Charlotte’s fingers flew over her keyboard.
Just one more simulation. Her heart was racing—way more than warranted by the ten cups of tea she’d already slammed down during the day. Much more than the truly unsatisfactory orgasm she’d given herself the night before. She should just admit she’ll never have a man in her life again and get the damn vibrator. She deserved a little pleasure now and then—hell, she could probably voucher it as a business expense just for the stress relief. Daxon, the uber-sexy billionaire who financed her research would totally approve it and probably get a good laugh besides.
He was her kind of guy—easy on the eyes, supportive of her research, and completely and totally uninterested in her personal life. He probably had a different supermodel in his bed every night. But hey, no judgment! Whatever kept the boss happy made her job possible… and the only thing she needed more than her job was for guys—every guy, including Daxon—to simply leave her alone and let her work. Unlike her stalker-crazy ex-husband who should be behind bars… but wasn’t.
Fuck. Focus, Char!
She scanned over the last couple lines of code that she’d somehow typed while her mind was off having a strange collage party of vibrators, eccentric billionaires, and stalkers. And that wasn’t anywhere near as good as it sounded. But miraculously, the code changes were good, no syntax errors, a quick compile and… submit! She sent the sim off to run one more iteration and pushed away from her desk, tipping her chair back for a good stretch.
When she worked the kinks out of her body, she jabbed her finger at the screen. “Don’t even think about crashing,” she scolded the tiny icon of The Flash, which was spinning on the screen. He was her favorite DC superhero—who wouldn’t love a guy who could run faster than time and bopped around the multiverse?—and as long as he was zipping around in circles, her program was still running. This latest simulation, if it would just go to completion, would round out her most recent matrix of possible solutions for her dimensional travel equations and give her something to show Daxon… who was due into the office at any moment.
She glanced at the clock. The white face and black lettering was the boss-man’s idea of a physics joke: Never Trust Atoms. They Make Up Everything. Lame, but still funny. It was a quarter to five, and Daxon never showed up before five. Sometimes, he didn’t show up at all, even when he said he might. Billionaires tended to be busy. But Daxon liked to stop in and check on his favorite dark research company, and she wanted to make damn sure she had something to show him. Something new and exciting and that said Please throw more of that billionaire cash at this crazy thing! Because literally no one else would fund her research into practical ways to travel to another dimension… especially when her theories were way out there. Like, buried in her Ph.D. thesis yet somehow not publishable kind of “out there.” Although it seemed like there were plenty of other, even more wild theories about the universe that had made it into all the prestigious physics journals—the idea that there were multiple realities; the concept of the universe as a twelve-sided gem; and her favorite, that the universe was really a hologram projected from another plane of reality. Sure, those theories could get published. But her idea that there was only one extra dimension outside their own? That their three-dimensional earth was just a shadow of that higher order dimension, and that it could be unlocked by a simple solution of some not-so-simple equations? No, that apparently was unpublishable. It had nothing to do with the physics and everything to do with her ex—because Craig wasn’t just a crazy stalker, he was also a physicist. One of the top ones in the country. He did normal, respectable research on String Theory and wore his human-skin suit just well enough that no one believed he was the monster she described in her divorce filing…
She rubbed her temples. Focus.
Everyone else in the physics world thought she was crazy. But her boss, Daxon Hamilton believed in her. At least enough to give her a shot. But billionaires tended to want results, and if her research was going nowhere, he might shut down the company. Then she wouldn’t just be out of a job—she’d have to do normal work that wasn’t physics-related. And if she went back on the grid, Craig would find her. Restraining order or no, that fucker would find her and…
She grabbed her Wonder Woman mug off her desk and stood. It was a good thing all the tea was gone because her hand was shaking. Shit. She thought she was past that now. The nightmares had stopped once she had filed the divorce papers and fled to Seattle. The flashbacks and headaches took a little longer, but after a couple weeks and some meditation, those had chilled out, too. But the hand-shaking thing… that kept coming back, a heinous reminder that things might look okay on the outside, but on the inside… Damaged goods. That’s what he’d called her. Craig was an asshole, but in that instance, he was correct. She was damaged—he made sure of that. And now she was used up, worn down, and broken at only twenty-eight years old in a way that people just didn’t come back from. Not completely. Not to the kind of “normal” where they had lives and dated men and had kids.
What she had was her work—and her work was brilliant. At least, she thought so. And Daxon did too. She would not let anything mess that up.
Charlotte took a deep breath and headed to the break room. Another tea—okay, probably decaf because fuck her hand was still shaking—and then get the sim done, drop it in her results matrix, and voilà. She’d be ready to impress the custom Italian-made pants right off Daxon Hamilton.
Not literally. She didn’t want to go there, not even in her thoughts. Her fantasies hardly involved men at all—that was part of what Craig broke during all those years of hurting her in ways she didn’t even know she was being hurt. It wasn’t like he’d turned her into a lesbian or anything—she was definitely wired to be straight—she just… couldn’t. Not with a guy. Not even with thinking about a guy. That part of her was broken and dead.
So… a vibrator was definitely in order. Or rather it should be on order. Just as soon as she got home because she couldn’t actually use a work computer to shop for a vibrator, much less voucher it. Totally unprofessional, and she was already out there as it was. Besides, Daxon paid her crazy amounts of money—she had more than she knew what to do with. She’d just woman up and buy the damn thing. Online. From home. Tonight.
It was a date!
God, her life was so fucked up.
She blew on her tea, sipped some, then meandered back to her desk.
Jerry, her one true co-worker in Daxon’s dark company, looked up from his cubicle as she passed. She looked away fast enough that she could pretend she didn’t see him ogling her chest. Jerry reminded her way too much of her ex—only he wasn’t half as smart or creepy. Not that her creep-o-meter worked for shit. Otherwise, she might have avoided marrying Craig in the first place. The signs were there, in retrospect. The way he dissed her friends in private. The way he took her things—like her keycard for the gym—and pretended they were “lost.” How he went through her clothes, telling her which ones he thought were “inappropriate” for a woman in science, as if he had any right to dictate—
Her hand twitched so bad she slopped tea over the side. “Fuck!” she swore under her breath, quickly setting down the mug on her desk and wiping away the scalding liquid from her hand. She swore a lot more now—it was one of the first things she changed when she high-tailed it out of Cambridge. Craig didn’t like swearing, so she literally went online and found all the nastiest ones, just so she could say them out loud correctly… after she was safely on the other side of the country.
“You okay?” a male voice behind her asked.
Charlotte jumped in her skin and whirled around. It was just Jerry. But, Jesus, her heart was pounding. “Yeah. Uh, no. Just spilled some tea.”
Jerry glanced at the joke clock. “You think he’s coming today?”
She squinted. “Maybe.” Jerry’s theories were more conventional—there were a billion universes, each decision spawning an entirely new world, one in which she didn’t spill her tea, one where she wasn’t considering throwing it in his face… Blah, blah, blah. She found it hopelessly boring, but ostensibly they were working toward the same goal—finding a way to build a bridge to a different world/dimension/whatever. That was Daxon’s dream. Jerry worked his theories, and Charlotte worked hers, but they didn’t exactly work together.
The entire company was just Jerry, her, and some eccentric professor type out at the University of Washington with his own hypotheses, plus a couple IT guys to keep the servers running. That was all that comprised The Point—Daxon’s cheeky name for their dark company, named after Flashpoint, the time when The Flash went back and changed everything. Daxon was a fan, which was one reason he was a Highly Acceptable Person in her book. But the company? It was dark because the work was legit crazy. The kind even an eccentric billionaire kept off the books because it might bring shareholder prices down or something. Whatever billionaires worried about. But you wouldn’t find The Point registered at the Chamber of Commerce or filed with the SEC.
Jerry gave her computer a side look. “Got something good to show?”
She didn’t like sharing, well, anything with Jerry. Not even the air they were breathing. So she kept it cagey. “Yeah, we’ll see.” The Flash on her screen was standing still, tapping his tiny foot and checking the non-existent watch on his wrist. Her simulation was done. “Hey,” she said to Jerry, “watch the door for me, will you? Let me know if Daxon shows? I gotta put something together.”
Jerry gave her one of those long, body-scanning looks that made her skin crawl. “You owe me,” he said with a smirk and sauntered off.
Fucking asshole. She didn’t owe him anything. But she did need to get the data together for Daxon. She practically fell into her chair and whacked away at the keyboard, downloading the results, porting them over to her data cruncher, then pulling that into her matrix. Bingo. She sent the completed dataset to the printer, not that the codes within the neat little boxes would mean anything to Daxon. And not that she needed the sheet to explain it to him. But it gave her something to hold while she explained how she’d just taken an important step toward making Daxon’s dreams—and hers—come true.
She also prayed her hand wouldn’t shake.
Charlotte clenched and unclenched her hands in a desperate bid to quell the shaking while she waited for the printer, then snatched the sheet off. By the time she looked up, Daxon had arrived and was chatting with Jerry by his cubicle. The office was small, but the dozen cubicles were way more than they needed, not counting the data server farm in the air-conditioned room in the back. That was totally necessary. But once she showed her plans to Daxon, they might need more space. For now, she was glad Jerry choose to work on the opposite side of the room—then again, he was near the door and the break room, so she had to pass him every time she got tea or went to the bathroom.
Which gave him plenty of ogling opportunities. Such an asshole.
With the paper clenched in her hand, which had finally stopped shaking, Charlotte marched across the room, catching Daxon’s eye quickly. He smiled her way and gave her a nod, even though Jerry was still prattling on about his multiverse theories. Or something.
Daxon swung back to Jerry. “Sounds like you’ve got something there. Keep going.” He smiled. It was a dismissal, but the kind you couldn’t say boo about.
Charlotte’s heart swelled a little. She wasn’t in love with Daxon Hamilton and didn’t even fantasize about his sexy-sexy rich-man body, but damn… that man could smack down the creepsters of the world in a way that left them dazed and confused. Daxon was gentle but firm—and he never punched down or kicked you while you were on the floor, gasping for air. Like her ex. All the time. Emotionally, most of the time, but Craig’s Standard Operating Procedure was to use his fists just often enough that she never knew when it was coming.
“I hope that’s some kind of razzle-dazzle,” Daxon said to her with a smirk, giving a nod to the paper in her hand. “My day’s been nothing but corporate nonsense and lawyers. I need a pick-me-up.”
She couldn’t help the grin. “You’ve come to the right place, then.” She could practically feel the heat of Jerry’s glare, but she was an expert at ignoring that. She handed the paper over to Daxon.
He cocked an eyebrow at it. “Okay. What am I looking at?”
“A complete matrix for the first set of experiments The Point is going to conduct in dimensional travel.” She put it all out in a rush. She’d been working on it for weeks without even a hint since his last visit. Because she wasn’t sure if she could make the math work, and there was the small matter of a power supply, and aligning the solution states, and also the possible singularity event—
Daxon scowled, but it was half playful. “You mean the theoretical experiments.”
“No, I mean the experiment-experiments.” She held her breath. He might not approve the expenditure or the setup or the costs… but she didn’t think it was crazy enough to get her kicked out. And maybe, just maybe, it was crazy enough to work.
Daxon gave the paper another look, then a long, complicated expression aimed at her, like he was trying to figure out if she was being serious or had legit lost her mind.
Jerry’s look of alarm turned quickly into a sneer. “Charlotte’s higher dimension theory isn’t even a rigorously tested model—”
Daxon’s ice-cold glance shut him down. Then he looked to her. “Lab experiments,” Daxon confirmed.
“How better to prove something exists than to build a way to get there?” Her heart was hammering, but she could see it in his eyes. He was already all in.
He seemed to fight a smile. “Tell me.”
“Okay.” She had to suck in a deep breath because, suddenly, it felt like she was drowning. “So you know my extradimensional theory is basically the inverse of the holographic theory, right? So instead of there being some kind of mystical 2D world that we can’t perceive, which contains vibrating quantum strings that cast a holographic image that creates our world, my theory is all about the opposite. That our world is the 2D world—just a shadow of another, higher-dimensional universe, that our normal physics can’t detect. Just like the holographic world tries to account for the source of gravity—which we don’t understand at the quantum level, or even really at the macro level—by saying gravity leaks into our world from theirs, I think the same applies to my extra-dimensional world. Only the substance of this fourth dimension—in space, not time, and orthogonal to our three dimensions—isn’t made of anything we can measure or detect. Yet it has to be a physical dimension in some sense. It has to be made of something, and it has to be connected to our world. Otherwise, it couldn’t leak in gravity and explain the whole paradox about…” She trailed off because Daxon was holding up his hand to stop her.
“Charlotte, I don’t speak physicist, remember?” But his voice was gentle. “I read your thesis—that’s why you’re here—but I need the exec version, okay? Just give me the ant analogy again, then tell me how this…” He held up the paper with her matrix of experiments printed on it. “…is going to get us to your over-dimension. And how much it’s going to cost me.” He gave her a soft smile.
“Right. Sorry.” She took a breath, and then another. She ignored the scowl on Jerry’s face and focused on how to distill this down. Daxon was super smart, but she was using physics code-speak. Just because she was nervous. “Okay, there’s an ant walking along a piece of paper. The paper is our world. The ant thinks everything only has two dimensions—forward/back, left/right—because that’s all the directions it can go.”
“But there’s really another dimension—up/down—only the ant can’t see it,” Daxon added in, letting her know he was following her.
“Right. So the ant could totally go up off the paper if it just could figure out how to jump.” She licked her lips, trying to think how to extend the analogy so he would get it. She took back the paper with the printout of experiments. “So, ants can’t jump. But what if we turned the paper upside down.” She flipped it over. “Then the ant wouldn’t have to jump. If he could just figure out how to let go, gravity would pull him into the up/down direction.”
Daxon frowned. “You want to turn the world upside down.”
She scowled in frustration. How to explain this? “No. The ant doesn’t know about gravity—that’s an up/down thing—so even if his world was upside down, he wouldn’t know it. The thing that’s keeping him attached to the paper is his sticky little feet. A different force that works against gravity.”
Daxon’s eyebrows lifted, and he nodded for her to go on.
“For us,” she said, “gravity is our sticky feet. It’s part of our 3D world, even if it’s an effect that leaks in from the over-dimension.”
“So we just go weightless, and then we pop into your over-dimension?” Jerry’s sneer was clear in his voice, even if he was keeping his face carefully neutral.
“Obviously not.” She barely wasted a glare on him. To Daxon, she said, “Besides, even when we’re “weightless” gravity is still acting on us. There’s no way to turn off gravity because it doesn’t actually come from our 3D world.”
Daxon’s eyebrows were still lifted, but it looked like he was following. “Go on.”
“So the ant doesn’t fall off the page because he turned off his sticky feet.” She was still a little breathless, but she saw how to get there now. How to explain it so Daxon would understand. “It’s just that when the world is upside down, now gravity overcomes the sticky feet. And he falls into the 3rd dimension. He moves into up/down space.”
“So you do want to turn the world upside down.” Alarm was finding a home on Daxon’s face.
She held up her hands, defensively. “No, no. I mean, not really. More like I want to shove the ant off the paper.”
“And how are you going to do that?” Daxon took the paper back from her, but her matrix of data notations would make no sense to him.
“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.” She waited for him to look up.
“Schrödinger’s Cat?” He smiled. “The one who’s both in the box—and not in the box—at the same time, and we don’t know if the cat’s there or not until we look? Because its state is uncertain until we peek?”
“Yes!” Thankfully, he remembered that from their first discussion about all this. “So Heisenberg says you can’t know with absolute precision the location and velocity of a thing. At least, at the quantum level. If you can pin down the location, the velocity is uncertain. And if you can measure the velocity, the location is uncertain. But if you could measure them both—”
“You can’t violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,” Jerry objected. “It’s a basic tenet of quantum mechanics—”
“If you could measure them both,” Charlotte went on, ignoring him, “fix them both in our 3D world, then in order not to violate Heisenberg, then something would have to be uncertain. That something… would have to be your location in the 4th dimension.”
“Hang on.” Daxon raised his hand to stop her, but his eyes were bright. “You’re going to use Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to shove the ant off the paper?”
“Exactly!” She grinned. Yes! This was so going to happen.
Jerry had a slightly panicked look on his face. “But you can’t… how can you…”
“Yes. Exactly. How can you do this?” But Daxon’s tone had all the confidence in the world in her. Even more confidence than she had in this. As if he already believed she could do it. After the vast desert of Craig always tearing down everything she ever said or did, Daxon’s confidence was showering her with a drenching rain of praise.
Her heart was ready to hammer out of her chest. “I’ll need a modified MRI, a vibrator, and a whole bunch of power,” she gushed out.
“A vibrator?” Daxon looked like he was ready to completely believe a sex toy was the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe.
Oh. My. God. Did she actually say vibrator?
“A source of vibration. A vibratory machine. A thing that will induce a certain frequency resonance.” Oh my fucking god, just kill her now.
Daxon’s eyebrows knitted together. He was totally laughing at her on the inside. Jerry was simply disgusted. Please, please, please don’t let her have screwed this up.
Finally, Daxon choked out, “And an MRI?”
She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Yes. An MRI. A modified one. It measures the location and spin of atoms to map out the body. If it was high-enough precision, there’s a theory that you can precisely measure both spin angle and speed. If we vibrated an object to resonance inside the MRI, to get it in the range where the MRI could accurately measure, then everything about that object would be known… at both the macro and quantum levels… then Heisenberg would be forced break it loose from our 3D world. It would have to move in 4th-dimensional space.”
“Like… disappear?” Daxon’s expression was back to amazement, which calmed her raging heartbeat.
“Maybe. I… I don’t know.” This is where her calculations were fuzzy. And why she had a whole matrix of experiments. “Maybe part of it will remain in 3D space? Maybe all of it will move?” She flicked a glance at the matrix of data still in his hands. “That’s what the experiments are for.”
Daxon nodded. Slowly. “You need a modified MRI, something to vibrate your object, and enough power for the whole thing to run.”
She allowed a small smile on her face. “In my head, I call it the Static Extradimensional Intense Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine.”
Daxon grinned. “A SExI MRI?”
Oh god, no. “Uh…” For the love of… how did she not see that acronym? “We can call it something else.”
“Oh no.” Daxon huffed a small laugh. “We are definitely calling it that.”
Charlotte wished she could, through will alone, get all the heat flooding her face to dissipate, but it stubbornly just got hotter. “You’re paying the bills.”
“Yes, I am.” He settled his laugh into a smirk, then shook his head at the paper. “And this is peanuts, Charlotte.”
Her heart seized.
He looked up. “Peanuts in cost. Brilliant in concept.” He handed the paper back to her. “Make it happen. I’ll have contractors here in the morning to acquire and build whatever you need.”
The air went out of her in a whoosh. She wanted to shout yes! or hug him or simply thank him in some professionally appropriate way, but all she could manage was a mumbled, “Thanks.” She sucked in a shaky breath and then managed a stronger, “Thank you. Daxon. Thank you.”
“Thank you.” He smiled. “You and The Point are going to make some history. I’m sure of it.”
Jerry was seething, but his stupid jealousy or whatever barely registered over the buzz of happiness surging through her mind and body.
Daxon glanced at the clock. “I have to run. More corporate nonsense. Oh, and Charlotte?”
“Yeah?” Her voice wasn’t quite as shaky as she felt.
“You’re not still taking the bus, are you?” he asked. “The city’s a mess. I can’t afford to have you on the streets.”
“It’s fine,” she said absently. “It’s just a short—”
“I insist,” he said firmly. “I don’t even want you taking an Uber or anything. I’ll have a private driver for you in the morning, but for tonight—”
“That’s not necessary—” But she stopped at the cool warning look her gave her. “Okay. Personal driver. In the morning.”
“I’ll escort her home tonight,” Jerry jumped in.
“What?” She shot a look at him. It was true there was a surge of violence in the city—she watched the news—but she didn’t believe all this nonsense about witches and shifters or people being possessed. That was just local lore from crazy, hippy Seattleites. Something was happening—maybe there was LSD in the water—but her walk to the bus stop was short, and Hank was always there—
“That’s a great idea,” Daxon said, already checking his phone. “I’d take you myself, but I’m late. Stick together for tonight. I’ll have private cars for each of you and everything else you need here in the morning. Then get to work changing the world, people!” He said the last part with a wave and a grin, already turning to head out the door.
In a moment, he was gone.
She just stood there, stunned. Jerry was already leering at her, sweeping his hot gaze over her chest. Ugh. “I’m fine, really, you don’t need to—”
“You don’t want to make the boss angry,” Jerry said, the voice of a snake.
Goddammit. The last thing she wanted was for Daxon to think she’d go against his direct orders, risking his world-changing company. Not when he’d just handed her everything she could dream of. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll just get my purse.” She turned her back on Jerry The Human Slime and hurried back to her cubicle.
She hesitated a long moment, hovering over the open drawer with her purse. They were actually doing this. They were going to break the surly bonds of earth and venture forth into a new space, a new dimension, a frontier never explored before. She only prayed that it would actually work.
With a quick glance over her shoulder, to make sure Jerry wasn’t lurking nearby, she gave a tiny high-five to the six-inch-tall Flash perched next to her screen. “See you in the Speed Force, Barry Allen,” she whispered. Of course, that was truly crazy. Her experiments would be on small inanimate objects at first. Maybe some living but non-sentient things like grass if they had any success at all. She wouldn’t be sending people anywhere. Human experimentation was decades away, at best.
But the lightness in her step betrayed her.
This would work—she knew it—and someday, people would call it the Brennan Drive or the Brennan Effect or maybe the Brennan Resonator.
Anything but the SExI MRI, for the love of God.
Which reminded her—the divorce wouldn’t be final for another week, but she didn’t have to wait until then. She could change her name before all this went down. The last thing she wanted in any universe was for Craig Brennan to have his name on her invention. She’d been planning all along on going back to her maiden name of Netherman.
The Netherman Drive. It had the perfect ring to it.
Charlotte marched to the front where Jerry met her at the door.
She refused to let the hungry look in his eyes kill any of her buzz.