Fic: Twelve Bright Stars (1 of 3)
Title: Twelve Bright Stars
Characters: Toshiko, Team
Rating: Open
Spoilers: Everything prior to S1 E1, including Doctor Who and Fragments
Kind thanks to adina_atl and peasant_ (whose LJ I think may have been deleted) for the beta work, which happened a year ago. I had to put this down and sit on it for a while, but now I just want to post it and move on.
Finally, the ground stopped bucking. As dust spiraled in the beams of emergency battle lanterns hung from the ceilling, Toshiko crawled out from under the workbench where she'd taken shelter.
The floor was a disaster zone. Piles of papers and furniture and smashed electronics littered the area, rendered slippery and smelly by water that had slopped from the pool. Jack was standing in front of the Rift manipulator, frantically working the controls.
“Jack? Are you-” Toshiko picked her way across some of the rubble toward him, bracing herself against the edge of a fallen table as an aftershock rumbled through. The scent of scorched plastic assaulted her nose.
“Get back!” Jack snapped.
Toshiko backed away hastily, hitting her hip on the corner of a desk. “What’s burning? Do you need help?”
“The Rift controller is damaged." Without looking at her, he ordered, "Get the others, go into the firing range, and wait until I call you.”
She wove her way through the debris to find that Suzie had heard Jack bellowing and had already sent Owen down the steps. It was strained in the shooting range, strained and tense as the three of them tried to ignore the muffled whine of the Rift controller and the sporadic lingering aftershocks. With each one, the Rift controller would shriek and whine like a tortured thing, in a hellish parody of music.
“Tosh, what the hell is going on?” Suzie yelled.
“The Rift controller is damaged somehow,” Toshiko said. “I could smell burning and saw sparks arcing off something.”
Suzie sucked in her breath. “Shit!”
“I know.” Tosh turned so that her shoulder blades were pressed flat against the plaster. “Still, I haven't heard any explosions yet.”
All three of them looked at the ceiling. It didn't shriek like metal-on-metal anymore, but kept with the eerie whine.
“Nice of him to go all noble-sacrifice on us,” Owen grumbled. “If he gets blown to meaty little bits, we're stuck here.”
“Yes, and there wouldn't be anybody alive who knew what to do if the Rift opened,” Tosh said. “At least there are three of us here who do.”
“Do we?” Owen said. “Do you?’Cause fuck if I do, and you've been here longer than me. Fuck only knows if he does, either.”
Toshiko looked Suzie, and looked away. Neither of them, she noticed, would look at Owen.
They lapsed into silence again. Toshiko closed her eyes and repeated the few Rift controller protocols she knew, all of which centred on keeping the Rift closed. Always keep the Rift closed. Never, ever, ever open the Rift. Like a puckered scar, though, it kept tearing little holes in itself.
A grinding, groaning noise, so low in pitch as to be nearly inaudible, made all three of them jerk their heads toward to the ceiling. Owen rubbed at his left ear, as if he could make the sound louder or more discernable by touching hand to head. It went on for just long enough that she was convinced it was horrible, and then stopped.
Jack’s voice spilled out of her earpiece into the suddenly silent firing range. “Okay, Toshiko, it’s safe to come up.”
Owen pressed a hand against his brow.
"I guess you all heard that," Toshiko said.
Suzie and Owen looked around the room. "Yeah," Suzie said.
Carefully, deliberately, they made their way back to the main floor. Toshiko was the last up the stairs. When she came out onto the Hub floor, her eyes fell on a small black thing in Jack’s hand, held at arm’s-length.
Suzie, from just to the side of the stairwell, pointed at a fallen table, “Here, Tosh, help me turn this upright.”
“No, Suzie, leave it,” Jack cut in, still holding the black thing. “There isn't anything here that can't wait until later. Go home and make sure everything is fine there, call your parents. Keep your phones on, though.”
“Don't need to tell me twice,” Owen said. He felt at his back pocket, pulled out a wallet, shoved it back in, and made a beeline for the door. Suzie frowned at him, then at Jack, and she and Toshiko cleared a safe path to the door before leaving without a word.
Toshiko couldn’t resist picking up the bits of her computer, the keyboard and mouse and one monitor that had come loose of its mounting and was hanging sideways from the frame. It was just a small thing, really, and putting it away wouldn’t hurt.
Just as Toshiko was tightening the last screw on her monitor frame, Jack slid up beside her. The hair on his hands was singed, and he held his left arm close to his ribs, as if it were broken. “Here.” He dropped the small black thing she'd seen before on the table in front of her, and stepped back.
After a quick, hesitant look at Jack, Toshiko inspected it, crinkling her nose at the unmistakeable stench of burnt insulation.
“It’s part of the Rift controller,” she said. Jack nodded minutely. “I’m assuming it’s an important part of it.”
“That is-was-a time disruption analysis device. It was how we measured the magnitude of Rift spikes until…” Jack rolled his eyes toward the ceiling for a moment, then said, “about an hour and thirty minutes ago.”
“I can’t fix it, if that’s what you’re asking.” In the bluish emergency lights of the Hub, the charred and deformed little device looked both sad and diseased. “Not unless I could go back in time and-”
“Which you can’t, because that’s what caused this mess in the first place,” Jack sighed. “Damaged time, that is.”
Toshiko nodded. "So that was a Rift flare."
"The biggest one you'll ever see, unless we're spectacularly unlucky."
She picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, and still almost too hot to touch.
“Go home,” he said. “And this was arranged two weeks ago so don't think I'm pulling a trick, tomorrow morning at 7:30, I'll be putting in a call to a research institute in Osaka.” As he said “research,” he made quotation marks with his fingers. “I'll need you to be there. Some of the subject matter is over my head.”
“Are you...” Her voice trailed off. He had arranged calls to her family before, never telling her beforehand, lest they be tracked.
Jack nodded.
“I'll be there.” Toshiko was suddenly aware of how awful Jack looked. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Did you get hit with debris or something?”
Jack's head jerked back as if he'd been poked in the spine, exhaustion and fear written plain on his face. Then his shoulders sagged. “The earthquake,” he sighed.
“They're horrible, aren't they?” She'd been through enough as a child to know what to do, to ride them out with the calm demeanour of a professional. It didn't stop her from hating how they made her stomach turn or the feeling of helplessness. She pulled her scarf out from under a fallen keyboard and wrapped it around her neck.
Jack opened his mouth, like he was going to say something, and shut it abruptly. Moving around the desk, so that he was facing away from her, he rubbed at his temple and said, “Everybody has something in life that makes you want to drink yourself into a stupor so you don't have to think about what's going on.” After a moment, he turned back to her and said, “This is one of mine.”
“If you want, we can go to the pub,” she offered. Toshiko wasn't sure she wanted to go out, to be honest, even though asking seemed like the decent thing to do. More than anything, she wanted a hot bath and a glass of wine-assuming she had any wineglasses still intact, and that assumed her bottles of wine were still intact.
Good heavens, she needed to get back to her flat and make sure everything was okay.
Jack shook his head, looking drawn. “I'll survive. I promise.”
Toshiko hurried to the door.
*****
The next morning, upon arriving, Toshiko was surprised to find that most of the mess had been tidied up. All the furniture was upright, more or less, and the piles of papers and keyboards and mice had been moved from the floor to the benches. She and Suzie would have to rearrange their workstations, and heaven only knew what Owen would have to do, but that was it. Had Jack been up all night?
Creeping in through the half-open door, she peered into the lamplight to see two sets of fingers and a newspaper.
Jack must have heard her; from behind the paper she heard him say, “Shut the door.” He waited until the latch clicked into place before setting the paper down and dialling the phone. Once it started to ring, he put it on speaker, rose, and offered his seat to Toshiko.
The pretense of surveillance was negated by his inability to speak Japanese. Or so he had told her.
“Mother?” she asked, sitting down. The chair was warm.
“Toshiko?” Her mother's voice glowed with pleasure. “Is it really you, darling girl?”
“How are you, mother?”
“I'm in the kitchen. Really, Toshiko, I wish you weren't so far away, so we could talk at a better time.”
Toshiko sighed. This was part of their game, and there wasn't much she could do about it. “I could call you in the middle of the night.”
“That's alright.”
They talked about the weather, about her mother's friends, about everything except her job and the fact that Toshiko was still single, the former out of habit remaining from when Toshiko worked at the Ministry and the latter out of mutual agreement between them that it was a forbidden subject. The earthquake was never mentioned, because as far as Toshiko's mother knew, she still lived in London, not Cardiff, and thus it was of no importance to her. Jack busied himself with something in a file cabinet; Toshiko watched him pull papers out from one drawer and then dig through another. He’d been holding his chest like it hurt yesterday, but today it seemed perfectly-
“Toshiko?”
Oh, bother. “Sorry, mother.” Her cheeks grew warm. “I need to get to work now. It was nice to talk to you.” She went through the standard-issue end of conversation pleasantries, staring at a spiderweb in the corner, and as soon as they’d said the last goodbyes, placed the phone back in the cradle.
“All finished?” Jack asked. He was sitting in a chair in the far corner, balancing a stack of papers on his knee.
Toshiko pushed away from the desk and offered him his chair back. “Thank you so much.”
“I wish I could say anytime. Don't go away yet,” he added as she made for the door.
She froze.
“Don't look at me like that,” Jack protested, his expression all wounded innocence. “You're not in trouble.”
Toshiko exhaled slowly. The little black disk he’d shown her last night was on the corner of his desk, taking its place between an old perpetual calendar and his coffee cup.
“I had another look at the Rift controller last night,” he said. “It's not the end of the world, but it sure makes things harder for us,” Jack agreed grimly. “The good news is that the part that keeps the Rift closed and secure took no damage at all.”
“Is there anything we can do about it?”
“I want you to think of some way that we might be able to monitor the Rift using the technology that we have available.” He proffered her the stack of papers. “These should be helpful, they explained what the temporal analyzer was doing, although not how it works.”
Flat-footed, jaw slack, Toshiko said, "What?"
"We need a way to monitor variation in the Rift," Jack repeated. "I want you to figure out how?"
So she had heard him correctly.
Toshiko thought about that for a minute, chewing on her lower lip. “Am I on my own, or can Suzie be part of this?”
Jack shook his head. “Tell her I'll speak to her later. I'm expecting a call from London any minute now.”
Well, that was that. Toshiko made for the door again, and this time, Jack didn't stop her.
“Thanks again,” she said as she left, but Jack had already gone back to the newspaper, his eyes scanning over the reports on the earthquake, mayor's death, and the thunderstorm.
Shaken, and not a little annoyed at the assignment, she walked down the stairs just as Suzie strolled in.
“Suzie, Jack wants to talk to you when you're free,” she called.
“And good morning to you, too,” Suzie sang back. She had on her poison dart frog boots: pretty and deadly. Something had her in a foul mood today.
"How was your flat?"
“You would ask that,” Suzie sighed, flinging her giant tote bag dramatically on her cluttered work bench. “I have no more china in my flat. Instead, I have big pieces, little pieces, and annoying little shards that keep escaping the broom no matter how hard I try.”
Toshiko felt her jaw drop. “Oh,” she murmured. “I'm so sorry.”
“Serves me right for keeping it in an open cupboard,” Suzie grumbled. “Of course, it would have helped if I'd known we lived in an earthquake zone. What does Jack want to talk to me about? Do you know?”
“The Rift controller,” she said. “Part of it was destroyed yesterday. He'll fill you in on the details.”
Suzie dropped the pile of notebooks she'd been moving into a drawer. “That's not good. Has he called off to London to get it fixed? ”
Toshiko blinked. “I have no idea. He said he was waiting on a call from them.”
“You’d think he would. We are supposedly working for them.” Shoving a pile of notebooks from one side of her desk to the other, Suzie said, “What about you? Big mess at home?”
Toshiko looked at the floor. Aside from an old porcelain maneki neko on her kitchen counter, there wasn't anything in her flat to fall. Either it was made of paper, made of fabric, or tucked away in a cupboard.
“No,” she answered. “But then, I don't have much stuff.”
“That's probably not a bad thing,” Suzie said absently. “I mean, how much pointless junk do we really need?”
“I wouldn't call your dishes pointless junk,” Toshiko pointed out.
“At the end of the day, they're just things. They were pretty, but still, just things.”
Toshiko thought about her maneki neko, a tiny porcelain cat with gold-lacquered eyes. Battered and dingy from years of being cradled in little hands, and the only thing she had that had belonged to her grandmother, it was as precious to her as air.
With nothing further to say, she turned her workstation back on and fetched herself a cup of coffee.
*****
Toshiko stared at her computer and muddled through a few reports Jack sent her way, half-heartedly typing her ideas for the Rift observation system Jack had asked her for a week ago. Suzie came in not long after and hid behind her desk. She'd been at the nuclear power station every day since the earthquake, making notes on damage done to the structure.
Jack was still, well, twitchy on the subject of the earthquake. Any mention of it or anything related to it, like Suzie's work at the power station, would send him from a cheerful mood to strained, forced smiles. Toshiko had tried to talk about it a few days ago, but he'd told her not to worry, that you couldn't prepare for something that didn't happen. One more of his secrets, although why being upset about an earthquake should be something so personal didn't make sense to her.
Couldn't prepare...the phrase niggled at Toshiko's memory.
An idea slammed into Toshiko like a wave. How to observe the Rift-no sense in trying to find complicated ways to look for something that wasn't there, not if she could just look at what was there. If the Rift was a hole in time, a negative space, then as it moved around, it would have to cause changes in time as it went. Those changes could be observed, even if the actual Rift itself couldn't. That was how they found black holes, after all-looking for the emitted radiation, the death throes of atoms as they were pulled into the vortex. She scribbled down some thoughts on a notepad, gulping down the by-now ice cold tea in her haste.
On the scale of the Rift, something that was at most 2 kilometres long and of negligible width, located in an area of negligible change in gravity from start to finish, time could be assumed to be progressing at a constant speed, except where it didn’t. If it was assumed that Cardiff was a constant frame of reference, then any questions related to relativity and the change in the shape of time went away.
This could work, she realized. This could really work.
Toshiko leaped from her chair and raced up the stairs to Jack's office. Sticking her head through the open door, she said, “Jack, do we have any documentation showing the approximate physical location of the Rift?”
Jack, who had been digging through a drawer in a filing cabinet in the corner, stood up and said, “Excuse me?”
“Do we have anything showing the physical location of the Rift?” she repeated, doing her best to not show her excitement. “A map or city plan, perhaps?”
By way of response, Jack bumped the drawer he'd been looking through closed, opened the drawer by his knee, and pulled out a map of Cardiff. A fat red line ran along the centre.
“This what you're looking for?” he asked.
Toshiko snatched it right out of his hand, staring at the slash of colour. “The very thing.”
“Is this for the Rift observation system I asked you about?”
She nodded, trying to restrain her excitement. It was unseemly, for one, and for another, there was no guarantee this would work. “It's for an idea I had, yes.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Care to share?”
Toshiko took a deep breath. “If we build a matrix of known points, connect them with a material for which the speed of a light impulse is well-controlled and stable under normal environmental conditions, and send through an impulse of a known width, we can find the time it takes to travel between any two points on the matrix. If time itself varies and everything else is constant, the travel time between those points will be different. Then if we take the difference in travel time between any two consecutive observations from any two points on the matrix and it is nonzero, we know that it's Rift activity.”
The words poured out in a rush. When she finished, she took a step back, waiting for his reaction.
It wasn't long in coming. Tapping the button on his earpiece, he barked, “Suzie, conference room. Now.” Gesturing to the door with his head, he said, “Let's go. Bring the map.”
When they arrived in the conference room, Suzie was already there. “You called, Master?”
Jack, surprisingly, answered her with merely a raised eyebrow and an amused look; he took the city map from Toshiko and spread it out on the table. “Alright, Tosh, tell Suzie what you just told me.”
“It's about the Rift observation system Jack asked us to do,” Toshiko started. “I don't know if you've had a chance to work on it yet...”
“I've been too busy at the power station,” Suzie replied. “Go ahead.”
Toshiko flicked an at Jack, who nodded slightly. “Do you know how it was determined that light doesn’t need any special medium in which to travel?” she asked. “It was done by a pair of American mathematicians in the 19th century.”
Suzie raised an eyebrow. “Enlighten me,”
“They took about two hundred fifty mirrors, lined them up on either side of a river, and turned them into an interferometer. Half the light went through the mirrors to recorders just behind them, and the other half of the light reflected off the mirrors in sequence, and after it hit the last mirror in the series, the total time was measured.” Toshiko stepped to the whiteboard and drew a hasty sketch. “We should be able to use an adaptation of their method to measure variation in Rift energy output.”
Suzie cocked her head and scowled, staring at the diagram. “Known distance, unknown time.” Leaning forward slightly, she said, “I get that, but the Rift isn't precisely a known anything.”
“It's not, but its effects are.” She drew two lines, one short and one long, on the board. “If the distance between two points is known and the frequency of an impulse and the speed of impulse propagation through a medium are constant, then the time that it takes for a pulse to travel from A to B should always be the same, allowing for error in the measurement. If there's a noticeable, observable difference in travel time when everything else is controlled, it means that time is non-constant.” She smiled, a little bit nervous at their reaction.
“And if time is non-constant, it's a pretty good guess in this city as to why,” Suzie finished. “I take it this is your solution to our problem?”
Jack stared at the board, head cocked to one side in thought, arms folded across his chest. “I think it's a great idea,” he said abruptly. “Simple and elegant, easier than relativity. Help her make it work.” He turned on his heel and left.
Suzie looked at Toshiko over the rim of her glasses. “Well, well, well. You've got the boss's seal of approval.”
Blushing, Toshiko answered, “We don't know if it will work yet.”
“It's novel, that's for sure.” Suzie reached out and grabbed at the map. “What's this?”
Toshiko sat down across from her. “It's the Rift,” she said. “According to Jack, the red line is the historical average position of the Rift.”
“And you wanted this why?”
“Well,” Toshiko started, “I thought about building a three-dimensional array such that it spanned axis of the Rift.” Suzie narrowed her eyes, listening. Toshiko continued, “That way, we travel time observations for any given impulse in three-space, which will allow us to pinpoint where along the Rift a flare is occurring.”
Her voice trailed off at Suzie's focused stare. “Do you not think it will work?”
“What are you doing here?” Suzie asked abruptly.
Toshiko blinked. “What?”
Suzie snorted. “Why are you here? Why aren't you in London, where all the main research centres are?”
Toshiko looked away. “London never gave me an interview.” It was true, after a fashion. Jack’s little song and dance at the prison could hardly count as an interview, any more than the lone voice in the ceiling could count as a trial.
"They had you come in for that alien autopsy." Suzie's hands moved across the table, inching closer to Toshiko's.
"The only reason they let me in is they thought I was Owen."
“So?” Suzie snorted, interrupting Toshiko from her self-recriminations. “Ever since you sent out that translation program, everybody who's anybody sat up and took notice. The only reason they didn't take you right then and there is that you were supposed to be Owen."
Toshiko felt like her brain was four steps behind this conversation. “Wait, wait, back up. Who got the translation program?” Jack had told her he was going to make sure it would go where it was needed the most, but hadn't told her where. “I thought it was just for here.”
“Are you serious?” Suzie shook her head in exasperation. “London's got it, Glasgow has it, UNIT has it, the Americans have it, I think even the Aussies have a copy. As soon as you broke the code on that alien jellybaby recipe...”
“Biscuits,” Toshiko corrected absently.
“Whatever. Once you broke that, it got sent to anybody who asked politely.”
Toshiko was abruptly glad she was sitting down. She didn't know quite how she felt about UNIT having access to her work, and-oh, the Americans and their military-
“I imagine the cryptographers were none too pleased,” she said.
“Did you really not know?” Suzie pressed.
“I try to not care about things that don't matter to me.” Once she had given the final copy to Jack, she'd vowed to never think of it again.
With a shrug, Suzie said, “Well, if you ever get tired of this, you'd be the shining star of one of their research labs.”
“Good to know.” Toshiko straightened up, turning the topic back to her idea. “Do you think the Michelson-Morley experiment can be adapted to indirectly observing the Rift?”
“In theory, it should work...” She sat up straight and slapped her hand on the table, once again startling Toshiko. “You are so high strung,” Suzie complained.
“Sorry,” Toshiko said, wringing her hands in her lap. Suzie made her nervous.
“Whatever. In principle, it should work. Every time we're in a building after a Rift spike, you can see it.”
Toshiko frowned. In a building? She couldn't think of what that might be like. Some kind of rippling effect in the air?
“I don't know what you mean,” she said. “I don't think I've ever been on a call for a Rift flare.”
“What?” Suzie cocked her head to one side, then the other. “Really? You've been here a year.”
Now that she'd said it aloud, Toshiko realized it was true. A full year, and she'd only been in the field for Weevil hunts. “No, never. I'm always on the controls here.”
“Huh. I guess you are,” Suzie mused. “How odd. Anyway, if you're in a building that has electric lights during a Rift flare, the lights flicker. In a really strong flare, the bulbs sometimes blow out. Same general physical principles as what you proposed, only using electrical current instead of speed of light.”
“Hmmm.” Toshiko thought about that. “We can't use the power grid itself, because it's subject to too much variation from outside sources.”
“You are so literal. I never meant we should try that,” Suzie said. “It was just an illustration.”
“Sorry.”
Both Suzie and Toshiko stared at the map on the table.
“I've got an idea,” Suzie said. “Tell me what you want, and I'll build you the business end of a test unit. You figure out how to do the recordings and the software end. I'm rubbish at that.”
“Done.” Toshiko seized at the offering. “What do you think? Four weeks for the basics, five until we can install?”
Suzie laughed. “You're wanting miracles. It'll take me at least five days to get all the parts.” She stood up and headed for the door. “You really should be in London,” she said as she sauntered out.
Toshiko rolled up the map and followed her out. She walked over to Jack's office. He wasn't there, although his coat was on the hook, so he had to be around.
She found him in the autopsy bay with Owen, helping him unpack a large box. Both men looked to be absorbed by their task, and she didn't feel comfortable interrupting them. She decided to wait for a few minutes to see if they reached a stopping point; if not, she'd find him later.
She didn't need to wait long. Jack elbowed Owen and said loud enough to carry up to her, “Just between you and me and the walls here, I think somebody is admiring our manly physiques.”
“Keep it in your pants, Harkness,” Owen groused. “Besides, it's just Tosh.”
“A little respect, please!” Jack said, looking affronted. “She's the smartest person you'll ever meet. Be properly humble in her presence.”
While Toshiko felt her cheeks flush at the unexpected praise, Owen said, “Well, given that we never meet new people locked in this loony bin, that's not saying much, is it?”
Ouch! Stung, Toshiko spun on her heel and retreated to her workstation.
“Tosh,” Jack called. She turned to look, and took a step back when she saw he was only inches behind her. He must have run up the steps three at a time to get to her so quickly. “I was going to ask what you needed, but then somebody put his mouth in gear without engaging his brain.”
“It can wait until later,” Toshiko mumbled, looking at the ground.
“Well, I'm here now,” Jack said. “What's up?”
“Suzie and I are building a prototype for the Rift monitor,” she replied quietly, still bridling at Owen’s comment. “I just wanted to let you know that I'll be using most of the processing space on the mainframe.” Waving at a nearby monitor with her hand, she said, “In case you had any other projects running.”
“Excellent,” he said. “Whatever you need, you've got it, so long as it doesn't require live sacrifice.”
“If we do, you're the first in line, Jack!” Suzie called from across the room.
Jack shot back, “Only if you tie me up and ritually flog me first!”
Suzie turned her chair so that her back was to them, but both Jack and Toshiko very clearly heard the word “Bastard!” come from her general direction. Beaming, Jack turned to Toshiko and said, “And here I was wondering if she didn't love me anymore. Is there anything else you need?”
Toshiko felt her irritation at Owen melting away. It was difficult to be angry when the Jack and Suzie show was in progress.
She bit her lip, thinking. Suzie was handling the construction; the software would be simple enough, aside from measuring time, which, of course, was the most critical part of the concept.
“I don't suppose we have an atomic clock lying around, do we?” she asked.
“Several,” Jack said, thinking. “Chip scale work for you?”
“They will...” Her voice trailed off. Ideally, for the precision she needed, she needed a comb array.
“Tell me,” Jack urged. “I told you already, this is top priority.”
Toshiko finally looked up at him. “Can we get an optical frequency comb array for the main signal controller?”
If he was serious about it, she'd know with his answer. A full-size comb array was exorbitant in price and would take up a full room, not to mention the trouble of getting one.
Frowning, Jack held his fist to his lower lip and walked around for a minute, from where Toshiko stood to the Rift controller and back again. “Maybe. Maybe not. Can you build the prototype with chip scale?”
Toshiko smiled, bobbing her head. “Yes, thank you, that would be wonderful.”
“Anytime.” Jack went back to the autopsy bay, making a lot of noise going down the steps. Although she was still feeling put out by Owen's thoughtless-and unfortunately true-remark, knowing that she had Jack's support with respect to getting what she needed was nice.
“Hey, Suzie?” she called.
“Hey, Tosh?”
“How many nodes are you planning to have on the prototype?” The more nodes present, the more accurate it would be, but also the more of a hassle to program.
“Twelve,” Suzie answered promptly. “Five on a side, plus source and receiver.”
“Brilliant,” Toshiko said. It wasn't much, but it was sufficiently many nodes that they would be able to see where the problems would occur and not so many that it would be cumbersome. “Single transmit source? Multiple?”
Suzie called back, “Just the one, going from one to eleven.”
“You're using the interferometric design, partial refraction and partial transmission?” That was the critical part. Unless they could measure travel times between each individual node, the array would only tell if a Rift flare was in progress, not give them an idea of where, physically, it was.
“Yes, teacher,” Suzie said, sounding half amused and half annoyed. “Make sure you plan for that in your software. I have it set up so that there is a UHF transmitter on each one, broadcasting the time of arrival at each node.”
“Thanks, will do,” Toshiko answered.
With everything involved, the program would be challenging to write, but not overwhelming. It would take some careful measuring to get the exact positions of the points and the distances between them known within tens of millimetres, but otherwise, no major difficulty. The points weren't moving, so as long as they stayed not moving (earthquakes aside) there should always be a nonzero time differential, and if there were, they could always do a test to calibrate what the difference would be, and any residual random noise should be easy to filter out with a boxcar.
The more she thought about it, incorporating a broadcast signal would be fine for a small array like the prototype, but completely unsuitable for anything larger. She would have to program each receiver to send an identification message at the beginning of each one, not to mention working up a query-response system if something failed. Also, if there was a time anomaly in process, it would be reflected in the time of arrival of the signal message. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though-if the time difference as measured by the entire travel-time array was identical to latency in the broadcast time of arrival, that could be used as a check on the system.
“Toshiko?”
Jack's voice on her headset made her look up. “What is it, Jack?”
“Go home!”
She looked at the small clock on her desk. Nearly seven at night. When had it gotten so late?
“Just a minute!” She was almost finished with this one section, the one that would take the position of the sensor array and transform it to position in the real world. Once she finished that, she'd leave.
I'm going to have to make a graphic interface, Toshiko noted idly. She got by just fine with an alphanumeric interface; Jack, she knew, did much, much better with a map. So did Suzie. She had no idea what Owen liked.
“I thought I told you to go home,” Jack complained. Toshiko started in her chair.
Goodness, it was quarter to eight.
“I'm sorry,” Toshiko started. “I just wanted to...really, I was almost done with...”
“You still need to eat and sleep,” Jack pointed out. “Whatever it is can wait.”
Food. Toshiko realized that she was starving. Ready to eat anything that moved, and probably some things that didn't.
“Did you walk today?” Jack asked.
Shrugging on her jacket, Toshiko said, “I did. Why? Did the weather turn bad?”
“Yeah. It’s pouring. Come on, I'll give you a ride home.”
The ride home only took a few minutes, and shortly after, Toshiko set about her usual evening ritual. Shoes off, stockings off, telly on, wander around looking for something to eat, perhaps read a bit, sleep. The long day must have taken it out of her more than she expected-her eyes were heavy as she cuddled under her duvet, watching some old romantic comedy-
*****
The next morning looked a lot like the night before: cold, blustery and wet, with the added bonus of a stiff neck from sleeping on the couch. Toshiko dug through her closet until she found her warmest jumper, which she layered over a silk blouse and wool trousers. She flipped the telly to the news from whatever odd movie was on the channel she'd fallen asleep to. After catching the tail end of a report on fixing road damage from the earthquake, a cooking segment started, which made her look at her plain toast for breakfast and leftover chicken for lunch with a sigh.
It took some effort for Toshiko to wrench her mind from the real world and focus on her day-to-day existence. That what she considered normal was so abjectly bizarre and surreal was an irony not lost on her as she stepped into Hub.
“That's a load of bullshit. If your intention is to hold the immediate welfare of the city of Cardiff hostage, I'm not dealing with you.”
Toshiko winced. It wasn’t even fully daylight yet and somebody was already on Jack’s bad side. He was speaking into his mobile from just outside his office; she made sure to stand out of sight.
“Yeah, I know what caused the earthquake. It's irrelevant. What matters is we get this repaired.” He stopped, listening, and then said, “My staff are perfectly competent to...look. You have two options. Either you do this for the safety of the citizens of the United Kingdom or I call Downing Street and let Harriet Jones sort this out.”
She didn't mean to eavesdrop, she really didn't. But when Jack threatened to call the Prime Minister, that was enough to get her undivided attention. Also, if Jack knew the cause of the earthquake, assuming normal geology wasn't at fault, did that mean it was Rift-related? That would make sense, given that the Rift controller was damaged in the process. It would also explain why Jack was so strung out afterwards.
“Look, Yvonne, you have until Monday to get the timekeeper apparatus transferred here or I call the Prime Minister. Yes, I know that's only a week.” He threw a ball of paper into the rubbish bin in a perfect bascule. “We'll take care of the...this is not a big country and London is not far from Cardiff. Make it happen. Goodbye.”
That hadn't sounded promising.
“Toshiko!” Jack bellowed. “Come upstairs, I know you're here.”
So much for being quiet and unobtrusive. Then again, the cog door made a mighty ruckus when it was opened. She walked up the steps and into the office. “Yes?”
“I have good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is that I can get you your comb array. The bad news is that we need to play games to get it.”
Toshiko frowned. “How so?”
“The powers that be in London want you up there next Monday to build them a prototype in the lab, including a full-scale demonstration. I have no intention of subjecting you to London's notions of how to do business.” His face twisted into an ironic expression. “They’re not willing to provide the atomic clock unless they can be shown that it works in advance.”
“What?” Toshiko protested. “We don’t even have a working prototype here.”
Jack snorted. “Like I said. We're playing games.”
“How am I supposed to prove to them that it works?” she asked. “There isn’t a temporal anomaly in London. Possibly small-scale ones, but they’ll be ephemeral in nature-”
“No, there aren’t,” Jack interrupted, “which is why instead you're going to write a document explaining what it is you're doing and why. Think proposal, only instead of begging for the funding, you're justifying the money I've already spent.”
“For whom?” Toshiko asked. “Accountants? Management? How much detail do you want?”
Jack said, “As much as you can give, but make it in really small, simple terms.” He threw another wadded-up piece of paper into the air. “Oh, yeah, and make sure you describe why we're doing this. You know, the kind of things that come from the Rift, how we can adjust the Rift Controller to keep it from blowing open if we see a big flare in progress, the like.”
“Management, then,” she noted. Accountants tended to need a justification of why she needed one part over another, not an idiot's guide to why they were there in the first place. Managers were usually far, far more frustrating, particularly when they had no experience in what they were supervising.
“After a fashion,” Jack agreed. “Go to it.”
Characters: Toshiko, Team
Rating: Open
Spoilers: Everything prior to S1 E1, including Doctor Who and Fragments
Kind thanks to adina_atl and peasant_ (whose LJ I think may have been deleted) for the beta work, which happened a year ago. I had to put this down and sit on it for a while, but now I just want to post it and move on.
Finally, the ground stopped bucking. As dust spiraled in the beams of emergency battle lanterns hung from the ceilling, Toshiko crawled out from under the workbench where she'd taken shelter.
The floor was a disaster zone. Piles of papers and furniture and smashed electronics littered the area, rendered slippery and smelly by water that had slopped from the pool. Jack was standing in front of the Rift manipulator, frantically working the controls.
“Jack? Are you-” Toshiko picked her way across some of the rubble toward him, bracing herself against the edge of a fallen table as an aftershock rumbled through. The scent of scorched plastic assaulted her nose.
“Get back!” Jack snapped.
Toshiko backed away hastily, hitting her hip on the corner of a desk. “What’s burning? Do you need help?”
“The Rift controller is damaged." Without looking at her, he ordered, "Get the others, go into the firing range, and wait until I call you.”
She wove her way through the debris to find that Suzie had heard Jack bellowing and had already sent Owen down the steps. It was strained in the shooting range, strained and tense as the three of them tried to ignore the muffled whine of the Rift controller and the sporadic lingering aftershocks. With each one, the Rift controller would shriek and whine like a tortured thing, in a hellish parody of music.
“Tosh, what the hell is going on?” Suzie yelled.
“The Rift controller is damaged somehow,” Toshiko said. “I could smell burning and saw sparks arcing off something.”
Suzie sucked in her breath. “Shit!”
“I know.” Tosh turned so that her shoulder blades were pressed flat against the plaster. “Still, I haven't heard any explosions yet.”
All three of them looked at the ceiling. It didn't shriek like metal-on-metal anymore, but kept with the eerie whine.
“Nice of him to go all noble-sacrifice on us,” Owen grumbled. “If he gets blown to meaty little bits, we're stuck here.”
“Yes, and there wouldn't be anybody alive who knew what to do if the Rift opened,” Tosh said. “At least there are three of us here who do.”
“Do we?” Owen said. “Do you?’Cause fuck if I do, and you've been here longer than me. Fuck only knows if he does, either.”
Toshiko looked Suzie, and looked away. Neither of them, she noticed, would look at Owen.
They lapsed into silence again. Toshiko closed her eyes and repeated the few Rift controller protocols she knew, all of which centred on keeping the Rift closed. Always keep the Rift closed. Never, ever, ever open the Rift. Like a puckered scar, though, it kept tearing little holes in itself.
A grinding, groaning noise, so low in pitch as to be nearly inaudible, made all three of them jerk their heads toward to the ceiling. Owen rubbed at his left ear, as if he could make the sound louder or more discernable by touching hand to head. It went on for just long enough that she was convinced it was horrible, and then stopped.
Jack’s voice spilled out of her earpiece into the suddenly silent firing range. “Okay, Toshiko, it’s safe to come up.”
Owen pressed a hand against his brow.
"I guess you all heard that," Toshiko said.
Suzie and Owen looked around the room. "Yeah," Suzie said.
Carefully, deliberately, they made their way back to the main floor. Toshiko was the last up the stairs. When she came out onto the Hub floor, her eyes fell on a small black thing in Jack’s hand, held at arm’s-length.
Suzie, from just to the side of the stairwell, pointed at a fallen table, “Here, Tosh, help me turn this upright.”
“No, Suzie, leave it,” Jack cut in, still holding the black thing. “There isn't anything here that can't wait until later. Go home and make sure everything is fine there, call your parents. Keep your phones on, though.”
“Don't need to tell me twice,” Owen said. He felt at his back pocket, pulled out a wallet, shoved it back in, and made a beeline for the door. Suzie frowned at him, then at Jack, and she and Toshiko cleared a safe path to the door before leaving without a word.
Toshiko couldn’t resist picking up the bits of her computer, the keyboard and mouse and one monitor that had come loose of its mounting and was hanging sideways from the frame. It was just a small thing, really, and putting it away wouldn’t hurt.
Just as Toshiko was tightening the last screw on her monitor frame, Jack slid up beside her. The hair on his hands was singed, and he held his left arm close to his ribs, as if it were broken. “Here.” He dropped the small black thing she'd seen before on the table in front of her, and stepped back.
After a quick, hesitant look at Jack, Toshiko inspected it, crinkling her nose at the unmistakeable stench of burnt insulation.
“It’s part of the Rift controller,” she said. Jack nodded minutely. “I’m assuming it’s an important part of it.”
“That is-was-a time disruption analysis device. It was how we measured the magnitude of Rift spikes until…” Jack rolled his eyes toward the ceiling for a moment, then said, “about an hour and thirty minutes ago.”
“I can’t fix it, if that’s what you’re asking.” In the bluish emergency lights of the Hub, the charred and deformed little device looked both sad and diseased. “Not unless I could go back in time and-”
“Which you can’t, because that’s what caused this mess in the first place,” Jack sighed. “Damaged time, that is.”
Toshiko nodded. "So that was a Rift flare."
"The biggest one you'll ever see, unless we're spectacularly unlucky."
She picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, and still almost too hot to touch.
“Go home,” he said. “And this was arranged two weeks ago so don't think I'm pulling a trick, tomorrow morning at 7:30, I'll be putting in a call to a research institute in Osaka.” As he said “research,” he made quotation marks with his fingers. “I'll need you to be there. Some of the subject matter is over my head.”
“Are you...” Her voice trailed off. He had arranged calls to her family before, never telling her beforehand, lest they be tracked.
Jack nodded.
“I'll be there.” Toshiko was suddenly aware of how awful Jack looked. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Did you get hit with debris or something?”
Jack's head jerked back as if he'd been poked in the spine, exhaustion and fear written plain on his face. Then his shoulders sagged. “The earthquake,” he sighed.
“They're horrible, aren't they?” She'd been through enough as a child to know what to do, to ride them out with the calm demeanour of a professional. It didn't stop her from hating how they made her stomach turn or the feeling of helplessness. She pulled her scarf out from under a fallen keyboard and wrapped it around her neck.
Jack opened his mouth, like he was going to say something, and shut it abruptly. Moving around the desk, so that he was facing away from her, he rubbed at his temple and said, “Everybody has something in life that makes you want to drink yourself into a stupor so you don't have to think about what's going on.” After a moment, he turned back to her and said, “This is one of mine.”
“If you want, we can go to the pub,” she offered. Toshiko wasn't sure she wanted to go out, to be honest, even though asking seemed like the decent thing to do. More than anything, she wanted a hot bath and a glass of wine-assuming she had any wineglasses still intact, and that assumed her bottles of wine were still intact.
Good heavens, she needed to get back to her flat and make sure everything was okay.
Jack shook his head, looking drawn. “I'll survive. I promise.”
Toshiko hurried to the door.
*****
The next morning, upon arriving, Toshiko was surprised to find that most of the mess had been tidied up. All the furniture was upright, more or less, and the piles of papers and keyboards and mice had been moved from the floor to the benches. She and Suzie would have to rearrange their workstations, and heaven only knew what Owen would have to do, but that was it. Had Jack been up all night?
Creeping in through the half-open door, she peered into the lamplight to see two sets of fingers and a newspaper.
Jack must have heard her; from behind the paper she heard him say, “Shut the door.” He waited until the latch clicked into place before setting the paper down and dialling the phone. Once it started to ring, he put it on speaker, rose, and offered his seat to Toshiko.
The pretense of surveillance was negated by his inability to speak Japanese. Or so he had told her.
“Mother?” she asked, sitting down. The chair was warm.
“Toshiko?” Her mother's voice glowed with pleasure. “Is it really you, darling girl?”
“How are you, mother?”
“I'm in the kitchen. Really, Toshiko, I wish you weren't so far away, so we could talk at a better time.”
Toshiko sighed. This was part of their game, and there wasn't much she could do about it. “I could call you in the middle of the night.”
“That's alright.”
They talked about the weather, about her mother's friends, about everything except her job and the fact that Toshiko was still single, the former out of habit remaining from when Toshiko worked at the Ministry and the latter out of mutual agreement between them that it was a forbidden subject. The earthquake was never mentioned, because as far as Toshiko's mother knew, she still lived in London, not Cardiff, and thus it was of no importance to her. Jack busied himself with something in a file cabinet; Toshiko watched him pull papers out from one drawer and then dig through another. He’d been holding his chest like it hurt yesterday, but today it seemed perfectly-
“Toshiko?”
Oh, bother. “Sorry, mother.” Her cheeks grew warm. “I need to get to work now. It was nice to talk to you.” She went through the standard-issue end of conversation pleasantries, staring at a spiderweb in the corner, and as soon as they’d said the last goodbyes, placed the phone back in the cradle.
“All finished?” Jack asked. He was sitting in a chair in the far corner, balancing a stack of papers on his knee.
Toshiko pushed away from the desk and offered him his chair back. “Thank you so much.”
“I wish I could say anytime. Don't go away yet,” he added as she made for the door.
She froze.
“Don't look at me like that,” Jack protested, his expression all wounded innocence. “You're not in trouble.”
Toshiko exhaled slowly. The little black disk he’d shown her last night was on the corner of his desk, taking its place between an old perpetual calendar and his coffee cup.
“I had another look at the Rift controller last night,” he said. “It's not the end of the world, but it sure makes things harder for us,” Jack agreed grimly. “The good news is that the part that keeps the Rift closed and secure took no damage at all.”
“Is there anything we can do about it?”
“I want you to think of some way that we might be able to monitor the Rift using the technology that we have available.” He proffered her the stack of papers. “These should be helpful, they explained what the temporal analyzer was doing, although not how it works.”
Flat-footed, jaw slack, Toshiko said, "What?"
"We need a way to monitor variation in the Rift," Jack repeated. "I want you to figure out how?"
So she had heard him correctly.
Toshiko thought about that for a minute, chewing on her lower lip. “Am I on my own, or can Suzie be part of this?”
Jack shook his head. “Tell her I'll speak to her later. I'm expecting a call from London any minute now.”
Well, that was that. Toshiko made for the door again, and this time, Jack didn't stop her.
“Thanks again,” she said as she left, but Jack had already gone back to the newspaper, his eyes scanning over the reports on the earthquake, mayor's death, and the thunderstorm.
Shaken, and not a little annoyed at the assignment, she walked down the stairs just as Suzie strolled in.
“Suzie, Jack wants to talk to you when you're free,” she called.
“And good morning to you, too,” Suzie sang back. She had on her poison dart frog boots: pretty and deadly. Something had her in a foul mood today.
"How was your flat?"
“You would ask that,” Suzie sighed, flinging her giant tote bag dramatically on her cluttered work bench. “I have no more china in my flat. Instead, I have big pieces, little pieces, and annoying little shards that keep escaping the broom no matter how hard I try.”
Toshiko felt her jaw drop. “Oh,” she murmured. “I'm so sorry.”
“Serves me right for keeping it in an open cupboard,” Suzie grumbled. “Of course, it would have helped if I'd known we lived in an earthquake zone. What does Jack want to talk to me about? Do you know?”
“The Rift controller,” she said. “Part of it was destroyed yesterday. He'll fill you in on the details.”
Suzie dropped the pile of notebooks she'd been moving into a drawer. “That's not good. Has he called off to London to get it fixed? ”
Toshiko blinked. “I have no idea. He said he was waiting on a call from them.”
“You’d think he would. We are supposedly working for them.” Shoving a pile of notebooks from one side of her desk to the other, Suzie said, “What about you? Big mess at home?”
Toshiko looked at the floor. Aside from an old porcelain maneki neko on her kitchen counter, there wasn't anything in her flat to fall. Either it was made of paper, made of fabric, or tucked away in a cupboard.
“No,” she answered. “But then, I don't have much stuff.”
“That's probably not a bad thing,” Suzie said absently. “I mean, how much pointless junk do we really need?”
“I wouldn't call your dishes pointless junk,” Toshiko pointed out.
“At the end of the day, they're just things. They were pretty, but still, just things.”
Toshiko thought about her maneki neko, a tiny porcelain cat with gold-lacquered eyes. Battered and dingy from years of being cradled in little hands, and the only thing she had that had belonged to her grandmother, it was as precious to her as air.
With nothing further to say, she turned her workstation back on and fetched herself a cup of coffee.
*****
Toshiko stared at her computer and muddled through a few reports Jack sent her way, half-heartedly typing her ideas for the Rift observation system Jack had asked her for a week ago. Suzie came in not long after and hid behind her desk. She'd been at the nuclear power station every day since the earthquake, making notes on damage done to the structure.
Jack was still, well, twitchy on the subject of the earthquake. Any mention of it or anything related to it, like Suzie's work at the power station, would send him from a cheerful mood to strained, forced smiles. Toshiko had tried to talk about it a few days ago, but he'd told her not to worry, that you couldn't prepare for something that didn't happen. One more of his secrets, although why being upset about an earthquake should be something so personal didn't make sense to her.
Couldn't prepare...the phrase niggled at Toshiko's memory.
An idea slammed into Toshiko like a wave. How to observe the Rift-no sense in trying to find complicated ways to look for something that wasn't there, not if she could just look at what was there. If the Rift was a hole in time, a negative space, then as it moved around, it would have to cause changes in time as it went. Those changes could be observed, even if the actual Rift itself couldn't. That was how they found black holes, after all-looking for the emitted radiation, the death throes of atoms as they were pulled into the vortex. She scribbled down some thoughts on a notepad, gulping down the by-now ice cold tea in her haste.
On the scale of the Rift, something that was at most 2 kilometres long and of negligible width, located in an area of negligible change in gravity from start to finish, time could be assumed to be progressing at a constant speed, except where it didn’t. If it was assumed that Cardiff was a constant frame of reference, then any questions related to relativity and the change in the shape of time went away.
This could work, she realized. This could really work.
Toshiko leaped from her chair and raced up the stairs to Jack's office. Sticking her head through the open door, she said, “Jack, do we have any documentation showing the approximate physical location of the Rift?”
Jack, who had been digging through a drawer in a filing cabinet in the corner, stood up and said, “Excuse me?”
“Do we have anything showing the physical location of the Rift?” she repeated, doing her best to not show her excitement. “A map or city plan, perhaps?”
By way of response, Jack bumped the drawer he'd been looking through closed, opened the drawer by his knee, and pulled out a map of Cardiff. A fat red line ran along the centre.
“This what you're looking for?” he asked.
Toshiko snatched it right out of his hand, staring at the slash of colour. “The very thing.”
“Is this for the Rift observation system I asked you about?”
She nodded, trying to restrain her excitement. It was unseemly, for one, and for another, there was no guarantee this would work. “It's for an idea I had, yes.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Care to share?”
Toshiko took a deep breath. “If we build a matrix of known points, connect them with a material for which the speed of a light impulse is well-controlled and stable under normal environmental conditions, and send through an impulse of a known width, we can find the time it takes to travel between any two points on the matrix. If time itself varies and everything else is constant, the travel time between those points will be different. Then if we take the difference in travel time between any two consecutive observations from any two points on the matrix and it is nonzero, we know that it's Rift activity.”
The words poured out in a rush. When she finished, she took a step back, waiting for his reaction.
It wasn't long in coming. Tapping the button on his earpiece, he barked, “Suzie, conference room. Now.” Gesturing to the door with his head, he said, “Let's go. Bring the map.”
When they arrived in the conference room, Suzie was already there. “You called, Master?”
Jack, surprisingly, answered her with merely a raised eyebrow and an amused look; he took the city map from Toshiko and spread it out on the table. “Alright, Tosh, tell Suzie what you just told me.”
“It's about the Rift observation system Jack asked us to do,” Toshiko started. “I don't know if you've had a chance to work on it yet...”
“I've been too busy at the power station,” Suzie replied. “Go ahead.”
Toshiko flicked an at Jack, who nodded slightly. “Do you know how it was determined that light doesn’t need any special medium in which to travel?” she asked. “It was done by a pair of American mathematicians in the 19th century.”
Suzie raised an eyebrow. “Enlighten me,”
“They took about two hundred fifty mirrors, lined them up on either side of a river, and turned them into an interferometer. Half the light went through the mirrors to recorders just behind them, and the other half of the light reflected off the mirrors in sequence, and after it hit the last mirror in the series, the total time was measured.” Toshiko stepped to the whiteboard and drew a hasty sketch. “We should be able to use an adaptation of their method to measure variation in Rift energy output.”
Suzie cocked her head and scowled, staring at the diagram. “Known distance, unknown time.” Leaning forward slightly, she said, “I get that, but the Rift isn't precisely a known anything.”
“It's not, but its effects are.” She drew two lines, one short and one long, on the board. “If the distance between two points is known and the frequency of an impulse and the speed of impulse propagation through a medium are constant, then the time that it takes for a pulse to travel from A to B should always be the same, allowing for error in the measurement. If there's a noticeable, observable difference in travel time when everything else is controlled, it means that time is non-constant.” She smiled, a little bit nervous at their reaction.
“And if time is non-constant, it's a pretty good guess in this city as to why,” Suzie finished. “I take it this is your solution to our problem?”
Jack stared at the board, head cocked to one side in thought, arms folded across his chest. “I think it's a great idea,” he said abruptly. “Simple and elegant, easier than relativity. Help her make it work.” He turned on his heel and left.
Suzie looked at Toshiko over the rim of her glasses. “Well, well, well. You've got the boss's seal of approval.”
Blushing, Toshiko answered, “We don't know if it will work yet.”
“It's novel, that's for sure.” Suzie reached out and grabbed at the map. “What's this?”
Toshiko sat down across from her. “It's the Rift,” she said. “According to Jack, the red line is the historical average position of the Rift.”
“And you wanted this why?”
“Well,” Toshiko started, “I thought about building a three-dimensional array such that it spanned axis of the Rift.” Suzie narrowed her eyes, listening. Toshiko continued, “That way, we travel time observations for any given impulse in three-space, which will allow us to pinpoint where along the Rift a flare is occurring.”
Her voice trailed off at Suzie's focused stare. “Do you not think it will work?”
“What are you doing here?” Suzie asked abruptly.
Toshiko blinked. “What?”
Suzie snorted. “Why are you here? Why aren't you in London, where all the main research centres are?”
Toshiko looked away. “London never gave me an interview.” It was true, after a fashion. Jack’s little song and dance at the prison could hardly count as an interview, any more than the lone voice in the ceiling could count as a trial.
"They had you come in for that alien autopsy." Suzie's hands moved across the table, inching closer to Toshiko's.
"The only reason they let me in is they thought I was Owen."
“So?” Suzie snorted, interrupting Toshiko from her self-recriminations. “Ever since you sent out that translation program, everybody who's anybody sat up and took notice. The only reason they didn't take you right then and there is that you were supposed to be Owen."
Toshiko felt like her brain was four steps behind this conversation. “Wait, wait, back up. Who got the translation program?” Jack had told her he was going to make sure it would go where it was needed the most, but hadn't told her where. “I thought it was just for here.”
“Are you serious?” Suzie shook her head in exasperation. “London's got it, Glasgow has it, UNIT has it, the Americans have it, I think even the Aussies have a copy. As soon as you broke the code on that alien jellybaby recipe...”
“Biscuits,” Toshiko corrected absently.
“Whatever. Once you broke that, it got sent to anybody who asked politely.”
Toshiko was abruptly glad she was sitting down. She didn't know quite how she felt about UNIT having access to her work, and-oh, the Americans and their military-
“I imagine the cryptographers were none too pleased,” she said.
“Did you really not know?” Suzie pressed.
“I try to not care about things that don't matter to me.” Once she had given the final copy to Jack, she'd vowed to never think of it again.
With a shrug, Suzie said, “Well, if you ever get tired of this, you'd be the shining star of one of their research labs.”
“Good to know.” Toshiko straightened up, turning the topic back to her idea. “Do you think the Michelson-Morley experiment can be adapted to indirectly observing the Rift?”
“In theory, it should work...” She sat up straight and slapped her hand on the table, once again startling Toshiko. “You are so high strung,” Suzie complained.
“Sorry,” Toshiko said, wringing her hands in her lap. Suzie made her nervous.
“Whatever. In principle, it should work. Every time we're in a building after a Rift spike, you can see it.”
Toshiko frowned. In a building? She couldn't think of what that might be like. Some kind of rippling effect in the air?
“I don't know what you mean,” she said. “I don't think I've ever been on a call for a Rift flare.”
“What?” Suzie cocked her head to one side, then the other. “Really? You've been here a year.”
Now that she'd said it aloud, Toshiko realized it was true. A full year, and she'd only been in the field for Weevil hunts. “No, never. I'm always on the controls here.”
“Huh. I guess you are,” Suzie mused. “How odd. Anyway, if you're in a building that has electric lights during a Rift flare, the lights flicker. In a really strong flare, the bulbs sometimes blow out. Same general physical principles as what you proposed, only using electrical current instead of speed of light.”
“Hmmm.” Toshiko thought about that. “We can't use the power grid itself, because it's subject to too much variation from outside sources.”
“You are so literal. I never meant we should try that,” Suzie said. “It was just an illustration.”
“Sorry.”
Both Suzie and Toshiko stared at the map on the table.
“I've got an idea,” Suzie said. “Tell me what you want, and I'll build you the business end of a test unit. You figure out how to do the recordings and the software end. I'm rubbish at that.”
“Done.” Toshiko seized at the offering. “What do you think? Four weeks for the basics, five until we can install?”
Suzie laughed. “You're wanting miracles. It'll take me at least five days to get all the parts.” She stood up and headed for the door. “You really should be in London,” she said as she sauntered out.
Toshiko rolled up the map and followed her out. She walked over to Jack's office. He wasn't there, although his coat was on the hook, so he had to be around.
She found him in the autopsy bay with Owen, helping him unpack a large box. Both men looked to be absorbed by their task, and she didn't feel comfortable interrupting them. She decided to wait for a few minutes to see if they reached a stopping point; if not, she'd find him later.
She didn't need to wait long. Jack elbowed Owen and said loud enough to carry up to her, “Just between you and me and the walls here, I think somebody is admiring our manly physiques.”
“Keep it in your pants, Harkness,” Owen groused. “Besides, it's just Tosh.”
“A little respect, please!” Jack said, looking affronted. “She's the smartest person you'll ever meet. Be properly humble in her presence.”
While Toshiko felt her cheeks flush at the unexpected praise, Owen said, “Well, given that we never meet new people locked in this loony bin, that's not saying much, is it?”
Ouch! Stung, Toshiko spun on her heel and retreated to her workstation.
“Tosh,” Jack called. She turned to look, and took a step back when she saw he was only inches behind her. He must have run up the steps three at a time to get to her so quickly. “I was going to ask what you needed, but then somebody put his mouth in gear without engaging his brain.”
“It can wait until later,” Toshiko mumbled, looking at the ground.
“Well, I'm here now,” Jack said. “What's up?”
“Suzie and I are building a prototype for the Rift monitor,” she replied quietly, still bridling at Owen’s comment. “I just wanted to let you know that I'll be using most of the processing space on the mainframe.” Waving at a nearby monitor with her hand, she said, “In case you had any other projects running.”
“Excellent,” he said. “Whatever you need, you've got it, so long as it doesn't require live sacrifice.”
“If we do, you're the first in line, Jack!” Suzie called from across the room.
Jack shot back, “Only if you tie me up and ritually flog me first!”
Suzie turned her chair so that her back was to them, but both Jack and Toshiko very clearly heard the word “Bastard!” come from her general direction. Beaming, Jack turned to Toshiko and said, “And here I was wondering if she didn't love me anymore. Is there anything else you need?”
Toshiko felt her irritation at Owen melting away. It was difficult to be angry when the Jack and Suzie show was in progress.
She bit her lip, thinking. Suzie was handling the construction; the software would be simple enough, aside from measuring time, which, of course, was the most critical part of the concept.
“I don't suppose we have an atomic clock lying around, do we?” she asked.
“Several,” Jack said, thinking. “Chip scale work for you?”
“They will...” Her voice trailed off. Ideally, for the precision she needed, she needed a comb array.
“Tell me,” Jack urged. “I told you already, this is top priority.”
Toshiko finally looked up at him. “Can we get an optical frequency comb array for the main signal controller?”
If he was serious about it, she'd know with his answer. A full-size comb array was exorbitant in price and would take up a full room, not to mention the trouble of getting one.
Frowning, Jack held his fist to his lower lip and walked around for a minute, from where Toshiko stood to the Rift controller and back again. “Maybe. Maybe not. Can you build the prototype with chip scale?”
Toshiko smiled, bobbing her head. “Yes, thank you, that would be wonderful.”
“Anytime.” Jack went back to the autopsy bay, making a lot of noise going down the steps. Although she was still feeling put out by Owen's thoughtless-and unfortunately true-remark, knowing that she had Jack's support with respect to getting what she needed was nice.
“Hey, Suzie?” she called.
“Hey, Tosh?”
“How many nodes are you planning to have on the prototype?” The more nodes present, the more accurate it would be, but also the more of a hassle to program.
“Twelve,” Suzie answered promptly. “Five on a side, plus source and receiver.”
“Brilliant,” Toshiko said. It wasn't much, but it was sufficiently many nodes that they would be able to see where the problems would occur and not so many that it would be cumbersome. “Single transmit source? Multiple?”
Suzie called back, “Just the one, going from one to eleven.”
“You're using the interferometric design, partial refraction and partial transmission?” That was the critical part. Unless they could measure travel times between each individual node, the array would only tell if a Rift flare was in progress, not give them an idea of where, physically, it was.
“Yes, teacher,” Suzie said, sounding half amused and half annoyed. “Make sure you plan for that in your software. I have it set up so that there is a UHF transmitter on each one, broadcasting the time of arrival at each node.”
“Thanks, will do,” Toshiko answered.
With everything involved, the program would be challenging to write, but not overwhelming. It would take some careful measuring to get the exact positions of the points and the distances between them known within tens of millimetres, but otherwise, no major difficulty. The points weren't moving, so as long as they stayed not moving (earthquakes aside) there should always be a nonzero time differential, and if there were, they could always do a test to calibrate what the difference would be, and any residual random noise should be easy to filter out with a boxcar.
The more she thought about it, incorporating a broadcast signal would be fine for a small array like the prototype, but completely unsuitable for anything larger. She would have to program each receiver to send an identification message at the beginning of each one, not to mention working up a query-response system if something failed. Also, if there was a time anomaly in process, it would be reflected in the time of arrival of the signal message. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though-if the time difference as measured by the entire travel-time array was identical to latency in the broadcast time of arrival, that could be used as a check on the system.
“Toshiko?”
Jack's voice on her headset made her look up. “What is it, Jack?”
“Go home!”
She looked at the small clock on her desk. Nearly seven at night. When had it gotten so late?
“Just a minute!” She was almost finished with this one section, the one that would take the position of the sensor array and transform it to position in the real world. Once she finished that, she'd leave.
I'm going to have to make a graphic interface, Toshiko noted idly. She got by just fine with an alphanumeric interface; Jack, she knew, did much, much better with a map. So did Suzie. She had no idea what Owen liked.
“I thought I told you to go home,” Jack complained. Toshiko started in her chair.
Goodness, it was quarter to eight.
“I'm sorry,” Toshiko started. “I just wanted to...really, I was almost done with...”
“You still need to eat and sleep,” Jack pointed out. “Whatever it is can wait.”
Food. Toshiko realized that she was starving. Ready to eat anything that moved, and probably some things that didn't.
“Did you walk today?” Jack asked.
Shrugging on her jacket, Toshiko said, “I did. Why? Did the weather turn bad?”
“Yeah. It’s pouring. Come on, I'll give you a ride home.”
The ride home only took a few minutes, and shortly after, Toshiko set about her usual evening ritual. Shoes off, stockings off, telly on, wander around looking for something to eat, perhaps read a bit, sleep. The long day must have taken it out of her more than she expected-her eyes were heavy as she cuddled under her duvet, watching some old romantic comedy-
*****
The next morning looked a lot like the night before: cold, blustery and wet, with the added bonus of a stiff neck from sleeping on the couch. Toshiko dug through her closet until she found her warmest jumper, which she layered over a silk blouse and wool trousers. She flipped the telly to the news from whatever odd movie was on the channel she'd fallen asleep to. After catching the tail end of a report on fixing road damage from the earthquake, a cooking segment started, which made her look at her plain toast for breakfast and leftover chicken for lunch with a sigh.
It took some effort for Toshiko to wrench her mind from the real world and focus on her day-to-day existence. That what she considered normal was so abjectly bizarre and surreal was an irony not lost on her as she stepped into Hub.
“That's a load of bullshit. If your intention is to hold the immediate welfare of the city of Cardiff hostage, I'm not dealing with you.”
Toshiko winced. It wasn’t even fully daylight yet and somebody was already on Jack’s bad side. He was speaking into his mobile from just outside his office; she made sure to stand out of sight.
“Yeah, I know what caused the earthquake. It's irrelevant. What matters is we get this repaired.” He stopped, listening, and then said, “My staff are perfectly competent to...look. You have two options. Either you do this for the safety of the citizens of the United Kingdom or I call Downing Street and let Harriet Jones sort this out.”
She didn't mean to eavesdrop, she really didn't. But when Jack threatened to call the Prime Minister, that was enough to get her undivided attention. Also, if Jack knew the cause of the earthquake, assuming normal geology wasn't at fault, did that mean it was Rift-related? That would make sense, given that the Rift controller was damaged in the process. It would also explain why Jack was so strung out afterwards.
“Look, Yvonne, you have until Monday to get the timekeeper apparatus transferred here or I call the Prime Minister. Yes, I know that's only a week.” He threw a ball of paper into the rubbish bin in a perfect bascule. “We'll take care of the...this is not a big country and London is not far from Cardiff. Make it happen. Goodbye.”
That hadn't sounded promising.
“Toshiko!” Jack bellowed. “Come upstairs, I know you're here.”
So much for being quiet and unobtrusive. Then again, the cog door made a mighty ruckus when it was opened. She walked up the steps and into the office. “Yes?”
“I have good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is that I can get you your comb array. The bad news is that we need to play games to get it.”
Toshiko frowned. “How so?”
“The powers that be in London want you up there next Monday to build them a prototype in the lab, including a full-scale demonstration. I have no intention of subjecting you to London's notions of how to do business.” His face twisted into an ironic expression. “They’re not willing to provide the atomic clock unless they can be shown that it works in advance.”
“What?” Toshiko protested. “We don’t even have a working prototype here.”
Jack snorted. “Like I said. We're playing games.”
“How am I supposed to prove to them that it works?” she asked. “There isn’t a temporal anomaly in London. Possibly small-scale ones, but they’ll be ephemeral in nature-”
“No, there aren’t,” Jack interrupted, “which is why instead you're going to write a document explaining what it is you're doing and why. Think proposal, only instead of begging for the funding, you're justifying the money I've already spent.”
“For whom?” Toshiko asked. “Accountants? Management? How much detail do you want?”
Jack said, “As much as you can give, but make it in really small, simple terms.” He threw another wadded-up piece of paper into the air. “Oh, yeah, and make sure you describe why we're doing this. You know, the kind of things that come from the Rift, how we can adjust the Rift Controller to keep it from blowing open if we see a big flare in progress, the like.”
“Management, then,” she noted. Accountants tended to need a justification of why she needed one part over another, not an idiot's guide to why they were there in the first place. Managers were usually far, far more frustrating, particularly when they had no experience in what they were supervising.
“After a fashion,” Jack agreed. “Go to it.”