by Josh Karnes
* * *
Aaron and Carl left Kyle and Laurie to solve the mysteries of the universe on their own. They had other work to attend to, notably to retrieve the four dead phones and see if they could determine just what had happened to them. They hadn’t expected the degree of concern that Kyle and Laurie were exhibiting, and neither was sure what they were talking about with the hard drive.
As soon as they got clear of the building on the way to the dock, Aaron started in, “What do you make of that, Carl? I think those guys are worried about this.”
“It sure seemed like there must be something more going on than malfunctioning smartphones,” Carl replied.
Only the core team working on Daedalus knew the extent of their experiments, and information about the cubes disappearing was controlled to a very short list. When Kyle had sent the team out on Sunday to set up the smartphone array to monitor time anomalies, the project was presented as just a way to keep track of whether Daedalus was interfering with GPS communication. Since GPS is relied upon for navigation in virtually everything from private cars to ocean liners and smart bombs, anything that disrupts their communication can be disastrous. Or so they were told. Now Carl was not sure that was the whole story.
“No kidding. When scientists who are working with a supercollider that some people say is capable of destroying the earth get nervous, well that kind of worries me a little, Carl.”
“Let’s just get the phones and get to the bottom of this,” Carl said. “Probably the Pelican cases are not watertight, maybe it’s corrosion or some heavy metal contamination. Maybe there’s a localized magnetic anomaly there. You know those buoys are close to that giant sinkhole out there, who knows what could be in there. Back when the Navy was running test facilities on Culebra, they left behind lots of materiel and there’s plenty of unusual pollution. Something weird is going on with these phones, for sure. We need to figure it out so if the Daedalus is breaking them, Kyle can fix it. Last thing we want is for them to build something that screws up our guidance systems by jamming GPS.”
Those were all good explanations, Aaron thought. They would definitely need to get to the bottom of this, even if it meant literally getting to the bottom of the sinkhole. Maybe there was some sunken magnetic material down there, or maybe one of the Navy’s tests during the cold war impacted the ocean bottom and localized heating and magnetic field from a nuke did something to the rock that changed its magnetic properties.
“Alright, Carl,” Aaron said as they boarded the Zodiac and he flipped on the ignition. “Let’s get the phones back to the lab, let some of the techs there tear it down and see if they can figure out what went wrong. While they are doing that, we should come back out with diving gear and some EMF meters, see if there’s something in that sinkhole that could cause the phones to go haywire.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Carl said as they sped off in the direction of El Pliegue.