by Josh Karnes
Chapter 25
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
Aaron led the way as he and Carl entered the lab with the four phones in hand. Their plan was to briefly drop the phones off with the bench techs and grab more gear and head back out. However, they ran into Larry Duncan before they could get to the techs, and he had different plans.
“Are those the phones with the bad time data?” Larry asked. Larry had missed out on their earlier briefing directly but got a summary from Kyle. He had decided that the phones were a critical piece of the puzzle and wanted to take command of this analysis himself.
“Yeah. One of them, the screen won't come on. The other ones boot loop, but at least the display works,” Aaron reported.
“Come with me,” Duncan instructed. They followed him to his office where he picked up his phone and spoke, “Hey Kyle, grab Laurie and meet me in my office.” He hung up after getting an affirmative response and within seconds Kyle and Laurie entered the small room. As they entered, Larry announced, “Aaron and Carl have the phones from the buoys. They say the screen is dead on one and the others boot loop.”
Laurie took the bait, “We will have to get them on the bench to figure out why they are not booting, but let's assume Aaron and Carl were right before, they're out of storage space. The real question is why.”
“Right. As soon as we finish this meeting, Laurie, can you take them to the bench techs? If they have to tear them down to the components then do it. I want to know why they did this, exactly,” Larry commanded.
“Larry, when these guys came in earlier, they were talking about an anomaly happening even when we were not running Daedalus. What are the chances this is unrelated?” Kyle said.
“Well, anything's possible. But I think it's safe to assume that we caused a disruption. It can't be a coincidence that we are doing gravity experiments and we are seeing gross timing distortions.”
Aaron and Carl had not yet been privy to this line of thought. They knew the phones were malfunctioning, but they had not been told that the experiments they were doing there at Thermion's facility on Isla Roca might cause actual time distortions.
“Wait a minute. Are you saying you think the phones are actually aging faster than everything else? That somehow these phones are experiencing more time passing than the other phones in the grid?” Aaron asked, disbelieving.
Kyle realized that Larry let something slip that he probably should have kept to himself. “We don't know what is happening, not with any certainty,” he said. “All we know is that the phones we put in the buoys were reporting anomalies that the other phones didn't report. So something is different. We ruled out hardware, so it has to be some external thing.”
“Well, these buoys are right on top of that big sinkhole out there,” Carl said.
“Sinkhole...” Duncan said, not being familiar with much that lies outside the lab.
“Yeah. It's a seven hundred foot deep hole in the ocean just a thousand yards off our coast here,” Carl explained.
“Hey, anyone know how that thing got there? Did it have anything to do with the munitions testing the Navy did on Culebra?” Laurie asked.
“No way,” Duncan said. “It's big, right? You said seven hundred feet deep? There's nothing the Navy could have done to make a hole like that. It has to be naturally occurring.”
“Well what is it, anyway?” Laurie asked.
“Guys. It's just a hole. Nothing special. There are several of them around the world, some nearly as big. And this is by no means the deepest thing in the ocean. It's just unusual because it's a hole where the surrounding water is only sixty or seventy feet deep so that seven hundred foot deep hole looks like a giant hole, but it's not really that big of a deal. It's just a geological feature,” Kyle said. “That's a red herring. It's not causing these anomalies.”
“Well, there are sure a bunch of divers out there who think it's special. There's at least one tour out there every day, dozens of divers,” Carl said.
“That's interesting,” Larry said. “Whatever our anomaly is, it must be extremely localized, if dive tours are out there every day and dozens of divers operate without noticing it.”
“Actually,” Aaron said, putting the pieces together, “if those phones were actually aging a decade for every hour they were out there, and it was not just an oscillator malfunction on the phones, then any divers that got near it would drown.”
“Drown?” Laurie said, surprised. “Why would they drown?”
Carl answered gravely, “They'd run out of air. I mean, if it was like the phones, then they would be underwater for hours while only seconds passed on the surface. They would run out of air, probably before they could surface.”
“No. I don't think so. They'd dive and all indications for them while they were diving would be that they'd been down for an hour, their dive computer would tell them to go up, their air would be running low. Then they'd surface and on the surface it'd only be seconds or minutes. But they're moving, so if this is truly localized, then they might not notice at all. Get close enough to the perimeter of the anomaly, whatever that is, and they'd just experience a mild and very temporary acceleration of time. So they'd be under for, say, 59 minutes, but their dive computer would say an hour,” Kyle explained.
“Okay, so this doesn't have anything to do with divers,” Larry said.
“Well, there was a group out there looking for a lost diver today. Don't know if that's related,” Aaron said. For just a moment, everyone in the room thought that maybe, just maybe, Carl was right. A diver must have drowned. But then the moment passed.
“That's just a random coincidence,” Larry said hopefully. “You guys going back out there?”
“Yeah, we thought that there may be electromagnetic anomalies from the sinkhole, maybe remnants of something the Navy deposited there, so we thought we'd take an EMF meter out and check it out,” Carl said.
“Worth checking. But I'm more concerned about the timing anomalies. The phones obviously aren't going to work anymore. I have another idea.” Larry lifted a large case onto the desk and opened it. Inside were four electronic devices each about the size of a paperback book. “These are portable atomic clocks. CSAC,” he pronounced it see-sack. “They just tell time, and they are extremely stable over a long time. We can rule out oscillator anomalies by using these.”
“CSAC?” asked Laurie.
“Chip Scale Atomic Clock,” said Kyle. “It's an ultra-stable real-time clock chip that's better than a normal clock but not quite as good as a real atomic clock like a cesium.”
“Well, if there's an electromagnetic anomaly, they would still be affected,” said Aaron.
“We can shield the pelican cases with mu-metal,” Kyle said. “It is the only stuff that can shield a magnetic field anyway. We have some in the supply cabinet. I'll get it for you. You can cut it with tin snips and then just copper-tape the edges.”
“Sounds good, but how do we know it's not radiation causing this?” Carl said.
“That's ridiculous,” Larry said. “But you might as well check. Take a Geiger counter. I'm sure Kyle's got one right next to his mu-metal,” he said sarcastically.
“Actually, I do,” Kyle said, with a wink.
“Well guys, it's been fun, but we have to get moving if we plan to get this all set up before dark,” Carl said. Aaron reached over to close the case with the atomic clocks, while Kyle motioned for Carl to follow him to the supply cabinet.