Granular, Episode 3: Data Regression Suppression
[Editor’s note: read the entire story from the beginning.]
Through most of Zach’s seven-hour spaceflight back to Central Colony Four, he could think of nothing else but the bizarre granular effect he’d seen first hand. Well, that and the startling sensor readings he’d taken in his hotel room the following morning. Well, that and being a murder suspect on an alien lunar colony. Well, that and Paula Altenberg, whose dark brown eyes seemed to gaze at him from every smooth surface in his cabin.
Surely, he told himself, it was just the heat of the moment. Paula had been a friendly face in an alien environment, after a night of terrifying dreams. But whatever his logical mind demanded he believe, his body refused to comply. The memory of her voice, the light bouncing off her hair, the way she smiled at him, as if….
“What good is it?” he whispered. He clapped both hands over his face and tried to make peace with the truth. He was infatuated with that woman, but felt as if the odds of seeing her again were lower than the freezing point of mercury. Wait, he realized, that made no sense. Lower odds equated with lower temperatures? Maybe space-time wasn’t the only thing that was breaking up into dysfunctional bits.
Get a grip, he thought.
Earlier in his life, he’d had a best friend to confide in. But the stress of work and the inertia of his daily routine had made friendship into a time-intensive luxury. Now he had no one.
After too many postponed dates and absent-minded conversations, his last two relationships had also dissipated, like steam off a hot griddle. The fact was, his work had become everything to him. And now, his inability to either analyze or classify the granular effect, much less combat it, left him all alone in the universe.
But only if he gave up, he decided. It wasn’t as if he knew nothing about the forces that shaped space-time. Whatever the granular effect was, it had to be an outgrowth of existing phenomena. If he could just identify the trigger mechanism. But so far, he lacked the data to reach a meaningful conclusion. When he returned to his lab on Central Four, he could analyze the meagre datastream he’d managed to collect before Altov’s shocking call.
Fortunately, he’d already retrieved that data with his handheld, from the scanners he’d abandoned in his hotel suite. It was now safely uploaded to Bohr University’s NexusNebula. Good thing he’d acted fast. Now that his commercial star liner had enfolded itself in a so-called “warp bubble” ─ an archaic term that Zach loathed ─ no wireless signal could come in or out.
And now what? With three more hours to go, he might have thought to read through archived output from the inter-temporal analysis he’d left behind to pursue this madness. Yet it wasn’t at all clear that his project was relevant anymore. Maybe, perish the thought, the nature of space-time itself had changed. He and the rest of human science might have to start over from scratch!
Need a drink, he told himself.
Unlike the cramped quarters endured by conventional air-travelers in centuries past, the average star liner was spacious and well-appointed. With only a tiny fraction of external gravity and no wind resistance, a star liner’s size was limited mostly by market forces. That meant a weary traveler looking for diversion had a lot of options.
He walked out of his cabin and headed for the star liner’s food court. In his fevered state of mind, the “Gravity Well Bar and Grill” seemed to materialize like a desert mirage just a few meters to his left. On entering, Zach waved off a robotic server and slid onto the corner barstool. On the next stool was a human male absorbed in day-old news on a bright red quantum tablet. Zach ordered two fingers of Epsilon Eridani scotch and tried to make his heart settle down. But the moment the android bartender set his glass on the counter, Zach’s neighbor looked up from his reading. A burly man, his salt and pepper hair was a jagged array of asymmetrical razor cuts.
“Civilization’s going crazy,” he said. “Did you hear the latest?”
“Haven’t kept up with the news,” said Zach into his drink.
“You gotta,” said the man. “This reporter just blew the lid off the Extrasol Construction Company.”
Zach glanced at him sideways. There were conspiracy theory jockeys all over his university campus ─ most of whom were first-year students. He didn’t expect to find any on a commercial star liner and certainly not in this man’s age bracket.
“Hey, I know that look,” said Zach’s bar mate. “Listen, my name’s Preston Carter, I’m a journalist. You heard of me?”
“Sorry,” said Zach. “Like I said, I’m not much of a news hound.”
“OK,” said Preston. “I respect that, even if I can’t understand it. But at least you know the difference between news and misinformation, right?”
“Sure,” said Zach. “But in my field, we hear all kinds of space-related rumors. I mean, haven’t people been crying wolf about WorldGov colonies for the last hundred revs?”
Preston stared at him a moment, then jammed a pudgy thumb into the screen of his tablet.
“Yeah?” he said. “Well this is real. Reporter from the Sidereal Chronicle … uh … Paula Altenberg. She’s top notch. See? Even you’ve heard of her.”
Zach’s jaw had dropped just enough to give him away, but he decided there was no reason to let on exactly how he’d heard of Paula.
“So … what’s going to blow the lid off Extrasol?” he asked.
According to Paula’s reporting, Preston told him, there’d been a sharp rise in severe accidents at space colonies originally laid out by Extrasol’s automated construction crews. Particularly jarring had been a series of explosions in the colonies’ main power grids.
Preston’s eyes widened.
“What do you think?” he said. “It says here that there was an explosion on Haliak just yesterday, over in the high-rent district ─ and Haliak was totally an Extrasol job. Lucky for me, I was covering the opening of the new Crelenk space observatory on the other side of town. Hey, what field did you say you were in?”
“I just said I’d heard a lot of rumors,” said Zach.
“Naw,” said Preston. “You said ‘in my field.’ You a scientist?”
Zach shrugged. At some point, he decided, a little bit of truth might go farther than a whole lot of denial toward keeping his mission secret. He raised his glass, as if in a salute.
“Zach Griffin,” be said. “I’m in the Astrophysics Department at Bohr University.”
“Right,” said Preston. “The Time guy! Wow, would I like to get a statement from you about this Extrasol scandal.”
Zach winced.
“Oh … no … no,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t seen any of the data. Ms. Altenberg might be very reputable, but that doesn’t make her scientifically literate. You see what I mean?”
Preston let out a sigh.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Hey bartender, another round for me and my friend. Don’t worry, I’ll cover it. I’ll bet those university types are pretty stingy with reimbursements, am I right?”
Zach nodded knowingly, even though his expense account was more than adequate for any reasonable expense.
“So, tell me,” said Preston. “What’s a hot-plasma guy like you doing all the way out on Haliak? Don’t tell me you have a thing for Crelenk females.”
“It’s classified,” said Zach. “And for the record….”
“Aw, come on, that was a joke,” said Preston. “But help me out, will ya? Here I am, a science journalist, alone for three hours with a top temporal expert. Can’t you give me something? My editor is already chewing me out for letting Altenberg get the Extrasol scoop.”
Zach took a deep breath and made two key realizations. In the first place, with the potential for murder charges to be leveled at him by the Crelenk government, he wasn’t in a position to make an enemy of an aggressive journalist. Second, with the gist of Paula’s article nibbling at the edge of his consciousness — not to mention everything he’d been through in the previous twenty-four hours ─ talking shop with Preston was probably the best way to escape his obsessive thoughts.
“Buy me dinner,” he said. “I’ll see if I can come up with something exclusive about my latest work, OK?”
Later that night, well fed and a bit more inebriated than he was used to, Zach found himself fighting to stay awake on the lander for Central Colony Four. So when a team of three plain-clothes members of the Bohr University security team confronted him after Customs, it was a little overwhelming. The first to speak was a tall, Chinese woman dressed as if for a formal dinner party.
“Professor Griffin?” she said. “No need to worry. We have your security needs met. Your car’s waiting. Come this way.”
Zach’s slurred speech embarrassed him, but not nearly as much as the phrase ‘security needs’ scared him.
“Security?” he asked. “What? Am I in some kin’ of … of dangerous?”
The woman glanced at her companions.
“We’ll explain on the way,” she said. “But please, the car. Now.”
The next few hours were forever a blurry patch in Zach’s memory. As he pieced together later, they consisted of him being escorted home, given strict instructions not to answer his door and then tucked into bed, following an injection to counteract the worst effects of his high blood-alcohol level.
“That stings,” he remembered saying, and just about nothing else. That is, except for a general sense of urgency that he couldn’t quite grasp. Only the next morning, after he’d been escorted by a security team to Semyon Altov’s office, did he begin to understand.
Altov’s grim face, drained of anything resembling good humor, already told Zach more than he was ready to hear. Altov shut his office door.
“Sit down, Son,” said Zach’s department chair. “Before I fill you in on the current situation, I want you to know that this department, in fact, the entire University administration, will do everything possible to protect you in the coming months.”
Zach’s eyes and mouth opened wide, but Altov put his hand up for silence.
“Please,” said Altov, “Listen first. You need to hear the facts as soon as possible.”
Facts? Zach’s mind reeled.
The word “facts,” when applied to a human being, never boded well. As it happened, his anxiety was justified. Based on Loor TreVal’s time of death, only an hour after Zach was spotted entering her home, and corroborated by the presence of human footprints near her strangled body, the Crelenk governor of the Haliak colony had demanded Zach’s extradition.
Zach shot out of his chair and began pacing Altov’s crimson shag carpet like a man obsessed.
“But I … I didn’t…” he stuttered.
Altov stood up from behind his desk and grabbed Zach by the shoulders.
“I know that, Son,” he said. “We all know it. Listen to me, this is just protocol. The AI adjudicator has already confirmed that it couldn’t be you,”
Zach’s shoulders tensed as he fought back tears.
“Adjudicator?” he asked. “I thought those AIs only handled government cases.”
“Come on, Zach,” said Altov, “Your lab is entirely funded by the government. You’re WorldGov from your quantum tablet down to your … your socks. And here’s why you should be grateful. The footprints at the murder site don’t match your shoe size. Not based on your last purchase, anyway.”
“WorldGov tracks my purchases?” asked Zach. “What else do they know?”
“Don’t go there,” said Altov. “Look, they know all my secrets, too. But just the AI and just as classified data points. It’s for your own protection. Nobody cares what you buy or what you do outside the lab. Now sit down again and listen carefully.”
Though the AI adjudicator had fairly well demolished the Crelenk governor’s case against Zach, it would take time for his case to go through Interstellar Court. There, the University’s attorneys could pull out all the stops, including the Certified Psychological Profile (CPP) that WorldGov required of every citizen.
In general terms, the CPP was a combination of exhaustive interviews, cognitive testing, a genomic work up and a quantum computer-assisted holographic brain scan, that could do everything except read his thoughts. Though in fact, a skilled image expert had already demonstrated an ability to narrow the subject’s probable train of thought down to a convincing short list.
Because Zach’s CPP showed conclusively that he lacked the aggressive tendencies required for murder, that and the circumstantial evidence was more than enough to acquit him.
All the same, for at least the next six months, Zach would be under suspicion and, as such, a target for anyone seeking retribution. Or, for that matter, anyone trying to score points against WorldGov “hegemony.”
“I don’t want to scare you,” said Altov, “but the danger is real. You’re not just a suspect, you’re a symbol of everything our non-human allies fear about us. That’s why later today, University Security will transfer your things to a Faculty Club guest suite, where they can protect you better.”
Zach ran his hands through his off-blonde hair.
“Can’t believe it,” he said. “But OK, enough of this nonsense. Doesn’t anybody care about the phenomenon Loor contacted WorldGov about? We need to follow up on the data I captured right away.”
Altov shook his head.
“That’s the other thing we have to talk about,” he said. “Since you’ve been back, we’ve heard from the Haliak governor’s office. Turns out Ms. TreVal was a known crank. That phenomenon she described was the third wild goose chase she’d sent the Haliak government on in the last year.”
“But I saw it myself,” said Zach. “And later, there was another incident, an explosion. An eye witness described the same granular effect I saw in Loor’s living room.”
“Zach,” said Altov, “Let me give you a piece of advice. I’ve never met anybody with a better command of our field. If you tell me you saw something unusual and you have data to prove it, I believe you — without question. But there are times when the truth has to take a back seat to survival. You start raising a fuss about this and you’ll end up on the street.”
“Why?” asked Zach. “It’s just data. And if I’m right, every space colony between here and the belt of Orion is in big trouble. Who is it? Who doesn’t want me to report my findings?”
“No idea,” said Altov. “What I do know is that the University President called me an hour ago and asked me to ensure you wouldn’t go public with any new findings until this trouble blows over.”
“President Delaney?” asked Zach. “What’s it to her, unless she’s doing the bidding of her big donors? Whose the company that just donated forty million credits to renovate the Quantum Computing Center? There’s your answer.”
Altov sighed.
“You mean the Ultramat Corporation?” he asked. “They’re a shipping company. What possible interest would they have in an obscure, unproven cosmic phenomenon? Now look, I know this isn’t easy, but you have to calm down. As soon as you raise your voice about this, someone will post that video of you shambling out of Central Four spaceport the other night.”
Zach’s throat tightened.
“There … there’s a video of that?” he asked.
“Son, there’s always a video,” said Altov. “That’s the universe we live in. And while we’re on the topic, I don’t want to hear any more about you talking to journalists.”
“What?” said Zach. “You think he got me drunk just so he could video me?”
“All I’m saying is,” said Altov, “take the rest of the week off and give yourself a chance to settle into your new reality. Just lie back and catch up on your favorite holo-series. I can get Suvir to cover your classes.”
Zach looked out at his superior through new eyes. Was Altov complicit? Regardless, someone, perhaps the same person who had Loor TreVal killed, was determined to keep Zach quiet. He knew his best bet was to play along ─ but for how long?
The universe is crumbling, he told himself, but not as fast as me.
^^^
Image: Spirit111/Pixabay
Mark Laporta is the acclaimed author of the Changing Hearts of Ixdahan Daherek series and the new novel, Probability Shadow, published by Chickadee Prince Books, available now in paperback or ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or at a bookstore near you.
