Large meetings tend to induce drowsiness and the Pentagon war room was packed with enough top brass to send Megan into stupor. It didn’t help that she’d stayed up late to review the latest fiasco with Patient Zero where he’d allegedly trashed his school’s chemistry lab. Megan sighed. That kid attracted trouble like a magnet, which was perversely appropriate considering he was bait for GORGON. Covering her yawns with one hand, Megan’s attention was drawn to the wall screen which flickered and updated to a satellite image of Europe. Colonel Griffin was seated in accordance to military pecking order, flanked by Megan and Jonathan West. Officially they were both here as Griffin’s aides, but in her dark moments Megan wondered if Griffin simply needed a female presence to distract questions away. The old goat always treated her with grudging respect, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be sexist.

“...NRO just forwarded a new consideration for target development,” Brig.General Stapleton of the Marine Corps waved the laser pointer, as a large circle appeared overlaid on Eastern Europe, “...heavily shielded underground but finally resolved from magnetometry once NRO knew what to look for.”

”GORGON has built itself a particle accelerator,” Griffin grunted, it wasn’t a question.

Megan stared, sleep instantly forgotten. The inscribed circle skirted Warsaw, Budapest and Chisinau. If that was a collider, it was largest on the planet.

”How... when did they start building?” sputtered General Briggs, commander of US-NATO Air Forces in Europe.

“We estimate that construction began almost two decades ago,” an NRO analyst swallowed nervously, “soon after GORGON annexed territories to establish Ostland. At least ten percent of Ostland's population must have been consumed in constructing the collider.”

"Ten percent," Jonathan muttered.

”And it took you PHOTOINT types this long to see it?” Briggs looked outraged, “the damn thing is literally bigger than Texas.”

”That was part of the problem, sir,” the NRO analyst stiffened, “we weren’t looking for anything on that scale. And soil shielding made it hard to connect the dots.”

“It does coincide with GORGON’s primary defensive perimeter,” Jonathan nodded almost to himself, “Can someone please overlay the CERN collider for scale.”

A tiny circle, a dot utterly dwarfed by the larger circle, flashed on the border between France and Switzerland.

”What the heck does GORGON want with a collider that big?” Stapleton posed the obvious question. Megan and Jonathan traded glances. There was one thing Sybilline could want it for, but even she wasn’t that suicidal, was she?

”How long before it’s operational?” Griffin sounded hopeful.

”Uh...sir, it already is,” the NRO analyst licked his lips, “has been ready for the past twenty-two months if dummy-fire spikes in the magnetic data are anything to go by.”

Megan frowned.

”But what is it for?” Briggs sounded frustrated, “How do we assign target priority without knowing that?”

“Speaking of which,” Ariana Folgers, Program Manager, DARPA Strategic Technologies Office, cleared her throat, “are we sure we can penetrate GORGON air defenses this time? Not sure what Colonel Griffin has been up to since the fiasco at Brookhaven, but I don’t have much confidence in his pet projects.”

Griffin scowled. Megan wondered if Folgers had ever smiled in her life. That OAT, rather than the STO, had been assigned Project Omega-Delphi was still a sore point with Folgers. Inter-agency politics simmered beneath the surface, kept alive by old resentments.

A series of numbered asterixs appeared in the map on the collider rim, like beads on a ring but irregularly spaced. One of the asterixs blinked and the display zoomed in to an aerial shot of a grey building like a step-pyramid rising from a valley floor with snow-capped mountains in the background. Rail lines radiated out, dwarfed by the scale of the pyramid. Megan recognized SAM launchers on the terrace. The corner of the image was labelled ‘Zig-14’, along with a date stamp.

“Nearest practical target is on the Czech border,” Stapleton commented, “in occupied Slovakia. Everyone here is aware of GORGON’s network of subterran labor camps. What's not obvious is that the pattern of camps form a circle... talk about hiding in plain sight. The camps sit over excavation shafts and therefore structural weak points. Collapsing one of the pyramids should put the collider out of comission for some time.”

"A GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator ought to do it," Briggs rubbed his chin, "assuming our bombers reach target."

"Can they?" Stapleton echoed Ariana's doubt.

The screen switched to a photo of a B-2, presumably taken from another B-2. The bomber was being swarmed by what appeared to be metallic gnats. A smaller photo appeared inset, a wasp-waisted drone disturbingly insect-like with articulated delta wings and compound lenses. The captured drone had GORGON insigna painted on flanking intake nostrils and was only about a foot long going by the ruler placed next to it.

"USAF does NOT have air-superiority over Ostland," Briggs spat sourly, "None of our bombers have made it back. The enemy always seems to spot our stealth aircraft, which woud be patently absurd if it wasn't true. Those damned hypersonic drones simply fly into our jet intakes. Griffin here thinks the swarm is driven by actual insect minds. Whatever they are doing, its damned effective. ICBMs would work, but damned NATO politics..."

"Chairwoman Katrina Malenkov, or Sybilline as we call her, is nigh omniscient," Griffin nodded bluntly, "which means GORGON defenses are airborne even as your B-2s are taxiing for takeoff. We need to blind her, if our bombers are to stand a chance. Which is where Patient Zero comes in..."

"Pl...eease," snapped Folgers, "Using a high school junior against an enemy with super-Bayesian reasoning? Like that's going to work."

"Since we think Patient Zero's actions are inscrutable to Sybilline," Griffin suppressed his temper "all we are doing is mapping the kid's activity to a decision tree..."

"Why not use a random number generator?" Briggs frowned, "Or just toss a coin?"

"None of those methods are truly random," Jonathan spoke up, "Unlikely as it sounds, Sybilline can foresee any deterministic process we use against her. The CIA has enough dead agents as testimony."

"What about quantum processes?" Folgers raised perfect eyebrows, "Aren't those supposed to be truly random? We do have prototype qubit processors. Not big enough for code breaking. But adequate for random numbers."

"Good point, Ariana," Stapleton looked surprised, "Yes, Griffin, why haven't you used quantum computing?"

There was a pause. Griffin turned to Jonathan.

"We did attempt to use a qubit-based dice in the beginning," Jonathan nodded reluctantly, "but they didn't work."

"How so, Dr. West ?" Stapleton sounded skeptical.

"The qubit dice never did choose any offensive action against GORGON," Jonathan shook his head, "no matter how long we waited. The bloody thing always deffered military action. It was baffling and we eventually gave up."

"What?" Megan stared at Jonathan, "How is that possible? That's like flipping a quantum coin and always coming up with heads, right? When was this?"

It was bad form to question Jonathan in an inter-agency meeting, but that bit of revelation had spooked Megan.

"Right," Jonathan nodded uneasily, "It was a year ago. The odd thing is it worked fine in test scenarios, but whenever we tried to use the qubit dice to greenlight an actual bomber mission into GORGON territory, it would never give us the go-ahead."

Megan felt her gut clench as dread jogged her memory. Something Patient Zero had mentioned in one of their interviews. Something she'd dismissed as ludicrous, but Jonathan had warned that Sybilline was unlike any enemy they'd faced...

"It's a doomsday weapon," Megan blurted, "GORGON's collider is a doomsday weapon which Sybilline triggers whenever you try to foil her Oracle-vision."

"And you know this, how exactly?" Stapleton seemed unimpressed.

"This video explains it better than I could, sir," Megan pulled out her phone, "if I may?"

Stapleton gave a long-suffering sigh, but indicated for her to go ahead. Megan synced her smartphone to the wall projector, scrolling through her video logs till she found the right one, and clicked Play.

#

She adjusted her hairpin - with its built in video cam - as she rang the doorbell while awkwardly squeezing a briefcase under her arm. The surveillance-friendly hair accessory was geared toward female agents, and would record whatever Megan happened to be looking at, provided of course it was aligned correctly. Better than a fish-eye lens sewn into her suit lapel. The colonial home was located in a subdivsion that was decent without being upscale. Megan noted the stucco facade was crumbling in places, with a couple of sparrow holes that hadn't been patched. And if one looked closely, wood rot was seen eating away at the window frames. Weeds sprouted through cracks in the driveway which was blocked by an official-looking SUV, forcing Megan to park on the side of the road. Megan frowned at the Homeland Security license plate. She slowed her brisk walk, pulling out her phone to snap a photo and run the plate through a Federal database, then walked up to the porch. Loud voices sounded from within the house, muffled by the door.

"... if you'd drag your worthless ass out of bed before 9 AM..." a woman's voice was raised.

"... drove all night to get here, you unreasonable harpy..." a man's voice snarled.

A typical suburban weekend of domestic bliss, then. The door was opened by a scowling somewhat plump man with bloodshot eyes and a harried expression, "Can I help you?"

The man's eyes flickered with recognition and he smiled, "Oh, hi... Megan... Miss Murphy, isn't it? Come on it."

"Mr. Cook," Megan nodded, stepping into a foyer where a corridor terminated, "I work for the DOE, as you may recall. I'd like to speak to your son regarding the... incident last night at Fuller Dynamics. Can I come in?"

"Who is it?" A slender woman with Native American features stepped into the corridor from the kitchen at the far end, her eyes narrowing as she spotted Megan, "Oh, it's you... the DOE investigator. What do you want now?"

Her tone was less friendly than her husband's

"She wants to talk to Sean, dear," Andrew Cook spat out the last word.

"Take a number and get in line," scoffed Mrs. Cook, "there's already one of you government types interrogating my son right now. And before he showed up, FBI and cops were here taking statements."

"I'm sorry for the trouble, Mrs. Cook," Megan smiled reassuringly, "I'll make sure Homeland Security doesn’t bother you any more. Is it OK if I chat with Sean, though?”

Winona looked doubtful, if slightly mollified.

“It’s mostly for health insurance,” Megan spoke the magic words, “The DOE is willing to cover medical expenses stemming from yesterday's incident. I understand Sean's arm was badly injured."

Fuller's surgeon, Dr. Sinclair, had requested access to Sean's medical history, which had triggered a notification to OAT. Megan was pleased with herself for setting that alarm.

"Fuller's damn machines nearly killed my son," Winona clenched her fist and paused suspiciously, "You're not here to press charges, are you?"

Megan frowned, wondering why this woman would imagine that. If anything, the boy should file a lawsuit againt Fuller for endangering life and limb. Megan wasn't getting the full picture...

"I’m not law enforcement," Megan shook her head, "Nothing he tells me can be used in court.” Besides OAT doesn’t need any stinking courts to lock your son away if we need to, she didn't say.

"Of course, Megan, you can talk to Sean whenever you want," Andrew nearly simpered, "not a problem."

“In the living room,” Winona pointed, rolling her eyes behind her husband, “past the kitchen.”

Winona found Sean sitting on the coffee table, surrounded by bits of unfamiliar electronic gear, a laptop, a voltmeter and a soldering iron. An empty shipping carton lay open on the floor. His left arm was in a cast, and his face looked the worse for wear. A man in a suit and dark glasses stood with a clipboard, scratching off questions as he worked his way through the list.

”You’re certain it said ‘Hail GORGON’?” the agent paused, turning at Megan’s approach.

”Well, not certain,” Sean shrugged with his good arm, “My broken arm was distracting. It might have meant ‘Hail Bourbon’ or ‘Hail Gordon’ though it seems unlikely given the geopolitical context.”

”Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence DOE,” Megan flashed an ID, glancing at the search result on her phone, “I’ll be taking it from here, Agent Young.”

“Excuse me?” the man frowned taking off his glasses, giving an excellent impression of Hollywood’s image of a Federal agent, “Have we met? The DOE has no jurisdiction here.”

“The President disagrees,” Megan pulled out an official looking memo and dropped it on his clipboard, “And please send me a copy of your transcript on Monday."

”Is this a joke?” the agent sneered, flexing his shoulders, his eyes insolently tracing the contours of her suit, “National security is what we do, girl. Let the big boys handle it. Run along now.”

“Take the call,” Megan gestured.

"What call?" the agent frowned and then gave a start when his phone rang three seconds later, "Agent Young, speaking. Yes? Oh... yessir. She's here. No, sir... there's no problem. I was just handing off the investigation."

"You have the President on call?" Agent Young looked a shade paler, "Who are you?"

"A girl who knows the stakes, buh-bye,” Megan smiled sweetly, as Agent Young departed. She turned to Sean who was eyeing her warily, "Got a few minutes, Sean? I'd like to catch up on what you've been up to. Since your... incident at Brookhaven."

"Counterintelligence? You're not really a liason, are you?" Sean sounded tired, "So why don't you cut the BS and tell me what you want."

There was a manic gleam in Sean's eye. Megan wondered if the kid was lightheaded from medication. That could be exploited.

"Well," Megan drawled with a smile, "since we're being honest, why don't you start with anything you haven't told me about Brookhaven."

"Don't you want to ask about what happened at Fuller Dynamics last night?" Sean raised a brow.

"We'll get to that," Megan waved, making a mental note to requistion the police & FBI for their transcripts, "but I'm sure you're tired of repeating that story today. Have you experienced any changes since the accident with the subatomic wormhole?"

"Changes?" Sean's tone was neutral, his expression rigidly blank.

"Difficulty with school work. Psychological shifts. Even new... abilities," Megan nodded.

"What... like superpowers?" Sean's laugh was forced, "I wish." A transparent lie, thought Megan, his school work has improved dramatically. She would keep him on a long leash, for now, without pressing him. From her briefcase she extracted a manila folder sandwiching a sheaf of documents.

”Before I forget,” Megan waved the folder, “here’s a bunch of papers I need your folks to go over and sign. Your MRI had some interesting results. If you still aren’t experiencing any changes we need to understand why. We may need to take you in for extensive testing.” The threat was subtle but unambiguous. If Sean wasn't forthcoming, he’d be handed over to government scientists to be probed indefinitely.

"You want to ask about the alien," Sean studied her reaction.

"Aa... alien?" Megan flinched despite herself.

"I had a dream when I was unconscious," Sean leaned back on his good arm, "A dead universe... all the galaxies burned out. But there was something in there. An alien intelligence that was part of spacetime itself."

"Tell me everything," Megan's knuckles whitened on her briefcase. An eyewitness account of First Contact, in parallel to what the Russians had uncovered at Protvino, was invaluable intel.

"That's about it," Sean nodded, nervously running fingers through his hair, "I had a feeling I was looking at the other side of that wormhole. Then a blank."

"Ok, cool," Megan nodded casually, "if you recall anything else, anything at all, just call me... hold this for a sec, will you."

She'd dropped the suitcase to discard her suit in the stuffy room . Her arm stuck out, her suit trapped by the manilla folder. Sean reached out instinctively to assist and shuddered when his fingers touched the thin cover of the folder. He groaned and rubbed his eyes.

”Are you OK?” Megan’s eyes narrowed.

”Unggh...shit... I’m fine,” Sean’s eyes were glazed, as if forced to make sense of government forms at gunpoint, "Really."

"School project?" Megan pointed, dropping into a couch set against the window. In the daylight, Sean's face looked even more haggard, lines of pain evident. He had a black eye and his lip had recently been bruised. If not for recent events, she'd have thought the kid had gotten into a fight. For some reason his hair was glossier than the last time.

"Oh... this?" Sean glanced down at the hardware strewn on the coffee table, sounding relieved at the change of subject, "um, no. Just an idea for an experiment."

"What does it do?" Megan feigned curiosity. She had enough experience dealing with her nephews' hobbies, to know how to get a teenager talking.

"It uses a photon to simulate a coin toss," Sean sounded embarrased, "A way to potentially get rich by eliminating observations in unfavorable quantum histories."

"What?" Megan sounded nonplussed. Her electronically gifted niece hadn't mentioned anything like that. Even OAT threat assessments on exotic emerging tech, which Megan was required to read, had talked about practical quantum computers as being a decade away, at least the ones big enough to worry about.

"You remember the classic double-slit experiment, right?" Sean got up and began to pace, "Pass light through a pair of diffraction slits and you get an interference pattern on a wall."

Megan nodded brightly, dredging vague memories from her old high school physics class and half-digested OAT reports.

"The mindblowing thing is we record the same interference pattern on photographic plate even if we use only one photon at a time," Sean exclaimed excitedly, "Almost like the photon is splitting itself to go through both slits. But no interference pattern if one of the slits is blocked, by say, a photon detector."

"Isn't that because a photon is both a particle and a wave?" Megan sounded pleased at recalling that particular piece of academic trivia.

"That's the De Broglie explanation," Sean nodded, "which is weird if you think about it. The photon somehow decides to act like a wave if its sees two slits, but acts like a particle otherwise? Then there's the even weirder Copenhagen interpretation, which implies it isn't meaningful to ask which slit the photon went through. The path that the photon took supposedly exists only as probability that then gets finalized when we try to detect it. Which leads to nonsensical implications when you imagine the photon having macroscopic consequences like killing a cat. Is the cat dead or alive?"

"Yeah, so?" Megan was losing interest. Was there a point to this kid's rambling?

"There's a simpler explanation," Sean smiled wryly, "The photon is interfering with a different version of the same photon. The one that took the other slit in an alternate quantum history. An alternate copy of our universe cloned when the photon passed through the slits."

"What?" Megan frowned, wondering if the kid was pulling her leg, "that's just... silly."

"It's called the Many Worlds interpretation," Sean looked unfazed by Megan's skepticism, "and it's the only one that makes sense from what I understand."

"What's it got to do with anything?" Megan asked suspiciously.

"Well... if the Many Worlds is true, every quantum measurement clones the universe," Sean picked up a piece of hardware and brought it over to Megan. A closed tube attached to a bulky box with a mini-keyboard and an LED display. He pressed 'Enter' and the display lit up with a '0'. Pressed again with display unchanged. Pressing once more and the display changed to a '1', "which means every time I press this key, a single-photon crystal-emitter clones this universe into two, whose timelines diverge from that point on, because the photon's path can have real world consequences."

"You call that a simpler explanation?" scoffed Megan, "and what's it got to do with getting rich?"

"Say I wanted to break an unbreakable encryption," Sean continued, "all I need to do is to generate a random binary key with this gizmo. The chances of getting the right key by accident are a trillion to one, right? Not a problem, since I've already cloned a trillion universes. Each of my counterparts in those universes will see a different random number on this display, almost all of which will be wrong. But one of those versions of me, will have the right key by chance."

"That's your plan?" Megan barked a laugh at the sheer insanity of it, "just hope that one of your quantum clones will succeed? Even if you'll generate the wrong key in almost every instance? Go through this ritual... it will make you rich in another universe, which you can never see!" The last part came out more mockingly than she intended.

"I wasn't going to take it on faith," Sean scowled, "I was going to hook this up to a device that'll terminate me if I get the wrong key. The only version of me that survives will be the one with the right answer. It won't convince anyone else since I'll be dead in most universes. But I will know because I'd be alive in that one universe where I generated the right key. It was Moravec's thought experiment, the robotics pioneer... crazily brilliant dude."

Megan stared at Sean, feeling a chill. The kid was batshit crazy, nothing like her nephews.

"Oh... I'm not actually going to commit quantum suicide," Sean blurted, seeing her reaction, "I am not that morally bankrupt, to leave my mom and dad devastated in a trillion universes just so I could profit in one. Stupid reason to die to anyway. If the Many Worlds is wrong, I'll be completely dead. If it's right, I can take comfort that I'll win in atleast one universe. Besides quantum suicide wouldn't work for me anyway."

"Huh? Were you just bullshitting me then?" it was Megan's turn to scowl.

"No," Sean smiled wanly, "My bestie Mei Ling would kill me if she found out I offed myself in all those other universes. But... it might make a nice emergency device in a pinch, say if you need to defuse a GORGON fusion bomb by inputting the right code... same principle."

"I... see," Megan sounded strained, "Speaking of which, let's talk about what happened last night..."

#

Megan stopped the video. The faces around the table, in the Pentagon war room, looked flabbergasted. Even Jonathan.

"Agent Murphy, are you crazy?" Stapleton demanded, "you seriously expect us to believe there are trillions of copies of our universe and we are in one that did not order an attack based on a quantum dice?"

"God does not play dice with the universe, Agent Murphy," Briggs interjected, "That's a quote from Einstein, by the way."

Megan resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

"Observer selection effect is a thing, sir," the NRO analyst spoke up unexpectedly, "It would explain Dr. West's failure with the quantum dice, if GORGON simply destroys the world everytime we manage to defeat them mortally. It has been theorized that extremely energetic particle collisions can collapse the false vacuum in our region of space and destroy the Earth near instantly."

"Or Sybilline opens up a wormhole to a strong superintelliegence," Jonathan mused, "this one big enough to permit said entity to physically pass through. That would kill us all instantly."

The silence at the table lasted several moments.

"If quantum tech is ruled out," Folgers finally spoke, "it appears we have little choice but to trust Griffin's plan with Patient Zero."

It sounded like a concession, but Colonel Griffin didn't look too happy.

END OF CHAPTER