This is an early version of a ‘collected tale’ selected from Book 4 of the SeaWild.
From that unfathomed deep where lies Thine ancient loveliness and light…
Start thee upon the whirling rings And through the pilgrimage of pain.
~ George William Russell
Thirty-five year old Dr Evelyn R North, assistant physicist on Quantum Instant Entanglement System Communication (QuIESC) for Sci-Now Company, modified the theory to carry both information and matter. The company gave her a raise, unimaginatively renamed the project QuIEST for Quantum Instant Entanglement System Transportation, and immediately began building a prototype outside Sudbury, Ontario.
After six months of further calculations she knew the QuIEST device wouldn’t just be a harmless ‘matter copier’, disassembling matter in one location, recreating it in another. She believed QuIEST would create an unstable hole in space-time. No one would ever get around to pushing matter through the hole because it would be growing unstoppably and exponentially.
Dr North took her new findings to the project leader, who ignored them. Then she took them to the utmost echelons of the company, who fired her. After a few days of moping, she tried to take her story public. A handful of media outlets give her a spot as the humorous disgruntled ex-employee turned vengeful end-of-the-world prophet. No one listens, not really.
At first her friends made light reassuring fun of the topic, after a month they avoided the topic, after two months they avoided her. After three months, her fiancée told her she had a problem admitting she was wrong, but since he didn’t have a problem admitting he was wrong he was leaving her.
Little changed during her next year save moving back to Chicago. After the interviews, no one takes her work seriously and no company will hire her. After nearly fifty meetings and two trial periods, she accepts the only academic position she could get is for Campus Crackpot. Since she knows QuIEST could end the world at any minute, her job search tapers off. She isn’t bitter or vengeful though, she just misses the flow and harmony her work always provided.
She moves back into what she always referred to as “Father’s Most Humble and Devout Hindu Home” where she appreciates her fourth table waiting night job because her father’s an eight-to-five electrician. On the other hand, her once widowed, once divorced, and always pious father stood by his daughter, if only because he’s believed world would end at any minute for years. When she quits the restaurant a week before they turn on the QuIEST device, to prepare herself (almost successfully) for the world’s extinction, her father takes the week off too. And surprisingly, for seven days, they’re both happy.
The first media reports of the explosion and earthquake interrupt daytime talk and reality shows. Speculations range from terrorism and meteors to gas refinery accidents. And the tremors heard around the world aren’t merely seismic: heads of state round the world offer humanitarian aid while simultaneously demanding to know just what the Canadian military is doing.
Some are quick to figure it out; forty-five minutes later reporters outside her father’s house witness a train of agents in black SUVs whisking her away. An hour later in an underground facility she watches the company incident video downloaded from Sci-Now’s cloud servers.
Until now she retained her hopes that the QuIEST hole never formed. The world didn’t end, perhaps something less horrible had gone wrong with the device. But the video confirms her worst fears: thirty-three seconds after switch-on and for a split second before the video cuts out, a black bubble expands and consumes the device from within. Then the feed cuts out, two-point-four seconds later the massive explosion.
The agents already know space and time didn’t exist inside hole, already know matter simply stopped existing at the event horizon. They’ve already appropriated her work, they have engineers, mathematicians, and physicists combing over her theory. What they want to know is what stopped the hole’s expansion – and what caused it to implode.
Yes, implode. The satellite photos don’t lie: the ground under the site is an empty and perfect half sphere nine-point-eight kilometers across. For thirty miles around the implosion zone every building, tree, and shrub are bent backward towards the center.
She stares at the photos, envisioning the hole into nothingness, in three seconds, ten kilometers across, five kilometers deep, and still expanding. Eating roads, buildings, houses –people, the hole stops at nothing. It disassembles the fabric holding matter together, disolves each molecule of tree, every atom of earth.
She shakes herself free of the vision, but in this blink-moment Dr North realizes the answers. She knows why the bubble stopped and imploded and much, much more.
Iris, messenger ‘tween Gods and humanity, in the form of iridium isotope deposits. One of the rarest minerals but it wouldn’t take much to shut down the chain reaction. The calculations spring wholly formed into her mind. Once the expanding edge of the hole met sufficient amounts iridium hidden in the earth underneath the test facility, the field simply collapsed in on itself with mach-speed cataclysmic force.
She’s never been religious or a true believer of anything, but she also knows with absolute certainty the QuIEST device attained with science, math and physics the very enlightenment her father and millions of other souls have constantly pursued since the dawn of humankind. An enlightenment only few select consciousnesses ever attained.
The QuIEST device created a self-perpetuating field piercing and peeling back the Veil of Maya, the illusion of material existence, the illusion of all existence. Behind the veil of the QuIEST field’s event horizon, lay the Truth, the Void, Brahman the transcendent universal spirit, the home of the Gods. The black bubble housed the infinite Being as it entered the universe the way water enters a balloon. And when the iridium caused the QuIEST field to collapse, the implosion forced Brahman back behind the Veil of Maya. Perhaps the field left some trace transcendence behind, but the field was the hole and collapse meant closed.
She also knew these governments, these agencies, wanted to use her answers to create another QuIEST field, a new but stable and controlled hole to the transcendent. They weren’t even sure what they could use it for –transportation, weapons, interstellar travel, or even what would happen to the material things, or people, when they went there, or came back.
And they clearly believed they could invent a way for things to scientifically transcend and come back, to mechanically propel a person’s consciousness into enlightenment and retrieve the results at will. She wasn’t so sure. But the fact these people would use transcendent Brahman if they could told her much.
Inevitably someone was going to figure out about the iridium, figure out why the field stopped and imploded, and likely figure a way to stabilize the QuIEST hole in Maya’s Veil. There wasn’t anything she could do about it. But she could do something about whether they would ever have her answers.
So it was, Evelyn Radha North, modern herder of quantum particles for Brahman, looked up from the satellite photos and watched the agents faces change from excitement to disapproval as they realized all she knew, all she would and would not do. Without another single word, they filed out of the room, back to a waiting shiny black SUV, and they drove her back to her father’s house.