Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

a second—given that there were over two hundred cameras with their glass eyes cast in this direction, she finds it significantly harder to believe that it just happened to land right in between frames in every single case. That includes satellites, and the omnipresent, citywide drone mesh network that staggers and coordinates exposures in order to avoid just such frame-based blind spots. It should be impossible for something of this magnitude to happen without being captured.

Yet that’s exactly what the evidence suggests. One moment everything in and around Station F was normal, and the next, everything had already happened. It is for this reason that Henrietta has privately christened the crystalline riddle as “The Antecedent.”

One possible explanation is that the entire anomaly manifested, developed, and resolved faster than the speed of light. Maybe someone finally found a way to hack conservation laws, exposing exploitable subatomic flaws. Henrietta is one of the very few who now know that universal constants and enduring truths aren’t quite as immutable as everyone once thought.

A cryogenically preserved former Oxford philosophy professor whose work she thoroughly studied used to describe scientific and technological progress as a giant bag of white and black balls. New discoveries were like reaching into the bag and seeing which one you happened to pull out. White balls were safe and generally represented net gains for humanity, while black balls were catastrophic existential threats. Nobody knows the ratio of black balls to white, or if all the white balls are just the easiest ones to reach. Or if maybe the first black ball any civilization draws is always its last. All we know for sure is that once a ball is drawn, regardless of whether it’s white or black, there does not seem to be any good way of changing your mind and putting it back.

—

Henrietta would much rather be set up in the center of the platform, just below the origin, where all the best particle interactions are most likely to occur, but there is way too much competition—too many people trying to out-jurisdiction one another by comparing the heavy collections of biometrically signed and encrypted credentials that swing from their lanyards. The dynamic reminds her of card games like Magic: The Gathering; Yu-Gi-Oh; and, of course, Pokémon. Two players enter the fenced-off interior of the platform, play the best hands they can assemble, argue in multiple languages, and by the time it’s all over, only one remains.

So instead of competing, Henrietta snaps various sensors and experiments into the magnetic pogo-pin ports of autonomous quadcopter drones and sends them up to collect data on her behalf. Initially there was some attempt to control the airspace above the crater, but the French National Police officers looked so silly running around trying to figure out who was controlling what that, once they realized everyone was dicking around with them, they decided to sit quietly in their folding chairs, cross their arms and legs as tightly as possible, pitch their chins, and pretend not to care.

The irony is that, as far as Henrietta can tell, the source of mysterious energy isn’t even emanating from the focal point of the surrounding crystalline parabola anymore. We are all so accustomed to thinking of the position of everything around us as being relative to the Earth’s surface that it seldom occurs to anyone that we are, in essence, an arbitrary point of reference in the universe. There’s no reason why phenomena can’t be relative to the center of the solar system, or the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way, or some cosmological anomaly spawned by the Big Bang. Whatever physical laws The Antecedent obeys, and whatever forces now act upon its baffling and abstract mass, its location in spacetime seems to be shifting very gradually like some sort of dizzying, multidimensional parallax.

Henrietta has been able to take the threat of a micro vacuum decay off the table, and she’s leaning away from the theory of a rogue chapter of ingenious bad actors who somehow figured out how to weaponize dark matter. But there is one thing she has not been able to categorically dismiss: the possibility of the emergence of an entirely new particle.

While levels of ionizing radiation are at or below baseline, the emissions around Ground Zero are not quite as innocuous as first responders initially thought. Before the site was opened to investigators, multiple biological samples were exposed via drone and analyzed using portable digital pathology scanners. Healthy cells and even samples of malignant tumors appeared to be entirely unaffected, but curiously, precancerous cells in closest proximity to the drone’s antennas showed significant accelerated advancement. It is as though some sort of interaction between ambient electromagnetic radiation and the charged particles produced by The Antecedent cause localized fields inside of which matter can reach its temporal potential exponentially faster. Transitory nanoscale time machines are flashing in and out of existence all around like microscopic fireflies operating in wavelengths of invisible light. Henrietta believes that the exposure risk has not been sufficiently conveyed: Anyone with any kind of metallic implant who is at increased risk of cancer would be well advised to stay very far away.

34

  BACK DOOR

WHILE SHE WAITS for Moretti to give her clearance to leave for Paris, Quinn sits at her cubicle and investigates the attack on her own. It takes her all of about fifteen minutes to reach the conclusion that the story about a nuclear detonation is a cover-up—that her own people are lying to her, not only about one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in history, but more to the point, about the death of her ex-husband.

The weather is what gives it away. Something about it feels wrong. In all of the drone and street-level footage she has pinned around her virtual workspace, Paris is overcast, but no rain is falling. She zooms and pans, but can’t find a single umbrella, nor ultra-chic hydrophobic rain bonnet, nor cobblestone pothole