by Greg Enslen
The exhaustion she had felt earlier backed off again as if overpowered by some new force of her will, and she felt more alive, more invigorated than any time she could remember. It was not as if she could sprint all of the way to the top, but she did feel a renewed energy, a renewed sense of purpose.
She turned to the man, who stood beside her, still gripping her arm in one of his huge, paw-like hands. She looked up at him, and the words came out softly.
“I will help you.”
He backed away and started to laugh, laughing so hard that it sounded like a howl.
“You? You are going to help me push the rock? I could pick you up and break you in half with one hand. It would do better for you to ride on the rock, as much help as you would be!”
He had grown angry. She understood, accepting his anger from inside the shell of her newfound calm, unfettered by his shouting and his threats. He did not know, and for that, she could not be angry.
“Come here and kneel before me.”
She didn’t recognize her own voice – it radiated power, confidence. It was the voice of a queen, or a god. He looked at her for a long moment and then she saw that her hands and arms were sheathed by a glowing shimmer of light, throwing off sparks of energy in all directions.
He knelt before her.
She reached down and took his head into her two hands, turning his eyes up to meet hers. The skin of his cheeks tingled at her touch as if some type of transfer of energy was occurring through his flesh.
Somehow, she divided off a tiny fraction of her power, just a tiny sliver of the new and overwhelming power she felt inside her, and passed it to him, channeling it through her hands. When she spoke, her voice reverberated with a power she would never know again.
“Faithful servant of Zeus, you are worthy. Know that and complete your task.”
Her hands dropped away and he almost fell over when she broke the tenuous connection. He shook his head and struggled to his feet and saw that she had already turned and was leaving, starting off to where the flat area ended and the mountain continued upward anew, up towards the Temple. He saw that the footprints she left with her strange hide coverings, the ones that seemed sewn together out of two different types of hide, each of these strange impressions glowed an eerie yellowish color for a few moments.
When Sisyphus took the rock into his hands and began rolling it again, it felt lighter. Not a lot, but the rock seemed to be lighter by a fraction.
He began rolling the rock towards the hill, and it picked up speed. He usually pushed it as far as he could and then turned around to push with his legs, balancing the rock on his back, but this time he stayed behind it and facing it and ran, pushing it as fast as possible. The momentum of the rock carried it upwards, and he pushed with all his might, and the hill curled up towards the summit. He pushed and the veins on his forehead stood out and he pushed, thinking about the girl. The rock rolled upwards and he pushed and after a few moments he felt the rock move inwards, towards the hill, and he thought something had gone wrong until his feet found the lip at the top of the hill.
The rock came to a rest on top of the hill. Sisyphus stopped and placed his hands on the rock to steady it, slowly realizing what had happened.
He had done it. He turned and looked up towards the Temple. He could see it from up here, and it looked beautiful.
And he saw the goddess-girl, looking back down at him, waving. She was already almost all of the way to the top. How she could’ve gotten that far that quickly was beyond him. She waved back at him, and gestured at him in a strange way - she thrust one hand at him, the thumb pointing upwards. He had no idea what it meant, but it didn’t matter.
East of Clearwater, the Columbus River moved slowly for a long distance, weaving in and out of the trees that bracketed it on either side. The river was wider here than further upstream and therefore moved much more slowly, lazily, down towards the ocean.
In the growing darkness of the coming sunset, the river carried its passenger further and further downstream, the kid’s body moving slowly, occasionally becoming entangled for a few moments in the underbrush and weeds that grew out from the riverbanks before breaking free and moving on. And a bird would swoop down out of the sky and investigate this strange floating thing.
The boy’s body had sunk almost immediately upon entering the river, but only three or four hours passed before gasses and natural buoyancy in the body overcame its weight and the head and chest broke the dark surface. The kid had gazed up at the moonless sky with unseeing eyes, and the motion of the water rolled the body over and the journey downstream was begun as the dark shape moved out away from the riverbanks and into the faster surface current in the middle of the wide river. Near the picnic area, where the body had been dumped, the river flowed quickly and was very narrow. But just to the east the banks spread apart to form a very wide and slowly moving river that more resembled a wide, flat lake.
But in the growing dark the body moved slowly, bobbing up and down in the shallow water, constantly moving downstream towards the open sea. The last rays of sunshine tinkling off of the dappled surface of the river, and as another night of darkness approached on the lazy river, the kid’s body floated downstream, unnoticed.
Chapter 7 - Friday,
September 16
The Cray was an amazingly powerful piece of equipment. Just in sheer storage capacity and computing speed, it easily outdistanced any other computer Julie had ever heard of by a factor of at least 5 to 1.
One of the most astounding comparisons Julie had seen had been when the Cray Corporation representatives had shown this unit compared to the larger mainframes and personal computer units now available.
The best top-of-the-line desktop PC available on the commercial market was one that came with a 3 GHz clock speed, denoting the speed with which the computer’s Central Processing Unit, or CPU, could complete mathematical calculations. This speed was available on only two or three models and to attain these speeds, the Intel Itanium chip with a top clock speed of 3 GHz was paired with a chip-based double-speed mathematical accelerator co-processor, which helped the CPU make the calculations faster by doing some of the work for the CPU.
The largest storage units out there for desktop PC’s were hovering just over the 150 Gigabyte range, enough to store a hundred thousand copies of Gone with the Wind. These hard drives were getting bigger and bigger with every new model, and larger add-on units were becoming available with almost each passing day.
Business and corporate-oriented mainframes were still mostly running at clock speeds of around 800 or 900 MHz, if compared on the same scaling system as the smaller desktop PC’s. The mainframes used a different chipset, for the most part, and computed at different speed rates, but by using the formula of calculations per second, the two vastly different systems could be compared.
Some of the larger mainframes were storing their information in separate magnetic storage units of capacities in the 10 or 12 terabytes range, but the separate units for information storage and information processing slowed down the computer’s ability to process the information and pass it on to its users; the CPU was constantly “sending out” for more information from the storage units, making the calculations and comparisons of different stored data very difficult and time consuming. A simple search based on one field in a large mainframes’ database could take hours, even at top speed. A three or four-level deep search, based on several different criteria, could take much longer.
The Cray was a vastly different machine. Based on a wholly different architecture that employed a hierarchical system of levels and priorities, the Cray processed its information in a steady stream of uninterrupted calculations, unlike mainframes and PC’s that always process information in little packets, completing one set of calculations before moving on to the next. In this regard alone, the Cray was five or six years ahead of anything else on the market.
By using the same benchmarking system used on mainframes and deskto
p PC’s, the Cray running at top speed could be measured in the 80 GHz clock speed, thirty times faster than the fastest Intel chipsets or anything else available to the general public.
These speeds were practically unimaginable in the commercial market - desktop computers capable of those dizzying speeds weren’t foreseen for the next six or eight years, even taking into account the incredible leaps and bounds that computer technology had made in the past.
The Cray also stored all of its information, all 900 Terabytes of it, inside the main unit installed in the specially built Cray Room. The massive electronic memory that stored all of this information was constructed of some type of crystalline lattice that Julie had never even heard of, and she thought she was up-to-date on all of the latest information on the computer industry.
From the information she had read, it sounded like the information was stored in the crystalline memory in a digital series of ones and zeros, just like any other binary computer, but that was where the differences began.
Evidently the information in this case was stored at the atomic level and somehow suspended in a three-dimensional matrix inside the crystal, making the storage capacity of the crystalline cube exponentially larger than anything else developed so far. The cube itself was a perfect crystalline form absent of the slightest defect down to the micron level, and it had been grown in micro gravity on one of the military’s top-secret Shuttle missions. The crystal memory was a prototype version of a whole new field of memory constructs, and the Cray Corporation was hoping to begin scheduled growth of the crystals for mass production of the memories when (and if) the International Space Station was ever up and operational.
Poring over the technical manuals that she had “borrowed” from the computer lab (the books were technically for reference for the techies and engineers who would be working on the Cray, but Julie didn’t think they would miss them...), she finally began to grasp exactly how powerful this new breed of computer was. And they had asked her to program it!
Actually, she wouldn’t be programming it - Chris Hanson from the Cray Company and the FBI techies would be doing the actual input of her initial test run, and then she would write up a progress and implementation report on it.
Julie closed the books and sat back, thinking. What to do? The list of ideas she had worked up was okay, but it seemed a shame to waste the incredible computing power of this machine on some of the lousy, simplistic things she had thought of. Maybe something else would come to her soon, something that was a little more important.
With all of the files from every major crime committed in the United States in the past 30 years residing in the massive memory banks of this machine, she had to find a better use for it. Others later would use the machine to its fullest potential - why shouldn’t she?
Julie reached for the books again to learn just how far she could push her creativity, and just how far she could push the Cray.
Randy Kovacs sat behind his computer, staring at his screen. It seemed like this was all he did, all he had been doing for the past week, but that wasn’t exactly true.
He had left every morning at 8 a.m. when his night shift was over, and on Wednesday afternoon he had surveyed the damage done to his apartment complex. The damage was not that bad - only a few missing shingles and a couple of uprooted palm trees - but it still meant he had a couple hours worth of cleaning before he could go to sleep. That night he had not slept well, his dreams full of visions of huge storms moving across the face of the planet, each with a mind of their own, and each intent on a single purpose - to scrape the earth clean. The storms flattened everything in their paths, killing people and animals and plants, destroying homes and businesses, ripping away topsoil and washing everything into the hungry ocean.
The dreams had kept him awake that night, and Thursday night too. And now it was early on Friday morning, his midnight shift only an hour gone, and he was thinking about it again. Mandy was a storm like no other he had ever seen, seemingly thinking and feeling and, just when the Trackers had thought they had a fix on her, she would juke one way or the other, seemingly moving just to throw them off track.
Mandy had indeed stopped in the Gulf, pulling up and stopping and spinning lazily out there half-way between Florida and Texas and due south of New Orleans, drinking up the warm, shallow water of the Gulf. The Trackers and meteorologists were not happy to see this at all - a storm grew in strength the longer it remained over warm, open water, and even though the longest arms of clouds dropped rain on the coast from Florida to Texas, the central mass of the storm began spinning faster as it picked up strength, increasing to a Category 2 storm only hours after she had stopped.
Mandy had come up against the high-pressure air bubble parked over Texas and simply stopped. There had been a few possible Track scenarios that put Mandy overpowering the warm front and pushing into Texas anyway, but those calculations seemed to be wrong. As powerful as Mandy was, the outside bands of clouds and moisture had rammed into the warm air bubble and bounced back, stopping the eye from moving any further west.
And so, now, Mandy looked like she would be moving back towards Florida.
She was slowly drifting now, heading east at about three miles per hour, barely moving. High altitude fly-through’s had picked up wind speed and directional measurements, and the computer models now put the storm on an easterly Track, back towards northern Florida and southern Georgia.
That was not good - this one had already done enough damage. Mandy was a very powerful storm, and growing more powerful for every minute she sat out in the Gulf, and if she moved back towards Florida and Georgia there was a chance she could move up the coast, hammering the eastern seaboard with hurricane-force winds and huge amounts of rain. Floods would follow as the precipitation fell from the clouds, collected, and raced back towards the sea, and roads and bridges would be washed out just as they had been in the Miami area only a few days before.
Randy thought about it for another minute or two, then took his concerns to his boss. She was on the late shift now, too, because it was the most important shift at the Center - most of the best raw data came in at night and they were the first ones to see it and go over it.
She listened to his concerns and seemed to agree with him. “Yes, I see what you are saying. And if Mandy does turn north after crossing back across Florida, we could be in for a very bad week.”
Randy nodded. “She’s almost a 3 now, and too much more time out in the Gulf and she’ll be a 4. And it’s been a long time since a late-season category 4 hit the east coast. We don’t have any good data for Track prediction for a storm that big, that late in the Season. The water temperatures, trade winds, and salinity - they’re all different from the summer months, the conditions most of our models are written for. She could move up the coast and we would have little or no idea where she would go.”
His boss nodded, staring out her office window into the Control Room, with its huge television screens showing the current location and best-guess Track estimation, denoted with a thick yellow line with an arrow on one end to show direction. It took the eye of the storm back over northern Florida and back out into the Atlantic just north of Jacksonville.
But if the storm continued moving so slowly and the Coriolis Effect kicked in, sending the hurricane into a natural curve brought on by the rotation of the earth, then the storm could easily curl up the east coast. And as strong as it was now, Mandy could cause a lot of damage.
“Okay, thanks. I’ll talk to some of the others about it and get back to you. But if she makes landfall again and hasn’t lost any strength, I think it would be a good idea to issue a general hurricane watch all the way up the coast to New York. I would rather be a chicken little than end up apologizing because I couldn’t predict where Mandy went. Good enough?”
Randy nodded and thanked her and headed back to his cubicle. The storm was a bad one, one of the worst he had ever seen, but its sheer unpredictability was the most frightening part. And if the Tr
ackers at the Center couldn’t estimate where it would go, and couldn’t warn people in time, how many people could die?
It was night again, Friday night, and here the river was shallow and the kid’s body moved slowly, caressing the surface of the water. A human body, after an initial period of submersion in water, will float on the surface for a period of about 36 to 48 hours before the tissues and cavities of the body become so waterlogged that the body will sink once again. Most drowning victims are found floating on the surface, if they are found at all, and most in the first day or two after the drowning. After that, the bodies’ tissues and organs soak up enough water to overcome the human body’s natural buoyancy and sinks, most often for good.
The body of the kid floated for now, bobbing along the star-speckled surface of the river.
It was nighttime, and creatures along the banks of the river gathered and lapped at the water’s edge, safe in the night from predators. A group of screeching dark birds followed this strange object as it floated in the water.
The water’s surface was cloaked by a thin veil of mist where the warm and humid night air settled on the cooling water, and the kid’s body parted this thin veil as it drifted along the water’s surface. A head and one shoulder poked through the inches-thick layer of mist, and as the current slowed and sped up, the body picked up speed and slowed, causing the rocking, bobbing motion. On occasion the head would tip under and the torso and lower extremities would surface, one leg hard and unmoving from rigor mortis, the other curiously absent.
Norma Jenkins sat alone at home, watching TV. The X-Files was on, and it was about the only exciting thing she ever allowed herself to watch. There were some other exciting shows on TV that she liked to watch, like ER and Star Trek, but X-Files was her favorite. But sometimes the show was so exciting or suspenseful that her stomach reacted to it, churning and bobbing from the excitement.