Janine sighed. “I’m so sorry, Nunu. It’s a long story.”
“Actually, Jay, something really weird is happening, and I can’t explain it …”
“Spill it. In case you haven’t realized this yet, there are few things at the moment that surprise me. I’m sure you’ve worked out by now that the world could be coming to an abrupt end sooner than we might think,” she said bluntly. There was no point in hiding that fact from anyone anymore. Most people already knew it, even if they didn’t want to believe it.
“I know, Jay. I’m terrified. Not so much for me, but for the boys.”
“Calm down. We have the smartest people in the world working on this. Now tell me what’s going on?”
“It’s easier to show you. Take a look.”
Kath activated the camera and Janine gasped when she saw her sister’s image. “My god, Nunu, what happened to your hair? You look like you’ve stuck your fingers in an electrical socket.”
“I told you.”
“Hang on a second, I’m going to ask someone here about this.”
Janine showed Kath’s image to Sheri, who had been awoken by the conversation.
“Where is she? Where do you guys live, Janine?” asked Sheri.
“San Antonia, Texas.”
“Ask Kath about the humidity there.”
Janine placed Kath on speakerphone. “Kath, is it humid at the moment?” she asked.
“Are you serious? We’re having the driest spell I can remember. I don’t think the humidity could be more than ten percent.”
“That explains it,” said Sheri.
“Explains what?” asked Janine.
“Explains why they’re experiencing such severe static electricity and we’re not. Moisture in the air makes it much more difficult for a charge to build up and for an electron to transfer. I’m almost certain that this phenomenon is worldwide, but it’s exaggerated in dry climates.”
As she spoke Sheri’s face paled, and her eyes widened.
“What is it, Sheri?” asked Janine. She didn’t like the worried look on her face. She’d seen it once before, when she’d asked her whether they’d shut down EMB.
“This new development means that electrons are becoming more unstable in their orbits around the nucleus. We might all become conductors, placing ourselves at risk from electric shocks. Also, depending on how much charge is able to transfer from an atom, this may even influence the workings of EMB and our computers. We’re going to have to make this environment as static free as humanly possible.”
She yelled over to Drew, who was busy with his phone. “Where’s the nearest hospital?”
“Mmm, Canberra General, about ten minutes away by helicopter.”
“Can you do me a big favor? You need to warn the hospital about the dangers of static electricity and while you’re at it, I need you to ask them for as many pairs of antistatic shoes and hand creams as they can spare.”
“Why the hospital?” asked Janine, who felt the beginnings of panic stir inside her.
“I’m pretty sure they’re used in the sterile operating-theatre environment,” replied Sheri.
“I’ll get onto it straightaway,” Drew said. “I’ve got a very good mate who works in the theatre complex.”
“Oh and one more thing, Drew, you’ll need to contact the relevant government authorities and explain the seriousness of this new static electricity situation to them and the measures they’ll need to put in place to prevent a catastrophe from happening … across the globe,” she added glumly.
“The public should know about this, too,” said Drew.
Janine politely ended the phone call to Kath and then said, “I can help with that. I’ll do a quick broadcast to my listeners.”
She called Jack, who was fiddling with his glock on the couch. “Jack you can be my cameraman. We’ll sit you up on a high chair, and rest your ankle on a foot stool. Sheri, is there a camera set-up I could use?”
“Ask Drew, though I’m pretty sure we can transmit directly from here.”
Sheri grabbed the electronic speakerphone and proceeded to warn the reduced team of personnel in the building regarding the new antistatic measures. After doing that, she sat down, took a deep breath in and re-linked with Wesley.
“Wesley, we have another problem.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
“Shit, what now?” said Wesley.
Sheri explained the issue with static electricity.
“Jesus! EMB is full of semi-conductor components, and if we discharge large amounts of static to them, who knows what might malfunction.”
“Exactly, Wes.”
“What do you suggest we do?”
“I’ve just put into place antistatic measures here and you need to do the same. I’m also going to turn up the humidity. Luckily I’m reading a relative humidity level here of about sixty-five percent, what’s yours like?”
Wesley checked his computer. “Only thirty percent here. It hasn’t rained for a few days and the climate control isn’t back to normal functioning yet.”
“Okay, Wesley, do a little experiment for me please. Touch your sweater, just briefly, and now touch something metallic.”
Wesley did as he was told. A small electric spark startled him. “Sheri, you’re right, I only touched the sweater very lightly, but I don’t understand why I didn’t notice it until now.”
“Probably because it’s only become a problem in the last hour or so. It seems that these changes are starting to happen in an exponential way. What’s normal one minute is possibly no longer true the next.” She looked at her watch. “Oh my god. It’s imperative that we get Simon to you ASAP.”
“Some good news on that front. I believe he’s just entered the building. The pilot, however, reported that the tide is in almost as far as Glendale.”
“Good work, Wesley. Let’s get that humidity up and those antistatic measures in place.”
“Consider it done.”
Wesley spun his head around just as Simon was being escorted into the building by two armed marines. Despite Simon’s willingness to cooperate he was handcuffed, the orders coming from the general. He entered the room, his head hung low.
“Unlock those,” commanded Wesley to the marines.
The larger of the two marines pulled out a small laser device, which he brushed over the handcuffs and the cuffs clicked opened.
“Get over here, you weasel,” said Wesley in a stern voice. At this point he wasn’t sure who he despised more, Simon or the general. It was certainly a race to the bottom.
Simon hesitated for a moment then gingerly made his way over to the console. He was visible to Sheri on the vidlink.
“You gutless, repulsive, sick, twisted man,” she spat, her voice venomous.
He didn’t respond, but gazed around the room, seemingly dazzled.
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” she asked.
He failed to reply again. His eyes looked to be glazed over.
“Okay, Simon, have it your way, but you’re now going to listen to me. I don’t know what you did to my program, or how you managed to sneak behind my back all those years and spy on me, but I take my hat off to you, you did a damn good job of it. I trusted you with my heart, with my life, and you betrayed not just me …” she paused and sighed, “… but every single living soul on this planet. You wanted recognition? Well, you got it. Pity there won’t be anyone around to remember you though, let alone your daughter, who I doubt you gave a second thought to.”
The mention of Chloe seemed to shake him from his trance, and Wesley noticed that he looked more attentive.
“You’ll finally be recognized for your greatest achievement ever, Simon, the extinction of all life and possibly everything else in our known universe. Five billion years of evolution gone, just like that.” She snapped her fingers.
Simon finally looked up at Sheri, and for a moment Wesley thought he saw a tear build in the corner of his eye.
Stev
e tightened his grip around Sheri. There were tears streaming down her reddened cheeks. He said, “It’s enough, honey, let me take over.”
* * * *
Sheri shut her eyes. She did not want to believe that all the hopes and dreams she had once shared with that man had ended so pathetically. Where was the sweet, bright, lovable boy she had fallen in love with?
The professor wobbled over to her. He wrapped his hefty arm around her as she started sobbing, while Steve continued the conversation with Simon.
“Simon, as much as I’d like nothing more than to personally come over and strangle you, I have to contain myself, because apparently, in an ironic twist of fate, you might be the only person on this planet who may be able to get us out of this mess.”
Simon finally broke his silence. “You’ve listened to the tape of the conversation I had with the general?”
“Yes.”
“Well then you’ll know that it’s impossible to undo.”
“That’s not what you said in your conversation, you said there might be a way to reverse it.”
“No, I said that there may be a way to prevent it from having happened.”
“That’s what I meant, so let’s get on with it. Tell us what you need,” said Steve.
“We’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves, Steve, it’s a tad more complicated than that. Let me tell you what we’re up against first. May I sit down?”
Steve nodded.
“Firstly, the plan would be to unwind the events that have happened in these past two weeks, something which requires me to gain full access to a fully functioning EMB, which with all that’s happened, may no longer be possible.
Secondly, assuming I was able to do that, I would need time to overwrite the program I installed on EMB. It took me months to work on the patch, which was ten times simpler to do. Now you expect me to pull this off in what … ten, twelve, hours?”
“Eleven,” said Steve, looking at his watch.
“Thirdly, even if I do manage to do it, with the rate of change of the physical laws, I don’t know if electricity will be electricity in the way we understand it in eleven hours’ time, so that I can even utilize the computers and EMB. Electrons may just stop moving, and we may all just drop dead of heart attacks when our sinoatrial nodes suddenly cease to function.”
“That’s a lot of negativity that we don’t need to hear right now. We need to focus on possibility.”
“There’s a fourth thing,” came a different voice. Everyone swung around to see who had spoken. It was the professor, who was obviously intoxicated.
“What, Professor?” asked Steve.
“Even if we magically manage to achieve all that, my dear boy,” he said, slurring his words, “and we’re taken back to two weeks ago, who’s to say the whole damn sequence of events will not unfold again in exactly the same way they just have, bloody well bringing us back to this point in time two weeks later.”
They all looked at each other. The professor had raised a worryingly valid point.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
“He’s right,” said Simon. “I don’t know if there’s a way around that. When it’s two weeks ago, it will be exactly two weeks ago and we’ll be going down the exact same timeline in exactly the same way.”
“Perhaps we can leave a marker or something to remind us?” asked Drew.
Sheri sat up.
“What is it?” asked Steve.
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before,” she said. “It’s simple, apart from the initial magnetic switch which was related to Simon’s EMB patch, the laws of physics only started changing when—”
“When Steve discovered the alien signal,” finished Drew.
“Not just when Steve discovered it, but the exact moment that Steve discovered it,” said Sheri. “If you look back at the record and timeline of events, you’ll find that the first vague evidence of physical change, apart from the polar switch, which could be explained by EMB itself, took place at precisely the same moment Steve recognized the signal as being alien.”
Janine, who was listening attentively, asked, “I’m not with you, guys. What evidence are you talking about?”
“Something overlooked by nearly everyone,” Simon said. “It was extremely subtle, but I noticed it because I found it really odd.”
“I don’t understand. What is this subtle thing that happened?” asked Steve.
Simon continued. “You probably wouldn’t have noticed it either, Steve, but there was a small surge of energy across the globe at that exact moment. The reason I was aware of it, was that my electronic restraining bracelet gave me a light shock. Nothing to write home about, but I found it unusual, as I’d tried numerous times myself to initiate that in the hope I could somehow block GPS transmission of my position.” He shook his head. “I’d given up, thinking it was impossible to achieve without access to some hardware that I couldn’t get my hands on. Anyhow, I was so intrigued by that shock, that I checked with a few colleagues of mine and they reported a small surge in their power, too. So I checked more distant places, thinking it might just have been a local power surge, and I was surprised to find out that the entire national grid had experienced that power burst. I didn’t stop there, I started checking internationally, and guess what?”
“There was a power surge across the planet,” finished Sheri.
“Exactly. I found that so intriguing that I hacked into EMB thinking that perhaps it was somehow related to something I’d done.”
“What did you find?” asked Drew. He was slouched back in his chair. He adjusted the baseball cap he was wearing.
“I found that Steve had discovered the alien signal at that exact moment in time.”
“Incredible,” said Drew, giving a loud snort.
Sheri noticed that Steve had become quiet. Something was troubling him. “What’s wrong, hon?” she asked.
His eyes welled up. “It my fault, then. It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t been hell bent on discovering that damn signal, none of this would’ve happened.”
Sheri was quick to soothe him. “For heaven’s sake, Steve. It was in the ‘waterhole’ frequency range. If you hadn’t found it, someone else would have. There’s only one person ultimately responsible for this, and that’s Simon. He interfered with the program without running the required checks to see if there could possibly be a problem with string interference.” She glared at Simon. “You see, unlike the rest of us, who spent almost a year doing checks, he did none!”
“Okay, let’s stop the mud-slinging again,” said Wesley. “Where are you going with this, Simon?”
“The reason we got ourselves entwined with another universe and other physical laws is because somehow when the alien signal was detected, it resulted in EMB unraveling an area of space time, kind of like ripping open a connection to this other dimension or universe, or whatever you’d like to call it,” Simon replied. “Think of how a lightning bolt forms. Firstly a negative charge builds up in the clouds, then a positive charge builds up on the ground. This attracts the energy downward toward Earth and hey presto, we have a bolt of electricity, and a connection between Earth and sky. But, let’s just say for a moment that the positive charge on the ground did not build up. Yes, there would still be an imbalance, and the energy would build up in the air, but there would no longer be a way for that energy to discharge to Earth.”
Sheri felt a surge of adrenaline. Her ex may have been a pathetic psychopath, but she had to admit that he was a genius.
“Let’s compare that to our problem,” he said. “The signal somehow made its way into our universe, perhaps as a naturally occurring phenomenon, perhaps helped by EMB. It doesn’t really matter how, just that it happened. But without detection of the signal by us, and our focusing in of EMB onto the signal, a portal between the two universes or dimensions would never have opened up.”
“Okay,” said Wesley. “Keep going.”
“So, what I need to do somehow is to get that alien
signal to be transmitted on an entirely different frequency, one which would be of absolutely no interest to us, such that we would dismiss it as random stellar interference, or lose it in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum that is noisiest, so that we wouldn’t even notice it.”
“Kind of like noticing a real diamond in a bag full of cubic zirconias,” added Drew.
“Exactly!” said Simon, snapping his fingers.
“So are you just going to write an email to our alien friends asking them to please not transmit on a frequency we’re likely to hear?” Steve said.
The professor let out a mighty roar. Sheri wasn’t surprised. The man was likely to laugh at just about anything with that amount of alcohol on board.
“Of course not. I’m going to write a virus and send it back in time through EMB, which will surreptitiously alter their transmission frequency. Hopefully, they won’t notice the difference as their internet would still function normally.”
“You mean you hope it will, mate, and that they won’t smell a rat and try to change it back?” said Drew.
“Always a possibility, all this is conjecture. Who knows what their civilization is like, and how they might utilize their internet, but I think it’s worth a try, unless anybody else has any suggestions?”
Silence.
“Well, let’s hope you can do it,” said Wesley. “I don’t see any other options right now.”
“How do you plan on sending us back in time?” asked Steve.
“That’s the beauty of it. We won’t actually be going back in time per se, like in a time machine. Rather, by a strange quirk of Mother Nature, it’s going to just happen.”
“I’m not following,” said Janine, pouring Jack a whiskey with what was left of the professor’s Johnny Walker.
Sheri smiled. “I know exactly what he means. He’s talking about a paradox.” The man certainly was a genius, and for a brief moment she remembered the Simon she had met seven years ago.
The Waterhole Page 35