Groom Lake, Nevada, 2022
Colonel Kristoff Calavicci raced across the sandy plains of Groom Lake, Nevada in his dusty blue Ford F-150. He nervously chewed on a toothpick hanging from his lip, driving as fast as the poor truck could go across the massive air base, listening to the voices shouting from his smartphone. A few moments ago, his lead scientist and consultant, Doctor Elsa Beckett, had shown up unexpectedly at the Project Q lab and started unauthorized use of their experimental equipment.
"Doctor Beckett! DOCTOR BECKETT! It's not safe! You have to shut down the quantum oscillator!" screamed Kai Gushman in the background, one of the lead scientists on Project Q.
"Colonel Calavicci! Doctor Beckett has activated the quantum oscillator, but it's not ready!" shouted Dr. Gerda Beeks, the chief medical officer on Project Q, over the din of a massive machine powering up. "The system hasn't been calibrated! There's no telling what will happen- oh my god, she's stepping into oscillation chamber!"
"Doctor! Get out of there! The oscillator's photonic cannon will kill you!" Gushman hoarsely cried.
Kristoff took one hand off the wheel to pick up the phone. "Tell Gooshie to shut it down, Gerda!"
"We can't! Once the accelerator is engaged, we can't stop the reaction or it could blow this whole facility to the moon!" Gushman yelled. "Whatever it was set to, that's what's going to happen now!"
"How much danger are we in?" asked Kristoff, briefly contemplating whether he should be driving away from the facility instead of towards it. He hadn't worked this hard for his whole career to be vaporized in an instant.
"Let me check… the photonic cannon is- that doesn't make any sense! She's calibrated the photonic gun to aim inwards instead of down the test range. I don't understand- it's like she's… she's… holy shit, she's going to shoot it at herself!" Gushman panicked.
"I'll be there in thirty seconds. Do what you can to talk her down, Gooshie!" Kristoff willed the truck to go faster. The engine temperature gauge crept into the red. Empty beer cans in the passenger footwell rattled ominously.
Project Q was a DARPA research project to build a quantum superposition device that could dematerialize a piece of matter and rematerialize it elsewhere by forcing it into a superposition state, but out of phase with the regular world for a specified period of time. Once the appropriate time had lapsed, it would rephase into the world in a different location, making it the perfect weapon for delivering ordnance payloads without bomber jets, tanks, or soldiers.
Kristoff sighed, thinking back to the proposal his commander, Doctor Duke Weselton, had made to the DARPA Director. A weapon with no perceivable launch mechanism would be the ultimate stealth weapon. They could materialize a bomb inside a rebel stronghold or even an enemy nation's top-secret facilities. They could, perhaps, one day materialize a soldier to force an enemy leader to surrender at gunpoint, having the soldier magically appear in the leader's home, past all the bodyguards.
DARPA had enthusiastically approved the project, and they were given funding and an express timeline to build a proof of concept. There was only one snag: no one had any idea how to actually build this thing. Weselton had read about quantum superposition in some science journal but had no experience or true expertise in the field whatsoever, and simply made the pitch with no concept of how to make it happen, leaving the mess in Kristoff's lap.
The project seemed like a lost cause until two years ago, when an eccentric, previously unknown forty-year old physicist named Elsa Beckett published an academic paper demonstrating superposition of a large molecule in her lab at the University of Oslo. Kristoff took immediate note of Beckett's research, verified her credentials, and offered her a position at DARPA immediately at three times the pay she was making. She'd thought about it for far longer than most rational people would, but eventually he'd persuaded her to come aboard.
After that, the project grew by leaps and bounds. Project Q went from a fanciful daydream to a working prototype in 18 months, demonstrating a superposition of a macro particle at limits never before tested. Dr. Beckett was incredibly driven, working crazy hours. Kristoff didn't fully understand her motivations despite getting to know her reasonably well, but he hadn't cared up until now - the project was ahead of schedule and under budget, and he looked like a rockstar to the DARPA brass.
Until now.
Kristoff raced into the lab's antechamber, quickly pulled a pair of safety goggles over his greying blond hair, and barreled down the hallway to the quantum oscillator's observation room. Blinding white and blue light poured from the room and his hair stood on end from the sheer magnitude of power being used by the equipment. He felt like he was standing in a corn field as a lightning storm passed overhead, ready to be struck down by lightning at any second.
"Gooshie! Report!" he shouted over the din of the machinery. A silver ring of metal revolved rapidly around a platform in the middle of the mirrored circular room, bolts of blue electricity sparking from the walls. In the middle of the platform, dressed in a form-hugging white bodysuit, stood Dr. Beckett, her eyes closed, arms outstretched as though she were communing with the great machine somehow.
"The particle accelerator is at 92% power, Colonel! It'll reach 100% power within 60 seconds, and when it does, the photonic cannon will fire into the oscillator ring," Gushman shouted, his portly body shaking from the effort.
"And there's nothing we can do?" Kristoff asked.
"No sir! If we attempt to interfere in any way, in the best case scenario, we all die. In the worst case scenario, there's a massive new crater as a tourist attraction - the former state of Nevada."
Kristoff's eyes bulged at the thought. Fear and anger warred inside him, holding him in place. He wasn't sure whether to run into the chamber and rescue Dr. Beckett or run for the door and drive as quickly as he could, so he did neither. "What's going to happen to Doctor Beckett, Gooshie?"
Kai shook his head wordlessly.
Shit, thought Kristoff. He pushed the intercom button on the control panel with a squawk. "Doctor Beckett! What are you doing- why are you doing this? You're going to kill yourself!"
Elsa opened her eyes, her arms outstreched over her head, pulling the bodysuit taut. Blue lightning surrounded her body, and an unseen wind blew her white blonde hair upwards. She looked at the observation room with the scientists pressed up against the glass and smiled, shouting one word.
"Anna."
A flash of blue light surged from the oscillator coil, blinding everyone.
Once the shock wore off, Kristoff caught his bearings and looked into the oscillator. Dr. Beckett was… gone. Her white bodysuit lay puddled on the floor.
"Where- where'd she go, Gooshie?"
Kai stared at the chamber, dazed. "I- I'm not- uh, Colonel, I am afraid I have no idea what's just happened. The… the photonic cannon should have incinerated her entirely. But that's clearly not the case because her clothing is there." Gushman pulled out a complicated electrical instrument that looked like an iPad taped to a tuning fork.
"What? What is it?" Kristoff sighed, huffing loudly.
"According to these readings… she may have succeeded in our experiment, Colonel," Kai gestured excitedly, lost in the moment.
"Succeeded how, Gooshie?"
"She may have sent herself entirely out of phase with our reality! This is… this is astonishing! To send an entire living creature into superposition! The first pilot experiments showed promise, of course, but this-"
"Gooshie! English, please. Where. Is. Doctor. Beckett." He dragged his hands down his face, contemplating what he was going to tell DARPA.
"I don't know, Colonel. But wherever she went, she is very possibly alive. There's enough of a quantum trace in the oscillation chamber that we may be able to locate her, if we work quickly before the particles decay. She might even still be in this room with us, just invisible, out of phase with-"
Kristoff nodded impatiently and interrupted Gushman's pontifications. "Find her. Get to work."
Author's Notes
I wanted to get the first actual chapter out so that you weren't left with just a mysterious prologue for two weeks. I've currently got 18 chapters mapped out and 5 fully written, so we're making good progress. I'll say up front that my knowledge of quantum physics is layperson level at best. I'm taking a LOT of liberties with it, so if you happen to be a Ph.D. in physics with a specialization in quantum mechanics, please accept my apologies in advance for likely completely butchering your chosen vocation.
And if you do have a specialization in quantum mechanics, the original Quantum Leap was based off CTCs and the Lorentzian manifolds, but ignored the Novikov self consistency principle (as we saw by substantial alterations to the past). This fic is going with the many worlds interpretation (all realities exist) instead, because it's easier to resolve and means glaring errors in my writing can be hand-waved away more easily :D :D :D
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