John Schettler - Anvil of Fate

“You were here? Why didn’t you come up when you heard the Arch system go on-line?”

“I thought it was part of the alarm system. You know… Golems find a variation, raise the alarm and the Arch spins up automatically to create a Nexus Point here. I just assumed you both were responding to the alarm as well, so I continued with what I was doing. I had no idea what you were up to, and frankly I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to know after what happened to Kelly… I wasn’t quite sure of anything. Then Kelly called me.”

“You were just down stairs?” said Kelly, quite surprised. “I thought you were at the apartment in Walnut Creek. Why didn’t you say so?”

“Look, it was all I could do to compose myself enough to walk up here!” she said. “You surprised me with your call, so I thought I’d come up and return the favor.”

“I understand,” said Paul. “But I wonder why the Arch failed to start an hour ago when the first alert calls came in.” He had a feeling of vague disquiet, but quickly moved on. “Well, you may as well know the worst.” He told her what they had found in the Golem reports. “This is radical! It’s mind blowing. No Holy Roman Church. No United States of America! Maeve… when did you get your Golem alert call?”

“A a few minutes past one. I called the two of you, then left right away. Probably got here by 1:30 or so.”

“So that was you on the phone? We were just leaving USF when you called. My cell phone rang twice, but it was in the briefcase in the trunk of the car, and we were in a hurry. The first call was probably the Golem alert, which means we’ve already lost an hour.”

“No United States?” said Nordhausen. “What the hell does the world look like out there now?”

“Good question,” said Paul. “Well, we’re obviously getting power from somewhere, so there must still be a city out there.”

“How is that possible?” said Nordhausen? “We can clearly see the whole damn Meridian is completely shattered on the monitors. How can there be a San Francisco if the new world was colonized by the Muslims?”

Paul was silent for a moment.

“Come on, man. This is your theory. What’s going on out there?”

Paul reasoned it out. ”The Heisenberg Wave has obviously not been emitted yet,” he said, with some surprise, then hope growing in his eyes. “We aren’t seeing what has happened here on the monitors… We’re seeing what will happen.”

“But the monitors are reading blood red for this time period,” said Robert, “and that assessment is based on data the Golems are supposed to be retrieving from the Internet. If there is still an Internet. But how could there even be any Golems at all out there if this was such a radical transformation. This is maddening!”

“We’re in a Nexus Point, Robert. And a very deep one at that. A Nexus is an intersection of all possible Meridians, all possible outcomes. Everything overlaps in a grand synthesis here. Yes, there would be no Golems in the changed Meridian, but they exist in this one, and this time line is being preserved here in the Nexus with all the others. At first I thought the Golems would only be aware of actual changed facts, but somehow they are picking up other data, an awareness of information that may be coming from other Meridians passing through this Nexus Point. I can’t say exactly how it works, but it does work. I guess we’ll have to make a another new entry in the lexicon and call it ‘resonance.’ A Nexus point is the heart of infinity itself. In here, we can apparently see and know what every other Meridian in the Nexus knows—what Time itself knows. This event must resolve to some outcome, right Maeve?”

He looked to her for confirmation, and got no objection. “And the resonance here is telling us what the most likely outcome of this intervention will be in the history up until our time. That’s what the Golems are picking up as they become aware of the weight of opinion of all others time lines out there. The monitors are showing us what the changed Meridian is most likely to become after the Heisenberg Wave generates, and pointing out the variations from our own history in the RAM Bank.”

“Then it hasn’t changed yet? There’s still a Holy Catholic Church? Columbus discovered America?”

“Apparently not, because we’re all still alive and well. And we can’t be alive if this transformation takes effect. In fact, we may be the very reason the Heisenberg Wave cannot fully manifest now. Our presence in a protected Nexus Point is causing a real problem for Mother Time, She has to wait on what we do here. But keep a close eye on the power. If we lose our Nexus field all bets are off.”

“Well, let’s use the Golems to look up what happens in the future then, if this resonance allows access to the all the data then we could find out what they did from their own damn history files!”

“I don’t think that will work, but you could try it.”

“I did try it,” Kelly intervened. “All you get is crap people entered into Wikipedia, Sci-fi stuff, corny YouTube videos and other speculative data. No real information. The Golems are blind to the future because they see only information that was written about the past, about the history. Try Googling stock market quotes for a week from today. You get nonsense, no real data, because, it hasn’t happened yet. So forget it, Robert.”

“You’re telling me nothing will be written about it in the future?” The Professor was adamant.

“No,” Kelly frowned. “I’m telling you nothing has been written about it as of the moment of your query. You’ll note that everything the Golems fetch for us is from our present or the past. The history line ends with today’s date. The information is limited to the point on the continuum where the query originates. They can’t see the future, resonance or no resonance.”

“Yes,” said Paul. “If willful agents could know what is to come, then they could take preventative actions before those events happen and, if successful, they would immediately be exposed to Paradox. The event they prevented never happened, so how could they prevent it? No. Time seems to restrict all forward movement. You can only go back—to quantum arrangements that have already occurred. And you can return to your own milieu, as we obviously know, but you can’t go forward beyond the moment in which you live.”

“Kelly went forward,” Nordhausen pointed. “Graves and the rest of them saved him from Paradox and pulled him out of this milieu into the future! And all the moments between our time and that future are quantum arrangements too.”

“Well I didn’t say you could not be pulled forward to a specific time and location,” said Paul. “Hell, we just pulled Kelly forward over ten thousand years, to a specific location within a Nexus Point. My guess was that Graves and company simply moved him to a Nexus Point in their time as well, and kept him there—and a Nexus is a void in Time, so Kelly never really entered their milieu. He was in a Nexus the whole time. And yes, the line continues forward, but we don’t know what any of those quantum arrangements are. They are complete unknowns to us. We sent you to Rosetta, for example, only because we knew how to precisely code that time and place. But how do you code for an occurrence in Time you know nothing about? We could specify something in the math, but it would be a complete shot in the dark.”

Nordhausen shrugged, and Paul went on.

“Moving forward would require exact information as to time and location—information we just don’t have. Without it a person could shift right into the wall of a building, when we thought they were shifting to a safe vacant lot. The corona on the breaching bubble would probably destroy the inert mass there, allowing you to manifest, but you’d be stuck. There’s just not enough information to get a safe breaching point, even if it were possible to go forward. So we just cannot travel to the future, unless you want to do the Einstein shuffle and find a way to approach the speed of light for an out and back loop. But this is all irrelevant. While we stand here working out the theory, Time is holding her breath, waiting.”