Drinking Heavy Water

Chapter 2

Two

Chevrolet Gunfire really hated his job.

He loved working, but hated even the concept of job.

The Great State of Soviet Texas was designed from the dirt up so that nobody would hate their work. Unique among Earth’s four hundred and eighty-one nations, the Texas Datacore existed to optimize the health, happiness, and liberties of Soviet citizens. Nobody was in charge of anything beyond themselves. Chevy had trusted the datacore all through school, even when the post-doc work in experimental mathematics at the University of New Houston had almost melted his brain. The first year and a half had been torturous, but eventually the inexorable, irresistible, intoxicating equations had kept him awake all night, luring him far past what his fellow students could understand. The datacore had been right to put him there. He not only had a talent for the edges of mathematics, he enjoyed it. He’d had no higher ambition than to work at a university, expand the scope of human knowledge, and repay a dozen times over the Soviet’s investment in the miracle of his life. One wife, two dogs, three kids, and four months vacation would round that up to the ideal life.

Then the Soviet had traded five years of his services to the Montague Corporation.

Had Chevy known in advance, maybe he wouldn’t have so utterly outpaced his fellow students.

After a long night of wrestling with numbers and symbols, he loved to take a cup of tea out to the University commons and watch the sun rise over the crumbling half-drowned skyscrapers of Oldtown and the glittering Gulf of Mexico. He could catch a train out to the desert and see nothing but openness for kilometers.

In this ridiculous universe he still wrestled with numbers all night long, struggling to reverse-engineer the biological processes of the local lichen and algae. But the longest line of sight he’d seen since he’d gotten to Tritium? Down a hallway. Maybe twenty meters. The Montague corridors were made of curves, as if deliberately breaking up lines of sight.

Chevy spent hours in the infinity of numbers, and emerged to find himself boxed in.

Worse of all? Math differed on Tritium.

Math defined Montague’s abominable universes. He couldn’t add two and two and get five and a touch, not in any universe where humans could survive. But when he took the math far enough, out through calculus and past multivariable differential equations into the utter fringes of knowledge? Calculations that always equaled four at home suddenly came out to five and a touch, or maybe blue.

You couldn’t even trust the gravity. It wavered as much as fourteen percent. Step right before the gravity sloshed up, and your foot might come down a whole lot harder than you expected. Despite the stultifying training Montague had stuffed down his throat, he’d broken a toe getting out of bed the first day.

Recycled air. Recycled water. Recycled food—yes, technically, everything you ate on Earth went back into the food chain, but back home it was a little less direct. Tritium’s underground farm took sewage in one end and spat broccoli out the other. Plus, the Montague datacore cooked everything wrong. That wasn’t its fault—nobody could expect a machine to smoke brisket.

Wrong. So many kinds of wrong. A wrong right up there with thinking you had the right to decide to fritter and fumble your life and career, instead of contributing to your family and society.

Now he had to find a way to live with his duty.

When this assignment ended, he’d have a month of vacation. For a month, Chevy could visit his family. See a real sky, Earth’s sky, with his own eyes.

Worst of all, though?

He’d made progress on the equations. His assignment had been to scrutinize the tritium-fixing properties of different algae strains. He’d dug into the math underlying the biology, then the math underlying the genetics, and at the end Chevy’s mathematical talents had dragged understanding of Tritium further ahead than the other mathematicians had managed in ten years. And he’d been able to apply some of that to the physics as well. Biology, physics, computing—they were all expressions of the math that underlaid a universe’s natural laws.

After his vacation, Montague might send him straight back to Tritium.

Or if not here, to something even more claustrophobic.

Some place where those same equations equaled a sunset over Tahiti during a solar total eclipse.

He could put on a pressure suit and walk into that toxic universe. Trust his very life to a few thin layers of cloth infused with archaic polymers. Not even smart cloth; Montague’s ramshackle understanding of Tritium’s physics held Tritium Base down to late twenty-first century tech. The only thing you wore inside a suit was a diaper? No thank you sir!

They didn’t have proper AI, only antiquated pre-McDevitt Anomaly statistical inference and procedural programming languages. The underlying operating systems didn’t run so much as shamble. Chevy would almost rather have an abacus.

Almost.

He didn’t have a proper datalink. It couldn’t hold even a tenth of human knowledge. It wasn’t linked into Earth’s global network. It wasn’t even an implant, just a small black slab that clipped to his belt. It had misunderstood more than one spoken command, so he most often relied on the clumsy touchscreen keyboard and reading text off the tiny screen.

Worse: it was used. Montague’s local Human Resources officer had handed him the datalink when he’d arrived. It wasn’t in bad shape. Not exactly. A couple of scuffs. When he left Tritium, that datalink would be reset and allocated to someone else. The Montague staff cleaned the datalinks before passing them on, but Chevy couldn’t help feeling a used datalink was… unsanitary.

Never let it be said that Chevy was irresponsible, though. His duty to the Soviet drove him to do the best work he could. All he could imagine was that the Texas Datacore had determined that he’d do so much good for his country and his society that it outweighed five years of his personal happiness. He’d leave Tritium better than he found it.

Including his office.

On his last day he’d tidied the three-meter-square cell Montague had assigned him as a private office. His scrap paper had all gone to the recycler. He’d borrowed cleaning supplies from Housekeeping to scrub down the smart boards and the desktop, and vacuumed out the office’s corners. Despite the constant flow of air rising from the floor vent up into the ceiling exhaust, the office still smelled of someone else’s stale sweat. He’d shifted the desk to vacuum behind it, and gotten the crevices of the office chair and the bottom side of the desk as well. Montague hadn’t imported spiders, so there weren’t any webs, but still.

It’s not that Chevy liked spiders. Untidy creatures.

But a universe should have spiders. It should have cockroaches and seagulls and other pests. He should be able to track dirt in the front door and run barefoot on the beach and drink the blessed water.

He should be able to walk out the front door without exiling himself from Earth.

Chevy was considering vacuuming the ceiling again when his datalink chirped.

“Maths Third Gunfire.” Six months, and Montague’s imposed label still tasted clunky. It always would. Free men should not be labeled. Authoritarians had to signal everyone’s role, though. His heart hungered for the Soviet’s easy egalitarianism.

“Gunfire!” Maths First Lucy Kirkland said.

Chevy couldn’t help a little flinch at Miss Kirkland’s boisterous voice. Maths Second Gaetano wasn’t too bad, but Miss Kirkland was sixty kilos of unseemly excitement in a fifty-kilo bag. “Yes, First?”

Miss Kirkland usually spent time on civilized pleasantries, but instead only said, “Report to External Access Station Three.”

Chevy blinked. “Sir?” Scandalously, Montague called even women sir. They weren’t merely authoritarian, they wanted everyone to ignore the most essential piece of humanity. Not that Chevy chased women, but they deserved acknowledgement. Plus, he hoped to meet the right one before too much longer.

“External Access Station Three. Immediately.”

That made no sense. Math was the same inside Tritium Base and out. What did they want him to do? “Could you tell me what’s going on, sir?”

Miss Kirkland said with a touch of testiness, “The datacore says that you’ve got the highest scores of anyone. We need you.”

Chevy had the highest scores of everyone, in everything. “In what?”

“Mathematical first contact protocols, man!”

Piling rocks to see if aliens could figure out what came after one-two-three? “But there’s no—”

“We were wrong.” Her voice picked up an edge. “Get moving. You’re going out to the beach to help us talk to them.” The datalink made the old-fangled click of a severed connection.

Out to the beach?

Sudden sweat soaked into Chevy’s uniform. His heart simultaneously grew heavier and dragged itself up into his throat.

Outside?

Yes, his need to escape Tritium Base burned his marrow, but not so badly that he wanted to step outside.

And aliens?

Chevy had seen the holos of the dreadful beasts they called wildlife here. How could intelligence evolve from Tritium’s brutal predations? Or—worse still. Had some other intelligence found their own way to build a Portal? Was humanity at the edge of a conflict with an alien race from another universe?

He was supposed to go home in less than nineteen hours!

But he knew his duty.

With trembling hands, Chevy pushed his frame up out of his chair and headed for the number three infernal gateway.