Disclaimer: I do not own Jumper.
The star had a strange, unconventional beauty up close. The surface swirled with plasma and hydrogen, an ever-changing landscape that almost made sense. In the dream, everything almost made sense. Massive tendrils of starstuff rose up from the inferno, drifting towards her with slow grace. Sinuous, they wound around her. Small motes of light danced against her skin as she looked down at her arms. It was as if the star was reaching out for her, trying to tell her…..
Soft chimes filled her ears, drowning out the mournful melody she could almost hear. The chimes changed, turning into a blaring tone that grated on her ears, crudely yanking her straight out of her dreamscape and slamming her back into the waking world.
She opened her eyes, reaching out and groping for her phone. The screen glowed in the dim lights of the apartment, nothing more than a fuzzy rectangle. Her glasses must have fallen off when she had fallen asleep…somewhere. Where was she? And who was she this time?
Poking the glass screen of the phone until it shut up, she ran her hands over the surface of the hardwood table she had fallen asleep over. Her fingers bumped into her glasses and she snatched them up. The plastic was cold on the bridge of her nose. She straightened up, her spine cracking, blinking slowly as she looked around. Sleep still clutched at her, the chimes from her dream still ringing in her ears.
The studio apartment was bare, nothing but a cube with off-white walls the landlady had referred to as 'eggshell'. It sounded pretentious to her, considering that the carpet was threadbare, the stovetops permanently stained, and the wood floors downright symphonic when walked on. The price was fair though, for an apartment in….she leaned back in her chair, until she could see the city skyline and the trapezoidal Hancock building out the window. Chicago. Midtown Chicago.
She looked at the table in front of her. The computer tower there whirred, the monitor glowing as numbers streamed across the screen. Thick cables dropped from the back of the computer and crawled across the bare floor into the jack in the wall. The building was wired for wifi, but for the kind of computing power she was using the machine needed a bit of a boost. She glanced at the progress bar in the corner of the screen. Twenty hours down, three to go.
Chimes cut through her thoughts again, louder this time. They seemed to be coming from the white panel near the door…. She could have slapped herself. The intercom was ringing. Someone was trying to reach her. Her unconscious mind must have woven the sound into her dream without waking her up.
Her fingers curled around the mug in front of her as she stood, pushing back the chair she had fallen asleep in. She sipped at the coffee, grimacing. She had been out long enough for it to cool down. Lukewarm coffee was terrible, but coffee was coffee was coffee. Except burnt coffee. That was just disgusting.
She padded across the room, the floors complaining under her as she moved. Motion in the corner of her eye had her spinning around. She hadn't spent a lot of time in this apartment. It was a throwaway, which was why she hadn't bothered to furnish it. Because she had only been there a few times, she had forgotten about the mirror that had come with the apartment. It hung in the bathroom, her reflection staring at her through the open door. Blonde hair struggled out of a failing pony tail. Black-rimmed glasses guarded blue-grey eyes still fogged by sleep, and a red slash cut across one cheek where she had been resting against the table.
The doorbell chimed again. She turned away from her reflection, yawning. People in her profession were not the prettiest or the most put together.
Wandering over, she pressed the intercom button. "Yeah?"
"Miss Kathleen Higgs?" A deep voice asked. Right, that was the name on this lease.
"Yep, that's me."
"Your landlady called us. We're supposed to replace some faulty wiring. Something about flickering lights?"
Right on cue, the light in the kitchen began to shudder and blink. Convenient. She sipped her coffee. "Who are you?"
"Hendricks and Hendricks Lights, miss. We also do wiring."
"Right," she snorted. "And I'm the Queen of England."
"Miss? Can we come up?"
No point in leaving them outside, they'd just bust down the door. She looked over her shoulder. The computer was connected to a special land line that gave her access to the supercomputer she needed to do the calculations. It couldn't be unplugged, or the whole system would crash. There was no way to move it.
She would just have to find a way to make her visitors go away without a fuss. And while she was at it, she could solve world hunger. Sure, no problem.
"Sure. Come on in." She pressed the button to open the downstairs doors, flipped the lock on the door, and slouched back to the table. She collapsed onto the only chair, glancing down at her outfit. Aside from the fact that her ponytail had completely given up, she was wearing old sweatpants rolled over at the waist and a tank top. Not exactly company attire. She shrugged.
A glance at the screen had her pausing, a frown tugging her brows together as she leaned towards the computer.
Knocks rolling through the apartment didn't jar her concentration.
"Door's open," she called, her voice absent. The latch clicked, and the floor announced two pairs of booted feet entering the studio.
"Kathleen Higgs?"
"Kate."
"What?"
"Call me Kate," she said without looking away from the monitor. "Since we both know the name on the lease is a fake one." She tipped her head to the side, as if that would make the puzzle on the screen clearer. "I'm missing two hours," she muttered, dropping into her vacated chair.
"What?" a younger voice that she hadn't heard over the intercom asked.
"I'm missing two hours. The countdown said three hours a minute ago, and now it says one. It shouldn't do that." Kate glanced over at the two men standing just inside the door to the studio apartment. One was older and more compact, the other younger with brown hair that spiked upward in defiance of gravity. Both were dressed in grey coveralls with some sparky logo on the left lapel. They were also both holding black utility bags. She would bet one of her many identities that what was in those bags had nothing to do with wiring. Both were fit and looked battle-hardened. The cold look in the older one's eyes made her shiver. He had killer's eyes.
She flapped a hand at them. "Can you do me a favor? Can you come back and try to kill me when I'm not busy. Oh, and bring coffee while you're at it. Cream, no sugar. Thanks."
"Are you dismissing us?" Spiky Hair asked, his British voice outraged.
"Why would two hours be gone?" Kate mused just as the progress bar scrolled across the screen, eliminating another thirty minutes. "My access should be good for another forty eight hours, so it can't be that."
"Miss? Kate?"
"The algorithm is supposed to be correlating the spins and spectra between the twinned galaxies at a certain rate. Due to the massive amount of data and the complex equations factoring the many variables that control angular speed and velocity, it was supposed to crunch one segment of Cygnus A and one of Whirlpool, compare them, then move on to the next segment. The only reason it would speed up would be if it...found….a….. ….pattern." She blinked. The two fake electricians jumped as she leapt up, almost upsetting her coffee cup before she snatched it back. "HA! I knew there was a pattern. Those morons at NASA can suck it!"
"Miss? Uh, the light?"
"I'm busy," Kate said just as the words Calculation Complete flashed on the screen. "Just call your buddy out back."
"Which one would that be?" one of them asked in a condescending tone.
"The one jacked into the system and messing with the kitchen light," Kate responded, taking another sip of her coffee. Her free fingers moved over the keyboard, and the printer hooked up to the computer hummed. Pages of numbers and equations scrolled out.
Below the sound of the printer was utter silence.
"How do you know that?" the younger on growled.
"I guessed. But thanks for the conformation!"
They drew back as she returned her attention to the screen. Kate's gaze slid sideways, tracking their movements as they came together to whisper.
"Just who is this chick?" Spiky Hair asked, thinking her completely absorbed in her work. Kate opened the system dialog on the computer.
"File says she's Kathleen Higgs, a stock market analyst for some big name corporation," the older one said. Finding the satellite connection, Kate switched the link from the Titan supercomputer she was using to crunch her data to the secure offsite server she kept all her results in. She entered the command to package the data for transmission. So much data had to be compressed before it could be sent. Another countdown popped up on the screen. Kate gritted her teeth. If the data wasn't compressed correctly, she could lose everything. It had taken her months of telescope work to gather all the data she needed. She didn't have time to do it all over again, especially not if they had found her. According to the computer, it was going to need ten minutes to compile everything. She could keep them occupied for that long, right?
"What kind of stock market analyst studies galaxies on her weekends?" Spiky Hair whisper-demanded. "And a 'stock market analyst'? She looks like a hungover cheerleader."
"I'd go clinically insane of boredom if I was a cheerleader," Kate announced loudly as she minimized the countdown window. She turned to lean her side against the back of the chair, resting her chin on her crossed arms as she lounged. "So, how can I help you gentlemen today?" The older 'electrician' opened his mouth. "Oh, and please stop insulting my intelligence by pretending you're here to fix a light that clearly wasn't broken until you showed up."
"Very well, Miss Kathleen…"
"Kate."
"Would that be Kate Henderson, or Kate Hasselbach? Or maybe Katherine Michaelis? Perhaps Katie Menten?"
She batted her eyelashes. "I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Don't play coy with me," he snapped.
"I wasn't playing coy, I was…." Kate paused, blinking. "Rotational dynamics."
"What?" The older 'electrician' leaned back, startled.
"I was just thinking that there would need to be some correlation of the rotational dynamics of the galaxies, which would be evident in the spin…. Where did that page go?" Kate began to rustle through the pages spewing out of the printer. She pulled the one she wanted out, her gaze darting across the page. Yanking a pen from her pocket and thumbing the cap off, she began to underline some of the numbers.
Two minutes and half a page later, someone cleared their throat. She glanced up. "Are you two imposters still here?"
"It's rude to ignore guests," Spike Hair informed her in his lofty British accent.
"Well, Jeeves, it's rude to try and kill people."
She heard footsteps as he moved around to peer at the screen. "What was that earlier? It looked like some Matrix stuff."
"I was calculating the relative velocities, angular momentums, chemical compositions, and electromagnetic spectra of two galaxies half a universe apart. Despite the distance, they have almost identical irregular structures. If they had been elliptical or spiral shaped galaxies, this wouldn't have been a surprise. But they're strangely shaped. See these three arms here? Almost the exact same. Not only that, but their infrared, ultraviolet, and gamma radiation spectra line up almost exactly. Of course, the gamma radiation is the most interesting, because that's what I'm going to use to prove that the supermassive black holes in the centers of the galaxies are linked through spacetime, creating an Einstein-Rosen bridge."
She got a blank look. "What?"
"A wormhole. I'm trying to prove the existence of a wormhole. The problem is, both the Einstein-Rosen calculations and Schwarzschild's eternal black hole theories are inherently unstable and collapse almost as soon as they're formed which, of course, would happen at the speed of light. A negative matter solution works, but no one's ever been able to find physical evidence of negative matter, so I have to find a positive matter solution. All of this hinges on the theoretical existence of a white hole, the antithesis of a black hole that is thought to spew matter and energy. But where does this matter and energy come from? I posit that a black hole and a white hole can be linked, creating an Einstein-Rosen bridge. The data I have shows a significant correlation between the matter composition and radiation emitted by the holes. They're exactly the same, which has never been observed before. The chance of it happening randomly is impossibly small. Of course, I don't have any way to account for relativistic time dilation, which may be messing with my calculations."
He blinked at her. "There is no way you are a stock-market analyst."
"Maybe it's a hobby." Kate glanced at the countdown. Three and a half minutes to go.
She realized that she had lost sight of her other visitor. Kate was turning her head to look when she heard the soft whirr of machinery activating, and the hairs on the back of her neck rose as the air behind her charged with electricity.
Time was up.
Kate turned slowly. The older one had a black rod in his hand and was pointing it right at her.
"So, Paladin, I never did ask," she said quietly. "How did you manage to find me?"
If Big Bang Theory, Fringe, and Cosmos had a threesome and procreated, it would probably look something like this story. If you don't know what any of those things are, this is not the story you are looking for.
All I have to say is sit down and buckle up, because it's going to be a wild ride.