John Schettler - Nexus Point

The rising vibration of the generator feeding power to the Arch pulled Kelly back to the urgency of the moment. “Now for my other surprise,” he said. “I think you may like this one.”

He scooted his chair two terminals to the left and toggled some switches. “Time for a pattern signature,” his eyes gleamed with excitement.

“Pattern signature? On who? If you think we’re going down to that Arch—”

“Not us,” Kelly reassured her. ”But everything else will do.”

Maeve was back to the fishing trip routine with him, trying to figure out what he was up to. “OK, maestro, what is it this time?”

“Just one more thing I put into the Golem. Let me send out the query sequence first and I’ll explain.”

He was keying commands, very quickly, and Maeve found herself recalling the exponential keystroke error he had made on the first mission. “Take your time,” she breathed. “We apparently have plenty to spare if we’re under the influence of the Arch Nexus like you suggest.”

“Don’t worry,” Kelly breathed. “There. It’ll take about an hour, even with that bank of fifty high speed DSL modems I installed last month.”

“So that was why our hardware budget was high. I thought it was the RAM you ordered for the history module.”

“That too,” said Kelly. “I installed a whole new system here, just for you.”

“For me?”

“Look, Maeve,” he began with that placating tone in his voice that always prompted her to raise an eyebrow of suspicion. “This thing isn’t going to be shut down. I think you know that as well as I do. Don’t get me wrong. Everything you’ve argued up until now makes perfect sense, but the fact that I’m still alive means that the technology survives. It gets used. Oh, I suppose we could shut everything down for our lifetimes but, after we’re gone, then what? The way I figure it, we just have to ride the wave. At least that gives us a chance to keep an eye on things—it gives you a chance, Maeve. Outcomes and Consequences: that’s really what its all about now, right? We need you more than ever. Shakespeare needs you.”

Maeve had a defeated look on her face, but it resolved to a quiet resignation. Her stubborn strength and the energy of her considerable will power would just have to be directed elsewhere now. Kelly was right. “Looks like I’m going to be doing a lot of reading,” she said.

“Well I was thinking about that,” Kelly beamed, safely over the speed bump and accelerating again. “Like I said, this little module is for you.”

“What is it?” Curiosity was beginning to restore her.

“A gift from the Golem,” Kelly grinned. “I just sent a command to all hundred thousand plus screensavers out there on the net. It’ll take a while to migrate through the network, but then, watch out. We’ll have one hell of a data stream pointed our way in about an hour. I hope fifty modems can handle it.

“Do I get to know why this data stream is going to bombard us in an hour, or are you going to make me pull that out of you after coffee?” Maeve was angling toward the French press.

“Ok, I took a pattern signature on the Internet last month and I have some good data stored here on a runtime system with as much RAM as I could possibly get my hands on.”

“Ah ha! You’re as bad as Nordhausen, Kelly. The two of you were nodding yes to the vote for shutdown in committee, and then you were both off pursuing your own private little projects! What do you mean you took a pattern signature on the Internet?”

“Hear me out, I think you’ll approve of this. You thought my Golem alert was a good idea, right? Well this is even better. I just told all my little Golems to use the search feature and visit key portals and data bases on the Internet. They’ll sample the data there—just like a search engine index, and send it all here.” He pointed at the new module he had installed and then indicated a crawlway access on the floor. “That leads to a bay for air conditioning equipment. Heat management has not been much of a problem, so I used the bay for a RAM bank. It’s six feet wide and goes down ten feet—all the memory I could buy. You can never have too much RAM, right?”

“And you’re saying you’ve got all this data from the Internet running down there?”

“Yup—a runtime data bank—always on, and protected in the Arch Nexus. I have an Arion mini crunching error scans, just like the loop I coded into my Golem. Now this bank over here—“ He pointed at another crawl access a few feet to the right.

“There’s more?”

“I told you—all the RAM I could buy. I went to seven different vendors last month. Good prices, too! In any case, my Golems are out there sampling the entire body of published knowledge on the Internet. That’s the real reason I wrote the program. They can’t get everything, of course, but they’ll get enough for us to get a good pattern signature. It’s a bit like political polling, if that makes any sense.”

Maeve was flabbergasted. “You did this… for me?”

“That’s right, babe. That’s the way the world was before this little alert.” He pointed at the first RAM bank. “And my Golems will go out and fetch the whole thing again and put it right there.” He pointed at the second RAM bank now, grinning ear to ear. “All we have to do is compare the two and see what’s changed.”

Maeve’s eyes brightened with the realization of what he was saying. “Bless you, Kelly…” Now they had some reference point, some slim hold on the reality they brought with them to the complex that night. “But how will we compare them?”

“Oh, I’ve got plenty of help here.” Kelly gestured at a row of five computer terminals. “I routed everything into the research modules. And besides,” he winked at her. “I’ve got you.”

“Damn right you have!” She ran up to him and threw her arms about him. The fervor of the embrace sent his baseball cap flying off his head.

“Easy does it,” he said, his eyes still glued to the monitors. “We know that something’s is going on in Syria—now we need to find out when it happened. Since the change always ripples forward in time from the breaching point, all we have to do is figure out when things started changing in the history data.” He smiled broadly and added one more thing: “Pour the coffee. This is going to be interesting.”

Nordhausen was stunned.A time traveler. He was sitting in the middle of a cave in Wadi Rumm with a goddamned time traveler! Who was he? What was he doing here? The professor replayed the man’s remarks in his mind. He said something about being a messenger. He had some business here, and we’ve stumbled right into the middle of his operation. He was talking about a reaction—something Paul set off unintentionally.

The Oklo reactor!

Now the professor strained to recall what Paul had told him about the odd green water in the depths of the cave—the water that was glowing softly, quietly radiating as the bacteria concentrated the isotopes and started a low level chain reaction. It suddenly occurred to him that these people could have set up equipment here for an Arch! They could use the energy produced by the Oklo reaction for a natural nuclear power source. Its low radiation level would prevent it from being detected, and it would last for thousands of years!

“You mean to say… Are you telling me you have an Arch here? That my friend went through?”

“And may Allah go with him,” said Rasil. “He jumped too early, or he fell too soon, if that was the case. The timing will not be accurate. He will probably land before the event, and his coming may prove to be quite a stone in the still waters there.”