Violet Odyssey- Chapter 7

 “I want every researcher and technician from ACH out of bed and in this lab—now.”

Doctor Lindström’s voice thundered over the cacophony of overlapping arguments.

As Head of Communications, she was the de facto administrator over all research departments. It was a pretty elegant solution to a big problem, really. Every field of study thought it was more relevant and authoritative than the rest, so how did you decide who was in charge? Who mediated disputes?

A born manager with diplomacy in their DNA.

Someone from Communications.

It was a shame Naomi Lindström was such a grating person.

She marched over to my desk, her steely curtain of smooth gray hair barely moving beneath a sea of product designed to maintain her untouchable appearance.

“Ryan, I want three different criteria applied to your findings immediately. Relationships with Linguistics, Cryptography, and Rocketry.”

She paused to shoot a wide-eyed glare at an assistant who was jabbing a clipboard at her insistently.

“In fact, make it four. Gravitics.”

She turned away to placate her assistant, whose panic was only getting worse.

I flipped back to my screens, lifting my elbow in annoyance as an IT technician strung a cable under my arm and shoved another monitor next to my other two. My displays flickered black for a heart-stopping moment before flashing back to life, now with the added workspace of a third screen.

Now they give me the good stuff, I thought with a small grin.

I rubbed my temples, fighting back the ache behind my eyes. The room was an explosion of noise now, awash in the excitement and crippling anxiety brought on by the first major discovery about the Brass City in decades. The lights had been brought up, too. Comfortable calculations for a long-planned “passive” Odyssey Year—that is to say, not a manned mission—had been left by the wayside. In their place, new possibilities demanded a heightened level of diligence, and we couldn’t have a poorly lit mathematical error ruin everything.

In the corner, Rocketry/Ballistics and Thermodynamics were angrily shouting at Doctor Lindström, their arms waving wildly and gestures being made toward the USJAF liaison desk. There, General Hass was surrounded by a fresh mob of uniformed soldiers and people in button-ups, his tightened face speaking in low, controlled tones to the group. His hands made small chopping motions toward different people in turn, and they responded with enthusiastic, if stressed, nods before dashing off without delay.

Colonel Killough had returned with SSG Rivers, who stood off to the side of the group, watching me with a flat stare. The Colonel was speaking to a trio of younger soldiers with his arms folded.

The back of my chair was yanked slightly, startling me.

Doctor Alvarez grinned down at me and chuckled.

“Look alive, Doctor Ryan.”

He passed me a sheet of paper with a list of names under departmental bullet points.

“Here’s the org chart. Dr. Silas just checked in with security. When he gets up here, I’ll have him handling the Linguistics link. Dr. Atalla is already over there talking to Rocketry.”

He gestured.

I squinted through the crowd. Just as Miguel had promised, Dr. Atalla had ingrained herself in the middle of the crowd of bickering Rocketry, Ballistics, and Thermodynamics employees. I smiled slightly at the five-foot-three ACH researcher with the blonde ponytail, staring up at the group with her jaw set and her hands on her hips.

“She’s perfect for that crowd,” Alvarez said. “Her uncle is a Captain in the USJAF stationed out in San Antonio, and he works with the procurement team for BAF1. She’s used to dealing with hotheaded military types, which Rocketry and the rest are pretty wrapped up in.”

Doctor Alvarez finished with an uneasy glance at the military liaison group.

“Any word on the launch? Are they talking about scrubbing it?” I asked, trying not to make eye contact with SSG Rivers.

“Not yet,” Doctor Alvarez hummed. “I don’t see how they wouldn’t, though. You can’t throw a missile at the City on the Odyssey Year we get our first communication. But that’s a problem, Richard. You understand why?”

I bit my lip.

“Uh, I guess? It’s expensive and aggravating to have all this set up just to tear it all down. I get it. But I don’t really understand why the military seems so determined to see this launch happen. I mean, I understand why they’re involved. We’re talking about a nuclear weapon. A small one, but still.”

I looked back at Doctor Alvarez.

His face had gone dark, his eyes fixed on the corner of my desk. He picked at the laminate edge absently.

“Well, I know…”

He grunted and shook his head. Then he lowered his voice, leaning in to reorganize some papers on my desk.

“You know the Green Conservative Party that’s been campaigning these past couple election years?”

I opened my mouth to respond, but Evelyn and Doctor Loise arrived at my desk with an armful of binders each.

Evelyn sat down across from me, pushed apart my middle and leftmost monitors, and slid a binder directly over my keyboard.

“Gravitics signal analysis. It needs your amplitude scalings. I’ll set up here, and we can work on it together. You might not understand frame-dragging half as well as I understand harmonics, but we should be able to manage something workable if you can pay attention for longer than three minutes.”

She said it steelily.

Doctor Loise set the remaining binders beside Evelyn and addressed Doctor Alvarez.

“Miguel, Tran is stuck down in security. Apparently, he forgot to bring his badge, as well as leave his pocketknife at home. They need his ACH lead to sign him in.”

She turned on her heel and returned to the Gravitics desk clump.

Doctor Alvarez sighed and wiggled my chair again.

“I’m going to get Doctor Silas checked in so he can get caught up with Linguistics. Obviously, Doctor Strauss just broke the news—you’ll be working with Gravitics and Cryptography. When I get back, I’ll assist with the latter.”

He drummed the desk with his fingers, opening his mouth as though to say more, then thought better of it and walked away with a somber expression.

I clicked my tongue at Evelyn.

“Well, anyway, I have three filters set up to run amplitude through. What timestamps of the signal do you have analysis on so far?”

Her eyes flicked up from her laptop as the same IT tech from earlier shuttled her equipment from the Gravitics desks to mine.

“Three? Of course it’s just three. Can’t count on you to focus for a second.”

She shook her head and scrawled in the paper notebook she’d brought with her.

“I have an early analysis of the signal in there, in its entirety. It’s only a draft, but…”

I nearly choked.

“The whole signal? Eve, it’s been, what, six hours?”

Her flashing eyes were my only punishment for the nickname, likely because it had come wrapped in flattery.

“It’s the Odyssey, Ryan. Catch up. There are real researchers working here. Honest sciences. You can’t get by on your name, and you certainly can’t keep getting by on luck.”

The insult was molded to wound, but carried no venom.

Still, I bristled.

Evelyn continued.

“What’s strange is that we’ve found the signal presents differently under different simulations of gravity. Nothing changes in its content, of course. But the waveform shifts slightly.”

She looked up at me.

“It shouldn’t change at all.”

I pondered that for a moment.

“Not really, no. Gravity obviously affects the medium sound travels through, but your simulation uses high atmosphere, right? It should take a lot of gravity to alter the waveform. Pretty much at all.”

She nodded, twisting a length of hair on her finger.

“And yet,” Evelyn continued, “there is a change when we apply the gravity shadow of the Brass City. It’s hard to understand because we still don’t know exactly what the City is. The closest theory is light, but light doesn’t inflict meaningful gravity. Not this much, anyway.”

“It would take a lot of light, because the Brass City generates a lot of pull. Enough to alter tides on Odyssey days. But not nearly enough to bend sound. And yet here we are, doing nothing to solve the mystery.”

Tapping a few keys, I spun my center monitor around so we could both see it. The progress bar had reached 100%, and I pointed to the spikes on the diagram.

“I haven’t been doing nothing. Look at the inverse.”

She looked back and forth between the screen and me with a blank expression.

“The inverse? What are you talking about?”

I sighed and nursed my headache.

“The waveform. Look at the peaks and valleys. It forms the Brass City when we tweak the amplitude. This we know. But for every sound, there is anti-sound. It’s the same principle your noise-canceling headphones use to eliminate outside audio.”

I tapped the screen.

“So look at the inverse.”

She squinted.

“I don’t see what you’re trying to show me. Ryan, the sun is coming up. We don’t have time to waste, and we have to break into this signal from an acoustic and gravitational viewpoint. That’s our job. Sound and gravity aren’t terribly related, but the gravity shadow of the Brass City is never the same from one Odyssey to—”

I waved my hand through the air.

“Listen to me. The anti-sound—the inverse waveform—should be shaped a certain way. It’s the only way it can be shaped. So why isn’t it shaped that way?”

Evelyn opened and closed her mouth, cycling through possibilities with her hands.

“I don’t know, Ryan. Why does it matter? You can’t listen to it. There’s nothing there to hear. A waveform without data of its own—a shadow—means nothing.”

I tapped the bridge of my nose and exhaled.

“Not normally.”

I looked at the screen again.

“But we have to expand the search.”

I pulled my ID badge from under my shirt and removed the lanyard from around my neck. Part of the badge’s top frame held the only thumb drive we were allowed to have in the facility. It couldn’t be separated from the badge, and its contents were flashed whenever it left the facility.

I plugged it into my terminal and copied over the files on my screen. They closed one by one, VICA servers not allowing them to be open on more than one device at a time.

Terribly annoying protocol.

Understandable, but annoying.

I withdrew the USB and scanned the room, moving around the desk.

Evelyn stood.

“Where are you going? Ryan?”

I pointed across the room.

“To Linguistics. There’s data in the waveform’s shadow, and I’m going to figure out what.”