John Schettler - Nexus Point

“But Jen remembers Palma. Paul told me he had to do a lot of explaining to settle her down after the retraction.”

“Yes, Jen too, I suppose,” said Kelly. “She has partial memory of the event. She knows what happened because she was right here in the lab when we pulled Nordhausen out, but it all seems like a dream to her. She gets these odd déjà vu experiences now. Have you talked to Paul about it? The poor girl wakes up screaming, drenched in sweat. Paul has to sit with her for hours to help her sort everything through. I think the key moment was when the transformation actually took place at the mission end of the operation. Jen must have been up here in the lab when that happened. That put her in the Nexus with us—right in the eye of the storm. But right after I ran the final retraction scheme on Paul, I sent Jen down to tell Tom to cut the power. She moved outside that hundred yard radius again, very soon after the retraction.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure, but I think it takes a little while for the Nexus to collapse after the time breach is closed. That’s when Paradox is active, trying to clean up all the little loose ends and broken threads that it can before the new Milieu solidifies and the Meridian takes a definite course.”

“Don’t remind me,” said Maeve, a warning in her eyes. She didn’t want to think about that awful moment when she first realized that Kelly’s life would be forfeit if the mission succeeded.

“Just this once.” Kelly needed to get this out, and he ventured on. “I was fading, Maeve. God, it was an odd feeling—like when you start to pass out but your senses still keep working. I could see, and hear, and feel the cold surround me… I just had to get that note written, because I think I knew that someone was punching my ticket right then.”

“Kelly…” Maeve’s eyes were glassy and he could see that she was struggling to keep her feelings in check.

“Sorry, Maeve.” He put his hand on her knee, a gentle reassurance that he was still there, alive and well. “Don’t worry. We’ve got some good long years ahead of us yet.”

“A hundred years,” she whispered.

“A hundred years,” he repeated with a smile. “If you’ll have me.” He took off his baseball cap and ran his hand through his hair. “Well the point of all this is that I had this idea.”

“Not another one of those ideas,” Maeve teased with a smile. “How much time did you burn on our Arion system account with this one?“

“A lot,” Kelly confessed. “I guess I’ll be making my own little deposit in the project account to cover the debt. But I had this idea and so I worked up a program.”

“A program?”

“Yes, and I’ve had it running round the clock on a machine in the next room. On a lot of machines, in fact.”

“Twenty-four hours a day? What’s it doing, crunching some numbers for you?”

“Kind of… Remember when you said we had lost our reference point? Well I felt the same way for a good long while after I came back. I mean, you should have seen the operation these guys had.”

“You’re talking about our friends in the future—about Graves and all?”

“Right. They had some slick operation there. I wanted to get a look at their consoles but they wouldn’t let me set one foot out of my receiving chamber—that was what they called it. But I could see some of the equipment when they came and went through the door.”

“We agreed not to talk about that anymore, Kelly.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s just that I had some time on my hands there, in a manner of speaking, and I was wondering how they knew if they were going to be successful on the mission. Sure, the changes would be obvious, but where would the record of all the previous time be stored? What was their reference point? How could they navigate without a compass, as you said a moment ago? So, after I got back I started working the problem and—“

“I’m afraid to hear this,” Maeve protested. “You aren’t going to tell me that you used the Arch now, are you?”

“The Arch? No. I’m not that reckless. You’re right about Nordhausen. We’ve got to have some stern words with Robert the moment he gets back from his little fossil hunt in Jordan. No, I wrote this program, see, and I keep the damn thing running all the time. In fact, it’s all over the net: my little Golems.”

“You mean that screensaver you put out last month?”

“Yup. Circulation is up over a hundred thousand installs now, and growing. It was just a nifty little agent that I called my Golem. People love the damn thing!”

“Yeah, I have it running on my box at home too, but aside from the cute graphics and the pretty kaleidoscopic patterns I don’t see how it relates to what we’re talking about.”

“What’s in a name, my dear. A Golem, as you may know, comes from the Jewish tradition. It was a man made of clay, magically brought to life to perform menial tasks. It’s like a pre-industrial revolution concept of a robot.. Did you ever read Brin’s Kiln People? He had a world where people could make duplicates of themselves to run errands. Well, the idea has applications in the computer world as well. In Unix such software services are called daemons, artfully enough, and on an old Microsoft platform they were less romantically called ‘services.’ I kind of think the handle fits the task.”

“But what does it do?”

“Don’t you ever use the search feature? You type in keywords and then just walk away and cook dinner, or turn in for the night. Then my Golem screensaver comes up when the system idles and performs all your searches on the Internet. The next time you sit down at your box, the friendly little Golem is there with a nice little report.”

“OK, I’ll try the search feature—but what has this got to do with the time project?”

Kelly realized that he was rapidly spending Maeve’s reserve of patience. He came to the point. “That’s not all my Golem does,” he said a bit ominously. “I also slipped in a little routine that runs non-stop and performs a self checking error correction loop. It looks at the entire body of the static source code and compares it to the code in RAM to report any variation—almost like a virus scanner.”

“Now you’ve completely lost me.”

“Well, a virus scanner watches all the files you send, receive or copy, and looks for subtle patterns and variations. If it spots suspicious activity, it alerts the user and either quarantines the contaminated file or deletes it. In this case I have the program call home and complain if it spots any variation. I had this idea, see.”

“Oh you had an idea alright, but I still haven’t the slightest notion of what it’s about yet.”

“Remember Paul’s theory?” Kelly tacked back to the question of Time again, trying to bring Maeve along. “He said that living memory would not be affected by the changes in the continuum if a person was protected in a Nexus—even though physical things were subject to change. Take that copy of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, for example. It was right here in the lab desk drawer throughout the whole mission—well inside this null zone sphere I’ve been talking about. Yet it changed. That was how we were going to learn if Robert and Paul were successful or not, remember? I was supposed to read that passage in the book and compare it to my own living memory—my unaltered living memory of the book. Why, you were doing the very same thing with Shakespeare! You were scouring the plays for any sign or word that did not seem to fit. Since the program is a constantly running process, it’s like living memory when active. You see?”

Maeve was starting to get a grasp on what he was saying, though the technical details still escaped her. “You mean your computer program is like our memory as long as it keeps running. You think it will remain unaltered by changes in the continuum?”