Inception (Pt. 1)

“Ken, are you listening?” Irina asked, the frustration carrying clearly in her tone.

Ken blinked a couple times. His mind had wandered. He kicked himself internally, dreading her reaction. “I… Sorry, I lost focus for a second.”

Irina shook her head disparagingly. It was somehow much more humiliating than any of her other standard responses. “Have you become simpler since we separated?” With a click of her tongue, she gestured to the diagram on the whiteboard, tacked on in the center.

It depicted a clumsy rendering of a sphere, scrawled in colored pen ink. Below it was a cross section of its boundary. Ken recognized it when he’d first seen it; it was what set his mind wandering in the first place: he recalled it being the same kind of diagram May had wanted to show him mere days before.

It had been a week since that day—the day Irina invited him formally to help. Four days before, May had shown him a diagram she’d made. But at the time… he’d brushed her off.

But he recalled it still. In the moment he looked at it, it looked like this.

He snapped back to attention as Irina drew a large circle on part of the illustration.

“See this?” she asked. Her tone was harsh and serious, as was common for her, though not hostile. “Before an extirpation, there is this lensing effect.”

Ken nodded. After a week of seven continuous twelve hour days back-to-back, his brain was mush in his skull. Truthfully, he wasn’t completely sure what he was nodding at.

I don’t know if I can keep up anymore, he thought, clenching his jaw in annoyance as the idea flitted through his occupied mind.

“This is caused, in theory, by a concentration of dark matter, just before the extirpation.” She stepped back, rifling through papers on the table beside the whiteboard. “Do you remember your simulations during Aerodramus where we changed around the configurations of the dark matter particles?”

Ken nodded, though her back was turned now. He just didn’t have the energy to step actively into the river of words cascading from her. Just watching it rush past would have to suffice, for now.

She continued, as if she felt his affirmation. “What parameters did you use?”

He blinked a couple times. That was four years ago that he’d done that work. She wanted him to remember the density he’d run his simulation at?

He hadn’t even been the one to use the tool he’d made—not really. He’d finished it, come in for some early applications and to help with integration, and then handed it off to her team.

He didn’t like to think about that period of his life much. Perhaps he’d forgotten on purpose.

“I don’t…” he began, trailing off.

She drew a packet from those she sorted through, handing it to him. “Read that.”

He put it with the rest: a pile of some ten thick packets and notebooks, and that was just from today. A pile of similar texts awaited him at home, accruing from each day over the past week. After the long days, he just didn’t have the mental energy to stomach reading that stuff on his own.

“You ran the simulations as having extremely dense distributions of particles, as you seem to have forgotten.” She shook her head. “There was no collapse like this.”

He frowned. “So… there’s really two possibilities: our understanding of dark matter is incomplete, or there’s something else going on.”

“Or the third.” She locked eyes with him, fire in her eyes. “Your program was wrong.”

Ken lowered his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. It was possible. He was nearly certain that his program was well-made, and correctly implemented the known properties of dark matter, and the other types of control particles. It’s possible there was a silent error after it reached a critical density of particles…

But that was exceedingly unlikely—approaching impossibility. He’d written the software under NASA’s strict coding conventions at Irina’s behest, closely following the principles it outlines. Any errant segments should have emitted some kind of error signal, at least. It must have been something else.

“Are we sure that this is a dark matter phenomenon?” He ran his hand along the fuzz forming on his chin. “I mean, couldn’t it be some other kind of particle? It doesn’t really obey the principles dark matter does.”

Irina’s eyes turned to the whiteboard, and then fixed on the ground. A habit of hers marking deep thought. Finally, she looked up at the board again. “No. Impossible.”

She flipped through a stack of papers on the table beside her. “Because… Here.” The sheets hissed against each other as she drew one from deep in the pile. “Though at this time, you’d already left the project,” she said, looking up from the paper with mild annoyance, “later on, the government requested further testing.”

Ken took the paper, ignoring her first remark.

Though the paper was dense and obtuse, as the rest had been, he thankfully found himself understanding what he was reading. It detailed later trials, after dark matter had successfully been detected and measured, focusing on its generation. The mechanisms by which it was created and consumed.

It referenced a number of specific trials in which nuclear events were triggered in hopes that the methods the particles are generated by would be learned. It seemed by the description that these efforts bore no fruit.

“What is this?” he asked, handing it back to her.

“This, I believe, is the cause.”

Ken locked gazes with her, eyes narrowing. “The cause of…?”

“The extirpations.”

At first, he didn’t even consider that she could be serious. He just stared blankly at her. But as the silence grew longer, he realized: she meant that.

“That makes no sense.” He leaned forward, holding out his hand to take the paper back.

Irina looked at his hand, and then placed the page back on the table. She shook her head. “This… won’t help. I will just show you.” She stepped past the whiteboard, coat sweeping out behind her like a cloak as she strode toward the back of the room.

“Hey! Where are you going?” Ken called, scrambling to his feet. Snatching his coat and bag from the table, he hurried after her. “What are we doing?”

“I’m going to show you the fruits of this project that you denied.” She stopped on a dime, pivoting to face him, and flipped a switch on the wall. “I’m going to trigger an extirpation.”