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Chapter 62 - Sharing Emotions

NSA, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland: end of October

“All your reports for the last ten days have been uniformly negative,” Ames complained to Nathan Gondon, the agent who had taken over the Alexandre project. “This is your first time back in the office since you began trying to contact the girl, in fact. What’s keeping you from making contact with her?”

“You know, boss, if this were a normal surveillance activity, we could have located the girl within a day or two. But you told me not to use any NSA or police powers, so my hands are tied. I simply can’t track her down. We know where she works, probably—the Hopkins APL, but not where she lives. She stopped using her registered mobile phone a while back so we can’t trace her movements or get a likely home location. Here’s some other things too: First, she doesn’t have a driver’s license from any state. Second, she’s stopped using the credit cards that we know about. We found one bank card and a corporate card and the addresses are a lawyer’s office. She could have others we don’t know about. Third. I can’t find any current apartment or home rental record. Her parents own a home in the county but she’s never there, that I’ve been able to determine. I can’t stake out that home; it’s rural, has several approaches, and a waiting vehicle would stand out like a red flag. That home’s on several acres and has a fence around it and a gated drive. Fourth, I tried Johns Hopkins and they won’t tell me anything. Student privacy, they claim. Next, we queried the State Department passport database and her record still shows a Miami address. That site has multi-story buildings going up on it.

“The APL in Laurel is mentioned in several of her papers but when I went there to ask about her, they blew me off. They don’t give out any info about their workers. I have no idea about how she travels to work, but some of her past credit-card statements show charges from a Uber account and from some executive car services. Those outfits also won’t give out any info about subscribers. I also spent time outside the Physics building at Hopkins watching for her; never saw her. I tried asking various students at Hopkins if they knew her, but someone called the campus cops and they told me that I was banned from the campus for stalking.

“What about tracing incoming calls on any of her possible contacts, like her parents?” Ames asked.

“I tried to have the comm section do that. She’s gotta be aware someone’s tracing her, because after we filter all of the incoming numbers, we find various calls which come from what appear to be a bunch of burner phones—bought with a prepaid card or cash—and anonymous VoIP numbers; that’s mostly a dead end too. It sure looks like she’s aware that someone’s trying to track her. I think that there are only two possibilities to reach her other than sending an email to one of her addresses. One, we use the normal NSA powers for a national security investigation. Or two, try to make a contact through her parents. But to use number one, you really need a strong case and this one is far from that.”

“We’re not using NSA powers; we don’t have any concrete data to back up justifying a warrant for a regular investigation. I’m going on a strong hunch and those hunches have served me well. If you involve the parents, then that would involve other outsiders and most likely make it difficult to convince the girl...” Ames mused. “If she uses a car service for transport to the APL, could you watch for when a car arrives?”

“Watch what building?” Gondon asked. “There are dozens.”

“What about her social media and email contents?”

“We looked; she’s not on any social media—at least with her actual name. She has two email accounts that we could find. One is through Hopkins and then there’s what appears to be a business one with her own domain but that one is registered to an attorney’s office address. She’s very security conscious; all of her emails are encrypted. You nixed it before, but should I try to contact her using an email address?”

“That would be better than trying to go through someone else, like the parents,” Ames said. “But the email can’t come from a government address. Let’s figure out how to set up the email contact. And we need to come up with a way to convince her to work with us and a backup plan if your attempts to reach her don’t work.”

Applied Physics Laboratory, North Laurel, Maryland: early November

Tamara had recruited Peter as her emotion-“pushing” subject to test her EEG electrodes. She was ready for the test on a Friday in early November. She decided to first try the more difficult trial of her wearing the new EEG electrodes while the MRI was performing a scan—more difficult in terms of the likely MRI-generated RF interference with the EEG signals.

“Peter, can I try a little more unpleasant emotion with you first? One I found that makes someone kind of limp for a bit, so it apparently affects the motor neurons. I’d like to see how that appears on the MRI and EEG, if you agree.”

“Um, I guess. Don’t hurt me too bad, though,” Peter said uncertainly.

“This is for science, honey,” she said and he snorted.

When Peter was ready, from about twenty feet away, Tamara “pushed” a yellow-brown taste with black-tinted edges; Peter had no response.

At fifteen feet, she had no response until she caught his eye and then “pushed.” He jerked and told her, “I felt a painful sensation, like a punch in the gut but not in the gut.”

She tried it at inside twelve feet and again needed direct eye contact before Peter yelped as he slumped in the MRI’s chair. She quickly sent a silver healing taste and Peter quickly recovered and sighed as the scan ended.

“Shit, that last one actually hurt, Tamara! That wasn’t funny, you know.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. One time I used it on someone and Dad got the fringe; he said that it hurt him. I thought maybe only the fringe hurt, ‘cause the loss of muscle control didn’t fully affect him. What did you feel?”

“Like I got slugged, but it was crazy, since nothing in my body felt like it got hit. But I felt my muscles go slack, like I had no control. So crazy.”

Tamara went to check the scans in the control room and was pleased to see that the MRI scan, at least, looked good. Both Fox and Foster were there; Foster was monitoring the MRI and Fox, the EEG output. She couldn’t tell about the EEG tracing; Fox was still working on the output.

“Okay, Peter, let’s do the thirst one. No pain this time, okay?” Tamara said when she came back out.

“Sure, but you owe me,” Peter said, sulking.

With Peter sitting about fifteen feet away, she “pushed” thirst to him. When that scan finished, and as Peter hurried to get a bottle of water, Tamara went back into the control room.

Fox looked up from the instrument tracing. “Lots of interference in the EEG here,” he commented. “But I can see a pattern, if I’m reading this right.”

Tamara looked at the chart.

“I see what you mean,” she remarked. “It sort of looks like two signals superimposed. Say, Davy? We still have that brain phantom?”

“Yeah, it’s in the cabinet with the other coils. Oh I know... you want to try the EEG run with the phantom in the MRI, right?”

“Yep. A control. Dumb of me not to think of that first,” Tamara told him as Peter came in, guzzling his third bottle of water.

While Foster was setting up the phantom, Tamara looked at Peter’s scans when she “pushed” the muscle-effect taste. The scans showed what appeared to be an overload of the neurons in the motor cortex; that overload would also produce a kind of “ghost” pain because the overload extended into the nearby motor sensory area. Tamara now knew about another brain function her ability could affect.

When Foster returned to the control room, they set up an MRI run with the phantom using the same settings as they used with Peter’s scan and then examined the EEG tracing, which, of course, showed no “brain” activity at all.

When Peter returned, he looked at both tracings.

“Marty, do you record the EEG signals in addition to getting the paper output?” he asked.

“Yeah, I think I see where you’re going. Subtract the control run from the live one, right?”

Tamara grinned as Peter nodded. “Sure, that’s a better idea than my trying to use a noise-reduction mathematical filter, I think,” Tamara said.

“I can use the signal-comparison software in the MRI program suite to do that,” Foster offered. “The team working on the data-compression routine set up all of the instrument data acquisition files to use the same format and that includes the EEG signals.”

When they ran the comparison program, they could see that the remaining signal, after subtracting the portion contributed by the MRI’s RF, looked much more like an EEG tracing. Then Tamara tried the experiment with Peter in the MRI and wearing the EEG electrodes while Tamara again sent “thirst” to him. She already had EEG tracings of her “pushing” thirst without the MRI operating.

“Okay, this is enough for now, even though it’s a data set of one subject,” she declared, as Peter was finishing up the last of the case of bottled water. “I want to ship these tracings over to the neurologists at the med school and they can tell me if it shows what we’re looking for. But it does seem to work, so thanks, guys. This is great.”

They started closing up while Peter visited the rest room—he had drunk more than a few bottles of water during the session—and later, when she was alone with Peter, she mentioned the email she had gotten earlier that day.

“I got the strangest email,” she told him. “It came to the foundation email address. The sender was asking about having his company arrange to have me design a training program to improve a person’s sense of smell to enable them to get a job in an industry where scents are marketed—like perfumers or other cosmetics developers.”

“That is strange,” Peter responded. “That idea must have been based on your use of scents to show activation of the olfactory tract. You just mentioned that in passing in one of your papers, right?”

“Yeah and the email got my ‘alert’ sense going. I told you about hearing from Emma that someone was asking about me. Emma told me that she got several calls from people in Hopkins’ admin offices—and a call from the campus police too—that a guy was looking for info about me. The APL admin people also told me that a guy came in there and asked about me.”

“So where’d that latest email come from? Was it like a company address you could check on?”

“I didn’t have time to look it up, sweetie. With it being Friday afternoon, I wanted to finish testing those new electrodes. When we go home, we’ll look it up when we get there. You know, I kinda miss seeing Barbara there all the time; Terence too.”

Tamara had moved into Barbara’s apartment when Barbara graduated. Barbara and Terence were now living together in an apartment in Russet, a town along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway midway between College Park and Hopkins. Barbara was in the psychology doctoral program at Maryland and Terence was finishing up his physics degree at Hopkins, and they were both commuting now.

“So let’s go home now, sweetie,” she told Peter.

Tamara liked Peter’s two-bedroom unit better than her old single, especially since she and Peter were sleeping together now. She was using the spare bedroom as her “extra-curricular” lab now; that avoided having a big Faraday cage occupying part of her living room. After dinner at their apartment, Tamara got her laptop out and began searching for the company name used by the email sender. It was a fairly generic company name and she couldn’t find any company whose work or products could reasonably fit the emailer’s request.

“So you think that this might just be another attempt to find you?” Peter asked. “Like that airport thing?”

“Uh huh, I told you that my warning sense was tickled by it. Kind of a ‘watch out’ sensation.”

“It’s funny; I didn’t feel anything when you told me about the email,” Peter remarked.

“Really? Let’s try something more direct.”

Tamara started her email app and opened the person’s email; then she pushed the laptop over to Peter.

“Read it,” she ordered.

He did. Then, “Damn. This is crazy. I got a warning tingle. How does that work?”

“No idea. But see? Seeing the evidence directly was the key. Somehow you’re tuned to me.”

“I’m tuned to you in other ways, and I’m feeling the need for a tuneup now,” Peter said as he leaned over and kissed her.

As usually happened when they kissed, sparks flew, but this time was different. When they pulled apart, Tamara looked at him, eyes wide.

“Shit, you feel that?” she gasped.

“God, that was crazy,” Peter groaned. “I’m hard as an iron spike!”

“And that kiss made me cum!” Tamara exclaimed.

“And I felt it like it happened to me!” Peter gasped.

They stared at each other for a second and then clothes began flying off. Dropping his underpants to the floor, Peter reached for Tamara, who had just unclasped her bra, and began kissing her chest and caressing her nipples before he dropped to his knees while his kisses traced a path down to her navel. She giggled as Peter tickled her innie with his tongue. Then he grabbed the waistband of her panties and tugged them down, slowly revealing her delta. He buried his face there and she grunted, slightly spreading her legs and Peter found that her vulva was flooded with moisture.

He stood up and in a quick motion, swept her into his arms and lifted her as she squealed in surprise and he headed for their bedroom, carrying her with one arm under her shoulders and the other, behind her knees.

“Oooo... don’t drop me ...” she started, but as they approached the doorway, “... watch my head,” she giggled as Peter turned sideways going through the opening. “Are we both horny or what?”

“You bet,” Peter muttered as he deposited her on the bed. “Talking about how our emotions get entwined—like whenever we make love—got me like this.”

He pointed to his erection, now pointing almost straight up.

“Oooh, nice, swee... eep!” she choked off as Peter dove between her legs, pushed them apart, and began laving her vulva with his tongue.

As he wormed his tongue between her lower lips, Tamara’s breathing got so heavy it seemed to him that she was going to hyperventilate, but her gasps and moans drove him on. Peter moved around to get a better angle and then with several fingers, moved her lips apart to expose her clitoris, which was quite engorged now. He blew on it and then gave the area a swipe with his tongue. Tamara screeched. She was so loud that it startled him.

Peter tried to ask if she was all right but couldn’t move his head away from her vulva; she had clamped her legs behind his head, crossing them, and pulling him against her.

“Ooooh... so good... yes...” she was gasping.

Encouraged, Peter attacked the area with vigor, eliciting some additional squeals and “Yes...yes... good...” gasps between her louder vocalizations. Peter dove his tongue as deeply as he could into her pussy opening and began trying to tongue-fuck her, but then backed it out, licking her perineum from her flowing pussy opening up to her clit. Tamara shuddered and gasped with each stroke whenever he hit her clit.

Then with his other hand, Peter licked his middle finger and slid it into her vagina. As he felt around for her G-spot, he sucked her clit between his lips and as he rubbed that sensitive spot inside her, he nipped the little organ.

Tamara’s screech then cut off at mid-squeal—it actually turned into a voiceless scream—as she went rigid and her whole pelvis shuddered and her hot channel pulsed around Peter’s finger, as Peter suddenly realized that he himself had ejaculated at the same time that she had orgasmed. That’s when it occurred to him that some of the noise that he had heard actually came from him.

He moved up her body to hold her; she had gone quite limp, but Peter was amazed that even though he had shot a few jets of cum, he was still semi-hard and still quite horny.

Tamara recovered quickly, though, and told Peter, “That was amazing, lover, and I could feel your passions going up the scale too. Did you cum? It felt like it.”

“Yeah, I sure did. I think I felt almost everything you did, too.”

“Awesome...” She glanced down. “Oh! Poor boy, looks like you still have more shots left in the cannon...”

Tamara pushed Peter onto his back, then leaned over him and kissed the end of his cock, which quickly sprang back to almost full rigidity. Tickling Peter’s ball sack, she gently sucked Peter’s organ into her mouth. Using her tongue and lips, she worked his cock until its head was pulsing and almost purple. Then she raised up and straddled Peter’s hips, aiming his cock to impale herself.

She sunk down, plunging Peter’s shaft deeply into her until she was fully embedded. Then leaning forward, she began rocking herself back and forth, allowing her clit to rub on Peter’s pubic bone as she mashed herself against it. She began gasping and groaning again, but when her sounds began to reach a crescendo, Peter grabbed her around the waist and rolled her onto her back.

Peter raised himself up and began stroking into her and she began vocalizing again with gasps and “yes”es and “good”s and “harder”s. Harder Peter could do, so he did, hammering into her with increased strength. Tamara shuddered in a little orgasm and locked her heels behind him, pulling him in tightly with each of his lunges, then she began thrusting herself upwards into each of Peter’s downward strokes.

Both Peter and Tamara dimly realized that once again, they were feeling the sensations that the other felt, as the heat of their passion blossomed into the flowering of the total pleasure that they felt. The flower pulsed as it grew, gathering waves of sensation like additional petals, until suddenly their entire combined consciousness was filled with blinding colors as their flesh erupted in the molten heat of orgasm.

After Peter’s rigid muscles relaxed and he was able to catch his breath, he pulled back and his cock, still a little hard, made a pop sound as it dropped out of Tamara’s vagina. It was followed by a big glob of their mixed fluids. Both of them were still panting from the exertion.

“Jeez, that was intense,” Peter said after his breathing returned to normal.

The couple was lying on their sides now, facing each other, and their hands were softly stroking each other.

“More intense than I can remember—except maybe for our first time, sweetie,” Tamara murmured. “Even your hand touching my body now feels different. Yeah—right there. You stroked my boob and I felt your touch but also a sensation of my own hand on a boob. Like a touch-echo, I guess.”

“Um... I hate bringing up reality now,” Peter said hesitantly, “but ... before we ... um ... got involved, were you thinking of getting that FBI agent involved with that email?”

Tamara stiffened and looked at him. “When did you get that thought?”

“When you pushed the laptop over and said, ‘Read it.’ Before I began to read it, that thought popped into my head and it seemed that it wasn’t mine. It felt ... um, you know how I used to feel unwanted emotions? They just popped in, and that thought came the same way.”

Tamara sighed. “Yeah, right then, I had just made up my mind to call the agent on Monday, in fact. You do know that you and Barbara—at least Barbara, anyway—can sense you? Not your thoughts, exactly, but your feelings?”

Peter nodded. “Yeah, and I can sense her. Or I used to, but it’s been getting weaker, probably since we’re not around each other as much.”

“Damn... so much to figure out,” Tamara reflected. “I wonder if mind-to-mind communication is actually real or if it’s just sensing the emotions of others and that a sharp intuitive sense is helping interpret the probable thought... Eep! You rat.”

Peter had tweaked her nipple. “Don’t wanna talk now, lover,” he whispered as he leaned in to kiss her.

As he did, Tamara felt the pressure of a firm, damp object against her thigh and looked down.

“Oh good, lookie, it’s gotten nice and hard again,” she sighed as she lovingly stroked him and its leaking increased as it began to throb.

They rolled together and passionately kissed, which soon turned into another round of lovemaking. But this time it was a soft and gentle session, and when they were sated, they fell asleep, still wrapped in each other’s arms.

~~~~

On Monday morning, Tamara left a message for Special Agent in Charge Wilkins at the Baltimore FBI office and forwarded to her a copy of the strange email she had received. Then she went off to Werner’s office to sign the final papers for the purchase of the quarry property. Werner’s people had been able to negotiate an acceptable price, primarily because the purchase was by a charitable foundation. One of Werner’s employees would be overseeing the clean-fill project and they had already secured the services of a civil engineer to advise on the proper compacting of the fill as it was added.

Later in the day, she was able to talk to Wilkins.

“It is an odd email, certainly,” Wilkins agreed. “We did some checking on the source of the message and it’s from an address that appears to be registered to a shell organization. Someone really does want to contact you, but the way this is being done is very suspicious.”

“What do you suggest I do?” Tamara asked.

“It would be interesting to learn who’s behind this. If you agree, we could put a wire on you and you could meet at a public location. Then sound him out about what he really wants.”

Tamara paused, thinking. “One sec, Mrs Wilkins. I’ve got a thought on this and I need to put it into words...” A few seconds later, she continued, “Okay, how’s this. I’ll go with that suggestion, but consider this: the people who arranged that ambush at the airport appear to have some fairly decent resources, probably even governmental, since they must have gotten Customs involved somehow. Don’t you think that they’d have a way to block or detect some kind of eavesdropping gadget?”

“Yes, that’s true, but that would give us more info on your stalker,” Wilkins observed. “Then we can have him followed.”

“Okay, but how about doing this?” Tamara asked. “An adaptation of one of my new discoveries can be used as an undetectable communicator. It’s based on something I found when developing my power storage device and it’s related to energy flow in a kind of extra-dimensional region. I’ve observed that a circuit based on that discovery can send a signal from a source to a unique paired receiver. My engineer and I put together a prototype as a proof-of-concept; it can send signals, like a telephone does, from the transmitter to receiver, and since the signal doesn’t travel through normal space, it can’t be detected. The best part is that the transmitter can be very small and would use only tiny amounts of power.”

“Interesting; so how big is the transmitter?”

“We made it a bit larger than a half-inch diameter disk, like a button size,” Tamara told her. “The receiver needs to be larger ‘cause it needs the electronics to process the signal into sound and has to provide some kind of output like a wired port or something like a bluetooth transmitter.”

“And this thing works like you said and it isn’t detectible? That would be a powerful surveillance tool,” Wilkins remarked.

“It needs more work, but my proof-of-concept prototype sends understandable sound, but the quality is probably not much better than Alexander Graham Bell’s first words on his telephone invention, when he said, ‘Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.’”

Wilkins laughed. “Do we actually know how that sounded?”

“I read somewhere that those words were intelligible, despite their being crackly and indistinct. The sound from my device could best be called blurry and hollow but it’s clearly understandable. I’ll do the meeting wearing your hidden mike but I’ll also use my device. If he or they find the wire, then I assume they’ll not go looking for other devices. To use my receiver at your end, there’s a wired output which connects to a simple recording device, just like a microphone. It’s self-powered. And its range appears to be immaterial; you could be miles away or even on the other side of the planet.”

“That will work for me; but I’ll stay closer to Baltimore, thank you,” Wilkins laughed. “Where do you want to meet the subject? If you don’t have a site, I can suggest some.”

“I’m thinking of the Café Charles. It’s a fairly roomy and popular coffee shop and is generally busy; it’s right across the street from Hopkins. All the seating is in the open too—no booths. I’ve had experience with getting shot with ketamine, so I won’t put myself in a situation where that can happen again.”

“I was told about that incident, Tamara. I agree, you shouldn’t put yourself in danger. There’ll be two agents in there watching. And I don’t want you to be unduly concerned, but in some operations where the perp’s intention is doing a snatch, their accomplices will stage a distraction to draw attention away from their target. I believe that you’re a cool customer, Tamara, and wouldn’t panic, so if a distraction happens, when we meet to give you your wire, I’ll tell you the backup plan. And I’ll send you some text to use in your email back to that sender. You can put it in your own words; just use the same points.”

Tamara agreed and ended the call. About a half hour later, she received the email from Wilkins and used it to compose her reply to the unknown sender’s email address, telling him that she agreed to meet; she would consider a detailed proposal, but because of her schedule and other demands on her time, she would only meet at that given time and place.

NSA, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland

“She took the bait,” Gondon reported to Ames. “She agreed to meet at a coffee shop near Hopkins next Monday.”

“Okay, and I’ve got the hook set up now to force her cooperation. Take Kruse with you, but be sure he doesn’t mess up like when he put the counterfeit in some random luggage. Let me play one of the recordings now and you’ll see how you can use it to get her to agree.”

The two began planning for the meeting.

Applied Physics Laboratory, North Laurel, Maryland: same day

Tamara was reviewing the results of the coil-force experiments using the ultra-high-speed cameras with Betty Miskin, her engineer, and Emma. She had completed most of the calculations which appeared to describe the effects of the coil force at the macro and quantum scales.

“Emma, early on you told me that if current theory doesn’t match observations, then new physics needs to be developed,” Tamara opened the discussion. “So that’s what’s needed now. And new math too.”

Emma grinned at her. “Go ahead; I’m going to enjoy this, I’m sure.”

Tamara frowned at her. “Please. Okay, I needed a new kind of number to make the calcs easier to follow, so I made up one. A nonreal number.”

Miskin asked, confused, “Like real numbers? Nonreal? How?”

“Teaching mode on,” Tamara chuckled. “Here goes. Numbers are grouped into classes according to how they are related. Like integers—whole numbers. That’s one class. If we use mathematical operations on numbers, we can produce number classes other than whole numbers. Like division can create fractional numbers and doing certain geometric operations, such as taking the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, makes a special number called pi, which is an irrational number, yet another class. Strange name, but it simply means that pi cannot be expressed as a ratio of two numbers—it’s not ratio-able, if that’s a word. Also irrational is the length of the diagonal of a unit square. That’s the square root of 2 and it can’t be expressed as a ratio. Irrational. Okay so far?”

Emma was smiling broadly and Miskin was still looking uncertain and asked, “Where are you going with this, Tamara?”

“Be patient. As an electrical engineer, you obviously know about complex numbers. A real number paired with an imaginary one. The square root of negative one is an imaginary number and its symbol is i. Another number class. Double-E theory depends on calcs using complex numbers and they were invented to allow for the solution of quadratic equations, among other uses. So when the need arises for creating a special number, math allows for that; there are many such special numbers. I needed to create one to handle my calcs and I call it a nonreal number because, well, it isn’t real. The number is the quotient of one divided by zero.”

“Wait!” Miskin objected. “Division by zero isn’t allowed. It’s undefined in math.”

Emma’s smile got broader. She was certain that Tamara was going to pull not one, but thousands of rabbits, out of that hat. She began feeling sorry for those rabbits. And the hat too.

Tamara nodded wisely at Miskin [and turned to the reader of her story to apologize for this hugely technical description of her math calculations. Skip over it all if you want], and said to her, “Sure. That’s why I said that it isn’t real. It’s true that division by zero is undefined in usual mathematics, but it’s actually allowed under very certain circumstances. There’s a geometrical structure called the complex plane and the geometry it describes is useful to particle physicists. It’s visualized as a planar geometry where simplistically, the x-axis, also referred to as the real axis, consists of the real numbers, and the y-axis, called the imaginary axis, consists of the imaginary numbers.

“Now if we take the complex plane and include with it one point at infinity, we get what’s called the extended complex plane. We can visualize this kind of structure better if we imagine warping that plane into a spherical form; that structure is known as the Riemann sphere; it’s a model of the extended complex plane, and because a sphere’s surface has no end, it can be used to substitute for an infinite surface. Why is it useful in math to do this? Because the extended complex numbers, as visualized using the Riemann sphere, are useful in complex analysis because in very limited cases, they allow for division by zero, such that expressions like 1 / 0 = ∞ are well behaved. ‘Well behaved’ is kind of a mathematical shorthand meaning it follows a certain set of applicable rules. I see your eyes glazing over so I’ll try to get to the point.

“The Riemann sphere is important for many areas in physics, particularly in quantum mechanics. Manipulations using it provide natural values for photon polarization states, they yield spin states for massive particles of spin ½ and do so for two-state particles in general. In string theory—you know about that?”

“Not a whole bunch,” Miskin remarked. “Heard the term. Something to do with cosmology?”

“It’s used there,” Tamara answered, “but it’s more about particle physics. The textbook definition is that it’s a theoretical framework where the point-like fundamental particles are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. The wave theory of matter is that those particles can be described by waves. These give us three different ways of mathematically describing matter.

“Finishing up with the Riemann model, there’s a structure called a ‘worldsheet,’ which is a two-dimensional visualization which represents the embedding of a string in spacetime. Those are Riemann surfaces. The Riemann sphere is the simplest Riemann surface and it plays a significant role in string theory.

“So in order to describe what the coil force is doing, I had to go to string theory and found it useful to assign a number to the 1/0 quotient; I called it ʓ*, zee star, a nonreal number. I had to avoid using z because that’s the name of the third dimensional axis in geometry. Now you’re hoping that I’m getting to the real issue, right?”

Both Emma and Miskin shouted, “Yes!”

“I only did that teaching moment ‘cause in the calcs I’ll show you, you’ll see that the symbol ʓ* shows up in places, and that’s where I’m referring to cases involving projections on the Riemann sphere. The calcs speak for themselves, I hope, but here’s what they mean when translated into human language.

“The first set shown here is a derivation of how forces are moving or transmitted within the area of the coil force. Remember, it first appeared that we had something like a magnetic monopole, but the force lines didn’t appear to be radial like a monopole’s should be. The calcs show that there’s a supermassive something that’s somehow projecting a repulsive force through the window or portal that the coil-force circuit created. Supermassive as in the meaning of a fundamental particle, that is. This calc here shows its mass and properties. I went on a naming spree now ‘cause these particles needed names—can’t just call them Thing One and Thing Two... like Dr Seuss.”

The others laughed.

“So my theory is that we’re seeing dark matter and energy here, and I believe that these calcs can support that idea. Narratively, here’s what they show and I’ll throw in my names for the new particles. Dark matter is composed of ‘darmatons,’ they’re equivalent to hadrons, and were created in the high energy of the Big Bang. They’re supermassive. They behave kinda like monopoles might be thought to do and repel positive matter; they attract electrons and antimatter. They don’t exist in three-dimensional space but they interact with three-dimensional space through exchange with gravitons, which are the theoretical force carriers of the gravitational force. It’s the repulsive force from this exchange which is driving the universe’s expansion. Darmatons have an internal structure, symmetry demands this, and these calcs show that they must be composed of three snarks (the boojum snark makes the person softly and suddenly vanish away, that is, makes them invisible, according to Lewis Carroll, and that’s why dark matter can’t be seen) and their real-matter equivalent is the quark.”

Emma began laughing. “Who says physicists don’t have a sense of humor? Or aren’t literate? Tamara, this is brilliant; please do continue.”

“Okay, not much more to go now since we’re reaching the end where words can be used to explain. The math is ruling what the theory says now. So that’s the dark matter; the dark energy (what we’ve been calling the coil force and I suggest that we rename it the G-force) is made of the particles (I call them ‘cofons’) that mediate the repulsive force and they are exchanged between the snarks in the same manner as the gluons exchange between the quarks in hadrons to keep nuclei together. This idea all fits with supersymmetry theory and the standard model and fills in some of the standard model’s holes too.

“It also explains magnetism; magnetism is the projection of the G-force from the dimension of dark energy and matter into our own three-dimensional world. It’s a projection from the higher dimension, or whatever it is, of the darmatons in the same way that shadows are the two-dimensional projection of the blocking of photons from striking a three-dimensional object. I was disappointed though; this still isn’t the ‘theory of everything.’”

Emma had been examining Tamara’s notes carefully and looked up when she stopped speaking.

“My dear, you have truly outdone yourself here,” she said. “I’ve run out of superlatives long before this; I’ve never seen the extended complex plane used in the way you’ve done and I know maths intuitively. But I don’t see anything here that looks like an error or an invalid assumption. The zero division operation is very tricky but you did it within the strictures of the extended complex plane and Riemann sphere projections. But this work is so monumental that I need to have a lot more eyeballs on it. Let’s discuss who we should bring into a group to review your maths, shall we.”

After finishing up the discussion with Miskin about the preparations for the large-scale test of the G-force generator, Miskin left and Emma and Tamara began talking about the best people to involve in reviewing her dark energy-matter theory.

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