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originaldetectivesheep · 7 years ago

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A Life of Riley Part 2: The Building That Had A Grudge Against Furniture Or Something ch 6

Chapter 5

"Right," Riley said, hands on hips, turning away from where Wilson, his jaw set like he was being puppetmastered by his own demon into even standing here around with us again, was laying out balls of old bread and nose-reaming curry paste at the end of the scrubby third-hand slip-and-slide leading back to the culvert, "this is as set as we're going to get in here. Sandra, is Bira ready to move the gate back and put some water back in our channel?"

Sandra, back in the stairwell like she was hiding (I didn't blame her) checked her phone, then folded herself back in against the wall. "Yes," she answered, "yes, when I give the word he will open the sluice gate again. Five cubic meters per minute, was that it?"

"If we can get it out of this drool trace," Riley said, shrugging dismissively. "Sajitha, Carolína, are we all green on the dislocator?"

"Power connections are all set," I said, checking again, "and I don't know about how we're actually going to 'strike beam' out of this thing in a meaningful way, but at least the electrode's as clean as we're going to get it in air."

Riley stared at the ceiling, mouth open. "Sajitha it is a metaphor, we are not going to try and strike an ion beam in air, that would be dumb and have us all suffocated on ozone in about fifteen seconds." That completely sounded like something this lab might do by accident, but I kept my mouth shut. "All we're doing is keeping the arc lens focused in around the containment space; how is that doing? Are the splash panels tuned?"

"Panels are okay," Carolína said, flipping a few switches and unturning her lockout key in the control box. "All of the harness connections are green, but I'm worried that we don' have full contain – how do we make sure we have frame-of-reference coherence?"

"Planck-range numbers of electron-volts will do our contain for us," Riley said, grinning madly. "The sheer volume of energy flows is going to do its own disassociation – either we're going to be able to cell our target zone by panel-to-panel secondary arcs and hammer out whatever the twist in q is around here, or we're going to have front-row tickets to one hell of a fireworks show, let me tell you, and missed calculations don't matter to a cloud of ionized plasma." Well, that settled that; Sandra and Wilson didn't know enough physics to know what Riley was talking about, because if they did, they'd be running away screaming by now. Hell, I wanted to run – I was used to Riley and the risks we ran as a lab, but "get completely vaporized" was getting to be a little over the line. "If we're set, we just need to light this candle – Yuping, where the hell are you? Are the crutches done?"

"Zuodele," Yuping grumbled, stomping back along flatfooted next to the slip-and-slide. He wrinkled up his face and tossed the box he was carrying over at a corner; as it hit, a cloud of red paper chopstick wrappers paffed out, rose, and fell. So Riley had made him go use whatever connections he had to get a bunch of spare disposable chopsticks off someone's uncle's restaurant, then skin them out for the fish to walk with while we were doing science stuff in here – no wonder he was feeling humiliated. He settled in next to me, scowling as his fingers flew across the keyboard and the touch screen, and I took a step back as the controllers in the half-rack the other side of him started to hiss and whine as they came on line. That was the lab; you did your work.

"Right; we're good to go. Sandra, get Bira on the phone again and get that gate opened; Remy, Leo, get that hole opened up to water line and get the friggin fish grate in the channel behind it. Sajitha, Carolína, give Yuping some space and make sure that we don't lose any connections as we bring the assembly up to operating power." Riley settled on a pair of heavy welding goggles and checked the straps. "And Wilson, that's right, Wilson, you're still here; get way the hell back up on the stairs with Sandra, and don't look at the beam area without eye protection. This is going to get hell of dangerous in a second or two," Riley said more generally, "so if you don't know what a drop bar or an EMO button is, sit the hell down in one place and don't touch shit, and even if you do, stay in your lane and don't touch shit you haven't taken apart yourself." There was a heavy electrical thrum as one of the high-voltage stacks came up, and Wilson and Sandra didn't need an extra warning to get themselves bunkered as far back in the stairwell as they dared; Remy and Leo were almost jogging out, picks and crowbars on their shoulders, no less anxious to clear zone before we started getting up to point-at-the-wrong-thing-and-get-arced-to-bacon-bits energy levels. I pulled on my own goggles and took a deep breath: know your role, stay in your lane, and mine was right here with Yuping and Carolína in the belly of the beast.

When everything, literally everything, in your immediate environment, is turning into a monstrous fatal arc risk, you get to a level of concentration and focus that is just this narrow side of impossible. I was hyperconscious of every part of my body, every fold in the coveralls; every switch and shield and button on the panel; every move and motion Carolína and Yuping were making, where they were in space and where they were going next, and what was going to be clear: what might bump into what or who, and where we absolutely couldn't touch, where the nearest grounding handle was so that I could be sure that if I had any questions about anything, anything, I could grab on and know I wasn't going to short out the boards. But that was just me and her and him and the dislocator: the rest of the room was all but gone, and I didn't see what Riley was doing or saying, staring into the dislocation cell, yelling commands back at Yuping in half English, half Chinese to get the focus tuned – and I didn't see the fish, didn't hear them going floppy-plock, floppy-plock down the slip-and-slide on their chopstick crutches, marching towards the baits at the end and collapsing inside the cell, half-stunned or half-cooked by the arcs, the suffocating, crushing load of electricity in the air. Something was flashing in the cell, not just the flopping, twitching grinckles; the state in there was discohering from the ground state, and somehow – somehow, in defiance of everything we'd worked out about how quantum threading worked and the very goddamn most basic idea of the observer effect – it was almost like we were seeing into other parts of the graph, parallel threads of reality that, absent these nosebleeding levels of directed energy release, were completely and totally disjoint, unreachable from our own.

"Hey," someone said, echoing laid-back and neutral and hopelessly alien somewhere inboard of my ears, "hey wow, this is something. Are you guys humans? Is this the human slice? Like, wow. This is really something."

"Do you know what a quantum state space is?" Riley was speaking into what looked like a CB truck mike, splurchering out of speakers to be heard over the thunder of the dislocator's energy release.

"I – one sec, I'mma probe – oh, yeah, that's what you mean. So you used this thing to cohere our spaces together? Wow. That is so wild."

"Can you selfcohere into our space?"

"Oh, now that you asked me to, totally." Somebody in an archaic daguerreotype-cut suit was trying to fit between the containment panels, trying to slide out of the dislocation cell, and getting stuck because they were fat. "I have limited agency in your slice, but I can stick to this room, sure."

"Yuping, shut down the beam." Yuping punched off a few buttons and dragged down a slider, and the ringing in my ears, the hellish blitz of arc light in ionized air, dampened away. "You should be able to nudge that panel a little and get out now."

"Oh, no problem, not a thing," said the voice, which had to be more accurately the demon, as it walked through the solid steel-sandwiched lead and glass observation panel of the door like one of us might just walk through a friggin shower, "I was over in my slice before, and I was getting stuck on the state boundary, but if I'm cohered to yours, I'm not dense enough for this to be a problem." It stopped a few steps past, looking us over with beady rabbit eyes in a rabbit head, looking over the machines, at the panicked normies in the stairwell, the fish stumbling in at its smart leather-booted feet, at Riley standing unflappably right in front of it, arms folded.

"So you're coherent on three-space if you decide to cohere," Riley started, ever the scientist even though there was a friggin uncontained demon standing right in front of us, no magic circle, no bell book and candle, no nothing, "but you're not properly coherent in terms of basic atomic physics with other structures here. So you're more accurately pattern-overlaying your own ground state into ours – this is your limited agency, that you can communicate indirectly and by photon interactions because photons are so goddamn weird to start with, but you can't like affect anything with physical mass in this branch of three-space." So the demon was here and not here – we could see it, and it could make us hear it it telepathically or whatever, but it wasn't going to like reach out and rip us limb from limb. Maybe. Probably. Small comforts.

The thing held up a finger – despite the fluffy rabbit head and long, pointed bunny ears, the rest of it looked like nothing so much as that president with the sideburns, Arthur somebody – for a correction. "Nearly. Nearly. Unless I get a specific release."

"We're here to talk about that, actually," Riley said, leaning back. "I gather you have a release form for around here – inanimate objects without writable memory not physically built into the building?"

The demon did a shoulder shimmy that I guessed meant agreement. "Yes, that's about it. The particulars are a little different, but it's close enough. A maximum of one coherent object, anywhere inside the plotted notional building, per day or less frequently whenever I get hungry."

"So you are eating these things."

The demon pulled down on one of its ears, twirling it in a circle. "Well, not quite. It's kind of a metaphor. But moving around like this is expensive, and I'm sure you know that it takes matter to get to energy."

Riley nodded. "All right. If you don't mind me asking, how did you get to that release in the first place? How did they decohere you in?" I thought we were going to be renegotiating this stupid thing's stupid contract to buy it off with the growing pile of expiring grinckles still plopping down the slip-and-slide, but Riley had research questions that needed answered.

The demon leaned back with a kind of worbling sound, its head traveling weird like a cheap spring-plug bobblehead toy, like it wasn't attached to the thing's neck in any way that made sense for vertebrate biology. "Oh no, no way. There was this human kneeling down in this big chalk circle, all these candles going, all these herbs smoking, all this big production, so I decided to go over and humor them. It's – it's just like so cute, you know, like – it's like with you, probably like when your cat puts mice or dead birds in your shoes because she thinks she's doing you a favor, isn't it? When someone puts that kind of effort in, sometimes, every so often, don't you want to come over and play along? So I showed up, and played along with the script, and now I can take some furniture parts once in a while." It did the head-wiggle thing again, and I would have facepalmed if I thought it was remotely safe to take off my goggles. How were we supposed to tell that this thing wasn't just playing along here – wasn't just humoring us to get us in worse trouble?

"But this, though," the demon said, looking around in admiration at the hellish stacks of capacitors, oil smoke wisping off them as they fed back in from the mains that we hadn't unplugged, the arc-scarred containment panels and the mounting avalanche of dying fish, "this is hype. This is something else. This is what humans are doing now? This is the first time I've seen someone actually sticky these spaces together, for real, like the way we do. I'm impressed." At some level, I wanted to correct it, tell it not to mistake what the Applied Physics lab could do for what normal humans would do, but the longer this thing was impressed, the more likely it'd be to take Riley's bait.

"Glad you like it," Riley said, self-satisfied. "We wanted to get you in on the ground floor of a new opportunity, and we didn't have time to go rolling the dice on chanting and lots of herb. To make this as short as I gotta, I want to buy over your contract: same parameters as before on action space, but we swap out the part where you can eat someone's chair like every other day for this continuous flow of fish – as many as you like, whenever you want." Riley threw a hand through the air, indicating the slip-and-slide leading back to the hole, the stumbling grinckles crutch-flopping along to the end, the pile of accumulated derpfish flopping over each other on the concrete as they slipped off the end and fell over.

"All of these fish? Whenever? Wow, you guys are wild – all I heard about fish was that they're, like, water things, but you've made them land things? Are the stick parts part of the fish? No, I guess not, they fall off at the end." The demon was squatted down, a gold watch chain hanging free of its waistcoat, as it bent to look closely at the grinckles.

"You can pick one up and check it out if you like," Riley said, language precise because this also was a release form. The demon reached out a manicured, hairy-backed hand and picked up a grinckle by the tail, standing up as it turned the fish over in its hands.

"It certainly looks good; you got a good balance of mass per unit with these. It's a little flappy, but nervous energy is good – and it certainly looks like it'd be an improvement by total volume." It looked over at Riley. "May I eat this one to get an idea of the energy budget?"

Riley nodded, arms folded. "Sure, go ahead. You can eat the one fish you're holding as a free sample." Lightning-quick, the demon's head fell over to one side, onto its shoulder, opening a mouth on the other side as wide and random as a muppet face, lined with rows and belts of serrated triangular shark teeth. It tossed the fish up at it, and its head buzzed and chittered like someone'd put a reciprocating saw into a broken Pez dispenser, evaporating the grinckle into a faint bloody mist that mostly seemed to get sucked down inside the demon's body. Next to me, Carolína had blanched to an unhealthy new-butter tan, shit scared, and I guess that I probably was as well, but Riley was just standing there, unaffected, unafraid, not even grossed out by the bloody wisps of atomized grinckle drifting down to the floor.

"So? We got a deal?"

The demon juddered in place, like it was digesting or running a calometric calculation, maybe both. "Oh, word. This is definitely a better deal; the volumes are fine as long as your source can keep up, and I love the new per-mass budget. It's so much easier to crack this mix – heavy elements, it's like when I guess, when you eat like bamboo roots or sheep bones, it's so hard to digest it's almost not worth it. This stuff's all – CHON, CHON is your word for it, right? So good. I'm going to have to start working out again, or I'm going to get fat." It patted its already-ample gut, and looked up, back at Riley. "So what's the catch? There can't be a deal this good without a catch."

"No catch," Riley said, leaning back against the mutilated ping-pong table with a squeak. "I'mma probably need your help on something in a while, but it's nothing big, and I'm still getting all the pieces in place; for now, just hang out, eat your fish, and I'll be in touch. We sign this with the interlock, right?" Riley shifted some papers out of the way, pulling out a clipboard with a tan piece of paper or parchment on it and a tangled chunk of jingling metal. "Sandra, come over here, we need your signature on this as the facilities rep." Sandra stood up on the stairs, advancing over with tiny mincing steps, obviously scared out of her mind, and Carolína nudged in next to me.

"How in the hell does Riley know what you need to have to sign a contract with a demon?" she whispered.

"Don't ask," I muttered back. "Because Riley. Because Riley. That's all we need to know." I didn't know, and I didn't want to know, and I wanted to be anywhere in the world but in a basement full of unstable high-energy power supplies and suiciding fish, watching my lab head sign a binding contract with an extradimensional intelligence.

"Right," Riley said, folding up the contract and pocketing the metal thing, "that's done, we're all agreed, so you can go decohere whenever you like. We'll make sure the hole's clean and there's enough crutches over there so you can keep getting your fish, and then we'll pick up and bail. Good talk, nice meeting you." Riley threw the demon a thumbs-up rather than slapping it on the shoulder or something, and turned back to roll up the blueprints for Sandra.

"Oh no, thank you," the demon said, wigging its ears. "I'll just flex back here and get out of your way. Picnic night!" It winked out of existence, its branch of reality no longer bent onto ours, but out of the corner of my eye I was sure that I thought I saw a couple fish disappear out of the pile after it; sure that I could smell the tang of drifting blood in the air as it invisibly rotorootered them apart.

I took my goggles off, wiping the sweat off my forehead with an arm of the coveralls. "So I guess that's it," I said. "What now? Do we need to start discharging the caps and powering down to take the dislocator apart, or, Riley –"

"You – you need to come up and see –" Wilson blurted, panicked. "You need to turn on a phone – it isn't even just trending, it is on the news – we must get the hell away from here, the hell right now!"

"Wha? What is it?" Remy was back in front of Leo, coming back from the hole they'd punched in the culvert, the door they'd been ducked behind while the dislocator and the demon had been making this side of the basement so colossally unsafe. "Wilson, what's up? All our gear, we still got it up in the apartment. What happened?"

"This happened," he said, turning his phone around with the video already autoplaying. "Northern lights – coronal discharge – coming up from the ground, all over this building." Unearthly flames and towers of luminous particles reached up into the sky around the shadows of the Renfield Arms, distant and dark and creepier than hell on the tiny screen. "Earthquake sensors went off – but there was no earthquake – no ground shaking. Science Reddit doesn't know what to do – everyone is talking gravity well, and on the next refresh those posts are stripped and the users are kickbanned." The phone shook in his hand, or the land shook between the camera and the thing playing out on the phone, some noiseless phantom gravity wave rippling out from where we were hammering two branches of reality flat together.

"Really?" Riley asked with a totally inappropriate tone for the situation. "Gravity well? Was that a gravity wave? I thought I felt something weird when we had the beam up – Yuping, can you check the power and see how close we could get to max output? I brought down a couple detectors from the lab in Carolína's truck – we can get those up, run for another couple minutes if we can get it, and then maybe we'll see what sort of equipment we'd want to build to detect or track gravitons. I wonder if it was the power output, or the framing that did it – we've got the whole machine on the ground, and I guess it's loosely coupled into the building's mass footprint, and –"

"RILEY!" I yelled. "That is not the POINT – this is not the TIME – Riley, what Wilson is trying to tell you but can't because he is so scared he's almost quantum-decohered his own self is that we have pulled such horrific amounts of mass-media cop aggro that unless we get Real Gone Right Now, we're all going to go to Secret MIB Jail forever. We can't do another shot! We can't stick around here a second longer! We've got to get away! What are we going to do?"

Riley just nodded, looking at me like this was also part of the plan. "Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Okay. Well, I figured I might have to have a backup if like the capacitors melted and we set your apartments on fire, so it ain't a thing. Yuping, did you set that up with Simon? Do we still have our out?"

Yuping nodded, pushing up his glasses. "Yes. We are okay. He couldn't get another crew – middle of semester and also it's monsoon. We print tickets tonight, can fly tomorrow."

Riley nodded back. "Well, that's that. Come on, let's go upstairs; we can leave the dislocator in place for now, there's no way we can move it back tonight with that aggro and still get out tomorrow morning." Yuping stripped off his gloves and dropped them on the console, heading for the stairs, and the rest of us followed him up, still confused, with Riley taking the rear.

With everyone up the stairs and huddled back against the garage wall, Riley took a key from Sandra and locked the flimsy hollow-core metal door behind us, then unrolled out a magnetic label and flattened it out at head height. Danger, Machinery In Operation. "It may not look like much, but they won't expect that we could evolve as much power in as small a space as we've got; call it a 'beware of the leopard' gag." Riley turned and looked us over. "Like Sajitha said, we've probably got to get gone before the friggin Space Troops or whoever show up, so Sandra, Wilson, you don't live here, you go the hell home and pretend you don't know us." They nodded vigorously, like this was the easiest thing in the world and they really should have started doing it a long time ago. "The four of yous who live here, go grab your phones, your passports, anything else absolutely essential, as fast as you can, then you'll come back and sleep at the lab while Yuping goes home and gets our travel docs set. We're gonna be taking a little working vacation while the heat cools off."

Leo raised a hand. "Riley, I don't have a passport. It kind of got burned up back when my last apartment complex got completely destroyed."

Riley cocked an eyebrow. "Well, in that case, Leo, you're just down to the 'sleep at the lab' part – and no vacation. I'll leave you a key."

I had had enough, enough of Riley treating us like disposable footsoldiers, enough of the raging rampant stupidity around all over everything. "Leo, I will leave you a key. I still have my old one-room place: stay there, watch our books, call or write if Riley lets us have an address in El Rey or where the shit ever we're going to end up, and let us know what's going on here. This is stupid and atrocious and bad enough without making you sleep on the floor of the lab for weeks or months." I turned back to Riley. "Right, we'll go – phones, passports, what else is in this 'absolutely essential' that we're running away with?"

Riley looked at Yuping for confirmation. "Simon's lab's going to be taking care of most of it, right?" Yuping nodded. "Well, in that case, yeah, your phone, your passport, a bathing suit, and a machete if you got one. Everything else should be set up there. Come on, get moving – if we don't get in the truck and the hell out quick, none of this crap's going to matter."

I shook my head as I sidled along the garage for the back stairs, the back way up to the back door to our condo. It was always the little things, Riley's little off-side, off-hand remarks that really told you that things were going to get weirder, and stupider, and more dangerous – and "a machete if you got one" as essential equipment meant that this "working vacation" was going to get even weirder and dumber than hanging around here; I wished that it was my passport that had gotten burned up, that it was me who could get left the hell out of Riley's crazy schemes for once.

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