Chapter 1 - Fifteen years earlier
Idiots.
"And now I give you the man of the hour–heck, the man of the century—Austin McKinney!"
Morons.
"Thanks, Bill. It's not every day you get to prove Einstein wrong, and I gotta say, he gave us a run for our money. But in the end, ol' Al just wasn't a match for the boys of Broadlawn. Just think what he could have done with an RDA endowment!"
Cretins.
"For the benefit of the viddy and webby audiences just joining us, Austin, can you explain again how you..."
The dialogue of the back-patting carnival faded as Victor Enzo rounded the bend in the corridor away from the auditorium where the massive press conference had been hastily convened. He stalked into his office and saw a puny box of his personal possessions already on the desk next to an anything but puny security guard. Of course; why should they waste any time? Standard protocol for anyone dismissed from RDA Broadlawn Research Center: Walked off, if not carried off, by security. Your badge please, sir, thank you, sir, please take the box, sir, thank you, sir, come with me, sir. The same protocol whether or not you'd been caught faking your timecard, stealing electronic parts, or screwing the secretary in the store room.
Or breaking a major law of physics.
Enzo held his anger under a tight lid until his escort left him outside the turnstile by the main parking lot. Then he vented with a stream of invective.
"I guess that's better than bottling it up," he heard someone observe drily. Enzo pivoted and saw a lanky figure strolling over in the afternoon haze. Carrying a cardboard box.
"Dimitri! So they got you, too. Figures."
"Quite the stroke of luck," observed the other man without a trace of irony.
"Luck! Are you insane? You know what we could be doing with those results–you know it should be us in that conference instead of that patsy McKinney. What sort of luck is that?"
Dimitri Sereda fixed his friend with that intense stare he had always found unsettling. "I mean lucky that Vorsicht let us go. If he'd realized what we're capable of, we would be coming out of there inside boxes, not carrying them."
Enzo rubbed his stubble. "Yeah. Yeah." He paused, then looked Sereda up and down with an exaggerated motion. "So what are you waiting for? We've got work to do."
It had all started two weeks earlier. Enzo's Quantum Communication Research lab had been a maelstrom of activity, its occupants toiling under an implacable deadline only days away. Enzo had been sequestered in a conference room with Sereda, equations covering every whiteboard and wall when McKinney sauntered in.
"Vic, I need you to sign these contract reassignments. Your people need to be taken care of after the thirty-first."
Enzo glared. "They're not going anywhere. The knowledge massed in this lab is priceless. We're not going to cast it to the winds." He had long suspected his budget officer of being a closet spy for General Vorsicht, the RDA line officer with direct authority over Broadlawn.
"Vic, man. I'm just sayin'; you've got two days left. Don't drag everyone else down with your ship. They're good people."
Enzo ground his teeth. "That's why they're staying with me. But feel free to shoot your own resume to HR."
Three years of generous RDA funding had produced no results, and the end of the fiscal year was one day away. Enzo's dream of supraluminal communication was going to be cut off at the knees.
There was only one full scale lab test left. With typical Enzo flair, it was scheduled for 4PM on the last day of funding, and it would use up the entire remainder of the project's energy budget. It was a static test, an anti-climax for anyone not in the know. All a spectator would see would be the couch-sized test chamber, engineers glued to their workstations, and a nondescript LED displaying the effective communication speed as a fraction of the speed of light.
Sereda wrinkled his nose in apparent distaste as McKinney breezed out. "Don't let him rattle you, Victor. Eyes on the prize."
Enzo shovelled his hair wearily. "Right. Like we're going to pull a miracle in two days. Three years and it still comes down to NFE." He used the common project abbreviation for "Nobody Fucks with Einstein."
"But that's why you brought me on board," observed Sereda.
"That was a crazy strong anthropic principle bullshit idea, Dimitri. I don't know what I was thinking. No offense. We've been over this before."
"Maybe your intuition was smarter than you, Victor. We've been over this before, too."
"Well... if there's really anything to those extrasensory abilities of yours, this would be the time to use them. Maybe get inside Vorsicht's mind and convince him to give us another year of funding."
Sereda pinned Enzo with a stare. "Victor, did it ever occur to you that it has to work out this way?"
Enzo did a double take. "What do you mean? It has to come down to the wire? Science has to wait until the last minute to give us the result we want? Maybe you should have taken a physics major instead of playing with Rhine cards. It doesn't work like that."
"Maybe it does if you're changing the rules. Changing the universe. To one where NFE isn't in charge."
Enzo snorted. "I got off the strong anthropic principle train a while ago, Dimitri. But it sounds like you've been riding the first class carriage into Crazyville."
The other man smiled tightly. "This is what you pay me for, Victor."
"Well that won't be for much longer, will it. Does your brilliant theory translate into any plan of action?"
"Well, since you mentioned getting inside someone's mind—"
Sereda laid out his thoughts. When Enzo pushed away from the table in disgust, Sereda pulled him back down and patiently explained again. The discussion continued into the night, reminiscent of their college days of earnest debates, back when everyone thought they could solve the world's problems over German ale and Turkish coffee.
The next day, Enzo was nowhere to be seen. The staff set up the experiment, nervously gossiping about their leader's absence. At 3:59, Enzo swept into the lab, a barrel-chested invasion followed by the slight Sereda. He said nothing as he took up a seat in front of the test chamber viewing port, in sight of the LED. His eyes were unblinking, hyperfocused, and a pale sheen glistened on his forehead. Virgil Dixon, the chief scientist, approached Enzo hesitantly, quizzically, but a motion from Sereda told him to back off. At 4:00 exactly, the field generators were switched on and the quantum transceivers started synchronizing. The LED flickered to life and a number started racing upward: 0.8, 0.9, 0.99, 0.999. Inside the chamber, the quantum pairing communication system was cycling continuously, but it was not bandwidth that mattered. It took only one bit to change the universe, if it traveled fast enough.
Enzo appeared not to be breathing. Sereda was not looking at the experiment but instead was focused on his friend. The LED approached the previous record: 0.9999999985. The power gauges approached maximum draw. Sereda took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Enzo was a glass statue, eyes glittering, skin taut, muscles bunched, and inside his head a single thought pounded against his skull, purified to fanatical concentration through Sereda's telepathic assistance: 1.00000000001. For an eternity of a few seconds the lab was suspended in time, on the cusp of falling back along the same trajectory of failure as countless times before, when Sereda formed an action in his mind that if it had a word, would have been: PUSH.
And the universe shifted. The number on the LED cycled to 1.0000000000, almost immediately hit 1.00000000001, then rocketed upwards. When Sereda opened his eyes it was reading 4871925.10 and the staff were stunned, gaping. Enzo came to life, suddenly aware of the dryness of his mouth, eyes finally focusing on something else: Dixon, the first staff member to regain his senses.
"It's real," assured Dixon, although Enzo had not asked this time. "We've got tachyon traces matching every prediction. We've done it. We've beaten Einstein."
Had Enzo been what the senior management called a "team player" and what he called a "fucking sheep," he would have been the one collecting the glory and filing the patents two weeks later. But he had to try to convince them of the ramifications of his development.
"Those morons don't know a breathrough from their arseholes," he ranted to Sereda. "We kick Einstein in the pants and have a transmission rate of one bit every twenty hours. And their idea of a stretch goal is one bit every five hours! They don't get it! Everything is up for grabs. Now that we've pushed information past light speed, we should be able do it for matter. But no, they want to sit on this, keep it to themselves, publish as little as possible. Where would we be if Salk had done the same thing with the polio vaccine instead of giving it away? Thank God he wasn't working for the RDA!"
And with that attitude, it was only a matter of time before he found himself standing on the sidewalk holding a cardboard box. He and Sereda set up their own lab in the Catskills, on a shoestring budget. The staff he was able to afford tended toward counterculture types, which suited Enzo fine, as long as he didn't have to listen to their environmentalist rants.