by Josh Karnes
Chapter 45
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
Carson Lee would have preferred to have had a one-on-one meeting with Larry Duncan prior to speaking with the FBI, but this plan was thwarted nearly as soon as he departed the chopper. A slender man in his early fifties wearing a navy suit approached him, calling his name.
“Carson Lee? Carson Lee.” Otero confirmed. “Mr. Lee, you and I need to have a conversation.” Otero joined Carson Lee moving at a rapid pace towards the lobby of the facility in order to avoid the rain that was beginning to fall.
“You are?”
“Michael Otero,” he said while showing his FBI credentials. “SAC, FBI San Juan. I need to meet with you and your man, Duncan.”
“Do you have a warrant, Mr. Otero?”
“Mr. Lee, the FBI is requesting your voluntary assistance in a search for a teenage boy. This is a missing persons case. As you might be aware, every hour that passes dramatically reduces our chances of finding him alive. Frankly, we don't have time to get a warrant. We don't have time for legal wrangling. A life is at stake.”
“What do you want with Larry Duncan?”
“He is the man who has been in charge here during the time the boy went missing. I just need a few minutes of your time. Please take me to Mr. Duncan and we can get this over with.”
Carson Lee thought about this. He didn't like the prying eyes on his operations and he thought the longer this dragged on, the more footage of the Daedalus facility would be shot and shown on national TV. The longer this took to find the kid, the more likely some reporter would turn over the wrong stone or one of his staff would leak some critical piece of information. “This way,” Carson Lee said as he swiped his security badge and the magnetic lock on the door clicked open.
Larry Duncan was joined in his office by Laurie and Kyle. Kyle's assertion about the time loop and his cursory proof in the class ring was completely distracting him from the political storm that had blown in by way of the Coast Guard and the FBI.
“I have been thinking about this non-stop, and I am still having a hard time with it. Lay it out for me, Kyle. Just a week ago, we were not even sure that a time loop was possible. I mean, you are suggesting, in essence, we have created a wormhole. And we did it by accident. I can't wrap my head around the paradox of it.” Larry stopped talking. He was rambling. He wasn't making sense, even to himself. He needed to give Kyle space to make it clear.
“Look, Larry. I am not sure I can explain it well. I just saw it. We have evidence of it staring us in the face. I have a feeling about how it works but I can't make it work mathematically yet.”
“I don't need the math right now. Give me the feeling. Let's start somewhere.”
“Okay. I think this is really so much simpler than we have made it in the past. There's not alternate universes or alternate time lines and all of that crazy sci-fi nonsense. There's just one universe, and it's made up of matter, existing in space-time. So an object exists across space and time as dimensions of the same fabric, so to speak. It's just that ordinary objects we are used to, all matter, in fact, just moves through time. The problem for us is that we are not able to see across the dimension of time. We just follow it and we can't affect it, normally.
“We made a change to the matter, and the changed matter then exists in its changed form across time. Let's say our time loop is a week. So we put something in the portal, and whatever change we made to it before we put it in the portal takes effect a week ago. So if we dented your ring today and put it in the portal, then the dent really appeared a week ago. We just didn't notice it until we looked at it to consider putting it in the portal.”
“But we didn't dent it. We didn't put it in the portal.”
“Yes we did. The proof is the dent in the ring. But we didn't continue doing it. So the ring didn't continue looping.”
“You mean we changed the future.”
“We changed the ring. The future, well it's not set in stone. It hasn't happened yet for us, since we are forced to move through time at a constant pace and in only one direction. But that's just a human limitation. A four-dimensional being would be able to see the path of the ring the entire way like we can see the length, width and depth of your desk, for example. If we could perceive time as a dimension, then we'd see the whole lifetime of your desk along with the length, width and depth.”
“I'm still not getting it,” said Laurie.
“Yeah, me neither—” Larry was interrupted by new visitors coming in his door. It was Carson Lee and a man he didn't recognize.
“Larry,” Carson Lee said. “This is agent...”
“Michael Otero. SAC, FBI San Juan.” The men shook hands.
“Mr. Otero requested a meeting with the two of us,” Carson Lee said.
“Okay. Kyle, Laurie, we'll continue this later.” Kyle and Laurie got the hint and got up and left. After they left the office, the door was closed and they presumed the big wigs were having a private meeting. They took this opportunity to retreat to the lab.
“I need you to help me work out the math of this. Since we know what is happening now, maybe we can find the math error and figure out where, or when, our cubes have gone. And maybe we can tune it to make a shorter loop that we can observe better.”
“Come up with a better test,” Laurie said.
“Exactly.”
“Let's do it.”