THE TOMB

CHAPTER:2

                                                  The Tomb

                                                Chapter Two

                                                ** AD: 8019 **

      I open my inbox, noticing I'd received a message from the university. Bummer, I thought. They're asking me to return to the applied physics department as quickly as is humanly possible.  "Why now?"  I mumbled. I'm suited up, ready to enter the tomb, and I want to get cracking. "Oh well,"  I decided to call the department to make my excuses. I'm told this could not be discussed on air, only a face to face, as the topic is of the utmost importance. What, I mused, could be so urgent? I relented, so I told them that I'd teleport down straightaway. The faculty know I hate being teleported; I hated the cold, tingling feeling, even though it was only momentary, to me it's like having a needle in the gum. Once every six months will do, though some deem the experience quite a thrill, especially the females. I got suitably dressed, stepped into the teleport machine, pressed my code into the buttons to send me back to Nature and the university physics laboratory.

      "Peter. It's good to see you,"  The lovely and very sweet, Maria Bradbury, professor and head of the now combined theoretical and applied physics laboratory stood full frontal, forcing her attributes toward my gazing eyes. "I've something most wonderful to show you," she said, smiling broadly. I know you don't like teleporting too often. However, I feel you'll find what we've encountered is worth the journey, and, will intrigue you, as it has us," she announced, smiling and rubbing her hands together. I followed Maria along the corridor, admiring her very pleasant form.

      "I'm getting the feeling that this summons is going to be something stupendously good, Maria. What's so special about this enigma?"

      "Well," she said excitedly, "you know my team have been working on transporting information back in time, then using the reverse subsystem, looking for a 'ping' to receive that information. Well, we've succeeded!" she said, her tone became a smug, I told you so. "We'd often wondered if we could replicate these conditions here, on Nature, but you'd need to create a couple of stable black holes, then you'd have to create a super stable wormhole. I'd asked for time on the great quad collider and, guess what, we got it, fully funded too!"

      "You've not actually done just that?" I asked, waiting for her reply, and wondering if, somewhere down the line I'd missed out, being drawn into the historical aspect of my work, allowing things to pass me by. I came out of my revelry when Maria squeezed my arm.

      "Yes," she replied, excitedly, "Even better than that, we've sent a message back to the year 2017, and, guess what?" Maria began hopping about the corridor, her excitement bubbling over like boiling water in a pan.

      "Maria, I'm not into guessing. I'm a research scientist come archaeologist, historian. Please, Maria. Don't ask me to guess. Guessing is for children, eh?"

 She grasped his hand, then led him into the laboratory where the instruments of her trade lay, spider like, across the room, with arrows showing safe passage to the data recording apparatus where she and her team took their measurements.

     "Peter," she said, pointing to a sterile air seat, "please, do sit. I'd like you to watch this recording of how we set up the experiment, what we thought would happen, and, what then subsequently happened. First of all, you were quite right. Our four three hundred mile particle accelerators were set to ten to the minus 113 or one hundred sextrigintillion electron volts, with virtual super conducting magnets switching on and off at the calculated frequency, we let off the wimp particles. Then the modulator was set to send twentieth century ASCII data, one byte at a time, to be injected into the fully formed micro black holes. The whole process lasted just two point two picoseconds for each byte until we had sent the whole message, then the same for the reply using the other two colliders synchronously. The moment the black holes formed, they are so close that just before they merged a funnel formed, then we had our worm hole! We timed the whole thing precisely. The message was sent using Harold's theoretical zeta formula, the one he's been begging us to try for the last two years. We did this over and over, so many times you can't count them. Well you can and we did." She grinned a grin only Maria could cunjer. "Peter, watch what happened."