Wednesday 26 November 2008

2008 November 25

Once again I needed to remove the last of what I wrote before giving up for the day. It seems that my brain starts drifting more than I realise each night. The cold I seem to have developed isn't helping any with my current motivation to write, nor is the fact I know (from last year) that I could still finish even if I didn't write anything for the next three days.

Words today: 1256
Total for the month so far: 28,667
(Total characters in the document: 149,999)


Veronika put her former flatmates at the top of her list, right behind her family anyway. At the top of my list I had my family, and then, I had trouble. I knew a lot of people would be very happy for me but I didn't really have close friends, it was the same basic issue I'd have choosing a best man. Walter and I hadn't really spoken or hung out or anything over the past six months and he had been my best male friend for a long time. While I realised that it would be good to see him again I also didn't think it made sense to strike up the friendship again simply to have a best man. There were a few people at work that I had worked with for quite some time, at least up until the big secret and my relocation. And I got on well with people at the game nights but I didn't really do anything with either group away from work or games.

Having always been more than okay with solitude I'd not really considered how lonely others might see my life. Being unable to think of anyone besides Veronika and my family that I considered particularly close made me start questioning how good my social life actually was apart from Veronika. Looking back on the time since she'd shifted in I realised that I had probably been out socialising more than normal but Veronika would have been out less. Asking about that brought a hesitant response, she didn't want to make me feel bad or guilty for stifling her but she had turned down a few opportunities to do things because she wanted to be with me and figured I'd just be staying in. When asked why she hadn't asked me to go with her the actual event types were mentioned and I agreed that there would have been no point in asking me, I wouldn't have gone unless it was the only way to spend time with Veronika.

Neither of us had any great desire to have our extended families present, simply because we didn't spend much time with them apart from occasional Christmas type get togethers. So we ended up putting a few names on the list apart from family and going onto other things. Second on the list to start on that day was finding a place to have the ceremony, churches were out but we wanted something old and we didn't want to risk an outside wedding with weather concerns. That didn't really leave many places anywhere near where we lived so it was a fairly quick drive around to look at them and find out what could be hired for a day. Of what we saw our favourite two places weren't possibilities so we booked the third, a little earlier than we'd been intending but that's when it was going to be available.

Getting food led to looking at holiday destinations and as we left the third place Veronika won my heart yet again. She suggested we simply find a beach house in the city, rent it for a week and have our honeymoon there. Not having to spend hours on a plane or in an airport terminal seemed like a very good idea to me, as did the fact we'd have far less trouble dealing with problems if there would be problems.

Both lots of parents were happy to have a date to plan for, although everyone but my father seemed surprised at how soon it was going to be, three months instead of six was going to leave certain people rushed to prepare. I expect my father was making the mistake a lot of other people were going to as far as motivation for having the ceremony sooner but it was simply convenient to have it when we were going to.

Over the two months from those plans we ended up getting almost everything sorted easily, making me wonder why so many people complained about the stress involved. And then things went a little bad, Veronikas dress would not do as it was supposed to and stay up so they had to rework it with straps. My mother broke her foot while attempting to change a light bulb one afternoon. The rings we'd ordered didn't arrive when they should have.

My time at work was far less stressful, the formation of wormholes became almost passé and I was at times the only one actually watching the actual event instead of readings. Such an occasion led to the second breakthrough, having wanted to know where the other end was, or even if there actually was another end the group had tried to receive broadcasts at all frequencies they could envisage being used for communication. For whatever reason they hadn't yet tried sending anything through. Getting them to do so wasn't easy either, the possibilities for who they'd contact were overwhelming, and underwhelming. Aliens, alternate reality versions of ourselves or possibly no contact at all were all put forward as results we could expect.

The thing was, they'd all failed to see the pattern in the growth of the wormhole, just watching like I did wouldn't have helped determine anything but the watching in combination with going over the readings should have pushed someone to recognise that it wasn't actually a consistent growth pattern. Going over the micro recordings that had been made of each startup, before the wormholes got to be big enough for human eyes to see it became obvious there was a stepping up of size not a curve. Once it had been growing for a short while (less than five seconds) the growth changed though, most of the time there was simply larger steps in size. It was the others that made everyone think that somewhere new really had been discovered. The step sizes started to increase in specific, consistent, jumps instead of what was a close match to the fibonnaci sequence.

Kevin almost refused to believe me when I told him there was a pattern there, especially when the first three readouts were all different. It was when I showed him the fourth and fifth readout with my notes over the top of them, all five readouts that is, that he begun to see what I was saying. Each step up on the readouts I'd picked as having been interfered with was a specific margin, consistent across the entire test. Getting all the tests we had accurate enough records for and sorting them by date made us all (Kevin, myself and the others) wonder if we'd been guilty of wishful thinking. Each 23 days the jumps stepped back to the initial stage but because of the infrequency of tests that wasn't readily apparent.

Even the two higher ups that were keeping track of what happened in the lab agreed that there was probably an intelligence of some sort doing something to try and communicate with us. How to communicate back wasn't clear but it was readily agreed to just see what happened if we transmitted a specially modulated radio wave through the wormhole. Dan was clever enough to come up with the idea of modulating the signal by the same ratio as the incoming effect was having day by day. Setting up such a simple device would have been possible for me, but far more complicated than I could be bothered with. Fortunately there was plenty of transmission stuff and the means to create the frequency.

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