Their relief was evident. Both were nodding. “Very well,” said Bradford. “Proceed. Your methods have been quite effective to date.”
The connexion closed.
12
Collaboration
RIACH LABS, Alki Beach, Seattle, WA. 0800, Wednesday, June 7, 2215.
When Dani entered the institute Wednesday morning, she had two assignment lists. One was built from the suggestions that Marak and Kat had given her the night before. The other was the one displayed on the viewwall.
MORNING SCHEDULE—Lab D, station 3
1. Ob:082036 21800216:091505/N-47.5. Rec:N Check/Decay
2. Ob:082037 21781130:152005/N-47.5. Rec:N Check/Decay
3. Ob:082038 21810314:134505/N-47.5. Rec:N Check/Decay
She groaned at the list, which filled the screen and displayed a blinking “continue” triangle. These were the most tedious of assignments. Unlike the routine samplings and investigations, the “Check for Decay” assignments required her to retrieve scores of objects, one at a time. She would not be making recordings at all, but just letting the observation box integrate with her to see if a recording could still be made.
She knew they were necessary. As the scope of the TimeSearch project had grown, a new—or initially undetected—phenomenon had come to light. Some objects, when reexamined, had been unable to reproduce the recordings made from them the first time. The earliest, and most notable, of these instances had been two of the four objects in the hallway display cases. Important people had come to tour the institute soon after it opened, and a highlight of the tour was to let them step into the observation boxes and experience the famous recordings for themselves.
Dani had to admit that there were few better ways to impress potential investors or lawmakers than to let them relive a moment from the distant past through neurological links. People never expected it to feel as real as it did.
But that first attempt at showmanship failed miserably. After months of flawless sensory output, suddenly it was gone.
As a student, Dani had read several accounts of the event and the studies that had followed it, trying to determine what had happened. Two of those objects that had become so famous, the wire whisk and the tile sample, yielded no sensory information at all. The machines behaved as if they had no object to read. The baseball barely saved the day. It gave a satisfactory view of the crowds flying past at 96 miles per hour before glitching out just before hitting the glove. Nobody tried the axehead. The photo was gruesome enough, without the live action aspect of it.
The phenomenon of the sudden loss of access came to be known as “time decay,” and the objects that failed to give a reading were known as “blanks.” Dani enrolled in a graduate-level research class with the same name and worked with her fellow students to pin down the cause. Their first clue came when they realized that the first time an object was scanned, it was never a blank. Blanks came from the second, third, or fourth scanning, and sometimes not at all. Also, an object that was a blank for a particular interval might give a full reading if its scan interval was adjusted to a day, an hour, or even a few minutes later or earlier.
They tried different ways to make an object go blank. They tried exposing it to extremes in temperature or pressure and ruled out those factors. No surprise, since all the objects were stored under the same environmental conditions. They ran analyses to see if the compositional material influenced the decay, and came up negative. Finally they tried using the VAO converters on the recordings from the object, first making photographs, then moving images, then adding sounds and olfactory information. The photographs didn’t seem to cause decay, but they began having positive results when they tried to convert any recording that lasted more than a fraction of a second and then played the converted recording on an auxiliary device.
That was the breakthrough. Once the scan of an object had been recorded, converted, and replayed, the interval in the finished product was no longer productive for scans, ever again. Dani’s class had won an award for the paper they presented on the topic. They didn’t offer the class the next quarter; the deans declared the problem solved, even though the paper had proposed further research on exactly what happened to the chronetic energies of the objects to make the scans fail. Someday, they had said. For now, it was enough to know how to prevent it from occurring.
It wasn’t until Dani had graduated and had come to work at the institute, that she found out there were discrepancies. Her neat little set of conditions still yielded blanks, but there were other blanks too, and nobody knew why. Some objects with only original recordings, or both original and converted recordings, were experiencing time decay without ever having the recordings replayed. It was a puzzle. It made it up to number twenty-three on the list of topics to be studied further before slipping down as more important topics were proposed. Last she checked, it was at number forty.
Thus, the periodic checks of objects, the rescannings to document whether each object was still productive. Tedious and frustrating for Dani, but necessary to gather data in case that topic ever made it to the top of the list. Also, it gave researchers more confidence when requesting objects for their projects.
She had arrived at Lab D. She consulted her list of objects again, and went to the library to retrieve the first ones. She had learned to save steps by bringing the objects back to the box with her in groups of ten or so and swapping them out as needed. She didn’t even have to disconnect from the integrated sensors. Labels on the objects themselves made it easy to put them back in place when she was done. She went back to the lab with a whole tray full of objects.
Then she stepped in the box to begin.
As lunchtime neared, Dani remembered her assignment. Her other assignment, the one Kat and Marak had cautiously agreed to let her undertake. She hoped it wouldn’t be too obviously out of character for her to get lunch in the cafeteria. She would need to start by making some friends, and, after accessing the general employee files, she knew just the person to start with.
The Financial Services intern looked up, startled, when she set her tray down on his table. “Is this seat taken?” she asked him, with her most winning and disarming smile.
“Uh, no.” He hastily moved some of his mess to the other side of his tray. A mess which included, she noted, an actual book. Made of paper. Which he was trying to hide.
“Wow. Where did you get that?” she reached over, boldly, pretending to an interest that wasn’t altogether pretense after all. Where did he get that?
He tried to slide it just out of her reach, then realized the futility. “Uh, I, uh, can’t remember?” he tried. Then, all of a sudden, he relaxed and looked straight at her with his own, surprisingly gorgeous, strikingly blue eyes.
“Truth is,” he admitted, “I borrowed it from the library.”
Sure enough, there was a tag on the back. “Ah. 085212,” she observed. “I should have recognized it, I suppose, being an intern down there and all.”
He laughed, but there was still a trace of nervousness. This was a huge lapse, one that could get him fired, or worse, and they both knew it. It was also, she realized, the perfect opportunity to further her assignment.
“There are a lot of them down there,” he said. “Imagine that. There are books in the library, along with all those other objects. I’m guessing it’s hard to keep track of them all.”
She gave back the book and sat down, making a show of looking over the food on her tray, deciding whether to start on the salad or the sandwich.
“Are you going to turn me in?”
“Depends.”
“I never take them out of the building,” he blurted. “I just read them here.”
“Them? This isn’t the first one?” She kept her tone casual and unaccusing. She wasn’t really interested in getting anyone in trouble, and besides, this was the most intriguing thing that had happened to her in the six months she had worked here. Maybe she should have stepped out of her little bubble sooner.
“No,” he confessed, sheepishly. “I guess I really incriminated myself there, didn’t I? In my defense, I take really good care of them.”
“Oh, I can see that,” she glanced sideways at his pile of napkins and food wrappers, under which he had been hiding his book earlier. “And nobody has ever noticed? How long has this been going on?”
“Nobody notices me at all, actually. I’m an intern.”
She knew the feeling. “Nobody notices me either.”
“I sure haven’t. I’d have remembered, if I did!” His ears turned a little pink at the tips.
Dani flushed. She’d forgotten what happened when she let down her “don’t talk to me, I’m busy” defenses. Still, a little infatuation could be useful too, if she didn’t let it go too far. Besides, she could do worse.
She smiled, shyly and a bit, just a bit, flirtatiously. “So you’ll be remembering now?”
“Oh yeah. Definitely.”
“I’m Dani.”
“I’m Anders.” Anders Peerson, she knew from the personnel records, but she didn’t say anything.
“So, Anders, what are you reading? Anything good?”
“Actually, yeah. It’s kind of a sci-fi spy novel.”
Better and better. He might actually want to help her even without the threat of being reported. “Would you recommend it? Maybe I’ll borrow it when you’re done,” she teased.
“I only recommend books to people I know well.”
Was that an invitation or a rebuff? She wasn’t sure.
His voice grew a little softer. “I’d love to recommend a book to you, actually, when I know you a little better. You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in months.”
“Me too.” Inexplicably, she felt more lighthearted than she had in a long time. Whoa, girl. Remember your assignment, she reminded herself.
They conversed over vegetable barley soup and sandwiches with tall piles of deli beef. He found out she was on her own, without parents or siblings. She found out he had an older brother whom he idolized. He bought her a coffee. She tidied his mess while he was gone. He ignored his book, leaning forward to absorb every detail when she talked about her favorite old movies. She laughed at his stories about growing up in a family that packed up and moved every two or three years.
As the hour drew to a close, Dani wished it could continue. Suddenly, she remembered her assignment. “Hey, you work in Financial Services, right?”
“I’m flattered you noticed.”
She laughed. “I had a student ask me the other day, in one of my presentations, something I couldn’t answer.”
“What do you need to know?”
“Where do we get our money from? Who funds the institute? Is there a public record somewhere, or even something general that we let people see?” There, that sounded like a legitimate reason for asking, without any trace of a hidden motive. And it had the added advantage of being completely true.
“I can probably dig something up for you. Does it have to be public? I can access some files that the general public can’t. I have a talent for ferreting out useless pieces of information in places most people wouldn’t think to look. I was kind of known for that in college.” He laughed sheepishly. “Thus the fascination with spy novels.”
“Oh yeah, I suppose.” She squelched the eagerness that she felt bubbling up inside her and tried her best to appear only casually interested. “I can get a general picture from it and summarize for the kid.”
“Sounds good. After work, then? Do you get off right at five?”
As they talked, they were standing up, gathering belongings and trays. Preparing to go their separate ways.
“Yes, right at five. I’ll meet you outside the security gates, on those benches under the clock tower.”
“It’s a date, then,” he said. “I mean … let’s do it.”
But as Dani dumped her wrappers in recycling, deposited her tray on the rack, and headed back to work, she entertained the lingering conviction that he meant something more.
She felt astonishingly upbeat, even when she looked over her afternoon list and discovered more—many more—time decay checks. One thing about boring task lists: They gave her time to think.
Back at the library shelves, she was happy to discover that the next twenty-two items were small enough to fit on one tray. She could fit one more into her lab coat pocket—whoa, what was this? She realized she still had the four sample materials in her pocket from yesterday. She’d have to remember to take those back to the supply room. Oh well, they had probably twenty more sets there, so these wouldn’t be needed any time soon.
She carried the items back to the scanner station. This batch could keep her occupied for at least an hour and a half, and she could plan out her next step. Kat and Marak would be pleased with her progress.
Dani was a little surprised that she was enjoying this so much. Maybe she missed her calling, she thought wryly. She wondered idly what the market was for academic espionage. She was half-qualified; they’d have to consider her, anyway. Whoever “they” were.
She stepped into the observation box and placed the items on the small table there, arranging them in order by their tags, then stepped into the box and let the sensors integrate with her brain. The rest of this she could almost do with her eyes closed, if she didn’t have to set and check the parameters.
She placed the first object in the chamber.
13
Disruption
HUNTER’S OFFICE. 1320, Wednesday, June 7, 2215.
It was time. Hunter stood and moved out from behind his massive desk. Its size was meant to make him less accessible and more intimidating, but he always preferred to stand.
With a quick gesture of his hand, he pulled the connexion icon over to the center of the sparsely populated viewwall. Another twist and a microphone icon pulsed, awaiting his spoken command. “Dr. Brant,” he spoke into the air. The microphone vanished. He waited only seconds before the scientist’s image appeared on his wall. His own image to her was blank. They expected that. It protected their privacy, he always assured them, should anyone look over their shoulders and see the screen.
He waited while she stood and closed the door to her office. That was good. What he had to say would not be overheard.
“You are alone?” he asked her.
“Yes. They just left. What did you want me to see?”
“Something has come into my possession that might, shall we say, dredge up old memories. It’s not the sort of thing you’d want out where someone might access it inadvertently—or intentionally.”
“Someone already has, obviously.”
“I have gone to the trouble of ensuring that I have the only copy. I just want you to know the enormity of what I’m protecting you from. You have a holographic projector there, as I suggested?
She tapped the desktop device to her left. “I have it. Here’s the icon.”
A small rotating image of a hologram appeared on his viewwall. “Will you have privacy long enough to watch it?”
“Yes, my office door is closed. I won’t be disturbed.”
He waved again at a corner of the screen and sent the recording to her projector. As he played the recording on his projector, she would be able to view it simultaneously on hers. Another quick glance through the glass door assured him that his executive secretary was busy with a list he had given him earlier, his back to the soundproof office, oblivious for the moment as to anything that occurred within.
“Watch.” He touched the start button.
A garden bloomed before them, late summer flowers and tree branches nodding gently in the breeze. A fountain gurgled in the background, and birds chirped. The scents of late-blooming lilacs, hybrid tea roses, and honeysuckle mingled with faint smells of city exhaust settling down from the air overhead. On a cobblestone patio to the right of the hologram sat a bistro set, two white wrought-iron chairs and a matching table.
A distinguished-looking middle-aged man emerge
d from the left, his hand on the elbow of a young woman in a fluffy pink sweater. His gesture was one of support, not control. His expression was sympathetic, his actions considerate. He pulled out a chair for the woman, who was clearly shaken.
On the viewwall, he could monitor Dr. Brant’s reactions to what she was seeing and hearing. As he watched, her face hardened, which was not what he’d hoped. He did not want to strengthen the hint of resistance she had been showing. He frowned. She would know this scene well, would remember sitting in that chair some nine years earlier. She would remember Dr. Mitchum Seebak and the conversation they had that day. He could only hope that the memories would stir up the guilt she had buried.
There it was now: another emotion crossing her features. He saw shame, followed by regret, and those responses, in the principled woman that he knew her to be, would be enough to secure her firmly in his grasp. Ironic that he could use her very principles against her this way.
In the hologram, the other scientist was speaking. “Please, sit, Marielle. Relax. I’m here to listen, but not until you’re ready.”
“I’m ready, Mitch. I have to talk to someone.”
He nodded. He brushed her hair back away from her face, and gently wiped a tear from her cheek. With another man, this might have been a presumptive or possessive move, but with him it seemed almost fatherly. He handed her a tissue and waited quietly for her to compose herself.
She breathed quietly and deliberately for a few moments, closing her eyes and inhaling the peace of the garden, clearly willing it to calm her before she spoke. Finally, she opened her eyes.
“I killed him, Mitch.”
“Killed him? Who?”
“Nicah Myles. I drove the helicar that hit him and Elena that night. I killed him, and I put her into a coma.” She looked up suddenly, alarmed. “Please don’t tell Lexil!”
“Of course not!” He reassured her. “But surely, it was an accident?”
“That’s the thing. It wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t do it on purpose, but it was preventable. It should have been prevented! Oh, Mitch … I was drunk!” She buried her face in her hands, weeping, trying to stop.
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