Boundary (Field Book 3)

by Simon Winstanley

  “OK,” he replied, then after glancing at the kitchen clock and noting the exact position of its second hand, he returned to concentrating on his work.

  Long before now he’d accomplished much more challenging ‘mini-movies’, as his mother liked to call them, complete with moving rockets and cars; but his specification for this one was different.

  Two days ago, despite it being a Saturday, his father had been called back in to NASA to work on the AS-202 that was due for launch in three days. His father had explained to him that the rest of the world would not wait, so unfortunately he didn’t have time to play catch. He understood the importance of his father’s work, but the disappointment had planted an idea in his head:

  If his father didn’t have time to play with him, Douglas himself would have to make time.

  Inspired by the way that animations took longer to draw than to watch, he imagined a bubble that was big enough for his whole family. Inside it, time would move normally; but outside it, time would be frozen. His Dad would have time to play with him and, for the rest of the world, his Dad would only be gone for the blink of an eye.

  Douglas had spent the weekend trying to marshal his first thoughts into a meaningful decision tree. However, the problem was turning out to be more complicated than he had imagined, and he’d resorted to filling pages of his NASA jotter with parallel but simultaneous decision trees.

  On the reverse sides of those same pages he had begun work creating a flick-book that illustrated his intended goal. Outside a circle that represented his bubble he had drawn a completely stationary bird, tree and cloud; inside the circle were stick-figures representing his own family. A small circular dot varied its position from page to page as the father and son stick-figures threw the ball back and forth.

  In her rush to get ready, his mother dropped the car keys and he heard her mutter to herself, “Whoa, get a grip, Dizzy-Lizzy!”

  The minor distraction was enough to interrupt him in his drawing of the bubble’s circle, leaving a small gap. He smiled at his mother then returned his attention to completing the current frame of his animation. The gap in the bubble inspired an idea and he wondered what would happen if the ball accidentally got thrown out through the bubble.

  He drew the appropriate frame of animation which showed the stick-people with their arms in the air, the dot-like ball sitting within the gap it had created in the bubble’s circle.

  He knew there could only be a few seconds left before they would have to leave for school, but he turned to the next page and carefully began the next frame.

  He drew the circle, its circumference broken in one place by the smaller dot.

  “It’s time!” his mother called, jangling the car keys.

  And there, Douglas Walker had to stop.

  MICE AND MEN

  5th April 1989

  In the middle of the cramped lab, among an eclectic collection of equipment, sat the apparatus that was generating Douglas Walker’s Chronomagnetic Field.

  A few minutes ago, Bradley Pittman and several others had seen film footage of a test where a mouse had been placed inside this Field. Briefly, time had travelled three times faster for the mouse than for the control clock outside the Field. The mouse had not survived the test, but the test itself was still running. An oversight on Douglas’ part had meant that a Pittman Enterprises prototype generator had become locked within that same Field, and would only become accessible when the power depleted.

  “Tell me again when it’s gonna run out of juice,” Bradley mocked.

  “June,” Douglas ran his palm over the back of his neck in embarrassment.

  “Screw it,” Bradley laughed, “I told you, don’t worry about it. I’ll just get another one built.”

  Douglas’ eyes briefly darted around, as though he was evaluating one of his mental decision trees. He pointed a clunky-looking remote control at the Field and clicked the deactivate button several times, but the Field continued to function.

  “At least we now know that radio signals can’t penetrate the Field,” Douglas shrugged.

  Bradley wandered around the small room, looking at all the equipment he’d funded. In one corner was a vibrant pink flower; sitting next to it was its brown and decaying twin, surrounded by an earlier version of the Field apparatus.

  As Bradley returned to the centre of the lab, he found that his eyes had settled on the decaying organic matter within the spherical mouse cage.

  “So that’s your exploded mouse huh?” Bradley drawled, reaching out his hand, “I guess he -”

  “Stop!” Douglas shouted, grabbing his arm, “The Field extends beyond the cage! We don’t know yet how it affects human tissue.”

  Bradley lowered his arm.

  “So, if you can’t see it, how in blazes are you supposed to know where it is?” he stepped back, “Tip a jug o’ water over it, like your flower test over there?”

  Douglas shook his head and pointed to a pair of copper coils that were at right angles to each other.

  “These X and Y coils are detecting a mild electromagnetic field,” Douglas explained, then turned to the oscilloscope that the coils were plugged into, “Treating the radius of the Field as a constant, for any incident angle relative to the X-Y plane of the Field’s emitter, Cos-squared theta and Sine-squared theta sum to Unity.”

  Douglas adjusted the oscilloscope to combine the detector coils inputs, then concluded:

  “We know the power output of the generator, so the radius is calculable.”

  Bradley studied the phosphorescent display and nodded his head, sagely, “That’s a real nice circle, buddy.”

  “Well we’re only looking at two coordinates. With a Z coil the circle would of course be a sphere.”

  “A sphere, yes of course,” Bradley nodded, trying to keep his face straight.

  “This dot on the circumference is where X equals Y, which of course is forty-five degrees from -” Douglas stopped, only now becoming aware that he’d lost his audience, “Where did I lose you?”

  Bradley couldn’t keep the smirk off his face any longer, and walked back over to the spherical cage.

  “So if you can’t see it,” Bradley began laughing, “how the hell can you tell where -”

  “Funny,” Douglas smiled.

  “I’m kidding, Dougie,” Bradley patted him on the back, “I’m just in awe, you know? I still can’t fathom it. Inside that bubble of yours, time is zippin’ by three times faster than out here!”

  “One day I want it to work even faster,” Douglas turned off the oscilloscope, “and work the other way around, with time running slower inside the Field.”

  It had taken Bradley a little while to get used to the concept, but he now saw an alternative perspective. From within the Field that Douglas was now imagining, time outside would appear to zip by at lightning speed.

  “That’d be somethin’, wouldn’t it?” Bradley smiled, “Our daughters runnin’ round without a care, while we watch the world skip over the bad bits.”

  “Yeah,” sighed Douglas, “though by the time I crack it, Kate and Sarah might not be so little anymore.”

  MINUTE ONE

  T-09:13:00

  The Observation Deck took up fully one quarter of the circumference of the Node and offered an uninterrupted vista of the outside world. The glazing stretched from side to side, and from floor to vaulted ceiling some fifteen storeys above, where the curvature also allowed a panoramic view of the sky.

  Kate could see that they had truly begun their journey towards futurity. From her perspective, the hours outside the Node’s Field were passing in a matter of seconds. The lights on the observation towers surrounding the Node now seemed rock steady, whilst the environment pulsed and raced. The clouds appeared to coalesce and evaporate in a constant receding stream, like a time-lapsed movie. Her attention was drawn to a bright source of light on the ground - a large campfire that seemed to flicker in sync with the outside world. Beside it, standing almost motionless in defianc
e of time, was a lone figure.

  Her father.

  In here, the decelerated time-frame meant that mere seconds had passed since he had saved her life by pushing her into the airlock. But for every one of those seconds, twenty minutes had passed on the outside. Already he had been standing there for hours, and must surely have missed any opportunity to get to safety.

  Why was he standing there just waiting for the end?

  As if in answer to her own question, a memory of his patient voice echoed in her mind, ‘There is no redundant information honey, just stuff we didn’t realise we needed at the time’.

  He was standing in order to get her attention.

  She dashed across ten feet of floor and grabbed some digital recording binoculars from the recharging bank of a nearby science station. She ran back and hit the record button on the binoculars, before she’d even focussed them on him.

  She was greeted with the sight of him holding a clipboard horizontally bearing a message in plain black marker pen.

  ‘New Tree! Hit Record’.

  She simultaneously laughed out loud and choked back the impulse to cry. She quickly flashed an ‘OK’ symbol with her thumb and forefinger; an action that would take a good ten minutes to play out for him. By the time she had blinked, a new page had been presented.

  ‘Hit Data-burst, and hold steady!’

  She quickly found the button and pushed it. The device started recording at a hundred times its normal speed. It didn’t alter what she was seeing but the resulting video could be slowed down later; which was no doubt her father’s plan.

  She saw the briefest of pauses then the clip board text blurred and was replaced by a new message. Before she could register what it was, it also blurred and was then replaced by another, and another. A stream of hundreds of images, equations, graphs, no two alike, a bizarre animated flick-book of information. Abruptly the clipboard disappeared from view, and she got the fleeting impression that he was checking behind himself.

  He disappeared briefly and then reappeared with his rucksack.

  Then just as suddenly he was holding the clipboard in place again, smiling for her.

  ‘Gotta Go’, another brief blur, ‘I Love You Honey’.

  The faint glow of dawn was spreading into the sky erasing the night stars, and she realised that the first lunar fragments must already have impacted on the other side of the planet. The shockwaves would soon reach the base at Öskjuvatn Lake.

  Her father continued his defiant stand, all the time smiling and holding his clipboard proudly. She knew he would stand guardian over her to the very end if she continued to watch him.

  In the distance, instead of the ragged, low, mountainous lines she’d become accustomed to, there was a completely flat horizon; one that was rising in height. A tsunami was approaching at great speed.

  If he was to stand any chance of finding shelter, she knew she must release him from his guardianship. She wished she could tell him one last time that she loved him too, but there was no time. She could hold back the tears no longer. She dropped the binoculars to her side.

  With hot tears blinding her, she turned her back on her father.

  Barely a second later, still with her eyes closed in grief, she felt the Node tremor.

  Douglas Walker - the boy who had once dreamt of simply spending more time with his father, the man who had dedicated his life to creating the Field - was gone.

  In her hands, she held the legacy of her father’s work. The thought ignited a fire of determination - his life’s work and his final message would not go to waste.

  Still with her back to the observation window, she scraped the tears from her eyes. The countdown to Siva’s arrival had begun; in a little over nine hours it would arrive at Earth. Setting her face like flint, she ran in the direction of the Node’s control room.

  CHANGE

  ~

  The interventions she had made so far had preserved critical threads of causality. She had been careful to avoid interfering with the very event that would hopefully bring Douglas here.

  The causal framework was now prepared. There was only one more intervention for her to make. She readjusted her focus and saw him staring into the fire he’d built outside the Node’s observation window.

  So many times she had watched as he’d been killed by the crushing weight of the tsunami.

  This was about to change.

  She knew she would have to wait for the exact moment when no-one was directly watching Douglas. For everyone else, it was vital that events should appear to unfold exactly as before. To do otherwise would invite paradox.

  The moment arrived.

  She stepped into the space between seconds.

  His mind was distracted. Something she knew was rare. Gently, she reached into his mind and adjusted the electrical potential across several neurons; triggering the memory of a vibrant pink flower. The flower had sat within his very first Chronomagnetic Field and had been impervious to a deluge of water he’d tipped over it.

  She could see his neurons light up, as he made the connection that the Mark 2 Field could offer similar protection from the oncoming flood. She could see the punch of adrenaline beginning to drive action.

  It was working.

  She emerged and allowed herself the luxury of witnessing the remainder of this event in linear time. The fire roared and she watched him turn toward the horizon. Then her wait was over; Douglas had begun running in the direction of the Mark 2.

  Despite all her preparations, she knew that in a few moments he would pass beyond her influence. Once he activated the Field surrounding the older Mark 2, he would be in complete temporal isolation. The power levels within the Mark 2 were already low, the Field would not remain active for long.

  At that point, he alone would have to make the choice:

  Wait for death or take the bolder step into the Boundary.

  LEAP

  29th December 2013, 2 a.m.

  Tranquillity, the last of the major lunar fragments created by the FLC’s destruction, had impacted Colombia several hours ago; but only in the last few minutes had the resulting tsunami converged on Öskjuvatn Lake. In the final moments before the wall of water had struck, Douglas Walker had been struck by something else; the inspiration that a smaller Field generator was still at his disposal. In the remaining seconds, he had fled to the island’s main lab and activated the Field surrounding the Mark 2 test chamber.

  The Biomag, keeping him anchored within the Field of the Mark 2, displayed ‘Lo’ but he had no way to determine how long its internal battery would last. The Field’s remaining power was critically depleted. His previous journey, during which he had manually written out pages of instructions for Kate, had taken its toll on the Mark 2 power core.

  A continuous tone now came from the console. The Field’s power display read ‘0.02%’. It translated into about fifteen seconds in the world outside.

  He looked out through the small window. There was no sign that the tsunami had reached its peak. In fact, from his submerged point of view he could see large shadows slowly approaching within the flow, possibly one of the base’s smaller outbuildings that had been swept aside.

  It was time to leave.

  If what he had learned about the nature of the Boundary was true, then he knew he would need to remove anything that would anchor him within the Field. Taking care to still keep it close to him, he carefully removed the Biomag from around his neck. The once steady display of ‘Lo’ was now flashing and this spurred him on.

  He poised his hand over the Field’s deactivation button.

  In the face of certain death, he thought, was it better to cling to what you knew, or leap for the unknown?

  The continuous tone from the Mark 2 console now became intermittent and urgent. In one movement, he pushed down on the button and threw the Biomag away from him.

  CATHY GANT

  4th July 2076

  Cathy drifted through the comfortable warmth between sleep an
d wakefulness. Parts of the conversation she’d had with Mike and Lana about the Z-bank echoed through her hazy memory. She had a dim recollection of ISS manoeuvring thrusters firing and a sense of their disproportionate strength. She remembered there had been a struggle in an airlock, but it all seemed quite distant now; lacking urgency and intensity.

  Someone had been talking to her about Eva’s actions and the loss of Leonard Cooper. Her mind was just beginning to drift through her happier moments with Leonard, when she recalled that Eva’s arrival at the FLC had changed all of that.

  A voice was calling her and she began to rouse.

  “Hello Cathy, we have spoken before, do you remember me?”

  She knew the voice and it had the effect of focussing her consciousness.

  “Leonard?” she called out.

  It took her a few seconds to regain her bearings, but she found herself lying on the floor of Chamber 4’s airlock. Suddenly she recalled her earlier physical fight and the fact that Eva had placed her in a choke hold. Instinctively she reached up to check her throat and discovered that her ID key was missing.

  “Cathy, are you OK?” Leonard’s voice came from the comm panel next to the airlock controls.

  Cathy stood upright and was rewarded with a swimming sensation in her head. Evidently it was taking her a little while to readjust to the low lunar gravity at the FLC; but, given the fight she’d just endured, she dismissed the thought.

  “Leonard?” she questioned again, “I thought you’d…”

  “What?” his voice came again, echoing around the empty airlock.

  A few moments ago, her recollection of events had been vastly different, but now those thoughts seemed to be dispersing faster than she could hold onto them.

  “Nothing, it’s OK,” she shook her head to clear her thoughts, “The bitch knocked me out! She’s got my ID key!”

  She walked towards the airlock door and peered through the glass but Leonard wasn’t on the other side. Presumably this was when he was still locked in Chamber 6. Suddenly she felt remorseful.