John Schettler - Meridian

“Enable that switch again!” He shouted, pointing at Jen’s panel.

“What?”

“Toggle number three!”

Jen passed a moment of hesitation and returned the switch to its original position with a snap. Kelly slid over to her station, the wheels of his chair skidding on the polished tile floor. The bar was moving again, spiking up into the yellow and then falling off to the violet. Maeve was frozen, the telephone limp in her hands as she watched Kelly press the palm of his right hand to the side of his head.

“God…” he breathed, watching the dizzying array of numbers spin on a digital countdown readout. “Oh God…”

“Maeve???” The sound of her mother’s voice seemed to echo from the receiver, pinging with a trilling rhythm as if stuck in a reverberating loop. Maeve stared at the telephone, real fear in her eyes when she heard the strange sounds emanating into the room. “I’m frightened… frightened…” the echo seemed to resonate in her mind. No one else seemed to hear it.

“What’s wrong?” Maeve let the telephone slip from her grasp as if it had burned her hand.

Kelly had a desperate look on his face. “Phase inversion,” he said. “I wonder if they’ve crossed the line yet? Damn, we should have had cameras in the approach tunnel.”

“Phase inversion? Are you certain?” Maeve rushed over, leaving phone receiver dangling over the lip of the desk by its cord.

Kelly was staring at the main console, his mind racing the digital countdown indicator on the upper panel. It was speeding past 15 seconds, the millisecond displays spinning rapidly and giving the impression that time was moving much faster than it should. He had to do something, and quickly. A sudden thought occurred to him as he looked at the pattern buffer. The infusion! If they were moving as planned in the Arch corridor they would have already passed through the infusion. He should have a good signature for both of them in the pattern buffer now, an immense bank of hundreds of thousands of terabytes of computer memory, holding a virtual description, in mathematical terms, of their quantum matrix. He made a lightning fast mental calculation, looking at the reading on the temporal vector range and ciphering in his head. Then he moved, practically knocking Maeve over as he lunged for the vector gradient controls.

He thumbed a switch.

The digital clock passed through eight seconds.

His fingers moved in a blur on the keyboard, eyes glued to the screen. He gave the module the access code to the pattern buffer, and fed the data sample to the core vector guidance unit. Then he opened a protective cover on a side panel and he punched his index finger home, depressing an ominous red button.

“What are you doing?” Maeve blanched when she saw what Kelly had done. “That’s the vector loop!”

“What’s the bar doing?” Kelly shouted at Jen, ignoring Maeve for the moment. His voice had a frantic edge to it.

“Blue by one-seven point two.”

The digital clock passed three seconds.

Kelly leaned heavily on the main console, his finger poised on the buffer-loop release button as he counted to two. It seemed the longest two seconds of his life, a life he should not even be living, he realized; a life that had been stolen from the larders of Time.

He pressed the release, his breath expelling as he did so, his other hand groping to one side feeling for some support. His head felt very light, and his hands were shaking.

The digital clock ran out and a loud buzz signaled that the Arch breaching sequence had run its course. Kelly’s arm waved lazily behind him, groping the still air of the room. Maeve saw his distress and took hold of his arm at once, easing him down into a swivel chair.

“What happened?” She was as much concerned for Kelly’s condition as anything else, but her emotions seemed pulled in a hundred directions. The telephone receiver swayed back and forth, and not a sound came from the earpiece now. The console was still fluttering with digital readouts and waveform ray tracings on the thin panel displays. Kelly sat in utter stillness, pale and confused. Jen still sat at her workstation, looking from the color bar to Kelly and Maeve and then back again.

“Did something go wrong?” she ventured.

Kelly said nothing, prompting Maeve to look over her shoulder at Jen’s view panel. Now the various elements of the scene that had just played itself out began to gel in her mind, like odd, unrelated clues suddenly coalescing to a certainty. She squeezed Kelly’s hand, almost as if to assure herself that he was still there; still warm; still substantial.

“You initiated an emergency pattern loop,” she whispered, retracing the moment that had passed by in such a rush. “The countdown was at three seconds and you sent a loop command through the system.” Her voice gathered strength as the realization of what had happened solidified in her thinking. “Kelly, how could you? How could you possibly key the right variable without a computational cycle?”

Kelly gave her a vacant look. “There was no time,” he said quietly. “The temporal vectors were spiking out of the target range and I had to do something.”

“Something?” Maeve’s eyes widened. Her Committee had set down one ironclad regulation to be followed without fail in the event of any irregularity on an attempt to breach the continuum: Abort . Kelly, being a senior project team member, knew the importance of the regulation as well as anyone there, for any irregularity, beyond the obvious possibility of equipment failure, would most likely stem from an error in the calculations.

“The bar spiked into yellow—It must have been an incorrect entry on the shading variable I keyed for Nordhausen. I told him we couldn’t change the time, but I tried to shade the breach on the negative side of the target event, just for safety’s sake. Then the bar started to spike and there were only fifteen seconds on the clock. They were in the infusion and…”

“Oh God,” Maeve whispered. “But a loop , Kelly. Why initiate a vector loop?”

“It was the only thing I could think of,” Kelly began. “Actually… I thought of it last week, as a possible safety procedure for retraction.”

“Retraction?” Maeve gave him a look that immediately demanded more.

“Yes,” Kelly stammered, still physically upset by the experience. “I was thinking that once we had a signature on their temporal matrix from the infusion, we could run a loop vector, and use the timing on the cycle in conjunction with the half-life setting for retraction. Theoretically, it would allow us to run a retraction routine for every complete cycle of the loop, at specific points during the half-life decay sequence.”

“Theoretically?” Maeve’s eyes widened to emphasize her displeasure.

“Well none of this has ever been done before, Maeve,” Kelly protested. “It’s all theoretical at this point. Give me a break! We don’t even know if the breach worked.”

Maeve looked quickly at the console, finding the microphone to the PA panel in the Arch corridor. She flipped the switch and called for Paul and Robert several times, but there was no answer. Her lips tightened as she looked at Kelly, real concern in her eyes.

“So maybe it worked,” Kelly offered, hoping to look at things from the bright side.

“And maybe they’re lying unconscious in the Arch corridor,” Maeve countered. “Or maybe they’re dead! I’m going down there.”

“Wait, Maeve.” Kelly reached for her arm. “You can’t. The door is sealed and it won’t open for another five minutes until the particle flux effects have cleared.”

“Fine then,” she pulled away. “You can open the lock in five minutes. I’m going down there. God only knows what may have happened.” She looked at Jen, clearly angry.