Drift pattern, p.3
Drift Pattern, page 3
“Sir, are you okay back there?” Royse asks, stealing a quick glimpse over his shoulder before shifting his attention back to the road.
Macer stares into her eyes. “Yes, Royse. We’re doing fine.”
It’s unnerving to her that his response is so even and without the slightest bit of effort. He pumps his grip on her as he asks in a soft but deliberate voice, “Are you quite done with all of this?”
She inhales sharply and bites her lip while surrendering a defeated nod. How could she have been so stupid? No one sends a car with a driver in this day and age. The image of the pepper spray in her bag in the trunk flashes across her mind again, but how can she get to it?
Luci massages the circulation back into her wrists as she rattles off a series of random numbers. She mumbles to herself as if invoking a mathematical mantra of sorts.
Macer is stunned to silence, studying her.
She quietly multiplies, subtracts, squares, and divides the figures aloud until enough of the fear is shoved to the back of her brain for her to form an escape plan. She plays along. When they reach their destination, she’ll have more options. She’ll demand her bag, saying she needs it for feminine hygiene reasons. When she gets it, she’ll blast the old man in the face with the spray and kick him in the crotch. When the bigger man moves to help him, she’ll run. She’ll humor this Mr. Macer, whoever he is. She’ll play along and ask questions until the precise moment presents itself to strike. She inhales a deep breath to steady herself. Attempting to keep her voice from quivering, she says, “So, since I’m obviously stuck in here, let’s discuss your project or offer . . . or whatever it is.”
Hard rain pummels the roof of the limousine, forcing Macer to speak more loudly. “Dr. Gaudiano, as unbelievable as this may sound, we really do need your help in saving the world. I’m not exaggerating, I assure you.”
An exasperated breath escapes from her lungs. If she’d been drinking something, she would’ve involuntarily spewed it onto Macer’s orange rain gear. “Yeah, right,” she says, the words filled to the brim with sarcasm. “You must be out of your mind. I thought you were speaking metaphorically when you said that before. I had no idea that you were being serious.” So much for playing along, she thinks.
He leans in, and as he does, the plastic of his rain slicker squeaks a little. “I am completely serious.”
The ruby rectangle on his ear catches the light. This invokes the unsettling thought that he and Royse may be members of some cult.
“You have an amazing gift for solving difficult number sequences,” Macer says in an even louder voice to compete with the noise of the car barreling down the highway and the rain relentlessly striking the roof.
“Number sequences, huh? Like a code breaker, Alan Turing-type stuff?”
He shifts on the seat. “Not exactly code breaking, but dealing with sophisticated formulas that I guess could sort of be like codes.”
There’s no pause from Luci. “You got the wrong girl, pal. Breaking codes isn’t what I do.” She reminds herself that this is the opposite of what she should be doing. She needs to play along and act like she’ll do whatever they want.
His eyebrows rise as he rebukes her, “Yes, well . . . Royse here is not really an automobile driver, but he’s driving, isn’t he?” Before she can respond, he says, “You’re good with patterns—unparalleled to anyone in your field, in fact. That’s what we need. You’re what we need.”
“Yeah, okay . . . sorry,” Luci responds, trying to appear as sincere as she can. “Please continue.” She contemplates how the hard rain may give her an advantage when it comes time for her to make a break for it. As best as she can determine from the architecture outside, they’re on the outskirts of the city entering the warehouse district.
Macer smiles, and the crow’s feet around his eyes scrunch up. “Dr. Gaudiano . . . Luci, I need you to pause and suspend the analytical part of that fantastic brain of yours for a minute. What I’m about to relay to you will seem impossible to your rational mind at first, but if you give me a chance, you’ll discover it’s all true, every bit of it. And in a few minutes, I can prove it.”
She crosses her arms, tucking her tightly balled-up fists into her pits. “Em . . . okay. This code that you want me to crack, what’s it do? Bank vault system, security codes, nuclear warheads, what? And how sophisticated is it?”
Macer grips his chin to stifle a genuine chuckle. “Oh, nothing like that.”
As the vehicle begins to slow, he pinches the rectangle on his ear. “Pardon me a second, please.”
As he speaks and his intonation changes, Luci realizes it’s a communication device. “Shar,” he begins, “how much time do we have left?” He pauses briefly. Luci doesn’t hear a reply but knows there is one by Macer’s nodding head in response. “I agree, we’re striving for an amiable solution. That’s desired, but contingencies ought to be in place should the situation call for it.”
Her stomach clenches as she catches him shift his eyes from her as he utters the word “contingencies.” Exploiting the break in eye contact, she tries her wrist phone again, but it’s still dead.
He looks back in her direction. “And Shar, I’d like you to get the validation item after all.” Macer massages his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “And keep a tight clock. We don’t want to be trapped here for the next few weeks.”
When he disengages the conversation, Luci asks, “What’s a validation item, and what did you mean about getting trapped?”
He holds a hand up. “Just a precaution, a little bonus, if you will. But we’ll get to that.” He looks over his shoulder through the opening to Royse. “I’d like a moment before we go in, okay?”
Royse doesn’t look back. “I’ll just pull up near the main entrance of the warehouse. We should arrive there in about two and a half minutes.”
“That’ll be adequate.”
He shifts his gaze back to Luci. “There’s no easy way to begin what I’m about to tell you, so I’ll just dive in.”
Her stomach clenches as the sky rumbles again.
Macer interlocks his fingers and begins. “DPM—drift pattern mathematics. The papers won’t publish until 2041, and the first use of DPM isn’t deployed until twenty-two years after that in 2063.”
“I’ve never heard of drift pattern mathematics,” Luci says, studying Macer’s face to determine if he’s a liar or just plain insane.
“Yes, I know,” Macer says, nodding. “No one knows of it . . . yet.”
“What does it do? What’s the theorem?” Something inside her perks up. She attempts to suppress this obscene thrill, but at the same time, she’s famished to know something new, even if it’s a theory from a suspicious source.
“I’ll get to that in a moment. Imagine if, halfway through the twenty-first century, a breakthrough technology was developed that harnesses DPM. Hundreds of self-regulating machines deployed into the stratosphere, what you would regard today as weather satellites. These systems are able to skip or leap forward in time up to seventy-two hours and transmit back precipitation events.” He pauses allowing the words to sink in.
Luci grips the ball cap in her lap as she processes the concept of something jumping forward in time by seventy-two hours.
Macer continues, “Consider if, at first, it was used for luxury purposes. Imagine if you planned an outdoor activity like the one with the sticks and the holes in the dirt . . . uh . . .”
Her head is still swimming from the previous statement about the seventy-two hours thing, but she manages an answer. “Golf. You mean golf?”
He snaps his fingers. “Yes, that’s it, the golf. If one knew the exact time the rain would begin and end, you would plan your respite around it. Within a few years of the release of this technology, foretelling meteorological occurrences goes mainstream. People subscribe to services—”
Mesmerized by the concept, Luci butts in, “The ability to know future weather would change some many industries: agriculture, airlines, resorts . . .”
Macer smiles. “The science at the time was still in its infancy, but it didn’t remain confined to weather reports for very long. Where we come from, people moving through intervals are common weekly and sometimes daily occurrences.”
“Time travelers?” Luci blurts out as her rational mind slams on the brakes.
He nods. “Yes. We call them sitters because of the transport compartment, but time travelers. Anyway, crews of men and women from your future routinely leap skip into the past and back to your future.”
“Seriously? You’re talking about traveling through time?” She scoffs, glancing at the back of Royse’s head, trying to determine if he’s laughing in the front.
Macer continues as deadpan as can be, “That is precisely what I’m talking about. DPM. Drift pattern mathematics is the foundational theorem that time travel is built on.”
A burst of genuine laughter overtakes her, and it takes a moment to recover. “Oh, you guys are good,” she says, barely able to breathe. Some of the tension drains from her body as she scans the interior of the limo. “Is this being filmed? Is this for SYFY.net or some TruTV streaming channel?”
Macer doesn’t break from character. Luci is impressed by his commitment to the gag. She leans over and gives him a playful punch on the arm, but his stoic expression doesn’t waiver.
“Sir,” Royse says as the car slows to a stop, “we’re here. Shar reports that we have about twenty-five minutes.”
“What happens in twenty-five minutes?” Luci asks, returning the ball cap snuggly to her head. “What’s inside that warehouse, a surprise party or something? Is Tim behind all of this?”
“The four of us—me, you, Royse, and Shar—have to be out of here,” Macer says, ignoring the second question. “We must return to our time in your future.”
“So you’re from the future? What year?” That they’re continuing the farce mildly irritates Luci. When Macer hesitates to answer, she says, “Hey, you can give up the make-believe, alright? If you’re not going to take me to a car rental, fix my phone so I may call an auto-drive cab to there. It’s been a long night, and I have a three-hour ride before me.”
A disturbing thought pops into her brain. What if her notion that this is all a gag is her mind constructing a self-coping mechanism? She’s intelligent enough to know she’s capable of such a thing, because if all of this was real, it’d be too much to bear.
Macer sighs. “I realize that all of this is probably overwhelming, but as someone who’s a pioneer in the field of mathematics, there’s something you should know. Einstein got it wrong, at least in part.”
“Come on, the jig is up,” Luci says, trying to ignore the queasiness returning to her stomach. “It’s over. I’m on to the prank or whatever this is.”
Macer persists. “Unlike the fictional stories of H.G. Wells and his contemporaries regarding leap skips—or time travel, if you will—there are limitations to where and when one may go. The universe has seemingly randomly pre-determined points in time one may travel to. We call these intervals.” He rubs at his forehead again. “Think of an elevator shaft in one of your high-rise twenty-story buildings. The elevator rider can exit at any of the twenty stops, but they can only get off at those openings. He or she wouldn’t physically be able to leave the compartment halfway between floors. The exit options are pre-determined before the rider ever steps into the box. Now imagine a building that extends forever in both directions. That’s what a leap skip is like, extending forever into the past and future.”
Though she knows it’s preposterous, the concept of time travel limitations is intriguing. “So, one couldn’t go back in time to see Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address or the Titanic leave port or stop Hitler’s rise to power?”
“Precisely—unless, of course, there’s already a skip point juncture there.” Before she can ask, he informs her, “And there’s not.”
Her brow furrows as she processes the data. “And the warehouse here is one of these random skip hole things or something?”
“We use the term interval juncture, but yes, it’s an opening for a very brief period of time. This one was only open for 134 minutes and will close in—”
“In approximately twenty-three minutes,” Royse interjects from the front.
Macer closes his eyes to rub them. “I funded the lecture so we’d know exactly where and when to find you and have time enough to return here. We’ve gone to tremendous lengths to bring you back with us.”
“So the countdown is how long we have left before, what, it seals up for good?”
“Yes, that’s right. There’s another one that will open in a couple of weeks, but it’s halfway around the world from where we are now,” Macer says. “I’d prefer that you come willingly, but—”
Luci cuts him off. “Willingly? You can’t expect that. You kidnaped me!” She adds the qualifier, “Again, provided that any of this is real.”
“Oh, this is real—as real as it gets, I assure you.” The annoyance at continually being cut off shows on Macer’s face. “And kidnapping would imply that there’s a ransom. There’s not. I want to appeal to your humanity, Dr. Gaudiano. The fate of millions depends on your coming back to help us. Remember how I described a time corridor? What I didn’t tell you is that it’s being destroyed. To use the elevator analogy again, there are ‘floors’ that we used to be able to get off on that are gone to us now—obliterated as if they never existed.”
Luci ponders the data she has so far and moves to debunk it. She must debunk it and prove to herself this isn’t real. The gatekeeper of logic within her demands that it’s impossible. Her question comes out slowly. “So, if what you say is true—and that’s a big if—what do you need me for? I don’t get it. This drift pattern thing is already published in your future time. I mean, it’s out there for everyone, right? So for me, in my time, at this very moment I . . . we can go to the library and look up Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. I don’t have to go visit him in his time interval or whatever you call it.” She lifts the wrist with the computer band on it. “Even, better, I can Google it right here. You have the internet in the future, right?”
Macer’s answer comes out as an obligatory mumble, “Yes, we have a knowledge repository similar to the ARPANET of this interval.”
“Then why don’t you look it up and have your future computers bang out the math and be done with it?” With a sarcastic smugness, she adds, “Royse didn’t need to consult with Henry Ford to drive us here tonight. Why do you need a mathematician from your so-called past to solve the broken time doors thing for you if you already have the equations somewhere?”
His expression sours. “It’s a little more complicated than that. Something’s wrong and what we have isn’t enough anymore. The math we have rounds the numbers up or down. That’s the way the formula was constructed. And while it’s worked up until now, something’s changed and the exact non-rounded numbers are required.”
This revelation excites her because it’s something that’s relatable to her field. “You’re talking about Goldbach’s Conjecture!”
“I don’t know what that is,” Macer admits, “but you should come with us to see if you’re right. We’ll bring you back once you’re done. We must bring you back for this to work.”
She goes on to explain as if she’s sixteen again and answering a question in the Caribou Mathematics Contest. “Eighteenth-century Christian Goldbach. The issue is that the result of rounding the following value up to the next integer cannot be determined: 10−n, where n is the first even number greater than 4, which is not the sum of two primes, or 0 if there is no such number, right?”
“I honestly have no idea what that means, but the fundamentals of DPM in layman’s terms is like if you lean against a lamppost on the corner of Main Street on a Tuesday morning at 8:00 AM and then return there twenty-four hours later, you’re not in the same spot in the universe. Though you may be at the same geographical spot on the Earth and the lamppost is relatively the same, the planet is in a different spot than it was 80,000 seconds ago.”
“Eighty-six thousand four hundred,” Luci offers.
“What?”
“It would be Eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds in a twenty-four-hour period,” she answers.
Macer continues with an acknowledging nod, “Right. So anyway, the Earth is rotating, moving around the sun, but the sun and its planets are also spiraling through the galaxy, and galaxies spin around the universe. Everything is in a constant state of flux, hurtling through space. One also has to consider continental drift. Due to the shift of the tectonic plates, the landmasses are in a constant state of flux too, and they’re not moving at the same rate of speed. It may not seem like much, but what was formerly Europe was in a different place two hundred years ago from where it was eight hundred years ago. All of these are factors in the drift pattern.”
Luci rubs the nape of her neck. “So it’s a way to pinpoint the precise location of the lamppost on Main Street today and where it was a month ago and where it will be hurling through space a decade from now.”
“That’s only one aspect of it, but there’s a lot more to it.” He pauses before adding, “But fundamentally, that’s one of the major parts of it that we need you to solve. Until recently, the numbers could be rounded up or down within a hundred thousandth of a second, but not anymore. The metaphorical corner where the street lamp was has been obliterated.”
“Destroyed by who and why?” Luci asks.
He thinks on this, finally offering more of a proverb than an actual answer. “War finds every generation. Only the tools of our destruction change.”
He utters the words with such contempt that they hang on the air like frost.
