* * *
After the meeting broke up, Kyle hustled to catch up to Laurie to enlist her help in one small act of forgivable insubordination. “Laurie, how long does it take to fully shut down Daedalus?” he asked when he caught up to her.
“We haven't shut it down before. We don't even have a protocol for it. We're going to just have to make it up as we go,” she replied as she walked briskly towards the lab. “We're probably looking at two hours. Why?”
“Maybe we have enough time to sneak in one more test.”
“Larry was pretty adamant—”
“Yeah, I know. But I have an idea and I'm not sure it can wait.”
“Okay. Let's hear it,” she said as they walked.
“I think we broke two things. One is an assumption, Daedalus whole operating principle, that somehow we can skip across time in an isolated fashion, without a corresponding skip in space. I think the cube in the log proves we are wrong about that. When we skip something through time, it rewinds to its same place in space.”
“Yeah, I've heard this theory of yours before. But that would mean we have a time loop, and so we sent the cubes back in time and space, right? That's the theory?”
“Yeah, that's the theory.”
“Well then why didn't the hard drive test work?”
“It was too disruptive, I think. Too ambitious. We didn't just try to prove that we had a time loop, we tried to use a time loop to our advantage. It's too much. We need a much, much simpler experiment.”
“Okay, but you said two things. What's the other thing we broke?”
“Well, we never set out to create a time loop. In fact, we were not even sure of the physics, whether it is even possible. But now we have what looks like evidence of something that previously had been thought to be potentially impossible. We have to establish whether or not this thing is possible, which is why we need to run a test. But we need to also identify how we did this without knowing. And I think I know how, or at least I have an idea. Again it's the problem with trying to decouple space from time. All of our math is based on time, and time only. But what we overlooked is that when we bend space, we also reorient all of the objects in that space with respect to one another.”
“What do you mean, 'reorient'?”
“Think for a minute about two objects, each with some mass. Each has its own gravity that pulls on the other object, and the intensity of that gravitational force on each object is inversely proportionate to the distance between the objects. But what if you bend the space between those objects? What happens to the distance between them?”
“It changes? How is that? The distance is measured through space, right? So you bend the space, the distance stays the same.” Laurie said this, even though she had a hard time making sense of it. She knew in theory, it must be correct. She had written millions of lines of computer code based on this assumption. But she still wasn't sure. Daedalus was not behaving as expected, after all.
“Yeah but we are applying negative gravity with the gravium miniature black holes. Our feedback loop doesn't take this into account. We know that the gravium has a canceling effect on gravity but not on the time distortion created by the gravity, but we assumed—”
“We assumed it cancels out the space distortion too...” Laurie said, finishing Kyle's though. “So we are not compensating...” she trailed off, her eyes beginning to sparkle with realization that she was close to a solution.
“Exactly. One more test.” He knew he had set the hook. She was now invested.
“Okay. One more test. But then we are shutting it down, no matter the results.”
“Of course,” Kyle said, meaning it. “We just have to get it all shut down before the cavalry arrives.”
“What's this test you want to do?” she said as they entered the lab together.
“Just like the hard drive. We send an object, but one we can mark and one we are sure to find, today. One that would not have caused us to destroy it or change it like the hard drive.”
“What did you have in mind?” Laurie asked while Kyle directed them to a workbench with hand tools instead of towards the Daedalus control room as she had expected.
“My class ring,” he said. “I have had it on my right hand for twenty years. I never take it off. I would not notice some tiny change to it unless I was looking, but even if I was, it wouldn't make me stop wearing it.” Kyle rummaged through the tools on the bench and found what he was looking for: a small pointed impact punch.
“What are you going to do?”
Kyle removed his class ring, and then laid it on the bench. “If I made a mark like an engraving or a scratch, then it would be sort of repaired by taking the trip back in time, if my theory is correct. That's because I'd be taking material off of the ring by scratching it, and then that material, wherever it is, would just be back there when I send it back. I need to make a change that doesn't materially change the ring.”
Laurie didn't fully understand what Kyle was getting at. Obviously he had given this some thought and already had a plan. She let him continue uninterrupted.
“So I'm going to use this punch to create a small dimple in the ring, inside the band,” he said, and then began to line up the punch to make a dimple in the ring, but he stopped suddenly.
“Kyle?” Laurie said, transfixed on the ring he was holding in his hand. “Your ring.”
Kyle stared in stunned silence at the ring in his hand, and then finally said, “it worked.”
“But we didn't...” Laurie said.
“We must have. We did. We had to,” he said, convincing himself. “Laurie, this proves we made a time loop,” Kyle responded, awestruck, staring at the tiny dimple in the ring as he held it in his hand.
“How...” Laurie trailed off, confused.
“We must have made the dimple, put it in the portal, and then it went back in time. Back onto my finger. Then when we got to this same place in the time line. We went to put the dimple in it, but it already has it. This will kick us out of the loop, because we aren't going to make the dimple again and put it back in the portal.”
“You mean, in some alternate version of... I don't understand,” Laurie admitted.
“Neither do I. Not really. But the evidence of it is right here in my hand.”
“We have to tell Larry,” Laurie said.
“Yeah. Are we shutting Daedalus down?” he asked.
“We'd better wait.”