Time for a Break, I Think

“Okay, I think those are good levels,” Dr. Lynxala - a Patheurian - said as he double-checked his spreadsheet.

Wormholes were the ultimate workaround for the pesky speed of light barrier and Dr. Lynxala was studying them. He was the head of the Blackdeep research facility: a place so secret that even the admiralty of the Alliance of Planets was unaware of its existence.

Dr. Lynxala’s long, furry tail wrapped around his left leg, as it always did during these tests. One wrong number and the anti-protons that power the generator could either collapse or collide with the protons in the wall of the generator itself, instantly transforming the gram of antimatter into a small sun. Or they would be successful, but in creating a dreaded black hole instead of a worm hole.

He looked at his comrades in their unwashed labcoats and then at the neon sign glowing from their workstations in the backroom: A reclining, green-outlined alien vixen holding a glass of wine beckoned the viewer.

“Visit Vulane!” it said on the side above the comely vixen. She was reclining in front of a glowing, green beach and a speech bubble above her said:

“I think it’s time for a break...”

The lights in the staging area below slowly began to burn brighter and brighter as the apparatus spun and drew more and more power. Dr. Lynxala put his pure black safety goggles over his eyes and even through them, he could still see the flash as a momentary blip appeared in the circular gateway... and then fizzled.

The team was ecstatic. Lynxala breathed a deep sigh of relief as cheers rose as high as the Vulanian wine corks that popped behind him.

Finally, a result. His faceless bosses were starting to get impatient, he imagined. He joined his colleagues for some celebratory libations near the electric vixen.

Dr. Lynxala pointed at the somewhat lascivious neon sign. “You’re lucky we don’t get surprise visits from...” He trailed off. “Looks unprofessional, folks.”

“So long as we get results,” Dr. Rezen said as she lifted a thin plastic receptacle to her long lips. She was a camel-like alien.

“And nobody knows who we work for anyway,” said Dr. Irdin, a human male.

Dr. Lynxala and all his colleagues - about a dozen of the most talented physicists in the Alliance - all lived onbase. They were compensated thoroughly for it, but their personal habits had begun to show. Lynxala suspected that Irdin and Rezen, for example, were having some kind of affair.

He was jealous.

After a party flowing with Vulanian wine, Dr. Lynxala went back to his apartment about a kilometer away in the vast Blackdeep complex. His apartment was much larger - and emptier - than his real home back on Patheur. It had huge vistas to the nothingness that the moon was flying through on its journey to the end of the universe.

Whenever Lynxala was jealous of his coworkers, he used it as inspiration to continue work on his novel, Love and Wormholes: Interspecies Dialogues in Deep Space.

He planned to publish under a pseudonym, “Professor Skywine,” to hide his identity. He was terrible at spelling, plot, character development...

...And computers.

Despite the popular depiction of geniuses in intergalactic media, they are not knowledgeable in every area. In fact, they are usually spectacular in one, very tiny area of knowledge... and fools in all the rest.

He had sent his first draft to a literary agent on the planet Vulane, who was receptive. She had a cute, squeaky voice and said very nice things in the databits he would receive from her in the subspace net. The image on her Portside account had her sitting on a cushion in a revealing skirt with a silly grin on her delicate snoot, her long, extravagant brush flowing behind her in the beach breeze. Behind her - other than her tail - was the classic setting sun of Vulane, dipping into the bright blue sea and turning it into a miasma of orange and purple.

Lynxala couldn’t write that prose if he was being tortured.

She was obviously vapid, and Lynxala needed that trait for his musings - a cute vixen who loved romance novels instead of secrets. He didn’t want anyone who would pry into who he really was or what he was doing.

Her latest correspondence was her voice along with a data packet. She gently explained that she had some notes on his latest draft.

“No wonder it took so long,” he said. Data packets through subspace channels took forever to travel through space. When Lynxala asked the computer to download the file to his private server, a few things happened at once.

First, the file began to download. Lynxala - who, as we’ve mentioned, is terrible with computers - used a private server instead of the heavily secured - but internally public - mainframe in order to hide his private work from his colleagues. When the file finally downloaded, a hidden script accessed the mainframe through one of its unsecured entrypoints.

Lynxala didn’t like feedback. Writers don’t like feedback.

No one likes feedback.

When it finally finished downloading, Lynxala - who was now in his star-patterned pajamas - stood and walked to the coffee machine for some liquid encouragement.

“Cream, two sugars,” he said.

Instead of the sound of pouring black liquid followed by a few squirts of cream and two white cubes falling into his mug, he heard the error noise: two quick, annoying beeps, followed by the control panel going red.

“What the...?”

Instead of allowing the genius scientists to make their own coffee, the invisible bosses of Blackdeep had connected the coffee machines to the mainframe in order to expedite the distribution of caffeine.

The coffee machines were not monitored by the security protocols.

Who in the Hells would want to hack into a coffee machine, they had asked themselves. Don’t spend money where it isn’t needed, we’re already paying these people enough.

Lynxala slapped the console with his pawed hand.

“Where’s my coffee, you infernal contraption?!”

After a few seconds, the panel went back to its sterile white and coffee, cream, and sugar dispensed. The vixen who had programmed the virus hidden in the datapacket to enter the Blackdeep mainframe had correctly guessed Lynxala’s passcode:

“Skywine”

...and had gained administrator access to the mainframe.

Meanwhile, Lynxala listened to the dulcet tones of his editor as she gushed about his writing style, the setting, the characters, the plot, and especially his choice of words. He smiled and nodded along to the ‘feedback’ as his literary agent-slash-editor caught all his subtext and metaphors.

“Yes,” he said, pausing the audio, “the rain in that scene was an allegory for relationships on a deep-space research station!”

After hearing her nice, soft words, Lynxala fell asleep and dreamed of accolades for his taudry story. A few kilometers away in various directions, other scientists had fallen into a stupor from poisoned Vulanian wine hours ago while a satellite dish slowly moved into position and sent a huge data packet to an area of deep space that was supposedly empty.

Well, not entirely empty. According to the Alliance’s star charts, the signal was headed directly to the Sh’ra homeworld, but of course it wouldn’t reach it.

The Sh’ra were an animalistic, reptiloid race that threatened all of the other “civilized” races. They had the opposite view.

Someone obviously wanted a cover story in case what happened next didn’t cover their cunning little tracks completely.

The “morning” - signified by soft yellow artificial lights above beds - arrived as gently as possible. Lynxala stretched and yawned. His report was ready to send to the higher-ups with a flick of a key.

He strolled over to the food dispenser.

“Anything with eggs?” He asked as he looked out over the vista.

It was the same as he had seen on the last seven-hundred or so nights: darkness, sprinkled with stars and nebulas overlooking a gray, dead moon. There was no atmosphere on the moon the Blackdeep facility inhabited, so the universe was able to yawn before him. Sometimes he thought he could even see incoming galaxies a billion light-years distant if he relaxed enough.

But that was when he was younger. When the idea of a dying universe was interesting.

Now, the meals arrived like clockwork: eggs, bacon, meat, potatoes. He watched them slide down the tube as he studied his spreadsheet on his tablet.

He double and triple checked the math for the day’s test and sent it to his subordinates as he replayed his literary agent’s commentary. Soon, he was summoned to the reaction lab for the day’s demonstration.

“Chief?” Dr. Rezen called out. “Can we have a rest instead? Just a day off?”

The Partheurian blinked, his tail coiling around his leg again. “Did you frazhas drink too much? Is it ‘time for a break’?” He asked, satirizing the sleazy neon sign in their break room.

There were nods from every corner.

“Alright,” he said. “Rezen, make up some kind of report... but for the love of Fracht, stop drinking. Let’s be ready to go tomorrow.”

There were quiet hurrahs as Lynxala turned away, ready to head back to his room and continue his lurid tales of romance in the dark corners of deep space. He wrote a line he liked very much:

“...And for the first time in their careers, when they looked at the stars, they saw each other...”

The next morning happened just like the previous hundreds had with the exception of a message from his mysterious bosses:

Received. Good progress. No breaks today: continue the experiment.

Lynxala nodded to his beige console where the message glowed in green letters. Groggily, he went to his spreadsheet with what he thought were all the parameters he had entered the other night into the mainframe and emailed everyone to be in the experiment chamber by oh nine hundred.

“Prep particle accelerator,” Lynxala said to the onboard computer.

“Affirmative,” it responded in a sly, soft tone.

Lynxala’s ear twitched as he went to the coffee machine and ordered his usual. There was no delay as the black liquid spilled forth into his paper cup. By oh nine hundred, Lynxala was in his sweat pants and lab coat in the experiment chamber as the rest of his team lumbered in.

“No ‘time for breaks’ today,” he said, aping his earlier unclever jab at the neon vixen on the wall. “Okay computer, enact protocol three-zero-one-zero.”

Protocol 3-0-1-0, the three-thousand-and-tenth experiment performed at Blackdeep, was the spreadsheet that Lynxala had created and uploaded to the mainframe. However, because of the virus embedded in the feedback from his “literary agent,” a few very important numbers and ratios had been altered using the backdoor in the coffee machine.

When Lynxala uttered the command, things occurred extremely quickly. The particle accelerator, which had been warming up for an hour and was above spec in terms of power output, suddenly altered its target and unleashed a stream of atoms - all going near the speed of light - into the generator holding the gram of anti-protons. The anti-protons - interacting with the normal matter - converted all their mass into energy within a quadrillionth of a second, as did the regular protons.

Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, indeed.

About half a lightyear away and about a month later, the synthetic eyes of an up-and-coming archvillainess - hidden in a patch of blank sky near the Sh’ra homeworld - watched her monitor as she intercepted a certain data packet from a part of the sky that was supposed to be uninhabited: catching her species up on a hundred years of work in a nanosecond.

“Time for a break, I think,” she said to herself as she entered the coordinates for her home planet.