Chapter 2

Holly Teak tilted her face to the Colorado sun and spun, light as an aspen leaf on an alpine breeze, as sure of herself as the Rocky Mountains spinning around her. She crossed the gardens from the cafeteria to the Quantum Entanglement Physics Lab building. VEIL, the Variable Entanglement Investigation, Loville, had carved an alcove out of the quartz of Mount Herman to make way for the cutting-edge lab where, today, they would break the quantum entanglement record.

Not just break—shatter. Obliterate.

“Good Morning, Ling!” she called to the groundskeeper.

“Good afternoon, Doctor Teak.” She paused from raking mulch. “Did you just wake up?”

“Oh, no. I forgot to sleep last night. Crisp mountain air always makes it feel like morning around VEIL. I remembered lunch though! The cafeteria had great subs.”

Ling returned Holly’s smile, shaking her head. “That’s good, ‘cause you skinny. Isn’t this the day of your big test?”

“It sure is!”

Holly burst through the front door of the QEPL building, startling the security guard.

“Oh, Doctor Teak.” He relaxed. “Should have expected you to be extra exuberant this afternoon.”

She handed over her badge and cell phone but had to think a moment about the acronym she had assigned him. She raised onto the balls of her feet, looking at him intently across the counter as she considered... Front Room Access, Ninety Kilos. Yes, his acronym was a little odd because she had to include his metric weight to make it work. “Hello Frank!”

He inclined his head in greeting, a slight, almost perplexed smile on his lips. “Ah, you have found a way to remember my name.”

Holly grinned. She hadn’t shared her secret method of remembering names with him.

“I always think you’re going to forget, like you did for the first month, but now you always manage to pull it out of that giant brain of yours.”

She frowned. “Are you saying this brain makes my head look fat?”

Frank’s eyes went wide. “I didn’t say that! It was a compliment not an insult!”

She burst out laughing. “And I was joking, not offended.”

He laughed too, but still looked perplexed. He put her cell phone in a locker behind him and handed her the key and her badge. “Good luck today, Doctor.”

She tucked the key in her pocket. “No luck needed, Frank. This is the start of something great!”

Speed-walking down the halls, she came to two guards at the Entry Control Point for Lab One and the Ops Center overlooking it. The shorter one turned to examine her badge, scowling at her. She scowled back, trying to remember his acronym. Security Control Officer, Toroid Territory? She gave it a shot. “Scott?”

He gave her badge a cursory glance, shaking his head and deepening his scowl. “You always call me that, but it’s not my name.”

“Why not?”

The man’s jaw dropped a little. “Because I’m named something else.”

His acid tone caused the man behind him to frown as well.

“No need to be sharp.” He waggled his eyebrows at Holly.

Oh, Rick Sharp! From now on, Holly could remember his name by that hint.

“It’s not quantum physics, Doctor Teak. Just read the name on our badges.” Sharp sounded weary.

Holly raised an eyebrow. “That’s a great idea!” She looked at the man behind Sharp and remembered he had a stone leg. Not really, but that’s how she remembered him. “You’re Stone, right? In charge of security?”

“You got me pegged, Doc.” The man smiled and nodded.

Peg-leg? Was he joking? He struck her as much more clever than Sharp. She nodded. “You have that cool, bionic prosthetic, right?”

He grinned with one side of his mouth. “Cool. Yeah, I guess. Though I thought the original leg was cooler.”

He was joking. Holly liked him.

He put his hands behind his back, reminiscent of a relaxed military stance. “Are you excited to see your crystal in action?”

“Am I excited? I haven’t been this excited since I got an electron microscope kit for my ninth birthday.” She read his badge. “Lieutenant Sebastian Stone—I am super excited.”

She had probably said excited one too many times. Oh well; today was special. She smiled. He smiled back. Cool.

Rick Sharp shook his head at her and handed back the badge. “Doctor Teak, you haven’t spent much time outside labs, have you?”

She bit her lip and heat filled her cheeks. “Not really.”

Stone diverted the conversation. “What did you do before getting the assignment here?”

“At the University of Illinois, I developed a compound that superconducted 18.3 degrees Celsius higher than anything on record. It was the most exciting thing I’d done—before today.”

Nodding slowly, he asked, “And that’s a good thing?”

“Yeah! If other scientists didn’t break the record every five years or so, it might be worth a Nobel Prize.”

Stone chuckled, shaking his head. “Huh. Well, I hope your experiment goes just as great today.”

“It will! The success in Lab One today will change the world as we know it.”

“You are very confident, Doctor Teak.” Stone gestured for her to pass.

“I ran the numbers. Doctor Assad ran the numbers. Numbers don’t lie. We’re going to generate a lot of entangled photons today. At this point, we only have the equipment to catch one percent of them. Eventually, we gotta catch ‘em all.”

“Just like Pokémon.” Sharp gave a half grin like he’d cracked a good joke.

Holly tilted her head. “What’s a Pokémon?”

The guard gave a short, humorless laugh. “You just go get entangled, Doctor Teak. Leave catching the Pokémon to security.”

Holly nodded agreeably and accelerated toward the stairs. She kept herself from running but couldn’t keep from bounding up the stairs two at a time.

As Holly popped up out of the stairwell, the head of Test Operations looked over from her huge, see-through monitor. Big as a white board, the display neatly divided the Ops Center from the front observation area with its console to ceiling windows.

“Hi Holly!”

“Hi ... Sssally? Sandy! Sandy East!” She almost shouted the name. She had remembered without an acronym!

Sandy’s smile confirmed Holly had it right.

Holly pressed forward to look over the consoles and through the large windows. As she did, she brushed shoulders with Dr. Joseph Assad.

He turned and greeted her. “Doctor Teak.”

“Hi, Doctor Assad.”

Doctor Assad and she worked side-by-side in the Chemical Physics Lab. She knew he’d grown up in Mexico, but wasn’t Mexican. Lebanese, if she remembered right. The handsome man was smart and incredibly patient with her when she made her intuitive leaps. He’d listen, then go to the smart board and figure out the math to back up what she had just figured out in her head.

The woman next to Dr. Assad, right next to him, was the geologist on site. Holly had never seen them together, but their closeness made it very clear they were comfortable together. Holly casually scanned her badge. Ah, yes, Dr. Abbie Crossan. What was the deal with her pink hair?

Dr. Crossan was the one who wanted Holly to recalculate the photon entanglement rate to account for possible cascade effects in the surrounding mountain strata. Why? The billions of photons produced at the energy level Holly had specified could not penetrate anything opaque—like the back wall of the lab. The photons would never reach the quartz behind the lab.

Dr. Crossan glanced quickly at Holly and looked away.

More photons are better. Stop scowling.

Holly looked away too and down into Lab One. This was a good place to stand when they irradiated her crystal to see if it scintillated like Dr. Assad predicted. She agreed; it should look pretty. Lots of photons emitted in the visual range.

But her eyes did not first fall on her crystal; they fell on the sandy-haired Chief Technician—Axel Ashton. She sighed. Axel and she had shared a shuttle from Denver International to VEIL, arriving the same day four months ago. He had impressed her that day as a man who got things done, and he continued to impress her by building every single apparatus she dreamed up for this project. His sea-green eyes instantly took in a problem, and his clever hands went to work solving it.

Axel was a proton and she was an electron orbiting around him. Every time she needed a piece of equipment built, fixed, or aligned, she was drawn to him. The increased frequency and strength of her heartbeat right now suggested it wasn’t the only reason she was drawn to Axel. With his assistant at his side, there was nothing they couldn’t make work. And Axel put in as many hours as she did. He was easy on the eyes, and just as easy to be with. As much as she loved working, she loved working with him even more.

Axel’s diligence was the reason the consoles in front of Holly were telling her that the power levels were perfect, the lasers were aligned, and everything was as ready as it could be. She saw him as part of the machine—a vital part.

Axel glanced up. She smiled and waggled her fingers at him. Yep, she liked him a lot. The thought made her sigh again.

He didn’t even need an acronym. Machines turned on axles, so Axel fit him just fine.

She followed him with her eyes. As he walked around their creation with his assistant, her eyes moved to that creation—her crystal and the giant, metal donut that encircled it. Axel and she had named it the Quantum Entanglement Symmetrical Toroid. QUEST. The perfect acronym. In the center of the donut was mounted her crystal, about the size of a large flower vase but egg-shaped. 1024 lasers mounted in the toroid all pointed at specified facets.

“That’s some diamond.” Sandy East surprised Holly by suddenly appearing behind her.

Holly gazed at the softly sparkling synthetic gem. “Yes. But you know it’s not really a diamond. No carbon. It’s beta barium borate doped with iodine. That’s why the crystal sparkles like a million-carat diamond engagement ring.”

Sandy nodded and turned to the Asian computer operator sitting in front of Holly. “Speaking of engagement rings ... Minerva, did you hear about Zeke Callahan?”

Zeke’s name made Holly remember who that was, and she glanced down at the black-haired technician next to Axel. The only two people on the lab floor below, they moved to stand behind a plexiglass shield to the right of the toroid.

Minerva looked up at Sandy. “No, what about him?”

Sandy, usually professional with her Naval Academy training, bubbled with the news. “He and Amelia Parker got engaged last night! She’s wearing quite the gorgeous rock on her left hand!”

“Really?” Minerva’s mouth opened in elated surprise and she tilted her head. “That’s fantastic! Couldn’t happen to a nicer couple. And Amelia is so sweet. Feisty, but very sweet.”

“Yeah. I feel like I’ve known her forever, even though it’s only been a few months.” Sandy stepped back and returned to her screen.

Engaged. Holly wrapped herself so tightly in her work that she rarely thought about getting married. She watched Zeke and Axel inspecting a boxy part of the toroid near the lab’s back wall. Zeke had to be three or four years younger than her. Engaged. Good for him. She chuckled, reading the red t-shirt stretched across his broad shoulders. Big white letters declared: Never Trust an Atom, They Make Up Everything. Appropriate.

She glanced once more at Axel, shook off her nuptial thoughts, and turned to do her own last-minute inspection. And ran right into the boss—whose name was ... she looked from his steel-blue eyes to his badge. Adam Stettler. She kept her eyes lowered but found the nerve to apologize to the intimidating man. “Oh! Sorry, Director.”

“Doctor Teak. Everything ok?” He stood like a wall in front of her, a man with a square jaw, square cut hair, and a permanent furrow between his eyes.

She nodded and raised her eyes. The man was chosen to oversee this project based on his excellent Air Force record, an engineering degree from the Academy, then time in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But it was his icy, controlled gaze that disquieted her. “I was just going to walk around the room and do a final status check.”

“Carry on then.” His glare cut through her like a laser through ice.

Holly carefully side-stepped him. Behind the half-dozen consoles that lined the windows was a space for observers, but no chairs. No problem. Holly hated sitting.

She walked to the back of the large room away from the observation area. Around the perimeter of the Ops Center, operators manned twenty or so computers that monitored several thousand parameters. The screen summaries all looked great.

She walked down one aisle and up the other. At the last station, next to Sandy’s big display, sat the head of IT. Holly leaned over the focused young man’s shoulder to see his badge. Patrick Crossan. Didn’t I just see that name? Crossan? His display was partitioned into miniature windows, copies of several of the other stations. He flipped between windows like a video game.

He must have felt Holly hovering over him and he looked up. “Hey, Doc Teak.”

Why did everyone remember her name, but she couldn’t remember theirs? “Hey. How’s everything looking?”

He looked back at his multiple windows and pursed his lips. “No sign of a meltdown. Should go as programmed!”

Holly smiled and nodded. She walked back to the observation windows and found her spot. She looked back at Sandy who was donning a headset. Holly took a deep breath. The time drew near.

Sandy East called to the Project Director. “Director Stettler, would you give the final authorization to start the countdown?”