Deep Down Under

Chapter 29

Florianigiasse Road, Vienna, 12:00 pm

Jerome and Lucia just kept on staring at Sadowsky cursing himself for being so forgetful. Apparently, those who had kidnapped him were closely linked to what he taught at his college. Ancient history.

It looked something that had come straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.

Lucia attempted to pry the answers out of Sadowsky with her gentle, warm touch. "Can you please explain what is going on?"

"No...It can't be," he muttered, possibly to himself.

Jerome got impatient, "This is a waste of our time," he grumbled.

Lucia gave him a disapproving look.

"Fine, but it will be heard to believe,"

"At this point I'll be willing to believe anything but aliens," Lucia said.

Sadowsky let out a breathe which Lucia never noticed he was holding, "Somewhere around 250 BCE, an emperor known by the name Ashoka discovered something terrible, a terrible secret that could destroy the world,"

"Wait," Jerome interjected, "so you have a secret that could destroy the world?"

Lucia gave him a look that said shut up, which compelled him to keep quiet.

Sadowsky continued, "He was one of those peaceful emperors. So, to prevent the secret from falling into the wrong hands he created a brotherhood consisting of nine men, who would protect the secret at any cost, even willing to kill."

He paused to take a breath, "now this part is my own theory. I think that your father, Andreas," he pointed towards Lucia; both of them remembered a lost loved one, "was onto some research that could cause potential destruction to the world. In order to prevent any chances of this occurring, they-they killed him."

Lucia's hands balled into tight fists and tears began to well up in her eyes, "h-how could they?" Jerome tried to calm her down by placing his hands on her shoulders but she just shook them off.

Then she managed to not think about it, "is there anything else?" she asked, wiping a tear or two.

"I don't know how much of this is true, but Subramanian, the ringleader of them said that Ashoka had some sort of 'vision' or 'premonition' or something. A premonition of the end of the world. And that destruction was caused by none other than man himself," he finished.

Lucia's eyes widened, clearly she had realized something important.

"What is it?" Jerome asked, wanting to know what surprised Lucia so much.

"You said premonition right?" she asked.

Sadowsky nodded as a reply.

"I just came up with my own theory on future visions and all that, which ultimately lead me to come up with a scientific explanation for the human soul," Lucia explained. Sadowsky spoke up, "yeah that Subramanian guy was trying to tell me some scientific explanation for the soul as well. Something about..." he trailed off, unable to recollect the facts.

"Energy?" Lucia completed, with some doubt. Sadowsky snapped his fingers, "exactly!"

She began with her theory, "my theory is that the brain has way more capability, what we're using is like...only ten percent."

"A lot of TV shows deny that fact you know," Jerome interjected.

Sadowsky backed Lucia up, "it could be The Nine influencing them. They're very powerful."

Lucia continued, "Consciousness is a quantum effect, like its energy, which flows from one body to another. And if this potential energy is tapped, we could see into the future. Now take the number of dimensions we have in our universe. There are four: length, breadth, height and time. Now there is a theory called string theory, which states that there are eleven dimensions, nine spatial and two time dimensions. If you have one time dimension, time travels in one direction: forward. And if you have two, time travels back and forth. So it's kind of like a timeline."

She paused to catch her breath and then resumed her lecture, "The brain, if kicked up a notch by something...I don't know dark matter or dark energy or something could help the brain access this timeline. This ultimately leads to seeing things in the future."

Jerome's mind kicked in, "how is it so certain that that particular event will take place?"

Lucia chuckled, "it isn't," she looked towards Sadowsky, "ever heard of Schrödinger's cat?"

He shrugged, "what does a German physicist's cat have to do with premonitions?"

Jerome rolled his eyes, "It's a thought experiment."

"It's like a probability experiment. A particle could be at two different states at one time, you only see one state after observing it." Lucia explained.

Sadowsky had a blank expression.

Jerome let out a sigh, "Imagine you have a cat in a bunker with a bowl of poison and then you lock it in for a few hours. Right before you open, there's a fifty-fifty chance that the cat's dead or alive, right?" he put up the question tag to check if Sadowsky was keeping up with him. As a response, he nodded, allowing Jerome to continue, "And when you open the bunker, the cat is either alive or dead. But, before you open it the cat is actually both alive and dead. So, using the analogy, the cat is the particle and being dead or alive is a state."

Suddenly, complicated quantum mechanical concepts became much easier for Sadowsky to contemplate. He felt a bit of chemistry between Lucia and Jerome. Also, Lucia seemed to be the one who came up with the theories and Jerome made them easier to understand to the public.

Sadowsky raised his eyebrows, trying to register that he was impressed. "So what you're saying is that there's a fifty-fifty chance of the predictions coming true?" He tried to come up with the output after processing whatever information he had just received.

Lucia nodded, confirming that he was correct.

Jerome let out an anxious sigh, "those odds are more than the chances given by the scientists at the LHC while finding the Higgs Boson."

Sadowsky raised his eyebrow, "You mean the God particle, right?"

Lucia scowled, "Why the hell do they call it that?!" Jerome nodded, ignoring his colleague's drama.

"They discovered it, right?"

Jerome nodded once more, "That's why I'm worried,"

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