35. Adrift in the Dirac Sea

Where had the power come from? That was driving Avi crazy. It certainly hadn’t come from the building. It could have blacked out the whole state without providing enough power to open a wormhole, let alone one a person could pass through. It didn’t make sense! The design was a little weird, but they’d been using it for two years without it eating anyone. It had to be something about the conditions of his tachyon project. That didn’t explain the power, though. No matter what the perpetual motion fans on the internet said, power didn’t come from nowhere.

So it had to have — he tried to keep it basic — come from somewhere. Ok, cool, fine. But where? Not the power grid. Not the sun, duh. What was left?

...even worse, wormholes (if they existed) needed negative energy. Good luck sucking THAT out of the power grid!

He stopped pacing. Negative energy. Tachyons were thought to have negative energy in some inertial frames. Was it enough, though? (No time to wonder if it was real. Something real had happened.) Had it somehow primed the pump for the theoretical negative energy of the Dirac Sea, swirling in the empty spaces between subatomic particles? He suddenly had a lot of sympathy for the first dork to have been rubbing two sticks together out of boredom when they caught fire. He could explain the mechanism just about as well as the original firebug. No, that guy was better off, since they could at least use the fire and reproduce the results!

He eventually went to make Colette quit working and eat. It’d been over fourteen hours. At least grad students holing up and working themselves to death wasn’t really something anyone thought was out of the ordinary. He’d mostly stopped replying to texts or calls, except from his parents, but nobody was too surprised by that either, giving him some space. Hah, the last thing he needed! He needed a research team, no, two of them. But good luck with that!

Colette almost had to be tugged away bodily from her desk. Not resisting, just not stopping looking at those papers until Avi got her out in the aisle.

“I’m up to the seventies for the local area,” she said. “Is it possible I’m too close?”

“I don’t KNOW!” Avi almost wailed, tugging his hair, then lowered his voice hastily. “I really don’t know. I’m not even really sure what happened. We might be dealing with more power than I thought, though.”

“...how much more?”

“How much more than WHAT? There’s no scale for wormholes!”

“Ok. Ok. Let’s go get dinner. Breakfast. Whatever.”

The walked down those infinite-seeming shelves. So much time, so much accreting time, even if you limited yourself to the past.

“Maybe I should be looking for anachronistic things,” Colette said drowsily.

“Would they seem anachronistic to us? What if Mateo changed the past somehow?” Avi said.

“Hmm. But ... I don’t think he’d go full Connecticut Yankee. We’d only see it as normal past technology or events if he affected things so much it became the norm.”

Avi’s head felt full of warm cotton. “How do you mean?”

“Like, if you find a ... I don’t know, a rubber band in a burial mound, it would seem weird to us. Let’s say someone wearing a rubber band was sent back in time and died and was buried —“ she winced at the realization of how tactless this example was turning out to be “—we’d still see the rubber band as anachronistic, since the time traveler didn’t go back in time and open a rubber band factory, pushing back the invention date.”

“Huh. Ok. I guess so. So...you want to look for things that seem weird for their time?”

“And most of it will be internet conspiracy fodder based on the idea that technological development is a smooth upward-trending line. But yeah. I want to try. Mateo would leave some mark.” She rubbed her face. “...maybe. I don’t know, Avi.”

“I don’t know either.”

It wasn’t until they returned to the archives after food Avi only vaguely tasted that she said “It doesn’t have to be technology he deliberately introduced. Something that stands out, though. Someone with his name in place or time with no English or Spanish names. Someone with an unusual appearance for a given area, either personally or what he’s wearing. Weird grave goods.”

“You think he might be dead?!”

“He might have stayed in the past long enough to die of old age if we don’t get him out.”

Avi made a face, trying to parse the causality involved. “Ok. Right.”

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