Hurricane #18: The Laboratory (Patreon)

When Zoë Irsaw suggested going back to their laboratory, Serrano couldn’t help but conjure up the image of the most stereotypical steampunk mad science affair: brass pipes and dials, flasks of mysterious bubbling liquids, Nixie tube displays, weird gadgets with lightning arcing between two metal poles for no obvious reason. When the hyena led them into a room that matched it all note for note, she couldn’t help letting out a delighted squeal. Sarah—back at her normal size—gave the coyote one of her enigmatic raised-brow glances. The professor just grinned.

“All right.” They waved the two over to one of the workbenches. The device that had been in Serrano’s wall lay disassembled, pieces hooked up to an ungainly green-gray box with a half-dozen meters and dials, an oscilloscope, and an amber CRT display. They set the ray-gun down on the workbench. “Ah…yes.” They pointed to screws along one side. “Triangles, see? It’s a highly unusual style for screwdrivers here, but it’s the same one they used on the in-wall device.” The hyena pulled out an electric screwdriver from below the desk and disassembled the gun with startling speed.

“Hmm.” Irsaw tapped something inside that looked like a transformer. “This is part of what should be the power supply, but I was right. There is a small battery here, but not nearly enough to power the quantum tunneling system the in-wall device has. Once it starts drawing power from you, it uses a fraction of that to open the tunnel and hold it open. Most interesting.”

Serrano crossed her arms. “When you say ‘interesting’ I hear ‘alarming.’”

“They’re not mutually exclusive. It does confirm my suspicion that this is bespoke technology.”

“Meaning…?”

“That it’s specifically built to target you.”

Serrano’s ears lowered.

“They already had the quantum tunneling technology, though. They’ve been using it to steal inventions from parallel dimensions.”

Irsaw’s brows shot up. “You’re sure of that, Miss Wylde?”

“I can’t prove it, but I traced where the storms were going to when they exited Faerie and spent a few days in that land. Technologically, it’s similar to this world, but with…inventions that were odd anomalies.”

Irsaw grinned and waved a hand around the laboratory. “You’re in a school full of odd anomalies, including most of the staff and students.”

“It’s different. The weirdness here hasn’t been…commercialized. Besides, this particular branch of reality is a chaos nexus. Theirs isn’t. It should be quite boringly normal.”

“A ‘chaos nexus.’ That’s a most intriguing description.”

Sarah shrugged. “You’re very close to Faerie, multidimensionally speaking. So there’s more magic, more ways to bend physics a little, more sapient races. Everything gets a few clicks louder, brighter, and weirder than other mortal realms.”

“You didn’t mention that before.” Serrano squinted. “Does that make your Queen more or less likely to prune this branch if things go really wrong?”

“More. If things go wrong in a chaos nexus, it tends to have pretty serious ripple effects if you don’t stop it fast.”

She sighed. “Terrific.”

Irsaw looked between both of them. “Well. We’re just full of apocalyptic possibilities today, aren’t we. Did your investigations give you any idea who might be behind the apparent cross-dimensional theft?”

“We have a name from an operative here: ‘Sark.’”

“And from my dreams,” Serrano added.

“But,” Sarah continued, “I only have company names from the other world. And I have no idea why they’ve moved from stealing commercializable gadgets to stealing storms.”

“I think I can explain that. Think of it as stealing power, energy, on a scale that no world at a technological level comparable to this one would be able to generate. The question is what they need that power for.” Irsaw tilted their head. “Do you remember any news stories there about massive projects that seem like science fiction on a grand scale, or perhaps huge problems that the whole world’s facing?”

“Nothing extraordinary.” The wolf shrugged. “Most worlds at that point along their progress have similar issues, sociopolitical ones you get when your technology or magic becomes powerful enough to level civilization before your collective civic wisdom is strong enough to keep you from doing so. Potentially catastrophic side effects from industrialization, like pollution, global warming, local extinctions, all that.”

Irsaw nodded thoughtfully, then held up a finger. “Explain ‘global warming’?”

“Pollution heating up the atmosphere enough that polar ice caps melt, sea levels rise. That’s got to be in your news media at this point, although I don’t know whether you’re still in the ‘deny anything is wrong’ stage or the ‘blame the political opposition’ stage or what here.”

“Hmm. We are in a warming trend, but in historical terms, nothing has been out of the ordinary with our global climate until the effects that correlate with the extra-dimensional assault on Miss Layotl in the last few months.” Irsaw furrowed their brow, looking thoughtful. “How dire is this ‘global warming’ in Sark’s world?”

“I saw news stories about expanding deserts and a major city that was crumbling into the sea, so I would guess very.” Sarah crossed her arms. “So how are you one of the few worlds that isn’t having to deal with this in some way? Are you unusually responsible with your industry?”

“I’d like to think so, but of course, I have no comparison point.”

“Also,” Serrano said, “we have a storm goddess.”

“Everybody has a storm goddess.” Sarah waved a hand around. “I mean, just about every world has multiple mythologies with multiple gods, and there’s always a few who deal with the weather. It’s the way the multiverse works. There are other worlds with Ulohne, specifically.”

“Miss Layotl might be on to something, though.” Irsaw began pacing around the workbench. “If the multiverse contains effectively infinite variations, then in some worlds gods must be more real, if you will. They have greater or lesser effects, greater or lesser involvement.”

“Sure.”

“Have you heard of Maxwell’s Demon?”

Sarah shook her head.

“Yeah.” Serrano nodded. “It’s kind of a thought experiment, right? There’s, like, two chambers full of atoms or molecules with a door between them, and a demon who controls the door and only lets the right atoms through as they bounce around. It could kind of sort the molecules that way, into fast-moving and slow-moving, which affects…something.”

“Excellent, yes. The something is entropy. The demon in the experiment can regulate the temperature of the chambers without affecting pressure—decreasing the total entropy in the system. It’s a theoretical experiment because in practice, it appears to violate the laws of thermodynamics. But what if some small fraction of worlds—including this very one—have such a demon who counteracts our unfortunately entropy-increasing activities?”

Serrano’s eyes widened, and she almost bounced in place. “Ulohne! So she’s not just a force for massive destruction, she’s literally saving the world!”

“From idiotic mortals,” Sarah muttered.

“Yet idiotic mortals in another world have found a way to drain her power away. Perhaps to save their world, perhaps for less altruistic reasons.” They pointed at Serrano. “Through you, Miss Layotl. Why you?”

“I still don’t know.”

Sarah tilted her head. “Your family didn’t have any idea when you asked?”

“Well. Uh.”

The wolf narrowed her eyes.

She sighed. “Look, I don’t know how faerie families work, but mine is dysfunctional. I haven’t seen my dad in a quarter-century, and nearly all of his side of the family treats my mom and me as latrans non grata. And my relationship with my mom is…strained. She’s weird.”

“Weird how?” Irsaw tilted their head.

“Weird, I don’t know, I mean, she never has a regular job, she’s into old pagan stuff.”

“Old. Pagan. Stuff.” Sarah threw her hands in the air. “Well, that’s certainly not worth following up on, is it.”

“No, it’s just hippy…fine,” Serrano groaned, pulling out her phone. “Let’s all give her a call.”

Irsaw raised a hand. “I didn’t mean you had to—”

“No, no, let’s do it.” She punched the contact button and set the phone on the table on speaker.

Aji answered on the fourth ring, just before it would have gone to voicemail. “Serrano?”

“Hi, mom. Are you busy?”

“I have a few minutes. I haven’t heard from you in a while. How are you doing? How’s the music career? You’re working with your cousin Chiltepin now, aren’t you?”

“Complicated, also complicated, and no, in that order. So, uh, I have a quick question about religion.”

“Really.” Serrano could all but hear her mother’s brows lifting.

“Yeah. So, like, your side of the family worshipped Ayanta and other old gods?”

“I’d say respect, not worship. Some of us. Mostly the women. My mother, her mother, on back.” A note of wry amusement crept into her mother’s tone. “I thought you agreed with your father on that being ‘hippy bullshit’.”

“No. I mean, yeah, kinda, but better than his fundamentalist bullshit. Anyway, uh, here’s the thing. I’ve been having…dreams about storms, and a librarian I met has had me look up some mythology.”

“Really. When you were a cub, you loved storms so much, I couldn’t keep you from just running right out into them. I called you Ulohne’s little thunder maiden.”

Irsaw and Sarah both raised their brows. Serrano’s ears skewed. “What?”

“She’s the goddess of storms.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. That’s the mythology I’ve been…studying. I didn’t know you knew.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I didn’t know I knew.”

“You don’t remember your dedication ceremony with Shaman Jim?”

“I sort of remember an Uncle Jim, and I remember the confirmation ceremony you dragged me to.”

“Your father dragged you to confirmation. That was his church. With ours, it’s always been more personal, direct. I was dedicated to Ayanta by your grandmother. But you, well, you picked your own goddess.”

“Huh,” Serrano mumbled, acutely aware of Irsaw and Sarah both staring at her piercingly now.

“Just what are these dreams, Serrano?” Aji said after a few seconds, sounding concerned. “This is cryptic, even for you.”

“Sorry. Love you, gotta go.” She disconnected almost before Aji finished a worried love you, too.

Serrano looked back at the other two and took a deep breath, spreading her hands imploringly. “No. Come on. Some new age ceremony of my mom’s is not going to give me a connection to the weather system.”

“And yet, Miss Layotl,” Irsaw said, raising their brows.