THE DARK MATTER THEORY: THE PARAMETER DEFINITION
By Stephen Tannhauser
Description: Would-be actress Penny discovers her new neighbours Sheldon and Leonard have all sorts of wonderful geeky interests . . . and one very dark secret that will change her life forever.
Notes: To any who may have found this story by following my other works, I want to reassure everyone that I have not abandoned The Metahuman Transfiguration; I simply found myself struck by this idea so compulsively that I had to get it down before I could go on. Rest assured that I will continue both tales.
Disclaimer: The author does not own THE BIG BANG THEORY or any of the characters. Much of the dialogue in this story is adapted from the screenplay for the Pilot Episode, written by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady.
- 1 -
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA—SEPTEMBER 24, 2007
"So if a photon is directed through a plane with two slits in it," said Sheldon as they moved down the featureless, turquoise-walled corridor towards a particular door, "and either slit is observed it will not go through both slits. If it's unobserved it will, however, if it's observed after it's left the plane but before it hits its target, it will not have gone through both slits."
Only half-listening, Leonard checked the door; there was no nameplate or sign on it, but he'd kept careful count of the doors they passed as per the directions in his hand. "Agreed," he said, turning the knob and opening it. "What's your point?" The answer was a touch sharper than it might normally have been, but his stomach was jumping in knots. It was always the part just beforehand that was most nerve-wracking.
If Sheldon felt any of the same nervousness, he didn't show it; he only looked blank. "There's no point. I just think it's a good idea for a T-shirt." He followed Leonard into the room, where the same bland turquoise walls surrounded an empty waiting area and a desk occupied by a single bored-looking receptionist scowling at a folded newspaper. Leonard glanced back at Sheldon, who closed the door and, with a carefully concealed and quiet movement of his hand, locked it.
They went to the desk together. The receptionist, a black woman who looked to be in her late thirties, didn't move or acknowledge their presence. Leonard cleared his throat. "Excuse me?"
"Hang on," said the receptionist flatly, not taking her eyes from what Leonard could now see was a crossword puzzle.
Leonard glanced at Sheldon. It was possible this was a gambit to buy time or put them off their guard, or it could just be a lazy employee, but either way, he wasn't in the mood to play games. He saw Sheldon's agreement in his calm flicker of a return nod. Time to provide the distraction they'd discussed. Let's see who catches who off guard.
He leaned over, angling himself to survey the crossword, and pointed at the remaining empty spaces one by one. "One across is 'Aegean'," he said. "Eight down is 'Nabokov', twenty-six across is 'MCM', fourteen down is—move your finger—'phylum', which makes fourteen across 'Port-au-Prince'." He shrugged as the receptionist finally looked up at him with a bemused glare, then pointed at the clue for fourteen across with the best smile he could find. "See, 'Papa Doc's capital idea', that's Port-au-Prince . . . Haiti," he finished with a deliberately awkward glance away.
"Can I help you?" said the receptionist, with a distinct Please go away tone in her voice.
"Yes," said Leonard. He looked back at Sheldon, who nodded meaningfully. The confirmation only made Leonard's desire to throw up stronger, but he hadn't really expected their intelligence to be wrong; it almost never was. "Um, is this the high-IQ sperm bank?"
"If you have to ask, maybe you shouldn't be here," said the receptionist, dryly.
"I think this is the place," said Sheldon quietly, playing his role just a few seconds longer. It seemed to work; the receptionist handed them the usual paperwork and told them to fill it out. His stomach pirouetting like Baryshnikov, Leonard thanked her. "We'll be right back," he added.
"Oh, take your time," the receptionist drawled, deadpan. "I'll just finish my crossword puzzle. Oh, wait." She regarded her paper as if it had just confirmed bad news she already knew. Leonard frowned slightly. This wasn't the typical response. Maybe their intelligence had been wrong. He sat down beside Sheldon and went through the motions of filling out the forms, wishing they'd taken more time to plan this. We're getting sloppy, he told himself with a mix of fear and annoyance.
"Leonard, I don't think we can do this," said Sheldon quietly.
"What, are you kidding? We should be at least semi-pros at this by now," Leonard muttered back. "And you're the one who wanted the extra compensation, so we could get fractional T1 bandwidth in the apartment."
"No," insisted Sheldon. "Look, I do yearn for faster downloads, but that's not the point. Something's wrong about this, and don't pretend you didn't spot it either." He indicated the receptionist with a twitch of his chin. "Passive subjects never react with that complex level of humour, and we didn't come prepared for a quisling scenario."
"Let's not get caught in false dichotomies," said Leonard. Sheldon wasn't wrong, but his problem was that he tended to fall back to escape mode if something didn't match his preparations. "If she had any natural neurological predispositions to DID, the agent might have taken advantage of that. There have been cases like this."
"Oh," said Sheldon. "That's a good point. Let's check. Excuse me?" he called over Leonard's head to the receptionist. "Quick question for you, ma'am: were you sexually abused in any way as a child? Drunk father, sneaky uncle, that kind of thing?"
"Sheldon!" Leonard pulled him back down into the chair and gave a sheepish smile in answer to the receptionist's horrified look. "Sorry, ma'am, my friend's just—he—he's always had a little trouble with personal boundaries," he waffled.
The receptionist's mouth closed, then flattened into a tight and pissed-off glower. "I think it's time for the two of you to leave," she said, voice cracking a little with anger and . . . was that hurt? Leonard thought it might be. Which suggested some very interesting possibilities. Oh yeah, right, he thought immediately after that. Interesting. That's the right word, uh-huh.
"You're right," he said aloud. "Absolutely. We'll, we'll just go. And get out of your hair. Right now." He gestured Sheldon towards the door and gave a meaningful nod, then backed up, keeping his body between Sheldon and the receptionist's line of sight. "Sorry to disturb you. And about the crossword puzzle. You know, I'm sure you get people coming in here all the time just trying to show off their brains, and really, kinda hard to blame them, they want to make sure you'll accept their genetic material, right?" Come on, Sheldon, come on, finish setting the damn wards, already . . . . "'Cause after all, there's no guarantee any smart person's sperm is going to generate high-IQ offspring, really . . . well, take Sheldon here for a start; he's got a twin sister with the same basic DNA mix who hostesses at Fuddrucker's down in Texas!" In truth, he'd never met Sheldon's sister and had no idea of her IQ, but he told himself he'd apologize for the slander later, if he lived. "What if some poor woman pins her hopes on his sperm and winds up with, I don't know, a toddler who doesn't know if he should use an integral or a differential to solve the area under a curve? I mean, I'm sure she'll still love him, but . . . ."
"Really?" said Sheldon, turning around. He'd adjusted the silver, blue-jewelled ring on his right hand to face outward, and Leonard took the opportunity to do the same with his own ring. "I wouldn't."
"And that's why you handle the physical side of things," said Leonard. "Now!" He ducked down into a squat, arms over his head.
Sheldon jabbed his hand forward, eyes narrowing. The blue jewel on the ring came alight with a searing, blazing blue-white radiance, and a wave of force slammed outward from it, caught the receptionist up and pinned her back against the wall. She gave a shriek that sounded almost more surprised than anything else, her eyes bulging. For a sickening second of dismay Leonard thought, Oh, crap, we were wrong after all—
Then the room abruptly went dark as a nighttime swamp. The temperature plunged. The receptionist's white-coated form vanished into a roiling mass of shadow from which two blazing red lights burned across the air at them. "Excubitors!" blatted a discordant, scouring howl of a voice. The shadow-mass writhed and struggled against Sheldon's binding like a broken-backed snake. "No! You will—not—have her! Consent! Consent was given!"
"Give it up, Smokey the Bandit, we know you're lying!" Leonard shouted back, scrambling to his feet. His breath plumed into the frigid air. He wasn't worried about noise now; Sheldon's wards would keep anything from escaping, at least as long as he was alive. "If you really had consent you wouldn't have needed to hide! We know what you've been doing, and it stops now! Get out! Back to the basement with you!"
"Noooooo . . . ." To Leonard's shock, the shadow-form suddenly wrenched itself away from the wall, bulling its way forward against Sheldon's restraining force like a strong man shouldering his way into a typhoon. Sheldon looked equally aghast. This thing was way stronger than they'd expected. All around the room, lamps, books, clipboards, magazines, file folders and potted plants suddenly sprang into the air and began whirling around them, the wind whipping up into a howling storm. Leonard hunched against it, holding onto his glasses with both hands. Sheldon stumbled backwards until his shoulders hit the wall, but he kept his hand up, the ring still aimed at the shadow-form. The dark thing laughed, and it was like the coughing roar of a lion, deep and hungry but more malicious than any natural beast could ever be.
"Is this the day, little Guardians?" it mocked, still forcing its way towards them step by step. "The day when you meet the Maker you serve . . . so . . . faithfully?!"
"That's certainly a possibility," said Sheldon, and if his voice quivered, it didn't break. Like Leonard, he knew that the less fear you showed, the more blithely you appeared to dismiss any acknowledgement of threat, the angrier—and more foolish—things like this became. "But I really don't think so. Partly because I'm still keeping an open mind on the topic of whether this Maker actually exists, and partly because you've made the same mistake entities of your ilk so often do."
The thing laughed again, still clawing its way towards Sheldon. At the end of its snapping, writhing limbs, night-black, diamond-hard talons formed, gouging the floor as it neared. Leonard had a sudden horrible vision of his intestines decorating those talons. "What . . . mistake?" it hissed.
"Well, it's a perfectly natural one for consciousnesses that normally exist outside a temporal reference frame in a nonphysical medium," said Sheldon. "You tend to forget that once you take over control of a physical body, even in the indirect way you evidently have, you become subject to all the physical factors and conditions of the material universe. Including, in this particular instance . . . inertia."
He snapped his hand closed and yanked hard, reversing the direction of his kinetic pull in a heartbeat, and spun gracefully out of the way as the thing hurtled through the air where he'd stood and smashed hard into the wall. The howling windstorm stopped; every object in the air fell to the floor in a cacophony of clattering crashes and bangs. The swirling darkness faded, thinning out, and for a moment Leonard could see the dazed, appalled face of the woman underneath it. He seized the opportunity, dove on her and grabbed her head with both hands.
"De profundis clamo ad Te, Domine!" he bellowed. He had come to terms with Sheldon's staunch refusal to commit to a theological paradigm—he even understood it to a degree—but he himself had made his choice within months of starting this vocation. "In nomine Patris, Filis, et Spiritus Sancti, retro me, Satanas!" His ring came to searing, blinding life, and he plunged his fist into the darkness surrounding the woman, knotting his grip fast. The noxious, stygian pseudosubstance burned in his hand like acid. "I bid thee, spawn of darkness, get—out!"
He yanked backwards as hard as he could. The swirling, cloudy mass of darkness tore free of the receptionist, solidifying as it did into something that flailed in Leonard's arms like an octopus. Leonard jerked his head at the door to the inner office. "There!" he shouted to Sheldon, who nodded and levelled his hand again in readiness. With all his strength, Leonard spun and heaved the nyctoplasmic mass over the desk to splatter against the door. The instant it hit, Sheldon unleashed a jet of blue-white fire straight into its heart, igniting every strand and thread of the quasi-corporeal body the thing had conjured for itself to hold onto its place in this world.
The thing screamed at a pitch and volume so loud that both Sheldon and Leonard almost fell over. The glass in both outer and inner doors shattered, as did the computer screen, the ceramic coffee mugs and plant pots, and every lightbulb in the room; the water bottle of the drinking station in the corner burst, spewing its contents over the floor, and the coffee table splintered and cracked. And then, with a blinding flash of light and a thunderous WHAM, the thing vanished. Silence crashed onto the room, leaving only a ringing in Leonard's ears. From the way Sheldon grimaced and dug at his own ears, he'd been half-deafened too.
"Ho—lee—crap," gasped the receptionist, still lying on the floor. "What in God's green earth just . . . happened?" She sat up, blinking in bewilderment, looking around. "What the frick is goin' on here?" she demanded.
Leonard indicated the inner door. "You wanna go check on the samples?" Sheldon nodded without complaint—he hated the dealing-with-people aftermath—and opened the door by reaching through the broken window to the knob on the other side. Leonard helped the receptionist to her feet. "Ma'am, there's no easy way to say this, so I'm just gonna lay this on you cold." He took a breath. "You've been the unwitting pawn of a spiritual entity bent on corrupting humanity, which probably obtained access to your subconscious through an induced depression experience based on your childhood trauma—any kind of dissociative potential makes it possible to hide the possession from the subject. My friend and I are basically, well, spiritual exterminators." He tried a smile.
"Oh yeah?" The woman blinked at him, still looking bemused. "So what kinda pay you get in that line of work?"
"Um . . . not a whole lot," Leonard admitted. "Mostly just a stipend. This is more a vocation than a job. But I do have to ask you one more question. Do you want to remember all this?"
"What?"
"If you want," said Leonard, "we can suppress your memories of this incident. We can't do that without your consent, though, or to anything other than what you allow. And it's not even for our own secrecy, 'cause come on, who's going to believe you if you tell them this?" Leonard gestured around at the office. "We just make the offer because we find that an astonishing number of people who go through crap like this, well, they don't want to remember. And I personally never blame them."
"Leonard?" Sheldon called from the inner office. "It's confirmed." He came back in, drying his hands vigorously and looking ill. "A good bunch of the samples back there were tainted. I've destroyed them now, but any child conceived with that sperm would have grown up with the self-discipline and psychic resistance of a gnat. Like an assembly-line of fleshy sports cars, just coasting through a life of vice and crime and poor impulse control until an MEE comes along to drive them off the lot."
"MEE?" said the receptionist.
"Malevolent Extradimensional Entity," explained Leonard, with a sigh. "That's Sheldon's term, he doesn't like the theological implications of the word 'demon'." He nodded at the inner door. "How long's this been going on?"
"Well, by the dates on the vials there were several weeks' worth of samples," said Sheldon. "The MEE probably took her over and tainted them after hours when everybody had gone home, and of course the doctors wouldn't have noticed a thing because it's not operating on the chemical level." He looked at the receptionist. "Excuse me, ma'am, but has anything obtained in the past twenty-three days gone out to clinics for fertilization use?"
The woman shook her head, eyes wide. "Son, you expect me to remember my own name at this point, you're crazy."
Sheldon grimaced. "I was afraid of that. All right, Leonard, you wipe her memory, I'll get the hard drive out of the computer. We'll crack it for the records back at our place." He went to the desk and knelt down under it.
The receptionist held up her hand half-heartedly. "Hey, you can't take that. That's private medical data."
Leonard squared his shoulders and turned to face her, looking straight into her eyes. "Ma'am, you can stick to the law here, or you can let us find and help the poor women who are going to give birth to children genetically twisted from birth to be perfect possession vessels. Like what just happened to you, except it'll be ten times harder to find them and free them without killing them. And to be brutally honest . . . we need your consent to wipe your memory. We don't need it to just pin you against the wall, gag you, and walk out with that hard drive. So what do you say?"
The receptionist stared at him. Then she slumped, walked over, picked up one of the fallen chairs and sat down in it, resting her chin on her hands. "I knew I shoulda finished that crossword at home before coming in," she mumbled. She looked up, and Leonard saw without surprise that for all her deadpan snark, her eyes were wet. "Okay, pal. Go ahead. Do the Men in Black flashy thing. I don't wanna know any more about this. Ever."
Leonard nodded in understanding, and gave her the best sympathetic smile he could. "It's okay," he said softly. "All you'll remember is coming back here after a coffee break and finding the place trashed. And that's all you'll ever need to know."
He put his beringed hand to her forehead, muttering phrases in Latin, then switching to the peculiar language that their teacher had called Aenochian and Sheldon insisted on calling the ur-Logos. Cued by the trained triggers of the words, psychic currents sparked to life; the walls between their minds dropped, and he felt his consciousness slide gently into rapport with hers. Her eyes closed. Quickly and quietly, he defined the memories to be buried, envisioning the false scrim of the woman (Althea, her name came to mind) going downstairs for a coffee and returning to find the devastated room. Atop that, he laid a series of wards that sank into the neurons: it would keep any other entities from finding the weak points into her psyche, at least for a few years. When he was done, he led her over to stand by the door, staring placidly at nothing, waiting for his trigger word to wake back into her normal life.
Sheldon joined Leonard at the door. "If Garner thinks I'm going to personally talk to each and every potential patient on this thing," he said, waving the hard drive at Leonard, "he's gravely mistaken. Just to establish that."
Leonard grimaced. "You could at least call him Bishop Garner, if you don't want to say 'His Grace,'" he said, reaching up to touch each corner of the door, deactivating Sheldon's wards. "I know you won't commit to his explanations, but you could at least be polite. The title's legitimate."
"I'm sorry, Leonard, but I have to be consistent," Sheldon stated. "I'll be polite when I'm talking to him, but if I'm not going to use his terminology, I'm not going to use his title. Besides, you know we're supposed to be discreet about the Church's involvement."
"Figures the only time you'd be any good at keeping a secret is when you want to annoy somebody about it," Leonard grumbled. "Come on. If we hurry we can make it back to the rectory and pick up our stipend checks before three."
"That's right, we could, couldn't we?" Sheldon suddenly smiled and made enthusiastic fists. "Look out, T1, here we come." He looked around. "You know, it's a pity we had to come here on business. You'd think our sperm would be exactly what this place is looking for."
"Oh, come on, like you'd have been able to go through with it," Leonard scoffed. "Do you even know how?"
Sheldon drew himself up stiffly. "Just because I've managed to rise above the crudity of my biological impulses doesn't mean the systems don't work, Leonard. Though I concede," he added, "that you made a good point earlier—we can't really guarantee the result, after all." He looked around quizzically. "I wonder what the protocol is for reneging on a proffer of sperm."
Leonard shrugged. "I think we just leave."
"Fine." Sheldon opened the door. "Let's go. After you, Alphonse."
Leonard bowed. "No, after you, Gaston." As Sheldon nodded and turned out, he turned to Althea and waved at her. "See you," he said, repeating his trigger phrase.
"Bye," said Althea, blinking awake. Leonard carefully closed the door, just in time to hear her startled, indignant cry of "What the hell—?" echo through the broken glass before he hurried back down the hall after Sheldon.
As he caught up to his roommate at the elevators, Sheldon was already on his smartphone, talking animatedly. Without warning, his expression suddenly turned to one of outrage. "What?" he demanded of the phone. "What? No, I told you what it was going to cost! We need more than that! We—oh, Lord's sake, I should have just sold my sperm in the first place! Thanks for nothing, sir!" He hung up and folded his arms, fuming.
"Let me guess," said Leonard. "Bishop Garner just told you how much the stipend actually was, this time around. Or how little."
"Leonard, I swear to you, I do not know why we do this," Sheldon groused.
Leonard raised his eyebrows. "Um, for the salvation and protection of humanity? The awesomeness of wielding power? The chance to delve into the secrets of the universe?"
Sheldon blew out an annoyed breath. "Oh, what good is any of that without some decent bandwidth? They probably have T1 at that church, I'll bet you."
"No, they don't," said Leonard firmly.
"How would you know? You make sure to turn your phone and tablet off whenever you go in."
There was no answer to that, and Leonard decided not to bother looking for one. "By the way," he said instead. "Thanks. For having my back, back there."
"Oh." That did catch Sheldon off guard. "Um. You're welcome. But, you know, we're partners on this, and best friends. I'd kind of think that went without saying."
"Should I not thank you next time?"
"Oh, don't you dare, mister." Sheldon pointed indignantly at him.
Leonard grinned at the floor. They'd survived another encounter, he thought. That was really the most you could ask of any day. If nothing of any interest happened for the rest of today, he'd call that a fair exchange and be grateful.
The elevator signal chimed; the doors slid open, and they stepped inside. Leonard took a deep breath, then blinked as his stomach growled. "Hey," he said to Sheldon. "You wanna get some takeout on the way home?"
"Ah, yes, the great cycle of existence," Sheldon mused. "From the highest practices of the ethical use of transdimensional power, to the basest material concerns." He considered. "I could go for Indian," he said, as the doors closed.
TO BE CONTINUED