by Josh Karnes
Chapter 20
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything? Laurie Carter was reminded of the scene from The Matrix when the oracle told Neo not to worry about the vase he hadn’t broken yet. That was the nature of this paradox.
Yesterday they had put their control server’s hard drive into the Daedalus portal, under the working theory that they may be sending things back in time. This was meant to be an experiment and also a shortcut. But now, she didn’t know what to expect. If the hard drive had gone back in time and they had read all of the data they had put on it, then what? Nothing had changed. It’s not as if some grand revelation had suddenly emerged. But would it have done that? Would she even know?
“Hey Kyle,” Laurie asked. “Tell me what we should be expecting now.”
“What we should be expecting?”
“Yeah. We put the rewritten server’s hard drive in the portal. So what are we expecting to happen?”
“Well, if the hard drive went back in time with the data intact as we wrote it today, then it would have alerted us whenever it happened. Now, I don’t remember finding any great treasure of information about the future and about these anomalies suddenly popping up on our monitors, so I have to guess it didn’t work.”
“How so?”
“Well, if it had worked, then our memories would be different now. For one, we wouldn’t remember putting the hard drive in the portal, because, well, we probably didn’t. Instead we would remember making a crazy discovery some time ago about what was going to happen in the future. In other words, since we know we put the hard drive in the portal yesterday, that pretty much proves the experiment didn’t work,” Kyle explained. He tried not to think about the paradox.
“You know, just as the hard drive vanished, I remembered back when we first started running the Daedalus, like two years ago. We had a hard drive crash while we were doing one of the first full-power runs. I think we called in IT who fixed it really quickly. Do you remember that?”
“Now that you mention it, I do remember something like that. But we had all kinds of problems a couple of years ago when we first got started on this. It’s hard to put my finger on one specific incident.”
Laurie took on a more serious tone. “Well I can remember, probably because the computer controls are my main responsibility. I remember being worried about the stability of the computers to control the micro black holes, and what would happen if they crashed while we were further along. You know, could we cause some big problem? I remember when they were first firing up the Hadron collider, there were all those theories that if they botched it, it could convert everything into strange matter and destroy the earth and everything in it. That kept me up nights. What we are doing here is not that different.”
“Yeah, I have worried about that too. A lot. And since we are hacking on space-time, the truth is, we could potentially cause a much more subtle range of problems. I try not to think about it too much. Larry and I go round and round about this.”
And what’s really baking my noodle, Laurie thought, is whether we already broke it, and we just don’t know it yet. As she was pondering just what kind of people they were to think they could control space or time, Carl Jacobs and Aaron West strode into the lab in their direction.
“Just the two I was looking for,” Carl called out.
“What’s up Carl?” Kyle asked.
“Well, remember those phones out on the buoys that had a big time offset and dead batteries? Well yesterday we went out and hooked up solar panels on each of the buoys to power the phones, and we swapped them for new hardware just to rule out a fluke of four bad phones. We have been monitoring their time offsets and they are huge, but they correct each second when they get a GPS update. But within just a couple of hours they all crashed right about the same time, looks like ran out of storage space.”
“What happened with the storage space?” Laurie asked. These phones had about sixteen gigabytes of storage space, and they had nothing on them except for the operating system and the script that was reporting their time offsets. It’s not like someone was downloading apps or media files onto them.
Aaron responded, “Best I can tell, it’s syslog.”
“Syslog,” Kyle prompted.
“Syslog is a log file that Linux-type operating systems write to on the device, whenever events occur. These Android phones work this way. So when things happen like a driver has an error or it can’t contact a server it needs or whatever, it writes a line to the log file,” Laurie explained for Kyle’s benefit. “But the syslog file is usually tiny. How could it cause the phones to run out of storage space?”
Aaron answered, “Well, for every second of GPS time, they were running over one hundred thousand seconds of local time, phone time. So each second they were accumulating about a day’s worth of logging. Best guess is, after a few hours, it accumulated something like 30 or 40 years worth of logging data.”
“How is that possible? Are you sure about that math?” Kyle said, astonished.
“Yeah, look,” Carl said, “those phones were racking up about a day’s worth of RTC time each second. There’s thirty-six hundred seconds in an hour. That’s about ten years worth of seconds for the phones. So every hour we left the phones out there running, they each wrote a decade's worth of syslog. Give or take.”
The reality of what was happening was sinking in. The group stood in stunned silence for a few moments. “Ten years in an hour,” Kyle said, eyes fixed in the distance. “Dear God.”
“Carl, when did you say this all happened?” Laurie asked.
“It was last night. We got the phones refitted and solar panels up before dark.”
Laurie gave Kyle a grave look, “That was about the time we put the hard drive in. We haven’t done any experiments since then, have we?”
“No. Daedalus has been powered down. You would have known if we had it up,” Kyle looked over at Aaron and Carl. “You’re sure about the time,” he said needlessly, mostly reminding himself so he could be sure.
“Yeah. Last night, they crashed. We were about to go out this morning and get them, figure we should just bring them back for a post-mortem. We will have to find another way to monitor the time anomalies because these phones obviously aren’t going to work,” Aaron said.
Kyle fixed his eyes on Laurie. “How is that even possible?” he asked. She didn’t answer.