by David Smith
He could barely make it out at this distance, but he could see lights approaching the box and recognised Sarah Cumbers by her small stature and the odd, shuffling way in which she walked.
Leaving Jones to examine the cold, dead reactor, he picked his way along the gantries to join Cumbers. She was examining the black box with her tricorder, and as she noticed his approach she said ‘This is very odd.’
‘What is?’
‘This box. It’s some sort of containment structure, but I have no idea what for. The surface of the box is made of a material I’ve never seen before, and it has some very odd properties. It’s almost as if it’s reacting to the scanner differently from normal matter.’
Ruiz looked at the box more closely and noticed that it wasn’t actually black. The surface was an iridescent fabric woven around a frame to form a large box structure. The surface was just slightly translucent and when he looked at the box square on, he could make out the shape of something inside.
‘So what is that in the box?’
‘Don’t know, sir. The box isn’t air-tight and doesn’t have any significant structural strength. It’s also not proof against any form of radiation that I can see.’
Ruiz didn’t need to be psychic to immediately realise that whatever had happened here had to be related in some way to this box. He could feel the hairs on the back of neck standing on end.
Cumbers apparently didn’t feel the same and casually reached over and removed the top surface of the box. Peering inside they saw another unfamiliar object.
A black sphere sat on a column of the same material as the containment box, but its surface was connected to the services rising from below by a loom of thousands of tiny filaments, each connecting to the sphere’s surface at a perfect right angles.
‘Now what the heck is this?’ murmured Cumbers to herself.
Ruiz was still trying to work it out himself, when Jones called him back. ‘Got a bit of quandary here, Commander. I’ve found out why the Jevean died, but that’s just opened up more of a mystery sir.’
Ruiz left Cumbers to examine the black sphere, while he returned to where Jones was still examining the ancient thorium reactor.
‘What’s up James?’
‘The reactor core is showing signs of massive thermal overload. That’s what killed these guys: the reactor failed and all the life-support plant died with it. No great surprise there. The real surprise is the way the reactor failed. These reactors use a thorium-uranium fuel cycle, so in addition to the thorium 232 isotope there should be a wad of uranium 233 somewhere in the system.’
‘I take it there isn’t?’ asked Ruiz
Jones nodded. ‘And that’s the mystery. I can work out how much of the various elements there should still be in the reaction chamber, and use that to work out when the reactor shut down. Thorium 232 has a half life of around twenty-two minutes, decaying into protactinium, so if I do the math, the ratio of thorium to protactinium gives me a time-scale of about a thousand years.’
‘So that fits with what we know about the war in this sector?’
‘It does, but that’s not the interesting bit. The half life of uranium 233 is around one hundred and sixty thousand years.’
‘What’s interesting about that?’
‘I can’t find any uranium 233 anywhere in the system.’
Ruiz was confused. ‘I thought the uranium is an inherent part of the fuel cycle in this sort of plant. How is that possible?’
Jones shrugged. ‘It isn’t. If we’re right about the thorium decay, the quantity of uranium should be about the same now as the day the plant shutdown, a thousand years ago. It should’ve taken hundreds of millions of years for the uranium 233 to decay to a level where I couldn’t detect it with a tricorder.’
Ruiz was out of his depth. With a sigh he said ‘Ok. Log it and take the data back to the ship. I know there’s nothing we can do here, but I still want to know what happened.’
--------------------
The Captain acquiesced to Ruiz’ request to stay in orbit around the tiny moon for an extra day or two.
Like Ruiz, he hated leaving a mystery unsolved, and he allowed the science team to make numerous visits to the tiny outpost.
Lieutenant-Commander O’Mara put her best people on it, but they were getting nowhere fast on all fronts.
No-one could work out where the missing uranium 233 had gone and no-one had the faintest idea what the scribbled diagrams in the control room meant.
The greatest mystery though, was that no-one had come up with a plausible function for the strange sphere-in-a-box. They had deduced that whatever it was, it didn’t move, it didn’t emit any radiation of energy field or have any effect on space time. Someone had deduced that it required only a tiny amount of power, but all of them had agreed that supplying power to a machine whose function was unknown was foolhardy.
Most of the team had quietly conceded that they would never resolve the mystery. However, Sarah Cumbers was not amongst that number.
She was still working long after everyone else had given in and gone to bed.
She hated not knowing. Things she couldn’t understand niggled away at her, costing her sleep. She’d been fascinated for years now by crewman Jonah James whose life seemed to buck every assumption of random chance. She’d never been able to work out why things that most people wrote off as mere coincidence kept happening to poor Jonah. It had kept her awake, night after night.
This was a similar mystery and she was losing just as much sleep over this as she did over Jonah James.
It occurred to her that even the talk of the missing uranium 233 was an issue of probability and chance. That’s all a ‘half-life’ was: The time period that half of a given mass of uranium 233 atoms would decay into other elements according to probability laws. The missing uranium represented random chance gone askew.
The penny dropped: That’s what the diagrams were.
They weren’t illustrating the change of state of sub-atomic particles; they were illustrating the change of state of statistical probabilities.
She sat up. Was that what the machine was for? To alter the underlying nature of statistical probabilities? There were many Federation mathematicians who believed that probabilities could be considered in the same way quantum physics was, with probability streams being analysed in terms of ‘quanticles’. Had the Jevean also explored this field?
She pulled up the images of the diagrams scribbled on the white-boards in the control room. She looked at the diagrams with fresh eyes, looking for familiar patterns among the symbols. Things started to make sense. She could see where most of the diagrams had been corrected, adjusted or over-written, but one in the centre of the board was untouched.
It was the last one. The formula they’d been experimenting with when things went wrong. The symbols on either side were equal but opposite. Were they trying to find a way to change bad luck into good luck? Or vice-versa?
As she thought about it, it began to make more sense. The rate at which uranium decayed into other elements was always expressed as a probability, just as people often declared events that happened to Jonah as “one in a million” events. Had the Jevean here skewed probability so much all of the uranium in the reactor had spontaneously turned into useless non-radioactive elements?
When that had happened, the Jevean had found themselves literally powerless to try anything else, but it occurred to her that the diagram indicated that the process was reversible. It might be possible to make bad luck turn good.
Unbidden, the image of Jonah James’ sorry life played through her mind’s eye. The loss of his parents in an inexplicable roller-coaster accident that Jonah had walked away from without a scratch. His pet dog being vaporised by a lightning bolt that missed Jonah by inches. That bizarre incident on the school field trip where Jonah’s teacher had become the victim of a shark attack in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains.
In her mind’s eye she could see the fabric of pr
obabilities warping and flexing around the unwitting Jonah, and she immediately decided to do something about it.
She could resolve the mystery on the planet, ‘cure’ Jonah James and finally get some sleep.
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‘What are you, nuts???’ gasped Jonah.
‘No, I’m serious!’ moaned Cumbers, completely astonished at Jonah’s reluctance.
He was subconsciously backing away from her although the tiny, cramped Communications Equipment Office offered him no escape route. ‘You want me to suit up, visit a research facility where everybody died and sit there while you zap me with a device that may or may not screw with random chance?’
She thought about it. That was about the size of it. What was his problem? ‘Yes.’
‘No. You must be out of your tiny frickin’ mind!!’
‘But you won’t even notice!’ complained Sarah. ‘The machine will alter the flow of quantum chance particles through your body, but you can’t detect that sort of thing: no-one can because it’ll happen outside what we perceive as space-time.’
Jonah looked terrified: ‘You’re crazy.’
She smiled ‘Maybe, but I’m crazy-smart.’
‘Nope. You just have your own special brand of crazy. Mad-scary-stalker-crazy.’
She sighed. There had to be some way to convince him. Or even just bribe him. What did Jonah want more than anything else in the world? ‘I’ll tell you what Jonah; you come with me, we’ll operate the chance machine together, and if it works, you’ll be cured. That’s good, but the real upside for you is that if it does work, I’ll never have a reason to bother you again.’
She was disappointed to see the change of expression on his face, even though it meant she’d found his weak-spot.
He looked her in the eyes. ‘You’ll leave me alone? Forever? You promise?’
She nearly backed out, but decided this was worth doing. ‘I promise.’
‘Well what are we waiting for? Let’s go play with some mysterious alien technology.’
--------------------
Being borderline autistic, it never occurred to Cumbers to notify anyone of what she planned to do, much less ask permission.
As it seemed rude to wake anyone at 3am ships time, she casually over-rode the transporter system notification protocols so their trip to the surface wasn’t logged.
She took a heavy-duty universal power supply and plugged it into the console in the alien control room, and then using notes from Dhillon did her best to decipher the console’s labels.
Sadly none of them said ‘Press here to invert luck’ but she figured the big red button in the centre with the label that said ‘Execute’ was probably the only one she needed.
She checked the power supply and saw that it wasn’t going to last long. The console was feeding power to the computer systems as well as the sphere in the machine room, and was draining the power supply much faster than she’d anticipated.
‘Right Jonah, we need to move quickly. Go into the room at the end of the corridor, stand next to the black box at the end of the gantry and let me know when you’re there.’
‘Is that it?’ asked James nervously.
Cumbers barely heard him, busy concentrating on the console controls and the whiteboards with the complex and still largely unintelligible diagrams. She focused on the diagram in the centre. Clearly the one that had been written last. Now did that diagram show luck being nullified, or inverted? ‘Yeah, go. Quickly. The power supply won’t last long.’
Jonah did as he was told and trotted across the gantry. ‘I’m here Sarah. What happens next?’
There was no reply, but the odd black box began to glow from within, and he suddenly felt every hair on his body stand on end.
‘Hey Sarah, the box is glowing. Is that right?’
The world turned white and for a moment everything rippled and wobbled. Jonah had the strangest sensation of being turned inside out, as if the universe was lost inside some infinite form of Jonah James before everything went dark.
--------------------
Jonah woke up to find Sarah Cumber’s slightly spotty face peering down at him. ‘What happened?’
‘Dunno’ she smiled and passed him a One Falandian Groat coin. ‘Flip it!’ she urged.
‘What?’
‘Flip the coin! And call it while it’s in mid-air. I need to see if anything has changed!’ she urged.
Jonah sat up and took the coin. As always with Cumbers she’d not considered the practical issues: flipping a coin whilst wearing the gloves of an environment suit was near impossible.
To his surprise, Jonah managed it first time, and as the coin tumbled through the air he quietly called ‘Tails.’
Cumbers reached out and caught the coin. Tentatively she opened her hand to see the emblem of the Falandian Republic rather than the image of their head of state, President Oomahja.
‘And again!’ she urged passing it back to Jonah.
‘Cumbers, this won’t prove anything’ he moaned.
‘Flip the coin!’ she insisted, and again he did as he was told and called tails. He tried to catch the coin but missed and it landed with a crack on the sheet steel of the gantry, tails up.
Cumbers smiled broadly. ‘Again!’
By the tenth time he flipped the coin and called tails, Jonah was beginning to think Sarah was on to something. Ten calls, ten tails. Around one thousand to one odds.
Cumbers was grinning like a loon as she transported them back to the ship, and Jonah kept flipping the coin. Every now and then he’d call heads to try to catch himself out, but the coin would land to reveal the smiling visage of President Oomahja.
Delighted as he was, this was quite unnerving.
--------------------
Despite her promise to stop bothering him, over the next few days Cumbers came up with a series of tests to find out exactly how much Jonahs luck had changed.
She managed to get Jonah in on a poker game in engineering on nightshift which was notable for two things.
Firstly, it was clear Jonah was no poker player: he wore his heart on his sleeve as always and couldn’t fail to hide his delight at being dealt a winning hand.
Secondly, none of the hardened poker-playing engineers had ever seen anybody come up with a royal flush in three consecutive hands. While they admitted they could see no obvious cheating, that didn’t stop them refusing to play against him.
Perhaps the most ominous test was playing pool against Yiyun Li. Everyone wanted to test their mettle against Li, the ship’s unofficial pool champion, but no-one ever put money on themselves more than once. Li had made a good living hustling pool back in Shanghai, right up until he took a senior triad member for ten thousand credits. He’d been laying low in Starfleet ever since.
Jonah had played pool before, mostly with catastrophic results. These results weren’t entirely related to his play, but long wooden sticks and balls of hard phenolic resin could create surprising amounts of carnage in Jonah’s presence.
Li left the pool table completely frustrated and bewildered at the run of extraordinary good fortune that accompanied Jonah’s play. Every miscue was a winning shot, every missed pot left Li in an untenable position. After four games and four losses, Li quit.
It was shortly after this that Jonah became worried.
In echoes of the game Monopoly, Jonah’s bank sent him a message stating that an audit had revealed that they’d short-changed him over the years and owed him nearly a million credits.
A letter from his parents that he’d lost many years ago turned up in a book he’d been carrying around with him for all that time.
He was announced as the winner of the Oregon state lottery first prize of nearly eight million credits. That seemed to be incredible good fortunate in itself, but In actual fact, it was literally a miracle: Jonah hadn’t even bought a ticket.
It was only as he was contemplating quitting the ‘fleet to spend his new-found wealth that he realised
things had taken a darker turn too.
A news-cast from earth included a small piece on an old nemesis of Jonah’s who’d hounded and bullied him all through his high-school years. Jake Arden met a grisly end while visiting the Portland museum of natural history with his partner. The stuffed remains of a great white shark (found in extraordinary circumstances in a fresh water lake in the Appalachian Mountains) fell from its mounted position, killing the unfortunate Mr Arden who was regaling his partner with unlikely tales of his high-school capers.
The news-cast also detailed a catastrophic fire at the hospital from which Jonah had once been fired, and a sink-hole that swallowed the first restaurant in which Jonah had caught food-poisoning.
For the first time since they’d met, Jonah sought out Cumbers.
‘What do you mean “Change me back”????’
‘Sarah, I’ve seen things from way, way back, being put right by fate. I can’t . . . ‘
‘There’s no such thing as fate!’ snorted Cumbers. ‘All we did was experiment with probability. What happened on Earth has nothing to do with us, that’s just . . . coincidence.’
She blushed as she realised how stupid that sounded. There was no such thing as coincidence. Only converging probabilities.
Jonah sounded scared. ‘It’s fate!! How else could something happening here and now affect things that have happened so far back in my past??’
She shrugged. ‘It’s only a theory, but if the quanticles that govern chance do exist, they’d exist outside what we understand to be the space-time continuum. We’ve tried to alter the probabilities that are centred upon events that affect your life. The ripples of that attempt will be spreading out forwards through time and space, but also backwards. In that sense, I guess it makes sense that those things back on earth happened.’
‘So that’s the norm now, is it? That anyone who’s had good luck at my expense could suddenly have a damned sperm whale fall out of the sky and kill them??’
‘You’re being ridiculous’ she chided.
‘I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s misfortune. Believe me, I know exactly how it feels to suffer from bad luck’ he growled.