“We agreed not to talk about that anymore, Kelly.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s just that I had some time on my hands there, in a manner of speaking, and I was wondering how they knew if they were going to be successful on the mission. Sure, the changes would be obvious, but where would the record of all the previous time be stored? What was their reference point? How could they navigate without a compass, as you said a moment ago? So, after I got back I started working the problem and—“
“I’m afraid to hear this,” Maeve protested. “You aren’t going to tell me that you used the Arch now, are you?”
“The Arch? No. I’m not that reckless. You’re right about Nordhausen. We’ve got to have some stern words with Robert the moment he gets back from his little fossil hunt in Jordan. No, I wrote this program, see, and I keep the damn thing running all the time. In fact, it’s all over the net: my little Golems.”
“You mean that screensaver you put out last month?”
“Yup. Circulation is up over a hundred thousand installs now, and growing. It was just a nifty little agent that I called my Golem. People love the damn thing!”
“Yeah, I have it running on my box at home too, but aside from the cute graphics and the pretty kaleidoscopic patterns I don’t see how it relates to what we’re talking about.”
“What’s in a name, my dear. A Golem, as you may know, comes from the Jewish tradition. It was a man made of clay, magically brought to life to perform menial tasks. It’s like a pre-industrial revolution concept of a robot.. Did you ever read Brin’s Kiln People? He had a world where people could make duplicates of themselves to run errands. Well, the idea has applications in the computer world as well. In Unix such software services are called daemons, artfully enough, and on an old Microsoft platform they were less romantically called ‘services.’ I kind of think the handle fits the task.”
“But what does it do?”
“Don’t you ever use the search feature? You type in keywords and then just walk away and cook dinner, or turn in for the night. Then my Golem screensaver comes up when the system idles and performs all your searches on the Internet. The next time you sit down at your box, the friendly little Golem is there with a nice little report.”
“OK, I’ll try the search feature—but what has this got to do with the time project?”
Kelly realized that he was rapidly spending Maeve’s reserve of patience. He came to the point. “That’s not all my Golem does,” he said a bit ominously. “I also slipped in a little routine that runs non-stop and performs a self checking error correction loop. It looks at the entire body of the static source code and compares it to the code in RAM to report any variation—almost like a virus scanner.”
“Now you’ve completely lost me.”
“Well, a virus scanner watches all the files you send, receive or copy, and looks for subtle patterns and variations. If it spots suspicious activity, it alerts the user and either quarantines the contaminated file or deletes it. In this case I have the program call home and complain if it spots any variation. I had this idea, see.”
“Oh you had an idea alright, but I still haven’t the slightest notion of what it’s about yet.”
“Remember Paul’s theory?” Kelly tacked back to the question of Time again, trying to bring Maeve along. “He said that living memory would not be affected by the changes in the continuum if a person was protected in a Nexus—even though physical things were subject to change. Take that copy of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, for example. It was right here in the lab desk drawer throughout the whole mission—well inside this null zone sphere I’ve been talking about. Yet it changed. That was how we were going to learn if Robert and Paul were successful or not, remember? I was supposed to read that passage in the book and compare it to my own living memory—my unaltered living memory of the book. Why, you were doing the very same thing with Shakespeare! You were scouring the plays for any sign or word that did not seem to fit. Since the program is a constantly running process, it’s like living memory when active. You see?”
Maeve was starting to get a grasp on what he was saying, though the technical details still escaped her. “You mean your computer program is like our memory as long as it keeps running. You think it will remain unaltered by changes in the continuum?”
“Something like that. As long as it doesn’t shut down and re-boot from the source code. The trick was to make sure it would always be running. That’s when I got the idea to tack it on to the code for my screensaver. Now it’s on over a hundred thousand boxes all over the globe, and the sun never sets on my little Golem program. He’s always active and running somewhere, and if any variation is noticed, he’ll phone home.”
“Phone home?”
“The program will send a data packet here to the main server I set up for it last month.”
“And what does that tell you?”
“It’s not what it tells me, it’s what it does.”
Maeve gave him a look that said she would tolerate no more nonsense. He knew he had to sum things up for her fast. There was nothing to be done now but to blurt it all out.
“I set it up so that if a significant variation is detected anywhere on the globe, the server will contact me on my cell phone and put the Arch generator on cold standby.”
“The Arch generator? Do you have any idea what it costs us to run that kind of power here?”
“Yes, but don’t worry, nothing has happened in the last 30 days and our electric bill will be well within the norm.”
“But why, Kelly? Why would you want the Arch on standby like that? What good would it do for your program?”
“Maeve…” Kelly tried to fashion one of his own stern glances now, with moderate success. “If the program reports changes then something is afoot, as Nordhausen would say. I’m betting my Golem will alert us to variations in the continuum.”
“Variations? How could there be changes to the continuum. OK, I’ll admit that Nordhausen pulled the wool over our eyes and got away with a little train ride through the English countryside, or so it seems now from your data file there. He won’t get away with anything like that again, by god. Now that I think of it, an alert system like that would be a nice fail safe for us. Just you let me catch that rogue in the act the next time he tries to pull off an unauthorized time breach. Can you set that thing to call my cell phone?”
Kelly laughed. “If you insist,” he said, “And I think you probably will. That’s the general idea, though. If it works, and I’m still not sure that it will, then we could be alerted to changes in the continuum. We could have a chance at maintaining a safe reference point here.”
“Here?”
“Right,” said Kelly with a satisfied smile. He put his baseball cap back on and waved expansively at the lab around them. “Right here—right smack dab in the heart of the Nexus. We spin up the Arch and the field will start to coalesce. A null spot will form, and we can be here in the center, safe and protected from any change in the Meridian. Then we’ll know, Maeve,” he concluded. “We’ll know. We’ll be the reference point, if you follow me.”
She did.
“Clever boy,” she whispered. “I knew I had you around for some good reason.”
Kelly smiled, relieved that he had been able to get through the technical issues to the heart of the matter. “The phone rings,” he summed up. “I get in the Subaru and haul ass over here to the Arch complex. Maybe you have a good idea there, Maeve. I think all four of us should be able to respond to the alert. That way we improve our chances of getting someone into the safety of the Nexus Point before the Meridian solidifies on some new course.”