John Schettler - Nexus Point

“And this Heisenberg wave?”

“Ah, yes.” Kelly reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out one of his favorite candies. “Necco Wafer?” He offered, but Maeve simply folded her arms, waiting. “The Heisenberg wave.” Kelly began to explain his theory again. “Ever throw a stone in a pool of water? Well of course you have. So you know what those little ripples look like after it goes ker-plunk. Well, I got this idea: if someone opened the continuum, the effects would ripple out from the breaching point, just like those little waves. It’s just quantum stuff. Paul and I were talking about it. In fact, he encouraged me to run up this program.”

“Ah,” Maeve seized on that. “A conspiracy!”

“Just a collaboration. I ran the theory by him and he said the quantum uncertainty principle had to manifest somehow. So I thought of the ripples in that pond and came up with—“

“A Heisenberg wave. How clever.”

“This is the cool part,” Kelly hurried on. “I have a good data map on the location of all the boxes running my Golem. All I have to do now is send out this query and have each box on-line report its code status. Then I’ll know exactly which boxes have a mutant running, and exactly where they are with the GPS sync that’s been built into all CPUs for the last five years.”

The Global Positioning System was another nifty little feature that had enjoyed wide proliferation. Ever since the US Air Force started turning dumb iron bombs into precisely targeted killers, GPS technology began to pop up in a wide array of appliances. It was a standard feature on all cars since the 2006 models, and now even computers could use the internet to tell the world exactly where they were. They sold the idea as a way of enabling new zip code like domain structures and IP addresses for the burgeoning Internet. It was a nifty anti-hacking scheme spawned by the Department of Homeland Defense. They wanted to know where every cell phone, vehicle, boat, plane and computer was, and once the technology was in place, their wish was made a reality.

“I just made the GPS feature a system requirement for my Golem.” Kelly was pulling up data as he spoke, eyes bright with the glow from the monitors. “Now I can plot where the corrupted systems are, and map the damage graphically… Like this!” He poked his finger on a key and leaned back, fingers locked at the back of his head and elbows splayed out like twin antennae. The screen began to display a map of the world, and tiny colored dots were winking on, slowly coloring the map with the data plots.

“The green dots are normal systems… the red dots are corrupted. I’ll have a possible breaching location soon.”

“You mean they’re coming here—to our time?”

“Well, not necessarily,“ Kelly equivocated. “When we ran the mission to 1917, things changed here as well. The change migrates through time but, like Einstein said, its really space -time. The temporal coordinates determine when the Heisenberg wave starts, and the spatial coordinates determine where it starts. The change ripples out from the location of the Nexus—like a wave, only it moves through the fourth dimension as well as the other three.”

“A Heisenberg wave…” Maeve grasped the simile and held on to it. She imagined some critical change in the Meridian. From that single point, a place Paul called a Nexus Point, a ripple of quantum uncertainty would expand out in all directions, altering everything in its path.

“Effects from alterations in the Meridian have a brief local life before they migrate out,” said Kelly. “It happens slowly at first, relatively speaking of course. This is the work of the first few nanoseconds.” He pointed at his data plots. “After that the wave accelerates rapidly until it reaches an infinite speed and changes everything; everywhere. But look here!” He rotated the flat panel monitor to give Maeve a better view. “Here’s the footprint of the devil, Maeve. It started somewhere in this location…”

Kelly pressed a finger to his LED screen and noted the swirl of interference caused there by the pressure. “Wouldn’t you know it,” he said. “Right smack dab in the Middle East. Looks like Syria… Somewhere north of Damascus near the Lebanese border. That’s where the system seems to indicate a Nexus forming, and there’s a shadow of something else further south—a bit east of Akaba. Very odd. It’s almost as if the two points arose simultaneously.” He keyed some GPS coordinates and told the system to display the name of the nearest town for the point in Syria. “There,” he said with finality. “How do you pronounce this… Mas-yaf?”

Maeve leaned in. “No,” she corrected him. “Sound the letter Y like a long I, and make it three syllables instead: Ma- sigh -af. It’s a famous castle ruin north of Tripoli.”

“Well, that appears to be our Nexus Point. And look—the change is proliferating throughout my whole Golem network. I’ll bet they’re spotting variations.”

“You mean to say the whole time line has just been altered again?”

“Altered? Who can say. But it certainly appears to be vulnerable, and we may be the only two people alive that know it—at least in this Milieu. I thought about that. The only thing that irked me about the prospect of using the Arch was this: how would we know what’s gone wrong? It was easy to monitor changes to my program like this, but getting back to your issue with Shakespeare—it looks like you would have to read all the plays again tonight to see if something changed. Not to mention everything else we’d have to check, history, politics, scientific discoveries. It’s maddening! We would need some kind of master library to serve as a reference point—a kind of touchstone to measure the whole world against. So I got to thinking…”

Maeve slumped into a chair at his side, leaning heavily on the armrest with her elbow, chin in hand. She was resisting the impulse to get up and run to the emergency equipment locker for an axe. She had a forlorn look on her face. “Oh, God,” she breathed. “I wish we had never done this—any of it.”

Kelly gave her a sympathetic look. To him this was an exciting adventure into cyberspace and the arcane realms of mathematics he so enjoyed. He could see that Maeve was truly distressed, however, and he offered one small consolation.

“Dust in the wind, Maeve. We want permanence, we reach for it, hope for it. Lord, isn’t that what heaven’s all about? But it doesn’t work that way—at least not in this realm. Nothing stays put for long. It’s all process; all change. We’re just surfing the wave now, that’s all. I don’t see what else could be done. I know how you must feel. It’s going to be lonely here—in the heart of it all. We’re sitting at infinity’s bedside now, and she’s quietly dreaming. At least we’ve got each other, if that’s any consolation. And I’ve got another little surprise up my sleeve as well.”

She looked at him with a smile. “I think I hear my poet in there somewhere,” she said, feeling just a little safer to see Kelly at the keyboard, a little warmer knowing he was here—at least for now. “I guess that’s what it all really boils down to,” she said. “This moment and the guy with the funny baseball cap sitting next to you.”

“Hey!” Kelly offered a mock protest. “Bonds signed this cap the year he retired. It’s going to be an heirloom.”

“Heirloom? You making any plans I don’t know about?”

“Don’t worry,” he grinned. “I’ll run everything by Outcomes and Consequences before I buy the ring.”

Maeve fought off the urge to snatch away his baseball cap, Barry Bonds and all, and muss up his hair. “I think your chances for approval may be fairly good!” She gave him a conspiratorial grin. “That is if I still have any pull with the committee.”