by Josh Karnes
Chapter 28
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
Larry Duncan sat in his office thumbing through his handwritten notes in one of many college-style lab notebooks that he was fond of keeping, thinking maybe something would jump out at him. Maybe there was something he had missed. He was doing an inventory in his mind.
What were the facts?
Their tests on Daedalus resulted in disappearing cubes.
A cube like the ones they sent into the portal was found in a log that was to be used to produce the same cubes.
There is an inexplicable massive time anomaly being reported by four GPS-equipped smartphones at the edge of their perimeter in the ocean.
A hard disk drive they put into the portal with information on it also disappeared and they didn't know where it was any more than they did the missing cubes.
Now, what were their assumptions?
The cube they found in a log may be one that they put into the portal.
The time anomaly reported by the smartphones from the buoys may be real.
What were their theories and hypotheses?
The cube found in the log was sent back in time, and the log in which it was found is the original source of the carbon atoms that made up the cube.
The hard disk drive was also sent back in time. No clue where, or when, it is now.
Daedalus is causing a time anomaly in the ocean just off the shore.
The real problem with this is that there were just too many unknowns. And these were unanswerable questions. If they were in fact observing a time-travel event, then this was likely the first time in all of human history that such an event had been seen. There was no established method to catalog data. There was no prior experiment that could be referenced to instruct his team. And on top of that, the so-called “observer effect” was certainly impacting this event. How was their observation of these events affecting their outcome? This is what was confusing Larry more than anything at this exact moment.
He was looking through his notes, but the fact is that whatever he didn't remember has likely not even occurred. If a change had been introduced in the past, such as if they had succeeded in sending back the hard disk drive and alerting their former selves of the problem that lay ahead, then he would remember it. His own memory would be different now than it was before. And so would his notes. But maybe, he thought, there was something in his notes that was important now, knowing what he knows, but that was not important to him at the time. It was a long shot, but he was looking anyway.
He knew that Kyle really had a better handle on all of this paradox madness than he did. But Kyle was a zealot. Intuitive. He had faith in things he could not see. Larry just could not accept that. Not yet. He wasn't ready. He wasn't that desperate.
And then there was that other thing. Carl was talking about a missing kid. That had to be a coincidence. A giant sinkhole with a bunch of amateur divers and nobody bothering to check PADI certifications, it was a given that one would drown from time to time. And if someone drowned over the sinkhole, they'd likely not wash up on shore. Larry wondered if the police were going to come looking on the shore of Isla Roca for the drowned kid. The last thing they needed right now, while they are trying to solve a complicated quantum puzzle, is for a bunch of cops to be running all over the island.
And then there was the completely irrational. There was really literally no way that Daedalus had anything at all to do with the missing kid. Why, then, did Larry Duncan, physicist and logician, have a tiny hint of fear that somehow they had caused this? It had to be Kyle, with his inexplicable faith, rubbing off on him somehow.
Just as Larry was shaking off this feeling, his cell phone rang. “Duncan,” he said.
“Larry, it's Carl. We have an issue.”
“Tell me about it,” Larry said sarcastically, and instantly regretted it.
“No, I mean, a new issue. There's a helicopter approaching. I am guessing it'll be landing in about two minutes. I think we should prepare for some visitors.”
This had to be about the missing kid.
“Alright, Carl. Can you meet them at the helipad? Whoever it is, try and get rid of them. They are not authorized to land here anyway. But find out who it is and let me know as soon as they are clear.”
“Will do.” Larry hung up the phone and filed his notebook with the rest of them on the shelf. He retrieved his current notebook from his desk and began writing out a note about the lost kid and the helicopter. Who knows? Maybe he'll be looking back on this note one day and find it is important. About five minutes went by before his phone rang again. “What's up, Carl?” Larry said.
“Larry, it's an FBI agent. He insists on seeing you. We are on our way to your office.”
Larry ran his hand through his hair and looked at his watch. It was only nine in the morning and already this was turning into a long day. “That's fine, Carl. Bring him on in. Straight to my office. Do not bring him through the lab. I don't want him seeing anything we are working on.”
“Of course. We'll be right there.”