by Josh Pearce

Cold, damp bones; a hard cot too short for his aching back; prostate problems. The old physicist ran through the litany every morning: claustrophobic corridors; smell of engine grease; the head constantly overflowing; the mess hall long run out of fresh fruit and down to only freeze-dried rations.

He’d been down here for 107 days, and each one had been the same.

The crew could pass time in all the traditional ways, but for the physicist there was only work. He went aft, through the officer cabins, medical room, storage, empty missile tube launch compartments, and propulsion control room to a locked hatch. He carried the key to it on a chain around his neck.

Within this lead-lined sepulcher lived the glowing red star that gave unto them the heat, oxygen, and electricity upon which their survival relied here, suspended in kilometers of dark water in all directions. The physicist looked into the furnace through a square of welder’s glass. A slot in the side allowed him to insert and retrieve various samples. What went into the crucible was never the same as what came back out.

K-251 Arkhangelsk, Soviet Navaga-class ballistic missile submarine, held silent stationkeeping beneath the Arctic ice, engaged in battle with colder intelligences.

• • •

Maxwell Laplace spotted his contact easily: Uri Shakhski stood out from the rest of the basement cafe crowd like an albino sea creature dredged up from beyond the midnight zone. They’d followed Shakhski around Havana for the past month, anonymous agents of an unnamed agency of an undefined government, and knew his routine, local associates, and mistresses. Max had two packs of Shakhski’s preferred cigarette in his suit pockets.

They locked eyes. Max approached Shakhski’s table, the same one he sat at every Tuesday Wednesday Thursday, espresso cup to one hand, ashtray to the other, same as always, except today a chessboard was set between them. “You were the one who was promised,” Shakhski declared.

Yes, when Shakhski had first made overtures, the agency had said they’d be in touch. An unusual case: a walk-in with no demands of money, and no discernible ideological motivation. Alarm bells: double agent. But the fact that he’d contacted them, even knew about them, made them curious.

The waiter brought Max’s coffee. The agent made a point of unwrapping the fresh pack in plain view, and offered a cigarette to Shakhski, who took two. Accustomed rituals, expected response. He lit one for himself. “We’re interested in what happened on that sub.”

“Ah! So your preliminary corroboration was satisfactory?”

Max shook out the match. “Distrust and verify.” The agency was still working on it. “You haven’t said what you want in exchange.”

“I will tell you all, if you just play a game.”

• • •

Not even the sailors aboard K-251 knew its mission: without missile tubes, the submarine ran with a reduced crew rotated out every three months by helicopter, returning afterward each time to new coordinates transmitted directly from Severomorsk in a cryptographic key held only by its captain. Oddly, though, once K-251 reached those coordinates, the physicist chose their final position from the navigation charts.

The deeper and darker, the better. It hovered at 450 meters, the edge of its test depth. Music and singing were banned because of enemy patrols. The filmstrips were fogged by X-rays. Only three complete decks of cards on the whole boat, enough mismatched ones to spark violent accusations of cheating – but there were chess sets. The machinist turned slugs of scrap pipe on his lathe until there were pieces enough for every person aboard.

From the reactor room, the physicist in goggles and heavy gloves carried unnatural elements at the end of long tongs, passed through the forward compartments to reach his laboratory equipment before the end of the sample’s half-life. For some elements, a mere matter of minutes, running an obstacle course of low pipes and narrow hatchways.

The crewmen carried tungsten lightbulbs in their breast pockets. If the filament suddenly glowed with ghost light, they turned around and went elsewhere, scattering like photons through the bulkhead slits, a mad scramble to get as far from such sorcery as possible.

The cavernous missile section, spanning upward through all three decks, was crammed with ionization chambers, particle accelerators, cloud chambers, mass spectrometers, and cyclotrons. The scientist had been experimenting with decay products of transuranics and fissile fragments. Watching for scintillations on thin pieces of foil in the dark as the star matter melted away neutron-by-neutron like a snowflake cupped in warm hands. Looking for stable elements beyond 94. Accustomed rituals, expected results.

His modest machinery was unlikely to smash exotic particles into existence out of thin air, like the larger colliders could, but if he could find the right neutron speed or radiation frequency against the right isotope, he thought he could bootstrap the problem. So far, he’d only sifted a few flakes of commonplace plutonium. The periodic table was a pigeonhole desk with a drawer full of a thousand keys and another drawer full of a thousand locks. His task, to find the two that fit.

A Geiger counter was his only companion in the chem lab. To sonar operators in passing ships, its cackling sounded exactly like fish feeding on polyps and plankton, the background noise of the ocean.

To the crew of K-251, the physicist’s dictaphone mutterings were as incomprehensible as Enochian incantations. Only the machinist had any idea: He customized the physicist’s equipment, creating finer detection plates, dense magnetic coils, reaction chambers of alternating hexagons. Their discussions were detailed mathematical specifications.

The machinist’s craftwork grew more precise. Once crude abstractions, his chess pieces became lifelike in their expressions.

• • •

“But first,” Shakhski said. He wrote something on a napkin, folded it in half, then slid it across the table to Max. “For later. Now –” he held two differing pawns in opposite fists “– draw for colors.”

Max pointed to the right. Shakhski opened his hand. Black pawn. They made starting moves. Their game clock was the half-life decay rate of some unstable element, slotting the neutron source back and forth between them. Pawns to c4 and c5. Knights to the f-file. Max was not the agency’s strongest, but he’d gone through basic training and knew enough to hold on through the opening. Exchanged pawns.

“The Arkhangelsk was on special polar assignment for over four months. What were its orders?”

Shakhski said something and moved his bishop. The agent paused. Up till now they’d been speaking Russian. “Excuse me?” He could pick out words from every language family, but this he didn’t recognize. It didn’t even sound human. Like a record spun backward. Shakhski gestured at the board.

Well, analysis was part of the job. Maxwell pushed a pawn to g6. Shakhski kept talking. A white pawn forward to the center, and Maxwell finally saw the emerging grammar. “So, of course, smashing the atom is not the mission – not primary, at least. Has its uses, though,” Shakhski said.

“Say all that again?”

Shakhski touched an ear. “Eh?”

Logical response was to develop his bishop to mirror Shakhski’s. “I said –”

“Ah, now I understand you!”

He thought he was still speaking Russian, but the phonemes felt somehow wrong in Maxwell’s mouth. “Are you fucking with me?”

“Naturally! But not about this. You cannot understand what I’m saying until you understand what I’m doing on the board. But also could not make yourself heard until you made the right response. I’m sure this table is bugged, but your handlers won’t decode anything on the recording. I have encrypted our conversation. We are speaking a secret language now.”

Two more opposing pawns, mirrored knights, and castling. Moving in synchronicity. “Why put a physics lab on a military submarine? Were you creating a new weapon?”

“Now that we can speak without caution ….”

• • •

Crewmen started to notice that pictures of sweethearts pinned above their berths were fading away to blank white pieces of paper, aftmost first and worst. They scrimshawed corn cobs and dry chicken bones into chess queens with their girlfriends’ faces before they were forgotten.

Purposeful positioning in all that water: It slowed down cosmic rays and made them visible. Measurable. The rare subatomic particle that interacted with a hydrogen atom created a visible reaction, the faint blue glow of a photon traveling slower than light. The physicist and machinist fabricated new detectors from square foils of various elements, laid out in a grid, and where the flashes appeared on the checkerboard indicated the particle’s scattering and penetration, and therefore its weight and composition. The physicist even claimed they could map each radiation source, pulsars and colliding galaxies, as they appeared above the horizon.

They spent many hours together seated on either side of the board in a lightless chamber, carefully keeping handwritten score. In the steel belly of a submarine, beneath an iced-over ocean, across thousands of light years, staring at a tabletop in the dark – stargazing at black holes.

• • •

“It’s not as esoteric, maybe, as everyone thinks,” Shakhski said. “Nucleons have mass and velocity, and you can physically bounce them off each other. Like a boy playing marbles, or a man playing billiards.” He moved his queen sideways to c2. “An element can transform into something else by gaining a neutron – pawn promotion – or split into multiple different pieces – family fork. Chess moves from the universe.”

The agent moved his other knight out. “How do you get from flashes of light in the dark to altering the real world?”

“Same way we got from flashes of light to a fistful of metal that can destroy a city – by playing God. The detector grid showed that there are fundamental rules. Building models is how humans interface and manipulate those rules.”

After some maneuvering, the players traded knights, and then Shakhski gave up his other knight for one of Max’s bishops. They retreated to their corners to regroup.

Max said, “The universe is too vast and chaotic to map onto 64 squares.”

“The number of possible chess moves is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. Project upon the cosmos whatever system of understanding you wish. Listen for a hiss and crackle on your telephone tonight. Watch a dead channel on your hotel television and look for patterns in the static.” Shakhski stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. The spell was broken. “Until next week.”

• • •

Maxwell Laplace did receive regular phone calls from his handler. “The wiretap was useless,” she said through white noise. “Did he give you anything?”

He unfolded the napkin. It was a list of short lines:

1. c4 c5
2. Nf3 Nf6
3. g3 d5
4. c4xd5 Nxd5
5. Bg2 g6

The scorecard of their game, all the way up to where they’d left off: 17. Bf4 Ra8-c8. Shakhski had predicted it move-by-move, from the very choosing of colors. Or he’d been manipulating Maxwell soon as they’d made contact, and the freedom of choice was a fiction.

“I didn’t get much from him yet, but I’m beginning to see the shape of it. Did the verification come through?”

“Didn’t find his name, face, or fingerprints in our copies of the Red Fleet’s files, but a small square area – postage stamp-size – of the note he first passed us was painted with a radioactive element we’ve never seen before. Its decay rate indicates this sample was created 39 days ago, exactly when Arkhangelsk was lost.”

They had satellite photos showing orphans like pawns and widows like queens standing in staggered lines at the tideline, watching the ragged waves of the Barents Sea encroach and the official state silence further erode what these families had once faithfully thought was the stable structure of their lives.

Listening buoys and a Trafalgar-class recorded Arkhangelsk’s last minutes of life. Acoustic analysts agreed that it matched the sonar signature of an OK-550 model nuclear reactor suffering a meltdown. The OK-550 used liquid bismuth and lead for coolant, a far more efficient and silent system than pressurized water, but also a system that could not survive a power loss. If the core reduced its thermal output too much, the lead-bismuth mixture would solidify in its pipes, becoming a useless, immovable lump of metal.

Then, without coolant circulating the heat away, the uranium-238 turned molten, burned through its containment, melted a breach in the submarine’s outer hull, and exploded in a burst of seawater steam. There could have been no survivors at that pressure, with that violence.

“Likely it was fission product poisons,” his handler said. “Uranium can split into xenon for example, which absorbs neutrons, so if enough accumulates in the core, the reaction fizzles. Then the xenon eventually breaks down, fission increases, and the core heats back up again. I would say it’s possible there were impurities in the fuel, but there was also an emergency shutdown at Diablo Canyon eight days ago, as well.”

“Sabotage? Enemy action?”

“We don’t care about nationalistic weapons programs – what have policy decisions to do with entropy, gravity, or relativity? But if someone is performing alchemy on an active nuclear reactor core, that’s something we ought to know about. Find out, and contain it.”

The nuclear fireball in the sky was setting, an illusion of Earth’s knight’s-tour orbit around it, and of trying to apply a non-inertial frame of reference to an inertial system. He held his hand up to the window. His skeleton luminesced faintly. “I can see my bones. He’s transmuting them into something else. With magic.”

“This is spycraft, which means it’s bullshit. He’s enchanted you with his story. Don’t get lost in it. Facts only, Agent. Most likely he swapped out pieces with strontium-90 using sleight-of-hand. Your body takes it up instead of calcium.”

“What do I do about it?”

“Keep those pieces away from you. Strategize.”

He asked, “Who are you?” because they’d never met.

“Just the voice on the line, your voxy lady. Get the job done and come home. We can always transform you back into what you were.”

Disconnect. Agent codenamed Maxwell Laplace turned on the TV and stared at the visual noise until he saw his next moves.

• • •

All the familiar images: playing chess against death, like The Seventh Seal; or against the devil in Retzsch’s Die Schachspieler. In this case, there was another opponent, one who didn’t play dice but could be tempted into a different game.

“No,” the physicist said. “Your premise is faulty. You display a fundamental misunderstanding of the standard model.”

“It’s all the same pieces, just in a different configuration,” the machinist argued. “Isn’t that why we’re down here? To record unusual patterns?”

Because, yes, the Arkhangelsk and the entire Arctic Ocean acted as the largest extant neutrino detector, which allowed them to locate not only far-off sources of cosmic radiation, but also every nuclear reaction on Earth: unsanctioned fast-breeder reactors, hidden submarines, classified cyclotrons, megaton test detonations, and even neutron sources in orbit that existed in violation of the Outer Space Treaty.

The physicist dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “That is fantasy. We only agree to such orders so the state will fund our pure research.”

“There’s a source of new particles out there, and I’ll prove it.” The machinist had been busy for months. He brought out hundreds of chess pieces in different colors, weight, composition. He drew from them randomly until he had a full set lined up on the detector grid board, then switched on the Geiger counter. It ticked andante like a metronome.

“A mix of different elements: lead, graphite, uranium, and so.” The machinist made a pawn opening. “Pieces can be neutron sources, absorbers, reflectors, or simply inert. There’s no way to tell just from looking or touching. It’s a matter of logical deduction, the only clue is the change in the radiation level. Same as how we conduct all our physics – by bringing unidentified elements together and measuring what happens.”

“I know how to do physics,” the physicist said sourly, and advanced his pawn to meet the machinist’s face-to-face. The Geiger counter clicked nervously.

“Then let’s see whose model of the universe is the correct one.”

With meticulous caution, they built subcritical pawn structures. It was touch-move rules, no taking it back. Bomb-making rules. A tremble in the hand, and you could irradiate your opponent, yourself, or blow up the entire room. Win, lose, or draw. The overhead lights dimmed and brightened in response to the combinations, the Geiger counter applauded the most daring gambits.

• • •

The agent made his next move confidently, even before he sat down. The board was set to where they’d left off. “Ah, now we are in tune with each other’s minds,” said Shakhski. “Active listening. Mirrored body language. Breathing and blinking together. Our pulses have synced.” Traded bishops, and moved parallel rooks.

The outline of Maxwell’s skull was showing. “How are you doing these things? Part of the KGB’s parapsychic experiments?”

“On a surface level, it’s the same psyops training you’ve received. A war game, the psychology of your enemies laid out before you to read. We each tie the pieces to our brain – we can go through a step transformation from such high-minded mapping down to the lowest building blocks.” The pieces shifted.

So many options unfolding before him: biology – to combine cells into viruses and cancers; move a bishop, now chemistry – molecules daisy-chained into neurotoxins; move a knight, now nuclear physics.

With his elemental pieces in the right places, they emitted enough X-rays to cast shadows on the curtains behind Maxwell. Could see the lattice of bones, of course, but also the silhouette of a cheap, stamped-metal pistol in the small of the agent’s back. Shakhski could see the shape of the endgame from where he sat.

• • •

The detectors showed a constellation star map of every neutrino source in a sphere of flashing lights that surrounded the players sitting in the dark. The machinist had built a defense of rhodium rooks and beryllium bishops between his potassium king and the physicists’s attack. The Geiger counter squealed in its highest registers, but the neutron absorbers protected his body from the radiation.

“See?” said the machinist. “The proof is right in front of you. A new particle, between neutrino and neutron. It’s not generated by any reactor or collider developed by the current nuclear powers. Someone else, from above –”

“Someone, pah. It’s something. Just because Kremlin Premier and the cowboy-in-chief have the same delusion doesn’t mean the rest of us must. Laser guns, missile shields, science fiction! And just because you can’t explain it as natural phenomenon, yet, doesn’t make it supernatural.” The physicist had an unnoticed nosebleed.

“The Kremlin wants us to look for threats – buried launch silos, secret labs on the Moon, whatever it is. There are particle weapons already – neutron bombs.”

“Capitalist weapon. Neutron radiation kills organic matter, leaves the hardware untouched. Destroys workers, preserves machinery.”

“But they’re also used to trigger partial fission in warheads, disarming them. This could do the same.”

“Warheads in flight are easy targets. Reactors are shielded against outside neutrons. Works both ways. Keeps everyone outside of them from dying.”

The machinist insisted, “This God particle may be light enough to pass through concrete and lead, but massive enough to interact with uranium.”

“Physically impossible,” the physicist said, coming apart before his eyes.

• • •

The language moved deeper, past the probability states of electrons and quarks, to the arcane symbols of pure math carved out in well-worn ruts on the wood board.

If the Russians had found a source of nucleonic radiation beyond low-Earth orbit but within the heliosphere, Maxwell thought, the implications would be of concern. “Where in the sky was it coming from?”

“I know where all the atomic structures are,” said Shakhski. “I know how to remove them. There is a Soviet piece near Pripyat that has been overextended. Unprotected, and without defense against my next move. Our interaction, Agent Laplace, was simply to let known my opening in a blindfold game against superpowers.”

He could almost see the solution, like small bones against dark background. Vision swimming. Tasting blood. He had to make a phone call, to let them know what the next moves were.

• • •

“It is the key, this single particle!” the machinist exclaimed. “It unlocks a vault of energy in the heart of every physical object. Energy that can be used to transform, transport, transcend!”

The machinist promoted a pawn to a knight and completed a smother mate. Surrounded by neutron sources on all sides, it went through quick nuclear transmutation several steps up the periodic table into something unstable, shed its excess neutrons, and chain-reacted with the surrounding pieces. A bright flash lit the room for a heart blink, outlined the grin in his skull. The rays reflected off the defensive pieces and focused like a lens on the physicist’s king.

Critical.

The old man dissolved down to the bones. All the soft tissues and liquid cavities bubbled away, leaving a seated skeleton and metal hardware. Fillings, belt buckle, zippers. Keys.

The machinist plucked a black pawn from his side of the board, took the keys off the skeleton’s neck, and walked aft.

• • •

Shaskhski knew in advance all the outcomes. “There is a rainstorm of blue-shifted invisible light coming from the direction of Sagittarius, and I am the prophet of its inescapable coming.”

Maxwell could almost see the answer in the atomic structure of the chess game. Black and white pieces tessellated like protons and neutrons. The blueprint of a new element almost perfect, almost integrated, but missing a single, vital connection.

“Your population think it God, but I say no,” Shakshki railed. “I will reach into the heart of every reactor and harden them against him. I will transform them into weapons that can brush away the structures of God himself with a wash of synthetic elements. Man’s collective knowledge.”

Maxwell found the solution. He moved his rook from a8 to c8. Inevitable and unstoppable. The piece rested at the edge of the field like the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant. The model of the universe was complete.

Shakhski seemed unconcerned about the danger. “And if not God but some other rough beast slouches toward them, all the converted machinery will be ready to interrupt whatever dark engine propels it across the stars.”

Maxwell babbled in tongues. He was trying to tell the agency’s listening devices all that he knew – the existence of a weaponized physics that could disrupt power grids, sink fleets, nullify arsenals. That could be turned against themselves, or directed at offworld threats, real or imagined. That could reinforce god delusions.

A system of action-at-a-distance, controlled by puppeteering microcosmic models of reality on a Cartesian grid. And all this in the hands of one stateless man who considered it a game.

The words fell out of his mouth, but meant nothing. He was stuck in the deep language of the game and couldn’t climb back out to human communication. On the recording, he sounded like the frantic static of a Geiger counter, of the cosmic background radiation.

“Your success – as an agent, as an agency, as a species – pivots on my stratagem,” said Shakhski. Max’s organs were burning, his bones radiant like nuclear fuel rods, transforming into an angel of light. People in the cafe screamed, rushed for the door. Shakhski finally returned to situational awareness. Casually, white resigned. “We are entangled, your fate entwined with mine.” So much so that when Shakhski tipped his king over, the agent fell dead out of his chair.

• • •

Much later, agency analysts decrypting the tape and recreating the cafe chess game from the scorecard came to a few inescapable conclusions. By using pieces made of certain material – radioactive sources of polonium, cesium, americium and even uranium or plutonium; control rods of boron and cadmium – and a grid of graphite and tungsten carbide neutron reflectors, they could assemble a tabletop nuclear reactor. Shuffling the pieces around according to the recorded moves adjusted the criticality levels and exposed each element to different degrees of neutron flux.

By moving them to the right squares at the right time, every piece became something other than what it had started as, their atomic structures changed by the amount of neutrons they either lost or gained. And, at the end after so many attacks, the king was transmuted into a new transuranic of the same kind that Shakhski had initially passed to the agency as proof.

When this element decayed into its daughter isotopes, it emitted subatomic particles with unusual and previously unrecorded properties. If introduced to a nuclear core, those particles proved to be death to fission chain-reaction. A reactor so poisoned would radiate strong pulses of these God particles, like setting off a neutron bomb that could traverse the entire diameter of the planet Earth, or even further out across planetary orbits through the vacuum of space.

Despite extensive testing, the particles’ transformative effects on the human body could be neither proven nor disproven.

And, as the agents quickly learned, finally knowing the rules of how to play the game was not the same as knowing how to win the game.

• • •

The machinist unlocked the shielded door, clenching the pawn in one hand. He stepped into the reactor core, and vanished.

• • •

Shakhski arranged both kings on the board’s middle black squares to indicate the final result. Then he stepped through the cafe door into a nuclear furnace of sunlight outside, and vanished.