byTaborgas Ramirez, the electrical engineer, waited for Dr. Heda’s signal. A nod meant it was time to hit the button to launch the spatial-temporal adjacency shifter. That would, God willing, send them—Dr. Heda, Taborgas, and three other post-docs—from Lab A to Lab B, which was one hundred meters away, through sterile white walls, cement block, and steel girders. In Lab B, the team’s other post-doc—the experiment’s control—would greet them upon arrival.
Dr. Heda gazed from one post-doc to the next with hard downturned lips, giving his unshaven face a mixture of seriousness and confidence that Taborgas found so reassuring that he let himself marvel that he—a hard-working middle-class kid from Manila—was about to make a Star Trek fantasy a reality in a nondescript basement beneath a used bo
