Alamogordo, New Mexico

It is fitting that I should end up here, a bare eighty miles from the desert obelisk that marks the dawn of the nuclear age, as I open the briefcase. I wince a little at the noise beyond my bedroom wall, for the house is a narrow duplex, one of those ghastly wartime contraptions built for the great logistical chain of the Manhattan Project, and the neighbors have company. They’re perfectly nice people, I remind myself, but the noise grates on my nerves.

In Pasadena, they will have discovered the theft by now.

No one understands quantum mechanics, Feynman says, and to believe otherwise is a sure sign of ignorance. His point is well taken, for nothing in that universe is understandable by any means other than the pure language of mathematics. My own scientific talents are middling at best, but even if I will never match the achievements of such luminaries as de Broglie or Heisenberg, I can say with certainty that Feynman is wrong. The sphere fits in my hand, palm-sized but oddly heavy, and it amuses me that the security protocols of Washington bureaucrats, the locked doors, the armed guards, cannot prevent one man, one poor associate professor whose tenure is about to be denied, from simply walking away with their prize. The sphere is a gift, they whisper in faculty meetings, but from whom? They refuse to say.

If you find it peculiar that I could bypass every security measure with the ease of a man on a Sunday jaunt, you must understand that the sphere wanted to be found, to be placed in the proper hands, and unlike the others, I understand what is truly revolutionary about the new science – quantum mechanics is magic. Think about it. Those luminaries of decades past unlocked the mysteries of the universe with no microscope, no beaker of effervescent chemicals; they thought purely in mathematical terms, and by mastery of the arcana of complex numbers, of angular momentum, of statistical mechanics, they spoke the language of God himself. The bomb, whose inauguration is marked by that stone obelisk, was the proof of their concept, and one could argue that a pod of dolphins or a troop of chimpanzees, working in total ignorance, might well have solved those same mysteries with time and dumb luck.

But I don’t think so. I believe that my forebearers did not merely discover the secrets of quantum mechanics – they spoke those secrets into existence.

The sphere is warm in my hands, and I close my eyes, trying to think as my mathematical predecessors: I contemplate the wave function of the hydrogen atom, light passing through a double slit, the twisting and bending of molecular orbitals in the various isomers of cyclohexane. The equations pass through my brain with greater and greater speed, and as the sphere begins to emit pulsing waves of energy, cool blue followed by searing-hot white, then a not-light so black that it folds the contours of my brain upon itself with the pain of a thousand hells, I realize that I have achieved the impossible, a perfect understanding of the deepest mechanics underlying all space and time.

No more than a few seconds elapse before I awaken, but in that brief interval, I have traveled to the farthest stars, plumbed the innermost recesses of black holes. The neighbors on the far side of my wall are dead, their maimed bodies bearing witness to horrors never meant for human eyes, and I consider that the surrounding streets, the city, the world at large, would count them among the fortunate if they could see what I have seen. There are federal agents on my trail, sniffing my path from California to the Chihuahuan Desert like bloodhounds, but I will avoid my pursuers for now – the mathematics are wrong, and they are sleeping. Soon enough, the mathematics will be right, and the stone tombs of a thousand distant stars will open once again.

When that day comes, I will show myself to the world.

Many thanks to E. J. Trask and the Macabre Monday crew for the underlying prompt.