Drake bolted from their seats.  Dr. Tabitha Small remained silent in her chair and rested her forehead in the palm of her hand.

The scientists present yelled questions at her.

“How long did it last?”

“How big was it?”

“Is it reproducible?”

“It was roughly the size of a dime,” she said into the microphone, and the room hushed as she provided additional details.  “I managed to successfully maintain that size and could harness its gravitational properties.”

“How so?”

“Like magnets,” Becca said.  With this, Tabitha looked up again.  “It has a force very much like magnets.  Anything that was not attached in the room was drawn to it, but the advancements we’ve made in atom control allowed me to either increase or decrease the gravitational pull.  We still need to run time trials, but I was able to maintain a uniform black hole at a steady level of gravity for a full hour before I discontinued the experiment and called for this meeting.” 

Becca stared down at her notes and took a breath.

“But to what avail?” she finally continued. “Hyper-speed interstellar travel? Certainly. But is that it? Of course, it would lead to the miracle of actual galactic exploration and development, as was the founding mission of ENH.  But to what end?  While we’ve managed to now generate black hole conditions within a laboratory, and some level of control over the gravitational pull itself, we have yet to fabricate any sort of exotic material capable of sustaining itself within the gravitational pull of the black hole itself.  Until we have that, any sort of wormhole transference is improbable, if not entirely impossible. In other words, we’ve made the hole but cannot go through it.  In other words, until we manage that, of finding a way of actually sending something safely into the black hole, then our creation of a black hole is nothing more than a parlor trick.  And now that the trick has been accomplished, it’s only a matter of time until our competitors find out and we have yet another race on our hands.”

Again, a hush fell over the room.  

“So here’s the challenge: Everyone goes home for twenty-four hours.  If we don’t act now and act quickly, it’s only a matter of time before this tremendous headstart evaporates.  The time for action is now.  So tomorrow we begin twelve-hour shifts by teams, eight to eight, seven days a week, at least for the foreseeable future.”  

Near the back of the room, Dr. Tabitha Small scowled as she felt words form in her belly and come involuntarily up her throat.

“Where are you going with this?” Tabitha shouted out from the crowd.  Her cheeks and ears reddened the second that she spoke.

“Excuse me?” Becca asked.

Tabitha rose from her seat.  

“We’ve worked for years to get to this point.  I understand competition, but this sudden rush seems unplanned.”

Becca cleared her throat.  

“Well, here’s the truth,” she said. “It’s not just about the competition.  It’s the volatility of what we’ve discovered.  So why the urgency?  While this is a breakthrough, we’re still dealing with dangerous matter more powerful than anything known to man.  Twelve-hour shifts will not only give us focus, but the stability we’ll need for on-hand teams.  Less disruption lends itself to less room for error.  There’s a difference between rushing and urgency.  This is a critically urgent time for us all and for the world.”

“It’s not that simple,” Tabitha said.  Her face felt like it was on fire.

“Of course, it’s not,” Becca said from the podium.  “But anyone — any group —  who found themselves on the cusp of changing history has never been faced by the challenges that lay before us right now.”

Tabitha slunk into her seat as Becca walked off the stage and out of the room.  

Tomorrow she knew she’d face Becca’s reprisals.  But for now, even though it wasn’t even ten in the morning, Dr. Tabitha Small — who rarely even kept a bottle of wine on hand at home — suddenly felt in need of a drink. 

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