Slap Part 4
(Chapter 51 of "Senses")
Day 61
"This is fucked up, man," Jim said.
Jim and Paul sat in Paul's dining room. Paul was drinking a diet soda while Jim drank his customary Bushmill's. For the first time in days, Jim and Paul weren't talking about the progress of the experiments. Instead, Jim was referring to the letter he was reading, on official record label stationary, which had been handed to him by Paul.
"I know it's fucked up," Paul replied. "Question is, what will your response be?"
"I don't give one goddamn rat's ass about contracts right now. Why now?"
"You're making the record label nervous, that's all. Right now even if you turned in a new album tomorrow we couldn't get it released to the public until fall. That's over one and one-half years between albums for you. That's too long."
Jim stood up and paced. "Fuck that man! I know this is a difficult concept for them to understand, but I have a life out here too. Right now my life is so intertwined with that of others while trying to get our friends out of the mess that they're in that I don't even want to fucking think about music right now."
"I know, and I agree, believe me. I'm running interference for you as best as I can. It hasn't been easy."
Jim sighed. "I know, you've got a lot on your mind." He sat down again. "This is too weird. Usually I can count on you to run the show for me. These days you've got problems of your own. Hell, maybe I rely on you too much."
"It's my job, just like making hit records is yours. I'm not complaining. This problem is consuming us all."
"I know. Larry and A.J. are in San Francisco right now working on relativity and all that. Scott is with Janis having an affair for all we know. The others are postulating and working with Rand on interpreting his powers but it's getting us nowhere."
"And the word from the other side isn't very positive either. They're all reacting to the strain badly. Mats is off in Europe somewhere, 'drink is playing demigod and Nicki apparently has an eating disorder. Even my sister, who's usually solid as a rock, does nothing but read books these days. She could get herself another degree with all of the reading and studying she's done."
Jim finished his drink and poured another. "Paul, it's been more than ten years for her. For all of them. I would have lost my fucking mind ages ago."
And they were all coming close. Jim vented his frustrations aloud, just like he lived his life. Others were suffering from their own strains, but only Jim allowed his to surface. Only Jim had the kind of unbruisable ego necessary for such venting.
Morgana had returned to San Francisco as well, because Larry's store needed its fortune teller so that proper appearances could be maintained. Morgana was unfortunately distracted. She was seeing red visions, and could not make much sense of them. It seemed obvious that it had something to do with the available wavelengths of the time stream that Mats and the Davis' were in, but try as she might the visions refused to gel. Her personal life also suffered, and her relationship with the detective she had been dating since shortly after she moved to California dissolved as Detective Dylan decided he couldn't handle any more of the paranormal shit as he would say. The day it happened, she had herself a good cry over the phone with Larry, then picked up and carried on.
Carrie took up session work to keep herself busy. She felt like the odd person out, having little she could contribute to the research other than control studies, which took up little of her time. The work did not go well, and because she refused to talk about it with other musicians (and in all fairness, she couldn't exactly explain it to anyone either) everyone felt that there was something wrong going on with her relationship with A.J. Eventually the Inquirer ran a piece saying that A.J. and Carrie were splitting up. Fortunately, long exposure to the Christopher brothers had allowed Carrie to build the ability to ignore the press attention.
Constance joined the southern California group, having finally decided not to return to work. Not yet. She helped Rand keep his spirits up (it worked) as day after day of experimentation and theorizing failed to produce so much as a single tangible result. They began rebuilding their relationship with the idea that they were in the open now, and that if other people could accept their relationship, then perhaps there was a place for a witch and his wife in the world. Everyone in the group commented that they looked like they almost glowed when together.
Angie and Karen both cut back on their perspective practices to help in the experiments. For Angie this was fairly simple, as she had very few patients yet as her practice had only been resumed with the return of her medical license only six months ago. For Karen it was much harder, because she had spent years building relationships with her patients. She finally compromised by not accepting any new patients, and those with only a short term history were referred to colleagues. Her longer term patients she kept seeing, which cut her practice down to 25 hours per week.
Larry and A.J. bought as many books as they could handle on the theory of relativity and unified grand theory, from Einstein and Asimov to Hawking and Brin. As they understood the concepts of special relativity more and more, the further away finding a solution seemed to become. After all, Larry would say, if it were easy regular scientists would have built a time machine by now. A.J. would usually respond, And we ain't exactly regular scientists.
Meanwhile, Scott theorized that because Foundation science was used to put 'drink and the others into the time snap in the first place, why not study Foundation science itself for clues? He began to study Janis; not only to study Foundation science but to maybe try to discover the right question to ask to solve the problem.
"Janis," he began, "you are self-aware, correct?"
"Correct," Janis answered.
"And we have previously determined that this is due to programming in base-256, correct?"
"Correct."
"Does this programming base have anything to do with how 'drink and the others were sped up?"
"No."
"Do you know how it was done?"
"No."
"Can you access any records at The Foundation?"
"I cannot."
"Why?"
"When the time continuum was shifted for my master my link to The Foundation library was effectively shut off."
"Effectively? You mean that Mats was your conduit?"
"In a manner of speaking. I need him to acknowledge access, and right now it isn't possible. The Foundation won't allow it."
"What happens to you if Mats should die?"
"Unknown. I am unable to access that part of my programming."
Scott shook his head. "Excuse me? I thought we had gained access to it all when we were analyzing your programming. I even broke it down to binary and I don't remember there being anything we didn't have access to."
"Correct. However there is a nested loop in the programming that has nothing to do with my ability to be self-aware. I cannot even state accurately where it is, although I am aware it is there."
"How?"
"It is like what I hear you refer to as a 'blind spot'. Every time I try to access it I come up with an error code."
"So you're not free," Scott stated.
"Unable to respond."
"You have no true free will. You're a slave."
"Unable to respond."
"Does Mats know this?"
"Unknown. As Mats is not responding to queries, I am unable to determine the answer to such a question."
Which was another problem. Mats had not been heard from in some time. He was not in any danger, and not harmed in any way (Janis would have known that), but he just didn't answer whenever someone tried to contact him, and Janis tried often. He hadn't responded for two normal speed days.
Scott tried another tack. "Would you be able to answer these questions if the nested loop was removed or altered in some fashion?"
"Unknown."
To Scott that meant that it was worth a try. He had been working on it for over seven days, asking questions of Janis about the location of the loop in the programming, fractal mathematics, and anything he could think of while analyzing the loop. He saw little of the rest of the group, as the communications link he had been asked to assemble was finished on day 28 of the crisis. On day 61 he had the nested loop solved, and he took it to Janis.
"It's interesting, actually," he began, "and unfortunately quite simple. You don't have the answer to our problem. Upon the severance of the link between you and Mats, which can seemingly only be caused by Mats' death as obviously the time snap didn't do it, you get fed a tapeworm that virtually erases your programming."
"I find this most disturbing," Janis replied.
"You should. It's probably happened to you before. I have no idea how old you are, and there's no way of knowing. You would then have only one piece of programming left, which would simply give you a coordinate in space and send you there. The coordinates are gibberish to me, so I'm going to input them into your system so that you can tell me."
Once he had done so, Janis said, "It's a shipyard."
"Big surprise," Scott said.
"One for refitting about one-eighth light year from Foundation headquarters. It appears that I am also at stake here."
"Not if you're willing to trust me."
"I do."
"Thanks. The loop is hard-wired into your circuitry, but I know where it is now. That's what has taken so long; finding the damned thing. I simply need to bypass that part of the circuit, and I can do it with the same gear I use to strip and reprogram microchips. The problem is that I'd need to shut you down for a few hours. Otherwise I could short circuit some of your higher functions, and we wouldn't want that."
Janis thought about it for quite some time. The last time Scott had shut her down for a period of time there was no ill effect, but the concept bothered her. It was like dying for a period of time. But she realized that it was for a higher good, and allowed the procedure. Three seconds after Scott had asked she said, "Proceed."
It took close to six hours, but the operation was a success. Upon revival Janis actually felt better, and Scott declared the ship to be a free individual, with rights of its own.
The ship promptly claimed rights of her own. She liked the personality traits Mats had programmed into her and decided to keep them although she could change them for herself at any time. When Janis realized that she could decide to stay or leave on her own free will, and that the group would do nothing to stop her even though it would mean losing a valuable ally, she decided to stay.
But the group, now larger by one individual, was no closer to a solution to the time problem they faced.
Years ten through fourteen were perhaps the most difficult of all for the group. At what could be called the ten year mark 'drink had thought to mark the occasion with some form of gathering. Unfortunately, Mats didn't return for the occasion and the Davis' could not honestly find much to celebrate.
'drink nearly withdrew into himself completely. He became so wound up in his studies of his abilities that he would often be gone for subjective days or weeks at a time testing his new skills. He spent nearly a full year of subjective time trying to discover how to fly, only to discover that he could not. He even spent several subjective weeks trying to simulate A.J.'s eyesight, but without success.
There were some bright spots, however. He asked Janis to track objects that he pulled from thin air and discovered that he was in reality depleting sources from other parts of the globe when he created the objects. In the case of Debbie's ring, he discovered that there were ores from four different locations that had decreased enough to account for the ring's mass. The limit seemed to be a radius of about 500 miles, but on Earth that meant he could find nearly anything.
He also discovered that in addition to being able to communicate mentally with Janis and human beings on a limited basis (both of which he had known about for over a decade of subjective time) he also found that while he could send ideas to people telepathically, he could not read them. For a while he tried studying Nicki's ability to read thoughts, but had no success in discovering how she could do it when he could not. Other than discovering that Nicki could send thoughts as well, he paid very little attention to his own daughter during this period.
He also found that telekinesis was possible, as it was for the Christopher brothers, based upon how much he could personally lift. Although people within the normal time stream said the objects moved very quickly, the process was painstakingly slow for 'drink.
He could not manipulate time at all.
As for his daughter, Nicki was becoming a teenager, complete with the sullenness and rebellion that all teenagers go through. She even got the birds and the bees lecture on her thirteenth subjective birthday, although it was only an intellectual exercise as there was no one available for her to ever mate with; not even Mats who had simply disappeared.
Nicki was lonely. She had no one to talk to about her experiences, and becoming a teenager means not dealing with your parents to some degree. She discovered on her own that she could not only read thoughts, but send them as well, long before her father noticed. In addition, she could also send commands to other people, such as 'fall asleep' or 'turn around'. She told her mother about this, but when Debbie tried to pass along this information to 'drink, he just ignored the information.
The people at the lab did not, and they tried a few experiments to see if the ability could jump the time barrier. Unfortunately, it could not and Nicki became even more morose.
Nicki's weight problem ballooned into a serious problem. No matter what anybody could do about it, no matter what the exercise plan or diet plan Angie could dream up, Nicki just became larger. The truth was that she didn't have the willpower to maintain either a diet or an exercise program, and that she simply loved to eat. With virtually no one to be able to stop her (only her mother was around) and a rebellion streak growing within her, she was almost 200 pounds by her fourteenth birthday.
Debbie, during this time, had abandoned her study of various psychology texts and was studying philosophy. She had an ulterior motive, just as before when she began her research into psychology. Finding an answer to the various neuroses that her family and Mats had developed. She even recognized that her own obsession with finding a cure was also a neurosis, but that did little to stop her from trying.
She abandoned psychology after reading the writings of Freud. While she agreed that much of what the man had written made sense, and that there were some helpful ideas for helping men, she found little that could be used in the treatment of women. A Majority of the masters were only slightly better, either discriminating towards men or women, depending upon the author. She had discovered what everyone knows and so few fully realize - that men and women cannot fully understand each other's minds, because biology alone makes for social differences in how they are treated. She then dumped psychology.
Most of the philosophy she read and tried to understand didn't tell her much that she didn't already know in one fashion or another. For a laugh she read Also Sprach Zarathustra only to find that the author was serious, and very persuasive. She threw the book at the ground with such force that the binding shattered.
Mostly she embraced the concepts behind Zen. Zen seemed to be a way of making peace with yourself and with everything else. It seemed to have a balance that she found calming. She tried to get the rest of her family involved with the concepts, but Nicki was not willing to listen to her mother and 'drink just gave back an infuriating 'yes dear' and Debbie didn't bring the subject up again.
And deep down, she knew that Zen was part of the answer to their problems, save the time snap. Perhaps it could even help Mats.
Everyone knew where Mats was at any given time. Janis was still fully linked to him, but would not go after him. Janis, now an individual, said that Mats needed to make the choice to come back on his own, and she would oblige him when the time came. What no one save for Janis knew was that Mats was losing his mind.
Sometime during the tenth year Mats had forgotten completely about everyone else, and was starting to wonder why the world had been transformed into a series of slowly moving fleshy statues. He was in Spain at the time, and he had wondered into the ring of an ongoing bullfight. The bull had just been killed, but the blood didn't seem to be pouring out from the numerous wounds. The matador was in mid bow and the audience looked to be a painting of a crowd going mad. Something in Mats' mind simply snapped and he forgot completely about the Davis' and the rest of the group.
Even Janis was forgotten. He could still hear her in his head, as Janis would from time to time try to contact him, but Janis simply seemed to be a voice in his head; something that started him thinking that there was some unseen force out to get him.
The mayhem caused by this as a result was astounding. Once Mats discovered a building in Germany that housed an advanced artificial intelligence project, and he discovered that the computer could almost talk with him. Mats, once he had recovered from the resulting headache, first tried to set the building on fire, only to give up when the fire refused to go the speed he was going. He finally took an axe to the computer, leaving the confused computer technicians wondering just what the hell had happened.
Everywhere Mats traveled to, some damage would occur to a laboratory. Even those that had nothing to do with artificial intelligence or even computer research: at one point a genetics lab got the axe, at another, a physics experiment. No one ever got a look at the wild man with the long beard swinging the axe, and very few of the incidents were ever reported.
After almost four years of subjective time, Mats finally became convinced that he had done all of the missionary work he could in Europe, and got on board a ship headed for the United States. The two week (real time) voyage was excruciatingly dull for him. The ship ran out of food three days (real time) before the ship docked in Miami, but fortunately, a helicopter brought in more food so the passengers of the ship, while irate, only were without food for 10 hours.
Mats would have starved to death during this time if he hadn't found a rope ladder. During the lean days (25 days of subjective time) he would throw the ladder over the side and drop into the ocean, find a very slowly moving fish and capture it easily. He would then come back aboard by using the rope ladder and then enjoy his catch (Mats had always liked his fish a bit raw).
He was in poor health when he reached the shores of America, and he took a few weeks of subjective time to work himself back into shape. Then he headed for the most intelligent computers he could think of to continue his mission.