Steven Montano
How to Build A Bridge
6
how to build a bridge
Geographic locations already suitable for the construction of wormholes -- or “Zones”, as they were more commonly known -- were by their nature fundamentally unstable. While the exact explanation for how these areas came to be was a hot topic of debate, the nature of the areas was not. Even on an entirely stable planet (which Earth was far from) the Zones were typically areas of heavy radiation and adverse atmospheric conditions that bordered on the insane, and while the strange and cloying darkness of Zone 66 would in the past have sent most scientific minds into a frenzy trying to understand how such a phenomenon could even exist, such conditions had become almost common in regards to dimensional travel. Cole had read of arid regions turned polar with cold, once submerged caverns boiled dry with heat, even areas of relative anti-gravity where islands of floating stone rotated in place around some innocuous central point like a tree or a dead animal. The fact was the unstable nature of these areas was precisely what made them such ideal locales for building Bridges in the first place: altered telemetry, gravitational variances, geospacial anomalies conducive to cross-dimensional travel. The bizarre phenomenon responsible for breaking down the laws of physics in the Zones, while nearly impossible to explain, were precisely what made them the perfect locations for the focal points for wormholes. The reality-warping wasn’t just useful, it was necessary, but that presented challenges in and of itself, because in order for any cross-dimensional gateway to exist -- for the “Bridge” to be built -- a number of very physical structures had to be constructed at either end of the worlds the wormhole was meant to traverse.
Cole’s job was to make sure such a gate could be built. She wasn’t sure if her mental problems had started before or after she’d begun her life as an Engineer, and realized at some point in her Colony-mandated therapy that it didn’t matter. Either she’d been predisposed to some form of madness which made working in areas of twisted reality a perfect fit for her, or else something that had not yet happened in her adult life, in a future where her career had already been decided, reached back in time and altered her consciousness, made it so the mother she’d never even met haunted her, and that sometimes disembodied voices and faces pressed against the walls of her fragile mind. Time was not constant, and never had been, and believing that what was yet to come couldn’t impact what had already happened was, by Cole’s estimation, one of the biggest misconceptions in the history of humankind. And she was the proof.
***
One of her earliest memories of her mother was her father telling her she’d died.
“She passed when you were born,” he’d said when Cole told him how she’d seen Mama outside her bedroom window. She was six years old. “She got to see you, just for a second, and then she was gone.” He wasn’t a man to mince words, even with a child. Especially when that child was responsible for the death of his wife, a woman he idolized, or so Cole guessed based on the sheer number of pictures of the woman to be found in the house. Aunt Ginger insisted he kept those about so Cole wouldn’t grow up wondering what her mother looked like, but with the way her father treated her, so cold, kept at arm’s length, she had the sense from an early age that not only did he hold her responsible for the death of her mother but that he wanted to remind Cole of her crime every day of her life.
She grew up haunted by her mother’s eyes, which stared at her from her two-dimensional prisons on the walls and shelves. Dad kept locks of his wife’s hair and toiletries preserved in cases like a museum built in her honor. Every inch of their small home (she later thought it sad that they couldn’t afford a better place to live on even with a Colonel’s pay, at least until she realized he’d spent most of his money on alcohol and prostitutes) seemed covered by some sort of memorabilia to Lauren Cole.
It was no wonder, Dr. Rauch told her in their fourth therapy session, that she started having visions of her mother by the time she was barely in kindergarten. The first few sightings had been flashes, fleeting images her child’s mind couldn’t even be sure were real: her mother’s face in the window, a shadow moving in the hall or outside the door when it was bath time, the sensation of being watched while she lay in her bed at night, trying to sleep but unable because of the unsettling feeling that someone stood over her while she tossed and turned. When she realized it was her mother she tried to allow herself a sense of relief, and to feel comfort from knowing that the spirit of the woman who’d brought her into the world was perhaps watching over her...but before long the sense of fault returned, guilt instilled by her father’s constant reminders of the sacrifice her mother made so she could live, especially whenever Cole misbehaved or earned demerits at school. When the guilt came, then the ghost at the window or at the foot of her bed seemed anything but friendly.
By the time she was ready to graduate from the fifth grade Cole was convinced her mother’s ghost meant to kill her. Once she tripped and fell down the stairs, unprecedented, a fall she knew in her heart had been a push, even if she hadn’t sensed a physical presence. Another time she found herself falling asleep and sliding under the water in the bath, again and again, and it was only through the most desperate struggle that she managed to actually pull herself out of the tub before she drowned. Yet another time she woke from a deep sleep and found she’d sleepwalked straight out the front door (which meant she’d descended the stairs without falling, undid the lock and opened said door) and out into the street, and it was only by chance that the shock of sound from the car about to run her over and its blazing headlights woke her in time to fall back onto her front yard. Coincidence, her father insisted, or evidence she needed therapeutic attention, which he made clear was not acceptable, especially for the daughter of a ranking Colonial Officer. But therapy she sought, secretly at first, and later in open defiance, and that was when she began to realize she really was crazy, because something in her future would cause a madness she would never be able to escape.
***
She spent most of her life waiting for it: the trigger, the future event that would reach backwards in time and twist her concept of reality so tight it snapped. Was she predestined to become an Engineer, to tamper with the reality-bending forces that would ultimately shape and warp her psyche? Or was she the living embodiment of the so-called self-fulfilling prophecy, driven to study temporal physics and learn how she could build the means by which humans anchored wormholes because she believed that at some point in her future she’d be exposed to the reality-shifting Zones, which in turn would send such forceful ripples through time they caused her to believe she was being haunted by the ghost of her mother?
Ultimately, she supposed, it didn’t matter, because by the time she graduated high school Rianne Cole had neglected to follow in her father’s military footsteps and instead devoted her every effort to unlocking the secrets of temporal physics, stellar cartography and the construction of Calabi-Yau engines, better known as the anchor portion of interstellar Bridges. Never remotely interested in science at a younger age, the knack she later found she held for the subject matter once she decided to set her mind to it was so uncanny it was difficult to assume it wasn’t her manifest destiny to do so. Her test scores in the temporal sciences were jaw-dropping from the very first class, and soon she became a full-on bookworm. Rather than pursue anything that resembled a social life she became obsessed with reading every book on temporal physics she could get her hands on, from the fundamentals of Einstein and Rosen to the advanced spatial construction techniques of Mertz, Kyler and Janovich.
The next several years of her life, up until the point when she graduated with honors a year early at the age of twenty-four, were a blur of research and lab work, occasionally interspersed with visitations from what she felt sure were the phantom spirit of her dead mother. The visitations came more and more seldom the older she got, but they never did cease: she would wake some nights with a dark presence standing at the foot of her bed and staring down at her, a shadow figure with pinprick white eyes, her body wreathed in a shroud of malevolent cold. Sometimes Cole sensed the ghost in the distance, watching her, a dark silhouette against the backdrop of the setting sun, visible only for fleeting moments.
She isn’t there. She never was. You’re losing your mind.
She spent years in therapy convincing herself that she was not being haunted by the ghost of the mother she killed in childbirth, and it took some time before she found a voice she trusted and could relate to in Dr. Rauch, who acknowledged her theory that future contact with temporal-altering Zones affected her mental stability without pandering or actively endorsing the notion.
“The thing to acknowledge is that whatever might have triggered these visions, these fears, is ultimately out of your control,” Dr. Rauch told her. His name was German but he claimed to be Egyptian, and she’d told him early on he had a voice like a Bond villain, which he’d appreciated. “We can’t change what is, only what is to come, and how you deal with what is now.”
He’d helped her, and with the aid of his clear perspective and the haloperidol (a strong anti-hallucinogen) he prescribed she became surprisingly stable. At least until the incident at Zone 23.