“No. But they’ve just cracked it. We are about to find out,” George said, keying in the access code.
The door swished open, causing everyone in the room to look up from their workstations. There were a total of ten people, excluding Kristen, and they all seemed to be holding their breath in anticipation.
“Hey,” Kristen said, tearing his eyes from his tablet. He was leaning against a desk, flicking through 3D diagrams and what looked to be schematics. “You have to see this.”
Darren threw a glance over his shoulder just as the door closed behind them and the access terminal changed from green to red. “Bea, Nyle, can you dial in?”
“Forwarding you the call code,”Bea replied in Aiden’s earpiece.
Kristen set up the video call on one of the big screens in front of the whiteboard, loading a 3D model of some kind of a device on the second.
“We’ve been looking at the earring’s data since it finished decrypting,” Leonard, the team leader, began. He tilted his head to the monitor with the device diagram. “There were actually two schematics inside the earring. The one you see is for an engine modification, and the other one”—he loaded up a second blueprint—“for some am advanced synchronization device.”
“What, like a performance optimization mod?” Bea speculated, her voice booming from the speakers around the lab as the video feed connected to the Maine.
“No, and that’s where things get interesting,” Kristen said, excitement lacing his words. He loaded a video file and pressed play. “I think it’s better to see it for yourselves.”
Aiden recognized the Valrais labs immediately. Darren’s father was in the shot and so was Dr. Batbayar. She was holding a holographic visualization of the engine modification Kristen still had on the left screen.
“Garret. This last iteration… the simulation results look promising. 99.9% success rate,”she said, excitement pouring off her in that same way it had when she’d made the announcement of the groundbreaking discovery in Sara’s memory. This video wasn’t from that day, nor was it from the day of the attack as the timestamp placed it a couple of weeks before it.
“Are you saying we can access it now?”Darren’s father asked, leaning in to study the screen of her tablet.
Aiden felt Darren tense up, so he slid his hand into Darren’s and held it tight.
“Yep,”Dr. Batbayar grinned, walking over to a workbench with various parts of devices scattered across it.“And there is more to it than we originally thought. Arnold was doing tests on the binding frequencies between the engine and the synchronizator and…”She took a deep breath and fumbled with her shirt’s cuff buttons.“We were wrong in our initial analysis of the multiverse. Garret, there is more than one. Arnold proved it.”
Aiden gawked at the screen, not quite comprehending her words.
“Kris, babe, did she just drop on us that not only does the multiverse exist, but that the Valrais scientists proved there aremultiple?” Nyle piped up, confusion and excitement warring on his face on the screen.
Kristen smiled. “Keep watching.”
Dr. Batbayar went to the whiteboard behind the cluttered workbench and drew a number of circles.“The ‘world’ exists as a cluster of multiverses. So, it’s not just a single multiverse like we initially believed. Our universe—the ‘Primary’ Universe—sits within one of these multiverses. Let’s call it Multiverse DES:01.”She went and labeled the nearest circles around it as DES:02, DES:03 and DES:04.“Each multiverse is independent of the others, and the synchronization device we designed… It allows us not only to travel between the universes of our own multiverse, but also access the other multiverses.”
Aiden felt his jaw go a bit slack. He blinked at the screen, then at Kristen, and then he trained his gaze on Leonard.
Bea whistled over the speakers before any of them had managed to collect their thoughts. “That’s… quite the discovery your folks made, Darren.”
“On top of human evolution, and the most advanced AI in existence,” Nyle frowned at them through the screen. “This is crazy. No wonder Marcus went after your family…”
Aiden squeezed Darren’s hand, hoping that the contact would ground the other man before his mind had the chance to plunge into that dark and lonely place he still carried with him. “Tiverich, do you understand the schematics?” he asked.
Kristen shook his head, his mouth slanting downwards. “I’m afraid that’s beyond me.” He pointed at the video, which was still playing on the holoboard. The timestamp had changed, and Dr. Batbayar was in the middle of debriefing a group of people about a successful ‘jump’ test.
“Holy shit! They did a successful test, too!” Nyle shouted in disbelief.
Kristen nodded, running his fingers along the edge of his tablet. “Small scale, but yeah. It looks like it… works. We haven’t really studied this part of the video yet, but Dr. Batbayar goes over some of the synch device components. Even with her explanations though, it’s really complex stuff. Sorry.”
“It’s actually notthatcomplex,” Leonard piped up, his green eyes sparkling. “For a physicist, I mean.” He grinned. “Which I am.”
As Leonard went on to explain some of the principles behind it, a surge of worry speared through Aiden. The second part of the Valrais Legacy wasn’t a weapon like a part of him had hoped. His mind still struggled to come to terms with the world-changing discovery, but the pragmatic in him felt a little lost. They couldn’t really use this to fight Marcus. They still had the evolution sequence, true, but they were already a step behind.
Could they sell the technology? To a competitor in exchange for men and firepower? Was the risk worth it, considering the kinds of possibilities Dr. Batbayar’s discovery opened?
George sat up, clapping his hands for attention. “This is quite unexpected. Science has been scrambling for decades to solve the mystery of the universe all the while we had the answer already…” He looked around the lab and hummed. “Darren, this might not seem like a win at first, but it changes the rules of the game. It doesn’t give us a direct way to take Marcus down, but… winning comes in many forms.”
Aiden narrowed his eyes, his brain half following what George was saying. He opened his mouth to speak, but George lifted his hand.
