Hindsight (Daedalus Book 1)

by Josh Karnes

  Chapter 3

  Isla Roca, Puerto Rico

  8:03 AM ADT

  At the request of Thermion’s CEO Carson Lee, Larry Duncan had assembled his entire team in the large conference room just to the right of the lobby of their Isla Roca facility. The message and other information Kyle had found inexplicably present in the oscilloscope the day before had sparked a chaotic firestorm of activity at Thermion, and Carson Lee himself had jumped on the company’s Gulfstream jet to fly down from their Arlington headquarters as soon as he had hung up Larry’s call. If this development was anything but an elaborate prank, then it was a monumental development that would change the very purpose of the Daedalus project. Carson Lee arrived in the room and the chatter among the team came to an abrupt halt. It was unheard of for the CEO of the company to address the team, and in particular in this type of meeting, which had the feeling of a working session and not a presentation.

  “Alright, everybody. None of us are leaving this room until we have a new plan for going forward in light of this new information. I know many of you have already become involved in this new development, but from this point forward you are all full-time on the task of reorienting us for our new project plan. Now, first I’d like Kyle Martin to bring us up to speed on what he found, and then Larry will lay out our new mandate. Kyle?” Carson Lee prompted. “Oh, and before you begin, Kyle, I’d like to remind everybody here: everything we are discussing is in the highest confidence. Not a word of this is to leave this facility. Kyle?”

  Kyle Martin sat up a little straighter at the conference table after being called on, and quickly the conference room’s projector showed the disorganized contents of Kyle’s laptop display on the pull-down screen. Kyle was an engineer and a scientist, neither comfortable nor skilled presenting to C-level staff. But he knew why he was on the hot seat.

  “Okay,” Kyle began as the screen displayed a simple text editor showing the contents of the note he had been presented with on the oscilloscope the day before. “Yesterday, while Antonio and I were doing the final checks on the gravium servo controller, the DSO crashed and when it came back from reboot, this message was the only thing on the screen.” The room began to buzz as the team members began to read the eerie note that was shown. “Of course, since it was a note written directly to me, I read it. As you can see, it says that there is an archive of data on the hard disk of the DSO that the team should read, and it intimates that this data archive comes from some time in the future. Almost two years to the day from today, in fact.

  “Now, I know what you are thinking and that’s what I thought too. Crazy, right? Well as some of you know, it’s not that crazy. I can’t explain exactly how it happened but after reading through a lot of this data, I think it’s pretty clear that two years from now we succeeded in creating a time loop with the Daedalus device, and the hard drive in the DSO was rewritten at that time with data that is on it now. Considering the fact that Antonio and I actively witnessed this scope suddenly change, and the data on the scope’s hard drive changed right before our eyes, there must be some credibility to this claim.”

  “Wait a minute,” Carl Jacobs said. “What do you mean, time loop? I thought we were doing GPS accuracy research here.” The room’s occupants put up a dull roar of commentary about this point and Larry Duncan cut in to settle them down.

  “It’s true,” Larry said, “what we are working on here is tangentially related to GPS accuracy. The tools we are building can be used to fine-tune the intensity of gravitational fields we can produce using the particle accelerator by creating micro black holes, and that by tuning those gravitational fields we can investigate the effects of gravity on GPS time accuracy. But the stretch goal of the Daedalus project has always been to use these controlled gravitational fields to create pathways through which we can move matter from one place to another nearly instantaneously.”

  Aaron West stood up. “A worm hole?” he replied, incredulously. “Do you seriously expect us to believe—”

  “Not exactly a worm hole,” Larry clarified. “More like a localized gravitational field, where time for the object in the field passes at a lower rate relative to the time for things further from the field, like the rest of the stuff on earth.”

  “But the amount of gravity that would be required to make a meaningful difference in time would be—”

  “Yeah, that’s what the gravium is for,” Kyle said, taking over the narrative. “Gravium is used to reduce the effect of these strong gravitational fields on other objects, so we can use this sort of space-time shortcut without crushing the thing we are trying to move,” he explained. “In theory, anyway. We haven’t made it work yet.”

  “Sounds like we have,” Carl said.

  “Okay, I’m getting to that,” Kyle continued. “The point is, we never intended to create a time loop. It was an accident. Let me get into what the data archive has in it.”

  “Keep it high-level,” Larry instructed his subordinate.

  “Right. High-level. Okay. Anyway, once I suspected something was up with the hard drive in the DSO, I called Laurie to come investigate. She found that the hard disk had been totally rewritten, and it contained a very compact Linux OS to just boot up and display the message you see on the screen, and the rest of the disk was filled with an enormous amount of data and notes from all of our research, including most of the material we already have now and are working with daily, plus more. It looks like the same kind of data but all of our research and findings for the next two years are in this archive.”

  A low murmur quickly descended into stunned silence, and Kyle allowed it to settle before continuing. “I haven’t read all of the data. No way I could have since yesterday. But I did spot check and skim, and found some things that stick out. It looks like we had completed the Daedalus device and we were in the process of testing it, trying to move one-centimeter carbon cubes across the lab. The cubes were not showing up where we expected them to, and in fact we only found one of them, from what I can tell. The one we found was inside of a log that was the original source of the carbon that they used to make it, back at Florida Scientific. Then, apparently I tried putting a little dent in my class ring with an impact punch and put it into the Daedalus portal, but before I could make the dent, it was already there. Same thing for Larry’s ring.”

  Kyle removed his class ring and set it on the table. Laurie picked it up and her eyes were fixed wide as she took in the ring. She said, “you mean this dent?”

  “Yeah. That dent. Apparently I put that dent in it sometime in the future and put the ring back in the portal. I can’t explain it any better than that. But there it is. So based on this theory that we were sending material back in time, we decided to try and send information back in time so we could accelerate our research. Looks like we tried it many times and it never worked, until we used the DSO’s hard drive.”

  “How is that even possible?” Carl asked.

  “Well, just like the class ring, we changed the hard drive’s contents, and then put it into the portal. It wound up back where it was in the past, which was yesterday, inside the DSO. But it was different. The data was changed on it. Just like my ring wound up back on my finger with the dent in it. I am not really sure how it works. Nobody has ever done this before.”

  “In reading through the contents of the hard drive,” Larry continued, “it looks like Kyle actually developed a theory about how this works. We still are trying to put the pieces together.”

  Still standing, Aaron raised his voice above the rising chatter and said, “So if what you are saying is true, then that means we must have eventually made the Daedalus work. So far we haven’t even finished putting it together so we can begin testing.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Larry said. “But this is where this whole problem gets very confusing. Sometime between now and two years from now, we will have completed the Daedalus device and we will be using it to transport objects, apparently back in time. And the data archiv
e on the hard drive contains all of our notes on how to build it, so we can now skip all of the trial and error and get it completed in just a few days rather than years. If I am correct, we have already constructed all of the pieces and have them mostly put together, and we were just treading lightly and cautiously testing because we know the risk is very high if we make a mistake. But with the data we have in hand, we know what the mistakes are and what works, so we can complete the project immediately with far less risk.”

  This was a point of great concern for Kyle. In fact, the implication in the statement that Larry had just made was one of Kyle’s greatest fears. An intense sense of dread had taken hold of Kyle from the moment he saw that message on the screen of the oscilloscope. Now, mixed with this dread was guilt, given the evidence that he had taken part in this experiment, or at least some future version of himself had done so. When Kyle signed on for the Daedalus project, it was clear that they did not intend to attempt actual time travel, but simply something akin to Star Trek’s “Warp” technology. They wanted to bend space and send objects through a shortcut, to use Einstein’s analogy. This was a crazy, ambitious plan to begin with. This was a new frontier, dealing with science and technology that had yet to be invented. They were making an attempt at application of what had been pure theory for most of a century. Kyle found this idea thrilling. It was like being an astronaut on the first moon mission; a dedicated effort to pierce through what was a hard barrier of human ingenuity, with full funding and support by not only the private company Thermion, but America’s government as well. But the bright line was that they didn’t want to fold space back on itself and attempt to send objects back in time.

  This was a critical distinction to Kyle because the risk to the so-called “fabric” of space-time when moving objects forward in time was, to his thinking, reasonably small. An object may exist today, and it will continue to exist tomorrow, contingent on what happens to that object through the passing of time. If you leave your car keys on the night stand when you go to bed, then they will still be there just as you left them when you wake up in the morning. It wouldn’t make much difference in a universal sense if they keys actually only aged a few minutes while you slept alongside them for eight hours. They will still exist.

  This question became only slightly more prickly in Kyle’s mind when considering moving data, or people. It’s not as if someone like Carson Lee could use Daedalus to try to live forever. The whole concept was limited by the time passing at different relative rates depending on gravity. So if a thing—or a person—went into the Daedalus portal then they might be able to pop out halfway across the planet, in a place that would have normally taken them hours or days of travel to get to, but to those not in the portal, only fraction of a second would have passed. This was the whole point of Daedalus. There is no way for a would-be sci-fi villain to use Daedalus for these types of human selfish purposes.

  At its core, then, Daedalus was a device that had the potential of making travel or transit across actual space happen extremely quickly. In theory then, it may eventually unlock the potential for man to explore the far edges of space, even if only to observe. For example, if an object could be moved from one place to another faster than the speed of light, then why not light itself? Why couldn’t Daedalus’ technology be used to create a new generation of telescopes, allowing man to see, in real time or near real time, the edges of space that are millions of light years away from earth? Given sufficient development time, these things were possible.

  But actually making objects, information, or people travel back in time was not possible. At least, it was not supposed to be possible. It was not the goal of Daedalus, even at the limits of the project’s ambitions, to make travel into the past a reality. However, it appeared now that they had accidentally created a device that not only had the potential of sending objects and information into the past, but he had physical evidence that they had accomplished this feat. For Kyle, this was a terrifying new development.

  The chatter in the conference room was now growing to a new level, since most of the team members could not help but to begin talking with their colleagues about the implications and possibilities implied by what Larry had just said. Kyle wanted to steer the conversation in a productive direction, but he had to nearly shout to bring the meeting back to order.

  “It is true, as far as we can tell, that the data contained on the DSO’s hard drive may give us information to help shortcut some of our development work. But I want to make something very clear right now. It was not some distant third party group of people who did this work and sent information back. It was us. We are the very people who did the work to bring about a semi-functioning Daedalus. So whatever is contained in those records, those are discoveries and innovations we would eventually make on our own without assistance. This is not a miracle of solving all of our problems that we are not capable of solving. This is just revealing to us the solutions that we would have eventually come up with anyway. We are just going to be able to get to some of the answers with less effort. We still have to proceed with caution. This device we are building has the potential to break things in our universe that we don’t even know exist.”

  “Right, Kyle. We still have to proceed with caution. But we now know what many of the wrong answers might be, and just like you said, we can trust this data because we came up with it ourselves,” Larry said while giving Kyle a disapproving look.

  “On the contrary, Larry. Not only can’t we trust it because since we came up with it, like you said, ourselves, but we also can’t judge what errors still exist. It’s a huge mistake to assume the answers in this data archive are the right answers. It is just a snapshot of our thinking at the time when the archive was made. I would like to point out: Daedalus was not working correctly at the time we made this archive, some time two years from now. Sending this data back was an act of desperation from our future selves. This is no triumph. This is just a chance for us to pick up where we left off, which is with a broken Daedalus that has accidentally created a time loop that we don’t know how to control, using a system that we designed and thought would produce a movement across only space a few hundred feet across the lab. This is far from a solution. It’s much more like a confused physics student, unable to solve the problem, and then presenting all of their work to the professor to ask where their mistake is so they can move on. Only in this case, we are the confused physics students, and instead of an appeal to our professor, we have elected to present our work to a younger version of ourselves, who have not yet taken the class. Or the prerequisite class! We are just not prepared to continue the work shown in that archive. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

  Kyle’s rebuke of Larry’s statement left the room silent. Kyle was extremely well respected by his team. The Daedalus team represented here in the conference room was made up of a broad mixture of rock stars in their varying disciplines, each of them having a particular aptitude for physics. They had all been hand selected due to their understanding of space-time theory in addition to their other merits. But among this team, Larry Duncan knew that Kyle was maybe the only person who could potentially understand all of this. Kyle had an intuitive sense of space-time that was on a level above everyone else in the room, including his boss. Over the years, Larry had learned not to ignore Kyle’s often troublingly moralist objections, and he guessed that not many in this room of experts would take Kyle’s concerns lightly. But still, what Kyle had just stated was toxic to the development of the project. Larry knew that this data archive was a gold mine. It was like manna from Heaven. Kyle may not be wrong often, and he might not be wrong about this, but brazenly airing his concerns among the mixed team was not the right thing to do if they had any chance of moving the Daedalus project forward.

  “Okay, Kyle. We see your point,” Larry said. “However, we can’t stop working just because we don’t know what the outcome might be. This is the nature of science. We have a wealth of new information that will help us mov
e forward. And on that note, we have a plan of action.”

  Larry disconnected Kyle’s computer from the projector and connected his own. Showing on the screen now was a slide with an organizational flowchart. Each of the team members instinctively began scanning the slide for their name to try and anticipate what assignment Larry was about to lay out.

  “As you can see, starting immediately we will commence final assembly of the Daedalus subsystems. The leadership team of Kyle, Laurie and myself will make sure we follow up on any questions or failed tests that are indicated in the data archive as we continue to study the mountain of data. There are two years’ worth of notes in there, it will take us some time to get through all of it. But we are beginning near the end to commence the final assembly of, as Kyle put it, a partially-functional Daedalus device. Each of you can see your assignment on this chart. I won’t go through it in detail. I will email this to each of you so you can know exactly where to get started. Aaron and Carl, you will oversee the assembly and right now everyone here is a technician until further notice. We are in assembly mode. This is not going to be just Antonio and Kyle hand-tuning everything in the lab. We have a good idea of what things need to be changed or redone to get them to work correctly without having to go through the trials we would normally do, and Kyle and Laurie will oversee all of that, Kyle with hardware and Laurie with software. The goal is to have Daedalus up and ready to test by this time Thursday. That means we have about forty-eight hours from now. It can be done but it will be heads-down to make it happen. Everyone clear?”

  Heads nodded around the room as some continued to squint at the chart and others made notes or began to gather their things, sensing the meeting was nearing the end.

  “Alright then, let’s get to it. We have no time to waste,” Larry instructed. “Kyle, Laurie, if you could stay for a minute.”

  Kyle wondered, right at that moment, if this was where the ambition of man exceeded his ability, and if this marked the beginning of the end of the world.