2008 November 29

I did write quite a bit more than this, 6650 words more, but I'm not willing to put it up. And I can't currently think of anyone that I'd be willing to show it to if they asked. That's left me needing to write just over five and a half thousand words today so I reach the 50,000 word target. I believe I will manage.

Words today: 1522 (seen here) + 6650 (hidden)
Total for the month so far: 44,477

There wasn't any real purpose to be me being in the area the wormholes were formed besides curiosity but I still felt better for being there. I even walked around the equipment running my hands over it, something I'd never done before that I could recall, not even with my first car. The control room was also empty so I went and sat in there for a little while as well. Familiarising myself with more of the equipment there than I had already been taught about and seeing if anything would spark insight.

Heading back out of the factory and to my original work area was weird, it had been at least a month since I was transferred out and I was sort of expecting there to be someone new in 'my' space. Instead, I found my desk back as I had left it, and a welcome back note from a few of my former co-workers, instigated by Sara and Fiona if the location of names was anything to go by. I'd obviously been expected back as no-one seemed surprised to see me, and most of the people that went by just said hello or similar and no more.

When I found Veronika at lunch she was pleased to see me but unsure how to react to the news I was going to be spending more time in the front offices. Her first thought was that I'd done something wrong and she wondered if it was a result of her keeping me up when I should have been sleeping. I quickly reassured her that it was only because things had gone so well I was no longer really in a position to offer help much more. I wasn't able to tell her whether or not I was going to be spending more or less evenings at home from now on though, I hadn't thought to ask what the schedule was likely to be for 'testing' now that we'd made contact.

Because of my somewhat unofficial status as a team member I wasn't required to be at any of the evening tests from that point forward, Kevin agreed I'd probably done all I was likely to achieve in the way of big things. Any time I wanted to show up to a test though I was welcome to do so, as long as I continued to keep everything confidential of course.

That week I missed the one other test they held, because I was with Veronika and her family finalising details for the wedding. I didn't manage to contain my restlessness while there though, I was constantly wondering what the researchers were talking about with Cerebros & Styler and if they'd bothered with the video tests yet. Heading home I got questioned by Veronika, curious as to where my mind had been. She had been unsurprised I wasn't particularly interested in the discussion of dresses but when the issue of food got very little attention either she began to worry a little. I let her know that being somewhere other than the testing area while a test was happening had made me feel disconcerted. I didn't think it would be as much of an issue the next time and I was sure there would be a next time.

My sleep that night was filled with dreams of strange places, dreams I actually remembered and found myself needing to do something about so I was doodling in the morning as I ate my breakfast. Veronika had seen me drawing often enough that it wasn't really a surprise to see me like that but it was novel enough that she wanted to see. The pictures looked like alternate wormhole lab setups to me, probably subconscious attempts to figure out what Cerebros & Styler saw when they were communicating with us.

Veronika figured it was simply renderings of where I'd been working and asked if I'd ever be able to show her around. Not wanting to lie or break confidentiality I simply told her that I was expecting to be able to show her around after we were wed. Having been only able to sketch in simple black pencil was probably a good thing after that, I'm sure that if I'd had coloured pencils I would have been using them, including for the hair of some of the researchers. And while I'd seen people with hair those colours on the streets I figured Veronika would know there was no one in the company that had hair that colour. Skin tones would have been the biggest give-away however, nobody I'd ever met had skin the colours I seen in my dreams.

As a contrast to a couple of weeks back I took quite a bit longer to get to through the work in the front offices that morning. I only finished it all up shortly before Veronika would be taking her lunch break so I went to wait for her instead of wasting time walking between the two offices I had and then needing to turn around and walk back to get to the café. Veronika arrived with a couple of her colleagues, and they all came to sit with me so I was immediately surrounded. I got hugged, greeted, and then largely ignored for the rest of the time they were eating, unsurprising when the discussion was wedding stuff that I didn't have a part in. When I got up to leave I hugged Veronika goodbye and let her know that if I wasn't outside when she was ready to leave I was going to be late home.

The afternoon passed quickly for me, much quicker than the morning had, as I read my way through the reports from Kevin, Kris and a handful of the other researchers regarding the previous evenings contact with Cerebros & Styler.

I wasn't surprised to find that Ben's first action during his slot for communication had been to ask the two of them to turn on video reception equipment and then start sending simple test patterns through. I was a little disappointed that it hadn't been received by the two of them in a usable fashion but it did make sense from what I'd been told about the transmission requirements. Styler did mention having set up a recorder to store the transmitted signal and that she'd then hooked that up to a computer to try and decrypt it. Ben passed along the simple explanation of how encryption/decryption worked in that system and she told him it would probably take a week for their systems to manage anything.

Kris, when given his turn had simply told the two of them to expect a pile of junk momentarily and sent a couple of cheap cameras through, each oriented along opposite directions of transit. The result of that was vastly different from what everyone had expected though, signal from each of them was received for long enough that we got a very brief glimpse of the other end. Three still frames were extracted from the returned signal and had been cleared up as much as possible. The view of our lab that had been sent back also provided a large shock, separating out those still frames showed a colour change occurring up until the point the camera had been damaged beyond usability.
Kris managed to draw two strong conclusions from his experiment, the first being that bigger, denser objects were not as likely to be affected by the transit although he'd need a lot more tests to determine if there was an actual safe mass for such a trip. The second, and more surprising to me, was the speculation that what we thought of as differences in colours might be the result of different physical rules in their particular universe. He'd also come to the conclusion that there probably wasn't any chance of them being a part of our universe since that particular test occurred. We had no reason to think that different galaxies would see the same things in different colour.

Dan didn't have anything specific that he wanted to do so he'd simply arranged a number of scanners (frequency, magnetic, etc) in the room and spent the majority of his evening going through results from the current and prior wormholes. Kevin was also free of any prior plans for the evening so he ended up spending most of the three hours just talking more. I didn't notice anything exceptional in the transcript that had been hastily compiled but figured that I'd be well advised to listen to it all at some point if I could.

Getting to the end of my day I'd heard nothing in the way of further instructions and so I cleared my desk of the reports, made sure my other desk was tidy as well, and then went to wait for Veronika to leave. As we walked home we talked about small things again. It seemed that our time walking had become set aside for the normal day-to-day stuff and when we were home we could talk about wedding stuff if we needed to.