Chapter 8: Beau
As it turned out, Nick Assencio *was* in a bar with Julie Kim, his lab partner. However, he had not had anything to drink, and his situation was one that Sarah, in her most colorful flights of fancy, could never have imagined.
“This here is BarelzeePub,” Mae Johnson had told him.
She was, from what he could tell, the bartender, and also, maybe, the owner. She was almost a full head taller than Nick and muscular. Her eyes could have been dark brown, but they looked as black as her skin in the dim light of the bar. She wore an old fashioned-looking frilly blouse and a long brown skirt. Her hair was in intricate and ornate braids, almost down to her waist. Mae’s appearance was a fastidious one and at odds with the dark room. It wasn’t dusty or dirty, it just had the air of a dive. Perhaps, that was because of Nick’s company.
Next to Julie at the bar was a scruffy man of indeterminable age, named Beau. Beau was wearing a very soiled trench coat, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and drinking as if drunk was a serious and approaching deadline. He had long, dishwater brown hair that was even dirtier than his trench coat. Most of his hair was kept at bay by a bandana, though the bottom of it fell into his glass at times. Next to Beau, on a barstool, was a white French bulldog with a black spot over his right eye, who was, as French bulldogs do, alternately snorting and panting. His name was Connard. And, Connard was the only one on that side of the bar who was not covered in soot, bruises, burns, and minorish scratches. Julie was dabbing at an abrasion on her forearm with a wet paper towel.
Mae was reading a very thick and weathered paperback of The Three Musketeers. She was leaning back against the cupboards opposite the bar and holding the book with one hand. Nick’s eyes had the wide openness of someone entirely new to bars, and his head swiveled this and way and that, as if he expected something in the bar to bite him. In truth, Nick had believed that he lived in a world rational enough to have bet everything he owned or could borrow against the series of events that found him in this bar. Agitation spilled out of him into the air surrounding as he tried to absorb his surroundings like he might find the key to stability in the walls or furniture of this very room.
“You said she prays?” came the gruff voice from Nick’s right.
“Yes,” said Nick. Annoyed, he rejoined, “Now you’re going to tell me something laconic and terse like, ‘she better.’ Right?”
“No,” said Beau, “I’m going to tell you that if she has already prayed, then we might as well leave the city right now and find Julie’s friends in the Morningstars.”
There was silence for a moment while Nick’s ears and mind tore into what he had just heard.
“What are you saying!?”
“I see that you’re just as empathetic as you’ve always been,” Julie mumbled.
Beau ignored the comment, but Nick looked at her; his question still unanswered. If Nick had realized anything tonight, it was that all of his carefully collected, exhaustively scrutinized facts were not quite so immutable as they had been two hours ago.
“They can hear you when you pray,” said Beau.
“That’s the most-” Nick started.
“I hate to be a broken record, but really, from your perspective, is it any more ridiculous than anything you’ve seen tonight?” Beau cut him off.
He sighed. It wasn’t.
“They can’t hear you when you pray,” said Julie.
Nick looked at her hopefully, reaching, grasping for something rational.
“They can sense a little bit of what you’re feeling, thinking. It’s not like eavesdropping on a conversation. They can get snippets. I’m not sure exactly how it works; I’ve never done it. Supposedly, praying activates a part of your brain that interacts on some level with the fifth force.”
Her voice trailed off. She’s not sure, thought Nick. Would certainty be a luxury that he would never be able to afford again? Could anyone be sure about anything in the world that had been thrust upon him that evening? He resolved that he was pretty sure that he knew Sarah - at least better than Beau or Julie.
“She doesn’t know anything about any of the lab data or any of that stuff - how could she? Julie and I only started compiling really bizarre results a day or so ago,” Nick said. “She’s only connected to this because of me. And I…”
He what? He hadn’t asked to be a part of this? He didn’t even know what “this” was? In a bar, hiding from the police, seemed like an odd place to begin demanding answers. It had been such a strange day. Up until he’d been afraid for his life, Nick had been excited to take Sarah to dinner. It was their sixth anniversary. It was supposed to be a special night.
Well, it had been. Sort of…
He and Julie had been going through data sets from the Southwestern Subatomic Supercollider, scrupulously cataloging results and running different algorithms to track trends in the numbers. It was dull work, and Nick sometimes wondered if there weren’t already a computer that could run the same checks for him.
But computers often missed things. It was Garbage In, Garbage Out. The algorithms they wrote weren’t sophisticated enough to explain trends in the data – only to look for them. To a computer, they were all just numbers. Sure, there were programs to check for aberrations in the data, but human eyes were needed to interpret what aberrations might just be something like a jackrabbit chewing on some of the wires in the collider's many miles of cable or a bug in the coding script. A computer, for instance, wouldn’t have noticed that whole fields of data were coming back in such a way that was, while uniform, well outside of aberration and crept into the field of, well…
“I think a jackrabbit has played hell with the wiring on the collider, again,” said Nick.
He looked across the lab at Julie. She was sipping coffee and staring blankly at her computer screen. After a few more keystrokes, her chair swiveled toward Nick, but her head did not move. Her lab coat ruffled a bit in reaction to her motion. Nick had always thought it strange that they wore lab coats as there was no danger that anything would be spilled on anyone, but it gave the building staff a way to identify them. He actually had grown quite used to wearing his. It was the perfect weight for cool nights in this desert city.
“Earth to Nick,” she said. “I told you that an hour ago. My data sets are coming back all wonky, too.”
She adjusted her black square glasses. Nick had noticed that she didn’t actually need them but was too shy to call her on it. The glasses stuck out as strange because Julie didn’t seem to be overly concerned with how she looked.
“We need to enter them anyway, right?” he begged.
If Julie didn’t see the need to do them, maybe they could both leave early. Maybe, Professor Norris would accept that. If they both left.
“We’ve got to record it,” Julie replied flatly, as she turned back to her screen. “After all, what if they’re accurate? We could be witnessing history.”
“Right. And, that could only be explicable by there being a fifth force of nature in the universe: strong and weak nuclear, electromagnetism, gravity, and jackrabbit.”
“Jackrabbit force,” Julie said sipping her coffee. “I actually really like that. We should publish.”
“I think,” Nick continued, “that these tables and graphs are really here to weed out the weak from the strong in the department. I think Dr. Norris knows the level of tedium that this causes, and he wants us to be completely broken and batty by the time we finish.”
“That way,” Julie said with a very brief pause, “he can claim the jackrabbit force for himself.”
“The jackrabbit force?” said a third voice from just outside of the lab.
Nick looked up to see a man whom he would have described as a hobo, had that style of attire not been popular at the moment. He had several days’ growth of whiskers and was wearing an oversized trench coat that looked to have been issued by a defunct military organization. His pant legs and sleeves had soot on them, and his hair was long and verging on what could be unintentional dreadlocks.
“Sorry, sir, I think you have the wrong-” Nick started.
“Beau!?” exclaimed Julie.
Nick stared at her. She knew this guy? Maybe, he was some kind of hipster, rather than a vagrant. Nick stole another glance while Julie stammered. Was he in a band or something?
“You can’t be here! They’ll find you!” she squeaked after taking in that it was in fact, “Beau.”
“Why do you think I’m here?” he said. “They’re not going to just let you go ahead with finding out about the, eh, jackrabbit force was it?”
For a split second, Julie was speechless. The man’s presence had rattled her on a level that Nick had only seen in movies. This was something profound. This was something… dangerous?
“They won’t be able to stop us,” said Julie. “The data tables are almost finished. When Professor Norris releases his findings on this-”
“It’s too late,” Beau said. “Norris is already dead.”
In the silence that followed, the man lit a cigarette with a very deft maneuver that hid his lighter. In spite of whatever else had been said, Nick had an inclination to say something about the smoking – indoors? Who was this guy? What kind of prank did he think he was playing? But, the color had drained from Julie’s face. Her eyes went wide. Norris was dead? What? When?
“What do you-”
“Dead?” said Nick, “Julie-”
“You can't really have thought that they were just going to let you do this, Julie,” said Beau, “You covered your tracks decently enough to keep things down, but they found you. And I'm late. I tried to save Norris, but I was late then, too.” He walked over to the window and looked down. “He is already here. There aren’t any secret escape routes or anything that you happen to have on hand, are there?”
“I'm afraid that it's even too late for that,” said a fourth voice. It was a smooth, even voice, crisp but very curt. Another man, this one well-dressed and smirking, walked into the lab. “What he means, Ms. Kim, is that this moment will be the closest that humankind ever gets to discovering the thing that separates them from worshiping their made up gods and actually being their own gods,” the man added.
Sound drained from the room to the point that Nick could just barely make out a siren down the street. The SSS computer lab was on the fortieth floor of the Laika building. Beau looked at the well-dressed man and shuddered. Nick couldn’t tell and, at the moment, didn’t care if it was elation or revulsion.
“Professor Norris is dead? What the hell is wrong with you people? What's going on here?” Nick demanded.
He had wanted to know what humankind was separated from, but the entire episode had been so confusing that it was difficult to fixate on one point. …other than the one where the lead scientist in all of this was dead. Dr. Norris was dead?
Julie and the first man regarded the second man with the kind of muted hostility typically reserved for brand new tumors. The vagrant-looking man dropped his cigarette on the floor, stepped on it, and continued glaring.
No one moved.
No one blinked.
Nick prepared to indignantly break the silence with a second volley of questions but never got the chance. The second man raised his hand to chest level, pointed it at Nick, and an enormous blue bolt of electricity cascaded forth from his palm. It seared and crackled through the air in a nearly instantaneous arc on a collision course with Nick’s sternum.