by Josh Karnes
Chapter 11
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
Larry Duncan sat across from the digital image of his boss, Thermion CEO Carson Lee, as it spoke to him over his computer’s speakers. He had wrestled all afternoon with how to communicate this new information to Lee. Despite Kyle’s implication that they had inadvertently created a time loop, Duncan still wasn’t sure of exactly what was going on. They did not have nearly enough evidence to form a solid conclusion; they didn’t even have nearly enough evidence to speculate what might be going on. All they really had was a totally inexplicable anomaly and Kyle’s gut feeling that it was a time-traveling cube. That was not nearly enough. Larry knew that once he brought this up, Lee would have an endless stream of hard questions and Duncan didn’t have any answers for them. It was his job to have these answers. But the truth—no, the facts—that Duncan was now confronted with was that he lacked the capability to even begin to answer these questions. The Daedalus team had stepped off the cliff, into the abyss, and they were now drifting in a sea of unknowns. While Duncan knew this to be true, it would not satisfy Carson Lee.
Truth. Facts. That’s really the root of what was troubling Duncan the most about this. Kyle was sort of a mystic of physics. His position reminded Duncan of Ian Malcom’s line from Jurassic Park: your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. But with Kyle it was not that simple. He was curious, dedicated, and very smart. And he was practical. He would do whatever was necessary to make progress towards the goal. But he had this odd sixth sense that cropped up, like an intuitive understanding that they were going one step too far, and that all that they knew and understood in the universe would not be enough to guide them once they took that step. Kyle seemed to think that not only were there things they didn’t know, but there were things human beings could not know. And once we ventured into that realm of the unknowable, then the consequences could neither be predicted nor controlled.
Duncan’s rational mind rejected this line of thinking absolutely as some sort of quasi-religious hooey. Mankind only did not know that which they had not yet discovered. You can’t learn anything new without pushing past old boundaries of thought and reason. This was true science. Everything had an explanation, no matter how seemingly complex or unpredictable. Throughout human history we had ascribed those things we did not understand to the acts of gods. But in every single case, eventually man had discovered the true explanation for those things former generations considered supernatural. In most cases, it was the observations that could not be believed.
He realized only now that it was easy to judge the errors in logic of past generations, but when you are the one experiencing the inexplicable, it gives you a different perspective. He couldn’t help but wonder if Kyle was right. Maybe Duncan’s trust in the ultimate logical explanations was really intellectual arrogance. Kyle was no fool; in fact maybe it was Kyle who was the real genius here. Maybe it was Duncan who was relying on faith in something for which he had no evidence—a scientific explanation for the inexplicable—and Kyle who had a firm grounding in reality: that there are things man is not meant to understand.
This is why Duncan was not feeling his most confident as he tap danced in a videoconference with his boss from Thermion’s offices in Alexandria. “Look Larry, I trust your judgment. Damn, you’re probably the world’s foremost expert on space-time anomalies, which is why we put you on this project in the first place. What do you think is going on?”
“The truth is, we just don’t know enough yet. We are going to keep working the problem and try and find a way to get more concrete evidence. We scribed a serial number on each of the cubes we have in the lab and asked FSS to begin serializing the new ones they make for us, which is what we should have done to begin with. We didn’t know we’d need to positively identify which one we were sending, since we thought we were just moving the thing three feet across a lab table. We’ve now lost track of fourteen cubes total, and we have recovered one of them. We know going forward all of the new ones will be marked with a number, so the one we found in the log has to be one we already sent.” Larry knew there was a problem with that statement as soon as he said it.
“I trust you are working the right process, and I don’t need to micromanage your decisions on this. I freely admit I don’t understand the first thing about what you are talking about. Mostly what I need from you is some feedback on the timetable. How far has this set us back? And when can we get back on track?”
Timetable? Duncan thought. Can this guy be serious? They are potentially making fancy blocks of charcoal travel through time and Carson Lee wants to know how that affects the timetable? The absurdity of this whole conversation hit Duncan like a medicine ball to the chest. He was about to try and estimate the schedule impact of—let’s face it—a time machine. Maybe I ought to put myself in the portal, go back in time and slap my previous self, tell him to get out of this doomed project while he still can, Duncan thought, uselessly. Probably screw up and kill my grandfather in the process. Put me out of my misery.
“I’m sorry, Carson, but there’s just no way for us to know that. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that Daedalus is not working as expected, and we are doing everything we can to determine why.” And we may be, quite literally, moving heaven and earth, Duncan didn’t say. “The one bright spot is, if we are actually creating a time loop, then it means the theory of operation of the Daedalus is sound. It’s bending space-time just as expected. We are possibly just bending it too far.”
“Well, see that you bend it back on track. I know I don’t have to tell you, but we are over ten years into this project and God-knows how many billions of dollars and even the United States taxpayer doesn’t have unlimited funds, not to mention patience. I have avoided making promises but the DoD is going to start to call our bluff any day now.” Maybe we should start putting stacks of money into the portal then, Duncan mused. He was losing it.
“I’ll do what I can. Now I need to get back to the lab. I just wanted to get you this information while it was still fresh,” Duncan said, pressing away from the call.
“Okay, thanks Larry. I’m sorry to be such a jerk about this. You know our Puerto Rican science project will bankrupt every one of us if we can’t pull this off, and then we will have some very dangerous people looking for heads to roll. Even though on paper we are working for DARPA, the nerd’s big brothers in the DIA will not hesitate to make us all disappear if we break their toy.” Yeah, well I can make lots of things disappear when they go into the portal of my science project.
“I hear you. I’ll keep you in the loop,” Duncan said, instead of what he was thinking.
“You do that,” Lee said, and hung up.
Larry Duncan needed a drink. And a vacation. And a new life. But instead, he left his office and headed off to the lab.