“The green dots are normal systems… the red dots are corrupted. I’ll have a possible breaching location soon.”
“You mean they’re coming here—to our time?”
“Well, not necessarily,“ Kelly equivocated. “When we ran the mission to 1917, things changed here as well. The change migrates through time but, like Einstein said, its really space-time. The temporal coordinates determine when the Heisenberg wave starts, and the spatial coordinates determine where it starts. The change ripples out from the location of the Nexus—like a wave, only it moves through the fourth dimension as well as the other three.”
“A Heisenberg wave…” Maeve grasped the simile and held on to it. She imagined some critical change in the Meridian. From that single point, a place Paul called a Nexus Point, a ripple of quantum uncertainty would expand out in all directions, altering everything in its path.
“Effects from alterations in the Meridian have a brief local life before they migrate out,” said Kelly. “It happens slowly at first, relatively speaking of course. This is the work of the first few nanoseconds.” He pointed at his data plots. “After that the wave accelerates rapidly until it reaches an infinite speed and changes everything; everywhere. But look here!” He rotated the flat panel monitor to give Maeve a better view. “Here’s the footprint of the devil, Maeve. It started somewhere in this location…”
Kelly pressed a finger to his LED screen and noted the swirl of interference caused there by the pressure. “Wouldn’t you know it,” he said. “Right smack dab in the Middle East. Looks like Syria… Somewhere north of Damascus near the Lebanese border. That’s where the system seems to indicate a Nexus forming, and there’s a shadow of something else further south—a bit east of Akaba. Very odd. It’s almost as if the two points arose simultaneously.” He keyed some GPS coordinates and told the system to display the name of the nearest town for the point in Syria. “There,” he said with finality. “How do you pronounce this… Mas-yaf?”
Maeve leaned in. “No,” she corrected him. “Sound the letter Y like a long I, and make it three syllables instead: Ma-sigh-af. It’s a famous castle ruin north of Tripoli.”
“Well, that appears to be our Nexus Point. And look—the change is proliferating throughout my whole Golem network. I’ll bet they’re spotting variations.”
“You mean to say the whole time line has just been altered again?”
“Altered? Who can say. But it certainly appears to be vulnerable, and we may be the only two people alive that know it—at least in this Milieu. I thought about that. The only thing that irked me about the prospect of using the Arch was this: how would we know what’s gone wrong? It was easy to monitor changes to my program like this, but getting back to your issue with Shakespeare—it looks like you would have to read all the plays again tonight to see if something changed. Not to mention everything else we’d have to check, history, politics, scientific discoveries. It’s maddening! We would need some kind of master library to serve as a reference point—a kind of touchstone to measure the whole world against. So I got to thinking…”
Maeve slumped into a chair at his side, leaning heavily on the armrest with her elbow, chin in hand. She was resisting the impulse to get up and run to the emergency equipment locker for an axe. She had a forlorn look on her face. “Oh, God,” she breathed. “I wish we had never done this—any of it.”
Kelly gave her a sympathetic look. To him this was an exciting adventure into cyberspace and the arcane realms of mathematics he so enjoyed. He could see that Maeve was truly distressed, however, and he offered one small consolation.
“Dust in the wind, Maeve. We want permanence, we reach for it, hope for it. Lord, isn’t that what heaven’s all about? But it doesn’t work that way—at least not in this realm. Nothing stays put for long. It’s all process; all change. We’re just surfing the wave now, that’s all. I don’t see what else could be done. I know how you must feel. It’s going to be lonely here—in the heart of it all. We’re sitting at infinity’s bedside now, and she’s quietly dreaming. At least we’ve got each other, if that’s any consolation. And I’ve got another little surprise up my sleeve as well.”
She looked at him with a smile. “I think I hear my poet in there somewhere,” she said, feeling just a little safer to see Kelly at the keyboard, a little warmer knowing he was here—at least for now. “I guess that’s what it all really boils down to,” she said. “This moment and the guy with the funny baseball cap sitting next to you.”
“Hey!” Kelly offered a mock protest. “Bonds signed this cap the year he retired. It’s going to be an heirloom.”
“Heirloom? You making any plans I don’t know about?”
“Don’t worry,” he grinned. “I’ll run everything by Outcomes and Consequences before I buy the ring.”
Maeve fought off the urge to snatch away his baseball cap, Barry Bonds and all, and muss up his hair. “I think your chances for approval may be fairly good!” She gave him a conspiratorial grin. “That is if I still have any pull with the committee.”
The rising vibration of the generator feeding power to the Arch pulled Kelly back to the urgency of the moment. “Now for my other surprise,” he said. “I think you may like this one.”
He scooted his chair two terminals to the left and toggled some switches. “Time for a pattern signature,” his eyes gleamed with excitement.
“Pattern signature? On who? If you think we’re going down to that Arch—”
“Not us,” Kelly reassured her. ”But everything else will do.”
Maeve was back to the fishing trip routine with him, trying to figure out what he was up to. “OK, maestro, what is it this time?”
“Just one more thing I put into the Golem. Let me send out the query sequence first and I’ll explain.”
He was keying commands, very quickly, and Maeve found herself recalling the exponential keystroke error he had made on the first mission. “Take your time,” she breathed. “We apparently have plenty to spare if we’re under the influence of the Arch Nexus like you suggest.”
“Don’t worry,” Kelly breathed. “There. It’ll take about an hour, even with that bank of fifty high speed DSL modems I installed last month.”
“So that was why our hardware budget was high. I thought it was the RAM you ordered for the history module.”
“That too,” said Kelly. “I installed a whole new system here, just for you.”
“For me?”
“Look, Maeve,” he began with that placating tone in his voice that always prompted her to raise an eyebrow of suspicion. “This thing isn’t going to be shut down. I think you know that as well as I do. Don’t get me wrong. Everything you’ve argued up until now makes perfect sense, but the fact that I’m still alive means that the technology survives. It gets used. Oh, I suppose we could shut everything down for our lifetimes but, after we’re gone, then what? The way I figure it, we just have to ride the wave. At least that gives us a chance to keep an eye on things—it gives you a chance, Maeve. Outcomes and Consequences: that’s really what its all about now, right? We need you more than ever. Shakespeare needs you.”
Maeve had a defeated look on her face, but it resolved to a quiet resignation. Her stubborn strength and the energy of her considerable will power would just have to be directed elsewhere now. Kelly was right. “Looks like I’m going to be doing a lot of reading,” she said.