A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (10 page)

“Why do you have to do anything?” asked Kat. “If you find something incriminating, you could come across people that wouldn’t be happy about that.”

“Says the person who stands out with a sign, persuading people, every day? How can you ask that?”

“Dani,” Kat said gently, “my role is pretty benign. I’m not really a threat to anyone. I can influence public opinion, but nobody can go to jail from the things I do. With your insider’s access, you could become a real threat to them.”

“These are scientists! They’re not going to hurt me. I just need to find out if somebody is using the technology wrongly and let them know. They’ll want to do what’s right.”

Kat and Marak exchanged glances again. “I think we should tell her,” said Marak. “She needs to know.” Kat hesitated, then finally, reluctantly, nodded.

“How much do you know about the inventors of chronography?” Kat asked.

“Seebak and Howe? A lot.” Dani was on familiar ground now. “Dr. Howe was this exciting, brilliant woman who lit up the whole field for me until her accident—I was only twelve then. Dr. Seebak stayed mostly in the background, but he was really gifted. In college, I heard stories about how he’d walk into the room where everyone else was struggling with some complication—maybe an equation that wasn’t working out or an unexplained equipment glitch—and within a few minutes, he’d have it all figured out and they’d be up and running again. But he became sort of a mystery himself. He did something that caused him to be banned from the project—and from any other project that I know of, for that matter. We never hear about him any more. No presentations, no articles in the journals, nothing.”

“Actually, he’s still working in the field,” said Kat. “He just keeps out of the public eye—by design.”

“What? How do you know?”

“I have contacts,” said Marak.

His wife continued, “It’s better if you don’t know any more, but I do want you to know this: Dr. Howe’s accident was no accident, and Dr. Seebak’s departure was a compromise he accepted so that he could live without fearing for his own life. Scientists or not, you can’t just go blundering into this.”

Dani shook her head, refusing to believe it. But she was once again hearing the numbers in her head, and once again seeing Dr. Calegari turn to hide his scribbles when she came into the room, and once again feeling her isolation from those that headed the project. Could it be that they could be involved in something deeper? Were they being threatened? Or worse—she caught her breath—were they threatening others? She was suddenly very certain that Kat and Marak were right. And who was she, an insignificant intern with no power of the press behind her, to challenge something that was powerful enough to end Dr. Seebak’s career?

And then, on the heels of inadequacy and intimidation, an indignation rose up, a fierceness that surprised her. Chronography was still an amazing science. How dare they use it for corrupt purposes? She set her jaw. “Then tell me what I can do to help.”

HUNTER’S OFFICE. 0700, Wednesday, June 7, 2215.

Hunter enjoyed the early morning hours, before the functions of his real business bowed to the necessities of maintaining a professional façade. Soon, office routines would get their grip on the little people who served him, and they’d be scurrying around like bugs, intent on their petty purposes without a clue about what was really going on.

He hated them equally, the people who sat securely in their palaces of wealth and influence, and the insignificant ones who served them, directly or indirectly. He hated the powerful ones because their comfort had its foundation in the agonies of others. As a child, he had dreamed of taking them down. He hated the weak ones because they were so easily victimized and did nothing to step out of their squalor. None of them had had the backbone to stand up to him. Any initial resolve had crumpled beneath his threats.

He waited by his desk for the call he knew would come. Besides collections, part of his work involved acting as the bridge between the group and their depositors. Periodically, he reported to them, letting them see that he was in control of the variables in their mutual enterprise. His practice was to anticipate their concerns and have a solution in place before they contacted him. It helped to have cultivated the loyalty of their own confidential secretaries. Nothing happened in their offices that he didn’t know about first.

He hated them, too, of course.

Another part of his job involved collecting the information that served as such an effective inducement, the basis for everything, without which their goals would have been impossible.

Today, he would launch another demonstration, and they would be satisfied again, leaving him in unquestioned power. When it came time for him to apply the same pressures on them that they urged him to apply on others, it would be too late.

The connexion icon buzzed. He steeled himself. They must not suspect his true opinions of them. He waved at the icon. Two separate figures appeared on his viewwall, each displayed from the waist up. They were seated behind desks, of course. He preferred to stand, and he had subtly positioned his camera and the focal point on his viewwall at slightly below eye level, so that from their point of view he continually looked down on them. He remained silent, forcing them to make the first move. He knew his silence would be taken as subservience, but it was anything but.

Bradford spoke first. “We’re seeing signs that the screws need to be tightened on the central fixture. And the monitoring equipment will need to be expanded as well.”

“We haven’t been able to track its whereabouts as efficiently as we should,” added Griffin.

Their guarded words told Hunter more than they knew. They didn’t trust their own staff members. And they were wise not to.

“I’ve located the necessary tools already,” he assured them. “I’ll have them later today and I can use them before the end of the week.”

Their relief was evident. Both were nodding. “Very well,” said Bradford. “Proceed. Your methods have been quite effective to date.”

The connexion closed.

RIACH LABS, Alki Beach, Seattle, WA. 0800, Wednesday, June 7, 2215.

Whe
n Dani entered the institute Wednesday morning, she had two assignment lists. One was built from the suggestions that Marak and Kat had given her the night before. The other was the one displayed on the viewwall.

MORNING SCHEDULE—Lab D, station 3

1. Ob:082036 21800216:091505/N-47.5. Rec:N Check/Decay

2. Ob:082037 21781130:152005/N-47.5. Rec:N Check/Decay

3. Ob:082038 21810314:134505/N-47.5. Rec:N Check/Decay

She groaned at the list, which filled the screen and displayed a blinking “continue” triangle. These were the most tedious of assignments. Unlike the routine samplings and investigations, the “Check for Decay” assignments required her to retrieve scores of objects, one at a time. She would not be making recordings at all, but just letting the observation box integrate with her to see if a recording could still be made.

She knew they were necessary. As the scope of the TimeSearch project had grown, a new—or initially undetected—phenomenon had come to light. Some objects, when reexamined, had been unable to reproduce the recordings made from them the first time. The earliest, and most notable, of these instances had been two of the four objects in the hallway display cases. Important people had come to tour the institute soon after it opened, and a highlight of the tour was to let them step into the observation boxes and experience the famous recordings for themselves.

Dani had to admit that there were few better ways to impress potential investors or lawmakers than to let them relive a moment from the distant past through neurological links. People never expected it to feel as real as it did.

But that first attempt at showmanship failed miserably. After months of flawless sensory output, suddenly it was gone.

As a student, Dani had read several accounts of the event and the studies that had followed it, trying to determine what had happened. Two of those objects that had become so famous, the wire whisk and the tile sample, yielded no sensory information at all. The machines behaved as if they had no object to read. The baseball barely saved the day. It gave a satisfactory view of the crowds flying past at 96 miles per hour before glitching out just before hitting the glove. Nobody tried the axehead. The photo was gruesome enough, without the live action aspect of it.

The phenomenon of the sudden loss of access came to be known as “time decay,” and the objects that failed to give a reading were known as “blanks.” Dani enrolled in a graduate-level research class with the same name and worked with her fellow students to pin down the cause. Their first clue came when they realized that the first time an object was scanned, it was never a blank. Blanks came from the second, third, or fourth scanning, and sometimes not at all. Also, an object that was a blank for a particular interval might give a full reading if its scan interval was adjusted to a day, an hour, or even a few minutes later or earlier.

They tried different ways to make an object go blank. They tried exposing it to extremes in temperature or pressure and ruled out those factors. No surprise, since all the objects were stored under the same environmental conditions. They ran analyses to see if the compositional material influenced the decay, and came up negative. Finally they tried using the VAO converters on the recordings from the object, first making photographs, then moving images, then adding sounds and olfactory information. The photographs didn’t seem to cause decay, but they began having positive results when they tried to convert any recording that lasted more than a fraction of a second and then played the converted recording on an auxiliary device.

That was the breakthrough. Once the scan of an object had been recorded, converted, and replayed, the interval in the finished product was no longer productive for scans, ever again. Dani’s class had won an award for the paper they presented on the topic. They didn’t offer the class the next quarter; the deans declared the problem solved, even though the paper had proposed further research on exactly what happened to the chronetic energies of the objects to make the scans fail. Someday, they had said. For now, it was enough to know how to prevent it from occurring.

It wasn’t until Dani had graduated and had come to work at the institute, that she found out there were discrepancies. Her neat little set of conditions still yielded blanks, but there were other blanks too, and nobody knew why. Some objects with only original recordings, or both original and converted recordings, were experiencing time decay without ever having the recordings replayed. It was a puzzle. It made it up to number twenty-three on the list of topics to be studied further before slipping down as more important topics were proposed.
Last she checked, it was at number forty.

Thus, the periodic checks of objects, the rescannings to document whether each object was still productive. Tedious and frustrating for Dani, but necessary to gather data in case that topic ever made it to the top of the list. Also, it gave researchers more confidence when requesting objects for their projects.

She had arrived at Lab D.
She consulted her list of objects again, and went to the library to retrieve the first
ones. She had learned to save steps by bringing the objects back to the box with her in groups of ten or so and swapping them out as needed. She didn’t even have to disconnect from the integrated sensors. Labels on the objects themselves made it easy to put them back in place when she was done. She went back to the lab with a whole tray full of objects.

Then she stepped in the box to begin.

As lunchtime neared, Dani remembered her assignment. Her other assignment, the one Kat and Marak had cautiously agreed to let her undertake. She hoped it wouldn’t be too obviously
out of character
for her to get lunch in the cafeteria. She would need to start by making some friends, and, after accessing the general employee files, she knew just the person to start
with.

The Financial Services intern looked up, startled, when she set her tray down on his table. “Is this seat taken?” she asked him, with her most winning and disarming smile.

“Uh, no.” He hastily moved some of his mess to the other side of his tray. A mess which included, she noted, an actual book. Made of paper. Which he was trying to hide.

“Wow. Where did you get that?” she reached over, boldly, pretending to an interest that wasn’t altogether pretense after all. Where
did
he get that?

He tried to slide it just out of her reach, then realized the futility. “Uh, I, uh, can’t remember?” he tried. Then, all of a sudden, he relaxed and looked straight at her with his own, surprisingly gorgeous, strikingly blue eyes.

“Truth is,” he admitted, “I borrowed it from the library.”

Sure enough, there was a tag on the back. “Ah. 085212,” she observed. “I should have recognized it, I suppose, being an intern down there and all.”

He laughed, but there was still a trace of nervousness. This was a huge lapse, one that could get him fired, or worse, and they both knew it. It was also, she realized, the perfect opportunity to further her assignment.

“There are a lot of them down there,” he said. “Imagine that. There are books in the library, along with all those other objects. I’m guessing it’s hard to keep track of them all.”