Chapter 07: Cole
Start reading from the beginning…
Entering the base again was easy. Cole followed the crowd to the baggage claim and then wandered off toward the port’s exit. He was on the opposite side of LunaBase from the lab, so if he planned on making it in time, he’d have to hurry. He shouldn’t have any trouble with his security clearance, because at this hour, he was still fully employed by the project. His biggest concern was getting into the lab without being caught by himself or anyone who had seen the other Cole recently.
He started to jog, trying to remember some of the shortcuts to the lab from here. He used to come this way all the time, but in the last few years of working on the project, he rarely ever left the moon. Even when he did, it was to accompany Chan somewhere, so he hadn’t been in the area around the public port in quite a while.
Chan. How could Chan just fire him like that? No explanation. No discussion. After all the years Cole had worked on this project. This was Cole’s brainchild after all! Cole had been in college as an engineering major when he created this project. For a geology class, he wanted to obtain a soil sample from Charon, the large moon of Pluto. He took a passenger liner from Earth and rented a personal ship from LunaBase. He made a solo trip past the sun, using it to slingshot himself to the outer planets. This was usually the fastest way to get into the outer system, even if you had to start by going the wrong direction. He went as fast as he could too, because he didn’t want to waste a lot of time on this trip. Luckily, he didn’t experience any trouble, and it only took a couple of hours to get there, much less time than he thought it would. He took the soil sample and made the longer trip back to Earth without the benefit of a slingshot. After returning to LunaBase and turning in his rental, he caught a passenger flight back home. The trip took an entire weekend, with the longest part being the passenger trips to and from Earth’s surface. These took the better part of a day each way. When he returned to his college lab with the sample however, he realized that something significant had happened; his watch was running slower than anyone else’s. He asked a trusted professor about it, who chalked it up to simple time dilation. Objects in motion experience the passage of time differently than objects at rest. It happened all the time, according to the professor, because people are always zipping around the system doing whatever people do. Most folks don’t notice it, because after several hours or days in flight, a few seconds didn’t really matter. If you changed you watch to adjust to local time after a trip, those missing seconds disappeared anyway.
Cole thought there was more to this than the professor was letting on, so he began his research, giving most of the soil sample to a colleague to take over his original project. He kept a little bit of the sample as a token of the journey he was beginning however. He studied time dilation relentlessly, taking every physics course the college offered. Then he struck out on his own, purchasing a fast ship and a little office space on Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. From there he took many measurements of long, fast journeys, pushing the limits of time dilation as much as he could. He had little difficulty travelling into the future, because time dilation caused less time to pass aboard his fast ship than at his stationary base. A trip that took him a few minutes actually left him gone from his base a few hours. He started reverse engineering this knowledge into his ship so that rather than measuring time in relation to his motion, his ship would evaluate the speed and distance necessary to travel a certain distance through time.
It wasn’t until an accident happened that he found the secret to moving into the past. During a trip into the future, a tool dropped into the ship’s exposed circuitry. Cole usually left the circuitry exposed because he was always tinkering with it, making adjustments to it. The metal tool had become magnetized by a circuit it touched, and the polarity of the circuitry reversed. Cole’s ship moved into the past rather than into the future. He had not gone very far before a fuse blew and the engine shit down. He hadn’t even realized what had happened at first either until he painstakingly reconstructed the accident during the repair process. The electronics that controlled how the ship moved through physical space had worked backward, with the change in the polarity of the power routing through them causing his physical movement to reverse as well. Time dilation had become time contraction, and the ship passed more slowly through time than the universe around it.
That was when Admiral Chan had come knocking on his door. Chan wanted to dedicate government resources to the project, because he saw it as an advancement that could benefit all of humanity. In the years that followed, and the addition of a few physicists and engineers to the team, Cole’s research began to really move forward. Now, years later, Cole had been removed from the project inexplicably, and was running through back-alleys on LunaBase to find out why.
He stopped to catch his breath. He was just across from the lab’s reception area, and surveying the area. Dan and Arthur were exiting the reception area together, probably on their way to lunch somewhere. Dan spotted Cole and waved, so Cole waved back, and started walking toward them. The couple stopped for a moment for quick hello.
“You finally got out of the lab for a little while, did you?” Arthur said as they converged. “I can’t remember the last time I saw you out here with the rest of the world.”
“Yeah, I decided I needed a little space, needed to move around.” Cole was trying to be polite without saying too much. He didn’t want these two members of the team to think anything was amiss.
“You’re not exercising?” Dan joked. “Not you?” All three of them laughed. “Only kidding of course. Would you care to join us for a bite to eat?”
“No, thanks. I had better get back in there.” Cole had an idea suddenly. “You know Chan is out picking up the new pilot, right?”
Arthur looked at Dan and raised an eyebrow. Dan looked back at his partner and said, “I told you he was going to bring her in today!” Dan turned back to Cole, “Arthur isn’t quite ready to give up the ship to a pilot. It’s done, but he doesn’t want to share it yet.” Arthur remained silent.
“Did the Admiral say anything to you before he left? Anything unusual?” Cole inquired.
Arthur shook his head. Dan said, “Nothing unusual for Chan. You know how he is. Why, is there something going on?”
“I’m not sure. He just seemed to act differently around me before leaving,” Cole lied. “I can’t put my finger on it though. I thought maybe one of you had noticed.”
“Nope,” said Arthur.
Dan added, “Sorry,” and shook his head.
“Well, I’ll see you guys around then.” Cole turned and the couple started walking away. Cole watched them leave, trying to gauge if they were lying to him or not. In the end, he decided they didn’t know anything about Chan’s plan to fire him. He tried to remember where he had been earlier. He has not been out of bed for very long before he received the Martian message for the Admiral, but he couldn’t remember what time it was when that happened. It was risky, he knew, but he had to go into the lab and find out what that message contained.
“Hello Cole, welcome back,” said the monotone female voice as he entered the lobby. The mechanical receptionist sat at a desk in the center of the room. It was a very simple computer, without a human-like face or limbs. Essentially it was a kiosk that provided information and was given security controls over the doorways. It was not linked to any outside computer, Cole knew, in order to keep the lab’s secrets all within the lab. A thought occurred to him then.
“Reception, I need some information.” He approached the kiosk and looked at the display, which was a curved screen that circled uninterrupted around the entire unit. Things could appear flat or three-dimensional in this form of display, using human visual limitations to create optical illusions of depth on the screen. “Show me a map of the entire lab complex.” A map appeared, seemingly flat on the screen. “Provide real-time locations and labels for all individuals on the map.” A user had to be explicit with machines, since they do not make assumptions like a person would. Cole was used to this however, having worked in the lab for so long and being surrounded by semi-intelligent machines. It only took a couple of seconds for the scan of the lab to be complete, and Cole saw that he was the only one in the lab, and that he was shown both in the lobby and also in his apartment. An advantage of working with machines is that unless they were instructed to notice inconsistencies, like the duplication of an individual, they did not. Individual points on a map were only data to Reception, and many data included duplications.
Cole was trying to retrace his steps from earlier today in his mind still, but he was having trouble. He knew he had left his apartment and shortly after that had received the communication, and then he had forwarded the message to Chan’s office. Since no one else was in the lab, Chan’s office seemed to be the best place to go, to wait for the message. Just as he was about to tell Reception to turn off the map, he saw the other Cole’s label moving out of the apartment on the map, and down the hall toward reception. He began to feel a tremor in his hand, as though he had instantly become scared. He knew he wasn’t actually scared though, instead he recognized this for what it was: Novikov’s Effect. He had a sinking feeling that something awful was about to happen, and it occurred to him that he needed to leave, now.
“Reception, close and permanently delete this file,” Cole said as he dashed through a door into the opposite hallway lab hallway as the one the other Cole used. He knew this was a safe hall, because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d needed to come this way. Of course, he second guessed that immediately because he hadn’t remembered coming through reception earlier in his day, but obviously was about to. He pulled the door mostly closed behind him and peeked into the lobby through a small opening. As he watched, he saw himself enter the room and walk past Reception without being offered assistance.
Suddenly, crouching in the hall, he remembered that he had gone to pick up a coffee before getting started on his work. It probably hadn’t registered in his memory that he’d been in reception because the computer hadn’t spoke to him before. Having just woken up, he must have failed to realized that Reception ignored his presence, but watching it happen again from this angle through the gap in the door, it was obvious. He smiled at his own obliviousness as the past Cole exited the lab into the lane beyond, and then he closed the hall door. He knew he was only going to be alone in the lab complex for only a few minutes, so he rushed to Chan’s office and shut the door behind himself to make sure remained unnoticed.
“What are you doing in here?” asked a voice he didn’t recognize.
