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.
