Drift pattern, p.24
Drift Pattern, page 24
“They only suspended it for a moment, and it’s for the protection of the city, so I don’t mind if it keeps us all safe from infiltrators.”
Luci still can’t believe it. “This is the first I’ve heard of any of this. Is that a problem, sympathizers for New Australia living within the city? Why would anyone do that?”
He offers open palms to her. “Luci, I’m not a political person. I’m a technician. I’m like you. I deal in math, not revolutions.”
Luci picks up her lunch dishes and heads over to the sink. “You people are weird here. Really weird.”
~ Seven ~
March 27, 2191: Relicus City
relikus siti
[6.217012/127.792969/4.603.388.827/732:41:31]
mxK 27, 2191
Luci is up and showered before sunrise. She’s still kicking herself for dancing with Ish the day before as she heads downstairs to the kitchen pod. It was a foolish and highly unprofessional thing to do—one doesn’t dance with their colleagues in the middle of a project, regardless of what century it is. How could she have been so stupid? The stress of everything that’s happened plus being confined is beginning to take its toll on her. She’d never done anything as foolish as that back home. What’s happening to her?
Fortunately, they both manage to ignore her lapse in judgement and work the rest of the day without incident—not that it matters; they are no closer to understanding the connection between Gicul’s interval targets than when Ish first arrived at the guest house four days ago. Her mind drifts to how odd it is that Ish didn’t mind his sight being temporarily suspended during the attack from the New Australians. How can he be so docile about something like that? For once, she’s grateful not to have a Viatorio wired into her brain.
As she manually inputs the code into the food printer for her morning protein, she’s forced to concede that the destroyed skip point junctures may have been selected at random and bear no connection to each other. The idea that they may have searched in vain for something that doesn’t exist is disheartening—they’re running out of time. She can’t shake the feeling that there’s something in common between the skip point junctures, but what could it be? Maybe they should devote more time to cracking what Ish calls limber and porous DPM number compounds to see if the solution is hidden within those anomalies.
The meal fabricator dispenses an orange-and-brown lukewarm mash onto a plastic plate. Luci pokes at it unenthusiastically with her curved fork. She taps her forehead with the butt of her palm and says, “Come on, Luci G., you can get this. The answer’s in there somewhere. Just sort it out.” She forces a few bites of the mush into her mouth more as a perfunctory act for brain fuel than anything else.
Then she spots something. As she makes her way to the table from the kitchen pod, the plate slips from her shaking hand onto the glossy, illuminated floor with a plop. Her heart feels as if it could burst through her ribs, it’s beating so quickly. She knows what the quarter-folded sheet on the table is even before she reaches for it. The note is neatly arranged like a tiny paper tent in the center of the table, beckoning for her to read it. Luci extends her hand to it but pulls back, scanning the room for the intruder who left it.
Her throat constricts as she calls out, “Hello . . . hello, are you here?” Her voice cracks. “Hello?” Luci swallows hard while continuing to turn in a slow circle, searching for any movement. Any morning grogginess has burned away like gasoline on a fire of adrenaline. She feels the hints of a Jardon headache coming on. “Not now,” she chides herself, clutching the sides of her head. Every nerve is alive and ready, but no one is in sight. Her blood runs cold that this intruder is able to come and go as they please. She is trapped in the guesthouse with no way to escape or contact anyone.
“If you’re in here, you need to come out right now!” she shouts with a manufactured authority and confidence. “Security Minister Cavazos is en route for a status update.” It’s a lie, but it’s the best that she can manage. “He’ll be here any minute . . . and with a bunch of cybos, but I can hide you upstairs.” She’s not eager to meet the trespasser, but at least if they come out into the open, she’ll know what she’s dealing with, and that blasted curiosity of hers always wins out over what may be the most prudent course of action.
After an intense silence, Luci snatches the note from the table. She unfolds it, cupping it in her hands. The writing is in the same unstable penmanship as the first note.
sumTiN ubqt nU xstrAlyu izunt rIt
The word “Australia” instantly jumps out at her. It doesn’t take much to determine what precedes it is the word “new.” This note is easier to decipher than the previous one. She reads it aloud. “Something about New Australia isn’t right.” The sound of the door sliding open at the other end of the area startles her. Luci jerks from the table, knocking the stool back against the curved glass wall behind her. Without thinking, she grabs it by the metal rungs. She spins it around with its legs pointed outward like a circus lion tamer warding off a vicious beast. “Who is it?” she yells, giving the stool a practice lunge forward, testing its weight in her grip.
As small as it is, the kitchen pod blocks her view of the entry door. She gnaws at her lip as she cautiously advances for a better angle. “I said, who’s there?”
Ish rounds the corner of the cubicle-like food prep area with a perplexed expression. “You said you wanted to start earlier today, right?”
The stool feels heavy now. Luci allows it to sink to the ground before her. “What?”
He cautiously moves closer. “What’s going on here? Are you alright?” He cautiously eyes the fallen plate and splotches of her meal. “What happened here? Why is there food on the floor?”
“Another one,” she says. “They left another one.” All at once, she feels the fatigue in her muscles and sits on the stool for balance. She grabs the sides of her head, feeling the onset of another one of those blasted headaches. “I thought you were him.”
“I was him who?” Ish asks, moving more briskly to her. “What’s going on here? Was Minister Cavazos here this morning?”
She shakes her head and points over her shoulder. “On the table . . .”
Ish looks her over with a worried expression. His mouth opens for a question, but he opts to go for the table behind instead. Coming back around into her line of sight, Ish holds the note up. “I don’t understand. Who is this from? Who was here?”
“A few days ago, there was a note in the bathroom that said I was being lied to,” she explains. Luci runs her fingers through her hair and sighs as she looks up at Ish. “I didn’t tell you about it because—”
“Because why?” he asks sharply while demonstratively waving the note in the air. “If someone has figured out a way to subvert the security systems of this place, you’re at risk. The entire project is at risk. The whole world is in jeopardy. If Gicul manages to destroy all leap-skip passage by destroying the juncture nodes, you’ll be trapped here like the rest of us, and if you don’t go back, then—”
She avoids Ish’s eyes burning into her. “I know, I know. Maybe that was the plan all along, to trap me here to prevent DPM from ever being presented to the world.” Her gaze returns to the blobs of food scattered on the floor in a crude circle. The biggest mound is in the center as the others are arranged around it.
She shakes her head. “I didn’t know—”
“Know what?” he demands in a voice mixed with confusion and pain.
“I didn’t know if . . . if I could trust you.” The words tumble out like a stone. She opens her mouth to apologize but quickly snaps it closed. She resents the idea that she should feel bad for something here. She’s always had a problem in her time with the concept that women should act contrite when something went wrong for their male counterparts. She was the one abducted from her time, not him. She has nothing to apologize for here.
“How could you not trust me? What have I done to you?”
The concierge bot begins cleaning the orange and brown splotches on the ground.
“Nothing. You haven’t done anything wrong. I just didn’t know whose side you were on.”
“Whose side I was on,” he scoffs. “Whose side would I be on? I’m on your side. You’re on the side of humanity, so I’m on your side.”
“But I don’t trust . . .” She exhales a frustrated sigh. “I don’t trust the people that you trust. They brought me here against my will. Royse drugged me and abducted me. I’m not like you, just accepting things like when they blocked your vision yesterday.” She pauses, allowing her words to take root. “Your leaders have some messed up ways of doing things to people in the interest of the greater good. How can you blame me for withholding information like this? How am I able to trust any of you?”
He considers this in silence as the robot does its duty. Instead of scooping up the individual morsels of meal one by one, its extension arm pushes the smaller piles to the one in the center.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ve always trusted those in authority over me. It’s just the way of the Relicus people.”
She frowns at this admission but remains silent.
He cautiously asks, “So you trust me now?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Luci answers.
“What changed?” he asks, studying her face.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve gotten to know you better. Things are different between us now. I feel as if I know you more. You don’t seem like the others. To them, I’m only a solution—a mechanism to a means to an end. To you, I feel like I’m something more, something different than all of that. Sure, we’re partners on the project, but there’s also something else...”
Ish nods in agreement. “When was the other note left?”
Luci’s relieved when he doesn’t ask her to define what the difference between him and the others is, because she’s not certain that she’s able to quantify an answer.
“Did they leave the other note yesterday morning before I got here?” Ish asks more insistently.
There’s a comfort in seeing the analytical side of her partner coming to the surface. She shares the ability to compartmentalize the emotional side of things to focus on an unknown. “No, it was the day that Cavazos came here.”
A high suction noise whirs from the machine as the extender claw uncoils a small plastic tube.
“We’ve got to inform Security Minister Cavazos.”
Luci looks up at him in alarm. “Ish, please, let’s consider our options here. Once we tell the others about this, we lose all control. If someone is trying to help me—help us, turning the messages over will shut the door on that permanently. Macer and Cavazos will probably lock us away in a dungeon at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, and the situation here is already claustrophobic enough for me.”
What she’d give to see his warm grin, but his face is set and tight. “Luci, you’re not safe.” His eyes narrow to slits. “Everything is at risk. If something happens to you . . . if someone can get to you, we will lose everything.”
She looks away from him down to the concierge bot. It’s cleaning up the last of the mess, streaks of orange and brown left behind on the floor.
“Speaking of trust, do you trust me?” she asks. “Whoever this is has been here twice. They’ve gotten past the cybo out in the corridor twice. Neither time did they harm me when they obviously could have.” She omits the detail that the first note could possibly have been left while she was away at the Grange visiting Bru Mandal.
The bot whisks away, making her spill from a few minutes ago just a memory.
“Luci,” Ish says, pleading. “We can’t afford to—”
She stops him with a wave of her hand as the door in her mind opens. Remembering the arrangement of spoiled food, she has an epiphany. It was always assumed that Relicus City was the starting point. She inhales sharply before blurting out, “That’s it! We’ve been looking at it all wrong.”
“Looking at what?” Ish asks, attempting to keep up.
She closes her eyes, picturing how the mess on the floor looked like a wheel with a dozen or so jagged spokes converging in the center. She’s giddy when she looks at Ish again. “I propose that we’ve been looking at the wrong thing, or rather the right thing but interpreting it in the wrong way.”
“What are you saying?” Ish asks from across the room. “Don’t change the subject about what we’re doing with the notes. I’m not done talking about that.”
“Okay, okay, but let me show you this first.” She nearly knocks him over scrambling past to the kitchen pod. “We’ve been using the wrong common denominator. Here, I need another plate.” She turns her back to him, mashes the code into the food printer, and turns back to Ish as the processer begins assembling another batch of breakfast. “How do you know when a skip point juncture is destroyed?”
Ish walks slowly to her. “Why is that important?”
“Just answer the question, Ish.”
“Well, the way we can tell that they’re destroyed is because their FNS-80s and Bine Shadow data return to zero; plus, their trace magnetic signatures go out.” He pauses. “It’s like a star going dark in the night sky. It’s simply not a viewable object any longer on any monitoring equipment—that and any longchair or similar leap-skip transport wouldn’t be able to access it.”
“What would happen if someone tried to leap skip to a destroyed interval portal?”
“Nothing,” Ish explains. “In order for a corridor to activate, both origin and destination points have to correspond and be live. I still don’t get what this has to do with anything.”
The meal printer beeps a short tone, alerting that it has completed its task.
Ish pinches his chin. “We still need to discuss what we’re going to do about the notes.”
Luci raises her index finger. “We will, I promise. Just give me a sec.” She makes her way around the counter and crouches with the plate. “So, look at this.”
Ish looks horrified as she smears a perfectly good meal on the illuminated tile. “What are you doing? Are you having a Jardon relapse wasting food like that?”
She realizes why the act is so disturbing to him and the cultural faux pas that she’s committed. “I’m sorry. I know how valuable food is here, but just watch.”
There’s a scowl on his face, but he silently nods for her to finish.
Luci scoops more from the plate like an artist dipping a brush into her pallet. She finger-paints a crude circle. “So, every calculation tracking this stuff that we’ve done uses a Bine Shadow of 0.1573 or, in some cases, rounded up to Bine 0.2, right?”
Ish nods with an intense expression. “Yes, that’s correct. So?”
She recreates the image from before that looks like a bicycle wheel. “But that’s because we’ve presumptuously selected Relicus City as the initial leap skip point originator.” Luci plops a big glob in the middle to illustrate a hub.
Ish groans his disapproval.
Looking up at him, she asks, “But what if it’s not? The chronal points don’t change, but the STMO corridors would be vastly different. They’d have to be.” Halfway between the mound of food representing the hub and the outer rim of the wheel shape, she places a slimy chunk of protein and gestures at it. “What if the leap skips begin from somewhere else, near Relicus City’s time but not quite?”
Ish’s jaw drops as he kneels beside her. He whispers in astonishment, his eyes transfixed on the crudely rendered diagram in food. “Of course. The calculations would be completely different.” He rubs the back of his neck in astonishment. “If we reverse engineer the fixed termination spots into the past, eventually, they should intersect, and that may tell us—”
“It might show us where he is, or at the very least where Gicul has been operating from.”
Ish stands. “We may even be able to determine where he’ll hit next.”
Luci scrapes the food from her fingers on the edge of the plate, returning to her feet. “Which means that I’ll finally get out of here and go home.”
The brief elation on Ish’s face fades to a stoic expression of acceptance. “Yes, you’ll be able to leave this interval and return to your time.”
An awkward silence descends between them. Luci believed that except for the dancing incident from yesterday, they were past the stage of uncomfortable pauses. She is grateful for the distraction as the concierge bot zooms in to clean up the new food mess. “That’s how I figured it out,” she says, pointing at the busy bot cleaning like it’s a command performance from earlier. “Watch how it does it. It pushes as much of the food to the center before it sucks up the pile.” Luci points. “See how it leaves streaks? They looked like bicycle spokes to me at first, all of them pointing inward at the hub.”
“You have an amazing mind, Dr. Gaudiano. Only you could solve the mysteries of the universe by staring into a spilled plate of mush.”
She tilts her head playfully. “Is that a compliment or an insult?”
“Just don’t waste any more food. It’s very valuable around here.” His mouth forms a thin line. “You know, I’m still disappointed that you didn’t trust me. I get that things have been hard for you here, but I’m on your side.”
“I know, but please know that it was never my intention to hurt your feelings.” She rubs the side of her cheek with the knuckles of her clean hand. “What if we don’t turn the notes in and you stay here tonight?” She feels her face flush and is quick to qualify the question. “I mean on the basin sofa down here, of course.”
“Right,” Ish answers. “I assumed that’s what you meant—down here.”
His hesitation causes her to blurt out, “I mean, that’s not weird, right? I mean, culturally, that’s an okay thing, right?” No matter what she asks, the words feel clunky and wrong, and she feels her face heating up.
“No,” he stammers. “It’s fine. No one even knows a woman is even staying here, much less famed mathematician Luci Gaudiano.”
