Boundary (Field Book 3) Page 12

  Although the antenatal cortical enhancement program had been disbanded due to financial constraints, Dorothy knew that when dealing with evolution, results did not necessarily occur within the timescales dictated by something as mundane as a budget. She had taken her father’s original research in a different direction.

  Her father’s notebook had contained a comprehensive list of those who had received the antenatal enhancement, along with the names of the resulting children. Several children on the list had apparently shown no improvement after receiving the postnatal metastable-cortothene counterpart. For those children, her father had ruled a red line through their names and annotated those entries with the word ‘Substandard’.

  There seemed little point wasting resources on children that her father had already excluded so, using the considerable Pittman influence at her disposal, Dorothy had begun befriending the parents on the list whose children had not been red-lined.

  Most parents were delighted that their child had been invited to join the Pittman Academy, but a few had been hesitant because of the fees involved. For those parents, she had waived the fees; when balanced against the very evolution of mind, money was irrelevant.

  One such parent was Judy Benton, whose financial security had evaporated upon the death of her husband, John. Their son, Miles, already showed great promise; devastatingly bright for his age with highly developed empathic skills.

  Currently, Miles was holding the classroom door open for everyone as they left. She was almost taken in by this display of politeness, but reminded herself that the classroom door would have remained open of its own accord. He was ensuring that the others left before him. Inwardly she was amused by the fact that he was using others’ perceptions to quietly manipulate their responses; a very conscious action designed to ensure the privacy he would soon seek with her.

  From a psychological standpoint, she wondered how his ego had mediated his need to help others and the need to satisfy his own desire. She was just jotting down a personal note to follow up her own studies on ego morphology, when he arrived at the side of her desk.

  “Hello, Mrs. Pittman,” he introduced himself.

  Dorothy stopped writing and looked around the room semi-theatrically then whispered, “It’s alright, you can call me Aunty Dot!”

  He seemed to relax a little.

  “Is everything OK, Miles?” she prompted.

  “Aunty Dot, do you give gifts to everyone?” he asked directly.

  Dorothy could instantly see the source of his concern. He’d seen that the others in his class had also received a personal gift from her, but it was possible that he placed a certain exclusivity on their association. His latent insecurities required reassurance that her gifts to others had not devalued their own relationship.

  “No,” she said, “I only give gifts to those I believe are my friends. Do you still have the gift I gave to you, Miles?”

  “Of course,” he replied and pulled the silver dollar from his pocket.

  “Now, the Latin words on the back…” she prompted.

  “E pluribus unum,” he replied, reading from the coin.

  “That’s right, and you remember what that means don’t you?”

  “Out of many, one,” he frowned slightly.

  She leaned in closer and dropped her tone slightly, giving the impression he was about to hear a secret.

  “I have not given a single other person a gift like the silver coin you are holding in your hand. Like you, it is unique. Out of the many in this class…” she placed a manicured finger on his forehead, “One is unique.”

  She glanced around the room again for effect, then offered him the opened jar of yellow-coloured sweets.

  “Go ahead,” she smiled.

  He hesitated only for a second before dipping his free hand into the jar.

  “Why don’t you eat it now, before you go home?” she affirmed.

  He untwisted the wrapper and put the sweet in his mouth.

  She waited just the right amount of time to allow the sweet sugar-rush on his tongue to take place, then spoke to him.

  “Out of many, one,” she patted the coin with a single finger, “Aunty Dot wants you to remember that.”

  Wearing a considerably broader smile than a few moments ago he nodded.

  “OK then, Miles,” she replaced the jar’s lid and then added brightly, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow, Aunty Dot,” he cheerfully waved goodbye and ran to catch up with the others who were heading to the school gates.

  She had once told Judy Benton that her son was bright. That opinion had only strengthened in the last few minutes. Although it had been a trivial enough linguistic sleight for her to convince the four-year-old of their exclusive friendship, her own explanation troubled her slightly.

  She wasn’t sure if she’d used the phrase ‘Out of many, one’ to pacify Miles, or if it was because she was voicing her own subconscious thoughts.

  MIKE SANDERS

  4th July 2076

  Mike drifted above the lunar surface between elongated jumps; the languid gravity eventually pulling him back to the surface and sending up curls of the ubiquitous grey moon dust into the vacuum. His spacesuit’s comm unit crackled slightly with static.

  “FLC this is Sanders at Lima scrubbing station, repeat please.”

  Aside from a few pops of static, there was no immediate response.

  “FLC, I’m switching to comms relay Lima,” he made the appropriate adjustment, “Come back, when you’re on channel.”

  Floyd Lunar Complex sat in a minor depression within the Coriolis crater, a tenth of a degree above the Moon’s equator. To Mike’s right, the north-eastern rim of the crater was eroded, forming a slope gentle enough that the automated Regodozers could enter and exit the site with comparative ease. He found it difficult to believe that work on this facility had begun with the Apollo program, but he knew from first-hand experience that there was stuff up here date stamped ‘1968’.

  He looked out towards the west quadrant of the crater, to see the solar panel array gleaming like diamonds against the ink-black sky. Although the array was over a mile away, the lack of atmosphere on the Moon meant there was no light diffusion over the distance; everything he could see was pin-sharp.

  A lunar day was approximately an Earth month; the array had 15 useful days of sunlight in which to capture and store the energy, followed by 15 days of impenetrable night. Under normal operation the panels were designed to actively orient themselves towards the Sun, like sunflowers, so that the maximum amount of energy was always captured.

  From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a flicker of light reflecting from the array, as though some of the panels were incorrectly aligned. But when he checked again, he couldn’t see any variation, all the panels appeared perfectly aligned.

  The spacesuit’s comm unit crackled then emitted a burst of faint Morse code tones, before dipping into static.

  “Hello Mike,” came the voice from his headset, “we have spoken before, do you remember me?”

  The voice seemed familiar, but was out of place here.

  “Director Crandall?” he turned away from the solar array and looked back in the direction of the FLC, “Why is Houston using this channel?”

  Mike knew his transmission would have to make its way through the chain of repeater stations placed around the Moon’s equator and then make the leap to Earth. Only then could Houston’s Communication Director form a reply. Mike was unsurprised that there was a long delay before his suit’s comm crackled to life again.

  “FLC, be advised at this time we are unable to effect remote deactivation.”

  There was a brief pause and Mike somehow knew the words that would come next.

  “We’re still running numbers but order the immediate evacuation of the Z-bank and personnel to the RTO module. Over.”

  Mike looked down to see the suitcase-like Z-bank in one hand and an FLC evacuation pack in the other. The
lunar landscape had changed to become the interior of the Return To Orbit module. He found himself hurriedly stowing the evac-pack’s lunar-surface magnesium flare gun and securing the emergency O2 cylinders. He quickly secured the Z-bank in Leonard Cooper’s empty seat; a distant memory prodding at him that Leonard had lost his life during the implosion of Chamber 6. As he looked around the RTO’s tiny space he could see that all the other seats were empty.

  “Houston!” he called out, “Where are they?”

  He alone had escaped the destruction of the FLC.

  A view of the Coriolis crater filled his field of view and he saw the surface pattern changing, a moment later he could see the whole Moon. Framed within the small RTO window, Mike watched the Moon silently detonate, ejecting lethal shards of lunar mass in the direction of Earth.

  “It’s OK, Mike,” Ross Crandall’s voice immediately reassured him, “We’re sending you to rendezvous with the ISS.”

  Mike had a fleeting thought - there had been no communication delay when Ross had replied; but this soon gave way to a rising sense of relief that help was on the way.

  “They’re good people, Mike. Work with them and we can get you home. We’re in this together. Over.”

  “Message received,” he found himself gratefully replying, “We’re in this together.”

  He couldn’t determine how much time had passed, but suddenly he felt the docking clamps take hold of the RTO module. With the airlock door still sealed, he heard a high-pitched hissing sound as the air pressure began to change.

  THE MARK 3

  18AUG2013+46.44 : DAY 701.0

  Inside the Mark 3 chamber, Anna Bergstrom looked across the upper floor lab at the split-time clock. The first set of figures indicated the external date followed by the elapsed mission time, the second counted the days spent inside the Field:

  18AUG2013+46.44 : DAY 701.0

  Outside the Field was an identical clock on the hangar wall, it had been synchronised at the start of the journey but now it displayed:

  18AUG2013+46.43 : DAY 701.0

  The discrepancy lay in the fact that on day 187 of their journey, Douglas Walker had altered the radius of the Field surrounding the Mark 3. The volume of their transported sphere had temporarily become a variable rather than a constant. The Field equations had simply rebalanced, resulting in the Mark 3 proceeding at a momentarily faster rate through time. When Douglas had restored the Field’s original radius, the 360:1 ratio had also been restored, leaving the clock’s discrepancy as the only reminder of the event.

  Even now, with all her accumulated knowledge of the Field, she had to remind herself of the physics at work; the Mark 3 had not travelled into the future of those in the hanger, it had simply proceeded through more ‘local’ time inside the Field.

  Looking out through the observation window she could see it was dark in the hangar beyond, the circadian lighting system had been dipped to black to simulate night. In that darkness she could see the glow of a small desk lamp and two people beyond that. The Mark 3’s accelerated time-frame meant that they appeared almost frozen in time and she had to stare for several seconds before one of them began the long process of starting to blink.

  Initially Anna and Douglas had been puzzled by what those on hangar duty were doing. They appeared to be keeping some sort of tally. It was only after several days inside the Mark 3 that they realised it was a record of how many times Anna or Douglas had stood in front of a window. From the perspective of those in the hangar, the Mark 3’s occupants were moving at lightning speed, so to spot one at a standstill was a ‘win’.

  “I think Carter and Pike have started a new game,” she called to Douglas.

  “Is Pike the one who used to play table football in the rec room?” he replied, without looking away from his screen.

  Anna turned away from the window and joined him at the desk.

  “Used to?” she raised an eyebrow, “They probably still do. For them, their hangar shift has only been a few hours.”

  “You’re right of course,” Douglas sighed, “It just seems like they’re part of the decor now…”

  During their time confined inside the Mark 3 they’d grown to know each other’s expressions and mannerisms, so Anna could tell he was distracted.

  “You think you’ve found something…” she said.

  “I think so,” he narrowed his eyes at one particular matrix within the Field equations, “but it can’t be right…”

  On day 690, eleven days ago, the Field inversion equations had finally emerged from the billions of possible permutations. Field inversion essentially turned their current model for temporal manipulation inside out. The solution would allow the Node’s Field to pass at a slower rate for its occupants, while the outside world journeyed through several millennia.

  But both Anna and Douglas had noticed a coherent and recursive pattern within the solution, one that they both felt warranted further investigation. Instead of emerging from the Mark 3 to report the inversion results, they delayed their exit in order to conduct a deeper study of the Field’s temporal surface.

  “OK,” said Anna, sitting down next to him, “step through it.”

  Douglas took out a small card from his pocket. The back was black with small white text but the front had a garish yellow-green hologram, depicting a round planet Earth. As he turned the card from left to right, she could see the planet from slightly different angles.

  “OK, so we’ve already discussed the idea of representing Three-D objects within a Two-D surface -”

  “And the idea that the Field is representing Four-D space-time on its Three-D surface,” Anna continued, pointing towards the hangar outside, “We can see their movement through time, even though it’s only a representation on the three-dimensional surface of the Field.”

  “Now,” Douglas focussed in on a portion of the Field equation, angling the screen to give her a better view, “look at these diffeomorphism transform matrices. Here, and here.”

  Anna quickly compared one matrix to the other.

  “They’re identi-” she broke off, “No, they look identical, but only at the initiation and outcome of the function. In the Thurston mapping, the solution diverges from…nej, skojar du med mig?”

  In her shock, Anna found herself defaulting to Swedish, but she knew Douglas understood.

  “No, I’m not kidding you,” he shook his head, “Do you see what I mean?”

  “Ja, yes, but…” she found herself lost for words in both languages.

  “Try another set of Eversion volumes,” Douglas began to pace around the room.

  Anna tried various matrix transforms, she even tried compounding mapping solutions in the hopes that the functions would fail; but every time, despite the functions sharing identical start and end conditions, the underlying entanglement differed.

  She looked up from her workings.

  “The surface of the Field -” she began.

  “-isn’t a surface,” they both finished.

  “It’s a region,” Douglas continued, “one that maps the exterior time-frame to the interior one. And vice versa.”

  “When we look out there,” Anna nodded, “we’re only seeing the region’s boundary.”

  “The region actually has a… thickness,” Douglas shook his head in frustration, “no, thickness is the wrong word. It has a dimensional complexity. The correlation between the Field’s interior and exterior time-frames, seems to indicate that the region contains almost unbound permutation.”

  Anna began to move beyond the raw mathematics, to interpret its real world meaning.

  “Then the boundary of the region…” she began, her eyes widening, “It would contain -”

  “Infinite temporal variation,” Douglas was nodding, “Literally every possible variation of events that exists between moments.”

  A quiet descended on them as they both mentally wrestled with their own thoughts.

  After so much trial and error, it seemed odd to Anna that suc
h a momentous discovery should emerge almost unheralded. She’d become used to the almost endless cycle of days during the Mark 3’s long journey, with very little to distinguish one day from the next. She’d grown used to routines and even thoughts happening time and again. Suddenly, an entirely new thought occurred to her.

  “Déjà vu,” she said turning to Douglas, “When the Field starts up, do you ever get that blurry sense of déjà vu?”

  “Yeah, I think everyone does,” Douglas frowned, “Like a visual nausea?”

  “Yeah,” Anna nodded, “If I’m moving during the Field inflation or collapse phases, then I see smeary, watercolour trails coming off things.”

  “It’s because of the change in time-rate,” he explained, “For a millisecond, as the Field passes through you, one part of your brain is working at a different rate to another.”

  “And you’re sure about that?” Anna narrowed her eyes and tilted her head slightly.

  “What are you getting at?” said Douglas moving closer.

  “Maybe, during that millisecond, we’re seeing the simultaneous sum of all possible local events,” she thought of an analogy that Douglas would appreciate, “A bit like one of your old flick-books, but instead of seeing one page at a time, you see all the pages simultaneously overlaid on top of each other.”

  “A stick-man walking across a page would leave a trail of stick-men,” Douglas picked up on the analogy and his expression changed, “Or, depending on your perspective, he’d have trails in front of him showing actions he had yet to make.”

  Anna could see that he knew exactly what she meant.

  “In that one millisecond,” she said, “I think we’re looking into a tiny slice of the boundary’s infinite temporal variation.”

  She could tell that the idea had taken hold because Douglas was already searching for a scrap of paper. But after almost two years, their stock of blank paper was in short supply. She watched as he crossed the small room and swept the remains of their evening ration packs off the white plastic table. Guessing what he was about to do, she picked up a marker pen and threw it to him, then watched as he started to draw directly onto the table.