John Schettler - Touchstone

Whoever opened the gravesite before them hadn’t bothered to pry the lid off. They had just hacked into the top with an axe, leaving an ugly breach in the box.

“It’s kind of odd,” said Robert. “It feels like a desecration, even though Kelly was never here.”

Dorland stooped to get a better look, thrusting his arm into the hole in the box and rooting about. He pulled his hand out and sat back on his haunches.

“Well, Mr. Schroedinger?” asked Nordhausen.

“The cat is dead,” said Paul. “It’s gone. Someone’s got the DVD.”

“Who could have done this?”

“God only knows, but we have our suspicions, right? If it wasn’t Rasil or his men it was someone else. Someone from the future. They’re the only ones who could possibly know about this.”

“But we were going to keep it all secret,” Nordhausen protested. “Keep it to ourselves.”

“Someone had to learn about it or they could not have pulled Kelly to safety in the first place. We have to look at this clearly, Robert. One side used us to help them reverse Palma. The other side is fighting back. Maybe it’s Rasil, or his masters. Maybe it’s Sinan and his Assassins. This sure is a devious way to try and do in Kelly—just like something the Assassins might dream up.”

“So now what?” The professor flapped his arms against the cold. “Whoever took it, can destroy it, if they haven’t already. My god, what if Kelly’s gone?”

“I don’t think so,” said Paul. He was suddenly excited. “Because this wasn’t the only copy. There still must be a data somewhere on the archives at the lab. We’ve got to get over there! We have to go and burn a hundred DVDs of Kelly, and stash them everywhere. Put it on a Yahoo server somewhere as hidden code on a web page. Make it part of Kelly’s Golem program—anything to insure that the copy will survive. We have to publish this information so much that it can be always available… not hide it! Publish it! We had it all wrong. The only way to maintain his probability is to assert it vigorously.”

On the road backthey began to sort out the problem of who took the DVD. The night had calmed, although thin tails of clouds were still rushing aloft. The moon loomed in a cobalt blue sphere, with bright white stars dotting the sky overhead as the storm front passed.

Nordhausen said suddenly: “It’s clear now that there are other people moving through time.”

“I was afraid you were going to bring that up,” said Paul. “It’s a lot to start thinking about just now.”

“Well, we can’t avoid it. Someone physically dug up Kelly’s DVD and stole it. No one knew about that except the four of us.”

“No one in this milieu. But they were the ones who rescued Kelly in the first place, so at some future time the existence and location of the DVD becomes a known fact.”

“Exactly,” Nordhausen said excitedly. “We assumed they excavated it decades from now, and found the DVD, and had the idea to save Kelly. But now, look, we are going to try to make it so they don’t have to dig up the grave. So we don’t know how they found it… Maybe someone stole it, and they got it from them? Maybe they came back in time, and picked it up now, instead of in their own time. Suppose this is how they found it, perhaps only just hours ago because of what we’re about to do.”

Dorland interrupted him. “That’s the same Schroedinger’s Cat argument. But it’s a gross analogy trying to describe a quantum puzzle. Don’t worry. It doesn’t mean anything, it just makes you think. Niels Bohr said the cat existed in both states, alive and dead, until you opened the box, and then the probability collapsed into certainty, and the cat was either alive or dead. But the Many-Worlds theory says that at the moment a particle can or cannot emit, it does both, and each one sets off another fork in the universe, one with a dead cat and one with a live cat.”

“Well, you tell me,” Nordhausen shot back, “is Kelly alive or dead?”

“He seems to be in both states, before our very eyes. Schroedinger said there is a difference between an out of focus photograph and a snapshot of fog and clouds.” Dorland was pensive, “He proposed the original thought experiment to show that it was not possible to separate a superposition, it had to collapse… But in 1996, the National Institute of Standards and Technology managed to separate a single ion of beryllium into two states at a measurable distance of 80 nanometers.”

“More physics? What is that supposed to mean?”

Dorland rolled his eyes miserably. “I have no idea. Still, it seems to me that as long as we have Kelly physically here, and we make certain that there is a data set easily available for Graves’ colleagues to rescue him, then Kelly ought to maintain his integrity in this Meridian.”

Nordhausen was eager to agree. Then his thinking transitioned to the other problem that had been vexing him all night. “What about the hieroglyphics?”

“The hieroglyphics?”

“The hieroglyphics! The Rosetta Stone. And the other time travelers. If I didn’t cause the damage then they must have been running a mission themselves. That’s what triggered the alert—not my time jaunt.”

“Possibly.” Dorland was content to swim in uncertainty for a moment. “We’ll get over to the lab and see what the Golems have for us.”

Nordhausen pulled out his phone. “I’m calling Maeve to see how Kelly is. Maybe even our resolve to do this is enough to help him—even before it happens.”

“Good point,” Paul agreed, realizing that they were about to look into another box with the call. His heart was heavy when he thought of Kelly again.

Robert got through on the first ring, and gave a brief account of what they were planning. Kelly appeared to be no better, although he seemed to be resting comfortably.

Dorland whispered, “Tell her to meet us at your apartment in Berkeley. We can confer there. And use the code.”

The professor tried to remember. “Oh, yes,” he said. “And say hello to Alexandria.” It was a reference to a novel he had been writing on the destruction of the famous library in that city—and a fitting metaphor for his holding in Berkeley, as they had all agreed.

He switched off the phone with a visible sigh. “I don’t think she took that code business too well.”

This arrangement made, the men drove to the facility at Lawrence Berkeley Labs with as much speed as Paul could safely manage. They pulled into the rain swept parking lot a half hour later and rushed through the security station to the Lab. By the time they pushed through the door, they were breathless with the energy and excitement of their mission.

“You work the DVD thing,” Paul yelled. “I’ll check on the Golems.”

“Where do I start?” Nordhausen gave him a blank look.

“The blue system at the far left of the main control room. You know the one?”

“Yes, but what do I do?”

“Just do a search for any .MPEG file. You’ll find it. Make copies and publish. Use your imagination!” He rushed away, heading for the RAM bank center where he hoped the Golems would have news for him.

Robert located the data file on the archival storage system, and spent the next couple hours copying it on every available type of media he could locate. He set up a web and domain called KellyRamer.com, and posted the file in every possible format. It was linked into every University page he could access, and he added in meta-tags for easy searching.

When he was done, Nordhausen gave a sigh of exhaustion, and went to look for Paul.

“I made fifty copies,” he said. “Have we changed the future?”