“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.”
