Critical Mass

Charles DeWitt has spent his entire life alone. Orphaned at seven, passed through the hands of strangers, he built his interior world out of mathematics and silence and the singular obsession that would define everything that followed. When he proved the existence of parallel universes and collected his Nobel Prize, the world wanted to claim him. He gave it a year and then closed the door and disappeared into a private laboratory in rural Vermont to do the only thing that had ever mattered to him.

Not just proving the multiverse exists. Getting there.

What he builds in that laboratory will change everything. An energy source of almost incomprehensible power. An observation window into a parallel universe. And finally, after years of solitary and obsessive work, a way through.

But something is happening to the sun.

The readings are subtle at first, easy to set aside, the kind of anomaly that a busy mind files under probably nothing and moves on. Charles is not a busy mind. He is the most rigorous scientific mind of his generation and when he stops filing it under probably nothing and starts looking at it directly he finds a correlation that he spends months trying to destroy. He cannot destroy it. The correlation is point nine one and it points in one direction and that direction leads back to his own laboratory and his own hands and the device he built to change the world.

Eight billion people. One scientist. One experiment. And a number that is not quite certainty but is close enough to certainty that the difference between them has stopped feeling like science and started feeling like something that has no name in any language Charles DeWitt has ever spoken.