A novel. That which is sleepless is ever watchful–awaiting the opportunity to rise again…
CHAPTER ONE
The waves hit small peaks of four feet before the shockwaves coupled into tsunamis. Ethan paddled into the light ocean breaks and his eyelashes caught beads of water from the light spray. Ethan felt comfortable in the water, more comfortable than on land. In the water, his arms could propel him with unimpeded strokes. On land, his bum hip, a consequence from a childhood accident, gave him the lumber of an inebriated Frankenstein. In the water, with legs floating free and locomotion provided by his upper body, he had the grace of a dolphin. Because of this boundary on his talent, his confidence began at the water’s foamy edge and extended across the endless blue until land again intruded upon the ocean’s buoyant support.
Ethan paddled further out. His arms moved in easy strokes and his chest pressed into his surfboard. He took a mouthful of salt water and sprayed it into the air. The droplets and mist fell back down in front of him through the morning air, straight down from the absense of wind.
He glanced to his right, out towards the ocean. The horizon matched the sky above: grey and cloudy. Undulating swells from the ocean, like small moguls on a golf course, approached the shore. Ethan waited patiently, sitting on his board. Time when waiting for waves in the ocean slipped sideways rather than forwards or backwards. Relative time could be traced by the sun’s lazy arc, though past and future never seemed important. He looked towards shore, across a hundred yards of ocean. The shore always appeared farther away while out in the ocean. The idea of land became a mystic experience held only in vague memories. Two cars stared at him from the parking lot as if to remind him that, unlike the sea, some surfaces must be rolled or walked over.
Early morning surfers were a dedicated group. Of those, only the stubborn few journeyed out on cloudy Monday mornings which threatened rain. At six o’clock in the morning the air bit at casual surfers and alarm clocks interrupted their peaceful dreams. These reasons kept weekend or sunny-day surfers in bed and out of the dedicated surfer’s line-up. Ethan smiled, thankful for his lack of company.
The line of palm trees waved back at him. They swayed in unison.
He blinked the water out of his eyes. Two hundred yards down the coast, one other surfer paddled into a wave to catch it on its lip. Ethan watched the other surfer misjudge his position and give up on the wave. The rookie paddled back out to sea to wait for the next break. Other than this other ocean lover, Ethan had the waves to himself.
Ethan looked back at the parking lot. The larger car blinked its headlights at him. He recognized the boxy outline of his own pickup, and the other large vehicle, an SUV, must belong to the other surfer. “Hey man, your girlfriend is bored,” Ethan said to no one, referring to the habit of some surfer’s land-loving friends to honk and flash headlights when they were tired of the beach. “Maybe she should fly a kite, the wind looks strong enough–”
He stopped himself. The morning air was calm, perhaps brewing a dull rain, yet the palm trees waved at him. His senses suddenly became alert. A honking sound accompanied the car’s flashing headlights in synchronicity. This must be the car’s alarm. Ethan connected these two perceptions just as he saw the swells double in height behind him.
* * *
June Berget unbolted the front door to her shop. She took another sip from the cup of coffee she brought into the shop from her apartment upstairs. “Good morning,” she told the empty space to cheer the silence. The sun’s glare within the uniform grey clouds hazed through the front window and lightly warmed her back at the front register.
“Two crystal elephants, check,” she said, verbally tacking off her new register settings. “Topaz from Brazil, check. Ok, who’s next? Ah–handblown lanterns from Peru, check. Mister Register,” she told the machine, “you are now set for another day of customers. I hope everyone likes my latest inventory.”
With her register programmed, she sat down at the jewelry counter and began to count the handicraft jade pendants which she brought back from Oaxaca, Mexico. She hummed while she counted and marked ticks in a ledger. Spherical crystal prisms hung at the front window. The focused lights from the shop bounced within these prisms and painted multicolored triangles on the back wall of the store. June enjoyed inventory duty. She felt as if her goods were treasures, each accompanied by its own story. These stories included the lives of all of their purchasers, and though June sometimes missed the more unique pieces of crystal or mineral, she felt the story of each treasure would continue to enrich another’s life as it had her own. The treasures she brought from overseas or across borders always filled her with mystery and a longing–some of them antiques, some of them contemporary, and all of them filled with a sense of magic, released by the artist from the treasure’s own substance.
Her shop, named _Found In Time_, was seen as a jewelery shop to casual tourists, just another quaint remodeled Victorian home turned into a small business and upstairs apartment. A few tourists, though, recognized her real treasures: fossils. Her small collection of rare finds had been featured in magazines and this collection slowly expanded to become a specialty. From its humble beginnings on single shelf in her Victorian’s closet-cum-niche display, her fossil section now took over one third of her shop. The inventory was tough to find–it took her years to line up credible sellers and rare, authentic pieces–but each fossil held a story older than recorded history. Her passion for fossils had blossomed so thoroughly that her son had taken to calling her “Fossil Freak”, a moniker she came to enjoy. She sub-titled this nickname on her store fliers.
“You, my friend,” June said to an onyx ring as she counted it as stocked, “will end up on the finger of a great princess. Or a great martyr. Which one makes a better story, do you think?” She laughed at herself. “Oh, the princess, of course.” The ring had come from Venezuela. She noticed that it needed cleaning and slipped it from its velvet home. It fit her well.
The multicolored triangles painted on the walls of her shop began to dance.
June was on her last row of rings–wide silver bands with inlays of oyster pearl, made for men–when she began to hear a quiet tinkle all around her. For a moment, she thought someone had entered her shop–either one of the girls, or a very early customer–but such entrances usually didn’t stir up such a wind. She noticed the crystal within the display cases seemed to vibrate. The pieces began to hop, and her new ten inch crystal elephants fell over, upended.
Then she felt the earth buckle, and she suddenly felt sea-sick. She was on land, not on a boat, yet the ground seemed to tip from beneath her chair.
She stood up, suddenly unsure of herself. A loud thump resounded from upstairs, as if someone had suddenly moved a large piece of furniture. She grabbed hold of the display case in front of her to keep her balance for the real waves which followed.
* * *
Jeremy Mitnal squinted at his laptop screen. He glanced at the red numbers of his alarm clock. The red letters blurred slightly, reading six thirty-three in the morning. His typing had slowed but he remained focused. “Come on, give me a signal, dammit,” he said to his screen. “There’s only so many nights I can stay up–hello, what’s this?”
He studied the numbers on his screen which had suddenly become active. “Where’s all this data coming from, there aren’t any launches today.”
His laptop was built for speed, a product of the best performance available for computer gaming. Jeremy Mitnal didn’t play computer games. His hobby used the same mathematical functions as computer games. This continual market for the fastest machines around meant Jeremy could count on the popularity of fast machines. As far as Jeremy was concerned, the only proper use for such power was in massively parallel vector computation. Only amateurs used the incredible power of computers for “gaming.”
The sticker on his laptop read, “Heaviside is Alive.” Heaviside, the genius physicist of the turn of the century, had created the mathematics for transmitting radio waves and receiving radio waves. Heaviside had proposed the existence of an atmospheric layer which might reflect radio waves back to earth–allowing them to be received by remote locations. Jeremy spent four years puzzling over Heaviside. Jeremy designed radios–software radios–radios not built from hardware pre-tuned to listen to only certain frequencies, but radios built with adaptable software which ran on only the fastest computers in existence, software radios which could tune in arbitrary frequencies, isolate specific bands, and perform complex decoding on the information received.
Jeremy’s laptop, if queried, would have reported a system uptime of 127 days. His tracking log for this set of frequencies had lasted over four months, with no data found. His handmade antenna, a long rod covered in rubber tubing, was mounted on the inside of his bedroom wall, connecting to a custom transceiver he had built from plans available on the web. For 127 days the antenna monitored only silence from this part of the spectrum. Now, the data traffic would not stop. Jeremy’s laptop, if queried, would have reported the name Jeremy had assigned to this frequency band: “Vanden 8-48,” short for Vandenberg Air Force base, frequency group eight, decode algorithm forty-eight. This group of spectra could be listened to with standard equipment, but couldn’t be decrypted without a software programmable transceiver. His special equipment could listen to all the frequencies in the entire group simultaneously. The military, Jeremy knew, under pressure to use “Commercial, Off the Shelf” equipment within their own data centers, had begun to transfer certain transmissions to unregulated, high bandwidth, point-to-point wireless bands, where new commercial products were thriving with innovation. The military thought this new data transmission medium could still be secure.
Vandenberg’s central data center, if located on a map, was 32 miles from the house where Jeremy lived. If translated into seismic distance, the time it would take for a shockwave to reach Jeremy would be 42 seconds.
Jeremy felt his chair sway. “I really need some rest,” he told his laptop. “I’m nearly falling out of my chair, staying up all night–”
Jeremy didn’t complete his thought. A complete shelf of books in his tall bookcase lept from their resting place. He heard a car alarm begin its siren sequence outside. His chair jumped, and Jeremy fell sideways, landing against the floor covered with a mess of books. His laptop continued collecting data.
If you enjoyed this chapter, please leave me a note describing why. Thanks!
CHAPTER TWO
The swell caught Ethan by surprise and instinctively he flattened against his surfboard, his abdomen muscles tightening. The bulge of water passed under him, pushing him towards shore and subsequently tugging him back out to the depths. He saw the next wave suddenly breaking just behind him, and he dived to the side, abandoning his surfboard. In the water, he felt a ripple of movement, as if the earth itself shifted in an attempt to throw off the layer of water imposed upon it. He stayed under, allowing the wave to break on the surface, and conserving the oxygen in his lungs by floating, fetus-like, rather than waste his energy kicking against the churning sea. Sediment rose from the ocean bottom six feet below him. Wisps of dirt clouded before him, stirred by an unseen force, shaken from rest, as if a dust-covered beast had awoken in foul mood, a demon intent on freeing itself from under a cover of the heavy blue ocean.
He looked towards the surface of the water and stroked with his arms, paddling through his submersion to break through to the air. He came up with a splash, exhaled, and saw another wave ready to break on top of him. He took a quick breath and dove back under, curling himself into a ball. The wave broke, churning the water and sending Ethan tumbling in his suspended crouch. Bubbles swirled past him, mixing the darkness of the bottom with the whiteness of their surfaces. He remained motionless–to decide on a direction to swim now would be fruitless, he had no idea which way the surface might be. Time, so endless on the surface, with neither past nor present, held a different meaning under water, where it was measured only by the amount of air left to breathe. The water pounded as if it were drawn tight like the surface of a drum sounding from impact with the hand of God. Ethan’s lungs began to burn lightly, his body reminding him that his love of the ocean had physical constraints, practical limits to which he, nor anyone, could exceed. He began to float towards the surface, and, sensing this movement, kicked hard to speed his ascent. With another kick, he broke the surface, exhaled hard, and took another breath.
He looked offshore and saw the waves stacking up, grouped in bunches. Ethan estimated that the next wave would break on him in another two breaths. He looked towards the beach and saw the breakwater foaming with sandy water, the churn from the high breaks mixing sediment with the salt water. Where the group of half-dozen waving palm trees previously stood, only two remained standing, and these two trees swung like upside down pendulums struck by an angry child. He brought up his foot and grabbed his leg leash to reel in his board. It bucked on the surface somewhere behind him, tethered to its owner. Climbing onto it, he pointed it out to sea, faced the breaking wave, took a breath, and dived under it. He stroked with his arms, and came to the surface again, breathing hard. The next wave would arrive in three breaths. He prepared to duck again. The next wave looked bigger than the last. He knew he either needed to swim past their break or head back to shore. He took a breath and swam into the blue, heading straight at the next wave.
* * *
June heard a shattering sound–one of the display case doors slammed against the display frame and swung open again. The four foot benchtop display case in front of her, the display case she was supporting herself with, suddenly hung partially suspended in air, its base shifted sideways by half a foot.
For June, time began moving in slow motion. She saw herself leaning forward, but against a glass case which rested on foundation no longer there. For an instant this peculiar situation seemed only temporary. The thick glass of the case held for a moment, pausing, as if deciding whether to obey gravity. But the foundation did not return to its former place, and the display case began to slide away from her, until its balance had been compromised. It tipped, and June followed it, leaning over the now glassless counter and unable to straighten herself. The edge of the case hit the ground and the glass plates held their place momentarily, then, unable to fold, cracked in half, sounding as if a four-way automobile accident had occured.
A second shock sent the ground lunging again, and June felt herself tipping backwards, as if drunk. The crystal prisms reflecting sunlight near the windows swung violently, painting the walls of the shop in disco-like dancing lights. Glass animals fell from their shelves, shattering on the floor. She cleared her head and regained her balance. Her treasures were being thrown from their shelves. Stone carvings were overturning. Glass was shattering around her. Realizing the windows to her shop might not hold, she let the pride of her possessions slip. The years spent building her collection and the stories for each treasure left her mind. She took an uneven and decisive step for the front door.
A third shock jolted her forward and sent a splintering crack through the Victorian. She hit the door sideways, and stumbled outside, not stopping until she was half a dozen meters away from the front door. She stood on the sidewalk, turning quickly to find the locations of streetlights, power lines, or large trees. Finding none, and unable to keep either her strength after her sprint or her balance in the continued swaying of the earth, she fell to her knees. She fell to her knees in silence, appearing as if in prayer, just in time to hear the shattering glass of her store windows, her glass display cases, and the fragile treasures she had worked so hard to collect.
* * *
Jeremy Mitnal sprung to his feet. Adrenaline rushed through his veins. Any idea of sleep left his mind. The rocking earth brought back the drills of gradeschool, teachers suddenly shouting, “Duck! Under cover! Safe place!” These mandated drills meant to protect from nuclear war or natural disaster.
Jeremy leapt for the door frame, crouching within its shadow. His bookcase tipped away from the wall and angled forward, allowing his college textbooks to slide off the shelves. The earth swung back and the now empty bookcase returned to its upright position against the wall. His laptop beeped, indicating that either it had been unplugged, or the power had somehow disconnected.
Jeremy gripped the door frame, balancing himself. The shifting of the earth continued and he felt queasy, as if sea-sick. He felt a surge of panic–a pile of books lay on top of his laptop, and his his transceiver had also been buried. He gasped, and hesitated, desperately wanting to check on his equipment but afraid of stepping out from underneath the door frame until the tremors stopped. The waves in the earth rolled like the waves from a radio tuned to an emergency broadcast.
The rolling of the house diminished. Jeremy waited. Like waves from an FM radio bouncing off skyscrapers in a metropolis, he expected the earth to resound with echos of its original rumbling–aftershocks. The car outside continued to bleep its anti-theft siren.
* * *
“My God,” Ethan said, facing a wave over fifteen feet high, the largest wave he had ever encountered. He took a deep breath, and dived. The wave rolled over him, both the air in his lungs and the wave’s back-kick bringing him to the surface. He breathed hard, looking ahead into the next wave which began forming into its vertical wall. The question did not enter his mind–the waves were growing bigger. His uncertainty grew. “Duck dive under you?” he shouted, suddenly angry at the water, his confidence in the ocean challenged. The wave’s vertical height grew, and he readied himself. It’s peak tipped and broke, more than three times his own height, more than one hundred times his own weight. He readied his dive, thrusting his chest up and off his surfboard with his hands, then pulling the board back to him. He was under, and the wave broke on the surface, thundering through the undercurrent like a two-story locomotive in his ears. The wave spit him out its back side, propelling him up into the air. He gasped for breath, his heart pounding.
He remembered his paddle out–only a few minutes ago–when the ocean was calm and bucking with light, four foot swells. He had glanced down the coast to see another surfer, alone and paddling out to sea.
Looking down the coast now, he saw no one in the limited vision of the ocean’s angry spray. The wave which had just passed him continued its anglular break further down the coast, where the other surfer had paddled. He forced himself to take a deep breath. The wave kicked mist into the air as it passed, and then he saw a surfboard–kicked high in the air, its owner missing. He raised his arm to stroke in its direction, but realized paddling would be impossible. The waves coming towards him would break upon him, one after another, making it impossible to swim in the surfer’s direction, or any direction at all. Attempting to swim would only get him pounded, by waves taller than he had ever seen, and heavier than he ever imagined.
Ethan decided. He had to catch the next wave. Riding it into position was the only way to join the other surfer. At most, he had three breaths until its arrival. He turned his board into position and lifted himself forward. Standing up would be impossible. If he were lucky, he might ride the vertical for fifty feet before it crushed him in its collapse. His lungs filled with the second breath as he looked over his shoulder. The ocean rose up behind him into a wall of blue. He lifted his arm and thrust it into the ocean, paddling along the wave, building up speed. He felt himself lifted and he leaned in, cutting into the surface as the wave broke, gripping his board with white knuckles. Suddenly he was falling, sliding down a vertical surface which grew higher into the air, falling slower than it was rising. He felt unbalanced and exhaled through clenched teeth. The wave rose higher and threatened to throw him off its back, where he would be sucked underneath its churning froth. Instinctively, he lessened his lean and tipped forward, and found himself accellerating, just cutting into the wave’s side and falling down its transparent cliff. He saw the untethered surfboard ahead, and rode the wave towards it within a long barrel of freefall. Ethan forced himself to inhale, his chest expanding against the pressure of water falling on him from above. He reached the unmanned surfboard and cut into the wave, leaning forward and gripping hard, closing his eyes against a mountain of water. Water pressure pounded on his ears. He clenched his teeth and yanked his board sideways and down, forcing the angle of his board against the wave in order to be shot out from its underside.
The cut of his board ended in overcompensation, and he rolled, losing his grip. The wave yanked the board out of his hands. He kicked away from the board and he rose to the surface, propelled by this momentum, breaking into the air. He exhaled, winded, his face stinging.
He saw the other surfer’s board, thirty feet from him, bucking freely towards shore. “Barney!” he shouted with the air left in his lungs, his voice inaudible to his own ears which had filled with water. Then he saw the surfer, floating awkwardly toward the shore ahead, spinning with the aftermath of the last wave. He took a breath and dove, mentally forcing energy into his arms, forcing his sore fingers into each stroke. He reached three feet of depth, but kept swimming, until his hands hit sand. The next wave, forty feet out, began to break. He stood quickly, trying to shuffle out of the ocean. His foot strap dangled behind him. It had broken, setting his own surf board free.
He yanked at the surfer, whose head floated face down in the water. His awkward legs stumbled in the sand and he fell to his knees. Finally, he managed to pull the surfer up onto the beach, grip slipping on the surfer’s wet suit. The breaking wave hurled them into three feet of water, and he fell backwards, but kept a finger’s grip on the surfer. His feet began to scrape rock and he realized he was standing in the parking lot. The waves had crashed over the cars and they sat half submerged in salt water. He stumbled to the SUV and tugged the surfer’s body onto its hood. He checked the surfer’s pulse, but couldn’t feel one.
The next wave had broken, and the current began rushing toward them. The water seemed higher than before. Ethan lifted the surfer’s body onto his shoulders, and limped farther onto shore, wading through the salt water covering the seaside parking lot.
Only after stumbling with the surfer another hundred feet, and only after the waves subsided, falling back and leaving thick silt covering both the parking lot and the cars, did Ethan realize why his grip had become so difficult to hold, and why his ankle burned. His right thumb was broken and had begun to change color, and his ankle was raw from the prior thrashing of his board’s leash. He noticed this in the near-silence of the trickling water running back to sea. The silence of the coast pressed against Ethan’s throbbing ear drums. The surfer’s SUV had given up the siren of its car alarm. Only after all of these realizations did Ethan notice the way the surfer’s body hung about his shoulders, its head cocked at an impossible angle. The surfer’s neck had been broken by the waves.
If you enjoyed this chapter, please leave me a note describing why. Thanks!
CHAPTER THREE
“Ventura County is now claiming total damages at five hundred and sixty five million dollars after Monday’s earthquake. Experts report that the quake, centered just outside of Anacapa Island, may have resulted from under-water volcanic activity, the first of its kind on the California coast in over one hundred years–”
Ethan switched off the television. The news reports were tiresome, but his broken thumb ached, and he refused to take pain medication. Television became his only sedative as he lay about his small apartment. Luckily, his apartment had survived, a testament to California’s seismic retrofit regulations.
Concentration on the numerous oceanography books he had borrowed from the graduate library tired him. The subject might have been his specialty, as a post-graduate student in the Geography department, but the only interest he had in the ocean lie in surfing its waves, not in studying its movements. His favorite study topics were only those completed only after a long morning out on the surf.
“Oceanographers always have to make things complex,” he said aloud. “Just call a swell a swell, there’s no reason to call it a vertical orbital displacement.” Ethan had been attempting to read oceanography books since leaving the hospital on Wednesday, after viewing the new wave breaks on the local surfer web sites. “Just tell me why waves change the direction of their break, that’s all, leave out the fancy language.” He shook his head, believing that most graduate books tended toward complexity for complexity’s sake.
He turned the television back on. The news anchors narrated events with alternating facial expressions of happiness and concern.
“…and all thirteen kittens were rescued from their sea-side shelter, just in the nick of time. Meanwhile, several ocean front homes in Malibu have begun seismic retrofitting, safe-guarding against further erosion of the cliff face after the landslide following Monday’s quake left three houses buried under an estimated twenty-three tons of dirt. Luckily, all of the homeowners were away from home at the time of the slide…”
“Those houses belong to celebrities who use them as vacation homes for at most two weeks of the year,” Ethan told the television. “Of course they weren’t home.”
The news anchor disappeared from the screen and was replaced by the torso of a skinny man with rectangular glasses and a loud tie. The glasses were cocked at an odd angle and the tie had obviously been chosen as misaimed attempt at professional attire. “Geologists and oceanographers are continuing to study the origins and effects of the landslide.” A roughly cut voice-over interrupted the news anchor’s voice. The skinny man was continuing his responses to an interview.
“Certainly the insurance claims are important, but what we saw on the surface reflected only a portion of the land mass affected.”
A questioning voice, off screen, prodded him. “So you estimate the current damage in the hundreds of millions, but the future devastation may run into the billions?”
The skinny man shifted in his chair. Ethan recognized the skinny man as Professor Lindsay, the head of the geology department at the University. “Certainly, the damage on the surface could become more extreme if these slides continue, but importantly, an underwater slide of this magnitude certainly hasn’t happened for thousands of years, offering the perfect opportunity to study changes in the ocean floor, for example, air-impregnated rock which we have never been able to access has now been thrust near the surface. This could provide incredible opportunities for study, including evidence for or against global warming, for prehistoric microorganism study, land-mass wave coupling—”
“And if these damages reach in the billions, this would include the majority of sea-side homes along the entire central coast? The insurance payouts could reach into the millions?”
The skinny man, caught off-guard by this interruption, answered with a blank expression, and nodded helplessly. “Of course,” he said, as if confronted by a student asking, “Is this going to be on the exam?” during a review lecture for an upper-class midterm.
“Freaking news reporters,” Ethan said, turning off the television again. “Only one thing on their minds. Sensationalistic crap.” He fingered the scrap of paper used as a bookmark in one of his oceanography books. A scribble on the bookmark read “Dr. Lindsay” followed by the phone number Ethan had been calling nearly every hour for the past two days. He winced at the dull pain pressing up his arm. The pain kept him from concentrating, and any time he closed his eyes, he saw the image of a surfer floating face down in an angry ocean.
* * *
June left through the doorway of her shop, leaving its door open. The doorframe slanted at an odd angle now. The door could no longer close. She could have chosen to walk through the front window which had been cleaned of jagged glass and was left as open as the front door. The fragmented assets of the _Found in Time_ store were stacked in large boxes with individual clear plastic containers of various sizes along it’s back wall. White, orange, or red labels decorated each container, indexing by number and color into categories of minor damage, repairable damage, or unrepairable. Most of the labels were red.
June walked downhill several blocks, walked under the freeway, and continued to the muddy coast, stepping over the “Danger - Do Not Cross” banners which roped parallel to the water. The breeze blew her hair into her eyes and the strands stuck against her damp cheeks. She walked through the wet sand, at times sinking into it or carrying clumps of clay along with her. Her hiking boots collected the mud and became heavy. She ignored this and shuffled ahead. She was missing a day of work for the first time since starting her shop.
The waves lapped at her boots. She looked down at the sandy froth which blurred the line between land and sea. “God damn it,” she said, kicking at the foam and then pacing parallel to it. “What have I ever done to you, Woman?” she said to the air, with Mother Earth. “It took me twenty-two years to grow my home, my shop, and you destroyed it all in four minutes! It will take years until the insurance is payed out. Oh, the artists will demand pay by the end of the month, and the damn building inspector says it isn’t safe to live upstairs anymore. But you don’t care. Where am I supposed to go?” She wiped her sleeve against her cheek. “I didn’t deserve this. I’m a _vegetarian_, dammit. I protected you. I _recycle_!”
She faced the ocean and felt drained. Even if her shop were repaired, the news reported there may be further quakes–secondary shifts, they had nicknamed them–only weeks or months away, or perhaps only a year away. The coast no longer felt safe. She sat down on a muddy rock jutting up from the sand. Her shoulders trembled, not from the shiver of cold running up her spine from her damp seat but from the incredible uncertainty of her life.
She remembered the pieces in her fossil collection and this brought her some comfort. Thousands of years after the pain and death of these creatures, their indentations in the earth brought light to people’s lives. June sniffed against her running nose. The mystery of rock, mysteries which told time using different clocks from biology, clocks which ticked off hundreds of years in their slowest movements, might never be fully revealed.
She straightened her back and took a deep breath. The yellow sun, straight above, made the sea foam glitter as it performed it’s slow dance in front of her. She watched the gentle forward rushing of the thin layer of water at each wave’s most forward edge and it’s timid retreat into the depths or the sand itself. The backstep of the water scored veins into the sand as miniature troughs the oncoming waves immediately filled with sand. June watched this cycle repeat, the forward rushing water and sand filling each minor groove on the beach. Some of these troughs were wedged with small black rocks which alternately floated on currents or were left ashore. The rocks looked a bit smaller than the size of a golf ball, and were decorated with lacy fingers of white. The rocks had a slight bouyancy which allowed them to either drift near the surface or lodge temporarily within the sand. The rocks reminded June of a visit to Hawaii, many years ago, where she walked along a centuries-old volcanic lava funnel at the water’s edge, the Hawaiian lava becoming slightly pourous from steam as it struck the water and flowed within it. Porous lava rock could occassionally be spotted floating in the waves after breaking free from the magma’s rivulets.
June slid from her cold seat and kneeled to pick up a few of the smaller ones. She cupped water in her hand and roughly tested their density until the water ran out through her fingers. She noticed some of the rocks attracted to each other, and some of them seemed to avoid each other until they spun around to different positions. She watched this curiously, then collected other rocks to test her theory.
The tide occasionally brought more of the rocks to shore. June pulled off her hiking boots and socks, momentarily wincing in the cold ocean water, and began collecting them.
* * *
“the data doesnt match,” Jeremy Mitnal typed into his laptop. He was logged onto the Gnantenna online chat room and typing to its small group of participants.
“what about the sidebands?”
Jeremy sighed. He had been prepared for these obvious questions, but worked through them, just in case he had missed something simple. “like I said, there are no sidebands, because I cant find any modulation scheme,” he typed. “the signal has incredible power but no standard modulation. and no noticable time divisions, like I said before. its just constant power.”
“it must be a hardware problem then, it has to be noise.”
Jeremy shook his head and typed back quickly, “nonono, I can receive known good signals, calibration is ok, it is only this single band that shows power, it is not common mode noise!”
He looked at the clock on his laptop’s screen. In another ten minutes he would have to leave for class, and he couldn’t miss any more lectures or he wouldn’t be able to pass his general education requirement. He had slept through one too many sociology lectures after staying up all night at his laptop. The cursor on his screen blinked back at him. He started to count his venetian blinds.
“could you upload it to the anonymous server? we’ll take a look at it,” the response finally printed. “you can use our public key for safety.”
“_Yes_!” Jeremy said out loud, then, trying to be more subtle, typed, “sure.”
He copied the encrypted public key and pasted it on to his laptop’s desktop. After a few minutes of pointing and clicking, the file was encrypted, uploaded, and available to the group. He typed this result. Only the group would be able to view the file, using the correct passphrase–not even the military could unscramble the file’s public key encryption. He typed his goodbye to the group and logged out.
“Finally,” he told the ceiling. “I’ve been listening for years, and I’ve found something worth checking into.”
If you enjoyed this chapter, please leave me a note describing why. Thanks!
CHAPTER FOUR
Ethan nodded. They reached _Cafe Bianco_ and sat at an outdoor granite top table. The Cafe was one of the few places which had sustained no damage due to the building’s architectural history as the town’s first government office; it was built from adobe with eighteen-inch thick walls.
He played with the small rocks June had placed in front of him. “These are really polarized,” he said. Some of the rocks had slight attractivity, and others stuck to each other like glue. “I think there are theories about friction along the San Andreas which creates magnetic fields, but I wouldn’t have guessed they would be strong enough to align the iron in these.”
June nodded and sipped a Snapple. Palletes of the drink had been flown in as a corporate donation during the water and electricity emergency. Anything hot was unavailable. She was sure the beverage stock included ample quantities of her favorite flavor, but unsure of the corporate motivations behind the sudden generosity.
“Some earthquake detectors monitor very low frequency electromagnetism,” Ethan said. “I’m not sure anyone has proven why, but there is a powerful signal which always preceeds earthquakes.”
“Powerful enough to magnetize rock?” June asked.
Ethan shook his head. “I doubt it. Maybe, if there were incredible heat and pressure involved. But this rock is slightly porous, too, like they were stuck in an outgas. I can take a few of these into the lab, give them to the Geology guys. Maybe from their composition they can be matched to the island, or at least dated. It could be this island is some kind of prehistoric relic.” He checked his watch. It was late afternoon and he wanted to check his phone messages in case Dr. Lindsay had called.
June straighened in her chair at his mention of prehistory. Her favorite fossils were the mysterious older pieces which created more questions than answers. “I’d like to suggest something,” she said. Ethan gazed at her curiously. “If I get us a boat into the channel, would you be able to find out how deep it is? I mean,” she said, leaning towards him and lowerig her voice, “could we… _dive_ to it?”
A smile spread across Ethan’s face. He nodded. “This discovery could be big. Huge.” He glaced around him, suddenly suspicious he might be overheard. “Talk about funding–my department would be set–the project could take years of research.” The two made plans to meet the next afternoon. Ethan excused himself. June promised to have a lead on a boat and to have a few larger rocks, if she could find them, even if she had to go barefoot again.
* * *
“_What_?” Jeremy said, the e-mail attachment staring back at him. The e-mail attachment was encrypted and his private key unlocked the text which was for his eyes only.
“This is _not_ a hardware malfunction, I already _said_ that,” he continued, talking to himself, as if the e-mail author could hear him.
He could begin the process of checking his hardware again, but he would have to sneak into the engineering lab to use their frequency generator. “I should explain how they kicked me out of the lab last time,” he said. “Just because I’m not an engineering student yet. What kind of idiot would electrocute themselves from a wall outlet. I can do that at home just as well as in their cheesy lab.”
He read the email again. “The only other way you could be getting a signal like that is by a constant power source which would corrupt all traffic on the band, and everyone would immediately call the FCC,” the message said.
“Wait a minute,” Jeremy said. “First, this band is unregulated, and second, it’s not yet standard, so there aren’t many people listening or transmitting. Heck, they probably think they have a software problem.” He sighed. “You guys are no help.”
He stood up, grabbed his backpack, and powered down his laptop. He packed his equipment carefully in his backpack and put his bus schedule in his pocket. “FCC, yeah, right. I’m going to triangulate this signal myself, and then we’ll see who has the hardware problem.”
If you enjoyed this chapter, please leave me a note describing why. Thanks!
