Participants:
| Scene Title | Only For a Moment |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Elisabeth Harrison visits Washington KC to meet with Michelle Cardinal and discuss the intricacies of time. |
| Date | July 14, 2021 |
The new nation’s capital looks nothing like the old. From the sky it looks like little has changed since this was just Kansas City. A few new skyscrapers are going in to accommodate the additional load of the city’s transformation, but its visual identity is still the same. Even as the world has changed around it, the heart of Kansas City remains. But all of that may well be for naught. It’s the thought that keeps Elisabeth Harrison up at night, and the thought that haunts her observations of the KC skyline as her plane makes its final descent. The world feels so fragile right now. Like one wrong move could ruin everything.
As Elisabeth’s plane touches down on the tarmac she’s jolted from her worries. But they don’t go away.
They never go away.
One Hour Later
Department of the Exterior
Conference Room: Red
Washington KC
July 14th
8:27am
Elisabeth’s journey in Washington begins within the crimson-painted walls of a conference room. It’s still lined with shelves filled with books on law and justice from the time when the building was the Jackson County 12th circuit court. An old, mahogany table in here once was used by jurors in trial deliberation.
Michelle Cardinal stands on the opposite side of the room from the entrance, staring between the slats of vertical blinds, gazing down at the skyline visible from the seventh floor. When Elisabeth enters, Michelle makes a single wordless gesture to the ceiling and then puts a finger over her lips. The conference room is being monitored, and she knows how much Elisabeth values her privacy. Especially when undertaking a cross-country flight on short notice. Michelle doesn’t know why Elisabeth is here, but the matter has to be sensitive.
She looks tired. It's been a hellacious month, and between Pure Earth fuckers lighting the damn country on fire – literally – and the knowledge of what is coming, it's not hideously surprising that everyone looks like they're feeling strained. But Elisabeth offers a faint smile and a nod of acknowledgment to Michelle's warning even as she walks to the window to join her mother-in-law. "It's really good to see you, Michelle," she tells the other woman in a quiet, sincere tone. "How are Rianna and… David?" The last is asked almost hesitantly, as if she's uncertain she should ask.
Michelle’s expression becomes a touch more distant. “Good.” Feels half-hearted. She has a lot on her mind. “David’s treatments are going well, it’s staved off the worst of the gemini degradation. But I still… I haven’t had time to work on anything resembling a cure.” The regret in her voice is palpable. “How’s your little army doing?” She musters up the enthusiasm to ask.
Elisabeth reaches out and hugs Michelle's shoulders, a gesture that is not terribly uncommon but also not something she necessarily greets Michelle with at every family gathering either. It's perhaps an indicator of Elisabeth's own stress that the hug lingers just a moment or two longer than usual too. She uses the opportunity to murmur in Michelle's ear, "Visual or just audio?" And then as she steps back, she offers additional updates. "The children are doing fine, although they're already bugging me about when they can come back to the city. Harmony's keeping them busy with all manner of summer activities in Detroit, and I'm thinking it might be prudent just to keep them there for a while." Until such time as evacuation, that is. "RayTech's campus is finally starting to recover from the Pure Earth assault. I just don't like the idea of the kids being there, though."
Michelle gently taps one ear, indicating it’s only audio surveillance. “I’ve heard people here talking about the attack in the Safe Zone. There’s a lot more worried faces around here than there were a month ago. But if half the people here knew what we know…” she says with a rueful snort, “I don’t think they’d be as worried about terrorism.”
Elisabeth lets out a soft snort of agreement, a rolling of her eyes.
Stepping away from the window, Chel slides her glasses off and massages the bridge of her nose. “No new word from Richard.” She adds quietly.
"I figured," Elisabeth nods. "Not that I expect to be kept in the loop on what they find on their mission, but I figured if you'd heard anything you'd have sent word just to say he was okay," she smiles at Michelle just slightly. "Although both you and Ria are horrible at texting and calling to let me know you're still breathing," she teases in a slightly exasperated tone. She sighs, though. "Truth be told, there are days I consider throwing in the towel and just going up to Detroit to be with the kids until it's time. Knowing ahead of time is not something I would wish on anyone," she admits in a low voice. "And I don't really feel like I'm much use anywhere in this. I've always been bad at hurry up and wait." It's usually when she does something reckless, although there's not even any kind of that to do either.
She pauses for a moment and then confesses with a small grimace, "Sometimes I am really pissed off at your son." Dragging a hand through her loose blonde hair, she shakes her head. "Useless emotion that it is." Letting out a long sigh, Elisabeth glances at the doorway and says, "But I wanted to talk to you about something … personal, Michelle. I have a problem."
A modified silence field slips into place with no fanfare, close enough to their bodies to not include furniture. Liz's brow furrows slightly because she takes care not to make it a strictly silent field… the audio in the room is more fuzzed out, sounding like indistinct murmurings to whoever might walk in or try to listen. It takes a little more focus than a purely silent field, but hopefully will make their listeners not just barge in on them. "And now they can wonder to their heart's content what kind of personal problems I have. Before I get to the actual problem…" She doesn't care what they think. She cares first and foremost about her family. "How are you really doing? Because I know exactly where your son gets his hyperfocus, and I want to make sure that you're taking care of yourself in the middle of this. You can't help him if you collapse from exhaustion," she says quietly, her concern for Michelle clear.
“I’m fine.” Chel is quick to reply, and it’s clear that she isn’t. Like mother like son. “How I’m doing is irrelevant right now. The sun,” she says with a gesture at the ceiling, “is going to explode and kill us all. My hh—” She draws in a slow breath. “David is going to die if I can’t find a cure for what Mazdak did to him, and my daughter is…” Her eyes go distant for a moment and she doesn’t finish the sentence.
“None of us are doing well, Elisabeth.” That’s Chel’s full assessment. “But if I’m a disaster I can at least be a useful one. What’s your problem?” Anything to avoid hers.
It's not like she can dispute any of what Michelle says, and Elisabeth's eyes on her are sympathetic. She, too, is feeling the strain of it all, and she too is burying it beneath work where she can. "You're the person Dr. Gatter was supposed to let know about any messages that have come through the radio antenna at WRAY," she says quietly. "It wasn't something I felt should be done on a phone that could be listened to. But something came through."
Pulling in a deep breath, Elisabeth makes a point of being careful to give the entire message. "The kid manning the antenna first got a repeating loop for a period of time, starting on July 7th. It began with "Dust in the Wind," appropriately enough, and then a woman was talking about the nature of time passing – something called Frame Dragging. If time can be revisited, has it really even passed. And rambling a bit about," she swallows because this part hit her a bit in the guts, "if love is a collision of time and space, can it exist beyond the moment? Can the space not exist? Like, forever?"
She pauses a moment to gather her thoughts, make sure she still has it right. "The kid tried to transmit back… Michelle, he got Dr. Juliette Luis in 19-fucking-97. Her query of him was how we stopped the asteroid. Their calculations had it hitting the earth on January 12, 2019." Elisabeth knows that date is seared into both of their minds. "Gatter double-checked the designation of the thing. Here in our timeline, that asteroid was a near-miss in March 1989, and is not scheduled to come back here again until 2051. Nothing about the calculations we have matches up with that time… and more likely, that timeline."
“Frame dragging.” Michelle’s attention diverts from Elisabeth to the window. Not to look outside, but to stare beyond it. Something about that term is hauntingly familiar, but she cannot place the where or why.
After a moment of silence, Chel looks back to Elisabeth. “The Department… has had me researching whether there are additional temporal deviations beyond the ones you traveled trying to get home.” She paces around the room now, talking and thinking becoming one fluid experience. “Possible variations, all minute, makes it impossible to create a branch. Quantum frequencies not divergent enough to perceive. Deviations caused by time travel make perception possible. Ripples in still water.”
Chel glances back at Elisabeth. “Joy—Juliette—can’t be a coincidence.” As she makes this assertion, Chel continues to pace. “There was no solar activity violent enough to cause a bleed through differing quantum fields. No Overlays.” She squints. “Unless—” Nothing. No hypothesis. Chel snaps her attention back to Elisabeth. “Who else knows about this?”
Dragging a hand through her hair, Elisabeth shakes her head. "The only people who know are the kid who took down the messages, Gatter, myself, and now you. So far as I'm aware, there are no overlays or anything else reported during that time, no."
Giving the genius time to consider what she's already said, Elisabeth adds, "I don't know enough about the physics of the matter to postulate additional deviations except to say that we certainly may have caused some. The Wasteland future that the children came back from – Lene and Joshua and JJ and the others? That future didn't change because they came back. I know the adult Walter took one of those travelers home before he himself then got trapped in your world on his way back to ours, and nothing had changed in his future. But I also know that when I came through what I thought of as the Wasteland timeline… we certainly changed some things. We took that version of Lance with us to your world, so he couldn't have been in the Wasteland in 2040 when those kids – who knew him as an adult – came back. Is that a different timeline? There are other examples I could offer, if you want or need them. I don't know how you'd go about checking on them."
“None of those branch points are prior to the 1990s, though.” Michelle counters, continuing to pace. “We pinpointed the change between my world and this one to the 1960s, but none of this lines up with what I know about Juliette’s life prior to joining the DoEA in my timeline.” She shifts her weight to one foot. “This is… something else.”
Chel goes to stand by the windows, arms crossed. “Frame dragging,” she repeats under her breath again, trying to puzzle something out. “Was there anything else in the broadcast? Did she say where she was?”
"Actually, in reading the transcript, a couple of things caught my attention. She was broadcasting from Berkeley's SETI program using an array in Utah. I assumed she meant something like the Very Large Array radio telescope – although here that's in New Mexico, last I knew." Elisabeth pauses, thinking about it. "Raffill Township is what she said, but I can't find that on any map pre- or post-war. The day the broadcasts started was June 28th, though I'm not sure if that will help you pinpoint what you're looking for. She was trying to send a message through time to warn them of the asteroid." She grimaces. Because that's not familiar at all. "Parallel development of ideas and all, if their string is somewhere near ours, I guess it makes sense it'd be someone else developing the idea—"
There is a long pause. There is no such thing as paranoia when you're us. Elisabeth can hear Felix's voice in her head clear as a bell. Juliette can't be a coincidence, right? Has Rianna told Chel who she is? Does Juliette/RiannaPrice/et al. still retain the knowledge base that belonged to Juliette who worked with Chel in Flood? And is it relevant? It feels relevant, though she cannot figure out quite how, but… it's tied somehow to the tears in spacetime… tears that Juliette was … traversing before the 1990s because Dessa was born in the 1980s… There are a hell of a lot of questions Elisabeth suddenly wants to ask Ria/Juliette.
Tipping her head with her arms crossed, Elisabeth watches Chel pace, nibbling on her lip. "Frame dragging sounds like maybe it could have something to do with overlays, certainly. I understood enough to know she was talking about gravitational impact being an electrical field that basically drags spacetime – I think she was talking about the gravitational impact of the asteroid. But… I don't understand the implications at all. Michele… could the tears we've created with Looking Glass have had gravitational pull like that?" She shifts her weight uncertainly on the balls of her feet.
"Could someone's ability, if they were using it to somehow traverse through the space between, have a gravitational impact… or at least be enough to cause an electrical field that might… resonate like an overlay? Because brainwaves are just electricity, yeah? The universal resonance frequencies are so very very close together. And… someone with a power like that told me that no one is really ever dead, they're just 'somewhere else', which makes sense with the conservation of matter and energy… So could use of a power like that—"
She shakes her head slightly. "I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here," Elisabeth admits ruefully. "Could it create some of the problems you're looking for, I guess? I'm reasonably intelligent, but not at this level maybe."
Michelle is as still as a statue, staring at her whiteboard as if an oracle looking for a pattern of the future in bones or birds. “I don’t know,” is her resolute admittance of defeat. She turns to face Elisabeth with brows furrowed and a look in her eye that reframes the tone of her voice. Not defeat, but challenge.
“I don’t know,” Michelle reiterates, but there’s a liveliness around it this time. An electric energy. “There’s so many points of data it’s hard to differentiate wheat from chaff. Any number of the theories you suggested could be related, but without knowing more specifics it’s hard to pin down…” She erases the whiteboard with great vigor, trailing in and out while doing so. “…got some known constants…” she mumbles with a marker cap between her teeth, writing words down and circling them.
Radio transmission.
Vibrational frequency.
Raffil Township
Utah
SETI
Asteroid?
Juliette
Slowly, Michelle begins drawing connecting lines between the related regions. Question marks around Raffil Township. Then she’s searching something on her phone; SETI arrays in Utah, abandoned towns in Utah, and then glances up at Elisabeth.
“Did it have a designation?” Chel asks without context. “The asteroid.” She catches up to her thoughts. “Did the asteroid have a designation? That would help connect points if it did, because not a lot else is… connecting dots.”
Blue eyes watch Michelle's brain at work, trying not to smile at the fact that even if the woman is not using actual string, she's drawing string maps. Maybe it's just tiredness that makes Liz want to laugh at that. The question, though, brings her attention back.
Elisabeth made sure to memorize that information just in case – although if Chel is going to write it on a board where anyone who walks in can see it, hey. Still, she keeps that low-level of indistinguishable murmuring in place instead of a full silence field as she answers, "4581-Asclepius. Gatter told me that here was a near-miss with Earth in March of 1989 and isn't scheduled to return here until the year 2051. In whatever timeline Juliette of 1997 was broadcasting from …. The asteroid was scheduled to hit the day we all got here in 2019." She pauses and says absently, "I kinda wish I'd had the chance to ask what their background vibrational frequency is… I wonder if that would help narrow how close or far away a timeline is from us."
She pauses again, looking at the words vibrational frequency and then seems skeptical about even voicing this thought because she is not a Science Fairy. "Uhm…. let me toss this out there somewhat incoherently. If the asteroid is big enough to potentially have its own gravitational field – they can have that, can't they? – could its collision with Earth, any Earth, sort of drag that Earth sideways into a new universe or … cause an overlay of timelines… because the impact itself creates vibration and thereby changes the vibrational frequency around the planet?" It seems far-fetched, at BEST. Ludicrous, even. It would have happened innumerable times over the millions of years of asteroids smacking planets, right? "That's ridiculous," she scoffs at herself. Please, dear God, tell me that's ridiculous.
Chel is silent for a moment, eyes unfocused as she stares at not the whiteboard but the concept of the whiteboard. She idly chews on the cap of the marker, brow furrowing only a bit before she plucks the cap off with her teeth and write one additional line on the board:
1989
Then, she turns to Elisabeth. “In simplest terms, everything that has mass has gravity. A speck of dust, a single atom. The matter is how much.” She glances at the whiteboard for a moment before capping the marker again. There’s smudges of it on her fingers. “Could an interstellar object colliding with the Earth create a gravitational impact large enough to…” she traces a finger in the air, then taps an empty space when she finds the word she’s looking for, “nudge us off-course? I don’t know. No one studied how much gravitational force Magnes Varlane created in Natazhat in this timeline to successfully collapse spacetime.”
Chel paces away from the board, twirling the marker between her fingers. Elisabeth’s mother might’ve said that ‘She’s going to wear a rut in the carpet.’
Switching marker for phone, Chel does a cursory search while she talks. “The point of correlation here is Juliette Luis. Her ability alone—if she possesses it in that timeline—could cause heretofore unknown repercussions with the fabric of spacetime. I was never able to—” Her search comes up positive, interrupting her thought.
“Three-hundred meters.” Chel recites Asclepius’ dimensions from her search. “Not shockingly large, but…” she pockets her phone and switches implements to the marker once more, drawing a large circle on the whiteboard followed by a quick grid that it’s sitting on, a grid that bends around the sphere.
“Earth,” Chel says pointing at the sphere. “Spacetime,” she denotes, pointing to the grid. “The simplest visualization of frame-dragging. But what if…” She draws a circle around the entire diagram. “Juliette was speaking in short-hand. What if she meant rotational frame-dragging.” She looks at Elisabeth. “The Lens-Thirring Effect.”
“The idea is that a massive rotating object twists space-time. Like twirling pasta with a fork.” Chel makes a little hand-gesture to accompany the notion. “It impacts the motion of objects and gravity-affected particles. Imperceptibly, to us. But let’s scale up the gravitational effect. On a large enough scale it could cause light on the tighter end of the spiral to move faster than the light on the outer edges.”
Chel spreads her hands slowly. “This is, obviously, correlated to what we understand about how the Looking Glass operates. The charged particles spinning through the looped colliders on the triangular frame…” she draws a triangle around her diagram, “bend spacetime and assist the laser array in folding and compressing spacetime into a singularity.”
Turning her attention back to Elisabeth, Chel twirls the market between her fingers again. “How this all connects… it’s hard to say. But it can’t be coincidence. The question is why did we receive this message now? Or is this,” she gestures to the warping of spacetime, “the answer itself.”
Elisabeth is quiet for a long time, looking at the board while she listens to Chel's explanations. Her brows are pulled together in intense concentration. "So that's what causes the spiral in the air when the Looking Glass activates…" A pause, and then she sighs quietly. "There's no such thing as coincidence in any of this. Anytime things like this just pop up in our path, it's because something has been done that caused it – so… I don't think I've done anything more than give you yet another data point that seemingly connects nowhere." She ponders…
And then asks, "If this Lens-Thirring Effect is pulling everything around it into a singularity, is it possible that Juliette's power being used over and over again – and the Looking Glass being used in multiple timelines, could be pulling all of the local area's strands of universes into a single strand? In pursuing this research, are we collapsing all of the timelines into singularity by accident or even … causing the solar flare with a spacetime gravity well of some kind?" How many times have they punched holes in spacetime, after all? Elisabeth looks at Michelle, both eyebrows up, and tries to quip, "Or is that just rampant sci-fi nonsense my head just went to again?"
“It might be. Nonsense, that is.” Chel says with a tired smile. “But it also might not be. I don’t have enough data to do anything more than be worried by the possibility. I don’t know what that kind of consolidation would look like, effectively though. Would we even be able to perceive it? Would we simply cease to exist?” She shrugs, helplessly.
“I don’t know if we’re actively causing the flare,” Chel adds. “But I do know that according to the OEI’s research, solar activity is normalized across all timelines where solar activity can be monitored. There’s no variation. So, obviously the same HELE across all superstrings. This does make me wonder if our string variations are somehow localized to within Earth’s gravity well or…” Chel throws her hands up in the air. “Decades of research for that answer. If ever.”
Well, at least that's honest. Elisabeth can't help the faint rueful twist of her lips. "It's a whole lot of theory and no real way to follow up on it anyway. And well… it appears at the moment to have no immediate relevance to our primary goal, which is finding a way to bring that team home again. So… I guess if anything else comes through WRAY, I'll let you know. Gatter's reporting it to me because the other people he was supposed to keep in the loop are out of commission at the moment. In the meantime… I suppose we just keep doing what we're doing. One foot in front of the other." Because what the hell else are they going to do?
There's a momentary hesitation where Elisabeth considers the thought of telling Chel to go talk to her daughter who is currently housing the consciousness of Juliette… but Ria is here with her mother. If Chel needs to be told, Juliette will – on presumes – tell her.
"Try to get some sleep, Chel." Elisabeth offers the older woman a weary smile when she says it. "I know it's hard, but … put on your own oxygen mask first, yeah?"
Chel nods, tiredly, and looks at her whiteboard with a thoughtful frown. “Oxygen masks only matter if the plane isn’t in a tail spin,” she says quietly. Then, forcing a smile, looks back to Elisabeth.
She wants to say something to pick up the mood from that.
But she can’t find the words.