The chipped plastic intercom on my desk crackled with my boss’s voice. “On my way down, Margaret.” 

This was my cue to set my plan into motion.

I flicked the stiff toggle on the comm, and said, “Copy that, Horst.” It would take fifteen minutes for the elevator car to make the nearly two-kilometer drop to the Orphic Matter Lab, snuggled in the lowest levels of the abandoned nickel mine. 

Ever since Horst and I had gotten stuck and had to wait five hours for emergency crews to get us out, we’d made it mandatory to announce all incoming cars from the topside. No one should have to pee in the corner of an elevator while their boss turns his back, plugs his ears, and mutters la-la-la-la.

Those of us working here had to trust our lives to equipment left in a mine that had closed when Bohemian Rhapsody was in the charts. 

I switched to the line connecting me to Varia Hoit’s lab, two hundred meters down a branch of the north tunnel. “Incoming,” I warned her. “Fifteen minutes till splashdown.”

“Do you think this will work?” Varia’s voice crackled with static.

“Not if you don’t get over here.”

“Margaret.” Varia’s voice was distant like she was talking to me through a drain pipe. “I think I’ve changed my mind.”

“You said you’d give this a try, now come on,” I coaxed her. “I know Horst can be a bit...stiff, but you told me yourself he intrigued you.”

She surrendered a sigh and switched off. 

Hearing her approach from down the aluminum tunnel walk, I buzzed her into the Orphic Matter Lab, a fully-encapsulated system of tubes that protected our equipment from the extreme heat in the mine. 

Varia had spent four years in this hell hole under the frozen forests of Mattawan, Ontario. As one of the foremost authorities on a newly discovered bacteria —archaea, she called them— she’d become as much a creature of the underworld as they were. Her bacteria babies thrived on nothing more than sulfates and were considered the oldest living things on Earth. Extremophiles. Lovers of extremes— like Varia. Her interest in Horst proved it.

Holding a plate of brownies wrapped in pink cellophane, her plump cheeks flushed from the damp heat in the tunnels, she said, “What do you think?”

She handed me the brownies and did a little runway spin. Her thin, mouse-brown hair was pulled into a severe bun, held in place by a hot pink daisy that was missing a few petals. Over her jeans, she wore a silk Mandarin robe embroidered with lotuses.

“Damn, girl!” I whistled. “And you almost chickened out.” 

“I have dinner reservations at the Maple Leaf at seven,” she said. “If Horst says no—”

“Failure is not an option.” 

Helping her woo Horst Mossbacher had seemed a noble challenge at the time. Anything to distract me from the looming end to our Orphic Matter Ultra-Cold Detection (OMUD) project. NSF was pulling our funds at the end of the month. 

After two years searching for a theoretical subset of dark matter, I supposed it was fair. But we hadn’t made enough changes to the protocol yet, in my opinion. I had given up a post-doc fellowship with NASA for the chance to work with Horst. His numbers were seductive, and as far as my calculations went, they were absolutely real. Orphic matter was all around us, just waiting for us to figure out how to observe it.

The romancing of Horst was far less depressing than watching two years of my research go down the tubes.

“Do exactly as I told you,” I said to Varia. “Now take off your glasses, and focus on me.”

Varia slipped off her milk-bottle glasses, and her wandering eye went its own way. I always wondered which view registered in her brain, the focused eye or the wandering one. 

She struck a coquettish pose. There was something impish and witty about her. I wanted Horst to see her subtle attractions for himself. 

“Focus on me,” I said.

Finally, both of her blue eyes locked on my face.

“Good.”

I handed her the plate of brownies and, taking her by the shoulders, aimed her at the control room. “Casual, friendly, nonchalant. He doesn’t bite.”

Varia made her way to Horst’s workstation, crammed between absolute cooling units and neutrino detection controls. Watching her tie a bow on the plate of birthday brownies, I wondered if Horst could find it in his heart to pretend to be surprised. He had to know how Varia felt by now.

The elevator alarm sounded announcing the car’s arrival. Varia repositioned the brownies in front of Horst’s computer monitor and then slipped behind a steel cylinder of liquid xenon.

The tunnel flooring rang with Horst’s long strides. He punched his security code in the module door and stood before me, peeling off a scarf and gloves.  

“I ran last week’s readings again,” I told him. “There were a few blips that still border on noise.”

He sighed. “Send them over.”

“I did.”

He turned back to say, “You turn on the air conditioner?” 

“You cool the detectors, what’s a little cool diverted to us?”

“Dollars, Margaret.”

“Less than a month of cool—”

“Don’t start with me.”

I could have been at NASA, I thought. 

As he settled into his chair in front of his monitor, Varia looked like a cat ready to pounce.

Horst picked up the brownies and called over his shoulder, “You shouldn’t have, Margaret.” 

“I didn’t,” I called back.

Varia sprang from her hiding place and Horst bobbled the brownies.

“Happy birthday!” she cried.

He spun his ergonomic chair to face her. 

As she met his gob-smacked gaze, I knew she was working hard to control her wandering eye.

“It was a sweet gesture, Varia, but I have work to do.”

Varia had told me that his German accent made her palms sweat, that his blonde ponytail reminded her of a guy she had dated in the SCA, one Wolfgar, scourge of Northumbria, a role-playing barbarian hottie. 

Horst turned his back to her and took a brownie from the plate, while her hand hovered over his polar-fleeced shoulder. 

“Go on,” I urged under my breath. I willed Varia to run her hands up his arms, to work the knots from his near-manly shoulders, to lean down and whisper her dinner invitation in his ear.

But she began swatting at the air above the brownie in Horst’s hand. 

He turned as she fumbled for her glasses, then grabbed for something right in front of his face.

“How did flies get down here?” She swatted again. “We’ve contaminated the mine.” 

Horst dodged her hand and then caught her wrist. “Thanks for the brownies. I have a fly swatter, I’ll handle it.”

She glanced over her shoulder, and I waved her back to my desk. When she reached me, I took her arm and escorted her out the glass door to the tunnel.

“What was that about?”

Varia wet her lips. “It was —they were— flies. At first. Asilidae, robber flies, I’d say. How the heck did flies get into the mine?”

“The same way we did, I suppose,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘at first’?” 

“With my glasses off, I saw two dark objects fluttering around Horst’s head. With my glasses on, I saw they were flies. But with my glasses off, they weren’t flies exactly.” She took a deep breath. “My right eye is 20/300 and my left is 20/400 with some corneal scarring from the laser keratoplasty—”

“What did you see?” I demanded evenly.

She licked her lips again, her glasses magnifying her irises into blue moons. “When I put on my glasses,” she said, “there is a moment when the muscles of the iris naturally flex to reach a clear focal point—”

“And then you saw what?” I tried again.

“Dragons,” she whispered. “Little ones. They were eating the brownie. But the brownie wasn’t a brownie. It was uh—” She shook her hands and grimaced. “A carcass. Of some kind. The dragons were diving on it and taking bites—”

“Dragons?”

Varia paced.

“They were more like an afterimage. Clearly an artifact of my recent corrective surgery.” She pointed to her left eye.

“Dragons eating a carcass?” 

Varia’s brow furrowed. “Dinner at the Maple Leaf tonight? My treat.”

Dinner at the Maple Leaf was delayed by a blizzard. The three of us checked the travel advisories. Stay put for the night, which for us meant the bottom of a nickel mine. The emergency rations had been used a year ago during the last blizzard, and not replaced. My job. So, the only food in our common fridge was three beers and the remains of a Fast Freddie’s Combo meal. When I thought about prime rib at the Maple Leaf, my stomach growled. 

Horst’s rebuff of Varia had been overshadowed by optical artifacts. It heartened me to know it took so little to steer her from her romantic course. Horst and I would be gone at the end of the month. I would feel better knowing Varia wasn’t pining for him down here in the bowels of the Earth. 

I lay on the floor of the temperature-modulated OMUD control room and adjusted the bubble wrap I had chosen for a pillow, considering whether my commitment to making this match could survive such an epic fail. 

Varia had volunteered to sleep in her own lab, but it was hotter than a summer day in Houston down there. I convinced her to join us in the control room.

“Did you eat all of Varia’s brownies?” I asked Horst.

“They were mine. So, yeah.”

He was leaning against the wall, reading. Varia, on the opposite wall, only pretended to read. Her eyes flitted from the pages of Environmental Microbiology to Horst’s face, the light from his tablet deepening the furrows of concentration there. He started to pick his nose, then apparently realized Varia was watching him and aborted the action with a brush to his cheek, as if something had tickled him. Varia’s dragons, maybe. 

“I saw something of interest today.” She said it as if she’d read my mind. 

Horst didn’t look up from his reading.

“I have irreversible corneal scarring from a recent surgery, and I—”

“She saw flies,” I said, realizing she was on the road to further embarrassment. “They must have ridden the elevator before winter set in. How long do flies live anyway?”

Horst gave me a pinched look, his mouth hanging open.

“Who cares, Margaret?”

“If flies can get down here,” I argued, “then Varia’s bacteria may be in jeopardy of contamination.”

“Archaea,” Varia corrected. She pushed her glasses up her nose. “But I do have double airlocks on that part of the tunnel. But, back to my eyes...” 

I gave her a subtle shake of my head.

She ignored me. After a lengthy preamble about her failed eye surgery and some optics lingo I’d never heard of, she told him what she’d seen. 

Horst stared at her with his forehead knotted up. “Do you know how unscientific you’re sounding? You’re the world’s leading expert in bacteria.”

“Archaea,” she corrected. “I’m not crazy, Horst.” 

Varia leaned closer to him and he drew back a little. She pithed him with her eyes. “We’re three and a half kilometers under solid bedrock, shielded from all electromagnetic interference so you can isolate the interaction of dark matter with baryonic matter.”

“Orphic matter,” Horst corrected. 

“I think you need to look at this scientifically,” Varia argued.

He finally roused himself from his stupor. “Maybe your brownies were...augmented, and you taste-tested one too many.”

Horst and I were both staring at her now. 

Her glasses magnified her eyes wildly as they flitted from Horst to me and back to him. “Betty Crocker was the sole augmentation...and a little almond extract,” she said defensively. “I think you need to test this. Right now! After all, you’re the leading expert in dark matter.”

“Orphic matter. Go to sleep, Varia,” he said, looking back at his tablet.

I spent that night on the bubble wrap considering the possibility that Varia might have something. What if we hadn’t detected orphic matter because the space we were testing didn’t have any orphic matter in it? We were assuming that orphic matter was ubiquitous like dark matter in general. What if it wasn’t?

My entomologist friend at the University of Waterloo came through for me. In two days, I had a package waiting for me at the Mattawan post office. A box full of flies. Whatever kind he had on hand, something he used in his experiments. The flies rode the mine elevator with me, and I hoped we could contain them, for Varia’s sake. Horst didn’t know about the flies. I’d come in early, hoping to start a data run before he got there, because he’d shut me down in an instant.

I found Varia already in her lab.

She’d been looking at her bact— archaea under the microscope, flipping her glasses on and off and trying to capture a view of them as her eyes transitioned to focus, just like she had with the flies. 

“Flowers,” she proclaimed with a little laugh. “Fields of them like those impressionist painters. They even move like they’re in a wind.”

I set the unopened box on her lab bench. “Did you bring the brownies?”

She nodded, then pointed to a box. “Oh, Margaret. Not in here. Not flies.”

“I’m going to set up a run before Horst gets here. Want to help?”

She agreed and followed me to the OMUD chamber with her brownies. I ignored the alarms that sounded upon opening the seals on the access panel. It was a tight fit, but I managed to squeeze inside and place a plate of Varia’s brownies on top of the detection plates— hexagonal containers of liquid xenon with diodes imbedded in gallium underneath. Then I opened the box of flies and resealed the panel.

The experiment was well under way when Horst finally got there. 

“Margaret, what in hell are you thinking? No, no, you’re not thinking, you’re just trying to ruin the equipment so it can never be repurposed. You can’t contaminate the chamber with—”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” I said, my eyes fixed on the camera monitoring the chamber. A cloud of flies buzzed around the plate of brownies.

“What do you mean?” He stood with hands on hips, a concentrated ball of paunch pushing at the buttons of his Hawaiian shirt. Scourge of the North? Hardly.

I explained, “We had nothing living in the detection chamber until now.” 

“Obviously,” he moaned. “Scheisse, Margaret. If you want to blow our remaining dollars, why not just throw a drunken bash? But this?” He indicated the brownies perched over his xenon platters.

“Maybe...” I knew I would sound as crazy as Varia. “Maybe orphic matter is a subset of dark matter because...it’s alive.”

The computer alarm sounded a gong. The first strike. 

I watched the monitors while Varia looked through the viewing port, flipping her glasses up and down. Every time we set up the experiment, it was the same. There was a delay of exactly 44.5 seconds from the time Varia saw the dragons to the first spike on the detectors. Six flies produced six peaks of between three and four electron volts. 

Within minutes, the computer was gonging incessantly, the audible alarm that a strike had occurred. I had to turn it off. I just watched the spikes on the real-time graph like a range of blessed mountains.

There are theories that dark matter universes are layered right on top of our own, undetectable, at least with current technology. 

“You designed these detectors perfectly,” I told Horst, “You were just looking at a vacuum.” 

All three of us sat at a corner table at the Maple Leaf that night. 

“I can’t stay long,” Horst said, ordering another cosmopolitan. “I have to start the paper.”

“But what was I actually seeing?” Varia asked. “What’s your scientific explanation?”

“I think living things have shadows of orphic matter,” I proclaimed. “Just as in our world, we can classify something animate or inanimate. It works in the realm of dark matter, too.”

“How do your detectors attempt to ‘see’ it?” Varia asked.

“We try to detect the energy released from random collisions of orphic matter and normal matter,” I said. “Our detectors aren’t perfect—”

“You just said they are pretty damned perfect,” Horst interjected. “Don’t start with me, Margaret.”

“If all living things have this...orphic shadow,” Varia said, “then things larger than flies should also have them.”

I got her meaning instantly. She was saying that we ourselves should have such shadows. I immediately felt the hair on my arms rise. What would they be like? Our own orphic shadows? I didn’t want to think about it. But when I looked back at Varia, she was looking at Horst over the top of her thick glasses, then sliding them back on. Off, on, off, on. 

Horst spread his arms with a flourish like a rock star posing for a fan photo.

“Oh my,” Varia said.

“What? Am I not orphically appealing?” he slurred. “Am I a dragon?”

“Not exactly,” Varia said and went back to sipping her daiquiri.

“I have an idea,” I said. “Another experiment.”

I concocted a plan to build lenses that would duplicate the focus of Varia’s wandering eye. It involved some false color imaging software loaded on a smartphone and attached to a series of specially ground lenses. By the time we had the lenses made, Horst was submitting the first paper on our detector findings and begging for extensions on our NSF funding. While I made adjustments to my “orphic visualizer” prototype, we continued to feed brownies to tiny dragons and record data that would secure our place in the world of particle physics. 

I machined a set of stainless-steel cooling tubes as frames for the lenses. This required critical measurements of focal lengths, a spatial corrector, and a dial that moved the primary lens in and out like a microscope platform. In addition, the misshapen lenses could be rotated, aligning with the eye of any given individual. The orphic shadow was then translated by my CCD detector, run through the colorizing software, and projected to the viewer. 

I followed the string of white Christmas lights down the tunnel leading to Varia’s lab, my boots sounding on the aluminum flooring that covered the tracks of the old ore carts. 

The module of her lab blocked the opening to the pool where her extremophiles lived. Double airlocks prevented contamination of its ecosystem. It felt like the stale breath of an underworld beast wafted down this tunnel, and perhaps it did. 

Entering the cavern was cumbersome, not to mention the level of radioactivity was anything but acceptable. Once in the airlock, I put on a sterile jumpsuit and mask, and then opened the door into the steam bath. 

The pool was no bigger than a hot tub, but colored brilliant aquamarine by the copper ions. Bubbles spiraled up from the rocks which were covered in a snot-like mat of orange archaea. Varia’s babies.

“I haven’t figured out how to take my glasses off under this mask,” she said, her voice a distorted hiss through the vocalizer. “I want to see what’s living here. In the orphic world, I mean.”

“I may have just the thing,” I said. “But you’re going to look like one of the sand people.” 

“Then it’ll be over soon,” she said.

Her headlamp swung back to the water.

“What will be over?”

“Our time together. Once you complete the device to mimic my vision, you won’t need to be down here with your detector.”

I got it. Horst and I would be gone. Off to scientific stardom, and she’d still be measuring the metabolic rates of orange biofilm.

Telling her she was too good for him would be of no help. I’d been in her spot before. Just getting on with saying goodbye was the best. 

“Your world is much bigger than this hole in the ground,” I said. “The world will know that you were the first to actually see dark matter. Just think.”

“I was going to name them after him, you know.”

“The bacteria?”

“Archaea,” she corrected. “Candidatus Desulforudis Mossbacherii.”

I ran my gloved hand over her shoulder and squeezed. “I’m not finished yet, Varia.”

I was starting to sweat. My time here was up. There was a reason I wasn’t a biologist— heat and stink.  

“I have something to show you,” I told Horst the next morning. He was hunched over his laptop, slaving over the paper that would change the world.

“What?”

“Follow me.”

He protested as I led him down the dank tunnel to Varia’s lab. 

We found her working at the pool. From the small viewing window, her headlamp revealed the subtle blend of colors marking different colonies of archaea and the poisonous steam that rose in gray ribbons. 

“Put this on,” I instructed Horst, holding out the fly-fishing vest. It was required to steady the prototype of the goggles I’d made. The two tubes were propped on dowels that were imbedded in the vest. “I’ll help with the goggles.”

“What?”

“You need to see.”

He strapped on the goggles, and I helped him steady the dowels in the grommets on the vest. 

“Look at Varia’s pool.”