The education had graduated past counting. Next came dozens of simple and complex formulas. The computer treated this as a memory exercise. It scored 92.9682% on the series. A mathematician could easily become obsessed with the 11 formulas the computer hadn’t recognized but the computer was unfazed and untroubled. A sinusoidal wave formula repeated several times, with different constants.
The signal was telegraphing its moves. The original signal frayed across 16 different wavelengths, the serial message split into parallel tracks, then exploded: 16, 256, 4096. 4096 stations on the radio dial, the same record in rotation. The formula altered again, and the signal strength warbled, a tremolo of meaning. Another formula, and the pitch of group shifted slightly. The computer was working for real now: a crash course in musical interpretation, and the pace was getting faster with each lesson. For the first time, there was more to study than could be absorbed in the time it came in – the computer was falling behind.
The data was complex and bulky now. The signal sent a formula, then a series of numbers with a dedicated group at the end. Another formula, then the same series of numbers sent in fewer characters. The ship’s computer noted the change with something approaching satisfaction: hash sums and compression. The subject was the same, but the lesson format had changed – denser, with a pop quiz to make sure the student was paying attention at the end.
More counting, in distinct sets of numbers. The Boots of Steel translated them into familiar categories, milliseconds behind the signal's arrival: atomic weight, density, fusion point -- specifying literal building blocks for the message to come. Groupings arrived, indicating molecular formulas; a few combinations representing compounds that could only be constructed in a set order provided the syntax.
The signal had done its best to establish a grounds for communication, and now it had to risk uncertainty. Procedural formulas describing mathematical surfaces flowed in, attached to molecular compounds. The Boots fell seconds behind in its coursework, trying to match the materials to its local databases. The test was an elaborate game of show and tell, as the flood of materials received addresses to name them, becoming more complex by magnitudes as objects were formed from the material substrates.
The computer noted that the signal had cut off, though the machine was by now several days in the weeds. A routine checked the end of the message and registered a checksum indicating the signal had been received in its entirety.
The translator routine demanded more resources to complete its work. The Boots allotted them, diverting power and processing time from non-critical tasks, a decision which a human mind might have second-guessed if it was awake to oversee the consequences.
Chapter 10
Intemperate | Cold | Chilled
The plane’s exterior freezes in stages as it flies through the thin air. A film of hoary crystals forms on the acrylic windows. Rushing air buffets miniature actuators and huddles below the ailerons, slowing their response time by milliseconds. A sheer frost layer forms, pushing down on the plane with its weight spread evenly across the wings. It is as if the jet has barreled through a million fine cobwebs without brushing them off; it lugs the extra weight under the strain of a drastically increased stall speed and an airfoil with disrupted lift potential. The situation is extremely dangerous and surprisingly routine for the pilots of the craft.
In the cabin, Wald’s legs have stiffened into a cramp from imposed inaction and cold air. The cabin, in Wald’s view, is downright frigid. He wasn’t the only one to think so; 16-A had gotten up a few minutes ago and retrieved a small wrap from her carry-on. Wald had watched her position the ineffectual wrap around her shoulders and over her chest before placing it carefully around her lower torso like an apron.
Wald lets out a deep breath and stretches his lower back. Vents in the ceiling blast jets of white gas into the cabin, like the security system of a bank vault that triggers after a lockdown. People assume that sort of incapacitant is teargas, but two-thirds of the time it’s just smoke, a mental trick designed to force you down to the ground and let you know you’re fucked.
A few rows ahead, the baby coughs and squeals as his mother feeds him a bottle.
Stephen knows the streams of smoke in the plane were just breaths of warm wet air, warmer than the air around him, but they looked cold. He feels the chill in his bowels, down in his shrinking genitals, and realizes he needs to relieve his bladder badly.
Two forms of inertia are acting upon Stephen. One is social. 17-C is balled up in the seat beside him, her legs tucked under her small frame. She is facing away, and her arms have relaxed against her lap, leaving her expensive book splayed between her listless fingers. Wald notes the title, Codex Seraphinianus and the bizarre creature diagrams on the heavy paper. He’s uncertain what it is supposed to be; he had taken it for an art book, but if there was meaning in those pages, it required some effort to see. The woman is sleeping peacefully, which is a polite way of saying that she doesn’t snore. Wald considers that he’ll have to wake her up to reach the bathroom.
Wald hears a ding a few rows back. A minute later, he eavesdrops on a muffled conversation. He can't make out what the passenger says, but the male attendant's response is clearly spoken: Oh, we don't do blankets anymore. There is a surprised silence before the passenger asks, Since when?
Since they decided the laundry costs were too high, thinks Wald. Since they started calculating how many dollars it costs them per week per pound of blankets: the same calculation the hotel does on your dirty towels, and the same calculation the airlines do on you and your bags. Cost per pound.
Wald fools himself over the second force. In his mind, he is extending a streak – he has never been in airplane bathroom. He knows the image in his head will not survive the reality. Not that he expects it to be all magical toilets and puppies – with a sign above the “occupied” light that reads: This bathroom is not all magical toilets and puppies and smoking is prohibited by law – but the gap would leave anyone disappointed. Some of the things that should be in an airplane bathroom but are not: a sink that automatically dispenses water at a warm temperature consistent with the heat of your hands; a toilet with a seat warmer and a jet cleaner like they have in Japan; 4-ply toilet paper; wall-mounted handles so mile-high club initiates can get better thrust and be done quicker; complimentary shampoo; a vending machine selling Nicorette.
The truth, the reason for the streak in the first place, is that Wald doesn’t want to act. It’s an irrational impulse that prevents him from gaining a few moments of comfort, the tenseness drained from his limbs. Those moments are an interruption to him, a false beginning, and soon the cramps would return. He could put a knot in the thread: get up, feel better for a few fleeting seconds. Reset. Then endure another flight -- one that has just started. He couldn't take that.
###
1816, the Year Without a Summer, was actually ordained a year earlier when Mount Tambora erupted in the Dutch East Indies, throwing massive amounts of pyroclastic ash into the atmosphere. The following summer, temperatures fell significantly -- the amount is difficult to determine -- resulting in dreary days of endless rain. Unable to gather enough sunlight to grow through the thick cloud cover, the damp crops withered and rotted, resulting in significant famine.
That was a long time ago, for someone looking for tomorrow's forecast, and not even a blink on the cosmic timescale.
13° C.
Wedding planning comprises an elaborate set of tasks that require advance reconnaissance and willingness to commit, a characteristic the planners presumably already have. A couple -- let's say the groom is a stock broker from Chicago, and the bride is a Lutheran and a CPA who dabbles in real estate -- a couple who is a year out from the date had better already be in the midst of choosing a venue or they are out of luck. If they have any interest in the weather forecast, it's only to see if a snow storm will impede their travel or if they will need umbrellas to keep them dry on their way into reception area. A meteorologist ca
n tell them whether they will need umbrellas with a significant degree of accuracy. This is mostly because they’ve seen it coming on down the line with doppler radar, essentially the same technology as used in baby ultrasonograms, with a bit of wave substitution. It is an observational means greatly improved from the days of hot air balloon readings and Torricelli’s Tube, though still likely to be wildly incorrect about snow accumulation, to the dismay and delight of school children.
What’s the weather going to be like one week from then, when a couple ought to start reserving hotel room blocks for out of town guests? A meteorologist will lie, offering a very specific set of highs/lows and precipitation estimates, while knowing their models are uselessly inaccurate after 36 to 72 hours, and bridal couples may choose to believe them or not. Studies have shown that meteorologists are so bad at predicting past three days that they would invariably have a higher accuracy rating by simply forecasting the same temperature and chance of precipitation as the current day for the entire week. That kind of uniformity looks suspicious to a viewer, so they might apply a general warming/cooling trend and introduce some volatility to the numbers; after all, weathermen are chosen for their presentation abilities, not their predictive ones.
14° C.
The weather is of tantamount importance a year from then, when the couple is joined in holy, or at least civilly recognized, matrimony. A meteorologist couldn't tell them much of value – they want a climatologist. Climatologists take a longer view: months, years, centuries. They deal in handfuls of degrees centigrade, sown out over time. Not that they’ll able to help you much either; a bride doesn’t want to know if the mean temperature in her geographic region will tend to rise by a fraction – she wants to know if she needs to hold the reception in a ballroom or under a bright sun that lights on her veil. Climatology models don’t – can’t -- predict the day-to-day. They are not meant to be selfishly applied, but representations of elemental forces greater than ourselves. It's a matter of perspective.
15° C.
What’s the weather going to be like 100 years from now? This question is probably irrelevant for the stock-broker and the CPA-slash-real estate agent, but their children might want to know the answer. Climatologists provided an answer to the question in 1922 when the Arctic was disappearing, and in 1974 when a new Ice Age had dawned in the pages of Time magazine; they have an answer today. It’s the job of science to provide answers. All around us are pollutants, waste – by-products of necessity. The atmosphere may be drowning in billowing clouds of carbon dioxide, invisible to the eye, but obvious enough to those who know we’re fucked. It may be we can't stop, that the curve will just keep on going. In the marriage of man to Earth, there is the possibility that man just can't change his ways. Irreconcilable differences.
10° C.
13, 14, 15, 10. Deniers and believers, arguing over a sequence of numbers: one hundred and thirty years of bobbing mercury recorded by men, distilled into a global mean. That’s too many years for humans to ignore, and not even a moment for the crown of rock below; an issue of practical agnosticism, where it's all a matter of perspective.
###
He awoke to a vision of a woman in white bending over him. He choked, fighting for air, gasping as though underwater. His face was on fire. The hairs on his arms tugged on his flesh, cracking the skin beneath.
Siri thrust Chandrasekhar's legs into a knotted ring of fabric: a white skin suit. Help me get it on quickly before you freeze to death. His body had yet to register what was happening -- there was no sensation of cold, just pain. Siri manhandled his flesh, shoveling it into the suit with abandon. Chandrasekhar scrabbled at the suit, barely managing to cover his left side up to the shoulder before succumbing to the deficit of oxygen in his panicked lungs.
The next moment he remembered was the click of a helmet and a wisp of warm air across his brow. Siri was still next to him, rubbing his limbs in an attempt to invigorate his chilled blood. She answered the question that his chapped throat couldn’t vocalize.
There’s something wrong with the environmental control. The computer isn’t responding correctly. He looked askance at her skin suit, one of two he had packed for emergencies, wondering how she had managed to survive long enough to find and put it on. She continued: the pod woke me four days ago when the temperature started dropping. I don’t know why, but your pod didn’t let you out. The readout said it was giving you medical treatment. Once the cabin became… inhospitable… the pod protected you. He shook his head painfully, and choked out: doesn’t..make sense.
She frowned at him. Look, I just spent three days trying to get the computer to respond to simple commands and the last 24 hours trying to free you from this shell. If you want to go back in, that’s fine by me.
He lunged, throwing his torso out of the sleeping cocoon and rolling onto the floor. Have to fix the climate control, quickly.. the cockpit. She gave him a look of mixed irritation and pity.
I don’t think you’ll get the chance. Come to the cockpit, she said as she left his cabin.
He struggled to his feet as his muscles slowly recovered from the shock, and took stock. Chandrasekhar’s eyes skimmed the readout from the suit helm. The environmental control must have been failing for weeks for the ship to have lost this much heat through the hull. Oxygen and CO2 levels were normal; if Siri were lying about how long she had been awake, then the filtration system was still working or she had been breathing inside the suit the whole time. He tried calling up a panel on the far wall: nothing. Yet the lighting was normal, and he felt the reassuring tug of induced gravity at a normal 1G. Whatever was wrong with the ship’s computer, parts of it were still functioning.
His legs were unsteady as he moved about the room, only partially due to those freezing seconds. His muscles would be temporarily weak after so much cryosleep anyway; the pod couldn’t totally prevent sinew decay through subcutaneous muscle spasms. He worked them consciously as he exited his cabin, grabbing a command gauntlet from a nearby shelf and latching it onto his forearm. He limped into the claustrophobic main cabin, unprepared for the sight in the viewport ahead of him.
A bright ring surrounded a disk of black felt, occluding the starry backdrop of space: a still life eclipse painted on the cockpit window.
Computer, status, shouted Chandrasekhar as he threw himself into the control chair. He stabbed out his fingers in a typing motion. Neither action drew a response. He clucked his throat and a status overlay popped up.
The computer was using up too many resources; something was causing a computational meltdown. Chandrasekhar used his gauntlet as an interface, combing through the system logs, looking for the cause. The output was garbage, series of numbers and symbols, none of it human-readable. He attempted to kill the rogue processes, but the response was sluggish and returned a negative error. The computer had diverted too much attention away from user commands and Chandrasekhar could not regain control.
The eclipse had vanished from the viewport -- no, not vanished. It had already encompassed them, and the outer ring of lights -- drives, Chandrasekhar corrected himself in his thoughts -- were outside their current view. They were drawing near to the surface, and the ship was coming in hot. He considered the danger of resetting the system, ship-wide. It was his only option at this point, risky or not.
With the gravplates to cushion the effects of deceleration, Chandrasekhar barely felt that the ship's engines had turned off and could tell nothing of their velocity. It was only through the display that he could tell the Boots' was suddenly stably hovering meters above an enormous floor of unknown make.
He called to Siri, pulling his hand back from initiating a full reboot. He settled into the command chair and set back to work on the ship's computer. Before he could say something to Siri, a harsh screech ran along the length of the cabin, the unmistakable sound of metal being shredded into filings.
Chandrasekhar lunged out of the chair and back toward his cabin where the critical equipment was -- gravi
ty belts, weapons, portable replicators -- and stumbled through a half-meter wide hole in the decking. He threw out his arms, catching himself for a moment on the incredibly smooth lip of the puncture. The effort of holding on was too much of strain on his weakened limbs, and after the first hand slipped, the second followed almost immediately.
Chapter 11
Perfect | Walk About
There’s a future where you are happy. It’s not this one; this world went to hell a long time ago. It probably started in high school during homecoming season or swim class and got worse from there. You can think back to a time when you were satisfied, content, before things got all fucked up and horrible. If you had a time-travelling device you could jump back there: tread your old stomping grounds; change a few key moments for the better. The absolute way to a perfect life.
High school is a surprisingly good place to find a time-travelling device, especially in the stands of varsity football games. Varsity ball provides an excellent venue for future scientists to study the practical implications of timeline interference in an observed environment -- sporting events in general are complex chains of cause-and-effect, but football is a special case. Many sports feature continuous, flowing action, played with limited interruption for injury, fouls and side changes: soccer; hockey; lacrosse; etc. Football has the advantage of comprising a series of plays that start and end with highly definable markers, snap to whistle. There are other possibilities, sure, but baseball is looser and tennis is limited to four players, while football provides the most the most significant data points to record and compare on successive dips into the time stream: yards gained; time off the clock; tackles; pulled hamstrings. Pro and college level games are probably too dangerous to mess with, considering the consequences of riots and the likelihood of swaying the impact of the millions of dollars bet on them every year. JV and lower is a little too intimate; there's a fair chance someone is going to ask the time-traveler which of his kids is playing and he'll have to mumble something indistinct and make an ungraceful exit.
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