Section F: Fairy Tales & Physicists

Interlude

"Where's the ceiling?"

Hair awry, spectacles askew, the lab coat-clad man drifted out from under a desk.

"And what the hell's happened to the gravity?"

The woman to whom he'd addressed the question turned from the computer console at which she sat. Or at least, the console to which she'd tied herself with a couple of power cables.

"So, you're not dead."

The dazed man blinked. "Dead? Suma, why would I be...? Wait. Did it go wrong?"

"Wrong?" The woman snorted. "Wrong? Tom, you're floating." She glanced upwards. "And if you look beyond the aforementioned absence of a ceiling—not to mention most of the walls—you'll notice the accompanying absence of a sky. And of everything else, for that matter."

Tom looked. He kept looking, as his visual cortex attempted to process the information with which his eyes presented it. Grey. That was the closest he could come to describing the...the...whatever it was that enveloped the section of lab of which he and Suma appeared to be the only remaining occupants. Grey, but only in so much as grey was the lack of colour. Even that didn't come close. What he saw was the lack of anything. The absence of even an absence. Void squared. Nothing to the power of nothing. And rather than feeling open or vast or expansive, as you might expect such a...dearth to feel, the nothing instead seemed to press in and down and around with claustrophobic menace.

"Whoa," he breathed. "What happened?"

Suma pointed to the console's screen. "Seems like we had a containment breach."

"What? But that's not possible."

She gave him a humourless smile. "Really? Our situation would tend to suggest otherwise. Don't forget, Tom, we were dealing with a singularity. The usual laws of physics—of what's possible—don't really apply."

"I guess." Trying to keep his gaze fixed on the floor, on Suma, on something solid—anything other than their silent, oppressive surrounds—Tom pulled himself alongside his colleague. "So, what exactly is our situation?"

Sighing, Suma ran a hand through her dark hair. "As far as I can tell from the telemetry and the sensors still working—we built in local backup batteries as a security redundancy, but they're fading fast—we're in a bubble of spacetime somehow...torn away in the blast unleashed by the breach."

Tom nodded "Right. Um." The nodding slowed. "Torn away from what?"

"Oh, that's simple. The universe. Reality. Existence. Take your pick. Basically—everything."

"But...but that means...we're..." He shook his head. "I don't understand. We were so careful. It was all going so well. How did this happen?"

"I just don't know," replied Suma. "Briggs was getting some great stuff on inflation, Wang's data was blowing the whole baryogenesis thing wide open and my readings on nucleosynthesis were simply astonishing. I heard Dubois report everything as being on track, someone started bitching about needing another coffee and then...well, here we are."

"Yeah. Here we are." Tom sat in silence for a few seconds, then risked a glance up at the abyss. "How long do you think we've got?"

Suma's laugh was hollow. "Here? Why, forever, of course. Because there's quite literally nowhere else for us to go." She took in the look on Tom's face. "Oh, you mean how long do we have to live? Well, until the air runs out, I suppose."

"Yeah, I guess so." He frowned. "Actually, why do we even have any air? Shouldn't it have all escaped to...to..."—he pointed upwards—"out there?"

"Tom, you're a scientist—think about it. There is no 'out there' for the air to escape to. We're not surrounded by vacuum or empty space. We're surrounded by nothing. Quite literally nothing. By the absence of everything the big bang brought into existence. Time, space, the whole shebang. For you and I—and every molecule in here—the universe is now this room. Or what's left of it."

"But...but...can't we somehow get back? To our universe? Our old one, I mean. Surely we have to try."

She turned and have his shoulder a gentle squeeze. "It's gone, Tom. Can't you see that's what all this means? Our universe is gone. We destroyed it. We played at being gods and it came back to bite us on the arse."

He stared at her. "So, that's it? There's nothing to do? No hope? We just sit here and wait to die?"

She removed her hand and looked away. "Actually, no."

"No?"

"No, Tom. I thought of another way."

"Another way? Another way to do what? What are you talking about, Suma?"

She kept her eyes fixed on the console's display. "I'm sorry, Tom. I don't know if this is better, but I had to decide while there was still enough power. I...I thought you were dead. I would have asked you, if only I had known. I'm sorry."

"Sorry about what? Suma, what have you done?"

"Played at being a god again." She gave him a crooked smile. "Slow learner, huh?"

"Suma," he implored.

"The thing is, Tom, it doesn't take so much to play at being a god when your entire dominion consists of half a worse-for-wear science lab. Just a few keystrokes. The recalibration of a containment field. The tweaking of the matter-antimatter ratio. The activation of the tachyon generator."

He grasped her arm. "But what does all that mean?"

"What it means, Tom, is that I did the only thing I could think of to keep me—us, now—alive in a universe with no food, no water and rapidly diminishing oxygen."

"Which is?"

"I created a time-loop, Tom."

"A what?"

"A time—"

****

"Where's the ceiling?"

Hair awry, spectacles askew, the lab coat-clad man drifted out from under a desk...