Translucent (9 page)

Chapter 9

“Megan, would you
kindly explain what this is doing next to your bed?” My voice had an accusing tone as I pushed aside the miniature globe on her nightstand, revealing a wrinkled newspaper article cut from the
Santa Barbara News Press
. The title had caught my eye.

Sleepwalking Teen Vanishes into Thin Air

I scanned the article, feeling faintly nauseous. About fifteen-year-old Ashley Lacroix, her increasingly frequent episodes of sleepwalking, and how on the morning of July first, her family had found her bed empty, covers thrown aside.

She was never seen again.

“Why is this here?” I asked again.

Megan ignored me, doodling in the corner of her math book.

“Megan . . .”

“
What?
” she snapped, looking up.

I held up the article. “We talked about this.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Why do you have this? Were you her friend? Was she in one of your classes? Did you know her? When the cops come and ask why this is sitting on your desk, what are you going to tell them?”

She glared at me.

“You need to get rid of it.” My patience was wearing thin. “We talked about this. No articles, no mementos, no journaling about it, no looking for details on the internet . . . because that’s what guilty people do.”

“It’s still a weird story.”

“Not to other people, Megan. Other people don’t cut out articles like this, only criminals do. They become obsessed, and that’s how they give themselves away. It’s psychology.”

“Kind of like how you’re obsessed with Emory?” she said.

“That’s not the same,” I said hotly, feeling heat rush to my cheeks.

“You’re blushing.”

I bit off my next words. “Just get rid of it, okay?”

“Okay,” she sighed, crumpling it into a ball and tossing it into the trash. This probably wasn’t the first time she’d thrown it away. The cutout already had signs of being crumpled. As soon as I was gone, the urge would come over her, and she would rescue the article from the trash, flatten it, and put it by her bed again.

To remind her of what we’d done.

Then she would get paranoid and throw it away. Then right before her mom came to empty the trash, she would fetch it again, not wanting to lose it.

I knew the cycle, but said nothing.

She was right. I was blaming her for my own slipup, taking my frustrations out on her. I was the one who had screwed up. Soon Emory Lacroix would come asking for more information, and now that he knew what I knew, he would never give up.

Our homework lay before us, all blank. Megan and I had the same AP Calculus class, and this week we had a huge problem set. I’d gotten halfway through reading the first problem and given up.

We were both going to fail every class this semester. That was obvious. I hardly cared.

“I looked up his dad again,” Megan said quietly.

My skin bristled. “What part of
They can track our browser history
don’t you understand?”

“Just thought you’d want to know I looked him up again.”

“Mr. Lacoix?”

“
Doctor
Lacroix. He has a PhD.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I found something weird,” she said. “But you don’t care at all, so fine. I won’t tell you.”

“Good,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Good, because I don’t want to tell you.”

“You just said that.”

“Why are we still talking about this?”

“Because you’re a butthead.” On my graph paper, I focused hard on outlining the individual letters of my name, brows tugged together in concentration. The silence wore on.

I found something weird.

It nagged at my brain.

Finally I could bear it no longer and exhaled loudly. “Fine. What did you find, Megan?”

“Oh, you
do
care?”

“Don’t be patronizing.”

With a smug smile, she woke up her laptop and navigated to an open tab. “So I looked up that defense contractor he works for—Rincon Systems, or whatever. Guess who they’re under contract with?”

“Who?” I said.

“The Defense Department.”

“No duh,” I said. “That’s the definition of a defense contractor.”

“Okay, shut up. But guess what branch?”

“No idea.”

“AFSPC,” she said, turning to me with a twinkle in her eye. “Air Force Space Command.”

I stared at her. “Wait . . .
Major Connor?
”

“Yeah, Vandenberg Air Force Base . . . the Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles . . . it was their helicopters that landed at the crater, it was their hazmat team, they were the ones that decontaminated our rooms. And Dr. Lacroix’s company was just awarded a four-year contract with them.”

“That’s just a coincidence, right?” I said. “Defense contracting is a big sector in Santa Barbara, so that’s not weird, right?”

“You mean, that we killed his daughter
and
crossed paths with his funding agency? It’s a little weird.”

“Huh,” I said, staring at the squiggles on my graph paper. Thinking about it, that seemed like either an impossible coincidence or a very minor one not even worth taking note of. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out which.

“But as weird as that is, it’s not as weird as this,” said Megan.

I looked up. “There’s more?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “His company just put out this huge document, over two-thousand pages long. Apparently, it was part of the bid that earned them the contract. The primary author is John Lacroix.”

“Emory’s dad?”

“Right. Check out the title.” She tilted the screen so I could see better.

I leaned in and read, and a chill went down my spine.

Defending Earth in the Worst-Case Scenario: Efficacy of Modern Weaponry against an Extra-Terrestrial Threat

Before I could react, Megan’s phone buzzed. A text message.

She stared at her phone. “Uh, Leona . . .”

“What? What is it?”

“It’s Sarah . . . the grad student. Look—” She held the phone out to me so I could read the text.

Get over here now. You guys need to see this.

“I tried everything,”
the grad student shouted over her shoulder, leading us at a near sprint through a maze of dark linoleum hallways toward the physics lab in Broida Hall after she’d unlocked the doors for us. “And I mean
everything
. Visible light didn’t work, so I tried infrared, ultraviolet, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays. Nothing showed up. I even bombarded it with Alpha particles, heavier stuff too. Gold nuclei. Whatever I could get my hands on, but it all goes right through like it’s not even there. It bothered the heck out of me.”

As we ran, an excited adrenaline buzzed under my skin.

We were onto something here. A major discovery.

Dark matter.

“Then I started losing my slides,” said Sarah. “They were turning invisible on me. Once the stuff gets on a surface, it wants to spread out and cover the whole thing. I’ve seen that behavior in superfluids before. Helium, for example. You get it cold enough, and it exhibits zero viscosity and starts doing all sorts of strange shit. It’ll climb right out of its container if you let it. Basically, I think we’re looking at a room temperature superfluid.”

“A superfluid?” I said dumbly.

“Oh, and just a heads up, the stuff grows in the presence of human tissue.”

Megan and I exchanged a nervous glance.

“The invisibility has to be an optical effect resulting from the superfluid state itself,” she continued. “I figured it was bending light around the object, and since light would obviously take longer to go
around
an object than straight through it, I knew there had to be a way to measure it, so I did a little experiment. That’s when it started getting weird.”

“What do you mean? What happened?” I said.

“You’ll see.”

Triggered by motion sensors, fluorescent tubes flickered on behind us, too slow to keep up. It was nearing midnight. At last, we burst into the brightly lit lab, where a half dozen empty Starbucks cups littered the floor under Sarah’s computer chair.

“There . . . that’s the apparatus.” She pointed at the two-by-four, easily ten feet long, that hung off both sides of her desk, before she stooped to catch her breath and brushed behind her ears the frizzy red flyaways that had come undone from her bun.

Fixed to the two-by four were a series of half-silvered mirrors at different angles, a red laser pointer, and a lens that magnified the beam of the laser into a dull red blob on a projection screen.

“That,” she said, grinning, “is how we see it.”

“How does it work?” Megan asked, as we cautiously approached the apparatus.

Sarah took a deep breath. “You guys know how light is a wave, right?”

“It’s a wave
and
a particle.” I said with a superior tone. I’d taken physics my freshman year to fulfill the requirement.

“It’s not a particle,” said Sarah. “It’s just a wave. Okay, so you know how light interferes with itself?”

“Whoa, slow down,” said Megan.

“Think of two beams of light as two squiggly lines,” said Sarah. “If they line up, so the peaks line up with the peaks and the troughs line up with the troughs, the beams add together and they’re brighter, right? But imagine if they don’t quite line up, and the peaks of one end up in the troughs of the other, and vice versa. The beams are going to cancel. They
interfere.
”

“Okay,” Megan said tentatively.

“Basically, what this thing does,” she tapped the two-by-four, causing the blob on the projector to jiggle, “is measure interference. A half-silvered mirror splits a beam of laser light and sends half of it along a different path, which then gets reflected back to rejoin the first half before the light gets projected on the screen. Right now it’s calibrated so the beams don’t interfere. In other words, they line up. Hence a bright, smooth spot of light.” She pointed to the screen.

If she said so.

“But now imagine we did something to one of the paths but not the other, so that light on that path took a tiny bit
longer
to complete the path. When the beams rejoined, the squiggles would be out of sync.”

“And they would interfere with each other,” I said, nodding.

“Exactly. You’d get an interference pattern.”

“You guys lost me,” said Megan.

“Just watch,” I said. “She’s going to show us.”

Sarah felt around the desk and picked up something I couldn’t see, which she handed to Megan. “Tell me what this is.”

Confused, Megan opened her palm to take it, and her hand flinched a little. She peered closely at what was in her hand. “It’s invisible.”

“What is it?”

Lips pressed together, she probed the object in her hand. “It feels like . . . a nail.”

“Like a fingernail?” I said, lip curled.

“No, a
nail
,” said Megan. “Like a hammer and nail.”

“Oh.”

Sarah took the invisible nail back from Megan. “I’m going to move the nail in front of one of the split beams. Watch what happens.” Holding the nail like a pencil, she leaned over her apparatus and inched it toward the two-by-four.

I stared at her hand, and then at the screen.

And then I saw it.

The red blob began to pulsate with fuzzy ripples of alternating light and dark. The pattern converged inward, as if being swallowed by something in the center.

An interference pattern.

As the ribbons of light shrank inward, they seemed to peel
away
from something.

A shape.

At last it came into stark contrast.

There, magnified on the screen, its shadow clearly visible in silhouette, was the triangular tip of the nail. Outside the nail, the red glow remained smooth and unblemished. Inside the nail, the light went crazy and gathered in blurry, wriggling strips like it didn’t know what it was supposed to do.

I looked back at her hand. No nail in sight. Her fingers hovered a few inches above the faint line of the laser beam, seemingly not even touching it. The schizophrenic pattern on the screen was the only evidence that a nail was dipping into the beam and interfering with it.

I found myself leaning closer, mesmerized. The way the light swirled . . . it almost looked alive.

My breath slowed.

“That’s trippy,” said Megan.

“That’s what you’d expect,” said Sarah, “given that the light passing through the nail gets slightly out of sync before it rejoins the other half of the beam. They don’t line up anymore, so you get interference. That’s not the weird part.”

She withdrew the nail, and the blob on the screen returned to normal.

I blinked, coming out of my trance. Without the wavelike patterns, I felt a strange emptiness. “There’s something weirder?”

“Much weirder.” Sarah grabbed a leather-bound journal off her chair and scribbled a note to herself, momentarily distracted.

“Should we be doing this?” said Megan.

“So I did a little experiment,” said Sarah, closing the journal. “I ran an analysis of the interference to figure out exactly how much longer it took light to travel through the superfluid, to see if I was right about it bending light around objects.”

“Were you?” I said.

“Well, that’s what was weird,” she said. “You’d expect if light had to travel around an object, it would take longer, right?”

“Right,” Megan and I said together.

“It didn’t. It didn’t take longer. It’s not going around it.”

“So . . . it’s going through it?” I offered.

“It’s not going through it, either. If light went straight through it, both beams would take the same amount of time, and you wouldn’t get the interference pattern I just showed you. We’re getting that because it takes
less
time.”

“Less time?” I repeated, not getting it.

“The reason we got interference wasn’t because light went slower through the nail, it was because light went
faster
through the nail. It takes less time. Zero, to be exact. Light takes zero time to pass through an object coated with this stuff, which means it’s not passing through the object at all. It vanishes on one side and instantly reappears on the other, no matter how large the object is. It jumps.”

I stared at her. “What do you mean, it
jumps?
” I said.

“It jumps from one side of the fluid to the other, without passing through the space in between. Like it’s not even there. Which begs the question, where is that space going?”

“It jumps,” I repeated flatly.

“Is that . . . bad?” said Megan, glancing between us. As if I understood this any better than she did.

“Guys, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Sarah. “Whatever it is, it’s brand new physics. I mean, this could be a Nobel prize.”