A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (6 page)

Dani showed them how to use a laser pointer to set the direction and distance of the originating point. Then she helped them adjust the viewing direction and angle on the machine itself. Together, they turned on the projector, and there they all were, little tiny people gathered around a little tiny stage, no more than a foot across. They all clapped, and the tiny figures clapped with them. That made them laugh, and the tiny figures laughed too.

While the kids were watching the hologram of themselves, Dani passed out the touch-and-color pages for the younger kids, and offered the decks of matching cards for those who wanted to come up front to get them after the presentation.

Finally, she turned off the projector, and her audience whooped and hollered. She had won two hundred new fans for the institute and its work. It had been a good morning.

Ms. Lawrence, who had been peeking into the auditorium every ten or fifteen minutes, stepped all the way inside to join in on the applause at the end. She dismissed the students to their classrooms to get ready for lunch.

“Would you like to stay and eat with the children? I know they’d enjoy that,” she invited Dani after the students had left.

“Oh, no, but thank you,” Dani replied. “I really need to get over to the high school to set up for my afternoon presentation.”

But she accepted help with gathering her things and packing them back on the hovercart. She nudged the whole batch out to her helicar, loaded it up, and soon she was on her way. She spotted a food dispenser hovering along the main flyway, maneuvered next to it, selected an ergonomic wrap sandwich, and paid for it with her irisscan. She always laughed a little at the “ergonomic” part; granted, it was easier to hold the sandwich while she was driving, but what a lot of fuss for something that would be in her stomach in ten minutes!

As she finished the last bite, Dani spotted the West Seattle High School parking lot, just outside the newly remodeled high school. She landed her helicar gently. For the high schoolers, she took a large stack of interactive question-and-answer sheets and some puzzle pages that would challenge them to determine the correct historic period from the audio and visual clues. Almost as an afterthought, she gathered some more of the holographic matching games, just in case the high schoolers wanted to try them. They were pretty easy to solve, but they still looked intriguing. She was ready.

HUNTER’S OFFICE. 1200, Tuesday, June 6, 2215.

Tod
ay Hunter was wearing a new suit, a dark blue Rafe Zerdo with charcoal pinstripes and a red pocket square. Before leaving his office for lunch, he paused to check the drape of his pants and straighten his tie pin, making good use of the full-length mirror he had had installed for just this purpose. Satisfied, he stepped out, locked the door carefully, and noted that his executive secretary had already left. Good. He had manufactured a pretense to send him away: He required financial records, immediately. Not at some time in the distant future.

The chronography repository would be empty at this time of day. One of the rules he had insisted on, right after the institute was opened, was that all employees must take a full hour for lunch, away from their assigned workplace. This policy gave him the reputation as a caring employer who looked out for the good of his employees, and he found that reputation useful, but his real reason was to clear certain parts of the building for specific purposes.

It was one of those purposes that led him to the repository now. The investigation he had requested yesterday would be completed, and the information it provided would be instrumental in acquiring more essential funding. Despite being near the top echelon of a research institute, he himself was no researcher. If truth be known, he despised the researchers, except for what they could provide him. They had no idea of the goldmine they sat upon. Morons. He was satisfied to let them do the work for him. Except, of course, for this part. He needed to do this himself, to ensure there were no witnesses. And he had to do it with no one nearby, because the process itself made a very distinctive noise, and it would interfere with his goals if someone heard it.

He removed the investigation results from the rack. It would need to be converted to a playable format for his purposes. He had learned that the investigation records were pointers to the real data. Pointers were helpful, because they were so small as to be almost undetectable, and they allowed the real information to be kept intact. The Video-Audio-Olfactory converter allowed him to access the raw data and edit it judiciously to remove any evidence of its source. The same device would then convert the edited information to a format that could be accessed, through another pointer, by a holographic VAO projector. He had never bothered to learn exactly how it worked, but he was pretty sure the noise came from reading the chemical signatures of the scents.

The multiple steps required to produce the incriminating evidence, any of which were quite innocent on their own, enabled him to obscure his tracks effectively, and the resulting holograms, carefully trimmed and edited, could be very persuasive.

WEST SEATTLE HIGH SCHOOL, Seattle, WA. 1235, Tuesday, June 6, 2215.

A few
clouds drifted lazily overhead as Dani found a spot in the high school parking lot. Visitors got preference here, with a cluster of spots open near the front entrance marked to deter students and faculty from their use. Transporting all her materials in would be easy.

Her first clue that something might be a little more challenging was the abundance of political posters along the entry hall under the heading “PRO or CON?” She saw posters arguing both sides of environmental issues (harvesting energy from the sea, protecting endangered crustaceans, global cooling), civic issues (lowering the voting age to 16, protesting the city curfew), economic issues (working hours for minors, raising the minimum wage), and international issues (balance of trade, involvement in the Asian wars).

Surprised, Dani had to admit that she was impressed. She didn’t remember anywhere near this level of involvement in the issues of the day when she was in high school, and that was less than ten years earlier. She looked forward to some interesting questions on her presentation, and wondered whether the giveaway items she had brought—really little more than toys and busywork—would find any takers after all.

The school office was on her right, and she was spotted immediately.

“May I help you?” asked a student office aide with no name tag.

Dani introduced herself. The student asked her to wait in the reception area. It took several minutes, but finally a woman in a sharply tailored suit came out to greet her. Her tone was businesslike, with no trace of warmth, when she spoke.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Adams. I’m Ms. Harris, the principal at West Seattle. I’m sorry to make you wait.” She brushed aside Dani’s reassurances that it didn’t matter and continued in that crisp tone of voice. “I asked them to have you stop and talk to me so we could be sure we had the same … goals … in mind. Please step into my office.”

Dani’s eyes opened a little wider. This was new. She followed the principal to her office, then offered, “I’m sure we do. Do you have some concerns?”

“Ms. Adams, I’m well aware that your institute uses these visits for public relations opportunities. I have no objection to that, but we need to understand each other.”

Dani just waited. She was pretty good at thinking on her feet, but still, she hoped this wouldn’t mean too many changes to her presentation.

“Many of our young people pass your campus on the way to school in the morning. The picket signs are evident, the political implications easily discerned. I have no wish to be inhospitable”—her tone said otherwise—“but I have to insist on a balanced presentation.”

“What do you mean by balanced?”

“We’ll need you to restrict your general presentation to demonstrating the technology and explaining its limitations.” Still, that tough tone of voice.

“I can do that.” Dani wasn’t sure what had stirred up the bad feelings here. It baffled her.

“After the presentation, for those students interested, you’ll have an opportunity to talk about how you use the technology in a question and answer format. I have to warn you, though, some of these students have studied the privacy issues and they won’t pull any punches. They will have prepared some difficult questions.”

Dani swallowed. She really wasn’t the confrontational sort. She responded the only way she could. “They may have prepared questions, but I haven’t prepared any answers. I can only be honest about what I know and what I don’t know.”

Ms. Harris’s no-nonsense expression softened. “How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-three.”

“Not much older than my seniors.”

“No. In some ways, those days seem like just yesterday,” she confided.

“Well, do your best. If they get too antagonistic, I’ll see if we can get them to debate each other to deflect some of it.”

Dani flashed a grateful smile. “I’d appreciate it. I didn’t expect this. I really like kids, and I respect their concerns.”

The principal studied her. “You’re different. They usually send one of those polished corporate mouthpieces to the high school. Do they know that you’re so straightforward?”

Surprised, Dani felt herself being drawn to the older woman. Perhaps she didn’t need to be on her guard after all. “Actually, I don’t think they know me very well at all.”

The two women eyed each other thoughtfully for the space of several seconds. It wasn’t long, but it was enough. Dani realized she had found a friend—in a most unlikely place.

Ms. Harris turned to open the door. “Let me show you where to set up.”

Dani had barely enough time to arrange her props and equipment before the high school students started filing in. She managed to smile at most of them as they entered, but only a very few of the kids smiled back. She could feel the tension in the air. She would just have to be as charming as she could to win them over.

Once they were settled in their seats, she began. “Welcome to my chronography presentation. Your principal, Ms. Harris, has told me that many of you are studying the science and the social implications of chronography. Good for you! We’ll be spending the first part of our time together examining the technology and the science behind it, and we’ll have a time to talk about the social implications later for those who are interested.”

She saw some nods, but not everyone seemed receptive. “Who would like to tell me what you already know about the science of chronography?” she asked, emphasizing the word “science” just enough to direct their answers.

A young woman off to her left raised her hand. She was neatly dressed in a crisp white shirt with short, cropped bell sleeves. Dani nodded in her direction.

“Chronography,” she said, “gives us the ability to analyze history through direct observation, reducing the subjectivity that we find even in original documents like letters.”

“That’s true. Does anyone know how it works?”

A dark-haired girl, lounging against her seat back, dressed in a rumpled tee shirt, spoke up without raising her hand. “You use old things as a source for sights and sounds and smells. When you put them in the box, they act like they’ve been little recorders all along, but you don’t get their stuff until years and years later.”

“Yes, exactly. So we can use them to find out what happened when no recorders were present. And then we can save the recordings for other people to analyze and interpret. If historians disagree about how something happened, they can go back to the same source that the first researchers used and draw their own conclusions. Does anyone know what we call that kind of research?”

A boy in the middle with bright blue hair leaned forward in his seat. She invited him to speak with an open hand held out in his direction. “That’s original research, right? Not based on anyone else’s research? And that’s supposed to be more reliable.”

Dani nodded. “It’s very important to our view of the past to be able to establish things as true or false, or as simply someone’s opinion of what’s true. What are some things that you can’t learn from a recording?”

More of the students were getting drawn into the discussion. Maybe they were realizing that this wasn’t going to be the propaganda talk they had expected. Answers started coming more quickly.

“People’s motives.” “People’s thoughts.” “Anything that happened out of the room, or out of the line of sight,” which gave rise to, “anything hidden in any way.”

Dani smiled. There were some sharp minds in this group. “You’ve thought this through already, haven’t you? Let me tell you what we find when we analyze a typical object.”

She showed them the plastic and leather samples and told them the former wasn’t helpful and the latter yielded only still photographs, which could be useful for establishing dates and times.

The girl in the white shirt asked, “How can you learn when something happened? If I look at a photograph, I can’t tell when it was taken.”

“One of the most important developments in the science of chronography was when we first learned how to calibrate for dates and times. Today, when we examine an object, we can zero in on a specific minute—even second—in time.”

“How do you know what time to zero in on?” blurted a girl in a dark hooded sweatshirt who, until this moment, hadn’t spoken.