TIME & TIED: ESCALATION

ARC 2.3 - To the Past

PART 37b: GEOGRAPHY & GEOMETRY 2

“Valid question,” Frank yielded. “Given one could time travel forward with no plan to return. Except, I did travel with Carrie back to the 1950s. We stayed in town. Meaning either there’s some sort of geographic failsafe, or, I don’t know, it’s doing geometry based on similar DNA. Found in our ancestors or other relatives.” He shrugged. “We’d have to test that empirically.”

“More to the point, what if you take the same trip twice?” Luci put in. “The machine seems to account for the structures around us, but what about the danger of overlapping its own arrival?” She smiled. “THAT is where the random variance comes in. By randomizing the time by a few minutes, along with the space within a certain radius, you shouldn’t have to worry about rematerializing on top of yourself.”

“Wait, Julie’s death,” Tim realized with a start. “That fits your pattern. She died back in the town where her parents were.”

Chartreuse let out a low whistle. "This is SO COOL,” she said. "The inventor must have, you know, put a lot of thought into this thing.”

Frank came back to the table. "As you say. It also means that we’d better not play with the electronics in the handle, as I have no idea how the heck this device is scanning all of space for its users, then accounting for the curvature of the Earth and whatnot.”

“Right,” Clarke mused, nodding slowly. “It would suck if your past selves were on opposite sides of the planet, leading to the machine placing you under the Earth’s crust or something.”

Frank nodded. “Unfortunately,” he added, “this makes our trip to retrieve Julie that much more difficult. I mean, short of recruiting her parents..."

“Bad idea,” Clarke asserted, with some bitterness. “Hell, they didn’t even stick around town past Day 3 of the search for their missing daughter.”

“Okay.” Frank looked to Luci, then back at Clarke. “Then we’re either going to have travel down to Illinois the long way - which is problematic in our present and a pain in the past - or we get fancy with geometry."

“And for that,” Luci summarized, “we’re going to need all of your birth places.” She sighed. “Of course, since I’m younger than Julie, and I don't even know who my parents were, I can't join the rescue mission. It adds too much additional randomness to the calculations.”

“You can co-ordinate our efforts here, Luci,” Frank noted, reaching out to touch her shoulder before looking at the others. "Now, I had a map of Canada, but if Julie was born in the States, that's not going to be big enough. I’ll run and get an atlas."

He hurried off upstairs.

***

"Tim, what’s up?" Clarke inquired, after scanning everyone’s expressions. "You're looking unusually pensive."

Tim flushed slightly. "Oh, w-well... I g-guess I've gone back to wondering where the time machine might be." He paused. "I mean, since it's so important that we find it, can't you do it, ah, temporally? L-Like, declare that whoever goes back to save Julie, they'll place the device somewhere that it can be easily found now or something?”

"Set ourselves up you mean?" Luci piped up. She shook her head. "We haven’t been able to do that yet. Frank's tried, and to a lesser extent, so have I. And while Carrie is a different story - she's somehow adept at paradox without even trying - at present, she's obviously incapacitated."

"Hey, you think maybe Carrie's connection to paradox is, like, part of the reason she's having trouble now?" Chartreuse proposed.

"It wouldn't surprise me," Luci agreed.

"Okay, I've got an atlas," Frank called out as he hurried back downstairs. "The map of North America is a bit crude but will hopefully serve for our purposes."

He laid it out on the table. "Now, I was born in Ottawa, Ontario," he began, drawing a circle around the nation's capital. "And with Luci staying here, I’d better go as a specialist on the time machine. Clarke, it's probably best if you come too, since Julie's unlikely to respond well to anyone else. Where were you born?"

"Vancouver."

Frank let out a breath. “British Columbia. Of course.” He circled the west coast city, pulled out a ruler, and connected the two points. "Which means that according to the midpoint theory, we end up somewhere southwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba.”

"I was, like, born here in town," Chartreuse added.

"Okay, so if we do a triangulation and take the midpoint of that... hm, practical use for this math stuff." Frank located the centroid. “Okay, I think it pulls us closer to Thunder Bay," Frank concluded. "Tim...?"

"T-Toronto."

Frank drew a few more pencil lines on the map. "Er, second triangle then... uh, with me, Clarke and Tim, the arrival point borders Lake Superior? Then if we add Chartreuse back... hm, quadrilateral. How does this work... we should automate these calculations..." More lines were drawn. "Okay, er, I think we'd be IN Lake Superior." He frowned, staring down at the map for a few seconds. "This isn't going to work at all, is it."

“There’s also the fact that, since the Earth's surface is curved, the shortest distance between two points isn’t such straight lines,” Luci realized. “Or maybe we’re supposed to use the circumcenter, not the centroid?”

“Is there NO way to work around that part of the locating procedure?” Clarke asked.

Frank shook his head. “Figuring that out would take time and effort, both things we don't have, given how we still have to track the machine down in our present in the first place!"

"If I might, you know, offer a suggestion?" Chartreuse piped up.

Frank gestured back in her direction. "Go ahead."

"It seems that what we really need for the time trip is a point somewhere south of Julie. To pull us into the States. So, like, how about Miami? It looks like you might get good results if you, you know, calculate a position including that city."

"But we don't know anyone from Miami," Frank protested.

"We might. Calculate it," Chartreuse insisted.

Shrugging, Frank drew in more pencil marks and triangle medians. "All right, well, if we calculate right back to me, Clarke and 'Miami'..." He blinked. "Illinois. West of Chicago. A little too far west, but it's the closest yet." He frowned. "Still, as I said, we'd need someone in Miami."

Chartreuse pursed her lips. "Well, actually... Laurie Veniti was born there."

"Oh boy.” Frank flipped the pencil forward onto the table and pressed his hand to his forehead.

"See, the Venitis had an uncle living here in town who, like, died when the twins were five," Chartreuse continued earnestly. "He left his house to their family, so they all, you know, decided to move into the area at that time. But originally, they were born in America too.”

“Y-You think Laurie will be okay with this insanity?” Tim asked.

“Or CORRY?” Luci added.

“Yeah, why would Corry allow anything that might help Julie out?” Clarke agreed.

“Stop going on about Corry - Laurie will help if I tell her it’s going to help Carrie,” Chartreuse countered. “And if I go along as well, I can make sure my friend isn't any trouble."

"Except - you can't go with her,” Luci interjected. She had retrieved Frank's pencil and drawn in a couple new lines herself. “If you do, everyone ends up in the middle of Lake Michigan."

"Those Great Lakes keep getting in our way," Tim observed.

"Okay, so... what if Tim, like, joins all of us too?”

"Stop, this is out of control," Frank protested. "First things first, do we really want Laurie, and potentially Corry, to find out about the machine?"

"Well, the situation HAS changed," Luci yielded. "Not only are we pressed for time, we’re under surveillance by some guy from the future. Extra help from a truly unexpected quarter could come in handy. Assuming we can trust the Venitis to keep quiet."

“I guess,” Frank said dubiously. “But you know how Laurie tends to babble. This isn't something we want the whole school to find out about."

"Hey! Laurie can, you know, keep secrets,” Chartreuse protested. "And she'll see the importance in not telling anybody.”

“But don’t you think her brother would take advantage of the situation?" Clarke insisted.

"S-Seems to me that Corry is the bigger question here," Tim agreed. "I mean, even if we only tell Laurie, won't he figure it out eventually?"

Frank drummed his fingers on the table. "Probably." He frowned. "Okay Chartreuse, you probably know Corry best. If he were to find out about the time machine, what would he do?"

Chartreuse pondered. "Well, he does know how to listen to reason. Though it might be touch and go, given Laurie's potential involvement. Still, yeah, if we can’t keep him out of this indefinitely, I guess it'd be better to, like, be up front with him about it."

"We certainly want to avoid him discovering things in a manner similar to Julie," Luci concurred.

“So should we put off deciding anything until we find the time machine?" Tim offered. "I mean, if we can't find it, this is all moot."

Frank shook his head. “Annoyingly, time is against us. Remember, come tomorrow night, I talk to the police and the situation changes again. So once the time machine turns up, we'll want to take the trip, not waste hours on explanations."

"Okay, I propose the following plan," Luci declared. "Chartreuse, you tell Laurie - discretely - about the trip to rescue Julie. If she's agreeable, we ALL go to present a united front to Corry. That way we'll know straight out if he's going to cause us trouble. In the meantime, the rest of us can try to figure out what happened to the time machine between Julie’s arrival in the past, and our present."

Glances were exchanged. “It sounds like our best shot," Frank agreed.

"Then let’s do this, for Julie!” Clarke chimed in.

“A-And Carrie too," Tim added.

"I'll totally make that unanimous," Chartreuse concluded, beaming. She thrust her palm out into the middle of the group. "So let's, you know, make it official!"

Luci and Tim instinctively reached out to place their palms on top of Chartreuse's. Frank and Clarke blinked in surprise, but then added their own hands to the group. "To the future!" Chartreuse declared.

"You mean the past," Luci observed, amused.

"Like, whatever," Chartreuse countered with a wink. She left for the Veniti house minutes later.