“Testing a theory of magical capacitance,” Doug said. “Lenora, give us some warning next time!”
“Why? Nothing is going to happen,” said a brown-haired woman, stepping out of a control booth-and then blithely stepping over the glowing outer ring of the magic circle as if the sea of energies it contained couldn’t turn her into a pumpkin. She used tongs to extract a metal disc from the equipment at the center of the circle, stomped back over to us, and tossed the disc on the desk. “Yet another failure.”
Inside the metal ring was a pinkish membrane with a gridlike test pattern at its center. I stared at it with growing horror. “Don’t tell me that’s real human skin. ”
“Of course it’s real,” Lenora said, “you can see it with your own two eyes-”
“Down, Lenora,” Doug said, holding the membrane up to the light. “Yes, Dakota, it’s human skin, but not from a human. It’s grown on a synthetic matrix in the Biotech building-they’re hoping to use it on burn patients. Dang-it looks exactly like it did before.”
“My point exactly,” Lenora replied. “I don’t care what mana flux you use, you’re not going to get any accumulation in a single layer. There’s no such thing as ‘tattoo magic.’”
I raised an eyebrow. “So what is it that I do for a living then, chop liver?”
“Oh, so you’re the Dakota Frost that got him on this wild goose chase,” Lenora said. “It was bad enough when he started dating the witch and eating granola-”
“Lenora!” Jinx said, putting her gloved fingers to her breast in mock shock. “After all the wonderful spells I’ve shown you… ”
“Which are supposed to do what, exactly?” Lenora asked, smirking.
“I don’t know in particular, Scully,” I said, cracking my neck, “but if you can’t get them to work, don’t blame Jinx. Start closer to home, like with yourself. ”
“Down, Dakota. I need a Scully to keep me honest,” Doug said, handing the disc back to her. “Please photograph it and run another control. So, Dakota,” Doug said, pulling out a tan gridded notebook and writing a few lines, “what did the graffiti do that was so unusual?”
I stared at him: as his smile faded he was left calm, like that little discussion hadn’t just happened, and he was actually taking notes. He hadn’t taken it personally, like I had. Doug was going to be a good scientist someday. Maybe he’d be open enough to listen.
“Tully was trapped against it, and while I was pulling him out it got a really good grip on us,” I said. “It’s really weird, but it felt like… it was sucking us inside. Not just pulling us against the wall, but into it, like the graffiti had made a doorway into a space beyond.”
Lenora, walking past with a fresh disc rolled her eyes. “Oh, for the love of-”
“This time I agree with her,” Doug said. “That sounds impossible.”
“If you’re that susceptible to new age mysticism,” Lenora said, “maybe I should loan you some back issues of the Skeptical Inquirer -”
“Whoa!” I said, holding up my tattooed hands. “I am simply reporting an experience and asking you to help me interpret it. I’m the last person to go in for cosmic woo-hooery.”
“You supposedly have magic tattoos,” Lenora said. “What are we supposed to think?”
I glared at her. “ Fine,” I said, and flexed my hand.
I have large tattoos-vines, snakes, tribal patterns-but small ones too: flowers and jewels and butterflies. The littlest ones are easy to tattoo. I can do them in one sitting-so I’m not above using them to make a point.
My skin glowed. Lenora’s eyes widened. And then a pretty little honeybee I’d tattooed on one of my vines came to life, buzzing up into the air. Lenora cried out in delight, and Doug laughed. Only Jinx seemed nonplussed. With a gentle wave of my hand, I guided the sparkling bee over the test membrane, and it gently settled down and became two dimensional again.
“You can pretend that’s a yellow jacket,” I said-the Tech mascot-and folded my arms. “Look closely at the connections that make up the design, particularly the Euler circuits. Skin only holds essentially one layer of ink, so it’s the design that holds the magic. Using a grid pattern in your tester, you were almost guaranteed to fail, except maybe at the edges.”
“I tried to tell them that,” Jinx said, nudging Doug with her shoulder, “but my little scientist here kept going on about his need for proper controls.”
“Holy cow,” Lenora said, rubbing at the membrane. The bee stubbornly remained where it was and did not smudge off. “Holy cow. I can see why Doug had a bee in his bonnet.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said. “And for the record, I’ve subscribed to the Skeptical Inquirer for the last ten years.”
“Oh!” Lenora said. “That’s… uh… can I put this in the tester?”
“Knock yourself out,” I said, and Lenora took the membrane into the test chamber like she was carrying a baby made of gold. I looked at Doug. “How can she not see the evidence right before her eyes? I mean, isn’t that the point of science?”
“She’s come a long way,” Jinx said defensively. “You shouldn’t pick on her… ”
“But it’s so fun,” Doug said, ducking when she whapped him with her cane.
Lenora moved behind a sheet of glass, touched some controls, and then a rising whine started at the top of the tower. I’d heard it earlier-I’d thought it was an air conditioner-but now I could see it came from a big device far above the magic circle, like an upside-down glass jar wrapped in hundreds of sheets of metaclass="underline" a massive magical capacitor. As it charged up, I could see a dance of light sparkling off a silver spear, pointing down out of the glass.
“So, now that we’ve established that I don’t make wild claims without something to back them up,” I said, “can you answer my question about how the graffiti bent space?”
“Sure. It didn’t. It had to be an illusion-you didn’t go anywhere, after all. There’s no way graffiti could affect the metric enough to change its topology.” At my baffled look, Doug tried again. “Look, it isn’t likely that any magic could bend space. It’s a matter of gravity.”
The rising whine reached its peak, and with another crack of thunder, a beam flashed down from the point of the spear. The test membrane flared with blue-white light, and the bee buzzed back to life. Doug looked back at it, amazed, as Lenora frantically took pictures of the moving tattoo. Then he shrugged and used what we’d just seen as his argument.
“That’s the largest magical capacitor on the East Coast,” Doug said. “Two hundred layers of infused papyrus and cold iron. When it fires, it puts out more mana than any magician in history-and it doesn’t affect gravity. If it can’t, then your graffiti can’t. It just can’t.”
“But it didn’t feel like the graffiti was affecting gravity,” I said. “Like you said, our feet were on the ground. The tag was… I don’t know what else to call it but bending space… ”
“But bent space is gravity,” Doug said. “Gravity is just… a kink in time that makes matter want to move together. It’s like setting two bowling balls down on a trampoline-first they’ll dent its surface. Then, slowly, the dents will come together.”
I squinted. “I’m… I’m not quite seeing it.”
“Don’t worry,” Doug said. “There are PhDs in physics that never get it. But the point is, bending space is so hard it takes the entire mass of the Earth just to keep our feet on the ground. And that’s just attraction, a dent in the trampoline. To make a tunnel from place to place-”
“You… couldn’t do that,” I said, starting to get it. “That’s not just bending space, it’s punching a hole-changing the topology, like you said. You can’t stretch a surface to make a hole-the trampoline would burst and the springs would snap back, going everywhere.”
“I’m not sure what that would mean in terms of my little example,” Doug said. “But either way, the amount of mass needed would be… astronomical.”