Oracle (9 page)

Jade
’s first breath
burned in her lungs like acid. It seemed as if the oxygen in the air had been used up, replaced by some poisonous vapor, but her body demanded that she inhale. She coughed, feeling grit in her mouth and throat, and tried again with only marginally more success.

She sat up and straightened her headlamp, which miraculously had survived the blast. She saw Dorion and Professor—the latter was already on his feet and climbing up to look through the
hole leading back to the cavern. Jade shuddered as the image of Noe Sanchez, sucked through that hole and into the heart of the firestorm, came unbidden into her mind.

“
What the
hell
was that?”

“A bunker buster,” snarled Professor without looking back. “A fuel-air explosive. Military grade. When I get my hands on Hodges…” He faltered, unable to conceive an act of retribution sufficient to balance the scales. “Are you okay?”

“
Hard to breathe.”

“
It’ll pass.” He slid down to join her. “The bomb burned most of the oxygen in the cavern, but the resulting vacuum sucked fresh air, relatively speaking, up from this tunnel. That’s good news at least. It probably means there’s a way out.”

He sighed, looking defeated.
“Jade, I’m sorry. I didn’t see this coming.”

She stared back at him, wondering if she had any right to be angry with him.
“Forget it,” she said, hoping it didn’t sound as insincere as it felt. She coughed and tried again. “If it hadn’t been Hodges, it probably would have been someone else. You saved us.”

“
Not all of us,” he muttered.

Jade turned away and knelt to rouse Dorion. The physicist was awake, but had a wide-eyed, shell
-shocked expression, and Jade thought it best to use a light touch. “Paul, we have to keep moving, okay?”

Dorion looked past her as if unable to focus, but nodded.

Jade turned her light into the depths of the tunnel ahead. The walls were rough, cut from the surrounding igneous rock, much like the tunnel that had led from the surface into the first chamber beneath the pyramid, but broader, more open. There was evidence of further collapse along the length of the tunnel, but nothing of the same scale as what had blocked the opening. As they advanced, Jade tried to imagine the ancients rolling the enormous golden sphere through the passage to its final destination, and then wondered if there was anything left of it now.

She wanted to ask Dorion about the spheres and dark matter, and how he seemed to know about her prescient vision, but he seemed in no state of mind to answer such questions. She turned instead to Professor.
“What I don’t get is this: if Hodges is working with the Dominion, why destroy the spheres? That’s not their style.”

Professor pondered this for a moment.
“Someone else then? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“
Wonderful.”

“
Well, at least now we
don’t have to worry about the Dominion using those spheres to power some new apocalyptic weapon.”

“
Look at you, finding the silver lining.” She meant it to be playful, but in her own ears, it sounded sarcastic, so she quickly added. “Except of course that there’s still one out there.”

He gave her a sidelong glance.
“What do you mean?”

“
The Moon stone.”

“
We don’t even know that there was a Moon stone.”

“
What happened to Mr. Sunny Optimism?”

He gave her quizzical glance.
“Why on earth would you want there to be another one of those things out there?”

The question caught her off guard only because she thought Professor knew her better.
“Because if it’s out there, I want to find it.”

“
I repeat, why on earth, et cetera?”

She shook her head.
“Because it’s there.” Even as she said it, she knew that was not the whole answer. “And because I need to know if what happened back there really happened. I need to know that I’m not going crazy.”

“
You are not going crazy,” said Dorion, breaking his long silence. “It really happened. I know because it happened to me.”

As they kept
moving forward through the serpentine tunnel, their way lit only by Jade’s headlamp since it seemed prudent to conserve the batteries in the others, Dorion related his story of a strange day at CERN. Both Jade and Professor listened without comment as the physicist told of the strange premonition of his co-worker’s death in a climbing accident.

“
The memory of attending her funeral, of knowing that she was dead, was so intense that I could not dismiss it as a coincidental dream,” he said. “I do not believe in psychic abilities, much less a deterministic universe where the future is already written, but I was at a loss to explain it any other way.

“
Then it occurred to me to consider the circumstances surrounding the event. It had happened inside the CMS—the Compact Muon Solenoid—which I helped design and which had only just been powered down after months of operation in which thousands of high speed particle collisions had been observed. Our experiments were, quite literally, recreating the Big Bang on a very small scale. The detectors were looking for very specific particles, but it stands to reason that other particles, similar to those that came into existence at the moment the universe began, might also have been produced.”

“
Like dark matter?” suggested Professor.

“
Exactamente
,” replied Dorion, slipping into his native tongue.

“
When we first met,” Jade said, “you said that you had seen me before. This happened years ago. So, you weren’t just limited to a peek at the near future. How does this work exactly?”

“
You must understand that, for a physicist, there is no such thing as ‘the future.’ Einstein said, ‘People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Time is often referred to as a
fourth dimension
because everything in the universe takes place not only in a physical location, but also a temporal one. We believe the earth is fixed in its orbit and every year comes back around to where it was the year before. However, during that year, the entire solar system has moved many thousands of kilometers as the spiral arm of the Milky Way orbits around the galactic core, and the entire galaxy itself moves an even greater distance as the universe continues to expand.

“
If it were possible to travel backward in time, we would not only have to move to a different temporal location, but also travel to a different physical location, light years from where we are at present.”

“
I don’t think that was the point Einstein was trying to make,” countered Professor.

Dorion nodded.
“You are correct. I merely point that out as a way of showing how facile the belief in time travel really is. But a common theme of time travel stories is the notion that, if it were possible to travel in time, we might effect a change that would alter history. Even a minor change, such as stepping on an insect, might have catastrophic consequences.

“
Since the advent of quantum mechanics, most physicists have come to believe in the existence of what has been termed the
multiverse hypothesis
in which all possible permutations of reality exist as parallel universes. In such a scenario, our time traveler would not return to a changed present, but rather enter an alternative universe.”

“
I believe another variation of that hypothesis suggests that those parallel universes exist as probabilities, and cease to exist based on what we observe. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, where two equally possible universes exist until we open the box and find out whether the cat is alive or dead, at which point one of those universes vanishes.”

“
Does it? Or are we limited by our ability to perceive only one universe?”

Jade felt a little lost by the discussion.
“What’s this got to do with dark matter?”

“
Ah, forgive me. I shall try to explain. As I said earlier, physicists believe that time, as we understand it, is an illusion. Einstein proved this. We all perceive the passage of time as a constant because we are all traveling through space-time at the same constant velocity, but if we could travel faster, we would perceive time passing more slowly. The equation of space-time, and of matter and energy, must balance.”

“
You’re losing me again.”

“
He’s talking about black holes,” intoned Professor. “At the event horizon of a black hole, the gravitational energy is so strong that time would appear to stand still.”

“
Yes, and if it were possible to survive the journey through a black hole, we would find ourselves in a different universe, a different permutation of reality. However, black holes are an extreme example. Recent experiments have demonstrated that the farther you move away from the earth’s center of gravity, time passes slower. Believe it or not, your head is aging slower than your feet. You are moving faster in space-time—the difference is measured in nanoseconds—the closer you get to the center of the earth. Any object with sufficient mass may cause local relativistic space-time effects.

“
Following the…ah, episode in the CMS, it occurred to me that perhaps I had inadvertently interacted with a deposit of dark matter created by our experiments with the Large Hadron Collider. The super dense WIMPs altered my perception of space-time just enough that, for a few moments, I experienced an alternate universe, and at an accelerated rate, so that I quite literally saw the future.”

Jade glanced at Professor. If anyone could understand what Dorion was saying and offer a rational rebuttal, it was he, but Professor was listening with rapt attention and not a trace of skepticism. She turned back to Dorion.
“And did you?”

“
Not exactly. Lauren went climbing in Chamonix and there was an accident, but she was not killed. Nevertheless, I could not dismiss what had happened. Had I seen one possible universe? Had my warning to her somehow changed the outcome?

“
It occurred to me that this incident might not be an isolated event. Even discounting the fraudulent claims of charlatans, there is an overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest that precognition does occur. Moreover, since dark matter may be all around us, accumulating into small pockets of increased density that we are unable to detect, might that not be a plausible explanation for these allegedly psychic premonitions.

“
Of course, my hypothesis was not exactly embraced in the scientific community.” He paused as if this was a painful admission. “After I…left CERN, I was able to find independent funding to continue my research. I decided to begin with an examination of the historical record, looking more closely at accounts of seers and oracles, particularly those associated with a specific geographical location—the Oracle at Delphi, for example. That is how I came to be here. There are numerous accounts of oracles and accurate prophecy throughout Mesoamerican history. You are aware, I am sure, that the Aztecs were expecting the arrival of Quetzalcoatl at the exact moment in history when Cortez arrived.”

Jade and Professor exchanged a look.

“And of course, there is the Mayan prophecy of the end of time.”

“
Umm, check your calendar,” Jade said. “That didn’t happen.”

Dorion gave a coy smile.
“That the prophesied apocalypse did not occur may be due to the fact that we were alerted to it and took appropriate precautions. Or, it may have occurred in a parallel reality, right on schedule. Did you know that there was a solar storm in 2012 that just missed the earth by a week? Scientists at NASA believe it would have destroyed modern civilization if we had been in its path. Perhaps in another universe, that’s exactly what happened, just as the Maya foresaw.”

He shrugged again.
“Who can say? I was not looking to make these old stories fit my hypothesis, but merely investigating all the possibilities. My expertise—and a generous contribution from my benefactor—made it possible for me to get work as a technician for the muon tomography project here in Teotihuacan.”

“
What were you hoping to find?” asked Professor. “Since there’s no way to detect dark matter, how would you know if you were right?”

“
With another vision,” said Jade, before Dorion could answer.

The physicist nodded.
“And it would seem that is exactly what happened.”

“
So I got too close to the WIMPs and caught a glimpse of a possible future, but because we were warned, we changed the outcome?”

“
Just so.”

Professor drew in a breath and let it out slowly.
“Well, it’s an interesting idea. Too bad all the spheres were undoubtedly destroyed in the blast. Except for the Moon stone,” he added hastily before Jade could say it. “If it exists.”