Read an Excerpt
Chapter One: The Problem CHAPTER ONE: THE PROBLEM
Herbert George “Bertie” Wells was twelve years old and had a problem: there was a black hole in his bedroom. Granted, it was a small black hole, about the size of a penny, and it looked innocent enough just hovering in midair above his experiments table. Yet it had already devoured eighteen pistachios, a hard-boiled egg, and a dog-eared copy of St. Nicholas magazine.
Now, Bertie wasn’t aware that he was looking at a proper black hole because, being the year 1878, black holes were barely a theory in the minds of a few clever physicists, much less a detected reality in far-off galaxies. Alas, Bertie had no idea of the black hole’s vast destructive power to eat planets if left unchecked, but he was getting a queasy feeling.
Hopeful to solve the mystery, Bertie studied his bedroom, a true disaster by any parental standards. His walls were festooned with fantastical drawings of dragons, martians, and knights of derring-do, showing more artistic energy than talent. Horseshoe magnets, part of an effort to design gravitydefying pajamas, lay strewn on the floor. A maze of salvaged steel plumbing pipes reached to the ceiling and crisscrossed the room, part of Bertie’s attempt to urbanize his gerbils. Due to his recent obsession with prisms, Bertie had collected all manner of mirrors, and his explorations of the Kent Quarry had yielded him notable hauls of flint, calcite, and other light-refracting crystals. He noted that he’d arranged these mirrors and crystals at several different points across the room to catch and refract the sunlight streaming through his windows. Curious.
Bertie sat on his bed and stared off into space for a few minutes, allowing his imagination to go to work. This was a normal look for Bertie, eyes glazed, mouth open, the occasional drool string forming on his bottom lip as he dreamed away. It could be disconcerting for those around him, who might think something had sprung loose in his brain and he needed medical attention. But anyway, no one was watching (or so he thought), so Bertie was free to look as silly as necessary. He pictured the sunbeams entering the pipes as glowing space rockets zooming through racing tunnels, sped up to incredible speeds by magnets pulling on their steel shells. He imagined the rockets zipping around so fast and colliding with such force that it literally popped a hole in the fabric of the universe.
Not a bad day’s work! Bertie thought, marveling at its possible applications: no more rubbish, or cockroaches, or tax collectors! You could just throw them into the black hole!
Bertie was accepting his imaginary gold chalice from the British Royal Astronomical Society when the cat dish exploded, milk and dish conforming into a noodle shape and vanishing into the black hole like spaghetti through a baby’s lips. The hole sparked and grew another few centimeters in circumference, followed by an angry pounding on the door.
“Bertie? What’s all that racket?” said a loud voice in the hallway.
“No-nothing, Dad!” Bertie shouted as his geometry notebook flew off his desk, ripped into a noodle shape, and was slurped down the black hole’s gullet.
The door flew open and Joseph Wells, Bertie’s father, entered the room. He set his hands on his stout hips and looked around with a sour expression, mustache twitching. Joseph Wells had three sour expressions—annoyance, confusion, and disgust—but they all fell under the heading of “sour,” and it was the only look Bertie ever saw.
“What on earth is going on in here?” Joseph Wells asked.
Bertie stepped in front of the black hole, which proceeded to suck at the seat of his trousers, causing Bertie to turn his knees inward and clasp his buttons, a peculiar posture noted by his father.
“Is there a problem?” Bertie played innocent.
“Is that your mother’s waffle iron?” Joseph Wells asked, yanking the heavy iron appliance from a long-forgotten-space-suit experiment.
Bertie sidestepped to keep the black hole concealed. “Yes, I was trying to—”
“And the toaster?” Joseph Wells reclaimed the toaster and now had an armful of kitchen goods.
“—yes, you see, I thought ‘what if’ I could make a suit that could—”
“—that could what? Burn down the bloody house? ‘What if this?’ And ‘what if that?’” Joseph Wells said in a mocking voice. “‘What’ and ‘if’ are dangerous words and a lot of hot air if you ask me. The world’s not interested in your ideas, son. Dreamers are a dime a dozen. It takes a lot of cheek to think that of all the big brains in the world, you—Herbert Wells of 162 Bromley Court—are going to change the world with one of your contraptions. You’re average, Bertie. There’s no shame in it.”
“Well, I—”
“I don’t tell you this to be mean but out of love, boy: get those feet on the ground. Forget ‘what if’ and focus on ‘what is.’ Your studies. Finding a decent trade with good benefits. Because that’s your future, if you’re lucky.”
“Yes, but—”
“No ‘buts.’ We’re not special. That’s the truth of it.”
The black hole gave another good tug at Bertie’s trousers, forcing Bertie to clench even tighter to hold them onto his body. The moment was awkward.
“Erm, yes, well, I want all this mess cleaned up before dinner,” Joseph Wells said, averting his eyes from Bertie’s peculiar distress.
“Yes, Dad.” Bertie assured him.
As Joseph Wells left and the door slammed, Bertie’s trousers were torn off his body and spaghettified into the black hole.
“Oh, come on!” Bertie hissed.
At that very same moment, only one hundred and forty-seven years in the future, in the year 2025, twelve-year-old Zoe Fuentes, a seventh grader at Louis Armstrong Middle School in Queens, New York, was taking her slime game to the next level. And her slime game was already strong: glittery, fluffy, grainy, thermochromic, and edible-blood slime; magnetic, glow-in-the-dark, and soap slime; booger-feel, spiderweb, and sand slime—Zoe made it all. She made slime instead of doing her homework, instead of engaging with the world, instead of making friends—and this day her extraordinary talents for chemistry took her past the usual ingredients of white glue and borax to deeper waters: glycine, formamide, UV light, electricity. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Zoe knew there was something potentially combustible in this mixture but—as was usually the case with her experiments—Zoe’s curiosity careened past any mental red flags and zoomed toward discovery. And her focus was total. She could shut everything out, even the two girls who were spying on her from the hallway outside the door to Mr. Alwine’s chemistry lab. They were giggling and whispering, calling her “slime girl.” She heard one of them say, “Look at her pants.” but Zoe didn’t really care. She dressed how she wanted: leg warmers, pink tights, overalls with suspenders, bright green sneakers, pigtails, and purple horn-rimmed glasses. Trying to fit in with the kids in her class didn’t make them any nicer, so why not wear what she wanted?
After Zoe ignored the girls in the hallway for a few minutes, they wandered back to recess. But there was another problem. Zoe pinched her earlobes with concern as the salad bowl of slime before her bubbled and spit like a primordial sea. There was a burst of smoke and a power surge through the classroom that turned all the clocks off and was followed by a strange quiet.
Zoe hid under the table, afraid to see the fallout of her actions. Her brain got her into trouble a lot. For some reason her ideas ran much, much faster than her common sense. She was almost too smart. Her mother, her classmates, her teachers, her tutors, the school administrators, none of them could keep up with her. They kept throwing new and exotic classes at her: multivariable calculus, linear algebra. They even tried to stump her with unsolvable problems like the Hodge conjecture, the Navier-Stokes equation, and the Riemann hypothesis, but she solved them with alarming ease, flummoxing her mother and tutors and causing job panic among Harvard’s top mathematicians. Because the answers rushed at Zoe with such speed, she became bored quickly and would look for other ways to occupy her thoughts: computing all the bricks in Manhattan or devising a hydrogen bomb the size of a golf ball.
What really stumped Zoe, what truly confused her, were her classmates. Their conversations. Their phones. Their jokes. Whereas most of the world moved in slow motion to Zoe, when it came to making friends, everything went too fast. She simply could not keep up or make sense of it all. On the rare occasions when she did try to interact with the other kids, they would usually just stare at her or whisper to their friends or laugh. Sometimes Zoe tried to laugh at things the other kids seemed to think were funny. Something on their phones or something from South Park or Rick and Morty. Stuff Zoe had never seen. Zoe would try to laugh along but she always laughed too late or too early and the other kids would then laugh at her.
So Zoe stuck to slime. Her mother had made her swear to rein in her slime game after a recent batch that she’d named “barf confetti” lived up to its name and coated the curtains in a foul-smelling goo. As for this latest batch? So far so good. She glanced at the walls. No flames. No acid splats of glowing slime.
Then a thump drew her eyes upward to the tabletop above her head. There seemed to be no reasonable explanation for the thump. Nothing on top of the table that would arguably make a thump. But the one thump was followed by two more thumps. And then by a squelchy, slidey sound that rekindled her earlier back-of-the-mind worries. UV light, electricity, formamide, glycine. Why had these specific ingredients intrigued Zoe?
Oh yeah, she thought, they’re the building blocks of life.
At this, three cute, though mostly featureless, blobs of slime, each about the size of an andouille sausage, peered under the table at Zoe, their sticky skins holding them to the wood. They didn’t have eyes but seemed to reach at her all the same with the hopeful, needy yearning of newborns. Colors bloomed under their skins, conveying feelings that Zoe understood in an instinctual way, though she wasn’t quite sure how or why.
The names came easier: Birthday Cake Blizzard, Lava Crunch Slushie, and Mermaid Poop, she thought.
Then (as if that weren’t monumentally weird enough) all time simply stopped.
That is, all time around Zoe stopped. Zoe herself could still move, blink, and (sort of) process information. After all, it had been a very extraordinary few minutes.
Zoe stared at the dust particles hanging in the air. She climbed out from under the table. The smoke from the experiment was also frozen like a painting in midair. Zoe walked to the window. Her classmates were frozen too. The swingers, the chasers, and even the four-square players—their ball hanging in midair—were all frozen. Hovering above recess was a pigeon—suspended in midflap, its eyes wide and shocked, apparently asking to no one, “What the heck is going on here?”
Zoe turned back to her slime table and screamed because there was a tall and skinny and awkward woman in a lab coat standing in the room, a total stranger in fact. And more oddly (just as oddly?) she was apparently unaffected—like Zoe—by the time phenomenon that had just statueized the rest of the world.
“Hi, Zoe!” the woman in the lab coat said with a floppy wave that did not match the seriousness of the moment.
