Paul Jones - Towards Yesterday

When she caught sight of Jim walking in her direction, Rebecca seemed to become suddenly aware of her appearance, running a long fingered hand through her hair.

Adrianna was already in the room, she passed Jim and Harry cups of lukewarm black coffee as they sat at the Formica table. Jim knocked back his in one gulp and grabbed a refill from the dispenser before sitting back down. “Now you have my undivided attention,” he said as he sipped from the Styrofoam cup. Rebecca’s eyes met his and she gave him an almost invisible smile.

“Sorry for getting you all up so early, you can blame Miss Lacy for that,” said Lorentz in an attempt at humor, his face betraying the true gravitas of the early morning meeting. “She has something she wants to share with us that I think you will all agree is important.”

Rebecca stood, took a sip from her coffee then began recounting the images she had seen in her dream. Several minutes later, her story complete, the confused eyes of the team stared at her.

“You got us all here at…” Adrianna paused to glance at the large clock fixed to the wall behind her, “five in the morning to tell us about a dream?” The diminutive scientist’s voice was heavy with incredulity, and she ended her question with a frown and a dismissive shake of her head.

“You will have to forgive Professor Drake,” Lorentz said, “I sometimes think that the trauma of the Slip caused her politeness to be left behind in the future.”

Adrianna let out a Humph ! and sat with her arms crossed sullenly.

“It’s okay. I think I need to explain something about myself,” Rebecca said turning to face the morose Adrianna. “Since I was a child I have experienced… I suppose you would call them waking-dreams… my subconscious processes information, problems and puzzles in my sleep and then, well, the results appear to me in my dreams.”

“So now you’re saying you have visions?” snickered Adrianna.

“No,” repeated Rebecca patiently. “I’m saying that I have a brain that doesn’t quit when it gets hold of a problem. Even when I sleep, it worries over them. It’s a well-documented condition.”

Jim could feel the tension beginning to rise between the two women, Horatio must have felt it too because he cleared his throat dramatically before asking: “So just what did your dream reveal to you Rebecca? Apart from the fact that I should never play against you in a game of baseball.”

Rebecca either missed the large man’s joke or chose to ignore it because, instead of replying, she stood up and walked to the head of the table. “We’ve been looking at solving the problem of the residual T-fallout all wrong,” she began. Adrianna began to object but Rebecca cut her short. “It’s a simple mistake, understandable under the circumstances, I suppose. We have been treating the signal as if it was indisputably the same signal that left the future when the slip occurred; searching for anything that would have caused the disruption and differences in the original signal to the one we have been receiving and analyzing. Instead, we should have been looking more closely at the signal itself.

Rebecca paused as if to give her next statement more dramatic effect and a sudden smile flickered across her face. “Actually, we should stop referring to it as a signal and instead start referring to it in the plural.”

“Signals?” asked Lorentz questioningly.

“ Signals ,” repeated Rebecca.

Jim would not have been surprised to see Adrianna slap herself on her forehead such was the suddenness of the realization that crossed her face. It would have been comical if the situation were not so incredibly important. “Of course,” she said. “How could I have been so stupid… it’s a harmonic isn’t it!”

Rebecca’s smile widened as realization swept across the faces of those seated around the table. All except for Horatio Mabry, who continued looking perplexed at his colleague’s revelation. “Am I the only one here who doesn’t understand what the hell you’re all getting excited about?”

“A harmonic,” said Adrianna, “is a component frequency of a harmonic motion, it’s an integral multiple of the fundamental frequency, yet separate and distinct from the overall waveform.”

“There’s more than one frequency in the tachyon wave that was sent?” said Mabry.

“I think,” Rebecca continued, “that there are probably far more than one or two extra frequencies in this harmonic.”

“So, you’re saying the original team sent more than one transmission?” Mabry asked.

“No,” Adrianna said. “We sent only one transmission.”

“So where did these extra frequencies come from? If you didn’t send them via the original transmission, then who did?” Mabry directed his question to Professor Lorentz who had remained silent after the revelation, his fingers steepled in front of his lips, head slightly bowed as he listened to his protégés talk. Now all heads turned to regard him.

“Perhaps it’s an echo,” Lorentz offered, “a bounce from some event in the past—”

“Or future?” interjected Mabry.

“—that has caused the signal to amplify and distort? My honest answer is that I do not know.” Lorentz seemed suddenly to shrug off the melancholia and exhaustion that had dogged him for the past few weeks as a wave of enthusiasm overtook him. “There’s only one way to find out. Adrianna, can you refocus your attention to Rebecca’s discovery?”

“Yes. I can put what I’m doing on the back burner.”

“I’ve run some preliminary calculations,” added Rebecca, as she pushed a paper printout across the desk to Adrianna. “They are all uploaded onto the central server for anybody who wants to take a look at them.”

“You’ve managed to isolate five streams already?” Adrianna asked.

“Yes. But that’s really just a cursory initial run—through of the data.”

Adrianna began scribbling notes and figures on the printout before finally looking up. “This first figure, how sure are you of its accuracy?”

A cloud passed over Rebecca’s face. “As sure as I can be under the circumstances. Why?”

“Because, if your calculations are correct, then we have a bigger problem than we first thought.”

“Please, Adrianna, do elucidate,” said Lorentz.

“Here,” she handed the printout to Lorentz, her own calculations written in her childish scrawl alongside Rebecca’s.

Lorentz flipped the sheets open as if he was reading a newspaper. All signs of his earlier hopeful mood evaporated into thin-air as his face drained of color. “My God,” he said, the words falling from suddenly dry lips.

“What is it?” Jim asked.

“It seems,” said Lorentz his voice barely controlled, “that our initial estimation as to the amount of time we have left before the second slip occurs has been severely underestimated. Professor Drake’s figures appear to indicate we no longer have years to stop this problem.”

“How long?” said Mabry.

“Two months,” said Adrianna, and then added, “If we are lucky.”

A silence fell across the room as Jim’s gaze moved to the face of each of his colleagues gathered around the table. They looked as though they had been handed a death sentence.

“You’re telling me that we can expect another occurrence of the Slip in just two months?” he asked. The question was directed to the room of people but it was Lorentz who answered.

“If Adrianna’s figures are correct—and I have no reason to believe otherwise—then, yes. We have just weeks before we will find ourselves back where we were on that fateful day again.”

Jim’s mind began to comprehend the impending disaster: the destruction of all their work to date, everything reset to where they were when the slip first occurred. All progress lost. The thought made him want to throw up. Plans would need to be made for when the second Slip occurred. They would have to arrange a meeting place for the group so they could ensure that they began work immediately. There would have to be— A terrible realization became suddenly and horrifyingly apparent to Jim.