Page 53 of Love and the Laws of Motion
“She will.”
“Livie—”
“Shewill.And when she does, we’re going to have this code figured out.”
Okay, Livie didn’t want to deal with the possibility right now.Fine.Maybe that was better.After all, she seemed more than capable of carrying on Finch’s research without her.What better way to care for the woman than by making sure her life’s work continued in her absence?
And for that to happen, they were going to need to crack the nut on this program.This was turning out to be one of the biggest challenges he’d ever faced.Hacking was easy.Every computer network or security system, no matter how complex, was nothing more than a puzzle, one with boundaries and rules.All you needed to do was figure out those boundaries and rules and eventually, you’d figure out the solution to the puzzle.Here, the puzzle didn’t exist yet.They had to conceive of the puzzle and figure out how to build it, before they could begin to figure out the solution.
He rubbed his face and attempted to refocus.“Okay, the problem is, we can’t begin to tell Hubble what to look for without giving it some defining characteristics.But we won’t know the defining characteristics until we record them.”
“Right,” Livie said slowly, still pacing.“It’s like trying to focus on something without looking directly at it.How do you see it when you can’t look at it?”
He chuckled softly.
She looked over at him.“What?”
“Nothing.I was just thinking...I mean, how dangerous is this stuff Finch is looking for anyway?Like, are we going to spend all this time teaching Hubble how to see it and the second it does, it blasts Hubble out of the sky?Like getting hit by a car you didn’t see coming around a blind corner.”
“It doesn’t work like that.At least, we don’t think it does.”Livie started to laugh, but then she froze and her eyes went wide.
“What’s wrong?”
She threw her hands up and spun away, pacing more urgently.“It’s like a car crash.It’s the...impact...the damage...you can reconstruct what happened...”
“Livie?”
“Shhh!”She covered her face with her hands.“I’m almost there.”
“Where?”What had he said?What was she trying to figure out?
“That’s it!”She grabbed her laptop at the foot of the bed and scrambled up to sit next to him, shoving aside the papers and clothes littering the bedspread to make space for herself.She began rapidly clicking through files on her hard drive, looking for something.“It’s the mirror shift!I am such an idiot.I’ve been combing through these numbers for months and—”
“The what?”
Livie paused long enough to look at him.“It’s the observation that sparked Janet’s entire theory.While she was examining past Hubble imaging of primordial black holes, she noticed some instances of minute red shifts that perfectly mirrored minute blue shifts.”
A blindingly complex program opened up on her laptop.He wasn’t even sure what program she was running.It wasn’t anything he’d seen before.
“And?”
“If we’re right, and those are streams of particles and anti-particles coming untethered from the primordial black hole that birthed them as it died, then this mirrored red and blue shiftisthe evidence of their existence.”
“Like one went one way and one went the other the second there was nothing holding them in the same place?”
Her face lit up.“Yes!And they left a trail behind as the black hole winked out.Thatis what we’re going to look at.The mirror shift.”
“The particles speak the language we’re looking for.”
“Exactly!”Her eyes were sparkling with the thrill of her revelation.He hadn’t thought dark eyes could sparkle, but that was before he saw hers, dancing with delight as she teased apart the mysteries of the universe.A peachy flush suffused her cheeks.Her chest rose and fell with each rapid breath as her lightning-fast mind put the pieces together.She was—in a word—stunning.
Which was not at all a helpful thought when they were in the middle of a potential breakthrough.
He cleared his throat.“How are we going to observe these particles?”
“We don’t need to!”She was practically crowing in triumph.“Because Hubble already has, but it didn’t know it.It’s all in the archives.They go back to nineteen ninety.”
“Are you kidding?You have a record of everything Hubble’s ever observed?”
