Francis knew it was a mistake as soon as she took the first step. More accurately, she knew it was a mistake when she slipped in between the oscillations. It was supposed to have been a test, but it had taken her 35 years to get to this point. 35 years of her professional and personal life. Two marriages lost. One estranged child. Ostracized by her peers. Relegated to the crackpot category of scientists, financially supported by the rich fringe elements populated by otherwise intelligent and successful people who believed in conspiracy theories about Roswell a hundred years ago or people who believed in Xenu. At least it was money, she would say to herself every morning.
The world had long ago written off what she called Valley Entanglement Transportation or VET as an implausible melding of Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum entanglement. But on her twenty-seventh birthday, she saw the shimmer of connection between troughs in the measured gravitational waves at the then aging, now largely abandoned in favor of space-based instruments, LIGO center. A decade before she started her two-year rotation at LIGO, a scientist named Herb Volker created a method to visualize the minuscule waves as they passed over the interferometer. It was in this visualization that she saw a single spark of connectivity between troughs.
She showed it to her supervisor, who discounted it as a visual artifact. She showed it to her Ph.D. Advisor who discounted it as a visual artifact. She showed it to her Mom who also happened to be a theoretical physicist. Discounted as just one part of Volker’s terrible visualization. Francis’s mother never liked Volker. Truth be told, no one liked Volker, but he was brilliant.
Francis thought differently and sought to prove that entanglement could exist between the valleys of gravitational waves. She had no idea of of the implications, but it was exciting nonetheless. That was 35 years ago. Now, at the precipice of proving her theory for large objects, she had grown tired. It had taken 10 years to develop a device that could detect and then amplify the gravitational waves from a celestial body from an impossible distance and long forgotten history. The first small scale device was shaped like a set of steel calipers whose pivot point was set into a metal enclosure about the size of a refrigerator box.
The calipers gave the amplified waves focus, the box both detected and then amplified them. At first, it didn’t seem like it worked. The fridge, as Francis called it, definitely detected gravitational waves. If Francis had stopped there, that would have been a case for the Nobel prize. No one had built a device so small that could detect the minute perturbations in the very fabric of space and time. But Francis wasn’t concerned with building a better mouse trap. She wanted a better Highway.
For days, the fridge ran, a small vibration at her feet. For days, she ate lunch on top of the Fridge as she tried to figure out why the amplification wasn’t working as she expected, until an errant olive got away from her and rolled toward the calipers at the end of the gleaming metal box. She hadn’t noticed at first, not until she finished her salad and started cleaning up after herself.
A half olive lay at the base of the calipers. The other half missing. Francis thought at first that she had made the cut herself when she put the salad together in the morning. But there were only whole olives left in her salad. She picked up another one with her fork and slowly pushed it toward the calipers. For a moment, Francis didn’t believe this would work and thought she should just eat the olive. Maybe, even for a moment, she didn’t want anything to happen. She longed for the release from such a Quixotic quest, if only so her sleep wouldn’t be disturbed by dreams of traveling in the folds of space and time.
But that’s not what happened. Half the olive disappeared, and then the whole olive and then half the fork. There was nothing on the other side of the calipers, no half olive, no half fork. Nothing. Francis put her arms in the air in triumph, whooping to an empty and cavernous room. The part of her that wanted to be free, the small frustrated part of her that wanted a more normal life free from sleepless nights, a life of mundanity, was once again suppressed. She put a box over the calipers so no one, just her, wouldn’t bump into it and lose their elbow or fingers. And the windmill became a giant.
Christopher Hazlett 