The Cupel Recruits (11 page)

The entire cavern was covered with the DL mineral, practically every face was made of it. She felt as if she were herself sitting in the center of a giant geode. Sitting on a rock and finishing the second half of her water from her first canteen, Lela gazed at the sunlight dancing on the DL, and the small octagonal shapes all over the floor. ‘Just like on the airplane, but a thousand times bigger!’ she thought to herself and smiled. Sitting on that rock, an amazing sense of peace washed over Lela and she basked in it as an alligator sits in the sun. As she breathed in and out, her breathing itself became very even and her chest felt light, almost giddy. Her thoughts came to her as if they were almost reflexive, ‘Don’t tell anyone about this place, not yet.’

Chapte
r 11

Gabriel burst into his father’s room early the next morning.

“By the time I was finished with Saraceni in the monitoring room last night, and visited medical, you were asleep,” Gabriel explained.

“Like now?” his father joked, throwing the covers aside. Alexander swung his legs to the floor quickly and stared alertly at his son, “Everything okay?”

“You mean, as okay as it can be here? Yeah, but they let me watch surveillance on Lela last night. Do you think she’s in danger? I swear, I’m a calm person, but if these people do anything to her, or Gretchen, or Caleb, I don’t know who I’ll become.”

“I saw her too,” Alexander confirmed. He squinted his eyes as he did in stressed concentration and tapped his thumb repeatedly on the bed. “She seemed alright, but I definitely don’t like them recording her like that, and I let Saraceni know about it.”

“What did he say?” Gabriel asked.

“Same old you’ll understand in time rap,” Alexander responded. He was making his bed with hospital corners and neatly tucked his slippers under the front right corner of the bed.

“You and your nervous energy, Dad.” Gabriel handed his father a pillow, “She was talking about flying to Africa the next morning when I saw her. She seemed very tired-physically okay, but…not herself.”

“I saw her on the plane to Africa, talking to that Brett Davies guy. She didn’t seem too tired, but she mentioned seeing that Phillip Harriman. Your Mom’ll be jealous.”

“She actually went to see him? I’m shocked.” Gabriel responded. “She must’ve been going for Governor Jacob. I haven’t seen him here. I wonder if he’s one of the ones who died.”

“I wish I knew. I’m used to having more information. This place is pretty hard to bear in that regard, but somehow I still feel more at ease here than I should.”

“Most of the time,” Gabriel agreed, pushing aside the olive-toned curtain to look out the window. He had ceased pacing like a caged animal since the outdoor excursion; it was just what he, and many of the others needed, basic outdoor exertion. Today would be another long day in their seats in the training room, but since many were sore from the day before, Molior didn’t mind as much.

Later that morning, in the training room, Gabriel entered and heard David’s voice booming at Saraceni about the surveillance.

“I don’t understand why you need to monitor my family. Are you planning on blackmailing us? I’m not building any weapons, even if you hold my family hostage.” Murmurs of assent came from many recruits.

“We are not blackmailing you and we are not hurting your families,” Saraceni said flatly, obviously offended at the accusation. It was the first time he had appeared more like a regular person and less like some Socratic model.

“Then why tape them?” Juliet asked.

“We don’t tape them. You view them in real time. And we do it so you can see that they are fine and to help you learn,” Saraceni responded.

“What can we learn from watching our families doing dishes?” Juliet countered.

“It can’t be in real time,” Gabriel challenged, and Saraceni looked weary, “My Dad and I visited you in the monitoring room an hour apart, but it was night at first and then the middle of the day an hour later. That’s not possible.”

“Time is a slippery concept,” Saraceni began. The door swung open quickly and Ruth Fielding breezed in. The class was caught off guard and took their seats. Wood and Stone immediately stood up and began collecting papers from the work bench in front of them, expecting to be called away.

“Good morning, recruits. I am Ruth Fielding. I work here and help prepare your curriculum,” she explained while putting down her files and water on the table at the front of the room. Saraceni looked at her quizzically and Ruth’s eyes conveyed that she had everything under control.

“Ruth Fielding runs this facility,” Saraceni added for the benefit of his recruits, who didn’t know what they were in for.

“Time is a slippery concept? Is that the topic of today’s lecture?” Ruth looked at the class, not Saraceni. They all looked at her, clearly conveying they didn’t know the topic of today’s lecture. “Oh, I see. Well, perhaps before you stage a mutiny you should try to put aside your emotions and visit the subject matter as a clinical observer. Perhaps you might learn something.” Kyle stared at his feet and shuffled them on the floor. Jane Grey Windsor intently took notes, as if staring at the paper would allow her to escape scrutiny. The rest of the class remained silent. All felt like they were in 5
th
grade again.

“Mr. Saraceni, the project team could use your services. I think I will teach today.” Saraceni nodded slightly, picked up his things and walked slowly past her to exit, glancing over his shoulder at the startled look on his recruits faces. He motioned to Wood to join him and he moved to follow. Ruth caught Saraceni’s arm and whispered to him so no one else could hear, “The Dark Janae attacks have broken into new territory, and with a greater rate of success. I need you to coach Hallowell and her teams.” Saraceni nodded and he and Wood filed out of the room. Stone retook his seat. He’d never seen Ruth Fielding teach a class before, and he was enthralled at the idea of what he might witness. Her actual teaching style and personality might be visible to him. Surely this would make him a sought-after storyteller among the Circle 2’s. Ruth removed her suit jacket and hung it neatly on the back of a chair. She pushed a wisp of silver bangs away from her forehead and assessed the class. She’d read all their profiles and seen surveillance on all of them. She knew them better than they knew themselves, literally.

“So, the linear concept of time…. a slippery concept indeed. If we say it is today here, and it is tomorrow in Tokyo right now, is that an impossibility? Isn’t point of view involved? Is time objective? Gabriel?” her laser focus was sharp and she started in more quickly than Saraceni would have. The class perceived the difference and shifted to a more business-like mode.

“Time is objective and subjective,” Gabriel concluded after a moment’s thought.

“How is it objective? Are you sure?” Ruth prompted.

“Yes, I mean, regardless of point of view of where someone is physically located, even the old astronaut example, there’s still some core true time that remains constantly moving forward. Even assuming that we as humans don’t measure it perfectly, or even properly, the reality of “real” time is still present.”

“And what if time doesn’t really progress, or it doesn’t really move in the direction it seems to, how would we know?’ Ruth asked, jarring awake the analytical minds of her students-for-a-day. “Anyone?”

“Like we’re all under some mass delusion that we all perceive time to progress the same way, but it doesn’t?” Kyle asked. His vernacular seemed to adapt to that of the group at an exponential rate.

“Hypothetically.” The corners of Ruth’s mouth turned slightly up as she amused herself with her own internal monologue. She often had two or three trains of thought progressing simultaneously, which is why teaching was not a comfortable fit for her anymore. Recruits minds were so linear it was confining to the advanced Circles.

“Not a mass delusion,” Enam Bamidele corrected, “but we’re all subject to the same thermodynamic reactions so we experience what they call the “psychological arrow of time”. It’s like one of the physical laws, where chemicals reactions only work in one direction, but not in the reverse. We experience time the way we do because our brains are wired to experience it that way.”

“Yes, psychologically, we order things to make sense of them,” Jane added as the resident anthropologist.

“You can’t be saying that time itself is just a psychological trick. I hate to break it to you, but there exist reams of scientific data that refute that,” Gabriel added.

“Yes,” Ruth agreed, “based on the principals of the universe that go along with that scientific data, and before we begin, I’m not suggesting that time moves backwards, but let us just theorize for a few moments.” All nodded agreement.

“Let us suppose you are moving along a wire across the universe, and the person next to you is moving along another wire in a different direction with a shorter initial path. Since we know from our astronomer friends that the universe is expanding at an exponential rate, depending on where you started and where they started, your positions in the universe, if you are moving along your wire as the universe is expanding, could not the initial shorter journey become the longer one as you are making it?” she asked.

“You mean like if I started walking on a boardwalk out toward the ocean, but they were building the boardwalk as I walked so I ended up walking farther than I initially intended to?” Juliet asked, demonstrating her grasp of the concept.

“That works fine for a boardwalk,” Gabriel challenged, looking to his right at Juliet in a collegial peer debate, “but for that to occur on the scale of the universe’s fabric of space-time, we don’t live that long. For us to actually feel the impact of the universe’s expansion at the level of our own perceptions, even assuming,” he stared pointedly at Ruth Fielding indicating his skepticism of the concept, “that
hypothetically
that was possible, we’d have to live aeons. It would never be perceptible to a species that lives like 70 or 80 years.”

“What if you didn’t have to stay on the same path, but could jump from your wire to someone else’s ? If their path was much longer and you jumped to it, wouldn’t you then feel the difference in time quite abruptly” Ruth continued the hypothetical example.

“That’s not allowed,” Gabriel refuted. “You can’t just jump to someone else’s reality. And even if you could, they’d be in the same boat as you, so it still wouldn’t make a difference.”

“Define ‘same boat’,” Ruth pressed, forcing Gabriel to reanalyze his last statement.

“Assuming,” he conceded, “that they were of the same matter, time and dimension as you to begin with.”

“So you think you can’t jump to someone else’s wire? What about another wire of your own, paths stemming out before you like the spokes of a wheel?”

“Maybe from one initial starting point, there are multiple possibilities, but once you’re on a spoke, you can’t just jump to another spoke, not where time is involved,” Gabriel maintained. He knew theoretically one could move along a thread of time, not across.

“If you were small and physically on the spoke of a wheel, like a bug or something, you could just jump to the next spoke,” Chandra aimed her comment at Gabriel.

“Yes, but that’s in physical space, not in space-time.” Gabriel countered.

“Well, why couldn’t you-where time’s involved, I mean, hypothetically?” she glanced hesitantly at Ruth to see if she was on the right track.

“Within a universe, time does not work that way. It would break the laws of physics,” David spoke up for the first time since his outburst. Ruth intervened.

“To keep us from going down a rat hole, please allow me to change the example.

Imagine you have one man who starts walking at the North Pole along the surface of the Earth and walks any longitudinal line straight to the South Pole (ignore that there is water in the way for now). His journey would be very long, one step at a time, and at the end, you would ask him if he walked a straight path, what would he reply? ”

“Most people would reply yes,” Enam contributed.

“And would they be right?” Ruth prompted

“No,” Kyle answered, “I mean, he must’ve walked around some rocks, or deviated to find somewhere to sleep, so it wouldn’t be exactly straight.”

“Certainly, but that’s not exactly where I’m headed. I mean, assuming we gave him a compass, a GPS, everything he needed and told him he would be awarded 1 million dollars if he walks an exact straight line to the South Pole, and he walks down the seven degree East longitude line-when he arrives, would he be paid?” Ruth queried.

“No,” answered Alexander, “whoever was on the hook to pay him would tell him he didn’t walk a straight line because of the curvature of the Earth.”

“Well, he can’t help that, what’s he supposed to do, burrow through the crust?” Juliet retorted.

“Then, to clarify, if we had a second, impartial observer located at the Earth’s core, and the Earth were invisible, and she watched the man walk down the seven degree longitude line, it would be clear his path was not a straight one because of vantage point,” Ruth advised.

“So, you want us to see that we aren’t moving straight through time though we think we are because the fabric of space-time is curved,” Gabriel concluded.

“Precisely,” Ruth praised him with her affirmation.