29. "Meanwhile" Is Kind of a Meaningless Term What With All the Time Travel but Anyway, Meanwhile

Avi was frantic. It had been over two weeks on his end since Mateo vanished. He’d told the cops everything he could and fortunately they decided he was a witness and not a suspect. He didn’t dare tell his advisor or anybody else. He definitely didn’t tell them about the warped concentric circles like gravitational lensing close up, the blast of cool humid air, the flash of gray and green he had seen for an instant as he turned around.

If this stupid theory was right, he needed unlimited access to the particle accelerator and no interference, as opposed to shutting it down since it might have killed him, or deciding he, Avi, was crazy. Maybe he was crazy. It would be a lot easier to back into some fantasy world where Mateo was alive and ok somewhere and maybe he could get him back.

Even if it turned out to be right, Mateo could have exited the wormhole in another universe, or maybe even the recent past. If it was a wormhole. There were all kinds of causality problems with that, everyone had beaten those dead horses to death, if travel to the past was logically impossible, let alone physically. He didn’t know, he didn’t know.

Even if this freaking accelerator was a wormhole generator, it wasn’t a steerable time/place machine! Even if he somehow managed to go in after him, there was no reason to expect he’d survive the trip, or that he’d come out in the same place as Mat, or that he could get back.

He rubbed his aching eyes. It was crazy. He kept wanting to ask Mateo for his take on it. He might not have the kind of hyperspecialized knowledge that he, Avi, had, but he had a lot of really solid general knowledge and he would come up with ways of seeing something he’d missed. This needed a research team, not just a grad student!

“Avi. You need to go home.” He jerked upright — and awake, apparently. He blinked in the overhead lights.

Colette was standing in the door, looking exhausted and worried.

“You can’t keep sleeping in the lab. You need to go home and sleep. And eat. It’s been, what, a week and a half?”

“Two weeks and two days, but who’s counting.” He laughed. It came out wrong. “Colette—I—“ I have to tell someone. “I think I killed Mateo.”

She came in, shut the door, and sat down.

“Ok.”

He poured out the whole story, his suspicions, the spike in particle detections that might be tachyons, the wormhole theory, the thing he’d seen, how those could have interacted to make these effects capable of doing anything on a macro scale.

“You didn’t tell the cops. Or me.” Her voice was raw, but not like she was feeling betrayed.

“I couldn’t tell them! They’d think I was crazy!” He deflated. “Maybe I am crazy.”

“Maybe you are. If you had a predisposition for it, the stress of a close friend disappearing could push you into a psychotic break, couldn’t it?”

His head snapped back up. “Geez, thanks! I knew y—“

“I didn’t say that was the case, I said it was a possibility. And it does happen to be a more likely possibility than wormholes, as far as we know.”

Avi slumped. “Yeah. Yeah maybe you’re right.”

“I am right, given we have probably millions of accounts of delusions and no accounts of wormholes, but that doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean, that doesn’t matter?”

“Because I’m going to assume for sake of argument that your theory is absolutely correct. If you’re suffering from mental illness, that has less of a time limit than locating Mateo.” She sighed sharply. “Also, let’s face it, if anyone could accidentally build a time machine, it would be you.”

“But how can you—“

“Archivist, remember? You said the amount of power suggested to you that Mateo probably wasn’t displaced very far in space or time. If he came out in another universe, or in the future, I can’t help you, or him, but if he came out in the local past I may be able to find some record of him.”

Avi stared.

“What? Whatever you’re planning to do has to start with locating him, right?”

“Well yeah, it...it does.”

“Ok then. Let’s both work at this, and if neither of us can find any evidence after a reasonable time, you’ll go get some kind of grief counseling, at minimum. And maybe I should too.”

Avi opened his mouth, then shut it. “...ok.”

“First, describe this landscape you saw in as much detail as you can.”

“Ok. It was a field, no, fields, and—“

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