1.The Science Doughnut

"Hey! Mateo! You gotta check this out! Are you done fixing that thing?" "Yes!" Mateo straightened up from the air conditioner. Avinesh, Avi to his friends, total blue-collar jock even now, was framed in the light coming from the basement door, and he was beaming with innocently unholy glee. Mateo and Avinesh had gone to the same high school, and had shared a love of mad science and, when possible, using it to punk teachers. They both liked really old computers and had made it up to their science teacher (at least) by winning state in a science fair their senior year with a clunky basic mechanical calculator that could grind out basic math facts if you had about ten minutes to spare. It had punchcards cribbed from an old deck of playing cards and a garage electric eye to read them (stolen from Mateo’s parents and hastily put back after their win). They’d even tinkered with some simple code machines before realizing they didn’t actually have anything much to say.

They'd diverged some after graduation. Mateo, with his love of using his hands along with his brain, went to a trade school and got a job as an HVAC repairman. That didn’t stop his Scientific American subscription or a steady stream of PBS documentaries. Avi had gone to college and discovered theoretical physics. Then, God help him, grad school in La Crosse just across the river in Wisconsin, but they'd stayed in touch.

"What're you up to now? Talking to aliens? Blowing up the sun?" Mateo jogged up the basement stairs and joined him in his race-walking down the hall. Avi rolled his eyes, but he was clearly pleased. He'd even tried to affect the Mad Scientist hair, to counteract his sporadic weightlifting hobby, but the texture wasn't quite right. "Carving my initials on the moon. No, dork, it's a particle accelerator." "What? Here? Aren't those things huge?" "Well, they usually are, yeah. I guess you heard about the one they're building in Switzerland, should be open in 2007 or something?" "The Large Hadron Collider? Yeah. It's gonna make black holes and destroy the world, the internet says. You'll like it." Avi laughed. "Come see ours. It's dinky but we're doing some great stuff with it." "Yeah?" "Yeah, my thesis is all about high-speed particles." "You slam them into other stuff and make gold out of lead, right?" "Well, you CAN do that, but it's not cost-effective. I like time travel better." "That's heavy, doc." "I don't have a doctorate yet, Marty." "Matty. What kind of time travel?" "Not the fun DeLorean kind, sorry. But it's really neat. It's based on relativistic speeds, or well -- we have some evidence that tachyons exist after all. If we're right, we may be able to observe particles moving faster than the speed of light." "But that ... what, takes infinite energy or something, right?" "Yeah, but tachyons are total rebels. If they are real, they need energy to slow down, not speed up. But we--" his eyes gleamed, and Mateo grinned in shared excitement "-- we might be able to use them to accelerate normal matter faster than light. It could be a measurement error, but if it works, we might be able to, in effect, move a subatomic particle a few seconds ahead in time relative to an outside observer." "Get out! For real?" "Yeah! Come see!" This basement was new to Mateo, being full not of the comfortingly mundane technology of boilers and plumbing and HVAC, but a blindingly white circular tubular expanse taking up the whole large low-ceilinged room, surrounded by yard-high guardrailed structures. "It looks like a giant doughnut covered in science." "Instead of sprinkles? Ahaha! It kind of does." Avi approached a bit of the science. "I guess there's not much to see even if it does work, sorry. No light show. Just a readout." "I don't care, man! This would make history!" He dropped down in a folding chair to watch, brushing dust off the knees of his jumpsuit. "And catch you a job wherever you wanted one." "Don't get your hopes up, we're basically trying to nail down if we even did observe a tachyon at this point." "That's ok, it's my lunch break." He was ravenous but that could wait. “Has Colette seen it? Or is she stuck down in the archives.” “Stuck. Looking for newspaper articles on that freak fall blizzard up in Collegeville a hundred years ago or whatever that she was talking about earlier. She’ll tunnel out eventually.” There was a long pause as Avi tenderly nursed various pieces of mysterious equipment. After a while he spoke. "It's funny, the Driftless is a kind of great place for spacetime research." He had his face stuck in some kind of scope, but Mateo could see the dreamy, absorbed smile in the shape of his cheek. "How come?" "Well, you know how this whole --" he waved an arm vaguely "-- area is all mountains and cliffs and rivers and hills and caves and all that jazz? Not like the rest of Minnesota?" "Yeah, so?" "Well, there was this guy from here in the Driftless that wrote a story back in the day called Project Mastodon. It’s about these guys who built a time machine and tested it here, because we're the only part of the Midwest that didn't get scraped all flat and boring and filled up with silt by the glaciers during the last Ice Age. That way they could be sure they wouldn't pop out a hundred yards above ground level when they went back in time." "Huh." "Of course space and time are basically aspects of the same thing --" "So they tell me" "-- so you probably couldn't make a time machine that just affected time. You'd travel in space too. Heaven knows where you'd pop out," he continued happily, still buried in his scope. "We're actually expecting these particles to move relative to spacetime if we can get them to shift in time only. Hopefully they stay close to those detectors and don't have time or enough energy in the system to materialize a whole second ahead and a whole mile away." "Or a second behind!" Avi shook his head. "Nah, nothing can go back in time." "Why not?" said Mateo. "Oh, because it's over? It doesn't exist anymore?" "I don't know about that," Avi admitted. "The philosophy of it, I mean. I just mean ... most physicists are sure that there's no mechanism for it. We've measured time dilation on just a fast plane with an accurate clock, and the one moving faster speed-wise went slower time-wise. ... but you can't ... go so slow that you go back in time. That'd be like ... negative speed or something." He shook his head. "There's some speculation about wormholes, but those've never been observed and might not exist at all. Anyhow, this experiment is about relative speed on a subatomic level. If they pop ahead a few milliseconds from our reference frame, that's basically a cool side effect. What I want to see is A. proof of tachyons and B. matter moving faster than light. THAT'S what's going to revolutionize physics!" The Science Doughnut began to hum. "Should I move over?" Mateo said. He sure didn't want to disrupt his friend's work by tripping and falling into something important or whatever. "Nah, that's fine. Just don't like, stick your face in it or anything. That happened to a Russian dude back in the 70s." "Holy cow." "Well might you say that, my friend, he--" The hum rose in pitch and volume, drowning Avi's voice, although Mateo could see his mouth move as he kept talking, like he didn't hear it. The lights rose too, blinding sheets of white. How were they doing -- wouldn't they dim with the extra power drawn by the accelerator? -- the walls began to slide sideways and the floor rose up like the deck of a ship on heavy seas. Mateo realized then nothing was wrong with the lights or the sound -- he was passing out, vision nothing but a swarm of drifting colored lights, and reached out in a panic for the floor so he wouldn't smash his face into it. Was he having a seizure?! His great-great aunt had had them, his father had said-- "Avi! I don't feel so--"

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