Chapter 23

Private Ethan and Private Mark, the two men tasked with cleaning out Scientist Gary’s personal possessions from his room near the lab, arrived early in the morning. They were told to get everything out and boxed up so it could be cataloged and stored away. The room was being assigned to a new scientist that was coming on base in the near future and Scientist Gary was presumed dead or at least not returning.

They opened the door and found papers scattered everywhere. Large posters were hung on the wall with writing on them that neither man could heads or tails of.

“Well, they said to save everything, You start on that wall and I’ll start over here.” Private Ethan said.

Private Ethan started to take the papers down, one sheet at a time and carefully stacked them. The bigger pages were folded and stacked. Then, once one section of the wall was done, the pages were put into a folder and then into a box. The papers on the wall filled one large box. They opened filing cabinets and found black and white notebooks. “Damn.” Private Mark said, getting another box and filling it with notebooks. The writing on the covers made it easy to keep in order. The boxes were labeled and stacked waiting transport.

The rest of his clothing, shoes and housewares were also boxed up and ready for moving.

Private Anna arrived toward the end of the day in a large truck. She was to drive the truck to the storage facility. Private Ethan and Private Mark made trip after trip from the room where Scientist Gary lived to the truck. Once the truck was filled, Private Anna drove that truck to the government storage facility.

The boxes sat in storage for two and a half months until orders came down from General Marshall to cataloged all of the stuff from Scientist Gary’s room. Scientist Elizabeth was given that task.

“Me? I’m right in the middle of my project!” Scientist Elizabeth complained over the comms device.

“I understand Scientist Elizabeth, but Scientist Gary was our top man in the wormhole engine project. We need to find out what he left behind. That virus he let loose in the network destroyed everything and General Marshall wants to try and recover something. So, Scientist Elizabeth, get over to the storage facility and find something, anything, that could get us back in business so we can finish those ships.” Major Sarah said with finality.

Scientist Elizabeth huffed, “I want more money and more staff for my project. The budget you gave me is not nearly enough for the material development and testing.”

Scientist Elizabeth heard a sigh on the other side of the comm device, “How about 10% increase?”

“Ha! Hardly. 50%.”

“The best I can do is 15%”

“I’ll go as low as 35%, but that is barely enough to make the progress you are asking for.”

A pause, then another sigh, “25%. My final offer.”

“Deal.” Scientist Elizabeth smiled happily with the increase. “I’ll have it done by the end of the week.”

She ended the connection and then packed a few things in a shoulder bag and left the office for the storage unit. “This shouldn’t take too long, I mean, how much stuff can one guy have?”

That one guy had a lot of stuff.

Scientist Elizabeth walked into the storage room and found two dozen boxes and another dozen boxes of other things that she didn’t know what to do with. “Damn.” she grumbled, looking over all of the boxes and all of the things she had to catalog.

Scientist Elizabeth took the first box and set it on the table. She took the lid off and found black and white notebooks all labeled. She took the first one, opened it and started to thumb through it. Equations. Formulas. Notes to other research that other people have done all nicely documented as if he were going to publish it. “At least his handwriting is neat.” Scientist Elizabeth said, picking up the next one and starting to thumb through it. More equations dealing with materials. “Huh. I wonder if any of this could be useful for my research. She tapped her comm gauntlet and started to read through her own research, but none of Scientist Gary’s research helped her.

This pattern continued over and over again. Open a book, find more notes and equations and research notes, compare it to her own research and work, then close it and move on to the next notebook.

Box 8 held books about the wormhole engine. Scientist Elizabeth took her time here and did find schematics on the engine and the math behind it.

She compared it to her own work and did find one minor mistake. “Shouldn’t this be a negative?” she asked herself. Then going back to her gauntlet, “Well, the equation balances, but isn’t this negative?”

More reading. More cross referencing to her own research and to the sources he noted and found that he is correct. A positive is fine, but why?

The material work he had done helped her finish her own work and the books about his work gave her more questions than answers. “Well if this is positive, then this falls out of balance, but if you add this in, it balances back out making this ... what? How does this all work?” she said, muttering to herself as she opened more and more notebooks.

When she got to the big sheets of paper, she unfolded them and laid them out on the table. The equations were written here with more notations about how it worked, why the negative sign works here.

“There really are multi-universes.” she said, marveling at his proof. “Now what to do with it?”

Her temporary mate called her, “Beth, where are you? It’s getting late, I thought you would be home hours ago?”

“John. Sorry. I totally lost track of time. I’ll be home shortly. Sorry.” she said, blushing bright red at her embarrassment for being caught forgetting to go home, or eat, as her stomach rumbled.

She put her personal things into her bag and then locked the door to the storage room and called security. “I need a guard on this door. No one in or out until I return. Understand?”

“Scientist Elizabeth, I understand, ma’am, but you don’t have the authority to ask for that.” the guard said, arguing with her.

“Well, I’ll call the general and I am sure he has the authority to tell you to put a guard on the door. How does that sound?”

“Yes ma’am. I’ll get a guard for the door right away. No need to involve the general in this.” the underpaid and overworked guard said trying to appease the scientist and not get the higher-ups involved. That general really scared him and held his job and life in the palm of his hand.

Scientist Elizabeth went back to her temporary mate, John and was in bed after eating a quick meal and taking a quick shower.

She barely said ten words to him. They were put together and told that their genetic material would be collected in a few months. Their living together right now made sure that they were compatible before their donation was to take place for the good of the society.

For the next week, Scientist Elizabeth spent 10 plus hours a day going over Scientist Gary’s paperwork. His engine works. But the targeting system was wrong. His design sent everyone to another universe, parallel to their own, not to another star system in their own universe. She tracked more of his work down, finding statements like this that just confused her to no end.

“In the context of multidimensional tensor fields, the eigenvalue decomposition of the holomorphic symplectic manifold yields a quasi-isomorphic bifurcation. By applying a non-trivial perturbation to the Riemannian metric tensor, we observe an orthogonal transformation within the Hilbert space that converges to a stochastic resonance in the quasi-linear regime. Consequently, the entropy of the covariant derivative becomes invariant under the Möbius transformation, leading to a topologically invariant homotopy within the Lagrangian submanifold. The resultant eigenvector fields exhibit a hyperspherical harmonics expansion, which, when integrated over the complex projective plane, yields a null solution to the Schrödinger equation under a discrete Fourier transform.”

At the end of the week, Major Sarah called her for a status update. “I have found all of his information interesting and very informative, but he made a mistake.”