Dr. Nigel Chase stared through the wide glass picture window into the clean room. The mysterious silver case sat upright on the table, glimmering, reflecting the room’s bright lights. The team from Antarctica had delivered the strange case an hour ago, and Nigel had learned nothing about it so far.
It was time to run some experiments, time to start guessing. He carefully nudged the joystick. The robotic arm inside the clean room jerked wildly, almost knocking the case off the steel table. He would never get the hang of this. It was like that silly contraption at the grocery store where you fed it a quarter and tried to fish out a stuffed animal. That never worked either. He wiped the sweat from his brow and thought for a moment. Maybe he didn’t need to turn the case. He would just use the arm to move the equipment.
“You want me to try?” Harvey, his lab assistant, asked.
Nigel loved his sister Fiona dearly, almost as much as he regretted taking on her son Harvey as his lab assistant. But she wanted Harvey out of the house, and he needed a bloody job for that.
“No, Harvey. Thank you, though. Run get me a Coke Light, would you?”
Fifteen minutes later, Nigel had repositioned the equipment, and Harvey still hadn’t returned with his Coke Light.
Nigel programmed the computer to begin a round of radiation bombardment, then sat back in the chair and stared through the window, waiting for the results.
“They were out of Coke Light. I checked every machine in the building.” Harvey held out a can. “I got you a regular Coke.”
For a second Nigel considered telling Harvey that another light drink would have been the logical course of action, but the boy had made a good effort, and that went a long way. “Thanks, Harvey.”
“Any luck?”
“No,” Nigel said as he cracked the can and sipped the caramel liquid that splashed onto his hand.
The computer beeped, and a dialog filled the screen.
Incoming data.
Nigel set the drink down quickly and leaned in to study the screen. If the readings were correct, the box was emitting neutrinos—a subatomic particle that resulted from radioactive decay and nuclear reactions in the sun and nuclear reactors. How could they be here?
Then the readings flashed red and the neutrino readings slowly ticked down to zero.
“What happened?” Harvey asked.
Nigel was lost in thought. Was the case reacting to the radiation? Was it some kind of signal, like guiding lights flashing in the night? Or an SOS, a proverbial tap-tap-tap with subatomic particles?
Nigel was a nuclear engineer—he focused primarily on nuclear power systems, though he had worked with nuclear warheads a bit in the eighties and on the nuclear power systems on submarines in the nineties. Particle physics was way outside his wheelhouse. A part of him wanted to call in another expert, someone with a background in particle physics, but something made him hesitate.
“Harvey, let’s alter the radiation regimen. Let’s see what the case does.”
An hour later, Nigel finished his third Coke and began pacing the floor. The latest group of particles the box had emitted could be tachyons. Tachyons were theoretical, mostly because they could move faster than light, which isn’t possible according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity. The particles could also conceivably make time travel possible.
“Harvey, let’s try a new regimen.”
Nigel began programming the computer while Harvey manipulated the joystick and the robotic arm. The young man was surprisingly good at it. Maybe video games, and youth in general, are good for something, Nigel thought.
Nigel finished programming the radiation protocol into the computer and watched as the device spun up inside the clean room. Nigel had a theory: Perhaps the case manipulated Chameleon particles—a postulated scalar particle candidate that had a mass that depended on its environment. Chameleon particles would have a small mass in space and large mass in terrestrial environments, making them detectable. If it was true, Nigel could be on the verge of discovering the basis of dark energy and dark matter and even the force behind cosmic inflation.
But Chameleon particles were only half his theory. The other half was that the case was a communications device—that it was simply guiding them, telling them what types of particles it needed to do whatever it was going to do. The case was asking for specific subatomic particles. But why did it need them? Were they “ingredients” to build something, or a combination to unlock it? Nigel believed they had found the key, the radiation regimen the case needed. Maybe it was a sort of Atlantean IQ test, a challenge. It made sense. Math was the language of the universe and subatomic particles were the proverbial writing stone, a kind of cosmic papyrus. What was the box trying to say?
The computer screen lit up. Massive output—neutrinos, quarks, gravitons, and particles that didn’t even register.