Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework (36 page)

"We knew that section was contaminated when
we built it. The construction crew said it was a problem with the
materials," Warden Harrison said dismissively.

"I'm sorry, Warden," replied a weary looking
doctor Kimberly hadn't met before as she shook her head
emphatically. "You may remember that room being contaminated since
the station was moved into place, but that's a new modification to
the time line."

"That's not possible, Charmaine,"
interjected a doctor wearing a white recovery mask. "You're saying
that events that have already passed are being modified by this
person, and that a whole construction crew would be too stupid to
just build somewhere else, or use other materials."

"That's
Doctor
Kershaw to you. You're
the only one here who doesn't concur on this matter. It's been
noted, now let me explain the theory according to the majority,"
Doctor Kershaw retorted. "The machine that our patient is attached
to affects objects and people in the near vicinity for a nine year
period in each direction. If something is exposed to its temporal
radiation for too long, or a person survives an intense burst, they
will be forever changed. Some minor exposure is about as harmful as
a mild tan, but if there’s enough exposure to make someone ill,
then that illness changes their past. There is also a ripple effect
that changes reality as we know it, like your memories. Just a few
days ago, that section was clean, safe. That's how anyone who knew
about it would remember it, but then he arrived, we removed his
containment suit, there was an intense surge of temporal radiation,
and the exposure changed its state. Since it is temporal radiation,
the state changes not only in the future, but also in the past
thanks to some kind of wake effect we don't completely understand
yet."

"All right, so a few days ago, that section
was clean. He got here and now it's been contaminated for nine
years," Warden Harrison concluded impatiently. "What about our
people? How does it look for them?"

"The nurses who removed him from his suit?"
asked Doctor Kershaw. "They're fully contaminated, like everything
else that was caught in the radiation burst. Their entire life
histories have changed in ways we can't be aware of. For all we
know, one of them had two children, but because they were
retroactively affected by radiation nine years behind us in the
time line, they may have abstained from having babies. That's how
dire this kind of radiation is. While we can measure how large the
area of exposure is, there's no way of measuring what kind of
change the exposure has caused, because as far as we're concerned,"
she shrugged and made a broad gesture, “everything in this reality
has changed thanks to a ripple effect that started with a big
splash of radiation nine years ago. In short, we shouldn’t have
removed his containment suit, we shouldn’t have tried to activate
the machine ourselves without understanding it first. It has a way
of expending the energy before extended surges, it creates
high-powered wormholes for travel and remote seeing. We
disconnected that temporarily. That is why we’re seeing these
problems. We shouldn’t have tampered.”

Fleet Warden Harrison nodded. "That was an
order from the top. There are all kinds of new technologies.
Wormhole generation that fits in the palm of your hand, new armour
systems, materials beyond our scope of development, and who knows
what else. I couldn’t talk them out of trying to study this thing.
I thought you could control this, some of you told me it would be
easy to contain.” Warden Harrison sighed and rubbed her temples.
“I’m getting a headache. I think I get the theory, let’s move on.
Do we have a way of treating exposure?"

Doctor Sewell gestured towards his colleague
wearing the white mask. "Doctor Finch has been treating himself for
nine years. He was present when our mystery man was removed from
the suit and toggled the machine."

"Yes, and you can't know how relieved I am
to know that my condition will only last nine more years. It's
taken all our tissue regeneration technology, but I've managed to
live a somewhat normal life. I expect that, using the same
treatments, the nurses and I will make it."

"So the effects of this exposure are nine
years both ways," Warden Harrison concluded. "What about
Roman?"

"He's absolutely terminal," Doctor Finch
replied. "We were only exposed for a few seconds. He's been
bombarded for years as far as we can tell, and is suffering from
full systemic degradation. He might last a few days longer, at
best. Containment isn't a problem though; we’ve adapted the micro
scale technology in his suit on a room-sized scale in short order,
so we’re safe."

"All right. What about that thing he's
attached to, what was it called? The Victory Machine?"

"As far as we can tell it's a combination of
technology from several different races built on a Sol System
frame," explained Doctor Sewell. "Our attempts at a deep scan get,
well, fuzzy."

"Even using the station's scanners?"

"Yes. It's the same as the Triton's computer
core. Any attempt at a detailed deep scan gets scrambled by some
sort of signal interdiction system that generates interference, but
we've learned a lot from Roman's connection to the device," Doctor
Sewell explained as he brought up a diagram of a net spread across
the back of Roman's cranium under the skin. "This soft cybernetic
implant interfaces the entire brain through bone. From our
observations, we've determined that he communicates with the
Victory Machine through a type of dream state. What he's most
likely seeing are characters and situations in the dream that are
showing him events of the future. They're interpreters for the
petabytes of information the cable is carrying per second. As far
as we can tell, the Victory Machine is collecting information from
thousands of points in space, all at once, using microscopic
wormholes that reach nine years into the future."

"Have you tried an interrogation scan?"
asked the fleet warden.

"Yes, I'll get to that in a minute," Doctor
Sewell said. "What's amazing about this device is that those
wormholes were initiated ahead of it, meaning that at some point in
time there was a sister device that created these wormholes looking
backwards. We assume it was destroyed by a surge of temporal
radiation, but the Victory Machine uses the residual radiation to
fuel itself. Something must have gone wrong when whoever built it
turned it on though, since there is a constant build up of energy
that it has to expend on a regular basis. That is how we found
Roman on the Triton. The device creates a larger wormhole under
incredible compression called a crush gate. Now a crush gate-"

"I know what a crush gate is," Fleet Warden
Harrison said. "It's a high compression wormhole that projects the
traveller through fast enough to create the sensation of being
flung to their destination. I tried a simulated one as a cadet,
just in case we had to use advanced Lorander technology."

"Lorander Company has been using crush gates
for decades, I wouldn’t call that advanced in the strictest sense.
Anyway, the Victory Machine creates real ones. For all we know,
Roman came from twenty, or fifty, light years away. He would have
travelled that distance in minutes, hours, or days at the
most."

"So it's like an exhaust system."

"Exactly," replied the doctor.

"What happens when he dies?"

"Well, we don't know exactly. The line
leading from the machine to his head is bidirectional, so he's
determining the crush gates' destination as far as we can tell. The
Victory Machine could start travelling on its own, or it could
employ another kind of safety mechanism. One thing we do know is
that it can never shut down."

"What, these things don't break? There have
to be delicate electronics corroding in there," Warden Harrison
said.

"We have no way of knowing what kind of
electronics are at its core thanks to inconclusive scans. It could
break down tomorrow, or in two hundred years."

"All right, and what happens if there's no
safety mechanism for this thing's exhaust or it just fails one
day?"

The masked doctor straightened in his chair
and replied, "Did you learn about the Borucki Colony incident?"

"You mean the biggest temporal explosion in
history?" Fleet Warden Harrison asked.

"Yes, it was the last serious large scale
attempt at manned reverse time travel. One of the first colonized
solar systems was rendered uninhabitable. That was one large
negative temporal disposition wormhole set to travel a relatively
short distance physically. If there were a temporal event due to
the failing of the Victory Machine, thousands of points in our
galaxy, possibly our universe, would suffer from smaller, but
devastating explosions. The larger events could create black holes.
While not as large as the one in the Borucki system, these
microscopic wormholes most likely point to inhabited areas, so
they'd be just as devastating."

"So there's no way of destroying it?" asked
the Fleet Warden.

Most of the doctors looked down at the table
in front of them, while Sewell and Kershaw looked at each other.
After a moment they nodded at each other and Kershaw turned to the
Fleet Warden. "We have to listen to Roman. If we give him what he
wants, I believe he'll use the next crush gate to move the Victory
Machine to a safe distance and he’ll begin shutting down the
microscopic wormholes, greatly reducing the area a temporal
implosion or explosion would affect."

"I have to ask, since the defence minister
will have me ejected from the service if I neglect the question:
can we make this machine useful? Could we hook our own man up to
this to serve the Carthan government?"

"No," answered Sewell and Kershaw at the
same time. "The consensus of this panel has determined that it's a
death sentence to whoever we connect, even for a short time,"
Sewell stated flatly. "That, and keeping that thing near any of our
installations, on any ship, puts them at risk."

"Out of all the military personnel we have
here - who are mostly criminals serving a sentence, I remind you -
you wouldn’t choose one to hook up to this machine? We could even
send him or her from one unmanned station to another," Warden
Harrison pressed.

“No, it would be inhumane and there’s
another, more important factor here,” Doctor Sewell insisted.

“Go on.”

“There is an important interaction between
the Victory Machine and its partner. We believe Roman is
interpreting data from the future and is part of an extrapolation
system that uses collected information to predict much further into
the future. Not only that, but we are fairly certain that he
chooses where to go. If we were to use even the most reformed
criminal, or any human for that matter, there’s no way we could
assure that they wouldn’t try to visit relatives, or change the
future for their own ends, or even intentionally misguide us in
some attempt at revenge. I hope that man in there, Roman, is some
kind of saint, with the purest intentions, or he could do a lot of
damage.”

“I can find saints in our ranks, Doctor. I
can even find ultra-patriots. Our reformation program works,
regardless of your well-known opinion of it,” the fleet warden
countered.

"All right, let's say you do find someone
perfect for the job. What would our time viewer look at? They'd
view Carthan worlds, seeing what happens to us in nine years
according to the actions we take right now. Sure, he or she would
also be looking at our enemies, maybe into areas we don't normally
have access to, but primarily, we'd be interested in ourselves,
right?"

"Undoubtedly."

Kershaw continued where Sewell left off. "So
we'd be at most risk. For all we know, the Victory Machine could
fall apart just as whoever we replace Roman with is looking at
Galt, population one point five million, and a black hole bursts
open right in the middle of Union Square."

"Thank you, I think that'll be enough to
turn the brass’s attention away from using it for the military. So
we seal Roman back up in his suit, listen to what he needs, give it
to him, and then he goes on his way," Fleet Warden Harrison
concluded. "So, what does he want?"

Doctor Sewell brought up the frozen image of
a charred beach. "The passive synaptic interrogation I performed
turned up an actual experience. Not like the regular interpretable
memory fragments, but a perfect presentation of what Roman was
experiencing while we were monitoring. I suspect it's thanks to the
state he enters when he's receiving data from the machine."

"So, this is a playback?"

"Yes, the most recent version. He seems to
be experiencing roughly the same point in time over and over again,
as interpreted by a woman we've identified as Ayan Rice, currently
living on the Tamber moon," said the doctor.

"Let's see it."

Doctor Sewell activated the playback and
Fleet Warden Harrison's senses tingled as the direct projection
overlay interfaced with her nervous system. She was not in control
of what she was seeing, but was walking beside Ayan Rice, a shorter
woman with red hair, on the beach. She recognized her image from
some well-known negotiations for a land grant and sovereign rights.
The media loved her, and she was one of the flash-points for long
term residents’ rage against land grants and the Carthan
governorship.

The smell of burnt wood mixed with the faint
aroma of dead fish came on the heels of the sound of surf washing
up and down the shoreline. Small craters of sand turned to glass
dotted the landscape, and across the water she could see the Triton
floating in the distance. The lights glittered in the shade of
night like the hundred tiny eyes of a massive sea creature watching
the shore. Past the smooth hull of the vessel the stars wavered and
shifted, distorted by some high energy field.