“Yeah?” Bradley followed him towards the centre of the structure. Once inside they walked around the curving interior boundary, taking in the expansive view through the circular glazed floor at the centre.
“Never gets old,” Gordon stopped walking and patted one of the new long-lens security cameras pointing down through the glass, “Hardware’s in place, just need the software. The USV’s very own Eye in the sky.”
“About damn time!” Bradley grinned.
“Yeah, the electrical repairs took priority so -”
“Is that why you got me up here?” Bradley interrupted with a gleam in his eye, “Is the Eye ready for some late-night snoopin’?”
“Ha ha! No, there’s something else. It’s the sunlight system.”
Bradley pictured the generators and the banks of heavy-duty lighting elements that surrounded the Eye’s circular structure.
“OK, Gordo, what’s up?”
“I’ve been looking into the power anomalies,” Gordon began.
“And?”
“Well, the first incident appeared to be a glitch. It looked like a cascade overrun of the fusion cells’ diffraction grating, but then it corrected.”
“As they’re supposed to, right?” Bradley checked.
“Right,” he seemed hesitant, “Now, the second incident appeared to coincide with the disturbance out at the lake. The one when you first arrived here?”
“Yeah, well I never saw the whole lake thing,” Bradley had been in handcuffs inside a carriage at the time, but he’d heard the exaggerated stories, “Go on, the second incident.”
Gordon drew a deep breath.
“OK, during the emergency arrivals, we’d boosted the sunlight system to maximum and that’s when the power anomaly appeared to happen. I had been thinking that it was some sort of generator E.M. containment fault, coupled with some sort of sonic interaction with the lake…”
Bradley looked down through the central glass to see the flat surface of the lake directly below them.
“… maybe a standing-wave reinforcing the feedback. It’s a bit of a stretch, I know, but it would match the ‘solid-water’ that people reported seeing. The timings seemed to fit, and it correlated with the safety shut down that followed.”
Bradley recalled the blackout within certain sections of the USV after he’d first arrived, but it all appeared to be a part of the general chaos of sealing the facility.
Gordon cleared his throat.
“Looking at the generator diagnostic recorder for the event, the only thing that I could confirm was the presence of a strong electromagnetic field that was not in alignment with the generators.”
“Great,” Bradley exhaled hard, “You’re sayin’ we gotta take the sun offline?”
“What?” said Gordon, apparently confused, “No, that’s not what I’m saying. Look, come over here.”
Gordon led the way to a point further around the Eye’s circumference and Bradley followed. Bradley suddenly had an odd feeling of suspicion.
“Why’d you get me up here?”
“I saw you playing with the stars,” Gordon shrugged as he continued to walk, “I know your company devised the generators so I thought -”
“Have you told the other Council members about this?” Bradley checked. If he was about to implicated in something, it might be easier to cover it up by dealing with this one individual.
“No, not yet. Do you want me to radio someone else?”
Bradley smiled, “No, it’s OK. Let’s see if us two can sort this thing out.”
They arrived at Gordon’s personal workspace; a small segment of the room’s curved interior, populated with a mass of disassembled electronics.
“A few minutes ago,” Gordon turned on an oscilloscope display, “I started picking up strong electromagnetic interference again. Exactly the same pattern as before.”
Gordon pointed to the display.
A circle filled the screen but there was also a faint line, running diagonally from its centre to the upper right. At the intersection of the line and circle, there was a dot where the screen’s phosphorescence glowed more brightly.
“I don’t get it Gordo, if the generator’s getting all messed up again,” he struggled, “then surely we gotta take it offline?”
“Bradley,” Gordon frowned and pointed through the central glass floor, “It’s night. The sun is off. But we’re still getting the pattern.”
It suddenly dawned on him. The generators were idling but the interference was still there. He felt his attention being drawn to the oscilloscope.
He knew he recognised the circular pattern.
“Wait a… I’ve seen this before,” he walked to the display and tapped at the screen, “I…”
Where the inspiration came from he couldn’t be sure, but it was persistent. Bizarrely, he also knew the exact formula associated with it.
“That there,” he tapped again, “is Cos-squared theta plus Sine-squared theta sums to Unity.”
Gordon simply stared at him and blinked.
“Bradley, how can -”
“I dunno how I know it,” he interrupted, “But it’s in my head. I know this from someplace.”
Perhaps it was the beer he’d been drinking, but suddenly the exact required memory presented itself in full clarity: a scruffy lab with a vibrant pink flower in the corner.
“I only seen this here ‘Unity’ picture one time before, Gordo,” Bradley smiled at his own feat of recall, “it was on a Chronomagnetic Field analyser that -”
“A kroner what?” Gordon shook his head, “What’s a -”
“Above your need-to-know, it don’t matter,” Bradley now made another connection and his temper suddenly flared, “Son of a bitch!”
Gordon actually backed away from him, “What?”
Bradley felt all the old feelings of resentment and bitterness rapidly rising. Even here, she’d found a way to interfere. Again.
“Get Monica Walker up here. Now!”
Gordon backed away a little further, offering up open palms, presumably in an attempt to pacify him.
“But what about the power sys-”
“Get her up here!” he snapped, “Gag her, bind her, put a bastard Peace Keeper on her if you have to! I don’t care, just get her up here, now!”
MESSAGE
DAY06 : 13SEP2033
In the early hours of the sixth day, Kate rewound her father’s message to begin at page one.
Inside a small rectangle, alongside the page number, the first of the binary codes read:
‘1011’
Using her father’s Morse parallel this became:
‘. _ . .’
She visualised the diagram they’d used when she was just a child.
“L” she spoke to the empty room.
There were ninety-nine more letters to go. In the Hab buildings, where she’d spent several weeks with her father, it would have been a simple matter to grab a pencil and scribble down each letter on a scrap of paper. Here aboard the Node, her room had no such practical resources and so she resorted to opening a small jotter application on the laptop. After decoding the message, she would commit it to memory and then delete the digital copy.
She typed ‘L’ and moved on to the next letter, ‘000’.
Having only three digits, she knew this translated into three levels up the Morse tree. She made the appropriate mental move, ‘_ _ _’ and added the letter ‘O’ to the jotter. After the first four letters had been transcribed she looked at the short collection and stopped.
‘L O K T’
“Hello Katie,” she read phonetically, wanting to laugh and cry at the same time. When she’d played code games with her father he’d often used those four letters to indicate that his message was in a code. She suspected he had a similar code with her mother; Kate had sometimes seen notes with ‘I C U’ written on them, but she had respectfully left them alone.
The sound of feet approaching her door made her pause her translation.
She’d grown so used to feeling on edge, that her reaction to unseen footsteps was almost a conditioned response. She listened carefully and found that she could now discern information that would have been invisible to her before the metathene had triggered her changes. She could hear that the footwear had hard soles and, judging by the volume increase per step taken, she could even estimate the stride length; it was a tall person. The footsteps passed her door and receded along the corridor.
Obviously, she thought, her new analytical skills were still in the process of adjustment; peripheral events were intruding on her central focus. She found herself wondering if Miles Benton had actively developed a technique for managing sensory priority during his time as an ego-morph, or if his senses had simply evolved to adapt.
Putting the thought aside, she refocussed on the task, patiently adding each new letter to the jotter. The message had obviously needed to fit a bandwidth of one hundred characters, so to compress the information into the available space, her father had made efficiencies. Words within sentences were not separated, but occasionally he’d left the box of binary numbers blank, denoting a change in sentence. Only when she’d finished all one hundred characters did she consider the message as a whole.
Lokt
Pittmanbarneskillednapier
Protectfieldboundaryinsidebiomag
Createabetterworldthanus
Weloveyoukt
His last sentence could have saved an entire letter by saying ‘I love you KT’, but he’d written ‘We’; he was telling her one last time that both her parents loved her. The sentence before that was an expression of both hope and regret; hope that when the Node completed its journey she could build something new, and regret that the present world had been unable to achieve it for her. Despite everything he had done, it was an apology that he hadn’t done better.
Kate sniffed and blinked several times to clear her watery eyes.
His first and presumably most important message was that General Napier had been killed by both Bradley Pittman and Alfred Barnes. Her father was warning her of Alfred’s cold capabilities, something she was already acutely aware of, but for different reasons.
Pittman had not made it aboard the Node, so presumably could do no more harm to her, yet her father had expended valuable digital bits to warn her. She allowed the quandary to be absorbed by her mental ocean, perhaps a significant convergence of wave patterns would present itself in time.
She re-read the third sentence.
‘Protect field boundary inside biomag’.
As far as she was aware, Biomags did not emit a Chronomagnetic Field. Working in tandem with Anna Bergstrom’s isotope, they were an almost passive device that shaped the flow of the Field in the wearer’s immediate vicinity. The need to protect the edge of a Field that wasn’t even generated by a Biomag, seemed nonsensical. But the message must be there for a reason.
Her father would have known nothing of her most recent mental developments. She had to assume that the clues he’d given to her could be solved by the person she used to be; someone without access to accelerated mental processing.
She sniffed again and wiped at her nose. Her fingertips came away bloody. The last time this had happened, she’d found herself in the infirmary. There was no reason to think that the same thing should happen again but she took no chances. Pinching the bridge of her nose to prevent a full nosebleed, she stared at the decoded message in the jotter application. Once she’d committed the words to memory she selected all the text and hit delete.
Scott had told her that the internal comms were still not operational, so Kate knew that if she needed medical help, she’d need to get attention another way. She walked to the door and placed her hand on the handle; at the first signs of trouble she could at least open the door and call for help.
Whilst waiting she looked at the mildly curving room, still trying to come to terms with the fact that this was her new home. The mundane, aspects of ordinary life began to seep into this extraordinary place. This would be her living room, her sofa, her table. The familiar items almost counteracted the surrounding impossibilities and it grounded her temporarily.
She saw the bag of clothes that had been given to her earlier; yet more ordinary things. Inspecting the clothes she was currently wearing, it was clear that the past week had aged them immeasurably; they were covered in greasy ash, stained with crisp patches of dried blood, and were torn in several places.
“Time for a change,” she muttered.
During her wait by the door, she’d experienced no other ill effects so she released her grip on the door handle and walked to the centre of her living room. She stripped out of her old clothes, noting that if she wanted to make any friends aboard the Node then she should probably take a shower at some point. At this moment though, she just wanted something comfortable and normal. She opened the clothes bag and, putting aside a small bag of basic toiletries, she pulled out a pair of baggy, grey jogging pants.
“Perfect.”
They were inside out but it was the work of a moment to turn them back the right way. It was only then that she saw a small paper note pinned to the soft fabric. Above several lines of handwritten text, the headline read:
‘Barnes=Danger’
Evidently there was someone else aboard who had arrived at the same conclusion as her. She considered the possibility that this was actually a test from Barnes himself, but from the note’s colloquial reference to the suggested meeting place, she considered it unlikely.
She looked at the note again. The meeting date was not for several days so it would give her time to acclimatise to her new surroundings. Although she was well acquainted with viewing the Node’s architecture in plan view, it would be different experiencing things on a human scale. Undoubtedly, what lay ahead would be a time of great change, both personally and socially. But the knowledge that she had allies gave her a new confidence.
Although her parents were no longer with her, in a very real sense they were part of her. She had many of their combined genetic traits and she was determined to use them to the best of her ability. She walked the few steps to the window and watched as the sun shot a shallow dawn to dusk arc above the horizon.
“I will create a better world,” she promised her father.
LIFELINE
~
Allowing herself the luxury of witnessing the event in linear time, she had watched as Douglas had begun running in the direction of the Mark 2. As she suspected, as soon as he established the Field around the Mark 2 test chamber, her influence on him and his immediate surroundings ceased.
She had seen this effect before. Her attempts to influence events within other Fields had similarly failed. Once a Field was established, it became temporally isolated; existing as a spherical non-event alongside the knots, arcs and loops of space-time around her.
But all the Fields had duration. They had beginning and end points based in four dimensions. Already, she could see that the Field containing Douglas had a very short duration. If she had influenced prior events correctly, when the Field collapsed around him, he would enter the Boundary and emerge here.
His mind would probably seek comfort and familiarity. Here though, where thoughts could easily influence actions or events, an uninitiated mind could prove destructive. When he emerged, she knew she would have to provide a safety net. She would just need to locate him first.
Among the surrounding time-lines, the non-event began to collapse. She could see that his personal time-line did not continue after the Mark 2 Field collapse.
It meant one of two things.
Either Douglas had simply died, or he was crossing into the Boundary.
As the non-event continued to collapse, she looked locally at the end of his physical life. She could see that his lifeline was dotted with bright singularities; minor temporal scars that marked his various journeys in different Chronomagnetic Fields. But there were no intersections there.
Here, outside of conventional
time, ‘urgency’ had very little meaning for her, but there was no other word to describe the sense she was feeling. If she assumed that Douglas hadn’t died, then he was already out there. He had the capability to accidentally influence events by a stray thought.
She quickly shifted her attention to encompass the entirety of his lifespan. It was then that she saw a tiny fold and focussed upon it.
It made perfect causal sense to her.
It had simply happened a long time ago.
BOUNDARY
~
Douglas knew that the Field must be continuing to collapse, the Boundary shrinking inexorably towards a sphere of zero radius. But to him it seemed that the Boundary was maintaining its size, while the dimensions beyond it were expanding infinitely. The decision trails within the space around him multiplied exponentially, each overlaying the others and growing brighter.
He knew the final moment would arrive soon and stared furiously at the small holographic card he’d been holding during the Field’s deactivation; the garish yellow-green simulation of Earth rotating back and forth, its circular atmosphere punctured in one place by an accidental screw-hole.
There was a moment of infinite brightness, then it subsided.
There was structure here.
The dimensions of the structure defied analysis, both in terms of scale and physical coherence. His mind reeled, searching for any sense of familiarity, but he found none.
Accompanying a sense of intellectual jarring, he felt the dimensions shift around him to create a massive contained space. The environment had a familiarity to it, but the perspective seemed incorrect; as though the distances involved had been altered somehow.
As analytical as ever, the thought crossed his mind that the environment may have been created for his benefit.
He tried to test this hypothesis by calling out, but discovered that the sound from his own voice emerged as a garbled collection of frequencies.
He turned his head to take in his surroundings and saw that he was situated on the edge of a large disc, facing towards its centre. Immediately in front of him was a collection of polyhedrons.
Boundary (Field Book 3) Page 20
