John Schettler - Nexus Point

The way led them down into a steep ravine, overgrown with scrub and thorn. The thick outer garments were coarse and itchy, but they made good sense to Paul now. He was grateful for the protection they afforded as the small party slipped through the gorge, descending all the way. They walked for nearly half an hour before they came upon two horses tied to a withered tree stump. One was a gray-flecked mare, and the other a sturdy caramel plow horse with heavy fetlocks and muddied hooves. Jabr approached them silently, and Paul saw that he had produced a small handful of brown sugar, which he used to quiet the horses while the two guards took up their reins and prepared to mount.

“We will ride two men to each horse,” said Jabr. “I will go forward with Hamza, and you will follow with Aziz. They are good men both. Have no fear.” He watched while Paul cast a sidelong glance at the plow horse. “Do you ride well?”

“To be honest,” Paul confessed, “I’ve never been on a horse in my life.”

This brought a moment of real surprise to Jabr’s eyes. He stared at Paul, as if trying to see through him, see into him to some understanding of who he was and why he had come. “You are no Templar,” he concluded. “That much is certain. And I doubt if you are a sergeant or even a squire if you have never set your cheeks upon the back of a horse. The Sami was wrong. Come now, Aziz will assist you.”

Yes, thought Paul. I’m no Templar—but who in blazes are you? Where in God’s name am I—or must I call upon Allah now to find that out? He knew that much of the world still lived in backward, almost medieval conditions, but this was too much. How could a band of Arab radicals be occupying the ruins of an old castle with complete impunity? All those sites were considered antiquities now and carefully managed by local governments. Yet these men ran about with turbans and swords as if they were acting out some private little fantasy here. It was all too strange. Nothing made sense!

Paul needed the help of both guards to get up on the back of the plow horse. Once he was safely mounted, the guard, Aziz, leapt deftly aboard, seating himself behind Paul and urging the beast on.

Paul squinted through the hood of his robe at the landscape around him. He was struck by the barren emptiness of it all. The hills were sparsely vegetated, falling off to a tumbled lowland below. He could see no sign of the village Jabr had mentioned. It was very odd. There were no lights, no glow of cities in the distant darkness of the night. Wherever this castle was, it must surely be remote. He looked over his shoulder at the stark outline of the castle in the distance and suddenly knew what was wrong.

Kelly staredat the glowing console panels, watching system after system coming on line, a look of amazement and pleasure on his face.

“It worked!” he exclaimed. “Heisenberg was right.”

“Heisenberg? What’s going on?” said Maeve. “Are you telling me that—“

“It changed.” The surprise in Kelly’s voice was edged with a hint of delight. “The program source code changed somewhere. The Golems are spotting variations, and the system called home, just like it was supposed to.”

Maeve was not happy. She had been battling the notion of unaccountable change for weeks, and this was the last thing she needed. “Maybe someone’s tampered with it,” she suggested. “Hackers are always pulling stuff like that.”

“He’d have to be a genius,” said Kelly, “with an open account on an Arion system, and a lot of time. I encrypted the source code with a 512 megabyte key. Yes, I know it’s illegal, but who’s telling. Now, it would take an Arion system about two years to power through that, let alone the fact that I set the key to mutate on a precisely planned route—I call it my guided key evolution. It would take a hundred years to break that—if it could be done at all.”

Maeve was just staring at him trying to absorb what he was saying. He was standing square in the middle of the room, his baseball cap tilted slightly to one side, hands on hips, and eyes scanning the consoles one by one as they came to life. She realized that he was using one part of his head to monitor the boot sequence while another part was explaining his code technique. He reached down to peck a keystroke on one of the systems, as if nudging something that seemed slightly out of place.

“Ah,” he said. “Someone turned this monitor off.” He poked the flat panel display power toggle with a look of satisfaction. All was in order. “So,” he continued. “Let’s just say that this key is unbreakable—for all practical purposes.”

“Unbreakable? Then—“

“At least not breakable with the systems available today. You either know the key or you don’t access the code. That rules out hackers—period. So when my Golem calls home, something is afoot. Something has changed. Let’s see if I can isolate the Heisenberg wave. I set this whole thing up to give us location. You’ll see.”

Kelly was all business now. He had his briefcase open and he was pulling out file folders and a small hand calculator. He marched over to a terminal and settled in, eyes scanning the screen while he waited for the boot sequence to stabilize. He was getting green readings on one board after another, ticking them off mentally in his head as the systems checked in. His little army of number crunching computers was alive and well, and he stretched his arms with a grin, cracking his knuckles.

“This is going to be interesting,” he said.

Maeve felt the flutter of anxiety ratchet up a level in her chest. Kelly had a knack for understatement. “OK,” she breathed. “Let me see if I have this straight. You’re telling me that your program spotted a change—but that it couldn’t possibly be tampering.”

“Correct.”

“And this means someone’s playing with time?”

“That’s my best guess. When I send out the program, it’s pristine. They install it, run it, and the code follows a precisely defined pathway, and constantly checks itself to be sure that nothing is amiss. Well something’s wrong. The only way that could possibly happen is if an element from the source code has been altered. Oh, its likely to be a little thing, like a change in a variable signifier, or something like that. Any serious change would crash the program entirely, and…” He keyed something on the system, squinting at the screen to read the result. “Just as I thought: no crash alerts. So the code changed. Looks like a very small mutation, but anything counts for this test.”

“Well what if someone’s hard drive died and the code was damaged or something?”

“I’d have checksum flags on that, and the basic integrity of the program is still good. See?” He pointed at a monitor, but Maeve could make no sense of the data he was indicating.

“Now I’m going to find out where the problem is, and possibly how it happened. It could be that our friends from the future are running a mission!”

Maeve didn’t like that idea. The notion that unborn people in a distant age were altering this very moment with the technology of the Arch was deeply disturbing, and a bit confounding. It meant that, in spite of all her arguments, the project would not be shut down. The technology would survive and proliferate, and spawn a thousand nightmares that would prey upon her from this day forward.