The Synchronizer

by Francis Tint

  “Turning in right now,” Blake spoke over the phone on speaker mounted on the car vent. She parked and exited the car, joining their friends waiting outside a mental hospital.

  “It took me a while,” Zach narrated. “I was trying to figure out what EPDM could possibly mean. Then I noticed from the lab notebook that scientists often sign with their initials. So it hit me, EP very likely stands for Edison Po.”

  “So who’s DM?” asked Julia.

  “I started looking into some other publications from Dr. Po,” Rachael responded. “It turns out Dr. Po was also working very closely with a university researcher, Dmitri Mit, DM.”

  “But why are we in a mental hospital?” asked Blake.

  “It looks like around sixteen years ago,” explained Corey, “he was admitted here.”

  “What? What happened?” inquired Blake.

  “No one knows for sure,” answered Rachael. “It sounds like he got too deep in the research one day, and lost touch with reality, started spewing nonsense.”

  “Quantum physics does that to people,” Zach commented.

  “So, how are we going to see Dmitri?” Blake asked.

  “This is where you come in, Blake,” Julia responded.

  The group reached the front desk. “Who are you looking for?” the hospital attendant asked.

  “Dmitri Mit. I’m his goddaughter.” Blake answered. “My dad, Edison Po, was a very close scientific associate with Dmitri. In fact, it was my dad who admitted him here.”

  The attendant pulled up the record from his computer. “It does appear that the patient was admitted by Edison Po. And you say you’re Blake Po? Any identification?”

  She took out her wallet and pulled out her license, realizing her official last name was not Po. She checked her other cards wishfully hoping something with “Blake Po” would materialize.

  “Miss? Your ID, please?” the attendant hurried.

  “Here’s your license, Blake,” Julia interrupted. “You dropped it when you opened your purse.” She produced a fictitious license with the name “Blake Po” on it. Unsurprisingly, Julia came fully prepared for the con mission.

  “Ok,” the attendant said as he examined the license. “There’s no record of you ever visiting Dmitri. What brings you here today?”

  “Um…” Blake stuttered.

  “Her dad got really ill recently,” Julia jumped in. “He asked Blake to reach out to Dmitri and see how he’s doing.”

  “And you guys are?” the attendant asked.

  “We’re her dad’s students,” Julia replied.

  “Yup, all physics geeks here. Completely harmless,” Zach added.

  “Well,” the attendant eyed the group and pondered for a moment, “maybe you guys will have better luck talking to him.”

  They followed the attendant and entered Dmitri’s room. An aged and tired man sat by a corner, staring at nothing in particular. He was incessantly muttering some unintelligible phrases under his breath.

  The group approached the patient, who seemed to be completely oblivious of their presence. He continued mumbling, “…two-nine-nine, seven-nine-two, four-five-eight, six-six-two, six-zero-seven, zero-one-five…”

  “What is he saying?” Julia asked.

  Rachael shook her head. “It just sounded like a bunch of random digits.”

  “Let me write them down,” Zach suggested. “Maybe it’ll come in handy.”

  Blake took a few more steps closer to Dmitri. She put her hand on his shoulder. Abruptly, he turned his face and halted his interminable chant, taking Blake by surprise. He looked into her eyes and held tightly to her hands. He said assertively, “Traitor.”

  “What?” Blake questioned.

  “She’s a traitor,” he repeated. “She’s a traitor, Po. A traitor.” His voice increased in volume.

  “Who? Who’s a traitor?” Blake asked.

  “She’s a traitor,” he kept repeating, louder and louder, squeezing her hands even tighter.

  “Ouch,” Blake screamed, “let go of me.” She struggled to get away from the patient.

  Corey stepped in and gently pushed Dmitri away from her. “Are you alright?” he asked. She nodded, caressing her hands.

  The patient receded and resumed his chant, “…seven-two-nine, seven-three-five, two-five-seven, eight-eight-five, four-one-eight, seven-eight-one…”

  Incidentally, Rachael’s phone buzzed with a text message and asked, “Blake, have you been checking your phone?”

  Blake patted her pockets and checked her purse, “I guess I must’ve left it in the car.”

  “There’s some emergency at Ashlea Edwards.” She showed Blake her phone and continued, “We should head back.”

  By the time they arrived at their workplace, Ashlea and Victor were already standing by a damaged bioreactor, trying to contain the mess.

  “We’ve been trying to call you all night,” denounced Victor. “Where were you?”

  “Rachael and I were visiting an old friend,” Blake said. “I left my phone in the car.”

  “So you thought it’s a good time to visit a friend and abandon a bioreactor when you’re trying out a new, unproven method?”

  “It’s not unproven,” Blake insisted. “We ran lab simulations, and we tested the method out in a small batch. It was going well when I left. Everything was normal. What happened?”

  “What happened was that the bioreactor overheated.”

  “There’s tight control in place for the bioreactor to divert more cooling water if it ever gets anywhere close to a buffer threshold. Also, our method involves cooling the culture more consistently throughout the batch. It doesn’t make sense. This shouldn’t happen.”

  “Yes, we noticed that you installed extra cooling pipes for that purpose, thereby exhausting the cooling-water reservoir prematurely. When the water runs out, the bioreactor just keeps heating up.”

  “That’s not possible. We have a huge reservoir of cooling water. There must be a leak in the system.”

  “In your lab model, did you calculate the cooling-water capacity required?”

  “No. It’s always assumed to be sufficient.”

  “There it is again. We can’t always afford silly mistakes. Luckily, I was around to stop the bioreactor before something more catastrophic happened. But it looks like it’s already beyond repair.”

  “What were you doing here anyway? How convenient of you to be here right when the bioreactor overheated!”

  “Ok, I’ve heard enough,” Ashlea stepped in. “Victor, thank you for being here in time to control the situation. Go home and get some rest. I will see you tomorrow.” With that, Victor left conceitedly with a smirk on his face.

  “I’m so sorry, Ashlea,” Blake pleaded. “Our new method does work. It will double output. The cooling water situation is just a minor setback. I can fix this.”

  “I think you have a lot on your hands, from what I see, between work and your personal life.”

  “I can balance it fine,” Blake interrupted.

  “Let me finish,” Ashlea said assertively. “It’s an ingenious method. I don’t doubt your science at all. But you rushed into this, and what we have here is a severe, unrecoverable consequence. Losing a bioreactor will put a strain in our production capacity and our capital. And the Board will need someone to answer to this.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Blake, we’ll keep in touch, and I will help you in whatever way professionally. I know you won’t do any harm, so I’m not going to ask security to escort you out.” Ashlea took a deep breath. “You should go pack up your belongings.”

  It took a moment for the words to sink in. “Are you firing me?” Blake asked, and Ashlea responded by simply walking away.

  Sniffling and in tears, Blake went to her workstation to pack up her personal effects. Her dreams shattered without warning. How could Ashlea not see beyond Victor’s smokescreen and trickery? What happened to the Ashlea who could see beyond profits and revenues, and
understand the beauty in the pursuit of scientific truth?

  One of her best friends was still lying unconscious. She was still trying to adjust to the truth about her heritage. This was supposed to bring her some normalcy. She had looked up to Ashlea all her life. How could Ashley just abandon her like that? She felt as if her world had been turned upside-down overnight.

  She opened the drawer and saw the bottle of the C05I pills she had kept from before. She had almost forgotten about the medicine she had taken from the woman who had spontaneously combusted. She went to the sample room and decided to keep with her the code-name drug and a bottle of Imperiall.

  Zach showed up at their promised time, by a dark alley. Normally, he would ask Corey to come along in a dangerous and covert exchange, but he really couldn’t afford any potential drama that might spring up between Corey and Dylan. Although his telekinetic power wouldn’t be much of a defense if they started to assault him, at least his leg braces could passably act like a weapon.

  Zach checked his phone for the time. How could someone who’s capable of teleporting be late?

  “Sorry,” a voice emerged behind him. “I was going to say I’m late because of traffic, but I guess that doesn’t hold much water for me.”

  “Not at all,” Zach replied. “You got what I asked for?”

  “Did you change your mind about joining us? The offer still holds. Our door’s still open.”

  “I’m good. I filled my quota of joining deadly cults.”

  “Fine. You can’t blame me for trying. Where are the files?”

  Zach held up a flash drive. Dylan continued, “How do I know the drive’s legit?” Zach plugged in the drive to a tablet computer, and held up the screen to display the contents. “How about those two folders, the Synchronizer and EPDM? Why aren’t you opening them?” asked Dylan.

  “They’re encrypted. We don’t have the keys,” Zach replied. “Maybe your team can crack the code.” He unplugged the flash drive from the computer.

  Dylan held up a bottle of neon-green solution. Zach asked, “This doesn’t look like what we used to take. They were pills.”

  “An extra-strength formulation.”

  “How do I know that’s the real deal?”

  “Well, you just got to trust me on it, don’t you?”

  Zach conceded and did not argue, “I suppose.” Simultaneously, they tossed their trade objects in the air and sealed the deal.

  “Nice doing business with you,” Dylan concluded and vanished.

  Back in his lab, Zach was hiding the solution when he heard a knock. “Just you, no Blake?” Zach greeted Rachael at the door.

  “Yeah… things didn’t pan out well at Ashlea Edwards. She probably wants some time alone now.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, the bioreactor was completely toast.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. Did it explode?”

  “No, Victor was there in time to save the day.”

  “Victor? The one who stole Blake’s job? How convenient.”

  “I know, right? It sounded super fishy, but we don’t really have proof that he sabotaged the thing. Well, maybe it’s for the better. With all that’s going on, she deserves a break.”

  “Don’t we all?” Zach sighed and retreated to his computer. “I still don’t have a clue how to decrypt the folders. The visit to Dmitri is basically a bust.”

  “You said you copied down the string of numbers he was muttering, right? I was thinking back at those numbers and some sounded somewhat familiar.” Zach passed Rachael the piece of paper with the sequence of digits.

  Rachael took a pencil and started noting some patterns on the piece of paper. “Look,” she gestured at Zach. “It looks to me like there's a repeating pattern of thirty-six numbers.”

  “Had I known this earlier, I wouldn’t need to frantically write down hundreds of digits,” Zach whined. “Does this string of thirty-six numbers mean anything to you?”

  Rachael studied the numbers more carefully. “Maybe,” she pondered for a moment. “Look at this, two-nine-nine-seven-nine-two-four-five-eight,” she exclaimed excitedly, looking at Zach.

  Utterly confused, he said, “Is that supposed to mean anything to me?”

  “That’s the speed of light in meters per second,” Rachael said matter-of-factly, as she continued to examine the numbers on the paper. “These are all physics constants! Here’s the Planck constant. That’s Sommerfeld’s constant. And lastly, the electric constant.” She carried out epiphanically, “this makes so much sense. It all links to the multiverse theory. It’s been said that these are the constants that will stay uniform across dimensions. This all makes sense to me now.”

  “Well, that makes one of us,” Zach replied. “How does this help us with decrypting the folders?”

  “This might be the key to help us decrypt the EPDM folder. The speed of light is commonly notated as c. The Planck constant, h. Sommerfeld’s, alpha. And the electric constant, epsilon. This might be what we need.”

  “Ok. Could’ve just said that.”

  “We need to show our work. We can’t just jump to the answer.”

  “Whatever. Let’s try c-h-alpha-epsilon as the key.” They waited with bated breath as Zach’s decryption program processed the folder. A few minutes later, the unexpected happened. They were granted rights to access the folder. “You did it, Rachael.”

  Squealing with joy, she said, “Let’s see what’s in the folder!”

  On the screen, two subfolders appeared, one labelled “The Three Brothers”, and the other “Results”. Zach clicked open the first folder.

  “This is interesting,” Zach commented. “This is basically Greek mythology. Why is it in an encrypted folder?”

  “Yeah,” Rachael concurred. “It’s just the story about Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, and about Hades’s plan to overthrow his two brothers.”

  “Well, some say Zeus was the one who betrayed Hades first.”

  “It’s all just a story. This is probably added here by mistake. What’s in the second folder?”

  Zach opened the folder named “Results”. “Now this is the gold. This is what we’ve been looking for.”

  “That’s information about the Synchronizer!” Rachael confirmed.

  “Jackpot. We finally got somewhere. Does it say what it does, how it’s made, or who built it?”

  “Hold your horses. I’m still going through the data. They recorded some trial results of the Synchronizer. We probably need to read through them more in detail to understand them thoroughly. From those reports, it looks like three of them were working together, EP, DM, and AE.”

  “EP is Edison Po. DM is Dmitri Mit. Who’s AE?”

  Rachael flipped through the file to see if there were signatory pages or spots where their names had been spelled out. “Here it is, AE’s signature,” Rachael pointed out.

  “Does the signature say Ash Ed?” asked Zach. “As in…”

  They said in unison, “Ashlea Edwards.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sports Drink

  Blake used the key Corey had made to enter her dad’s place. No matter how many times she returned to the house or walked by the height chart with her handwriting, she could not recover a shred of memory from her childhood. However, the warmth and the sense of belonging were real. They could erase her memories, but they couldn’t erase the unconditional affection between them. She had been betrayed by those she had once called her family. She had lost her dream career. But there’s one thing she could still hold onto. She could still hold onto her attachment to her dad.

  She entered her dad’s study, looking around the furniture. She saw the immaculately organized desks and bookshelves. She walked by one of the bookshelves and noticed there were deep scratch marks on the floor, as if heavy furniture had often been moved around. She traced them back to a close-by bookshelf, and displaced it along the marks.

  A door was revealed behind the bookcase. She turned the doorknob, and it ope
ned to a dark room. She hit the lights and her dad’s old private lab appeared before her. She shouldn’t really be surprised with all the secret work her dad had been working on, but she still gazed at the lab in awe. Aside from a thin layer of dust, all of the devices were still in good working order. The lab must have been in a near-airtight construction.

  She took a seat at the lab bench, and took out the pills with her dad’s lab notebook from her bag. Out of curiosity, she ground up the pills and dissolved them in solutions, then placed them in a spectrometer to determine the chemical composition. She had seen what Imperiall was multiple times before, so the result didn’t shock her. With the C05I, as Rachael had said before, it’s just a starch-like derivative.

  She tapped her fingers on the lab bench, wondering if she had missed anything. Was it simply a placebo sample? Perhaps mixing the two chemicals together would create something different. It was quite a stretch, and not very scientific, but it wouldn’t hurt to try.

  Rachael arrived at Zach’s home to visit Tylor. “You’re here early today,” Zach greeted her at the door.

  “I got you some home-baked cupcakes.”

  “Sweets for breakfast! The only reason to wake up early.”

  Rachael walked over to the bed where Tylor was lying soundlessly, attached to some devices monitoring his vitals. His core temperature had returned to within the normal range, and all the medical readings had recovered. “Did he make any progress?”

  Zach shook his head. “Equipment here is limited. From what I can see, he’s perfectly healthy.” He took a bite at a cupcake. “But I don’t know if the frostbite has caused any permanent damage beneath what we can see here.” Just as he finished his sentence, a notification ringtone went off on his phone.

  “I recognize that tone,” Rachael said. “Looks like someone’s got a date.”

  Zach took out his phone and replied to the message. “Mind your own business,” he teased and placed the phone down.

  Rachael gave up on further interrogating Zach. She took a flashlight instead and walked over to Tylor. She shined the light over his eyes and opened the eyelids. “Pupil response seems to be more sluggish than expected.”