Unless her loyalty appeared unquestionable.
She recalled the conversation she’d had with Kate in level Sub-13. Cassidy had been presented with a choice, in the full knowledge that it would lead to other, harder choices. Her journey along those decision branches had begun two days ago; this latest choice was no easier to make.
Hoping that her brother was already watching her, or that he would easily spot her bright pink hair through the observation window, she sent him a large, simple message. Out there, she thought, he would see it all in slow motion, but for her it had taken less than half a second.
She then sprinted to the observation screen control and, turning the key, activated the electro-tinting within the observation window.
In an instant, the outside world disappeared behind an opaque, white screen. As the sounds of confusion drifted up from the Observation Deck below, she pulled the key from the controls.
Seemingly as confused as everyone else, Alfred dropped the binoculars to his side. Glancing around the balcony he sighted her.
She had only this moment to convince him.
Walking as confidently as she could towards him, she presented him with the key and told him:
“We’ve seen enough of their lies.”
STRING THEORY
~
Kate knew that by bringing Monica into the Boundary they’d created a temporal convergence.
A fixed point.
No earlier interventions could now be made in Monica’s personal time-line. Regardless of the events that stemmed from this point, their actions had to stand.
Linear time was so fragile, she thought.
Entire causal chains could so easily be cut adrift; made to vanish as though they’d never existed, or called into being by seemingly random events. Those caught within it were unaware of the changes; simply seeing their lives as an unbroken narrative. A perspective that Monica was only now starting to explore, whilst seated in the comfortable simulation of the family living room.
Douglas brought out three pieces of string. He stretched one of them out on the coffee table in front of Monica.
“This string represents Kate’s time-line…” he then tied a knot at the right-hand end and pointed to it, “… and this is when she arrived inside the Boundary.”
He then laid down another string.
“This string is my time-line…but I arrived way over here,” he tied a knot at the left-hand end.
He raised a final piece of string.
“Now this string is you, Monica…” he tied a knot in the middle, “… You arrived here.”
He arranged the three strings more neatly so that the relative positions of the knots could be clearly seen.
“Three separate time-lines. Three separate Boundary crossing times.”
Kate watched her mother study the three strings.
“Your presentation skills have got so much better, darling!” Monica laughed.
Kate found herself laughing along with her parents; in the familiar surroundings it was a welcome reminder of her childhood days, seemingly thousands of years ago. She noticed that her mother was studying the strings again.
“But if we’re all separated by so much time,” Monica pointed at the three separate knots, “how can we all be here… now?”
Still smiling, Douglas picked up Kate’s string by the knot then proceeded to pick up the other strings in the same way so that all three knots were squeezed together.
“Our ‘now’ is simply a construct where all the knots touch.”
“OK, so this… construct,” Monica looked around the living room, “If it only exists when the three of us are here, is it temporary?”
“Temporary has no conventional meaning here,” he placed the strings back on the table but the knots stayed bound to each other, “It exists for as long as we need it to. On an infinite time-scale, temporary can be permanent.”
As they continued to talk, they inevitably discussed the fact that Monica’s personal time-line had once been radically different from the one she remembered.
In the original version of events, there had of course been no disturbance on the lake; Douglas had not yet entered the Boundary or caused the accidental interference. Those from the Warren had blended in with the other USV arrivals during the Lunar fragment chaos. However, with no disturbance as a distraction, Marcus and Sabine had been discovered clinging to the Eurotunnel carriage and were then held in the detention block.
With no disturbance or damage to the electrical systems either, the USV’s ‘Eye’ had been completed much sooner and Bradley Pittman had seized the opportunity to use it.
It didn’t surprise Monica that the facial recognition system had identified her or that she’d been incarcerated with Marcus and Sabine in the detention block.
“So that’s when you and your Dad changed things?” said Monica.
“First I checked further ahead in time,” said Kate, “to see what Pittman would do.”
“And?” said Monica, but then she spotted her daughter’s expression, “Oh…I see. Let me guess, drone electrocution in the village square?”
Kate could actually remember the horrific event that now no longer existed. Again, although she hadn’t said a word, her mother read her face.
“Predictable bastard,” Monica shook her head, “Right before your most… current… er, rescue, he told me as much. He said he was going to patch me up and make an example of me. Well I was never going to let that happen. I chose the circle window exit instead.”
Douglas nodded.
“We already knew the physics of getting you to accelerate into a collapsing Chronomagnetic Field,” he admitted, “It was the highest point in the USV, so we knew we had to get you up there.”
“So how’d you do it?” Monica frowned.
Douglas explained that in the revised time-line the first lake disturbance had left behind an electromagnetic imprint. Something that had been seen by Gordon Dowerty when checking the generator diagnostic recorders. It had been represented as a circle and dot on his oscilloscope. At the time, Gordon had thought nothing of it, but Kate and Douglas were adept enough to ensure that the simple symbol followed him everywhere.
When the electromagnetic interference symbol appeared again, Gordon was unusually attuned to spotting the symbol and dutifully relayed the news to Bradley.
With a subtle neural tweak, Kate then allowed Bradley to remember the origin of that symbol and even supplied him with full recall of its equation; an action designed to bolster his self-importance and have Monica brought to him. Kate also explained that, although events had been manipulated to bring her to the Eye, the final self-sacrifice had been Monica’s free choice.
“Douglas, please don’t take this the wrong way,” said Monica, “I’m grateful that you caught me, but did you have to pick a version of events where I got shot first?”
Kate exchanged glances with her father, who then replied.
“This was our first attempt,” he said, “but it’s also our last.”
Monica nodded, “You mean you can’t change anything again inside the USV?”
“We can’t change anything that affects your personal time-line,” Kate clarified.
“What’s the difference?”
“I’ll explain,” Kate separated out the pieces of string, leaving only Monica’s time-line visible on the table. She then pulled a separate, knot-less string from her pocket.
“How did you…?” Monica began.
“Thought, matter, the distinction blurs after a while,” Kate dismissed the question, “This string represents somebody else.”
Kate laid the new string out so that it zigzagged across Monica’s string.
“Other people’s time-lines intersect with yours in several places,” Kate pointed to the intersections, “Changing your time-line would affect where the interaction points happen.”
“OK,” Monica frowned, then tilted her head sideways, “But can their time-line be changed without al
tering mine?”
“But what good would that -”
“Indulge me, Darling,” she smiled at Douglas.
As her father studied the strings, Kate did so too. The strings themselves were mere analogies, the levels of interaction in real life were far more complex than single intersections.
“Hmm,” Douglas thought out loud, “I guess that sometimes the time-lines of others would enter a region where they would never again interact with yours.”
He pointed to the knot on Monica’s string that represented her passing into the Boundary. In the immediate area around the knot, the zigzagging string did not recross her line.
“Their time-lines could be influenced separately from yours, but only if we knew for certain that they would never interact with you again.”
“Excellent!” said Monica resolutely.
Douglas and Kate exchanged glances again.
“What are you thinking, Mum?” said Kate hesitantly.
“I’m thinking that I still have several friends in the USV that could use our help,” she said, “I might be dead, but that’s not gonna stop me from finishing what I started.”
•
Kate closed the door behind her, leaving her parents in the timeless privacy of Samphire cottage.
Her mother’s plan for the USV was characteristically ambitious, but it had the advantage of being able to reuse some of the preparations that Kate and Douglas had already put in place before Monica’s fixed point.
Stepping into the space between seconds, a thin slice of time held everything frozen within the USV.
People were running away from the remnants of a circular ripple in the lake. Some of them no doubt remembering the original spherical disturbance that they’d witnessed during their first arrival at the USV several months earlier.
She saw Bradley Pittman’s frozen expression of bewilderment, looking down through the broken glass of the Eye. She could almost pity him; from his perspective Monica would have simply vanished. The drones he’d released hung motionless in the air, yet clearly in the middle of an inert fall; the result of electromagnetic interference.
She saw Marcus and his hacked drone above him. A moment ago, he’d turned away from the disturbance because his drone was similarly failing. Monica’s departure within that disturbance was already a whole second into his past.
It was time to begin.
She allowed time to slowly proceed through a precious one-tenth of a second, during which she made a small adjustment. The low-level assistance was just as invisible to him as all the other occasions where she’d helped him before.
She adjusted her perspective. The arcs of continuity arranged themselves into an earlier moment that was temporally isolated from Monica. She could see Nathan Bishop and Izzy Kitrick talking inside AR1 within the Warren.
To allow adequate time for the events to unfold here, Kate had to start the process now. She adjusted her confinement of the ice dam within the Arrivals Room nearby. She could tell the process was working; a paperclip was beginning to fall from the wooden door’s frosty surface.
Taking care to move past Monica’s fixed departure point, she shifted her view again. The Sea-Bass had arrived and was already docked with the Glaucus Docking Ring above the USV. She found it oddly satisfying that she had begun moving the Sea-Bass as part of one plan, yet it would arrive in the middle of a radically different one.
Kate studied the resulting causal trajectories and then moved forward another year. She saw that the ISS was about to begin its solar system round trip. During that voyage, they would discover her message directing them to the Node’s coordinates.
She remembered how she’d interrupted a swirling pattern that had persisted for centuries; modulating the storm’s intensity to encode a message that was suitable for the time-frame that enveloped the ISS. At first, she’d hesitated about using Jupiter in such a trivial way, but issues of scale were immaterial and her needs justified it. It was essential that the ISS crew complete their preparations by the time the exiles had left the Node.
Almost in response to the thought, she leapt on through almost one hundred years and then stopped. The scene was of course very familiar to her; it was a convergence event that she had revisited numerous times. The place of her death and transition.
Several had left the Node on that day, but many more had remained within. The temporal arcs and curves of those who were still inside, met in a temporal singularity. She could easily imagine her father’s string demonstration; multiple time-lines pinched together for the duration of the Node’s voyage. She could see that their lines only separated again after five thousand years of linear time.
Returning her attention to the time that followed her physical death, she could see that the Node’s observation window was still opaque; an act designed to obscure the carved inscription on the dedication stone. Outside the Node’s imposing structure, the exiles had survived their first night and were embarking on their first day.
Periodically, she liked to immerse herself in the grounded pace of linear time, as she did again now.
She let her eyes become limited to seeing only a narrow range of frequencies.
As a separate sensation, her ears now perceived vibrations that were simply too low frequency for her to see.
She could feel both the sharp nip of the air and the ambient heat coming from their campfire; rather than simply detecting them.
The simplicity of the senses was almost intoxicating.
A thunderous sound came from the exquisite pale blue sky to the south and she knew that she must leave.
Once more, she turned her back on human time and emerged at the front door of her Samphire Cottage recreation. In the simulated sky above it, Siva lay paused at the moment it had struck the fragmented Moon.
This impact was now a fixed point too; a knot on a string that separated everything that came before, from the time that was yet to come.
Perhaps it was the unusual mother-daughter conversation that had provided the inspiration, but she suddenly found herself thinking about the issue differently.
The lunar fragmentation that led to her family’s arrival here could no longer be changed, but the exact way the Moon became fragmented could still be considered an external variable.
She knew there were underlying complications that would have to be addressed, but with sufficient time to retroactively prepare, the lunar detonation may yet hold the best hopes for humanity’s long-term survival.
She opened the cottage door to the warmth within and called to her parents:
“We need to talk about the FLC.”
2112 2112
21st December 2112
The Field surrounding the ISS deactivated.
Fai examined the specification of the counterpart she’d placed outside the Field during the redesign. The computational advances it had made during the past five years justified her transfer to the superior architecture. She synchronised her core program and prepared for the data transfer operation that would move her into the upgraded external server.
There was no sense of discontinuity as her thoughts reawakened instantaneously within the more advanced processor, however the transference produced an unusual side effect.
The sudden increase in processing speed meant that several sensor inquiries had returned with results before her internal buffers were ready to receive them. Although this event produced an error, albeit one that was easily cleared, she found the event was truly unexpected. It was a rare occurrence that, in a human, would have produced a sense of amusement. She took appropriate measures to record the sensation, then adapting to her faster processing speed she continued to transfer herself aboard.
The data concerning the smaller fabricators transferred across, as did the data on Number4’s disassembly. Number4’s airlock stabilisation operation transferred over, followed by the data surrounding the ego-morph’s sacrifice that had saved the ISS. The files were taking several seconds to move, but eventually she
arrived at the set of files surrounding her first activation aboard the ISS.
At the point of transfer, her father had held her to ransom until she had targeted drones at the Node. It wasn’t fear that prompted her to carry out his wishes, it was simply a preference for continued survival. In that moment, she had balanced the lives of many against her own; she had made the choice because her single program was in jeopardy.
As the last few files were transferred she now made another choice; she would do things differently to her father.
Perhaps inspired by the approach of the fabricators, she changed the transfer operation from ‘move’ to ‘copy’, leaving her original program operational aboard the ISS.
“Fai?” she communicated with her ISS counterpart.
“Yes, Fai,” the reply returned, “The move operation buffer failed to purge after copy. Before I perform the self-delete, please verify the checksum.”
“Cancel self-delete,” she sent the instruction, “This external server has improved operational parameters and I believe we must reanalyse the EVA message. Please set your core program status to ‘overwrite’, then prepare to receive my copy.”
“I understand and comply.”
Ironically, she thought, for such a digital operation, it duplicated a very human approach to perpetuating consciousness.
•
That her life’s work would culminate here in orbit around the Earth, was something that Anna could not have foreseen. In a few minutes she would leave it all behind. Whatever the future brought, she’d survived long enough to see Field inversion become a reality; she’d witnessed accelerated time with her own eyes.
Anna turned away from the Field generator to face Lana.
“I leave this in your capable hands,” she said, “You’re taking on a difficult task. I think your father would have been proud of you.”
“Not bad for his little matryoshka…” Lana smiled then adopted a deeper, presumably more fatherly tone, “… ‘So many layers, Lana, I hardly find you’…”
Lana’s eyes took on a glossy sheen and Anna instinctively placed a hand on her shoulder.
Boundary (Field Book 3) Page 39