“Fai,” Anna began to see something, “What is this?”
“I once detected a similar coherent pulse modulation within the FLC’s internal power consumption, shortly before its destruction. It was an analogue method of conveying digital information. This message shows similar structure.”
“OK, I can see there’s a pattern,” said Anna, “but how can this be a message?”
“Because the storm repeats,” Cathy replied simply, “and nature doesn’t do that.”
The four of them fell quiet.
“It is like Leonard’s message?” Lana tapped at the spike trace graph, then looked at Mike for confirmation.
“Dots ‘n’ Dashes,” Mike shrugged.
Anna felt a sense of growing agitation at being confronted with a concept beyond her understanding, but she forced herself to look at the available facts.
There was a coherent and repeated pattern to the red spot pulses. The pulses had occurred at a rate that accounted for the presence of the Chronomagnetic Field and the location of the ISS at the time. Then there was the format of the message; it had been carefully chosen so that a human receiver could recognise it.
“Have you decoded it?” Anna asked Mike and Cathy.
Cathy touched the screen. Underneath the graph, a line of simple text read:
‘EVA65.05-16.75’
“At first I thought it was something to do with my Extra-Vehicular Activity,” Mike pointed to the space-suited man on the footage, “But treating the numbers as video time code, or screen coordinates showed nothing.”
“My first thought is Eva Gray,” Lana nodded gravely.
“I had similar thoughts,” Cathy rubbed at the light scar on her cheek, “But that was probably because she was in my nightmares so much.”
“I think it has a different meaning for each us,” Anna thought aloud, “Fai, what’s your interpretation of the E.V.A. initials?”
“Only two interpretations carried statistical significance. One - given the astronomical context, I found a reference to the Eridanus Void Anomaly within an Archive study of cosmic microwave background radiation. Two - within my own program I developed an External Variable Assignment subroutine to handle the necessity of interacting with a greater number of people aboard the ISS. However, neither of these meanings had a correlation with the accompanying numbers.”
“If the message was intended for you, Fai,” Lana pointed out, “it would have used a more efficient method than Morse. What’s your interpretation, Anna?”
Until now, Anna had kept her explanation to herself but, having heard the others’ thoughts, she now felt more confident about voicing her own.
“Well, when I worked with Douglas on the original Field equations, the Eversion Volume Algorithm was part of a permutation program. But the bigger correlation here is that the numbers are the coordinates of something called the Node, in Iceland. Would you concur, Fai?”
“Yes, Dr. Bergstrom. They are also the coordinates of a drone strike initiated by Dr. Chen on December 27th 2013. Though the presence of a second Chronomagnetic Field signature is still present at those coordinates.”
For Anna, the initial shock of an attack on the Node vanished upon hearing that the Node’s Field was active. Douglas was probably still alive, she thought. He’d been working in Hab 1 immediately outside the Node when she’d been escorted away to Andersen Air Force Base.
“We need to go!” she found herself smiling broadly, but it was an enthusiasm not completely reflected in the others.
“There’s a catch,” said Cathy.
“Fai has an issue with your intentions to steal the Shuttle?” Anna guessed.
“I have no standing directive regarding the use of the Shuttle,” Fai replied, “You are free to use it as you see fit.”
“Then what’s the catch?” Anna turned again to face Cathy.
“The Shuttle was only ever designed to return to Earth at a handful of places, most them within thirty-ish degrees of the equator. Our landing options are limited. Even after landing, Iceland is so far north that it could take months or years to reach it…”
“Which leaves us with two choices,” said Mike, “Either we open this up to a wider debate when the others exit hibernation, or we have to prep the Shuttle right now and take our chances.”
“There is a third choice,” Anna looked at the others, “You just have to recognise which parts of the problem are constants and which are, ha, External Variables. The Shuttle design is limiting our options?”
“Er…yes,” Mike hesitated, “but -”
“So logically we need a new Shuttle design.”
“I’m sorry, Anna,” said Cathy, softly, “The crew will exit hibernation soon. We have less than twenty-one hours.”
Anna did a quick mental calculation.
“Not strictly true. We have less than twenty-one hours in here,” Anna placed emphasis on the words, “But outside of a newly established Field, we could have more than five years…”
PERSPECTIVE
~
She knocked four times on the cottage door, then it opened.
In front of her, just as she remembered him, was her father.
“Hi, Dad,” she beamed.
Unlike the world of temporal abstraction that she was used to existing within, here she had no foreknowledge of what his actions would be; his fatherly hug therefore took her somewhat by surprise. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to be ignorant of future events.
“Katie, Katie…” he repeated over and over as he held her, “Is this… now?”
“Yes,” she simplified for him. After closing the door, she guided him back through to the living room, “We’re somewhere safe. Somewhere familiar.”
“I know, we’re at Samphire, except…” he glanced around the room then brought out the photo featuring himself, Kate and Anna, “Except, there are bits that don’t seem to fit.”
Kate knew this was all part of his acclimatisation. She’d included the small anachronistic clues to encourage his analytical side.
“I remember Anna taking that photo,” she guided him, then gestured toward the sofa, “It was at the Node, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, we were in Hab 1,” he smiled, and sat down.
“Oh yeah!” she encouraged, sitting next to him, “Where did you find the photo?”
“It was down there on the floor, just before you knocked… No, no that’s not right,” his eyes darted back and forth, “No, I found this photo in one of the labs after I put you aboard the Node…”
Kate watched as he worked through his personal chronology.
“I was the last one on the island and… the Mark Two!”
His eyes suddenly found hers.
“The Biomag failed and I…” he suddenly stopped again and looked around the room, “Am I dead?”
“No,” Kate couldn’t help laughing, “Well, actually, it’s complicated.”
She saw his expression shift to become the concerned parent once more.
“Katie, I put you inside the Node. How can you be… wherever this is?”
A distant rumble of thunder told her that she’d have to proceed carefully; he’d just questioned the nature of the environment around them. For the time being, she’d have to look at things from his linear perspective.
“Like I said,” she held his hand, “it’s complicated. How long has it been since you last saw me?”
“Three, maybe four minutes?” he replied.
“For me,” she squeezed his hand gently, “It’s been… significantly different.”
“Katherine,” he frowned, “How long?”
She remembered that he always used the long form of her name when he was being stern. Hearing it here, in the imitation of their family home, resonated with her but she knew there was no simple answer.
“I prepared this place,” she looked around the room, “as a sort of safety net. A place I could catch you and your thoughts. But outside these walls, the idea of ‘how long’ doesn�
��t really have a meaning.”
“Then, please,” a concerned frown lined his face, “help me understand all this… surreal abstraction.”
“OK,” she began, “The first thing to realise is that, despite appearances, there’s nothing weird or mysterious about this place. As you and Anna predicted, everything here within the Boundary is consistent with the concept of dimensionality without linear time. We’re just perceiving physical laws from an unusual perspective.”
“A higher dimension?” his hands mimed a flat plateau.
“That would imply a hierarchy where none is necessary,” she explained, “Let me try this a little slower. Think back to the last time we saw each other.”
“At the Node’s window,” he nodded.
“Your clipboard message worked,” she smiled, “They got the data.”
Her father leaned back into the sofa and let out a sigh of relief. It seemed odd to hear him react so spontaneously to something that was distant history for her.
“Also…” she raised her eyebrows, “I worked out your L.O.K.T. message too.”
A smile lit up his face and it reminded her of when they used to send simple codes to each other when she was young.
“That’s my girl!” he said, proudly, “How long did it take you?”
“A few days,” she said.
“Wow. Impressive. I thought it might take you a little longer.”
“Ha,” she laughed, “It took me a lot longer to understand the notes that were on the memory card inside your Biomag.”
“I can’t begin to imagine how long it must have taken to piece it all together. It must have taken… years?”
“No,” she felt herself almost bragging, “Thanks to Alfred Barnes’ interference, it took me less than a month. By the time he killed me, I was more than -”
She was interrupted by a massive thunderclap that sounded as though it was directly above the cottage; her father was on his feet.
“What?!”
For a moment, she thought that the construct around them may not hold, but as she began to fill in the details for him, the disturbance receded.
She told him what she’d discovered aboard the Node: the cortical enhancement program detailed in Danny Napier’s file, her own metathene genetic activation and her suspicions that Douglas and Monica were part of that discontinued project. She also told him about her much longer time outside the Node, visiting incidents throughout Archive’s history; a non-linear patchwork of pieces that had allowed her to build up a complete picture. She concluded by telling him that although he’d first postulated the Boundary’s existence, she had been the first to enter it.
“To get your head around it,” she said, “You have to understand something. The Boundary, has always been here. It’s like a dimensional anomaly twisted up inside the fabric of the… I’ll call it universe. It would have existed even if no-one had discovered it.”
“Then it’s not a by-product of the Field?”
“No,” again she simplified; it would be easier to alter a mental picture later than to risk overcomplicating a fundamental point now.
“So you’re trying to say that, in creating the Field, we just stumbled into the Boundary?” he wore a sceptical expression that she recognised only too well, “Katie, do you have any idea how unlikely that is?”
“Yes,” she smiled patiently, “But the Boundary is a continuum with infinite temporal variation; in all of that infinite amount of time, the right circumstances only had to arise once. I was that ‘once’.”
Her father’s eyes were once more darting from side to side, assessing her logic, but soon it stopped and he faced her.
“Why wasn’t I that ‘once’,” he countered, “Surely you were still inside the Node, when I entered the Boundary?”
“Not the first time around,” she replied, knowing that inevitably they must come to this part of their discussion.
“First time?”
Kate drew a deep breath.
“It took me a… long time,” she inwardly cringed at the inadequacy of the language, “to interpret the Boundary. How to see it, how to interact with it, how to influence it.”
She let the last statement hang clearly for him to see.
“You’ve influenced things?” he said, then his eyes suddenly widened in understanding, “You’ve influenced events to bring me here?”
She nodded and continued.
“The very first time around, the tsunami outside the Node crushed you. You simply… died. My emergence into the Boundary still happened though because I received your messages. Only after several iterations did you actually make it to the Mark 2.”
“And that’s what allowed me to get here,” he nodded.
“No,” she sighed, “not even then. For several more iterations you simply stayed inside the Mark 2 until the end. Sometimes the Field collapsed, sometimes you unanchored because of the Biomag. But just once, you made the leap.”
“This time.”
“Yes,” she smiled, “this one single time.”
“Let me guess,” he smiled back, “That wasn’t luck, was it?”
Kate explained the numerous symbols she’d placed in his periphery during his final hours alone on the island. Each symbol was a visual echo of a diagram she’d seen within his clipboard notes.
The circular diagram had illustrated the Eversion point standing on the Field’s circumference and was synonymous with the Boundary’s inflection point. Her hope was that through sheer exposure to the circle and dot image, he would get the hint at the moment of deciding his own fate.
“Right at the end,” he said, “I was staring at my Earth hologram card. Concentrating on the message I’d sent to you.”
“Create a better world than us?” Kate recited.
Her father nodded and looked into the living room fire.
“It was only in the last second that I saw the circle and dot pattern,” he made tiny circular motions in the air with his finger, “Where one of my Dad’s bookcase screws had punctured the atmosphere.”
She smiled, that too had been no coincidence. As far as she could tell, that visual juxtaposition was responsible for his arrival. The fireplace flared slightly and she knew to expect a question from him.
“By influencing events, don’t you create an alternate future?”
Her father had spent most of his life evaluating mental decision trees, so she wasn’t surprised by the question.
“Yes,” she replied, “There’s a fine line between influencing the course of events and creating an unpredictable future.”
“Hmm, that sounds like the voice of experience…”
“Yes,” she admitted, “You remember me telling you about Marcus? Well, I once influenced a minor event.”
“How minor?”
“I made a buzzer activate, down in the Warren,” she found herself nodding over in the direction of the kitchen, where the access point would have been, “The result was that he survived an event that should have killed him. That one event spawned the continuum we’re in now.”
“Sometimes you’re just like your mother,” he smiled, “impetuous.”
She knew she’d have to tell him about the events within the USV, but the fireplace flared again and another burning question arrived.
“I have to ask, Katie. With this ability to influence events, did you ever try to stop Siva from reaching Earth?”
She had thought about it on numerous occasions.
“If I’d interfered,” she explained, “then there’d be no Siva threat.”
“Exactly,” her father shrugged.
“But if there was no Siva, there’d be no Archive. No Archive, no cortical enhancement or NASA programs. Your Dad would always have been around and you’d never have thought up the Field. No Field, no Boundary, so no-one could ever have interfered with Siva’s approach…”
“Paradox,” her father nodded, making a looping motion with his hand, “By using the Boundary to stop Siva, you can’t stop
Siva.”
“It gets worse though, Dad. I can’t interfere with the events that first led to me entering the Node, or I’ll never arrive here.”
The expression on his face told her that he fully understood.
“Damn…” he closed his eyes, “The lunar detonation can’t be stopped either. The Node departed to avoid the super-fragments.”
Kate stood and walked away from the sofa towards the living room window, “I need to show you what we’re dealing with.”
“We?”
“Or you could just sit on that sofa all day…”
He was at her side immediately, but she knew she needed to check something.
“You know this isn’t Samphire Cottage, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he shook his head in amazement, “It’s a construct.”
“Good,” she said, “Because the view from this window isn’t the English Channel.”
She pulled the curtains open to reveal the whole Earth; its moon still intact and orbiting around it. She heard him draw a breath.
“Wow, is this a construct model too?”
“No, what you’re seeing is the real Earth, but I’m showing you a span of twenty thousand years.”
The Moon sprang apart and Earth was immediately covered in fire and smoke but, almost as quickly, the effects disappeared. The lunar debris quickly spread out through its former orbit.
“OK, now here’s Siva,” she said.
A blur from the right of the window impacted with the lunar debris field and this time the devastation to the Earth was more severe. The atmosphere turned an ash grey. Most of the lunar debris vanished and, with no stabilising body to regulate its rotation, the Earth began to tip off axis. The atmosphere cleared and, for a short time, there were large verdant patches in several locations, but then a ghostly white sprawl crept across the globe as the oceans and landmasses froze. The former poles settled into their new equatorial position, rocking up and down slightly with the passing of the centuries.
“We’re going to change it,” said Kate and drew the curtains again, “but there’s something we need to do first.”
“What could be more important than this?”
As a first reaction, she’d expected nothing less from him, but the time had come to raise the issue.
Boundary (Field Book 3) Page 34
