29
Yanto Owens may not have been worried about his son, but he was proud of him. It had taken him a while to recognize that Kenneth’s stubbornness was a gift from himself, and even longer to appreciate it. So, although he did not think that time travel had been Ken’s project, he was pretty sure that whatever it was, he would almost certainly complete it successfully.
While Nora was at the Paddington Starbucks, Yanto was in his shop, playing with simulations of potential valence interactions of heavy metals. Some might call his shop a man cave, but Yanto always called it the shop. England was a nation of shopkeepers, not of cavemen. Like many such shops, it was full of parts of past projects and tools, old and new. Yanto, for instance, still had an antique 4K TV that he used as a monitor for most of his work. But it was connected to a new Chromebox about the size of an antique Altoids box. With it he could use virtually any sort of computer software he needed, probably running on hardware housed along some Norwegian fjord or a frozen Russian lake.
It had not taken people very long to realize what first they considered waste or litter was actually simply resources that were unavailable to them. Local entropy. But it took hardly more time for people to develop the tools to use that waste, just as bacteria had quickly developed that fed on the plastic in the oceans. Yanto was working on recovery of heavy metals that were scattered about as ‘waste’ in all sorts of places, from folks’ livers to last year’s computer. As he reviewed the properties of Thallium, he noticed some of the past projects gathering dust on the shelf behind his screen. One was Kenneth’s first 3-D printer. He had bought it as soon as the price of printers dropped to less than 1000 pounds. He had used to make models of Star Trek ships to sell to support his more serious projects. Another was a metal box that at first might seem to be a blue biscuit tin.
The blue box was a pc that Kenneth had built twenty years ago. He had left it behind when he went up to university, replacing it with a normal laptop. Yanto had used it for a while, but he too had bought a replacement as computing power got cheaper and cheaper, so it went up on the shelf. Ken had wanted it to be as small as possible to house an Nvidia GTX 580. He had built his own motherboard for the brand new Core i7, and Yanto had helped him make the case, which was the heatsink. The case got a little warm, but it kept the insides cool enough to avoid thermal throttling. Kenneth would joke that it was cooler on the inside. It looked like a Tardis.
Yanto smiled. Perhaps his son had gone time traveling. Kenneth might be a real Time Lord.
30
The four detectives met early on Friday morning around Kenneth’s table. House provided everyone breakfast, and decided it needed to order more groceries if it were going to be having guests. Surprised to find had been on the same train the evening before, they were met at the station by The Apple Tree’s Volvo Estate, and enjoyed high tea at the Inn and outlined what they thought they might do to solve the mystery. Then Nora had taken an Uberdu to her son’s cottage and the others had gone to their rooms. Both Lin and Rafael had wanted to stay up with each other, but they both feigned jet lag and retired to their rooms, separated by a locked door. Marcus retired to his room with his Yogabook to review once again the schematics of all the little circuits he had printed on the surface of Kenneth’s Hyundai. None of them had slept well.
So they had gathered early at Kenneth’s cottage for breakfast and to pursue their outline. The trio who had stayed at the inn skipped its famous breakfast for breakfast prepared by the House. House made each one’s choice, and decided it should order more groceries if it were to be having guests. Breakfast plates cleared away, they woke the Table to implement their plan.
First, they wanted to compare all the records of what Kenneth had done to the Hyundai with to the information Min-seo had provided him. What had he done that might be beyond what Marcus had printed or known. They wanted to know what sort of vehicle it was in which Kenneth was traveling.
Then, they wanted to study all of Kenneth’s notes about his concepts of time travel, especially his interest in tales of ‘sleepers’--usually knights or monks who woke after years of being asleep, often in some cave. Was he planning on going forwards or backwards. Did he have a specific time and place as his destination? If he had tried to go to a specific place in the past, they might find evidence of his success in historical records. Or not. They wanted to know what sort of route had he planned to take.
Next, they wanted to compare and analyze all of the data to see if they might understand better just how Kenneth had done the deed. Because, after all, he had done something. He had just disappeared. It was not easy to disappear in 2030, with everything and everyone connected. None of Nora’s or Marc’s social networks had told them that their friend Kenneth Owens was near, or had checked in, or had posted, or had commented. Because he had left his Table open, they could see that he had not withdrawn any funds just before Halloween, nor were there any unusual withdrawals in the weeks before. He had not planned on taking holiday funds with him, and he had left his bankcard behind. It was obvious that Kenneth had thought he was going time-traveling. Had he? Was that possible? And if Kenneth were not somewhen else, where else was he?
Because of the reviews of their correspondence and notes done before, it was quickly obvious that nothing had been done with the actual antennae on the Hyundai beyond what Min-seo had theorized. Marcus had managed to build it, and Rafael was wondering whether, after the weekend were over, if he could get Rutchsman to work for Panjiva. Certainly his company needed to strengthen their ties to Sheffield. Kenneth’s breakthrough, if he had really made it and was not just craftily hiding out, either dead or alive, somewhere in a crevice of Snowdonia, had been in software. He had further developed some nearly-forgotten work on optical analysis at the University of California and the work done by the LSST to find a way to identify what the thought of as time waves in ‘real time’--an odd concept when one thinks of it. He had relied on his Nvidia Plank One to show his waves graphically. He had taken his graphics card with him (those things are expensive, and he had wanted to be able to use it whenever he landed. He would be able to understand when he was even if he couldn’t get back to when when he had left.) But Marcus was able to use an Nvidia cloud service to see how it might work. Kenneth was traveling, if that was what he was doing, in a cross between an extremely-broad band spectroscope and a surfboard. Rafael laughed. He had been a fan of Norrin Rad as a kid.
The route Kenneth had expected to take was quickly obvious, and no surprise. He had taken seriously the stories of thin places and sleepers and crossing between worlds that were so common in Celtic tales. It seemed that Glastonbury might be a sort of station, a node, for the roads that led to other times and worlds, a sort of stone and iron age Paddington Station. Following that metaphor, however, they had no way of knowing whether Ken might be on a Great Western Railway route to Penzance or Pembroke or a local train to a suburb or off to Heathrow to transfer to some destination very far away indeed. Still, it did seem that Kenneth was not planning to go where no man had gone before, but to retrace the routes of his ancestors.
But was it possible? They all wanted to think it was, to verify Min’s theories and to suggest further, probably commercial applications, but also, and most importantly, especially to Nora and Marcus, to be able to believe that Ken was still (if that were the right word for someone in the past or future) alive, that he was someone who might return to them or whom they could follow. The rub was that to test his thesis, now their shared thesis, that time travel was possible and that Kenneth Owens had made a device to allow it, they would have to repeat it. Repeatability is the essence of scientific discovery. Repeating it, if they could achieve it without sharing their--Ken’s--find to the world prematurely, would not be easy.
They decided that it was time to try the food at The Apple Tree Inn. A bit of more relaxed time might let them imagine better how to repeat the conquest that seemed to have been made with Atilla the Hyundai. Besides, when House ordered food, the cost came out of Kenneth’s account. They didn’t know whether, somehow, he might need it to return. So they asked House to call an Uberdu, and Nora called Yanto.
Yanto answered immediately. ‘You’re right,’ he said, without waiting for Nora to speak. ‘Our crazy boy’s a real Time Lord. He’ll probably get a Nobel Prize after all.’
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