A Universe Disrupted: Intersecting Worlds, #2

By Eric von Schrader

A Universe Disrupted

Book 2 of Intersecting Worlds

They thought they were done with the parallel universe. But it wasn't done with them.

Billy Boustany had the adventure of a lifetime. Now, all he wants to do is to go back to the amazing universe he discovered. But the power brokers over there warned him to stay away and keep his mouth shut.

At the same time, Diyami Red Hawk, an idealistic young man from that universe has connected with Billy's daughter and is on a mission to build a modern Native American city in our world. But he's getting nowhere—until he finds support in unexpected places.

A plea for help from the other universe gives Billy his chance to return. He and his wife immerse themselves in the beauty and splendor of this odd, intriguing world. Then they encounter dark secrets lurking beneath its surface.

Billy, Diyami and their friends have to make the biggest decision of their lives, with the fate of two worlds hanging in the balance.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABSOM Books
• Release date: Sep 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985930412

Book preview

Eyes

The sun rose over the cornfields of southern Illinois. Its light swept westward. A soaring hawk followed the light towards the glass pyramid of Cahokia, arriving with the first gleam at the top level of the massive structure. The hawk swooped in a graceful curve over the white buildings that surrounded the pyramid. He watched the early morning stirrings of the city—curtains opening, fires being lit on terraces, a woman praying for her absent son.

Flying low over the awakening neighborhoods, the hawk saw people in the streets on their way to the canal to board the hydrofoil ferry. The ferry sprang to life, lifted out of the water, and sped westward to the great city of St. Louis ahead. A plume of spray behind it sparkled in the fresh morning. With a few strokes of his powerful wings, the hawk ascended, then trailed the hydrofoil all the way to the Mississippi. He entered a forest of skyscrapers and studied the buildings and streets below. Cocking his head in one direction then another, he took note of the first workers on the sidewalks, the delivery vans, the smooth blue streetcars. No detail escaped the gaze of his crystal eyes.

The hawk flew on, in widening circles over the morning-caressed city. Spring was loosening the buds of ten thousand trees. Giant carved eagles on a building façade stared back at him as he sped past. On a street of elegant houses, an old man walked two corgis under blooming dogwoods. In a luxurious penthouse apartment, a man sat hunched over a desk, studying a small book, whose pages were filled with rows of numbers. As the hawk floated past the penthouse window, he studied the man’s every movement. Even in this brief encounter, he could read the numbers in the book.

The hawk soared past the broad boulevards and tall monuments, over the river, and back east toward Cahokia. He landed on top of the ancient pyramid, built with a million basket loads of dirt, hauled by hand. The hawk looked out over the Grand Plaza at the immense image scraped into its packed earth: a sharp-beaked bird with outstretched wings and the legs of a man. It was his own image.

The hawk turned his head to look north, south, east, and west. Satisfied by all he had seen, he blinked. The world evaporated like a dewdrop in the sun.

Back to Normal?

On a Thursday afternoon in early March 2011, Billy Boustany had a big decision to make. The boneless chicken breasts were on sale, but the salmon looked pretty good too. Which would go best with the broccoli and pasta? As he pondered his choice, the familiar memories washed over him once again and threatened to crowd out everything else in his head.

He closed his eyes. He knew this was a bad habit and he was careful not to do it when he was driving. But other times, he surrendered to the images that put a smile on his face—egg-like cars gliding down a tree-lined boulevard, slender skyscrapers, iridescent like dragonfly wings in the afternoon sun, ribbons of light snaking through the trees of Tower Grove Park at dusk, an ecstatic mass of dancers under the spell of mad, impossible riffs from exotic instruments….

A wild shriek interrupted his reverie. A woman came around the corner from the breakfast food aisle pushing a shopping cart that carried a screaming toddler.

Honey, we can’t get that cereal. It’s too sugary. It will make you sick and make mommy crazy.

The toddler’s face turned red as he continued his tantrum. The embarrassed mother saw Billy and silently mouthed I’m sorry. Billy smiled to her as she whisked her cart past him into the produce section. The annoyance didn’t bother him. The memories were always there. He knew that shopping in a totally normal supermarket on an unremarkable weekday afternoon was his real life these days. And real life was a good thing—wasn’t it? Every day, he did his best to act like a regular person, but it wasn’t easy. He decided to go with the chicken breast, then moved on to look for the eggs, milk, and coffee that were the last unchecked items on his list.

He watched the other people in this suburban St. Louis supermarket going about their uncomplicated lives. They didn’t know the big picture, that another world permeated this one and that other people were passing through them right now, leaving no trace. They couldn’t know, and maybe they didn’t want to know. Blissful ignorance.

But Billy knew. To say that the last year had turned his life upside down and twisted it inside out was the mother of all understatements. Now, everything was different and would always be different. The bell could not be unrung. What was he supposed to do with that? He couldn’t talk about what had happened, about the magnificent city he had visited in the other world—which he called HD. Who would believe him? Also, people whom he didn’t want to upset had made it abundantly clear that he better keep his mouth shut. Were they watching him now? Maybe or maybe not—he wasn’t eager to find out. So he was expected to carry on like nothing had changed. No one had specifically told him to do that, but it followed logically from the prohibition on talking. Acting normal was a daily struggle. He couldn’t forget about his secret, or the joys and regrets that went with it.

At the dairy case, another choice confronted him. 1% or 2% milk? Which one did Carol prefer? Brain fog was a constant hazard when images of another world which no one could see kept crowding in. He went for the 1%—she would probably want the healthier option. Then he decided to splurge on himself by picking up a small carton of half and half for coffee. Why the hell not?

Billy wondered if his memories of HD would ever become mere background noise, faint echoes from a time long ago that had nothing to do with his current life. Would he get to the point where he would be like everyone else at this supermarket, whose biggest decisions were between chicken or salmon and 1% or 2%?

In one sense, the completely amazing summer of HD had been just like the rest of Billy’s life, but on fast forward. There were good times, serendipities, beautiful moments, and occasional insights. Also, he made some dumb decisions that created a mess for himself and the people he cared about. Then, somehow it all worked out.

Billy didn’t want the memories of HD to fade. What he wanted was to go back there. Somehow, someday. And if he ever did manage to go back, he wasn’t going to screw it up this time.

While standing in the checkout line, Billy scanned a rack of tabloids screaming about Brad and Angelina, Tom and Katie, and tragedies afflicting various celebrities he had never heard of. One headline caught his eye:

Aliens Walk Among Us

Experts Say It Could Be True

He pulled the paper out and looked more closely. A grainy photo showed a bug-eyed alien on a crowded sidewalk, surrounded by unsuspecting humans. Billy used to scoff at stuff like this, but now he didn’t rule anything out. He tossed the paper onto the checkout belt, along with the items for that night’s dinner. He looked up and saw the young mother wheeling her groceries out of the store. Her toddler was perched in her cart, clutching a box of Lucky Charms in his arms, like it was the greatest treasure in the world.

Billy’s wife, Carol, and their college student daughter, Meredith, got a big laugh out of the Aliens article as they prepared the chicken and pasta.

Hey, Diyami. You’re in the newspaper! Meredith said with glee. Diyami Red Hawk, tall and tattooed, came over to the kitchen island to look at the paper. He studied it intently, but didn’t understand. Meredith explained the joke. Nothing in these papers is true. They make up crazy stuff, and nobody really believes it. But here you are—an alien among us. Diyami had never seen a newspaper like this one. It was yet another strange aspect of this bizarre world he had committed to.

Diyami, a young engineer, was both a Native American and a native of HD. He had grown up in Cahokia, the thriving Native American metropolis across the river from HD St. Louis. He and Meredith had struck up a romance there when she visited HD the previous year. Diyami had taken on a mission: to build a new Cahokia in the SD world. It pained him to know that Native people in SD did not have the inspiration of Cahokia. He wanted to change that. The whispers of the spirits had led him to leave his parents and his life behind and go to SD with Meredith, Billy and Carol. Diyami was alone in SD, except for them.

Early on, the Boustanys and Diyami agreed to keep quiet about HD when anyone else was around. Billy made them all promise that they wouldn’t say a word without consulting with the others first. Nothing good could come of a revelation. At a minimum, they would be branded as weirdos. Or they might attract unwanted attention from the sinister Knights of the Carnelian, the shadowy group that ran St. Louis in HD. When they departed HD for the last time, Martin Matsui, an elder statesman of the Knights who didn’t care for their current intimidation tactics, made it crystal clear that the Knights’ condition for allowing them to leave was strict silence—never say a word to anyone in SD about the existence of HD. Billy, Carol, and Meredith had seen what the Knights were capable of, so they took this warning seriously.

Billy fantasized constantly of telling other people about HD—once or twice he had come close to spilling his guts to a random stranger—but he knew better. The only consolation was that this pact of silence made him feel like a spy or a superhero with a secret identity.

Dinners at home gave Billy, Carol, Meredith, and Diyami the rare opportunity to relax and speak freely with no one else around. They were the only people in the SD world who knew that HD existed.

Or so they thought.

Anomaly

Silent and invisible, eighteen satellites in the secret NUCLEOSAT 2 system crisscrossed the planet several times each day. To maximize their gaze into seven continents, some were in polar orbits, others in inclined orbits. Their mission was to scan world regions that were considered risks for illicit nuclear activity, whether by rogue states or terrorist organizations. The capabilities of NUCLEOSAT 2, launched in 2009, represented a major, almost exponential, improvement over its predecessor, the original NUCLEOSAT. Finely-tuned sensors could detect faint whiffs of gamma rays and byproducts of radiation with pinpoint accuracy. Other onboard instruments picked up electromagnetic pulses and traveling ionospheric disturbances, which could be caused by weather phenomena or by underground nuclear detonations.

The National Reconnaissance Office operated NUCLEOSAT 2 and fed the data generated every day to its client in the U.S. intelligence community—the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA). That data stream traveled through fiber optic cables to an unmarked NNSA facility outside Washington, DC. There, it worked its way to the Office of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation and settled on the shoulders of a lone analyst in a tiny cubicle in a large, windowless room. Lisa McDaniel peered at twin computer displays as she calibrated the new system’s sensors and analytical algorithms to tune out the noise from benign radiation sources so that it would produce useful data when aimed at global hotspots.

During the calibration phase, the satellites’ sensors were focused on the U.S., not because any threats were expected, but because many well-documented sources of radiation, like nuclear power plants and medical facilities, provided a baseline reference for training the software to ignore harmless radioactive signatures.

Plowing through all the glitches and noise in the signals from NUCLEOSAT 2 was tedious work, but solving puzzles was Lisa’s greatest satisfaction. She had both an undergraduate math degree and a master’s in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. In her short time at NNSA, she had earned a reputation as a careful, detail-oriented technical whiz.

Lisa was glad to have such important responsibility just three years out of graduate school and she threw herself into it. Over just a few months, she had diligently waded through most of the data NUCLEOSAT 2 had collected and had been commended by her supervisor for her elegant adjustments of the signal analysis algorithms to filter out noise. Now, in early 2011, there was one pesky anomaly left in the data that she couldn’t figure out, no matter how hard she tried. Between June and October of the previous year, 2010, the satellites had picked up a series of short, weak radiation blips coming from, of all places, St. Louis, Missouri. The radiation signatures were odd, neither those of medical isotopes nor of heavy atoms, like uranium or thorium. So they were probably not signs of a nuclear terrorist or dirty bomb maker. They didn’t correlate to any known sources, such as the research hospitals in St. Louis. Because they were so localized and time limited, they were also not likely to be natural phenomena. She set alerts in the system that would notify her if any additional, similar bursts popped up, but, so far, none had.

Lisa presented her problem at a team meeting.

There’s a recurring set of geographically isolated radiation signals that I haven’t been able to account for. They appeared frequently for about four months, then stopped.

Simple, obvious errors cause most problems. Have you asked one of the other analysts to review your code? a senior analyst commented.

I already did that, Lisa said. My code is good. She bristled at his condescending tone.

Maybe someone with more experience should take a look. I’m available if you need help.

The discussion continued as others around the table tossed out various potential causes, including interference from Chinese satellites trying to disable NUCLEOSAT 2. Intel about the Chinese birds is Top Secret—code word: Farmers Market! Don’t let it leave this room, the supervisor said. Lisa took notes on every hypothesis, even the ones she thought were a waste of time. After a few more minutes of discussion, the team decided to disregard Lisa’s anomalies. The NUCLEOSAT 2 satellites were ready to become operational and, since the blips had stopped, there was no real need to investigate further. The recent software update to the system may have fixed the problem, whatever it was. Lisa wanted to keep working on this issue, but the team overruled her.

After the meeting, Lisa was annoyed. She followed up in a one-on-one with her supervisor and asked if technicians could be deployed to St. Louis to make measurements at the most common locations of the blips. He replied that he would consider her request, but, since the data did not match any plausible threat patterns, a resource deployment was unlikely.

Lisa knew her data analysis skills were better than anyone else’s—even those who outranked her. In graduate school, she had developed algorithms to extract useful information from the Hubble Space Telescope’s data streams. The majestic images of distant nebulae and galaxies that the public saw were not simple photographs, but rather the result of Lisa’s refined siftings from the mountains of data that Hubble produced each time it turned its gaze to a slender slice of deep space. Serious astronomers didn’t need the spectacular images—they worked with raw spectrographic data—but the bosses wanted photos to dazzle the public and Congress to maintain support for NASA funding. The Hubble work was Lisa’s master’s thesis and she graduated at the top of her class. NNSA recruited her even before her commencement ceremony.

Lisa had gotten her job at NNSA by solving hard problems and she wasn’t going to let this one defeat her. She was absolutely certain that her code was clean and the Chinese interference hypothesis seemed pretty unlikely. So she kept working on the St. Louis anomaly in the small amounts of downtime she had from her official responsibilities. She crunched the data over and over, every which way from Sunday, using the math skills that had enabled the Hubble to find useful information in cosmic gas clouds.

Compared to untangling the mysteries of deep space, identifying terrestrial radiation sources should be a walk in the park. There was a logical explanation for everything—data didn’t just appear out of nowhere for no reason. In school, she had learned about Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson who, in the 1960s, worked with early radio telescopes. They figured out that static detected wherever the telescope was aimed was not, as their colleagues had thought, noise generated in the equipment. It turned out to be microwave background radiation, the echoes of the Big Bang—literally evidence of the beginning of time. Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery.

However, Lisa also realized that the St. Louis blips might be no more than illusory patterns within random data. She knew how easy it was for us to fool ourselves. Millions of years of evolution had hardwired humans to spot visual cues signifying food or danger on the savannah. Her professors at Carnegie Mellon had emphasized, over and over, that this innate ability often led us to see patterns, and be convinced of them, where none existed.

One Friday evening, Lisa was having drinks with her best friend, Dawn Driscoll, another young, brilliant analyst, who worked at the National Security Agency. Lisa and Dawn had found each other quickly after they moved to DC. They were kindred spirits. Lisa admired Dawn, who was savvier about organizational politics than she was. They were on their second bottle of wine in Dawn’s apartment, two nerds watching DVDs of Sex and the City and imagining that they were Carrie and Samantha, exchanging quips on the ineptitude and deviousness of men. They were laughing themselves silly.

Lisa and Dawn rarely talked about work. Like everyone else in the intelligence community, they were involved in classified projects, so shop talk was strictly frowned upon. Lisa had the impression that Dawn worked on super-secret stuff and she knew better than to ask about it. This evening, as Carrie, Samantha, and the pinot grigio worked their magic, Lisa found herself opening up about the problem that had become her 24/7 obsession—the mystery of the St. Louis radiation blips.

The weirdest thing is the odd sequence. They come in pairs. One will appear, then a few hours or a day later, there will be a second one in the same location. Then, nothing for several days or a week, then another pair pops up. It makes no sense.

Dawn refilled their wine glasses. Okay. What have you looked into?

I’ve checked out everything. I ran overlays of weather and seismic data. No correlation. I searched the telecom and utility records to see if equipment upgrades or antenna tests could be involved. That was a dead end, too.

Dawn listened quietly and asked a clarifying question now and then. Lisa was relieved to be talking to someone who took her more seriously than the arrogant engineers and supervisors in her department. She knew she should be discreet, but it wasn’t even a sanctioned project, just her spare time doodling. Anyway, she and Dawn both had security clearances.

After a while, Dawn said If it’s a human-caused phenomenon, cellphone records may show who was nearby when the radiation events occurred.

It’s the middle of a city! Lots of people would be nearby.

What if there were people who were present when the events happened and not there at other times? That might tell us something.

I don’t have access to phone records.

Neither do I…officially.

Friends and Family

For the first few weeks after returning from HD, Billy spent a lot of time staring out the window. He had already begun the process of selling his business, the chain of Duke’s Digital electronics stores in suburban St. Louis. Without a struggling business to attend to, his phone rarely rang and his email inbox was mostly empty. He didn’t have a lot of friends, a reality he had long felt embarrassed about, but which now made the pact of silence about HD easier for him. The peace and quiet was comforting, but what would he do with himself now? He couldn’t go back to HD—his ability to cross over had disappeared, as the Knights had told him it would. So, even without their threats, HD was over for him.

Carol returned to her teaching job at Parkway Central Middle School. It was awkward at first—the principal was upset that Carol had disappeared for two weeks the previous October with no warning or communication. Carol gave an evasive explanation that an unexpected family emergency had come up, which was kind of true since she and Billy had been kidnapped and taken to HD by the Knights. The principal relented and stopped asking questions because she needed Carol, who was one of the school’s best teachers. Carol believed in hard work and wanted to be busy; dealing with thirteen-year-olds was a welcome distraction from the images of HD, which came to her whenever she had a free moment. She had only seen a brief glimpse of this other world and now it was indelibly under her skin. If she ever got a chance to go back, she would make the most of it.

Meredith, who had spent weeks with Diyami and his family at Cahokia hiding from the Knights, knew that her destiny was intertwined with HD, Cahokia, and Diyami. He had cracked her world wide open and she loved him more than anyone she had ever known. She withdrew from her classes at Webster University so she could help him. His mission gave her an exhilarating purpose, though she couldn’t yet see what she was supposed to do to help make it happen.

The three Boustanys made haphazard efforts to reconnect with family and friends, but their hearts weren’t in it. They couldn’t talk about the most earthshattering experience of their lives. With memories of HD coloring every moment, other people seemed vapid and naïve. Billy, Carol, and Meredith had peeked behind the curtain. Empty conversations with clueless people couldn’t compare to that.

Carol didn’t breathe a word about HD to her friends from the neighborhood or the other teachers at school. They could see that she had been through some kind of traumatic experience. What do you expect when she’s married to a flake like Billy Boustany? He just walked away from his business without a word of explanation. Carol had always been loyal to them, so, as curious as they were, they didn’t pry or pressure her to confess. Of course, they speculated among themselves—Did Billy have an affair? Were there financial shenanigans?" Did Meredith have a drug problem or an unwanted pregnancy?

Meredith was drifting away from her circles of high school and college friends. She and Diyami got together with them a few times. They didn’t know what to make of her mysterious new boyfriend, the tall Indian with the tattooed face. He seemed nice enough, but he had appeared out of nowhere. When they went out to bars, he mostly kept to himself. He wasn’t good at making conversation with the other guys. He didn’t know anything about sports, politics, or TV shows. Occasionally, he would open up and talk his head off about dams or canals or other weird stuff,