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18.
Tedda and Wally walked along the pathway defined by the blue tape. The tape ended as they entered a tunnel that looked like the hole in a huge donut. The tunnel was circular, and its opening about 20 feet in diameter. The tunnel walls were composed of swarms of tiny particles, like millions of fireflies whizzing about inside dark water. Tedda became dizzy and reached up with a shaky hand to touch Wally's large, sweaty shoulder.
"Technically, this tunnel is called a step-down collar. You'll be okay," he said, putting a beefy hand around her waist and taking her hand in his other, free hand. "I'll hold you steady. It's common the first couple of times," he said. He guided her carefully as the tunnel turned, twisted, even twirled. The tunnel also grew dark as night, appearing almost starlit.
"Is that a light up ahead?" Tedda said with a quaver. She felt not so much terrified—it was wonderful to be in here—but disoriented as if she were on a carnival ride.
"Yes, good old fluorescent light," Wally assured her. He took her hand from her waist, and then let go of her hand.
She walked ahead of him in slow, wondering steps, down a sort of ramp made of this same tunnel dust, and onto a firm concrete floor. "Wow," she said. With Wally standing patiently beside her, she started to get her bearings. It was almost disappointing, so ordinary: a complex of tunnels carved out of stone; fluorescent lights overhead, strung on thick black or orange cable running to some power source that hummed annoyingly and loudly in accompaniment to the lamps' buzzing. One or two fluoros flickered nauseatingly, apparently near the end of their charge life. It made Wally's face alternate in sickening shades of light blue and faded green, and she imagined she presented a similar coloration to him. It was neither hot nor cold in here (up here, down here, she wasn't sure) but a slight breeze stirred lukewarm air that smelled faintly of machine oil and chalk. An orange golf cart sat to one side by a small loading ramp whose edges were marked in alternating yellow and black warning stripes. Tools sat around; gray metal boxes smelling of enamel and turpentine hung bolted to the chiseled rock face. "So where are we?" she asked.
"We are in the auditorium," he said stepping down past her with his hands in his pockets. He shrugged lightly, apparently not feeling intimidated by their surroundings. "I'm told the space we occupy at the moment would fit into the distance between a hydrogen nucleus and its electron jacket."
She gasped, trying to imagine such a thing. She couldn't. Even the distance he mentioned—for example, almost the entire mass of an atom exists in the nucleus, which is less than 100,000 as large as the atom, and the atom itself is infinitesimally small. "I am having a hard time getting my mind wrapped around it."
"I understand," he said. "Maybe this will help. Imagine blob of mass and energy, which will be the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. The electron of this atom will be a basketball over 100,000 kilometers away—two fifths or nearly halfway to the moon. On that scale, a bucket of hydrogen would occupy a volume the size of the solar system."
"Ah yes," she said, suddenly remembering she'd heard things like this before—but where? And why? And it seemed urgently important. "What is the problem with it all?" She held her fists to her temples and squeezed her eyes shut, concentrating, but her memory wouldn't tease out any more information.
He regarded her curiously, with a kind of veiled respect. "The problem is that the other side, East Gotha, is doing the same stuff we're doing. It started out innocuously enough. Someone invented a way to make space compact by quantitatively reducing, in a limited space, the so-called strong force, which holds subatomic particles together. They did this by developing a kind of monopol graviton magnet that pulls black monopoles in one direction, leaving their opposite the white monopoles, which causes an imbalance that collapses the local universal scale by one or more quantum levels. Spies from the other side stole the information, and now they are building a similar storage facility, and it's become an international or global defense issue. Let me show you." He led her to the golf cart. They climbed in, and he whirled the machine around in a sharp turn so that they headed out into the corridors.
Wally explained more as they drove, with engine whining and batteries cooking off an alkaline smell. "A very strange thing that seems to happen is the process of Rules gets out of control, and features we want may multiply many times over. We don't know how to stop it, and there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason for it. We might want one little corridor in a specific place, and maybe 100 iterations of it turn up. That's why there is so much here. We originally planned on a set of ten galleries bounded by one main street running all the way around. We have no idea how many miles of corridors there are, and we haven't been able to explore even a tenth of it all." They turned this way and that among corridors that always seemed to look the same: straight tunnels with chiseled, irregular wall surfaces, and ghostly interactions of shadow and light under cold fluorescent tubes. "As I said," he explained, "it started out as a storage experiment, possibly for acres of archives that could thus be kept in a space that would fit under your bed. So now, the next thing to explain is that, in creating this artificial volume of space, it's necessary to generate high amounts of energy to pull away the black monopoles. So far, it's not an efficient or cost-effective system, but as with all things, there is hope the scientists can improve it."
"Are you working on that, Wally?"
He shook his head. "No—I'm a high level systems programmer with a background in three-dimensional modeling. This project goes far beyond the skills I learned in college, but it's a fascinating field and I'm learning huge amounts of stuff day by day. Hey, so as I was saying, once they figured out how to create an artificial mini-world space, they figured out how to populate it with objects. It turned out to be a relatively simple process, based on the real world. It's called modeling, and they use Rules to create sets and subsets of objects. Rules are complex sets of instructions that mirror how the world behaves. Take a simple example. If I stress a banana, it breaks in half. I then have two halves of a banana. The trick is not to write a rule for breaking bananas, but to write a general rule for how solids of various types behave under various stresses, so there are many possible outcomes for the banana; maybe it gets smaller rather than breaking; or it becomes a handful of nuts. Not literally; those are metaphors, but then much of it is metaphor. There are a whole bunch of high-end mathematicians working on this, and they've given us programs, algorithms, for all this. That's our job here in the auditorium, besides maintaining the micro-space. We apply the rules in a kind of real-world programming that's similar to those energy transfer games. Think of the several steel balls suspended from an A-frame that one sees on people's desks. You lift one ball and drop it. It stops dead when it hits the next, stationary ball, and all the balls in turn transmit the potential energy through the row, until it turns into kinetic energy at the other end, and the last ball on that end leaps away. Think of Jules Verne's novel Journey to a Comet, in which someone throws an object into a body of water chilled to right around freezing—a reaction sets in as the near-ice crystallization of the water is nudged one smidge further, and an entire lake surface instantly crackles as it turns to ice. That's how the rules work in our femtoworld. More specifically, we can create a tunnel like this by just applying a Rule, and the tunnel crackles into existence. Energy with just the right instruction set ripples through, shaping things as we wish. It's not an exact science yet, but we've done wonders."
As they drove, Tedda noticed walls resembling shelves in the distance. People seemed to be busy stacking objects there. Several tow motors raced about in clouds of bluish exhaust.
Wally explained: "That was the original idea. The fatherland has invested large sums of money and resources in this project, and they are storing copies of our entire culture's documents, arts, records, you name it, on shelf systems down here. Originally, the idea was just to create a virtual world and store virtual objects—copies made from solid, hadron objects—but the project quickly found that something more than virtual reality was able to be built down here. Without the Rules, this would have all become a meaningless mish-mash of random space, like ice floating on top of a river in winter. Instead, we forced intelligent construction into this temporary micro-universe."
Wally drove in silence a while, and then stopped as they came to a dead end. "Listen," he said, sipping quietly at a bottle of water.
She listened, and heard what sounded like echoes of distant hammering. It sounded like hammers in a distant cavern full of water, where the sound reverberated many times on the cave walls.
"That's East Gotha," Wally said. "They are trying to tunnel into our space and deliver a bomb that will blow us to hell. Now you begin to understand the urgency of our mission. We've stopped expanding our own side in these micro-worlds. We are waiting for them to try and puncture into ours from theirs, and we hope to blow them out before they do us in."
They sat for a few more minutes in helpless silence, listening to the persistent hammering. Sometimes the hollow, metallic blows seemed frighteningly close, other times vague and far away like distantly echoing thunder. It was the sound of East Gotha applying its own rules, popping out new corridors, new halls, new underground caverns, in the hope of getting close to the West Gotha side and finding a soft spot that could be exploited to insert deadly mines.
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