Timelines

by Bob Blink

  But I had thought of a possible way to recover it, yet have it there for Kurt’s brother. “What if we took it, used it to get as much from it as possible, and then put it back?” I asked. “It would still be there when Kurt’s brother is supposed to find it. That would give us almost two years to use it before the downtime window moves forward to the time when he will stumble upon it!” I waited for a reaction.

  Carol wasn’t convinced. “What if the moment you take it, the whole time line is fouled up. Things might be altered, and you won’t have a chance to put it back and re-establish the existing time line. Are you sure that can’t happen?”

  I had to admit I didn’t have an answer for that possibility. “Okay, that’s one for the meeting. But. . . . .”

  Now it was Naiya’s turn to interrupt. “You know where he found it don’t you? She asked.

  “In Berlin,” I answered. “Kurt told me the address and described where.” I looked at her knowing there had to be something behind her question.

  “I had Martin check,” she answered. Martin was another of our historians. “The building corresponds to the complex where the German High Command had their headquarters. What are your chances of sneaking in their headquarters in the middle of World War II to search for it? Even if we think your plan of removing it and then placing it back will work, there is no chance to get it until after the war ends. That will only give you a couple of months with it before it is supposed to be found by Kurt’s brother. And we have to wait almost two years from now until the time in that era progresses up to the end of the war. We have a lot of time to consider our options!”

  Damn it! “You’re positive?” I asked her, knowing she would have done everything to verify the correctness of the information. I was just making wistful noises. There appeared to be no good options. She didn’t even bother with an answer, just nodded.

  Just then my cell phone chirped. I looked and noted an encoded message from Dave, who was supposed to still be downtime. I decrypted the message and read it. It was short, but emphatic. “Dave just learned about Kurt’s death,” I informed them. “He has something urgent to show us.”

  Chapter 18

  Monday, 29 May 2006

  Seattle, Washington

  The food in our cafeteria was exceptional. Carol had hired a professional chef as opposed to some short order cook to oversee the preparation of meals. As a result, most employees ate in rather than making the noon run to one of the numerous restaurants or fast food joints down the road a couple of miles. Always available were the standard chicken and miniature filet steaks, but in addition each day featured a unique dish from somewhere around the world. The selections were repeated, but it seemed to take close to two months before the daily special was offered again. Today it was Nasi Goreng, a fried rice dish from Indonesia, filled with a variety of vegetables and meat. Taking pity on our American sensibilities, the chef restricted the use of the fiery peppers so that all could handle the spicy dish. But he also made available plenty of the little green chabe rauit peppers, a small bite of which could clear the sinuses of the unprepared and send them rushing for a glass of water. Most didn’t know that a little bread worked far better, absorbing the hot oil from inside the mouth, whereas water simply flowed by, spreading it around a little. It was a dish I loved, having been introduced to it in Jakarta some years before. Our chef had managed to capture the real flavor unlike most of the Indonesian restaurants I had tried over the years. Today, however, I ate mechanically, merely shoveling the food into my mouth while my mind wandered aimlessly, trying to make sense of the mornings events.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder, and turned to see my wife’s concerned eyes boring into my own. “Are you alright dear?” she asked, genuine concern obvious in her voice. She knew how close I had grown to Kurt in such a short time.

  “Just trying to come to grips with the folly of bringing the man home, just to see him killed.” Bitterness was clear in my voice. “It would have been better if we had never learned about his finding my gun.” I knew better, of course. Without that motivator, I would have continued to ignore the fact we were holding him downtime, and he would have died painfully of the cancer that had been eating his insides.

  “At least he had the chance to see his daughter,” Carol added, trying to shift the direction of the conversation to the positive, but actually reminding us all that the daughter had died as well. It hadn’t been our fault. In a way we had provided the opportunity by bringing Kurt here, and reuniting him with his daughter. None of us could have guessed something like this might happen. We had thought the full focus of attention was on me, not anyone else. Shows how wrong one can be.

  “I keep wondering how things might have worked out if Kurt and I could have connected years ago instead of being enemies. I never understood why he had it in for us. Maybe I should have tried to understand, rather than simply deflect him away. Can you imagine how much we might have accomplished by now if we had been allies the past decade instead of adversaries?” It was one of those times I really wished we knew how to use the time machine better. If only we could go back, and change that relationship. Of course we couldn’t.

  Before either of the ladies could respond, Dave wandered into the dining room. We could see that he was anxious to talk, which was something that we couldn’t do here. Most of those around us had no idea of the real reason for our existence or of the tragedy this morning. We hadn’t finished eating, but none of us objected when Dave urged us to return to Carol’s conference room.

  Back upstairs and locked behind the secure doors Dave initiated the meeting. “I heard about Kurt when Mike checked in to get some additional security help. I’m sorry Jim,” he said looking my way. “I know you and he were actually becoming friends.” He turned and looked at Carol. “The trip to Los Angeles is obviously off for tomorrow.”

  I wondered where he was headed with this. Nothing he had said so far justified a hurry-up trip into town, and a special meeting. Carol was also curious, but held her comment and simply nodded, agreeing with his assessment.

  “Damn,” he said. “I’m already meandering. Look,” he said, suddenly more focused. “Kurt gave me something. Asked me not to say anything unless it became necessary. I think he wanted to see how you handled things, knowing that he was the only link to the translator device.” He looked square at me. “He told me how to find the device if something happened to him.”

  “What!” I said, jumping up from my chair. “You know where it is?”

  “Errr, not exactly,” Dave hesitated, a little taken aback by my reaction. “But he gave me clues that are supposed to help us find it. Here, look at this.” He handed me a small piece of plastic, roughly the size of a credit card but maybe three times as thick. It had a picture of Kurt and his daughter, a couple of years old I’d guess.

  I turned it over a couple of times, trying to determine what Dave was getting at. “So?” I looked at him, the question still on my lips.

  “I scanned it back at the base. Kurt told me what to do, but I wanted to check it first. It’s really very well done. Better than the commercial versions I used to see.”

  I still didn’t know what he was talking about. The others looked confused as well. I handed it back to Dave. “Explain,” I demanded.

  Taking the plastic photo back, he turned it in his hands and pressed a thumb against one of the faces. “He said to press here,” Dave said as he applied pressure to the flat side of the plastic. After a second there was a slight ‘snap’ and a piece of plastic in the center separated from the edges. Smiling, Dave handed me the piece that had broken out of the center.

  My heart picked up its pace a bit. “It looks like a key,” I said. Hopefully I looked back at Dave.

  “That’s exactly what it is,” he responded. “A while back you could buy spare car or house keys cut into what looked like a credit card. Hell, maybe you still can. I just haven’t seen them in years. Made ‘em easy to carry in your wallet against loss of your pr
imary set. They were pretty cheap, and you could see the key shape in the card. This, however, is a special deal. The key was completely concealed, and it’s a rugged key. The plastic is something special.”

  “The picture was camouflage,” Carol stated. “You say you got this from Kurt? I thought we took everything from him before putting him in confinement?”

  “Somehow he hid this from you” Dave responded. “He had it with him before we got back to the base. That’s where he gave it to me.”

  “He told you this is the key that unlocks wherever he hid the translator device?” I could feel hope being reborn.

  Dave nodded enthusiastically. “Now all we have to do is find where.”

  Naiya jumped in. “What the hell does that mean? He didn’t tell you where? That’s means we are no better off than before!”

  “But he gave me clues how to find out” Dave insisted. “First, he said we need to get the encrypted files off his computer. We need to decrypt them. Somehow he felt that wouldn’t be a problem for you.”

  It wouldn’t be. It might have taken the federal people a week with their best people and equipment. We had computers and software unlike anything they could dream of. I’m sure Carol’s uptime machines could break the code quickly. Still. . . . .

  “But the Feds broke the code. There was nothing there. It was all a scam,” I added.

  “They didn’t go far enough.” And they didn’t know what to look for,” Dave insisted.

  “What else did he tell you?” Naiya asked, now very curious.

  “He told me to look at the 1946 pictures. Then he said the key is ASCII ‘CRAMPTON’ as a mask.”

  Carol reached for her phone. “We need to get John in here,” she said while punching the auto dial button for John’s number.

  John is our key computer wizard. Not only savvy on current machines, he had become familiar with the uptime hardware and software that Carol had brought back. When he was available, he was usually at the downtime base where we kept most of the equipment. We had installed a few of the incredibly powerful machines here in the building, carefully hidden away, which John maintained as well. Conveniently, he was here at Epoch today.

  “Just when did this happen?” I asked. “What prompted him to suddenly open up to you, and pass along these interesting tidbits? And how come you never said anything?”

  “He told me during the attack on the way home. For a while there it looked pretty grim, and we were hiding there together by the cart after Dix was wounded. That’s when he slipped me the picture, and gave me the instructions on where the information was hidden. Just in case something happened to him. He asked me not to say anything unless it became necessary. With everything going so well there didn’t seem any reason to go against his wishes. Besides, we didn’t have the files needed to search for the information anyway. Maybe I should have said something to you anyway, but it didn’t seem necessary at the time.”

  It didn’t really make sense to me. Why didn’t he just tell one of us the location? Perhaps in his mind it represented some form of a test. Maybe he wanted to see if we were up to the task of finding it. If we were all we claimed to be, with access to uptime technology, then it shouldn’t present a significant problem for us. When all this happened, he still had to be a bit uncertain about us. Well, we’d never know for certain now.

  Naiya was thinking out loud while we waited for John to arrive. “You are saying that there is something hidden in the picture content of the files for 1946. What is special about 1946?”

  Carol’s intuition was on the mark again. “That’s the year his brother found the translator device,” she said without thinking.

  Just then there was a short knock, and John walked in. These days one has a stereotypical picture of the computer nerd. One expects him to be sloppily dressed, with long hair, and living on a diet of coke and fast food. John was six three, weighted two hundred and twenty pounds, and most of it was muscle. An ardent swimmer, he had just missed making the U.S. Olympic team a few years back. A vegetarian, he was also one of the most conscientious dressers I had ever know. While most of the staff was happy that ties were optional, I couldn’t remember ever seeing John without his. If this makes him sound a bit uptight, it shouldn’t. Easy going, he had a reputation for a fabulous sense of humor and a quick wit.

  Bringing John up to speed took only a few minutes. When Carol was finished summarizing, he looked at Dave. “That’s all he said to you?”

  Dave nodded affirmatively.

  John didn’t look at all fazed by the information. “It sounds pretty simple,” was his comment. “Kurt used multiple layers of coding to hide one thing inside of another. He also did it in such a way that anyone looking would think they had been setup when they broke the first layer, and most likely wouldn’t look any further. He also was a bit clever with how he hid the information. Rather than bury it in the text, which is where most people would look, he manipulated the photographic information that is a bit more subtle. He also used a key, which would be difficult for anyone else to guess, and there are an infinite number of possible variations.”

  “What is this “ASCII” key all about,” asked Naiya. This is not something she had grown up with, and while she was an avid user of computers, she had never been exposed to some of the details behind their operation.

  “Alphanumerics,” John explained, “letters of the alphabet in other words, all have a code assigned to them. The computer reads the code. The letter itself really has no meaning to the computer. Here, let’s do an example.”

  He stood and walked over to the white board and pulled it close to the conference table where we all sat. “Take the first letter of Jim’s last name, as that is supposed to be part of the key is deciphering this code.” He wrote the letter ‘C’ on the board. “If you look this letter up in an ASCII table, you will find the number 67, at least for the upper-case character. It’s 99 for the lower-case ‘c’, so there are a couple of options to consider. For now, assume the number 67 is the correct variation. The ‘67’ is for us humans again. We can remember a number like ‘67’. However, the computer only thinks in “1’ and ‘0’.

  This was basic computer 101. I was getting impatient, but let him continue at his own pace.

  “For the computer,” John continued, “each number, using a base sixteen or hexadecimal system, is represented by four bits, each bit being either a one or a zero.” He took a minute to draw a table on the white board.

  Bit # 1 2 3 4

  ‘1’: 0 0 0 1

  ‘2”: 0 0 1 0

  ‘3”: 0 0 1 1

  ‘4”: 0 1 0 0

  ‘5’: 0 1 0 1

  ‘6’: 0 1 1 0

  .

  .

  ‘F’: 1 1 1 1

  He stood back and looked at our group to see if we were following him. “The ‘F’ is a hexadecimal number, just like the ‘6’, not a letter of the alphabet,” he explained.

  Convinced we were following along, he continued. “Thus the ‘6’ part of the ASCII 67, which remember represents the letter “C,” to the computer is really 0-1-1-0. Similarly, the ‘7” part of the ASCII code is 0-1-1-1. Put it all together and the letter ‘C’ becomes the following to the computer.” Once again he wrote on the board.

  0-1-1-0-0-1-1-1-0

  “So what does that do for us,” Naiya asked, starting to get lost in this letter, number jumble. “How does it help us find out what is in the file?”

  “Let’s go a little further,” John insisted. “What we have so far are the bits for the first letter. Or at least one option for the first bits. We will still have to decide whether capital or lower case letters are being used. Now, we can do the same type of conversion for each of the letters of Jim’s last name. Each will have an eight-digit string, similar to this one. Notice anything interesting?” he asked.

  All of us shook our heads, not sure what he meant?

  “Jim’s last name, ‘Crampton’, has eight letters, each with 8 bits when converted
. Thus, the whole name is 64 bits long. A very fortuitous number in the computer world.”

  “So now we have a string of bits for Jim’s name. What do we do with it?” asked Naiya impatiently.

  “Ok,” responded John, realizing his audience didn’t share his enthusiasm for all the details. “I won’t know for sure until we experiment, but since we are told this is a mask, and the information is stored in picture format, here’s what I suspect.” He paused for a minute and broke into another brief technical description. “Picture data is stored as a bunch of pixels, each pixel representing one printed dot for the picture. The dot contains all the color information for that dot. I’m betting these pictures are 32 bit pixels. That means 32 bits of information for each of the dots. If we take the first two bits of the picture information, break it out into the bit-pattern, we will have a second string of 64 bits. Now we take the mask string of bits and line them up. Here, let me draw one more string, but I’ll only show the first eight bits.”

  He erased most of the board and created two more lines of numbers.

  Picture data 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1

  Mask Data 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1

  Resulting Data 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1

  “The first line represents a few bits of an imaginary pixel,” he explained. “The second line is the mask we discussed earlier. The mask is used to decide if the pixel data should be retained or discarded. If the mask has a “1,” then that bit of the pixel data is retained, be it either a “0” bit or a “1’ bit. If the mask bit is a zero, then the value of zero is used, regardless of what the picture data might be.”

  He gave us a minute to catch up, then continued. Being a 64-bit mask, it will ‘decode’ two pixels worth of data at a time. By repeating the mask over the entire picture, we can retrieve the bits that make up the desired message.”