Book Five, Chapter 129: The Signal

🔴 REC    OCT 19, 2018 05:12:55    [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

“So as soon as you fire that thing up, Event B happens, and we sail right out of this time anomaly back into a world that makes sense, right?” Antoine asked.

“Something like that,” Camden said.

“Great. I’ll get the champagne,” Antoine responded.

“Of course, there’s a very real chance that outside of the time anomaly, time travelers like us—well, walking paradoxes like us—will suddenly stop being able to exist,” Camden said.

He was still working on the device. He had managed to enter developer mode so that he could scan the underlying code to try to learn from it.

“You should have led with that,” Antoine said.

“Wait,” Kimberly said. “Are we sure that we can’t just get to the other side of Event B and this will all be over?”

Camden looked at me, so I decided to take the question.

“All we know for sure is that any Generation Killer who ever lived past Event B never returned,” I said. “At the very least, that means that time travel is no longer possible. At the very worst, that means that they just got swept away. Heck, maybe they just stopped existing.”

There was silence amongst the group. We were all spread out around the office area, taking turns sleeping.

“So where’s our happy ending?” Anna asked. “What do we have to do?”

“Happy endings might be asking too much. We need to discuss risk mitigation,” Logan said. “The way I see it, we either go back in time and try to live our lives, waiting for the sociopath brigade to find us, or we risk traveling into the future, past Event B, and hope that we still exist on the other side. Which choice is the safest?”

“Those are pretty bleak options,” Kimberly said.

“Well… there might be a third option,” Camden said, looking up from his studies at the table.

He looked around the room, and we all waited for him to explain.

“I’ve been looking at the functions of this device, and I think I understand a little bit more about how it was used. Yes, it does have the function of coordinating across timelines to attract the meteor to Carousel. I guess the plan was they were going to let it touch down in the mountains and then go dig it up. Of course, they didn’t know that it was going to touch down 300 years in the past, but that’s not important. That’s not the only function of this device.”

“What else can it do?” Kimberly asked.

Camden scratched his head and prepared his speech. Logan and I had looked through it with him, but we felt it would be better coming from our Scholar.

“Well, it seems they weren’t sure about their math. That’s why the first reality that came up with this device ended up sending the plans to all the other realities. It’s because they had an equation they couldn’t balance or something. So they sent the device and the equation to all of the other timelines, and whichever reality figured out how to steer an interdimensional meteor was supposed to send out the answer to all of the others so that they would all have the solution.”

KRSL crowdsourced from the multiverse. Pretty cool concept.

“Which is to say what?” Antoine asked.

“Well… we have the answer to the equation now,” Camden said. “It was sent out by another reality back in 2020. They figured out how to make the meteor hit specific coordinates, right? And then, when they sent that out, they also sent out a list of ideal coordinates for other realities to try. I have that data right here.”

“Huh,” I said. “So the first reality to figure out the math to make the device work got to choose the coordinates for all of the different meteor strikes around the multiverse?”

“Basically, yeah,” Camden said. “Communication is really hard, so as soon as someone got the right answer, everyone else, I guess, fell in line. I don’t see where anyone’s corrected their math. I think… I think this works.”

The cost of saving Camden was that the story took a sort of sci fi route.

“But what does that mean for us?” Kimberly asked.

“Well, it means that if we can go back to before 2020, we could send out the answer ourselves, but we could probably change it. We could make it look like our reality was the first to figure out the answer to the equation,” Camden said.

“Change it?” Logan asked. “What could we change? If we give them the wrong answer, they’ll just reject it. I’m sure they could get a supercomputer to disprove anything we mess up.”

He sat in a spinning chair with his arms crossed.

“Okay,” Camden said, “but what if we don’t change the actual answer to the formula? What if we just change—”

“The coordinates of the meteor strikes,” Kimberly said, finishing his sentence.

If we were the first timeline to send out an answer to the unbalanced equation, we could take control.

“Or we could make the meteor hit in the far future, long after we’re dead,” Antoine said.

Camden shook his head. “No, they didn’t anticipate that the meteor would travel back in time. I think that’s baked into the physics. I’m not at all qualified to change when the meteor strikes.”

That would be too easy.

“Okay, so we can’t change when the meteor strikes,” I said. “Can we change if the meteor strikes? Can we make the meteor miss? Of course, that might throw a kink in the whole time anomaly thing.”

“They could still check to see if the meteor would miss,” Logan said. “There’s no way we could trick them like that. Besides, if the meteor doesn’t hit, our timeline doesn’t exist. We probably don’t exist—most of us, at least.”

There was a moment of silence after that.

“So how does that help us?” Kimberly asked. “If we can’t choose whether the meteor hits, and we can’t choose when the meteor hits. How does choosing where it hits help us?”

That was the golden question.

We sat and talked back and forth for a moment, trying to discuss if there was some optimal strategy.

“Wait a second,” Logan said. “If the coordinates where the meteor struck were planned out and sent to every timeline, why in the world did the meteor hit the center of town in our timeline? Did we just get the math that wrong, or is our timeline’s KRSL suicidal?”

Camden, who was tired and worn down to the bone, actually started to laugh.

“It’s not a math error,” he said. “I looked at the underlying code.”

He started flicking through the screen on the device as if to show us his findings, but the screen was dense, and I couldn’t even get it to show up very well on the camera.

“What does it say?” I asked.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it’s taken without the author’s consent. Report it.

He coughed.

“So when they were making this device, they started by programming it, right? Not just the advanced math, or the physics, or the time travel—just the basic program. You know, what do you need this device to be able to do? You need to be able to enter coordinates and execute them, right? But they messed up.”

He scrolled the screen to a spot at the top. There was no way the audience would be able to see it.

“It wasn’t a math error—it was a programming error. When they were developing the original program, they created a dummy variable that contained coordinates they just happened to have on hand. They used it so they could check if their program itself worked. But then, at the end, they forgot to switch the variable. So even though you can enter in the correct coordinates and it appears as if the meteor is supposed to hit somewhere in the mountains, the actual coordinates used in our timeline were still those old dummy coordinates. And I bet you can guess what random coordinates they used to test their code.”

“Would that be the coordinates for the town of Carousel?” Logan asked.

“Yep,” Camden said.

“So our entire lives, our entire timeline, everything we know exists because of a programming error?” I asked.

“Honestly, that sounds about right,” Logan said letting loose a snort.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Antoine added.

We had a quick laugh.

“But if we fix the error, doesn’t that mean that we don’t exist anymore?” Anna asked.

She had been very quiet. I could tell she was worn out. I couldn’t ask any more of her, but it was nice to hear her add something to the conversation.

“I would suppose so,” Camden said. “But there’s no way to know. Inside the time anomaly, most ripples in time get fixed because similar timeline collapse in on each other, so it’s possible that even if the meteor never strikes the original settlement, a lot of Carousel would end up being the same. But I wouldn’t roll the dice on it.”

I got up, started pacing, then took a seat at the back of the room.

“I just feel like there’s a solution here that we’re not seeing,” I said. “Logan, can you give us a rundown of the history of this meteorite in our timeline? Just refresh my memory.”

Logan did that thing that smart people do in movies—he pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.

“Meteor hits in the 1740s. Town is rebuilt in the 1780s. The Carousel Adventure Society starts looking for the meteor, which at this point is just a legend, in the 1930s. They find it within a decade. It gets turned into a necklace. Necklace gets put in a museum. Necklace gets stolen in the 1960s. But you know that part.”

I thought for a moment.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Camden, do you have a map with all the little impact crater squiggles?”

“Not on me,” Camden said.