Thursday, April 12, 2012

16. A Close Call

Henly quickly pocketed his tricorder and slipped up the spiral stairway in the corner of the room to rendezvous with Lord Myron in the foyer.

"We have to get out of here," he rasped anxiously.

"What?" Lord Myron rasped in kind.

"We cannot remain here..."

His cohort appeared to be having a full blown panic attack. "What did you see down there?"  Myron could see Henly's forehead wrinkle above the goggles.

"We can't talk here," whispered Henly.

"Understood."

As they stepped from the front door, Henly trained his attention to a fob watch he'd extracted from a breast pocket.

Lord Myron confronted His Right Honourable Chairman to the Ministry of Science on the approach.  "Your Honour!"

Henly stepped beside Myron, watch in hand... "Ah, Right Honourable Sir!  We feared we would miss you," he said with a convincing rush in his voice and pocketed the fob watch.

The pale man appeared to be fit yet of a slightly meaty build, not quite that of a wrestler.  It was not likely that he relied on his elaborately etched brass and mahogany walking stick.  He had silvery white hair pulled back with no facial hair save long sideburns and bushy eyebrows.  His eyes were an intense blue-grey.  The pupils were a bit strange for a human and resembled that of a Terran goat or sheep. Henly would estimate this humanoid to be the equivalent of mid-seventies.  He was well-dressed, sported finely crafted cufflinks and a gold watch chain.

He noticed the man caught a glimpse of the device on Henly's arm, an item which utilized technology from either of their futures by half a millennium.

"Forgive me," he said graciously with a bow, revealing a long silvery ponytail, "whilst I would normally be more accommodating to our citizens, today is a busy day, and I await a visitor."

Henly bowed as Lord Myron allowed him to do the talking. "Our pardon.  I hope to repyay you with a visit very soon.  I met with a most strange phenomenon and seek an explanation with which to reconcile my senses."

"In that case I look forward to it!" The gentleman smiled warmly, his cheeks flushing pink, presumably over the prospect of a mystery to challenge his savvy in things temporal.

Myron and Henly bowed slightly, then made way for His Right Honourable Chairman to pass, where he disappeared behind the door.

Henly and Myron continued along the docks toward the center of town.

"Where to now?" whispered Myron.

"City Hall.  I must look over any records of missing persons as quickly as possible."

15. The Unnatural Cabinets

The starchart corroborated the "Symbol of the Gods" to originate from Henly's own time, only as seen from another galaxy. The acquisition of Federation technology and Lord High's apparent skills to shield it from detection worried Henly. The panel was locked and expressed complaint via a series of staccato sounds.

"Your people's?" inquired Lord Myron.

Henly nodded. "Yes. He's restricted access by using a fractal algorythm."

"That word is not translating for me," said Myron in a low voice.

"Very, very intricate," remarked Henly.

"I'll settle for that."

They both smiled for a moment. The two men had taken their respective translators for granted.

"If he's so advanced, what need has he of the people of Neo Adapolis?"

"That's a good question Lord Myron. Is the town sitting on valuable metals?"

Myron pondered the question for a moment. "Not that I'm aware," he said, "what about transdimensional flight? He's been dabbling in all sorts of anomalies, and what of the Farnsworths? That certainly was a strange phenomenon, but to what purpose would whomever need to lure people away?"

"To what indeed..." Henly paused. "How much do you know about this console overall?"

Myron slowly orbited the panels. "I know basic usage as would most beyond their mid-teens," he said while staring at the interface," but some of the technology is strange, like there's something else where a switch or display would otherwise be." he fingered the wood near an illuminated sphere, which briefly changed hue when his flesh moved past. "But let me tell you something. This should NOT be out in the open like this. This is very wrong."

"The cabinets..."

"Operation is on another dimensional plane within the cabinets."

"Or sphere. What if there's no cabinet at your destination to exit from?"

Myron faced Henly. "Pardon?"

"Isn't that how it works? The cabinets are configured to take you into whomever's dimensional cockpit is keyed into that location at that moment?"

"What? No! Nothing of the sort! The cabinets are those which have arrived! They are not stationary beyond there being designated coordinates! If you look at your scanner," Lord Myron pointed to the camouflaged tricorder in Henly's hand, "you may catch that some may not be where they were and other new ones have popped up."

"I had been seeing that, but merely assumed these were cabinets in operation."

"They are always in operation, Mr. Henly."

"In other words this here is not contained and operated outside of the proper environment.

"Precisely."

"Isn't this a touch wreckless?"

"Bit of an understatement," Myron frowned.

"Unless of course this is intentional. After all, how could someone as revered and respected for their intellect set this up by accident?"

"The question is, how has he succeeded in creating this relativity console out here?"

"-And this close to getting it to perform its function - at the cost of a city."

"I wonder what he is using for power?" Lord Myron Half-squatted to take a look beneath the console. "That stairway to the basement...," he straightened.

Just then they heard the door downstairs shut. Henly and Myron both took to silent breathing. They froze, facing eachother. There was no further sound from below.

A guest? Perhaps a local official.  Neither of them said a word.

Henly lifted his tricorder, set it to silent, and monitored movement in the foyer. He and Myron watched a dot on the schematic as it neared the boundaries of the building and beyond, followed by the distant echo of the door as it shut.

The two men exhaled hard.

Let's check below," whispered Henly.

They made their way down the narrow spiral of steps in the corner. Lord Myron decided to take a seat in the foyer as Henly continued down.

The piping from the console above had diverted to one side of the foyer, where a bookcase was placed to draw attention from it. In the dim light of an upright control panel, Henly examined rudimentary machinery the bottom-most level route to a glass tank of 2 meters by 2 filled with dark fluid. He held his tricorder up to it and - although similated, could not help but gasp at the readings.

Monday, February 27, 2012

14. The Conservatory

There was a symbol on a mat before the front door.  The two men looked down, then looked at one another.

"The symbol of the gods," said Lord Myron. 

Indeed its pattern closely resembled the ancient Mayan calendar of Earth: a complex design of glyphs set in a series of rings around a centerpiece of what appeared to be a constellation.  The tricorder confirmed it to be the coordinates of their current position; Henly recorded it.

Lord Myron leaned towards Henly's ear and whispered: "Is he in?"

"No," Henly whispered, "no life forms detected."

"You should be aware that I have a proximity device of my own..."

"...and I do not register on it..."

"Correct."

"...then it's working."

"I was thinking more along the lines of: if you don't then it's possible that His Honour may yet be within."

"Yes well there's that, but my scanner is calibrated to detect an array of non-organic activities consistent with intelligent behavior."

"I suppose it would."

Henly smiled.

The door was unlocked.  The ground floor was unspectacular for the most part: a room with quaint knick knacks on surfaces and what looked like comfortable chairs with ornate upholstery.  There was a narrow spiral staircase in a far corner and set in shadow so as to escape notice from anyone not expressly looking for it.  Deep red wallpaper with golden frames depicting scenes and forefathers of Neo Adapolis.  An Oriental rug of high quality with the same symbol incorporated into the center.

Henly looked toward the stairway, where the sound was loudest.  He nodded and Lord Myron slipped up.  Henly followed.  The stairway wound into a grand conservatory.

The conservatory was jammed with a mixture of contemporary and future technology.  Scanner
Screens including a grid of energy readings throughout the city alternated with more ornately framed portraits and scenes of Neo Adapolis' history.  Bookcases filled with journals and tomes were everywhere.  A drafter's tabouret of scrolls with a starchart weighted down at the corners displayed this portion of the galaxy, only the stars' positions were shifted slightly.  Henly's camouflaged tricorder triangulated the coordinates; he raised his eyebrows, sending yet again a ripple to his forehead above his anagraphic goggles.

"This is not possible...," gasped Myron.

Henly turned in Myron's direction and took a good look at the central console for the first time.  It was not unlike the console they beheld in the sphere, only more technology populated its panels.  A great cylinder of etched brass rose from its center and rotated slowly: the source of the grating, metallic sound.  Static played above from branches of what looked like copper, illuminating the dome with flashes of blue and reflecting on the panes of the dome.  A flare of spectral light hung in the air like a rainbow in the midst of violent tongues of lightning.  How beautiful, he thought.

Making his way around the console, Henly found several cultures represented on its panels.  He stopped at an LCARS systems interface.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

13. The Big Title

The residents of New Adapolis hurried into the streets, startled by the display of blue lightning within their homes.  Women chattered with one another about the strange occurrence.  A vicar connected indexes and thumbs as he stood outside the local rectory.  He observed the flurry of activity with his usual calm.  Henly and Lord Myron strolled through this scene, anxious but silent.  Henly deduced the vicar had warned his minions of similar inevitabilities as one would have expected of the times, only the vicar didn't know he would not be exempt from the  city's fate.

"Things are falling into place, Lord Myron," he said just loud enough to be heard by one man, "and not in a good way."

"So I gathered," replied  Myron.  His pale skin drew beads of sweat as the two maintained a running walk across town.

People left behind half-filled cups at a tea parlor to join and learn from those already in the streets.  Barbers, engineers, coachmen, society women and seamstresses, urchins darting about the adults like trees... It appeared that very little of the active populace were unaware of the phenomenon.

With so many citizens suddenly in evidence, Henly took in the great diversity of species.  Amphibian, furred, one type resembling simian, several reptilian but each unique from the other, plus all manner of humanoid beyond Terran.  Indeed it was that everybody came from somewhere else.  And they all lived by the same social code. The concept was positively exhilirating.

At last they reached the piers - and headed for one in particular.

"I'm overriding the filter and narrowing the band as far as it will go.  At this frequency I can pinpoint just about anything, but risk detection."

Lord Myron looked into the murky water, knowing what lay below.  He noticed Henly playing with the scanner's settings without hesitation and agreed privately that at this stage action was paramount.

Henly whirled and pointed his device past Myron's shoulder as the scanner gave off a sequence of high-pitched tones.   Myron turned slowly to determine the destination.

Facing back toward the street one could hear the snapping of sparks nearby as the robots welded submersible vehicles without deviation.  There was another sound mixed in as during their prior visit, only now that second sound was prominent.  It was like a rhythmic steam engine propelling metal on metal.  Or so Lord Myron could best categorize.

Henly looked up in revelation.  It came from the nearest building.  "Whose establishment is this?"

"Someone from the city counsel," Lord Myron said.  "This is a major landmark at this time. Its dome is in the first glimpse of skyline for approaching merchant and airships. There are many engravings, some of night scenes depicting an exceptionally bright..." his voice trailed off.  

Henly stepped past Myron toward the building.  The grating effect was unlike any steam powered contraption he'd ever heard.  "What did this official do?"

"The official title is His Right Honourable Chairman to the Ministry of Science. You can imagine such a position ranks high in this society."

Henly nodded while looking up at the patina dome.

"They say he was the man who unlocked the secret of our ancestors, made it possible for my people to utilize their technology on a small scale..."

"...he made your time machines possible..."

"He may have," Myron said slowly.

Henly turned back toward him.

"You know how these work.  Sometimes they take the credit for the the efforts of someone in their charge..."

"-but you don't think so..."

"They say this was built to his exact specifications, that he was a hard practitioner."

Henly took the inaccurate translation to mean the man was obsessed, a fanatic. "And he disappeared with the city?"

"Presumably."

"What would you say to paying this prominent and well-respected member of the community a visit?"

Lord Myron lifted his hat enough to wipe some perspiration from his hairline. "I was afraid you might suggest that."

Friday, January 27, 2012

12 - The Forboding Incident

Henly grimaced.  Yes the field of chronoton particles covered a wider range at the pier, but the center of the disturbance shifted like a roiling cloud.  So much for human hunches. 

"A pence for your thoughts," said Lord Myron patiently.

Henly managed a smile, not removing his attention from the tricorder.  "I'm thinking the sphere isn't everything."

"I agree," Myron said.

"-and I may know its purpose.  I hope for everybody's sake that I'm wrong."

On that ominous note Henly and Lord Myron set out for one of the designated spots where a time travel device would be.  An odd cabinet or shed stood beside a townehouse in an alley.  They went to a second location.  A similar cabinet sat in a corner of a carriage house.  A third led them to a large wardrobe in a parlor seen through a window from the street. 

"They possess a mechanism which camouflages them in various scenarios," Lord Myron explained, "for a society such as this where their use is commonplace, this is more for vanity and a desire to accessorize than to escape detection.  Hello what's this then?" A fifth target baffled Myron, who raised his derby to scratch his head.  A small tabletop lamp in the same room gave off strong emissions, by Henly's tricorder display stronger than the cabinet.

"I believe," Henly said cautiously, "that the item over there could be one of the articles from the sphere."

The front door was unlocked when they tried it.  The two men stepped in and nodded in turn to a man wearing engineer's coveralls as he passed them in the foyer to leave. This had to have been another boarding house.  They turned into the day room and stopped at the table where the lamp was set on a macramé doily.

Myron thought to touch the object.  It looked perfectly innocuous: a hurricane lamp of blown, frosted glass with a floral pattern etched with soft curves.  He thought the better of it and withdrew his hand. "What function does it serve?"

"It could be a phase shift inducer.  There were some within the sphere.." Henly looked up. "But why would anyone here need such a device?"

"What can it do?"

Henly's brow could be seen  frowning behind his goggles.  "Based on what you've said," he whispered, "a series of these could create a net of energy and collectively move the city, only but not spatially.  Temporally or transdimensionally."

After a pause, Myron asked: "Could this be why these objects were created?  To be set throughout Neo Adapolis undetected to relocat the city by this means?"

"I would say that's a distinct possibility."

"And what of the sphere?  Would that be the mechanism with which the city would be removed?"

"Not if my theory is correct.  We should return..."

Suddenly lines of static snapped to life in the room.  They passed through the lamp, bending as though passed through a prism.  Henly took care to keep his distance for fear of deactivation.  His tricorder output a cacophony of sounds. Henly and Myron stared at one another.

Suddenly all was normal.

"Blimey... What does the scanner say?"

Henly raised his tricorder and played with some switches.  "This is a pattern enhancer in the guise of a hurricane lamp.  A network of lamps set within structures around the city's perimeter to encompass everything within for... for... "

"What? For what?"

"This must have been a 'test drive'.  And according to readings during those few moments, the source of the emissions did not originate from the sphere."

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

11 - Neo Adapolis' Destiny

They walked through the fog along a cobblestone thoroughfare which opened into a marketplace.  They stopped, observing merchants hawking wares and women examining produce, inspecting fabrics, haggling for wool...

The locals were either oblivious or unconcerned of the happenings nearby in the harbor, and paid no attention to the two well-dressed but slightly unkempt men observing the scene. 

"It appears Mister Henly that the time lapsed while away is not consistent."

Henly was silent.   His room at the inn had long been re-let.  Six weeks had passed. There was no explanation for this, assuming there may be an actual science at work. And even if there were, could a computer program trained in medicine ever decipher what even the most accomplished temporal physicist could not?

This was still assuming the chronoton surge was the result of logical behavior rather than deliberate tampering.

And what of Lord Myron?  Was he whom he claimed to be, or there to monitor Henly to keep things going?

Henly raised his device for the fifth time that hour.  It indicated an almost blurry intensity of radiation from the direction where they emerged early that morning.

As he pondered the readings, Myron stepped into the movement of the square and purchased a scone with a tin cup of hot cider.

Henly frowned behind his goggles.  The readings were so intense yet so vague.  How could that be?  They did not resemble a phase shift; anyone unfamiliar could mistake it for one though...

...or was that the point?

He looked up at the grey sky. 

Lord Myron watched as he sat on a large burlap sack, observing Henly's shifting facial expressions.  The newest one looked promising.

Henly looked down and caught Myron in a half-smirk with a mouthful of food.

"What is it?"

Myron gulped hard, then chased it with some drink. After some moments he said, "For a moment I thought we were getting somewhere."

"I'm don't know..."

"Hold onto that thought, no matter how improbable."

Henly paused.  He had witheld from Myron his true nature, and with it his lack of a "gut instinct." Still, there was something to be said for unvisited options when all likely avenues were exhausted.  Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle said as much...

"There is something not right about these readings.  I've taken the radiation of the chronoton particles into consideration so that any phase shift on their part should be filtered out, yet the readings remain... 'fuzzy'."

Myron nodded. 

"I'd like to run a scan of the pier and immediate vicinity, narrow the beam."

For reasons Henly couldn't fathom, a smile slowly crawled across Lord Myron's face.

"Good show, man.  If anyone can crack this mystery, you can!"

For a microsecond, Henly wondered if his companion could be some form of artificial intelligence as well.  Short of him being the source or cause of this phenomenon, which was highly unlikey.  More like he'd come to this point in his people's history to learn first-hand the cause of some catastrophic event.  It could explain why Neo Adapolis was in no known Federation navigation records.

"Myron," he whispered discretely as the man stood, dusted the crumbs off his coat, and walked up to him, "I think it's time you told me what happened here."

Myron responded with a nervous chuckle. "What gave you the idea that I know what will happen?"

"Everything."

The smile disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

"Well?"

Lord Myron grew very serious as he looked Henly in the eye. "Neo Adapolis, with all its inhabitants," he whispered, "disappeared from known existence."

Friday, October 21, 2011

10 - Back to Sphere One

"No no, this can't be right."

Lord Myron observed Henly's annoyance with interest.

"This was where I had teleported to, presumably while Mrs. Farnsworth had been pulled from the water.".

"Ah."

There were more items from the period with barely any recognizable future tech.  Well, it was all from the future...

"Everything here looks like ordinary furniture or appliances, but they aren't," Henly fingered a hurricane lamp, wondering briefly why it was named thus when its shape did not resemble a storm system, "they're scanners, environmental fields, gravitational emitters... Some I cannot detect what their function is," he walked to the console at the center, "but they output a tremendous amount of chronoton particles.  That's what brought me here.  Wherever this is, the emissions are bleeding through to wherever Neo Adapolis' harbour is."

 "This I recognise," said Lord Myron as we stepped over to the center console.  He fingered the workmanship; it had taken on a fine wood surface since Henly's first visit.  "My people use this technology for relative travel."

"'Relative travel'?"

"We have learned that the universe is convoluted rather than one vast expanse.  We have found that it is not necessary to travel a straight line to reach distant destinations.  Mass and light bend to give the illusion of an expanse from our poont of view.  These allow us to pass through these so-called edges of space into the next - 'bend in the road' so to speak."

Having no eyebrows, it was not apparent that Henly's would have been raised, his eyes wide behind anagraphic glass. "More than just a theory..."

"Yes."

"Why that means time travel is possible as well.  You visit a star system eons before its state appears through telescopes back on your home planet..."

"Telescope?"

"A..." Henly was caught somewhat offguard, "...a device consisting of several lenses with which to view distant celestial-"

"Aha!  See, now *this* my people call a 'scanner'."

Well, Henly thought, that cleared everything up.

"How did your people come to achieve this sophisticated level of travel?"  Indeed Lord Myron did not appear familiar with much of the phenomena the two encountered this past hour.

"It is 'borrowed' technology from a culture long gone from the cosmos.  It was quite easy for our people to adapt it, even in Neo Adapolis's heyday."

By "heyday" it was easy to conclude that Lord M was referring to the Neo Adapolis they had been traversing.  So he was a direct descendant.

"I keep seeing a smattering of small objects emitting chronoton particles throughout the city.  They come and go.  Approximately one meter wide and deep."

"That would be Relative Capsules being used for travel."

Suddenly they were in black seawater.

Henly deduced they had spent twelve minutes in the mysterious room while he acted quickly and grabbed Myron by the scruff of his collar to pull him toward the docks.  It wasn't the most ideal method but there were no signs of distress or asphyxiation.  Henly gripped a corner post with one hand, deftly repositioned his other hand to grasp the back of Myron's coat, and hoisted the man over and onto the pier.  Henly then lifted himself out of the water to stand beside Myron, who was taking in great gasps of air while lying in a small puddle.  Seems that despite its gill-like application, Myron's invention was ill-equipped to shield him from fluids.

A nearby dockside pub cast its light on the two men,  who would have appeared as two roiling, glistening dark masses from dingy windows.

It seemed Myron had kept a firm grip on his hat the whole time; he now tilted it to pour off the water before returning it to his head with an air of stubborn dignity.

Henly waved his device up and down between them.  "You're fine.  None the worse for wear.."

Lord Myron nodded.

"Come, I have a room," said Henly.