“Now watch this,” Angel said. He went out of the cage and returned with a handful of hula-hoops, batons, and tennis balls. He tossed a hula-hoop in the air, and all six copters flew through it, quick as lightning, before it fell back into his hand. He threw two at once, and they did the same. Then he tossed a baton in the air, end over end, and one of the copters caught it, balanced vertically on top of a portion of its frame that extended up between the rotors. It hovered there, adjusting its position back and forth slightly to keep the baton balanced, for all the world like a vaudeville performer with a push broom on his nose.
“Impressive,” Sandra said.
“I like to think so,” Angel said. “But I just want you to know what’s normal, before I show you what’s abnormal.” He tapped the tablet, and the copter jerked suddenly higher, lofting the baton in a slowly twirling arc. Another copter caught it vertically again, dipping to cancel out the baton’s spin and momentum. The copters began a game of catch, flipping the baton to one another and catching it perfectly. Angel started throwing the hula-hoops into the game, and the copters again responded seamlessly, sometimes dashing through a hoop to catch a baton on the other side. Finally, he began hurling tennis balls at the copters, trying to disrupt their rhythm, but they dodged the balls effortlessly without interrupting the game with the batons.
Sandra knew the hard part of this performance was designing the copters in the first place with the ability to move precisely and know their exact position at any moment. The tricks themselves were just mathematics; the encoding of position and velocity and spin and momentum into a simulated model of reality. Even so, it was remarkable to see.
Angel touched the tablet, and the baton and hula-hoops dropped to the floor. “One more thing.”
He left the cage and wheeled in a stand with a wooden wall and a window. The window was adjustable; it could be made wider or narrower in both horizontal and vertical directions. Angel demonstrated the copters diving through the window in different configurations. When he made the window into a narrow vertical slit, the copters would actually hurl themselves sideways, momentarily losing control of their flight as they flew through the window at a ninety-degree angle, before regaining control on the other side.
“Watch what happens when I do this,” Angel said. He closed the window even farther, making it impossible for the copters to fit through the gap, no matter how they oriented themselves. He tapped the tablet, but the copters didn’t move. “They can detect that there’s no way through,” he said. “But watch this.”
He sent the copters back to their case, and opened a new case. A new set of six copters flew out. “These are from the set I used at the stadium,” he said. They hovered on one side of the too-small window, the same as the others had. This time, however, when Angel gave the command, all six copters dove, following each other in tight sequence. When each one reached the window, it turned, a rapid twisting motion like the first set had done, and reemerged on the other side.
It was less impressive than it might have been, considering all that Sandra had seen in the last twenty-four hours, but it was still dramatic. The opening was no bigger than her fist; there was no room for the copters to pass through it.
“They turned into another dimension,” she said. She had seen the varcolac do essentially the same thing, and given Ryan’s explanation on the mountain, she felt confident in assuming that a few of his extra curled-up dimensions were involved.
“Is this normal for you?” Angel asked. “Flitting in and out of other dimensions like taking a cab?”
Sandra smiled. “Not exactly. But I guess I’ve had an interesting life.”
“How did this happen? This is the same hardware and the same software I’ve been working with for years. They clearly picked up this ability at the stadium site, but I don’t see how that’s possible. Even if your varcolac used some weird quantum magic to destroy the stadium in the first place, my copters weren’t even there at the time.”
Sandra thought about it. “It must be in the data.”
“You mean the RFID data? That doesn’t make sense.”
“There aren’t too many options. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume your copters aren’t smart enough to learn a new behavior of this magnitude. So, either there was some magic quantum pixie dust at the scene that stuck to their rotors, or there was something in the data they picked up at the scene that altered their operations.”
Angel returned the copters to their case. Their engines quieted, making the empty room ring with the sudden silence. “I’m going to vote for the pixie dust. We’re not talking about altering their behavior to fly in figure eights. We’re talking about behavior that should be impossible. I don’t care what software or data you load into their onboard computers; you won’t be able to make them do that.”
“I’m not so sure.” Sandra said. Her throat was dry. “Do you have anything to drink?”
“Sure.” They exited the cage, and Angel led the way to a mini-fridge on a cluttered tabletop. “Coke okay?”
“Perfect.” Sandra popped the tab and took a long swallow of cold sweetness. She sighed and wiped her mouth. “The only thing I can think is that your copters are somehow accessing a Higgs projector, the same as the software in my eyejacks.”
“How does that work?”
“There’s a wormhole in the High Energy Lab in New Jersey that’s connected to a bubble universe. Somehow, Ryan Oronzi has figured out how to tap the power from it to affect the Higgs field in our universe, allowing quantum effects in the macro world. I have a copy of Oronzi’s software modules from my sister that accesses that projector, allowing me to create certain quantum and probabilistic effects.” She accessed a method from her eyejack display, and let go of the can of Coke. It hovered there, untouched, until she grasped it again.
“That’s really freaky,” Angel said.
“The point is, it’s the Higgs projector that’s causing the effect, not the software. I don’t know how far its reach is. Considering it’s another universe, though, the distance may not matter.”
Angel shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. Even if someone stored such a method on a chip, it would have to be written as a self-executing virus, and the virus would have to know how to plug in to the specific maneuver interfaces in my software. In this version of my software. And the only way that could happen is if I did it myself.”
Sandra grinned. “Is there something you’re not telling yourself?”
Angel rolled his eyes. “I’m not that crazy.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Sandra said. “Maybe my sister or Dr. Oronzi would have a better idea.”
“I’m sticking with the magic pixie dust theory, until you can prove it wrong.”
CHAPTER 15
Ryan was ready for the drop when he and Alex materialized on the top floor of the High Energy Lab. Alex wasn’t. She yelped and nearly fell over as they dropped six inches to the floor.
He laughed, and she glared at him. “What was that? We just teleported in here yesterday, and we didn’t fall then. I thought you had a pretty good lock on this place.”
“There’s some error drift with the distance you travel,” Ryan said. “Yesterday we teleported from the parking lot.”
“Error drift? So we could have ended up two inches under the floor instead of over it?”
Ryan found his favorite chair—a tattered recliner they had lugged up here at his request, and sat down. “Nope. The drift is always up. The module uses a tangent plane to shortcut some of the math.”
“So if I had tried to teleport to California… ?”