Chapter 40
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
After dismissing the team to go shut down Daedalus, Larry sat in his office and conducted a mental inventory. He went over what all was happening. What was connected, what was not connected. What could be connected? Could the disappearance of this kid actually be connected? And he considered that Kyle had just told him he had evidence of some kind, at least in theory, that they had created a time loop. Larry Duncan desperately wished he had been able to go to the lab and chase this down with Kyle rather than shutting down his project and running interference on a totally unrelated distraction.
To get his mind off of this, he opened up an email that had been sent to him just a little while ago from his lead technician. This was the report of the teardown analysis of the malfunctioning phones from yesterday's test. Ordinarily he would have Kyle and Laurie handle this, but since he had just sent them to the lab to shut down Daedalus, it left him both with time on his hands and nobody else to look at this.
All,
We completed our analysis of the four Samsung phones with boot loop and other issues that were taken out of service yesterday. Here is an overview of our findings:
a. All four phones, including the one with the dead display, were boot-looping as suspected, due to insufficient storage space to write to the syslog file. The system partition is 100% full on all of them, the majority of space taken with the syslog file. We downloaded the syslog file from each phone's flash and reviewed it. It is odd that the syslog file is almost completely filled with network error reports and the timestamps seem to cover a 44-year time period. It looks like a constant radio error, unable to connect to the network logged over and over again. We deleted the giant syslog files and all four phones booted normally and appeared at least partially functional, except for the one with the DOA screen. They will not consistently hold a GSM signal, however, and we could not get them to connect to wifi without a lot of packet overflows and the connection flapping. We stored the giant syslog files on the server if you want to review them yourself.
b. We disassembled the phones and found a tremendous amount of oxidation, far more than expected. Also, some of the PCBs were delaminating and the adhesives that hold the screen on and other adhesives were brittle and fell apart easily. You can see in the attached photos the extreme oxidation on the pins of the fine-pitch parts and particularly the battery connector and antenna contacts.
c. In order to identify the issues with network connectivity, we powered the oscillators in the phone and found all of them were way out of spec. Some of them were close to 1% under the rated frequency. This would explain why they were unable to hold wireless network lock. Maybe these were a defective batch of phones. Did they ever work before?
We wrote up a more complete report (attached) and put it on the server. It was odd, but these phones just looked like they were very old.
Thanks,
Cindy Li
The phones looked old, Larry thought. And the frequency wrong on the oscillators? That's what happens when they get very old. The adhesives all degraded? That happens when they get old. All of the corrosion? Old. Plus forty-four years of syslog entries. Even though these phones were at most six months old, Larry had to agree. The evidence seemed to indicate they were nearly half a century old. Considering they were trying to bend space-time, Larry had to believe they had succeeded.
But if the evidence was to be believed, then what was happening was opposite of what they expected. If there was a strong gravitational anomaly occurring near the phones, then time would pass more slowly for the phones than for objects in the surrounding area.
The other thing that was baffling was where this was happening. These phones were way out in the water. How is it that they were experiencing this extreme time distortion, while the others they were monitoring all over the island were not? And then, does this mean that maybe that's where some of the lost cubes are going?
Larry sat, considering these questions and working out possible answers plus additional questions in his head when a knock came at his office door. “Come in,” he said. Kyle and Laurie filed in one after the other.
“Larry, we confirmed the time loop,” Kyle said.
“I know. You told me that before. But we don't have time to look into it until—”
“No, before I mentioned that I thought I had identified what we did wrong that could result in a time loop—”
“Which was...”
“We were not compensating for the spatial distortion caused by the gravium—” Larry kept cutting Kyle off, getting ahead of his thoughts.
“Right. I wondered about that. It was a coin flip. So you think this error could cause a time loop? Like a wormhole?” Larry said.
“No, Larry, we know that it did cause a time loop—”
“No, we assume it is a time loop because of the log—”
This time Laurie had had enough of these two interrupting each other so she blurted, “Larry! We tested it and we confirmed we absolutely did create a time loop.”
“You tested it? How did you do that? Daedalus is shut down.”
“No, it's not,” Laurie corrected. “Kyle wanted to—”
“I coerced Laurie into helping me run one last test before we shut down Daedalus. Then after we finished the test, we wanted to tell you the results before we shut it down. If I am right about this error, then we might be able to make a minor adjustment and get Daedalus working correctly today.”
Larry Duncan took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. He rubbed his forehead with both of his palms. The man was torn. “Okay, Kyle. You ran an extra test. Tell me about it.”
“We needed a way to test that would work more reliably than the hard drive. I believe the hard drive test worked. We sent it back in time, just as we expected. But I think the problem was that when we got it, presumably, sometime in the past, we changed it back to how it was supposed to be, or we ignored it, like it just had a glitch or something. Laurie said that IT had to replace a hard drive in that server. Maybe that was it. Anyway, we need to test with something simpler, and something that we can predict where it will be, but that we won't try to change back or discard when we get it, in the past.”
Larry was following along. This made sense. “So what did you test with?” he asked.
“My class ring,” Kyle said, as he removed the ring from his finger and set it on Larry's desk. “I figured, I have had this ring on my finger almost continuously for over twenty years, so I know exactly where it would be today. And since it was on my finger all this time, I probably would never notice if there was some small change to it. I was going to use a punch to make a little dimple in the inside of the band.”
Larry was looking inside the ring as he held it in his hand. “This little dent?” he asked skeptically.
“Yeah, that dent.”
“So, what, you put a dent in the ring and then put it in the portal? Then what? The ring reappeared on your finger or something?”
“No,” Laurie said. “We never made the dent.”
“I don't get it,” Larry said.
“Kyle started to put the dimple in it with the punch,” Laurie said. “But when he took the ring off, the dimple was already there.”
Larry was confused. “I still don't get it.”
Kyle attempted to explain, realizing that it was not going to make any sense as he said the words. “The dimple wasn't there before. We must have put the dimple in it, with the punch, then put it into the portal. But that caused the ring to go back in time, how far we don't know, so that by the time I took the ring off, it was already dimpled.”
Larry was still confused, and more than anything, he was conflicted. Kyle was showing him a ring with a dimple in it, but that was hardly proof of a time loop. Kyle could have made the dimple before he brought Laurie to the lab for the test. Larry thought there was no way Kyle would do something like that, trick his team mates and undermine their work, but he still couldn't sha
ke this seed of doubt. “Maybe if I saw it, it would make more sense. Look. I also have a class ring,” Larry said, stretching out the fingers on his right hand. “Let's go do the same test, with my ring. We'll use your punch to make a dimple just like that.” Larry removed the ring from his finger and briefly glanced at the inside of the band, and then did a double take. His jaw dropped open and his eyes went as large as silver dollars.
“What?” Laurie said.
“Your ring. It has a dimple doesn't it?” Kyle said.
Larry stared at his ring in awe. “Yeah...” he muttered through his daze. “It has a dimple.”
Laurie and Kyle looked at each other in amazement. Kyle began to smile broadly. There, in the middle of a cluttered office on an island in the Caribbean, they were making history.
Then a sudden noise rocked them out of their reverie. It was Larry's desk phone ringing. Larry looked at the phone for three long rings before snapping out of his trance and picking it up. “Duncan,” he said.
“Mr. Duncan, this is ASAC Ray Ortiz. I hope I am not disturbing you.”
“Ray Ortiz? FBI? Yes, Mr. Ortiz. Funny you should mention it. We are actually extremely busy right now—”
“Well, you're about to get a lot more busy. I just landed here at your helipad and I noticed a U.S. Coast Guard vessel approaching your dock when I flew over.”
Larry held the phone and hesitated for a beat. “Okay. I'll have someone meet you there at the helipad. Give me a few minutes.”
“I think we're going to need to set up a command post here. Do you have some space we can use?”
“I'll see what I can do. We're really not set up for this. Stand by.” Larry hung up without waiting. Laurie and Kyle just stood there disoriented by Larry's distraction.
“What's going on?” Kyle asked as Larry dialed his phone again.
“Remember the lost kid? FBI is here. I have to talk to Carl real quick. One second—” He hesitated as Carl answered on the other end. “Hey Carl, how's the—”
“Larry,” Carl interrupted. “The Coast Guard are here, at the dock. They stopped us in the water and told us they are taking over the search. Aaron lost the side-scan. I'll tell you about it later. But I think you need to get down here to the dock and talk to these Coast Guard guys. This is above my pay grade.”
“Aaron is there with you? And the Grady family? Everyone is safe?”
“Yeah, we're all here. Just got here.”
“Did you find anything out there?”
“No. No sign of the kid, and Aaron never could get the side-scan working before it went overboard.” Overboard? Larry thought, but his mind was reeling from their discovery moments before and he didn't have the capacity right now to chase down this new mystery. He thought, What on earth is happening to this place?
“Okay. It really doesn't matter,” Larry said, forcing his mind to focus on the urgent matter at hand. “I'm going to go to the helipad and get the FBI guy. He just called, he's there waiting. Then we'll be at the dock in just a few minutes.”
“We saw the FBI helicopter while we were stopped with the Coast Guard.”
“Hang tight. I'm on my way,” Larry said, and then hung up.
“What's going on?” Laurie asked.
“I have to go escort the FBI guy down to meet the Coast Guard at the dock. We'll have to talk about this later.”
“Do you want us to shut down the Daedalus?” Kyle asked.
“No. Not yet. It's too late anyway. I'll try to keep these guys from coming up here but make sure the lab is cleared out and you guys get back to the dorms. I don't want there to be any reason for the FBI to sniff around the lab. Okay?”
“You got it.”
Larry began to walk to his door after Laurie and Kyle left and then suddenly he turned back as if he forgot something. He picked up his class ring from his desk where he had set it down, took one last look at the little dimple and then put it back on his finger. This day couldn't get any stranger, he thought as he left his office.