“She’s fucking great, Bry,” he’d said the last time we talked. He was dating his only real friend, his coworker and floor mate Val. “I totally don’t deserve her.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” I said. “You should bring her out to Nevada sometime.”
“Well, you know how it is here. Gotta work off the discounts they gave me for Mom and Petal’s funeral services.”
“I told you I can pay for that,” I said. “It’s been a year since Mom’s memorial. You don’t have to be some kind of serf.”
“Nah, man. It’s cool. I mean, it’s my life, you know? And I have Val,” he said.
It was nice to know he had someone, and it was the least I could do to offer them a chance to start fresh. But what did fresh even mean? NASA wanted to reach the Kepler system. The military wanted to develop energy weapons in case we encountered unfriendlies out there. My interns had begun staring at me at work, mentally boring a hole in my skull, no doubt hoping to reveal what they envisioned as a tiny version of some wormhole they saw in a sci-fi flick with people zipping around the universe, parallel realities traversable by psychedelic cosmic tunnels. But I didn’t want anyone zipping around in my brain. I wanted to understand how this happened and how we might replicate it in the starship’s engine. And maybe a part of me wanted to know if somewhere inside my head, there’s a universe where Petal and Cynthia are still alive, asking me to come down to dinner.
Scan. Tests. Questions. Repeat.
Do you feel any differently? the government doctors asked.
I feel fine, really.
Of course, I imagined the parallel realities, what would happen to me if I told my colleagues and superiors the truth. I’d be fired and stripped of security clearance, locked in a government facility for hiding a program I’d built to disable accelerator safeguards. And not only that; I often dreamed of being enveloped by light. I stuffed PowerBars and family photos into a fanny pack as if I were planning a long walk into the universe.
People from other labs, other universities poked and prodded before the military classified everything to do with me as top secret. Then came the protesters who believed the hole would expand, tear me apart, and then tear apart the whole damn world. Our public relations guy, Gene, said that’s highly improbable. Then came those seeking deliverance, who had loved ones waiting on organ donor lists, who couldn’t afford the experimental drugs or new age retreats. Or those who were financially ruined because they’d been laid off or forced to shutter their businesses. They all held signs: WILL WORK ON EARTH 2! They wore respirator masks on the days when the wildfire smoke reached hazardous levels. They prayed and chanted, held each other’s hands. They believed what I’d done was their ticket out of all of this.
At home, Theresa wants me to rest. She’s decided to be nice to me again, so I’m not going to argue with her. She’s been good to Axel even if he’s constantly telling me I’m basically fucking the babysitter, and that I’m a fucking asshole for getting married so soon. Theresa and I never had a real honeymoon—our job saving the world doesn’t really allow for much time off. A lot has been on hold. After this is all over. When things are better. After we’ve done what we set out to do. I want this to be a real marriage and not what other people seem to think it is, some brilliant, pretty young thing, a distraction from trauma. Theresa organizes my pain pills for the headaches that grow worse each day. She’s in charge of my schedule with the doctors and reporters. She blends my pea protein shakes and cooks my prepackaged meals, my favorite green chile tamales and sweet potato gnocchi, which she stockpiled when she found out the local grocery was planning to stop selling it. When I’m curled up well after midnight, staring at my laptop screen, she tells me that can’t be good for me. Does she mean work or the hole in my head? She asks me what could be more important than getting better, being there for my family. At night, she checks my math as I puzzle through the process of placing a singularity in the starship’s engine.
“You always forget to swap your variables,” Theresa says, lying next to me in bed. “And you’re not accounting for some of the quantum fluctuations at the event horizon.”
“How is your problem coming along?” I ask.
“You mean how are we going to get this black hole outside of your head?”
“Yeah, that would be the problem.”
“I’m toying with what it would take for us to create a tiny antimatter singularity. The matter and antimatter singularities should destroy each other.”