Chapter 7
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
Kyle Martin put his boss’s authority to use and commandeered 27 Android smartphones, all of the ones he could find or steal from the entire Isla Roca installation. Many of them didn’t have service agreements attached, but it didn’t matter; he would run them on wifi. He put together an ad-hoc team of technicians and engineers to help him put up a cobbled-together grid using these smartphones as GPS receivers.
Laurie whipped up a script that would run on the phones, making them send an update to a server every second, indicating the GPS time offset compared with their local time. After they put another cube in the portal, they could collect the phone time offset data out of the server’s log file and use another script to pick out the outlier; the one with the biggest offset. They then just go find that phone in their grid and hopefully the cube would be nearby. That was the idea anyway.
After Laurie had pushed the script out to all of the phones and verified she was getting data on the server, Kyle dragged his rag-tag team out and gave each of the five guys a stack of phones and instructions of where to put them. They distributed them as evenly as possible in a grid covering a quarter-mile radius from Daedalus. Many of them had to be affixed to buoys floating off the shore of Isla Roca. Given the extraordinary pressure to solve this problem, the team cranked this out in just half a day. By afternoon, they were ready to start another test.
Larry Duncan had to be in the driver’s seat with every test.
“Kyle, Laurie, we good to go?” Duncan said.
“We’re go.”
“Ready.”
“OK, start the test. Same pattern as before. Target one meter from origin location at the portal, due north, same elevation”
“Line laid in,” Laurie responded.
“Initiating beam acceleration. Full gravity beam in thirty seconds,” Kyle announced to the team. They waited, holding their breath. “Beam strength, one hundred percent. Put the cube in.”
Larry placed the cube into the portal and Kyle flipped a switch. Cube number fourteen vanished, just like the previous thirteen had.
“Laurie—” Duncan began.
“On it!” Laurie cut in. “Give me just a minute to analyze the data”. Laurie typed furiously into her laptop and then stopped suddenly, peered at the screen, and then said quietly, “this can’t be right.”
“What is it?” Duncan asked as he rushed behind Laurie’s shoulder to look at the data himself.
“Look. The four phones furthest from here, the ones on the buoys out in the water, all of them have huge negative offsets. All of the other phones are just a couple of milliseconds at most. Has to be an overflow or variable type bug in the script.”
“I checked it, Laurie. There’s no bug in the script. It’s only like five lines of code,” Kyle commented. “The data must be right.”
“Well how is that possible? You can’t have a negative time offset, and this is like…” she counted to herself, “four..five... like a hundred thousand seconds, negative. And then they didn’t post another time update the next second. Has to be a bug or a glitch. How is it even possible? Even if the clocks stopped completely on the phones, it’d have a maximum of one second of error.”
“That would be a positive one second. This is negative. It means the clock didn’t stop, but it went fast. Very fast, from the looks of it. Hundred thousand seconds, what’s that, a day or so?” Kyle asked.
“Something like that,” said Duncan.
“Well if those clocks really ran a hundred thousand seconds in the time that the GPS satellites only ran one second, then the batteries would be dead before the next GPS second.”
“What? Batteries?”
“Yeah. Batteries. If time is going at a much higher rate, where a day passes for the phones for every second that passes for the GPS satellite, then the battery would go dead in like, a second or two, since for the phone that’s like a day or two.”
“You mean, the phones are time-traveling?” Duncan asked.
“Looks like it,” said Kyle. “I am just reading the data”.
“I don’t buy it. Kyle,” Larry said. “Get the guys to go out and see what’s up with the phones that are not reporting. Maybe the buoys tipped over and they croaked when they hit the salt water. Maybe that’s the glitch. Once we fix those phones or replace them, let’s repeat the experiment.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Jennifer Swinton, a procurement specialist for Thermion walked up. Jennifer managed acquiring most of the materials and equipment that the Daedalus team needed.
“Yes, Jen, what’s up?”
“Mr. Duncan, I think there’s something you need to see.”
“Okay, Jen. We’re done here until we can get these broken phones working again anyway. What have you got?”
“I just got off the phone with Phil McClain from Florida Scientific. They found one of our cubes, embedded in a log.”
“Say that again,” Larry said with a stunned look on his face.
“They were feeding a log into their machine that turns wood into our carbon cubes, and their tool got hung up on something. Turns out it was one of our cubes, somehow roughly in the middle of a log.”
“How is that even possible?” asked Laurie, as Kyle gave Larry a grim look, like he knew a terrible truth.
“We are not really sure what is possible, Laurie,” Kyle replied. “Jen, you say this is a log that they were using with some machine that makes our cubes?”
“Yeah. That’s how they do it. They basically barbecue a log in a special furnace and it turns it into kind of a specialized charcoal briquette, and then they use a laser to cut the briquette into a cube. Ironic that this is the very machine that makes our cubes, and one of our cubes turned up there.”
“Where did they get the log?” Duncan asked.
“Well, they have a bunch of them there, they have been sitting for a long time, couple of years. They let them sit to dry out so they don’t have as much moisture content and we get better cubes. That log has been there maybe two, three years.”
Kyle Martin and Larry Duncan exchanged a long look.
“What are the odds that we sent the cube to Florida, and it happened to end up at the manufacturer that made the cube, inside a log that was going to be made into a cube?” Duncan asked rhetorically.
“Zero. That could only mean...”
“What? You lost me,” said Jen.
“Me too,” said Laurie.
Kyle was thinking, maybe they did send a cube back in time. Back to before the cube was manufactured. Maybe the cube’s carbon atoms in the past were locked in that log, and when it got sent back, it just realigned those atoms into the cube shape inside the log, where it really had started out. And if that was true, then this could not be one of the cubes they have already been working with, because this particular cube, the one stuck in log, would have only been manufactured yesterday. That particular cube must have been sent back sometime in the future, at least a few weeks from now. If the saw hadn’t caught on it, then they may never have known. It would have just been part of the carbon lump that would have been carved into a new cube and nobody would have known.
“We may have sent this cube back in time. That could be the log it would have been made from. It can’t be any of the cubes we are currently looking for because that log hasn’t been made into a cube yet. There’s like a dozen logical flaws with this, but it’s the only explanation that fits the evidence,” Kyle explained. “This doesn’t really help us find the cubes we are looking for now, but it does open up a pretty unexpected set of possibilities.”
“You don’t think all of the other cubes are stuck in other logs at FSS?”
“Well, I don’t really know what to think. But no, whatever logs are in the stack at FSS have not been turned into cubes yet, so if there is another cube in one of them, that has to be from some experiment we haven’t done yet. Who knows, maybe in a month or a year we make other adjustments to Daedalus and end
up sending a cube back in time, and this is that cube. But we may not have always been sending cubes back in time. There’s just no way to know.”
Duncan just buried his face in his hands.