So you see, when God announces his presence he always makes it obvious to humanity. How much more obvious than the events of the last few years does he need to make it before you will believe?
Twenty-Nine
“Look at this,” said Adrianna, gesturing to figures on her computer screen. “I’ve been working on this for the last few days. Check this out.” She punched a key on the computer keyboard and row upon row of numbers began to scroll down the screen.
The team, gathered around her computer, regarded the rapidly scrolling figures with confusion.
“What are they?” asked Jim.
“Those,” said Adrianna, as the numbers continued to scroll, “are the frequencies of the tachyons contained within the harmonic.”
“My God! How many are there?” asked Lorentz.
“I managed to isolate over seven hundred.” Adrianna swung around in her chair to face the others. “Most are close to being immeasurable, they barely registered on the scanner—it was a bastard to have to go in and extrapolate them individually—but that’s not the best of it. Take a look at this.” She pressed another key and an animated graphic replaced the figures.
“See?” she exhaled, her voice a hushed tone of awe.
“Very pretty,” said Jim, “but what the hell is it.”
“It looks like a string of DNA,” Mitchell guessed, but as he leaned closer to the screen he reappraised his observation, “Or, more precisely, it looks very much like a DNA double-helix.”
On the computer screen, slowly rotating around its axis, a blue strand wove its way helically up the screen. Attached at varying points along the strand were small glowing spheres of phosphorescent light, most bunched in groups of three but the further away from the center of the strand; the less the spheres were bunched.
“So what does DNA have to do with the harmonic?” asked Mabry, his bushy eyebrows arched questioningly.
“It’s not a DNA strand,” replied Adrianna. “It’s a graphical representation of the frequencies I pulled out of the harmonic.”
“What’s that?” asked Rebecca pointing at the center of the strand where a single red globe, bordered on either side by two green spheres of glowing light, pulsed gently.
“That represents the frequency of our original signal, the one that initiated the Slip. I’ve isolated it and confirmed its characteristics; it is definitely the original signal. It’s also the strongest.
“The two spheres on either side of it—” Adrianna used the index and middle finger of her right hand to point at the screen, “—are frequencies that were just below and above it. There’s barely a difference of just a few megahertz really.” She moved her tiny fingers to the top and bottom of the strand.
“You see here and here, the clustering of frequencies drops off. The further away you get from our central frequency, the weaker the signals become. I have a feeling that if we could amplify the signal significantly enough, and maybe clean out some more of the noise, we would find the missing frequencies to these clusters. Hell! For all I know the stuff my equipment is reading as noise could be more frequencies, too faint for me to extract. Without more sensitive equipment I will never be able to tell.”
“Amazing,” Lorentz said quietly.
“Yes, definitely amazing,” said Jim, “But what does it mean?”
Adrianna swung slowly around in her chair until she faced the group of scientists standing behind her. “I have absolutely no idea,” she said candidly. “We really don’t know enough about it to be able to speculate with any degree of accuracy. It could be echoes, a naturally occurring event that we have never been able to monitor before, maybe even similar experiments in other countries.”
“Well,” said Lorentz “keep running the tests, let’s see what else you can pull out of it.”
The music filled Jim’s apartment; Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the seventeenth—variation flowing seamlessly into the first few gentle piano notes of the eighteenth.
The lights were turned down low; a glass of red wine (a welcome gift from Horatio who was apparently quite the connoisseur) rested in Jim’s hand as he relaxed on the sofa, allowing the swell of the music to flow over him. No matter how many times he heard those opening notes he always found himself falling under the sway of the music. It was the sonic equivalent of a relaxing massage, unwinding his muscles and his mind, while allowing him to mentally escape the confines of the facility that had become his home over the past few weeks. He might not be able to leave the compound, but he could travel on the passion of the symphony.
Forbidden from leaving the security of the base, Lorentz had asked if he wanted anything brought in from the outside world beyond the complex’s security and razor wired perimeter. Jim knew that without his music he would go mad. He needed to maintain a connection with normality, something to remind him he had a life… once upon a time, at least. There wasn’t even a radio in the apartment, for God’s sake. If he was going to have to work here for any length of time, that would need to be rectified. The following morning he poked his head around Lorentz’s office door. “Knock, Knock,” he said.
Lorentz was busy at his desk running over figures, his eyes were red and puffy and he could read the relief in the scientists face at the excuse to break away from the computer screen.
“Come on in, Jim. What can I do for you?”
Jim had outlined his request to Lorentz who in turn called on Mina. She relayed Jim’s request to the appropriate security staff, and less than twenty-four hours later Jim awoke from a late afternoon nap to a heavy handed knocking at his door.
Standing in the corridor, two burly looking men in overalls and crew cuts pushed a couple of dollies stacked with securely taped brown boxes.
“Dr. Baston, we have your requisition,” said the bigger of the two men matter-of-factly. “Where do you want ’em?”
“Just drop them in the middle of the living room there, please.”
Wheeling the trolley into the room, the two men unloaded the packages and carried the dollies out.
“Thanks guys,” Jim said, as he closed the door behind them.
He ripped through the packing tape with a knife grabbed from the kitchen and pulled each of the separate components out of their respective boxes. By the time he had opened all but one of the boxes he had a set of seven pieces neatly laid out next to the now empty boxes: an amplifier, CD player, a tuner and four speakers, each with their own stand.
Fitting all the pieces together, he moved to the final unopened box, quickly cut through the packaging tape and rummaged through its contents until he found the exact thing he wanted. Jim pulled the silver disk from its case and slipped it into the tray of his newly assembled music system, turned the volume shuttle to an acceptable level and pressed the play button.
Instantly the room was filled with the synthesized tones of a Wurlitzer and as Ali Campbell’s voice began to sing about the magic of Kingston Town, Jim—fingers snapping to the offbeat accent of the tune—reggae-danced back to the box containing his music collection from the cabin at Shadow Lake and began to search through the CDs.
There were many years of memories tied up in this collection. The CD had been replaced years ago by instant streaming; at least in his future-past it would be, but right now, that was still years away. But, even in the distant future Jim had maintained his collection on disk just as those who had grown up with the vinyl album had sworn CDs just didn’t have the same kind of sound quality that their LPs had.