Chapter 7: Reality Break
Location: GIG/Apex Agonwood Research Facility
Lonna's T-Shirt Slogan for Today:
if Newton understood Relativity, he would have Ducked
I made it to Building B with five minutes to spare. The structure was massive, a matte-black hangar that Marcus had referred to in a text as "The Barn." I probably would have called it Hangar One.
When I swiped my key card, a small metal door to the right of where I expected The Barn to open clicked. But by the time I recognized which door had unlocked, it had already clicked again, locking.
"I guess they didn't teach door mechanics in Morgantown," Marcus said.
"Only door theory," I quipped.
Marcus chuckled as he opened the door. "I'm so glad you're here, Lon. We're going to have so much fun.
"It's all relative, Marc." I pointed to my t-shirt. "Bam!"
Marc groaned. "That was terrible even for you."
"What do you mean, even for me?"
"If you're done flirting, we have some things to get through this morning," Julian yelled from a corner of The Barn.
As I looked around, I realized I had expected hot desks, laptops and clipboards. Maybe a staging area for devices before they were integrated into the test homes.
But… the interior was cavernous. I could just make out three stories of endless server racks that lined the walls like books in a library.
"You guys have enough processing power here to mine every crypto coin in existence," I noted, looking around.
"We need it," Alex Greyson said, joining us. He looked less like a billionaire CEO today and more like a lead engineer, sleeves rolled up and holding a stark white coffee mug. "We're processing four terabytes of sensor data per second from the cul-de-sac."
"And this," Julian's voice came from the platform, "is what it looks like."
I walked up the ramp to the central platform where a massive, solid structure that looked like it was made of dark ice. "Is this ZBLAN?" I asked mostly to myself.
Julian smiled and responded softly, "You never disappoint." Julian walked around the perimeter of the block. "Manufactured in microgravity to prevent crystallization. It's the largest single optical fluoride crystal in existence."
"Now who is flirting?" I said softly enough that only Julian could hear.
He tapped a console on the railing.
"Dave, bring up the neighborhood."
"Spinning it up," Dave Kirsch called out from a workstation below.
The dark ice seemed to ignite from within. Lasers embedded at the base of the structure fired into the ZBLAN, exciting ions suspended in the glass. Inside was a volumetric display depicting a three-dimensional model of the cul-de-sac.
I could see the six houses, the landscaping, even the faint, ghostly trails of the security patrols moving along the perimeter.
"We are tracking vector data for every object in the test zone," Alex explained, standing beside me. "Thermal, kinetic, electromagnetic. The resolution is down to the millimeter."
"It's beautiful," I whispered. The fidelity was incredible. I could see the heat bloom of a bird hopping across the lawn of House 3.
"Look closer at Unit 6," Julian said, his voice dropping an octave.
I leaned over the railing, squinting at the model of the house on the far right. At first, it looked normal. But then I saw something that looked like a graphics glitch. The light inside the ZBLAN block was refracting incorrectly near the kitchen island. The straight lines of the cabinetry were bending, just slightly, as if looking through a heat haze.
"You're sure that's not a rendering error?" I asked, leaning a bit more. "Or—I cringe just thinking about it—a flaw in the crystal?"
"We thought so, too," Dave said, joining us on the platform. "We recalibrated the projectors. We replaced the sensors in the house. We even swapped out the floorboards. But the data persists."
"This was the latency data Julian showed me?" I asked, tearing my eyes away from the mesmerizing distortion.
"The atomic clock syncs in the kitchen of Unit 6 are lagging. Only by nanoseconds, but cumulative. We send a ping, and it comes back… old."
My stomach did a little flip with excitement. "If the sensors are working and the transmission medium—this ZBLAN—is lossless, then…"
Julian's expression didn't change, but the intensity in his eyes dialed up. "Go on."
"You think this might be gravitational time dilation," I said, pointing at the smudge in the glass. "Whatever is happening in that kitchen is creating a localized gravity well dense enough to bend the light, refracting the visual data."
"A gravity well in a suburban kitchen?" Alex asked, skeptical. "Wouldn't the house implode?"
"That would be why I could never get my thesis statement approved," I chuckled softly. "But, if it's at the subatomic level—what I called a 'pinhole,' or a topological defect—I theorized that it wouldn't be strong enough for implosion. Instead, it would create a drag on anything passing through it. Light, radiation… data."
I looked back at the ZBLAN block. "I'm talking about the space between all of the spaces that is so tiny we can't even measure it. But the effects of its presence are still detectable."
I saw that signature charming smile Alex Greyson was known for. He nodded to Julian and said, "I see it. She really does light up when she explains it."
"Wait until she starts talking about anime," Julian said, causing Marcus to snicker.
Julian gestured to a workstation set up directly in front of the ZBLAN block. It had three vertical monitors, a high-end mechanical keyboard, and—sitting right in the center—the stress ball shaped like a cat.
"Your desk, Dr. Patricks."
I looked at the desk, then at the impossible data floating in the dark ice.
"Okay," I said, dropping my bag. "But if I'm going to map a gravity well, I want raw data. I want the cesium clock logs for the last 48 hours, and I need the structural blueprints of House 6."
"Why blueprints?" Dave asked.
"Has no one else wondered if there is a mass concentration in that kitchen heavy enough to slow down time," I said, sitting down and grabbing the mouse, "the foundation hasn't cracked?"
Julian smiled, and for the first time, it looked like genuine relief. "Give her the logs, Dave."
"Is there a structural engineer on the team? Or, could we get one?"
"Yes. You're looking at him," Alex said, raising his hand. "I hold Masters in Structural and Electrotechnical Engineering, Lonna. Before I was a CEO, I was designing better bridges and better smart grids."
He walked over to my desk and tapped the screen where the blueprints were loading.
"The foundation is rated for seismic activity up to magnitude 8.0. If there was a mass concentration heavy enough to cause nanosecond time dilation sitting on that island, the concrete would be pulverized. The rebar would snap, and the sensors would be screaming about a catastrophic load failure."
"And yet, they aren't," I said, looking up at him.
"No," Alex confirmed. "The sensors are reading zero mechanical stress. We've scanned it with ground-penetrating radar. The slab is pristine. Not a hairline fracture, not a voltage spike."
"I'd like to say that is proof, but you were using tools that wouldn't be able to measure at the level that we need," I whispered.
"Proof of what?" Dave asked, looking confused. "That physics is broken?"
"No. Proof that the gravity isn't coming from here."
I stood up and walked back to the ZBLAN block, looking at the distorted shimmer of the kitchen.
"It's like…If you put a bowling ball on a trampoline, it stretches the fabric and weighs it down. That's standard gravity. But what if you're pulling the fabric down from underneath?"
I looked at Julian. "I think it's closer to suction. The gravity well is… maybe leaking? From somewhere else. That's why you have time dilation without mechanical stress on the floor. The floor isn't carrying the weight. The space is."
The room went silent, save for the hum of the servers.
Julian stared at the shimmering distortion in the glass, his expression unreadable. Then, slowly, a smile spread across his face. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up like he would consume me if we were the only two people in the room.
I quickly looked away before he noticed my reaction. "This is all first-guess hypotheticals. We're going to need a lot more data."
Marcus added, "And we need to figure out how to measure things that are currently unmeasurable."
"I don't think it needs to be the actual unmeasurable things. We just have to find a way to measure the effects of the unmeasurable things," I explained. "And…"
"You have a request?" Alex asked with genuine curiosity.
"Ideally, it would eventually be portable," I said as more of a question of whether I was being too greedy with that request.
"I'll take that challenge, Lon," Marcus volunteered.
Alex looked pleased. "Just having the right voices in the room has given us more leads in an hour than the last six months. "Let's rough out a plan of attack and a list of resources that we still need." Alex walked down the ramp of the platform and then turned back to me. "Lonna, you're going to need to familiarize yourself with the Agonwood R&D Campus."
I nodded, longingly looking back at the data I knew would be waiting.
"But before that, we have a bunch of paperwork to sign so we can lock you down and make it official."
"Could I request that you add a wardrobe allowance to her compensation packet?" Marcus said wryly.
I tossed the cat-shaped stress ball at him. "Hey, Marc. I know where you live."