33. To the Archivemobile

“Found anything?” Avi asked for the fifth time that week, wringing his hands.

“I’ve only gotten a hundred miles out and ten years back. This is a lot of information to comb through, and I can’t ask for help.” Colette rubbed her eyes. “This needs a team.”

“I know.”

“Thank God a lot of this is digitized. OCR is getting better, but ... still.” She took her hands away from her eyes to look at him, suddenly. “Am I crazy for doing this, Avi?”

“I don’t know,” he said numbly.

“Tell me about this location you need. Why does it matter?”

He came in and sat down. It was so quiet in here, air clean and dry with the musty-paper smell of files, shelves receding away surreally like an under-textured 1990s CGI scene, full of printed and written memories that were mostly mundane at the time and not his problem. He’d used to come in here and take naps. Now it was like a mine about to cave in. The gentle static hum of the fluorescent lights were like a wasp around his ears, a buzz in his teeth like a dental drill.

“Well...I—“ he looked down the nearest row of shelves. “I don’t know where the wormhole came out, if it was a wormhole.”

“Can’t you just reproduce the accident? Or ... is that too dangerous?”

“No! I mean, I’d risk it, but I don’t know exactly what happened.”

“What do you mean? The thing saves readings, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, but there were six factors in the readings and there was a LOT of fluctuations within those factors. I have those saved, but I don’t know which exact combination pushed it over the boundary condition for normal spacetime. I’ve been trying to brute-force the combination, like a computer password, but there...there’s so much fluctuation within each factor. I finally did math last night, and unless we luck out bigtime, it would take about ninety years, working round the clock. And that would be if we could keep testing back to back, but these conditions really stress the components so we’d only be able to try about once a day.

“But—but if you can find him in the past, where, to be fair, he probably isn’t, that doesn’t fit with any theories about time travel or transversible wormholes, but if he IS, the amount of power the distance in time or space it would require could help me calculate the setup needed to reproduce the accident!”

“Ok, that makes sense.”

“It does?”

“Well, as much as anything does.”

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