Chapter 1: The Particle Trap

Quinn stared into the mirror, running his comb through his perfect hair for the tenth time. "Brai?" asked a voice from just behind him, interrupting Quinn's careful attention.

He glanced back at the Pokémon, which lingered just a few steps behind him in the narrow bathroom. The Pokémon carried something under his arm—a green leather folio, with his full name embossed near the bottom. Pages packed close inside, bound by several matching rubber bands.

"You're telling me I'm running out of time." Quinn looked back, making a few more careful strokes through his hair. "I've been counting the seconds. It has to be perfect, Sirius. This is my moment. I'm changing the future."

He tucked the comb away in one pocket, then checked the other for the folded printout, and found it. Two tickets for the Royal Unova, leaving two days from now.

This was his moment—his moment to secure those extra two letters at the front of his name, and totally change the field of temporal physics.

"Xen." The Pokémon tapped one paw on the tile, agitated. "Brai!"

"I know! I'm coming!" He could probably push it a few more minutes—but his Pokémon was right. Professor Sada would be waiting for him, alone in the observation room with Avery.

She still has to say yes. I can't piss her off too badly before that.

"Right. Showtime, Sirius. You ready?"

In answer, the Pokémon offered him back his leather folio, grinning at him.

"Yeah, I know. Time to stop writing about all the things we're about to do. Time to do them."

He strode out into the dark hallway, hurrying around the corner towards the observation booth. A single armed guard in a white uniform saluted as they passed, his eyes lingering for a few seconds on the Braixen.

Then they rounded the corner, where a single thick door made of solid metal waited beside a scanner. "EXPOSURE WARNING!" it proclaimed, along with requirements for each person to wear their radiation safety monitor. Quinn reached into his back pocket, then removed the little plastic device, clipping it on the front of his button-up shirt.

Sirius snapped one onto the fur of his chest, looking very satisfied with himself. But Quinn's Pokémon always wanted to play along. Maybe he thought he was about to earn his own little PhD.

The scanner clicked, and the massive door began to retract, sliding slowly into the floor for them. The space beyond wasn't all that large, really—twelve feet wide, with walls of lead and only a narrow viewing window in the front. The rest of the space was covered with screens, showing status information about the upcoming collision.

"Tachyon generation threshold… 91%" That was the only number that mattered. Power draw was an issue for the investors, and containment was a problem for the engineers.

There were two women in the room. One sat near the display, watching the ongoing readouts like a hawk. The other lingered near the window, holding a little feline Pokémon in her arms to give her a better view of the particle trap.

There was very little to see through there right now, just a little vapor of sublimating liquid helium, along with occasional, brief flashes of Cherenkov radiation.

Quinn rushed over to his professor first. He'd long since learned to ignore her absurd hair and even more absurd fashion. Even Sada wore the required radiation detector, her plastic card stained an angry yellow.

I didn't plan for that. Quinn was momentarily bewildered, as something occurred that defied all his preparation. He stumbled his way over to her, opening the folio and flipping through it once.

That made enough noise that Professor Sada finally noticed, and looked up. "Quinn! Just the genius I was waiting to see!" She rose quickly, striding over in a few quick steps. She didn't shake his hand, instead clasping his shoulders in one broad, firm embrace. "Making history today, Quinn! Or changing it?"

"Both," he said, snapping his folio closed in a single sharp sound. "Looks like the accelerator is about to fire. But Professor—I don't think you should be in here." He reached out with his free hand, lifting the card from her lab coat far enough for her to see.

Sada looked down at it, mouth hanging open. "Oh. Well then. I suppose I shouldn't count on being able to travel back to before this incredible mechanism gave me several tumors."

She extended one hand for the folio. "I'll watch from the control room."

He reached into the folio, removing one copy of his preliminary research, marked with a silvery rubber band. Her copy. "Here. If you're looking to follow along with my predictions, start with the 'Practical Retrocausality' heading."

Professor Sada took it, tucking the printout under one arm. "Thank you, Quinn. I'll be cheering you on over the radio soon enough."

She lowered her voice, nodding towards the girl near the window. "Your guest is waiting for you. Didn't seem to know very much about your research."

He nodded hastily. "Avery? Nah, she's in parapsychology. But we've been attending together as long as I can remember. If I didn't invite her, she'd be furious with me." And I couldn't ask her out during the first tachyon impact in human history.

"I see." The professor released him. "Go on then, Quinn. Time to look at the past."

She slipped out through the security door, which instantly began to roll closed behind her. Quinn didn't wait for it to finish, hurrying towards the room's only other occupant.

Avery wasn't the first young woman to take on a Pokémon into her identity—she kept her long hair dyed green, and wore bright red clips in the ponytail on either side. Even in Blueberry's Large Experimental Collider, she wore a simple white dress. "Wondered if you were going to show."

"And be late to my own experiment?" He met her by the window for a brief hug. Sirius followed behind him, greeting her Meowstic for their own Pokémon equivalent. "I would never imagine."

Her hands were faster than his, faster than he'd seen coming. She flicked it open, then selected one of the identical stacks, the one with a green band. "This one for me?"

"I—y-yes," he stammered. "But I didn't expect you to be very interested in reading it. The physics is…"

"Beyond me," she finished for him, matching his tone. She handed the folio back, then shuffled through the pages, before stopping at random and starting to read. "The formation of tachyons requires the presence of a closed timelike curve with the radius no lower than the circumference of the particle's predicted—" She tucked it under her arm, then bent down to scoop her Pokémon off the floor. "I'll make sure not to look right at you while you're giving your graduation speech. I'm sure even the reflection of your brilliance would melt me."

She stared through the viewing window, blue eyes locked on a single point in the dark—the particle trap.

"Maybe they can bottle up some of your sarcasm and serve it at the ball after," Quinn said, falling into the open spot beside her. He paused long enough to reach under the bench, pulling out a stool he'd left there for Sirius the night before.

The fox hopped up beside him, where he was just tall enough to look through the opening at—nothing, yet.

"You're already planning speeches?" he asked, the first hint of nervousness entering his voice. "I thought it was premature, since I didn't know what my measurements would look like. But if you've already been writing yours…"

"No!" Avery touched his chest with one hand. "Until last month, I wasn't sure this project would take me anywhere close to a thesis."

He glanced down at her hand, feeling warmth blossom on his cheeks. He didn't push her away, though. Avery was always more affectionate, maybe a little too much. Avery was the one thing in his world he couldn't exactly predict, the thrill of the spontaneous. She was energy, no matter the moment.

"I never doubted you would do it. We're walking that stage together in May, Avery. You and me."

"We'll see." She tilted her head to the side, releasing his chest. "Can I ask you something about your experiment?"

He nodded eagerly. "Absolutely anything, Avery. You probably heard most of it already." It had taken months to get this far—months of coordination with Engineering, the miracle of his sudden sponsor, Professor Sada's intervention…

"Your miracle detector is in there, right? The one that can… detect time radiation?"

Time radiation was so far from the reality that it strained Quinn not to instantly correct her. But there was so little time left. If he started explaining what tachyons were supposed to be, the experiment would complete before he did. "Yes. It's somewhere in there. It has to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures to hold the charge we're looking for. So you shouldn't be able to see it before the moment of impact."

"I can't… see it." Avery looked down at the Pokémon in her arms, who nodded along with her. "I hear it."

"You… what?" His mouth hung open, momentarily stupefied. Few people could so reliably catch Quinn off his script than Avery. These days, he wrote backup notes for all the strange tangents he expected her to take, so he would be prepared for those too.

That one hadn't been on the list.

He stepped back, rushing over to one of the controls. He flicked through a few of them, until he got a live audio feed from inside the detector room.

Without the layers and layers of transparent aluminum radiation shield, he could hear clearly.

He didn't hear anything, though. There was a steady hum from the electromagnets, so deep it rattled the speakers in the wall. Then the rumble of pumps, and the hiss of liquid helium as it boiled on contact with the particle trap. The video was black and white, outlining the particle trap in its housing.

An uneven piece of metal about as thick as his forefinger, held by a dozen alligator clips made from pure platinum, all arranged at even intervals. "I don't hear anything!"

Avery clicked her tongue in annoyance, and the keyboard tapped next to him. A red "MUTE" appeared over the feed. Had he pressed that? "Not that. It's more like…" She whistled a simple tune, a dozen notes. It sounded soft and gentle, like a wordless lullaby.

It took Quinn until she finished to finally put his words together. "What do you mean?"

Avery shared another look with her Pokémon. How she could read anything from those huge, dark eyes, Quinn didn't know. But apparently she could. "Your particle trap is psychic, Quinn! That's what that sound is! Why your computers can't hear it."

Now that was one firm step over the line from curiosity into absurdity. Avery's intuition could go far, sometimes. But when she stretched too far, she would lead them both right over the crushing gulf of her ignorance. "I'm not even in parapsychology and I know that isn't how that works. It takes a mind to be psychic, not…" He took a deep breath, straightened his fancy shirt, and brushed a few stray strands of hair away from his face.

By his count, the capacitors should've sent his hypothetical tachyons around another half a billion times, building enough charge to—

Professor Sada's voice came in over the radio, exactly when it should've. "We're approaching maximum charge, Quinn! Any longer and we'll start bleeding particles out of the loop. Now or never!"

"I don't think we should shoot it," Avery whispered, taking a few sudden steps back from the window. Her Pokémon mewed in agreement, sending even Sirius into a nervous retreat.

Quinn alone remained by the controls. He flicked the plastic cover out of the way, exposing a bright red button beneath. He rested one hand there, watching Avery with the other. "Why not?" he asked. "This isn't your research, Avery! You barely passed Calculus!"

She shrugged. "I'm probably wrong! I just hope it isn't mad at us!"

A piece of reactive metal, mad? Avery had obviously been spending too long in parapsychology. It was time for them both to graduate.

"Observe," Quinn announced, raising his voice to be sure the radio would catch it. And more importantly, the recorder. "The first instance of retrocausality. These tachyons will be detected before I release containment. The exact difference will provide crucial information allowing us to confine the tachyon's charge, spin and m—"

Light exploded through the gap, brilliant green that splashed up against the detector in a cascade of incredible colors. The dark space became brilliantly luminous, making him shield his eyes.

Then it exploded. The radiation shield ripped apart in a violent detonation of sapphire, shredding through Quinn and turning Avery into a headless corpse a few nanoseconds later.

Quinn heard the music then. A simple melody, apparently echoing from the inside of his own head. There was something almost pleading about the sound, desperate to stop something that he couldn't quite explain.

"Get down, Sirius!" Quinn didn't think, he jumped, tackling Avery in the chest and slamming her to the floor with all the force he could. There was barely enough time for her to grunt with pain and surprise, before the impact obliterated the viewing window in a shower of razor-sharp not-glass.

Instead of ripping through the watching visitors, those shards flew all the way across the room, splashing up against the blast door like water.