"Wormholes," I prompted again. "Tell me. Wormholes are a thing now??"

"They've always been a thing," responded Lakshmi, skirting around the question. "Just... most people don't notice them."

"Okay, but why are you noticing them? You've obviously been tracking at least one of them. Does this have anything to do with your android, or—"

"Maybe we should show them the map," Trochee piped up behind me. I couldn't help but smile internally at the correct pronoun usage.

"Maybe that's a good idea," Lakshmi said after a short pause. She crossed the room to stand in front of Isaac, taking out the device with which she had controlled him before.

There was a click, and Isaac's head jerked up to survey Lakshmi, Trochee, and I with the same blank stare as before.

"Hey Isaac, could you show Micah the map?" Lakshmi requested.

"Of course."

Isaac stood, walked to the shelf, where he took down a device that looked somewhat like a holographic projector—a dome-shaped apparatus about the size of a soccer ball—but not a model I'd ever encountered. There was something very uncanny about Isaac's movements: I could have easily mistaken him for a human, but there was still a smooth, unearthly quality about him. Maybe it was the way that he never made any unnecessary movements. Trochee, on the other hand, was fidgeting with the hem of his jacket.

The three of us watched as Isaac took some cables, plugging one end into the projector and the other into a port on his forearm. Then he locked eyes with Lakshmi.

"Should I turn it on?"

"Go ahead."

Isaac flipped a switch, and the projector came to life, displaying a 3D image of the Earth, hovering before us. The hologram was a transparent blue, not unlike those you might see in Star Wars or some other science fiction movie. Even so, the image was much clearer than that of most projectors. Perhaps this device was one of Trochee's?

"What exactly am I looking at?" I asked, eyes scanning the 3D Earth before me. Other than bright dots placed at various locations, the globe looked relatively normal.

"This is a map of all the wormholes we've encountered." Lakshmi indicated the dots. "Isaac, zoom into California."

The globe distorted, suddenly displaying a more 2D image of only California. There were five dots—three clustered around the Bay Area, and two further out.

"We're here." Lakshmi pointed to San Francisco. "The most readily available wormhole is just down the street, here." She indicated one of the lights. "Then Kramer Hill is a little bit south, about a ten-minute journey from here, and there's one in a Taco Bell parking lot in Oakland."

"Why so many in one place?" The dots on the Earth map had not seemed particularly random—there were lots in North America and Europe, but fewer in Asia or South America and almost none in Africa.

"This is just the wormholes we've discovered. There are probably tons more, but these are the ones we've actually tracked down and know where they lead."

Isaac had switched the hologram back to the globe view. I peered at it. "Wow. That's a lot."

"We have a lot of time," Lakshmi replied.

"So you've been to all of these places?"

"Yup."

"And how do you discover the wormholes in the first place?"

"Trochee and Spond," Lakshmi said, "gave us technology that can detect the rough presence of wormholes. You see, there are these particles called inverterons—"

"Inverterons. My sweep detected some of those—"

"Yeah, they're known to humans, but technology like your sweep can only detect them at super close proximities. Which is why the US government has never discovered a wormhole and likely won't anytime soon."

"Okay." I took a deep breath. "Right. So inverterons—do they come out of wormholes?"

"Kind of. They hold them open. The more inverterons, the longer a wormhole can stay open. And the more detectable it is."

The conversation had definitely piqued my curiosity. "What's the... strongest wormhole you've ever found?"

"Strongest isn't really the right word. Long-lasting is better."

"Okay, so what was the most—"

"Probably that one in Finland," Trochee offered.

"It was in an abandoned mine just north of Helsinki." Lakshmi's eyes were gleaming. "Stayed open for eight whole days, on average, though that tended to waver a bit. Then it would close for two and a half days, then open again. Fortunately no one used the mine; I don't think anyone knew about the wormhole but us. And it was quite a trek to actually get to the wormhole's location; we had to go through all these tunnels..."

"And do you know where it leads?"

"Yup! We throw probes through all the wormholes and they give us coordinates."

"And where does it lead?" I inched closer, excited.

"About fifty meters above southern Greenland."

"Wow."

"Pretty random, huh?"

"Not what I was expecting."

"And we definitely haven't found all of them yet!" Trochee interjected, grinning. His previous unexplained anxiety had apparently vanished. "Like... we detected a pretty high-energy one in Iraq, but we don't really want to go check it out..."

I chuckled. "Understandable."

"It's all pretty crazy," continued Trochee. "Did you know, some wormholes only open once every year? There's one in Arizona that opens for three hours every two years... but it leads to the center of the Earth, so it's not particularly useful. Or the one we tracked to Pakistan only to find that it's erratic and there's no way to tell when it will open. Or the New York to Japan one that opens for five years every fifty years...."

"The gist of it is," Lakshmi explained, "there are a bunch of wormholes that go a bunch of different places. We go around and map them. Isaac stores all the data in his brain."

So that was why they created Isaac. At least that question had now been answered. "And—you four are the only ones who are part of this?"

"Part of it? Yes. Know about it? No, we have a couple other friends who help us out sometimes and are in on the whole thing. For example, I've got a friend who lives in Beijing and helps us track some of the East Asian wormholes."

I nodded slowly. Okay, so wormholes were a thing. Human technology was a lot more advanced than I ever would have guessed. In any other circumstance, I wouldn't have believed it. And yet—everything Lakshmi did seemed so legitimate. I'd swept the building; I knew something was going on. And if it weren't about wormholes, why would she say it was? It was a much too risky lie.

Yet there was still so much missing from the picture. Who was Trochee, really? Why did he and Spond have such advanced tech? And where did they get it?

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed one of the dots on the map slowly pulsating. It seemed to be the one closest to us. I raised an eyebrow at Lakshmi, and she grinned.

"Blinking light means the wormhole's open." She switched off the projector suddenly, walking towards the door. "We have fifteen minutes. Isaac, stay here."

"What's going on—?" I followed Lakshmi to the door.

Her grin widened. "Micah, I want to show you your first wormhole."