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The scientists exchange glances. Dr. T pulls a worn photo out from a bookshelf—Dr. X beside a smiling, freckle-faced woman. It’s the photo I saw on his desk when I did the Internet search for the fire giants and accidentally found Dr. X instead.
“Dr. X’s wife, Mrs. X,” Dr. T explains. “He loved her very much. She inspired his work. He used to say, ‘There is no meaning but what we assign to life, and she is my meaning.’” Dr. T puts her picture back on the shelf. “Lovely woman.”
The scientists all bow their heads.
“So … what happened?”
“Every year for Christmas, she gifted Dr. X with a new snow globe for his collection. He loved snow globes, said they were like little worlds unto themselves. Anyway, it was the week just before Christmas, the first snow of the season. She’d gone downtown to the shop to make her final payment and collect his gift. But …” Dr. T shakes his head sadly.
Dr. O continues. “A bomb exploded. They never found out who did it or why. A random attack. Meaningless. Mrs. X was killed in the explosion. When they found her body, she was still clutching her husband’s Christmas snow globe in one hand.”
Balder removes his helmet. “That is a sad tale indeed.”
“After his wife’s death, Dr. X was a changed man,” Dr. M says with a heavy sigh. “He said what did it matter if we could find the Theory of Everything Plus a Little Bit More, measure gravitrons, or prove evidence of other worlds if we could not stop such suffering in our own—the plague of the unpredictable, the terrible, the futile.”
“He wanted to use the Infinity Collider not to ask questions, but to search for an answer,” Dr. O says softly. “He wanted to search time and space so that he might find a way to stop death.”
“So.” I swallow hard. “What happened to him?”
“Dr. X had a theory that certain musical frequencies could open up portals in the fabric of time and space. Something about the vibrations. He believed that music was in fact its own dimension,” Dr. T explains in that teacher voice of his.
“My friend Eubie would probably agree,” I say.
“One night, he made a few secret tweaks to the Infinity Collider. Only Ed was with him.” He glances at Ed, who’s watching a bag of microwave popcorn expand in the microwave like it’s every bit as fascinating as the Infinity Collider. “According to Ed, Dr. X reconfigured the Calabi Yau into a sort of superspeaker, which he then attached to his radio to amplify the music—”
“It was the Copenhagen Interpretation!” Ed yells from the kitchen where he’s pouring the freshly popped corn into a bowl.
“—and push those musical vibrations into the universe in order to puncture a hole in the fabric of space-time and gain passage. It worked. Within minutes, he was gone. So was the Infinity Collider. We had to build this one from scratch.”
Dr. M sighs. “We haven’t seen or heard from Dr. X since. For all we know, he’s trapped in an alternate universe.”
“When was that?” I ask.
“Eleven years ago,” Dr. A says. “I remember because it was the same night the Copenhagen Interpretation played their Big Benefit Concert for Peace but Against Non-Peace and People Generally Being Not Nice. Great show. I think there was an aurora borealis. That’s what my girlfriend told me.”
“That was also the night they disappeared,” I say.
On TV, Dr. X’s somber face fills the screen. “Why must we die when everything within us was born to live?” He shakes the snow globe of the angel and it blurs with fake snow.
Connections. Dulcie said everything was connected. Maybe if I can duplicate Dr. X’s experiment, I can find that connection.
“Can you send me through to wherever Dr. X went?”
“Depends on whether you’re deterministic or probabilistic.” Dr. O laughs, but no one else does. “That’s a joke,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, it’s possible. A record of his trip might still be imprinted there, like an echo.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Dr. A says. “We’ve never been able to duplicate Dr. X’s experiment. There’s the possibility we could create a small black hole. Or you could enter another world and not come back. You could cycle through worlds indefinitely, like the Flying Dutchman.”
“But if he leaves an XL-gravitron—a sort of ‘parallel-world footprint’—we’d have proof,” Dr. M says, pacing. He lowers his voice. “It could mean funding.”
“Hmmm,” the scientists all say at once.
Gonzo whispers in my ear. “What if that thing pushes you into another reality where you’re a Grade-A wanker with no girlfriend. Oh wait. That would be this reality. Never mind.”
“Fuck off,” I whisper, and Gonzo’s smile widens.
“What’s that?” Dr. A asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
