A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

like a glowing pebble in a phosphorescent pond. The ripples began radiating outward uniformly. They watched as the waves spread, their amplitude dwindling to nothing within seconds.
    “I see. And immediately, it was opposed by the damping force,” said the doctor.
    “Correct. That progression is easy to predict. But look, here’s another one.” This time, the pebble fell in the pond, and the ripples radiated irregularly. Two bright blips on the outermost ripple, and new disturbances started radiating outward from them even as the original ones faded. When the surface settled into smoothness again, the places where the blips had occurred still glowed. “These spots, I’ve found, are much more likely to be the site of a new disturbance later.”
    “How much more likely?” Doc asked him.
    “Approximately a hundred times more likely.”
    Doc sat up straight. “What? That could cause the timestream a lot of trouble.”
    “I know.”
    “Is that the intentionality you were referring to?”
    “No. These blips I attribute to human actions, many of them related to the chronography institute. Their influence can be quantified, and the ripples behave in predictable ways.”
    “I’m puzzled, then. Is there a third type of force involved?”
    “Yes. Watch this one.”
    Lexil moved the graph up onto the wall. The pebble dropped. The ripples spread outward, produced a single blip, then faded. As they watched, the single glowing spot started to pulse, and then new ripples appeared, moving inward toward the blip, gradually reducing it in size until it disappeared.
    He heard Doc’s sharp intake of breath. “Is this an actual event, or a simulation?”
    “An actual event. The initial disturbance occurred about two months ago. It took three days for those ripples to subside, including the ones from the blip. Twelve days ago, this inward ripple started. It took it about six days to repair the blip. As far as I can determine, there was no human agency involved.”
    The older man leapt up and returned to his own work area. He yanked out boxes of memory rods, reading labels and casting them aside. Lexil heard him muttering to himself. He couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, though.
    “Doc?” he asked, walking toward him.
    By now, the older man was surrounded by displaced boxes. His head popped up for a second. “Looking for something!” and then he was back at it. A few more minutes passed. Finally, he emerged, triumphantly holding up a tattered box in one hand and a memory rod in the other. “Found it!”
    “That box looks old.”
    “It is. This is from back when we had just set up our third time disturbance sensor. That gave us, as you know, the ability to triangulate to any point in history, although we couldn’t be very precise at great distances. I thought I had seen a pattern like this before. Let’s put these numbers in your nice little visualization here and see what we get.”
    They sat down together in Lexil’s work area and plugged in the memory rod. “Haven’t used this format for data in a long time,” said Doc.
    “I have a conversion program that can handle it.” Lexil swiped a few screens to run the data through it, and soon, they had enough to create the visualization.
    It started with four or five of the bright blips on the screen. As they watched, the inward ripples started, first with the blip on the far left, then moving to the next closest one, and progressing sequentially until all the blips were gone.
    They sat in silence for a few moments after the visualization ended. Doc cleared his throat. “What do the spatial dimensions represent on your graphs?”
    “Physical dimensions on these two axes, and time on the third axis,” Lexil answered. “I can locate these blips on the earth’s surface within a few feet.”
    “Because that looked for all the world like something was deliberately moving from one blip to the another, doing the repairs, then moving on to the next.”
    “Yeah.