A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (7 page)

Dani was impressed. It was a question she rarely heard, but it was so much a part of her job. She was starting to like this talk-only-about-the-science stuff. It got her into topics that she didn’t usually get to address. “We don’t. Not at first, anyway.”

She reached over and picked up a ceramic vase from a nearby bookshelf. “Let’s say someone donated this vase, or that we found it in an old house or museum. We have a vague idea that it might be useful because of where it was found, but we don’t really know if it was always in that house, or museum, or anywhere, really. Let’s say it spent most of its existence in a school like this one, but we don’t know that.”

She had their attention. “Ceramic is a good material to use as a source. We can get complete visual and audio recordings from it, with moving images, for as long as we want. If we pick a random time, and we happen to end up in the summer, what will we see and hear?”

There they were, on the cusp of summer. They didn’t have to think long at all. “Nothing.” “We’re all gone in the summer.”

“That’s right, and we could have assumed that if we knew this vase was from a school. But we didn’t. So we see nothing except this room, with nobody in it. Once we see that, we might be able to guess that it’s in a school, and our second try at a recording will be more useful. What day and time would you pick?”

Hands went up. “You—when would you pick?”

“Well, I know that class meetings are here on some Wednesdays at 2:00 P.M., and those are usually pretty active, so that would be a good time.” This, from a boy with short dark curly hair.

“Okay, but what if you didn’t have that inside knowledge? What would you do?”

“I’d look at the room at regular intervals until I found something interesting.”

“That’s exactly what we do. Our initial scans are for a few seconds every fifteen minutes or so over an interval of a month or more at a time. I can set the scanner to automatically jump ahead and take these samples, but we restrict those to just visual recordings. Do you think that would be enough to tell when something interesting was going on?”

They were nodding, except the girl in the hooded sweatshirt. Now she spoke. “Not always, I think. What if someone stole something or got shot or something else that takes less than a minute from start to end? You wouldn’t see anything.”

“You’re right. You wouldn’t see anything at all. We’d look right over the top of that little incident, unless we knew right where—and when—to look. If we are trying to solve a crime, we can fine tune our calibrations a little better, to catch things like that, but the likelihood of our stumbling onto it randomly is really small. Anyone want to do the math?”

“I already have.” The boy with bright blue hair looked up from scribbling on his worktablet. “If you assume five-second scans every fifteen minutes, and an event that takes about one minute from start to finish, you will see five seconds of it only about six and two-thirds percent of the time. If you only looked at one month a year, that percentage goes down to a little over a half percent chance of seeing anything at all. I assume you’d need all five seconds to get anything useful.”

“That was quick, and you’re exactly right. Would you like a job?” The students laughed, but the boy sat up a little straighter. Dani was impressed again. She hadn’t expected anyone to actually take up her challenge. Not only had he done the math, he had taken it beyond the original question. She realized that she was beginning to really like these kids and starting to look forward to the political part of the discussion coming later.

“If we do happen to find something interesting, then we narrow down our time window and go back and take a second look. With this second look, we usually include the audio portion and the olfactory portion, if the material permits, but we narrow down the viewing angle for the visual to just the part we’re interested in. With this vase, for instance, we don’t really care about what the wall behind it looks like, and we’d probably have a general idea in which direction the action was taking place.”

“What do you mean when you say, ‘if the material permits’?” asked the boy who had done the figuring.

“We can’t get scents from anything but metal. We could turn on the scent scanner, but it wouldn’t give us anything. We didn’t find that out until we’d been doing recordings for several years. We’re a little more efficient now.”

A girl in a bright yellow shirt was waving her hand. Dani nodded at her. “How do you set the viewing angle? I mean, I know there’s a number you type in or scroll to or something, but what if someone turned the vase? Would you have to adjust for that?”

“You know, no one has ever asked me that before. We don’t have to adjust, and the reason is simple: The angles are absolute angles, related to the earth’s magnetic field. So ‘north five degrees east’ is always the same direction, regardless of whether someone has turned the vase or even upended it.”

She looked at the clock on the viewwall to her left. It was already 1:45, and she hadn’t even gotten out her equipment. “Would you like to try out the holographic projector before we get to the political questions?” Several students did, and she invited several of them to come up and learn how. Once she had showed a few how to point at the source location, set the direction, and turn on the projector, she left them experimenting and moved over to talk to Ms. Harris, who had sat quietly but approvingly through the whole talk.

“I think you’ll be just fine during the political discussion,” she said.

Eight students and Ms. Harris followed Dani into the conference room for the political discussion. She sat near the middle of one side of the long table, leaving the head of the table for whoever might want it.

She looked around to see what—and who—she might be facing. “Will you all introduce yourselves before we begin? Maybe one short sentence about why you’re here today while you’re at it. I’ll start. I’m Ms. Adams, but I’m not much older than you and it’s okay to call me Dani, if you want, with Ms. Harris’s permission?”

Ms. Harris nodded her permission, and Dani went on. “I’m here today because I believe in the institute that I work for. I believe it has done some wonderful things, but I also know there are concerns about what it could do, so let’s talk about those too.”

She looked to her immediate left at the girl in the bright yellow shirt. “I’m Alanya. I’m here because chronography seems really exciting, but really dangerous. I want to know more.”

The girl in the dark hoody, to her left, said, “Meredin. I love learning about the past. I just don’t want everybody to know everything about my past. Or really, about anyone’s past, without a very good reason.”

The math whiz with the bright blue hair had claimed the spot at the head of the table just beyond them. “Joph. I like numbers. I want to be sure we’re all getting the truth.” He looked at her very directly as he spoke. She could tell he meant business, and she liked what she saw.

The dark-haired girl with the casual tee shirt was next to him, opposite Meredin. She had pulled one long leg up under the other and was attempting to sit cross-legged on the chair, which was falling short of adjusting to her posture. She gave up and decided to be satisfied with one leg up. “I’m Tejaswi, but people call me Jazz. I see things other people miss. This chronography stuff weirds me out. It’s bad news. You’re from RIACH, right there in the middle of the weirdness.”

“Why are you here?”

“Honestly, I’m here to throw it in your face to see how you respond. No offense.”

Dani laughed, amused in spite of the girl’s challenge. Here was the opposition she’d been warned about, and she was keenly aware of the nods of agreement scattered around the long table. “Fair enough. I’ll remind you that I’m an intern. I’m not in the middle of anything, really. I’m out on the edge. But I’ll do my best to listen and answer what I can.”

She turned to the curly-haired boy, who was sitting on the left of Jazz. “Your turn,” she invited.

“I’m Shard. I’m interested in everything, but I’m here mostly to get out of sixth period.” His admission made everyone laugh, and lightened the tension.

An athletic-looking boy who hadn’t spoken up during the technology discussion, and who had slipped in late to this one, sat directly across from Dani. At her nod, he spoke. “I’m Beck.” He hesitated, trying to find words. “I don’t really want to say why I’m here, if that’s all right. It’s personal.”

“That’s fine, Beck.” Two more kids to go. She hoped she’d be able to remember these names. Ms. Harris was sitting next to Beck. Her gaze skipped past her to the next position, the other end of the long table.

“I’m Lora,” said the girl in the white shirt who had defined chronography. “I think chronography should be regulated. I want to know if anyone is watching the watchers. And if nobody is, I want to make a lot of noise until people wake up and do something!”

Dani nodded. She’d almost gone full circle now. “And you?” she asked the slender young man sitting on her own right. His brown eyes held a friendly look.

“I’m Ronny.” He had an engaging grin that took a little of the sting out of his next words. “Lora said exactly what I think, but there’s more. You may be a really nice person, and chronography may be this exciting new science, but I don’t think the people you work for are either nice people or pioneers. My grandfather is a detective, and he always says, ‘Follow the money if you want to know what’s going on.’ I want to know how the Institute gets its money. It’s privately held, and nobody seems to know who is financing it.”

Dani cleared her throat. Where should she start?

Ms. Harris must have noticed her hesitation, because she spoke up. “I think most of our concerns center around the privacy issue. Would you like to address that first?” A murmur of agreement gave Dani the floor.

“You’ve all seen the four posters, I suspect?” she asked. They nodded. “Fresh perspectives. Reclaimed heritage. Solved crimes. Authentic atmospheres. Those slogans, along with the idea of our recordings being PastPerfect because we can see, hear, and smell them, form the public face of RIACH. But there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and if you were there for most of it, you’d find it to be really, really boring.

“Earlier today, you heard a little bit about how we sample a time period to try to find something of value. Let’s imagine we were looking back on today from several hundred years in the future. Perhaps this discussion we’re having now will end up being the long awaited catalyst that produces new laws. People from the future want to know what we said here. Is anybody recording this?”

They all shook their heads at her. “Neither am I. And for most historic events, that’s the case. So a team of researchers from the future will have to use chronography if they want to know anything about what happens here. They may or may not know that we had our discussion at West Seattle High. They may or may not know that it was in June. They probably have no idea what room it occurred in. Also, most of the objects in this room will have been replaced or moved by the time they get interested. Look around. Do any of you see an object that would still be here in two hundred years?”

“The chairs?” suggested Meredin.

“They’re mostly made of biodegradable plastic,” said Beck.

“The metal parts, then?” asked Lora.

“Possibly, if the chairs are still intact, this research team might know that they came from this high school. But think of all the chairs in all the rooms. Should they sample all of them to try to find one that was in here?” Dani could tell they were beginning to understand the immensity of the TimeSearch project. “Also, if they’ve been damaged, they will have gone to a recycling station, and there will be no way of tracing them back here.”

Other suggestions came in. The flag. The clock. A piece of carpeting. In each case, Dani explained the difficulties. She summarized, “This is why we don’t worry very much about privacy issues. The things we find, we just happen on, and it’s not usually because we’re looking for them.”

Jazz hadn’t said anything for a while, but now she spoke up. “If you’re not worried, you’re wrong not to be.” They all turned in her direction. “The fact is, we’re not worried about whether people two hundred years from now can find out what we did or said. We’re worried about whether people today can find out. And any one of us could borrow a chair or even take our own clothing—natural fabrics work, right?—and take it in for analysis. Can you tell us truthfully that this is never done?”

Dani flashed back to the object she had investigated the day before. She didn’t know why they had scheduled a recent object, and after seeing Marak, she hadn’t really paid attention to the particulars of the images from the five minutes she recorded. She shook her head slowly. “I really don’t know. I know that I seldom see anything newer than a hundred years, but it does happen, and I’m not the only one scanning objects. Besides the interns, sometimes the fellows and the researchers use the labs. I … I can’t really answer your question. I’d just be guessing.”

Joph was scribbling. More math, Dani thought. He looked up. “Hey,” he said. “You know, the reverse is true too. If you’re not looking for a particular person’s secrets and you’d be satisfied with anybody’s, the odds favor finding something worth some money from all those objects. The newer the object, the better the chances.”

“That’s what my grandfather says.” Ronny was nodding his head. He looked immensely gratified. “Follow the money. That would be a hard opportunity to resist, if you had a crack at it.”