Always & Forever by: Elsbeth Numbers of the Beast Jack, my friend, I believe this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Deep inside an underground bunker in a secluded location in the Rocky Mountains, a dozen of the world’s leading scientists worked through the latest trans-dimensional calculations.

One gentleman stood in the back of the room, slovenly dressed in a shirt that hadn’t been changed in days and sporting a face that hadn’t seen a razor in weeks.

He ignored the rest of the team, not that he didn’t have anything to contribute most of what they were arguing over were his calculations. Punching some numbers on a handheld computer, he ran several scenarios with several different results. None of the scenarios were acceptable except for the one that included all of his original calculations. Some of the other scenarios would prove to be disastrous.

“Are we actually here to open a trans-dimensional gateway, or are we just screwing around?”

The room got suddenly quiet; all eyes turned to the man in the back of the room. As a two-time Noble Prize winner in mathematical physics, what came out of his mouth was usually considered gospel.

Most claimed him to be the true heir to Einstein; the rest claimed that he was a combination of Einstein and Hawking. What disappointed most was that he was no longer the vivacious young scientist like a rock star that turned the world on its head eight years ago.

With breakthroughs in quantum energy and trans-dimensional dynamics, there was talk among the community of harnessing the energy between worlds. Such energy, if harnessed correctly would bring the world out of the dark ages of oil and gas. Harnessed correctly, the power would take this world to the stars.

The scientist spoke before packed rooms made up of mostly young people, about space travel beyond our Solar System and even travel between dimensions. They would become the Columbus or Magellan of a new age.

This was all before the man’s wife was taken away by drug-resistant cancer. In less than a year the woman who was a picture of grace and beauty wasted away. He never left her side. When she could no longer walk, he carried her. When she could no longer eat by herself, he fed her. When she could no longer move, he sat by her side and cared for her every need. When she died, he almost joined her. He would have followed her willingly to the grave, but those around him would not let him.

“Jack, you’re scaring the children.” Rose Hawthorne, another Noble Prize winner in mathematical physics took a seat by her old friend and lover Jack Leigh.

They had dated for a while in college most of the time they ignored the Titanic jokes, but the relationship wasn’t meant to last. He was one of her closest friends, but she had always wished for something more.

She had tried to be jealous of his wife, Maggie, but they were such a good fit. If there was any truth to soul-mates, they were the poster children. She was ecstatic that he had finally joined the team to build the first trans-dimensional gateway. Of course, without him, they would likely not have been funded by any of the dozen or so nations that were paying the bills.

“Them young whipper-snappers.” Jack gave a half-smile as he ran through the calculations for the sixth time. She giggled; Jack was ten or more years junior to most everyone in the room.

“This is bullshit, Rose, where did they get those calculations? Did you see the ones covering the thermal flux? Did they ask some preschoolers write to them?” He typed in one of the calculations, ran the scenario, and thrust it in her face. “Boom!”

She looked down at his computer. He was right, of course; in fact, he was usually right when it came to trans-dimensional physics. It was as he was working on a different level than everyone else. It scared her sometimes. Mostly it made his colleges jealous. “You’re right, I’ll recommend to the team that we don’t use those calculations.”

“Damn straight, we won’t. Nicki Ioannou had some good ideas on Rift management. Why don’t we have her on the team?”

Rose nodded, the brilliant Greek scientist would have been a valuable member of the team; unfortunately, politics kept her away.

“Greece is bankrupt; they could never afford to buy into this technology. Plus, she made some enemies at the last European physics symposium.”

“It’s only because her theories stepped on too many people’s ideas on how the world should work.” He rolled his eyes and mumbled something about the idiocy of politics. He didn’t mention to Rose that he helped Nicki with that presentation. “When this latest test fails, and it will; I’ll go before the board and demand she is put on my team, or I am going to walk. Enough of the politics, I am doing this for everyone’s future, not so that Americans can run their air conditioners cheaper. Hell, if they push me, I’ll do it myself. I can get enough corporate backing, plenty of Angel investors out there with more cash than most countries.”

Rose looked at him with interest. This was the old Jack, the Jack that burned with new ideas. He never allowed anyone to stand in the way of his goal. She had a sudden terrifying thought of being left out. “You would still allow me to be on your team wouldn’t you?” She asked, almost in a little girl’s voice. It was as if she was asking to be on his team for dodgeball in school.

He looked at her with his bright blue eyes. God, she loved them. “Of course, don’t be silly I love your calculations on quantum disbursement. Crazy how much energy we need to bleed off, nothing we have now can handle that much output. Frankly, I think we should lock ourselves in a room for six months, maybe get another Nobel Prize out of the deal.”

Rose squirmed at the thought of being locked in a room with him. She cursed her unprofessionalism, but before she stood the Jack, she had once loved. The mathematician reached over and took his hand “Jack.”

He reacted poorly, throwing his hand up and immediately knew that he did. “I’m sorry, Rose, I can’t not yet.”

Rose nodded sadly. Jack was missing a part of himself, and she knew deep down; it was something that she would be unable to fill.

“Can I still be on your team?”

He looked at her and smiled, reaching out his with knuckles. “Of course, best friends?”

She nodded, giving him a knuckle bump.

Most of the team sat half a mile deep in the bunker with the tools of their trade surrounding them. In a small chamber, another mile beneath the room sat the equipment that would change the world forever. Wires and metals in an almost spider-like design thrummed with the initial subatomic energy.

“If we were smart, we would be doing this experiment on the moon.” Haruki Ito, an engineer from Japan, commented.

Stephen Carver grunted.” It would have been cost-prohibitive.” A professor from Cambridge and the senior researcher in the current experiment he was proud that his team wrote most of the latest calculations out of Cambridge.

He still resented the fact that Jack Leigh was brought in to oversee the project. They should have left him on his ranch to rot. If they needed him, there was always email. What bothered him was a rumor that Jack was going to pull himself from the project and get corporate backing.

A small side of the Cambridge professor, a side he kept well hidden, was in awe of the American physicist. The calculations he tossed out were difficult; it was almost impossible to understand how they were produced. Dr. Carver ignored the thought and brought up the calculations for the most recent test; they looked good enough.

“Dr. Leigh, we are ready to start.”

“Try not to blow up the planet, Stephen.” Rose joked. The rest of the room gave a nervous laugh.

The experiment, as Jack predicted, failed miserably. Stephen growled in frustration and looked up as Jack gave Rose Hawthorne a knowing smile. Then it came to him; the bastard knew it was going to fail. He, of course, ignored the fact that Jack had been telling them all week to change the experiment.

“Doctor Leigh, I would like to try it again but with some new calculations. We have run them through the simulator with varying results.”

Jack shrugged. “It’s your dime, Stephen.”

A half an hour later, the new calculations were loaded, and the experiment resets to run again.

“Make it so.” Jack laughed as the rest of the room just rolled their eyes.

All hell immediately broke loose. Energy displacement went off the chart, and all of the internal radiation counters popped around the room. “Settle down, folks, we are still Ok, but I recommend that all non-essential personnel move themselves to the upper floors.”

Jack leaned over and calmly spoke to the team leader for the group that would need to start the decontamination process of anyone who exited the lab.

“Jack.” Rose motioned to two of her monitors, then started to tremble.

Stephen Carver stood up and pulled his computer screen with him. The hologram screen flickered in and out a couple of times because of the radiation. “That shouldn’t have happened.” He dragged it towards Doctor Leigh, who watched his own monitors.

“Should have, would have, Stephen.” He turned to one of the engineers. “Get ready to dump the entire thing if necessary.”

“You can’t, Jack, it will cost us months of work,” Stephen exclaimed.

The Nobel scientist looked at Stephen with disgust, then reached over and started to type out some calculations on the fly. The Cambridge professor stood in awe.

“Well, we shouldn’t have to worry about months of lost work Stephen. We have a living gateway, congratulations.”

At that point, secondary radiation counters popped, and alarms began to go off throughout the compound.

“The planet, on the other hand, is going to be toast, actually maybe even this Solar System.”

Several people about the room started to cry. They had doomed the entire planet. The trans-dimensional reaction had gone out of control.

“OK, folks, not that it’s going to matter, but everyone evacuates.” Jack broke a small glass plate on the wall next to him then punched a large red button.

Sirens began to go off. Inside the control room, he pushed people into the emergency elevators. It would be like a rocket ride to the surface.

“Get as far as you can away from the mountain. I’ll see what I can do; I still have the original calculations that I can work with.”
Stephen looked around; he was ready to bolt. “How is that going to help? You cannot exactly run upstairs to your office.”

Jack laughed. “They are in my head.”

“Impossible.” Stephen then took off, leaving the others behind.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” Rose walked over to him and slipped her hands around his chest. “I’ll stay, too.”

Without a word, Jack picked her up and walked her to the nearest elevator, the last one leaving the surface. He gave her a quick kiss then threw the shocked woman inside. “I’ll tell Maggie you said hi.”

With four screens opened up before him, Jack’s hands flew over the keyboard, he had run at least two different scenarios, and all of them were bad. Rubbing his hands over his face, he was positive that the upcoming explosion was going to kill him way before the radiation.

“So, I wonder if you’re going to figure it out.”

He turned from his work and spied a young blonde girl sitting in a chair, spinning around in front of one of the control terminals. She wore one of those neo-Victorian outfits that were such a rage ten years ago. This wasn’t a weird reaction from radiation; perhaps it was something from the rift.

“Figure what out.”

“How to stop what is going on down below our feet.”

“I’m working on it.” He ran one more scenario; although it decreased the explosion by twenty-five percent, it wasn’t going to help.

“Boom right, you said that before. So Jack, how big a boom?” The young girl giggled.

“What’s with the gothic Lolita look? You know that’s a bit out of date. If you’re a hallucination, at least, I thought I would have better taste.” He turned around. If he was going to hallucinate, he wished it was Maggie standing next to him.

“Better taste?”

“Oh, don’t take it the wrong way, you’re definitely cute I’m just ten years too old for you.”

She laughed and then got serious. “How large, Jack?”

“Nova to low-level Super Nova, I am guessing.”

“You’re guessing.”

He shrugged. “I might be off ten to fifteen percent but close enough when you are talking about wiping out planets light-years away.”

She moved next to him to watch the screens. “You know if you’re going to stand there, at least help.” For some reason, he thought the little girl could actually help. He wasn’t positive anymore that she was a hallucination, much less a little girl.

“Not permitted, sorry.”

“Figures.” The Nobel Prize scientist closed three of the computer screens.

The scenario endings were all depressing. He found himself concentrating now on only one screen. His fingers began to type. She kept watching him then smiled when a bright spark went off in the back of his eyes. Jack began to make calculations on the fly within the program itself. It should not have been possible.

Theoretically, it took at the minimum thirty minutes to reload the calculations when the system was down. And they were never loaded by hand.

Jack did it anyway all from memory, and then he began to adjust the calculations. For a moment before the world went black he understood everything.

--0—

Jack sat on the edge of a moon crater watching the earth in all of its glory. He smiled; it was a great spot to watch the earth rise.

“So, no boom, kind of disappointing.”

He turned to the blonde-haired girl who stood next to him.“Sorry to disappoint, I kind of like the earth, how it is not scattered across the cosmos.”

“Oh no, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you did it. Good for you. See, I had a bet with the powers that be in this Universe and won.”

He didn’t believe in the powers that be in any universe but then again. “So, what would have happened if you lost?”

“The earth and most of the surrounding stars would be nothing more than expanding gas, and you would be placed at the bottom of a galactic black hole and left there for all eternity.”

“That’s good; I’m glad you won. So as the winner of this cosmic bet, what do you get?” He was pretty positive he wouldn’t like where this was going.

“I get you, of course. Jack, you scare the bejesus out of the powers that run this universe. No mortal should understand the inner workings of things. Your head should have exploded, but no, you went on your merry way creating havoc.”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be, it was a lot of fun. Now what to do about you? First of all, you have a reward coming.”

“A reward, I wasn’t thinking of one. I mean, the earth is still around; that pretty much works for me.”

“I figured that would be your response. So who is Maggie?” She smiled like she didn’t already know.

Jack began from the beginning, it was cathartic, an outpouring of his entire life with his wife. She was his only real existence for a living.

“So, Jack, would you like to meet her again?”

“You mean reborn, do that reincarnation thing? I’m not a spiritual person, so I’m not sure how that works.” He understood that in the strictest sense, she wasn’t an Angel, just something different.

“Oh no, you’re persona non grata in this Universe, my friend. Another dimension, I think.” She smiled when he didn’t blink. It was so nice to work with someone who understood how things worked, but she could see real hope in his eyes, a yearning for something missing.

“See, I’m actually here, not because of you. I am a Spiritual Detective working out the wrinkles in the multiverse. There is another Maggie without a ‘you, ’ and it’s causing issues.”

“Oh, that makes sense.” He then began to explain how that would cause problems within the overly complex systems regarding space-time. She began to jump up and down and clap her hands excitedly, which was quite the feat as the two of them stood on the moon.

“You have some growing up to do little girl, but after that, you’re coming to work for me.” She grabbed his hand. “Jack, my friend, I believe this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

“What, girl?” He never got out the rest as he felt stretched.

--0--

Jack felt someone poking his side, this constant irritating poking. One only person did that to him. “Stop that, why do you insist on doing that every morning.”

He opened his eyes, that voice wasn’t his but that of a young girl. He looked up and saw Maggie, but it wasn’t Maggie standing over him. She couldn’t be more than ten years old.

“Nadine, you silly goose, you’re going to be late for school.”

“Maggie?” it suddenly all came back to him, she was her sister. No, it was more than that. They were twins. Growing up on the outskirts of Paris they lived with their mother and father under the reign of Prince Jean-Christophe Napoleon.

Napoleon had not marched into Russia; there was no Waterloo. World War I and World War II also didn’t happen. It was a very different world, but it was the world in which Maggie and Nadine were born. He took one look at his former wife, his now twin, and began to cry.

Maggie immediately leaped to her side laughing. “Why are you crying, I didn’t hurt you?”

“I had a nightmare, you had died, and I was all alone.” Great sobs wracked her body. Jack had never actually cried before, but as Nadine, she let it all out. Maggie soon joined her, the two twins feeding off one another. Finally, they both calmed down.

“I’m not going anyplace.” Maggie wiped the tears from her face and then from her sister’s.

“I love you, Maggie.” Nadine smiled, joy filling her heart completeness she thought she had lost.

“I love you too, Nadine.” She reached over and held her sister close. “Always and forever.”

“Always and forever.”