John Schettler - Touchstone

Kelly wasn’t laughing any longer, and the four team members stood in silence, listening to the distant thrum of the generator turbines. Paul spoke next, his voice laden with the weight of Maeve’s deduction.

“I’m afraid she’s correct,” he said. “The alteration to the stone is too pronounced, too radical. If what you are saying is true, and it bore no inscription in Demotic or Greek, then our adversaries have managed to pull off a major coup while we were dallying about with this Rosetta business. God only knows what they’ve done.”

“What do you mean?” Robert looked at him, slipping out from behind the chair.

“What I mean is this: you say you think the Assassins were using the glyphs as a code, correct? Then this whole affair has been aimed at preserving the secrecy of that language. Now, I don’t know how they accomplished it, but they’ve managed to permanently do away with the Touchstone that led to the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. That means their code is secure, and all the messages they’ve been sending back and forth through time will remain a secret. Who knows what advantage that has given them in the Time war—perhaps it was enough to swing things in their favor again.”

“Yes!” Nordhausen put in loudly. “Khalid said something about a transformation—do you remember it Maeve? He said there was a miracle. They worked it, day and night, and the best they could achieve was a hundred years of enmity. But now something has changed! Khalid said it was all made new again!”

“Khalid?”

“Someone we met at Rosetta. In fact, we met two agents in place. One man, a fellow named LeGrand, was clearly an operative of the Order. I was a bit obtuse on that point, but Maeve saw right through him. Then we were approached by a second man, an Arab. Later, at the dig site, the two men spoke, and it was clear that they knew one another—as adversaries.”

He gave Paul the details of their mission, and angled back to those final moments before the retraction pulled them out. “Can you imagine,” he began, “the man actually apologized. He asked forgiveness and said he would pray for us. I wonder what he meant by that?”

Maeve looked at Kelly, who was rocking back and forth in his chair, a steady squeak punctuating each move.

“What about the Golems, Kelly? I thought they were supposed to warn us of any variation in the Meridians.”

“Good point,” said Kelly, getting up quickly. He went over to the history module, leaning in to inspect the console. “We haven’t heard a peep from the Golems.” He settled into a chair and began entering commands.

“Is there a radio handy?” Nordhausen asked.

“Radio? Yes we have a shortwave built into the history console there.” Kelly pointed and Paul spun his chair around, fixing his eyes on the communications module.

He reached out, his hand hovering over the dial as if it might burn him. Then he switched on the radio and they all hushed to listen. The speaker played a steady wash of static, which seemed to surprise Kelly at once.

“I had that set to KPFA talk radio—94.1 FM. Has someone moved the dial?”

Paul looked at the digital readout. The numbers were still set to 94.1. He checked to be certain the radio was receiving the FM band. Then he pressed the search feature and watched the numbers scroll. Static rippled through the speaker, until the signal strength located something and locked on. A man was singing in another language. The first thing that came to Paul’s mind was that he had stumbled across a Spanish broadcast channel, then the realization of what he was hearing struck him, and the color faded from his cheeks.

One by one the same awareness came to each of them as they listened. They were hearing the chant of the muezzin as he sung the call to prayer from the minaret of some distant, unseen mosque. His voice rose and fell, filling the silence of the room with a haunting chorus that deepened to a feeling of impending calamity. The lingering echo of the singer’s voice seemed to taunt them now, rising and falling through the intermittent static of the radio. Then the signal faded, unable to penetrate the magnetic aura of the Arch that surrounded them, and was gone.

Paul lookedat Kelly, who was hunched in thought as he tapped away at the history module controls. It was clear that something was wrong there.

“That’s odd,” said Nordhausen. “Could we be receiving a signal from the Middle East on the FM Band? Are you sure you don’t have the thing set to a shortwave channel? I often get foreign broadcasts when I browse the wires in my study. In fact, I listen to the BBC every night.”

“No, this is an FM signal. I’m certain of it,” said Paul.

“How very odd,” said the professor. “Atmospheric conditions must be ideal for an FM signal to go that far.”

Paul said nothing. He was suddenly very interested in Kelly at the history module. “What’s up with the Golems?” He leaned in to inspect the computer console.

Kelly just looked at him, then squinted at his monitor again. His face was a mixture of perplexity and disbelief.

“Come on,” said Maeve. “What do the little critters say about all this?”

Kelly gave a sigh and swiveled in his chair to face them. “I’ve got no variance flags on the RAM bank, no Golem warnings at all.”

“Great,” said Nordhausen. “That means this isn’t a major transformation after all. The Golems have found nothing amiss.”

“Yes, and let me tell you why.” Kelly’s voice had a warning in it now. He looked at them, his eyes shifting from one to another, even as the conclusion he was arriving at grew more certain in his mind. “The net must be down…”

The words seemed to linger in the air when he spoke them. He saw the faces of his friends crease with concern.

“What do you mean?” Robert spoke up first. “What do you mean the net is down?”

“I’ve been trying to query the network,” said Kelly, but I can’t seem to get a response. There’s over 100,000 machines out there on the net with my Golem program installed, but I can’t connect with a single IP address. It’s very strange.”

“You’re saying the Internet is down?” Nordhausen had an unbelieving expression on his face. “How is that possible? I mean, it was designed to survive a nuclear war, wasn’t it?”

“Theoretically…” Kelly was thinking hard now. “There’s no one single hub on the net that could bring the whole thing down if it failed. It’s a widely distributed network, with hundreds of thousands of servers scattered all over the world.”

“Then the problem must be local,” said Robert. “Check your connection, Kelly. You’re the networking guru.”

“I have checked it—give me some credit, will you?”

“Then it must be the damn ISP.”

“No, it’s not. We have no ISP. We’ve got a direct high-speed optical fiber link, right into the backbone of the Internet.”

“Then what’s the problem? Is your machine in order?”

Kelly held up a hand, fending off the professor as he came up to the history module. “You don’t understand,” he said as firmly as he could. “The hardware here is fine. I just ran system calls on every lab console. Our RAM bank memory is holding true, no problem there, but it’s the net , I tell you. It’s not there…”

Nordhausen just looked at him, a half smile on his face, fading with each second against the resolve in Kelly’s voice. “Not there?” He repeated the phrase, unbelieving.