Chapter 8 - Destiny
Sam has it all figured out and needs to get Drew onboard working with him. Returning to the mess room, Sam starts: “I know what happened to you, guys, but I need to know what happened right before you arrived here, then I can tell you what I know. Otherwise I’m gonna sound stupid.”
Drew is distracted: “Have you guys found anything yet?” he barks on the radio.
“All negative, Drew, we’re just about finished.”
“Get to the mess room as soon as you’re clear;” orders Drew, then continues, “Strong, help Megan in the galley. OK, let’s talk, Sam, you have a few minutes.”
Drew orders the others to wait outside as they begin to poke their noses in and closes the mess door. Drew and Sam sit around the table. “OK, fire away, what’s on your mind?” asks Drew.
“What were you doing just before you woke up here?” Sam asks.
“Where we were, is classified. But the last thing I did, was activate a remote controller I’d been given,” Sam enquires further: “Can you describe it?”
“Sure,” says Drew, “it was all metal with a sliding bit and a button to activate it. I slid it back and pressed the button.”
“What shape was the controller, Drew?” asks Sam expectantly.
“It was a cylinder about this big,” Drew makes a shape with his hands about 50mm wide by 200mm long. Sam starts to smile.
“OK, what do you think?” asks Drew urgently.
“The metal cylinder was a transport device, Drew. They told you it was a remote controller?”
“Yes, they said it would switch a drilling machine we were checking off and on, using the button, so we could work on the machine,” reports Drew.
“I think you were conned, Drew,” reveals Sam, “The device is made of Quantinium, just like the thing I was working on, that sent me here. Mine was a different shape, a cube, but still, here I am.”
Drew makes a refreshingly perceptive statement, “So we traveled here, as did you, at about the same time, and Captain Fischer, after making the last log entry, disappeared from the bridge, inside a similar strange cylinder, just before we arrived.”
Sam agrees and concludes, “Somehow we’re all connected. The timing and circumstances are too convenient. I needed to get off that island of rubbish and you came along in a boat, right on cue. There’s a reason for all this. We should work together to find out,” Drew acknowledges his agreement.
Sam continues, “You’re soldiers aren’t you?” Drew nods again. Sam keeps pushing: “Can you tell me, where you were and what you we doing before the cylinder brought you here?”
Drew shakes his head, decisively this time, and says, “Classified and don’t remember, in that order.”
Sam tries to recover the conversation, “OK, I remember what I was working on, so if I tell you that, maybe you’ll remember.”
“First, I need to explain what Quantinium is,” begins Sam and continues, “I was working on a new material, that I discovered in my lab, well OK, the idea just came to me in my sleep. This stuff emits quantum field energy, using certain shapes and combinations, to force a quantum-jump. The device I was working on activated and brought me here. My boss won’t realise how dangerous this stuff is.”
Drew starts to lose interest and asks, “OK, Einstein, what’s a quantum-jump?”
Sam explains: “Quantum-jump is a term we use for moving matter between dimensions. Think of it like using an elevator, moving slowly from one floor to the next. You feel like you’re stood still, but when the doors open, each floor looks totally different. Each floor is a different dimension and the elevator is a Quantinium device.”
Drew yawns and pretends to close his eyes and fall asleep, Sam raises his voice a little, “OK, you need to listen to this next bit,” Drew ‘wakes up’ and Sam continues, “The problem is not swapping dimensions, the problem is quantum equilibrium. If you keep forcing things to swap, keep vanishing things, eventually, you start to get mis-matches,” Drew still looks confused, so Sam simplifies further: “When the ‘elevator’ moves from one floor to the next, it takes energy with it, leaving a hole. You need another elevator going in the opposite direction putting the same energy back, to fill the hole. This is something I’ve just realised. Nature likes to be in equilibrium, it likes to rebound back to a steady state. If you use Quantinium without dealing with the opposite effect, you get unexpected things happening to compensate. Ultimately, the source dimension ends in chaos, trying to rebound in the best way it can. We have to warn them.”
Drew pretends to be waking up with a hangover, “I’ll take your word for it, Sam,” concedes Drew, “So, wadda we do and who do we warn?”
“We need to get to my lab in Hong Kong and tell my boss about these quantum effects. They’ll follow my work and discover quantum-jump, but they need to know about quantum-rebound.”
Drew shakes his head in disagreement, “First we need to find fuel in there, mate, the radio is fried and we need to find out what year this is. If people ‘vanished’ us, they might not be too happy about us coming back into their little plan.”
Sam replies quietly, “What year, makes no difference, Drew. Dimension changes don’t care about time or distance, they reside in the same speck of space-time. For all we know, this dimension could be completely irrelevant, probably why we’re here. No mate, our goal is to find the relevant bit of quantum-rebound that’ll fix all this and get us back to some form of normal life. This dimension may be completely different to the ones we left behind or there may be just a few differences.”
Drew looks hopeful and through puckered lips says, “Well, I guess anything is better, than living on an old trawler, next to a pile of floating garbage.”
The team set about looking for diesel fuel amongst tons of floating rubbish. Kaffey has figured the best way to find it: “Look for thin films of diesel floating on the surface, leaky tanks will not be far away. Vehicles and boats might be floating with tanks full of fuel. Oil drums, too!”
Of course, luck is on their side, as usual, under these quantum-jump-rebound derived circumstances, so they soon find a half submerged road tanker with tons of diesel still inside and another ship that has drifted into the pile, with a quantity of diesel drums on board. Sam predicts they’ll find enough fuel to get them to Hong Kong and Kaffey confirms exactly that, as they finish piping it aboard.
Sam explains dimensional travel (quantum-jump-rebound) to the SEALs for the nth time, why it’s unpredictable, how time and distance mean nothing: “You could land in another dimension that is supposed to be 1982, but it looks more like 2082. What you find depends on what happened in that dimension, the history they had, wars fought, inventions discovered, how things panned out. Forget time, there are no timelines. Nature is just a series of changes, one after another, in an infinite number of dimensions. Time does not actually exist, only the speed of change and the connections made from one event to the next, across dimensions.”
Drew thanks Sam again for his nth rendition of quantum-jump theory, goes rigid and remembers something, saying, “Where’s Daley?” The others look confused, with blank expressions, as if to say, “Daley Who?” Drew then returns to confusion himself, saying, “I thought Daley was with us. No matter, I must be thinking of another mission. Forget I asked.”
When quantum-jump occurs, one of the things that changes from one dimension to another is memory. In the case of Quantinium jumps, certain memories are left behind, so that the transfer can complete, like fitting a jigsaw piece into a puzzle that’s slightly different. The result is, people sometimes forget details they have experienced in a previous dimension.
When Sam and the guys reach Hong Kong, if that city exists at all in this dimension, it could appear to be in their past, present or future. Sam has already seen familiar stars in the night sky and the others have seen the debris on Rubbish Island, so they all know this dimension is similar to the ones they left behind, but Sam knows, ‘the devil is in the detail’.
/> Sam already suspects Jes and Megan are from a different dimension to the other SEALs (Jes had a full face mask that spoke to Sam) and Sam’s dimension could be different again, he’s not familiar with some of their technology and still can’t figure out what they were all doing before they met, he doesn’t know they were on Mars. He knows one thing for sure though, they cannot get back – how would they find their dimension in an infinite number of possibilities? They would have to pick the correct return ‘elevator’ from an infinite row of sliding doors, all looking the same. The best they can do is try to stop the chaos caused by uncompensated Quantinium use and restart their lives somehow in this dimension.
Sam’s university is in Hong Kong and he must get there and talk to his principle before even stranger things happen, leading to dimensional chaos.