[OC-Series] I'm the Last Person Who Remembers the Original Timeline. I Have Four Days. | CHAPTER 24: KEEP-ALIVE

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I sat with my hand on the dead key for longer than I should have.

The word I had said into the empty room was still in the air, or felt like it was. Please. Not in a notebook entry. Not in code. Out loud, to nobody, in a tone that belonged to a man asking for something. I had heard it leave my mouth and I had heard exactly what shape it was, and the shape was hope-shaped.

That was the problem. You do not key a line because you want it to answer. You key a line because it is scheduled to be keyed. If you key it because you want it to answer, you are doing prayer, and prayer is a category error when the receiving end is a quantum tether to a woman who may or may not be on the surface of the planet doing something Moreau told her to do that I cannot guess.

I took my hand off the key. I put it on the desk. I looked at the desk.

OK. New rules.

I opened a fresh page in the notebook. I labeled it KEEP-ALIVE PROTOCOL, because labels make a thing real, and a real thing is one you can follow even when you do not want to.

The principle was simple. A keep-alive is a signal that says nothing except that the line is open. It is what a radio operator sends into a frequency they hope someone is monitoring, with no expectation of answer, on a fixed schedule, until someone on the other end picks up and confirms. It does not contain a message. It contains the fact of itself. The carrier is the message. If you put words in it, you are no longer sending a keep-alive. You are talking to yourself.

I sketched it out. A single tone at the tether's resonant frequency, half a second on, two seconds off, four pulses, then silence. Repeat at fixed intervals. Choose the interval long enough that it does not look like a fault on a receiving instrument, short enough that anyone monitoring the line would catch one within a reasonable window. I set it at six minutes by the cesium. Twenty-four subjective minutes by what my body now told me time was, but the cesium did not care what my body thought, and the cesium was the only honest clock left in the bubble.

I built the pattern on the terminal. I tested it locally against a dummy load. It produced exactly what I wanted: a four-pulse signature any halfway-awake engineer would recognize as keep-alive on first read, distinguishable from noise, distinguishable from a signal carrying content. The kind of thing you send when you do not know if anyone is on the other end and you want the other end to know you will be sending forever, just in case.

I keyed the first one to the line on the mark.

The line did nothing. That was fine. The line doing nothing was the expected output. I set the next mark on the cesium for six real minutes from now and made myself look away from the clock.

Then I turned the page.

The label on that one was harder. I started with QUESTIONS and then I crossed it out because that was wishful, the word implying there was someone to answer. I tried LIST and crossed that out because it was too neutral. I wrote MANIFEST. A manifest is what you put together before you load a ship; it is the list of what you intend to carry, ranked, in case the ship turns out to be smaller than you thought. You make the manifest knowing you might not get to send everything.

The manifest was for the line waking up.

I built it in priority order. I have spent a long time on equipment under failure conditions where you do not know how much time you will have on a radio link before it cuts again, and the answer is always the same. You start with the question that has the most leverage and you go down from there. You do not start with the question that has the most feeling behind it, because you will run out of time before you have used the link for anything actually useful.

Item one: what is Moreau doing.

Not what Moreau is. I know what Moreau is. She is a fifty-three-year-old physicist in Sherbrooke with a daughter she lost to a driver who ran a light, and a theoretical paper I reviewed eighteen months ago, and a machine I now know is the cause of the wrongness Sarah has been chasing for the past day or so on a calendar that no longer means anything. What I do not know is what she is currently doing with the machine, having lost her one-sided second-source bet, having lost me as her intended underground reference, having Sarah in the warehouse instead.

The honest answer is, I have no idea. I can guess. Guessing is a worse instrument than asking. Item one stays.

Item two: what does Sarah know.

This is the leverage question. Sarah is between me and Moreau, and Sarah is the only conduit on the line. Whatever Moreau is doing, Sarah may know about it, may have been told some of it, may have inferred some of it. The shape of what Sarah knows is the shape of what I am allowed to act on. If Sarah does not know anything, I am sending into a void with a person attached. If Sarah knows the whole picture, the manifest stops being a manifest and starts being a conversation.

I wrote down item three before I let myself think about that.

Item three: is there a window. Is there anything that can be done from where I am, with what I have, before the boundary closes. The answer might be no. The answer is probably no. I have to ask anyway, because the alternative is sitting here keying a keep-alive into a dead line for the rest of my subjective life, and a man with a useless question still has the question.

I stopped at three.

I knew I could keep going. I could write the items down to fifteen or twenty before I started repeating myself. But there is an engineering principle that says you do not load a manifest past the point where the additional items stop being decision-grade information. After item three, my questions started looking like things I wanted to know, instead of things I needed to know in order to do something next. That was the line I had drawn for myself ten years ago in graduate school, in a different building, in a different city, and I had not abandoned it yet.

I underlined the heading. I closed the notebook.

The cesium said the next mark was in forty seconds.

I keyed the second keep-alive on the mark. The line did nothing. I set the next mark for six more real minutes.

I did this fourteen more times before the fan made the new noise.

The fan had been grinding since I had brought it back from the dead with the pencil-graphite trick, which had been hours ago by the cesium and what felt like a small extra geological epoch by the part of me that lived in the bubble's air rather than its clocks. The grinding had been steady. Annoying, but steady. Steady I could budget around. The new noise was not steady. The new noise was a periodic catch that came every few revolutions, like the bearing had picked up a piece of something it could not quite cough back up, and was working it slowly toward whatever final position would make it stop turning altogether.

OK. Triage call.

I had two options. Option one: turn the fan off, accept the loss of forced air circulation, watch the bubble get hotter and more humid until convection stopped doing my mixing for me and the CO2 started stratifying in pockets I would walk into without warning. Estimated time until that became a survival problem: eight to twelve real hours. Estimated cost in clarity, comfort, and the ability to do basic thinking: high but tolerable.

Option two: keep the fan running and accept that it would die when it died, and that the running was burning CO2 runway in two ways. The motor itself drew oxygen-equivalent through the heat it dumped into the air, and the friction in the bearing meant the fan was less efficient at the mixing it was nominally doing, which meant I was paying for ventilation I was not fully getting. Estimated time until the fan died on its own anyway: unknown. Estimated cost: I was making a worse trade and I knew it.

I picked option two.

I picked it for the reason I had picked everything since the dead line came back online with no one on it, which was that a running fan was a system I could hear working, and a hearing-working system was the only company I had that did not need to be answered.

I keyed the next keep-alive on the mark.

The line did nothing.

Somewhere on the next several marks, I stopped looking at the cesium between them. I sent the pulse, I noted the mark, I set the next, and I let the interval pass without measuring it. The interval was elastic. The interval was thirty subjective minutes one mark and an hour the next and something I would not have bet on the third. The cesium said six. The cesium kept saying six.

I let it.

That was the part of the differential I had been afraid of since I had first measured it cleanly on the day the standing wave caught and the boundary jumped backward at me, and which had stopped being a curiosity sometime around when I rebuilt the antenna and had started being weather. My subjective time was running long. Real time was running short. The two were approaching each other from opposite directions, the way a man on a beach watches a wave come in and the bubble he is standing in pull back to meet it. I had known the math. I was now feeling the math.

I stopped checking the cesium because checking the cesium was a way of bargaining with the differential, and you do not bargain with math.

I sent the next keep-alive on the mark.

The line did nothing.

I thought, very briefly, about saying the word out loud again. The one I had said into the empty room before I made the rules. I did not. I had a rule about that now. The rule was that hope-shaped vocalizations on a keep-alive schedule were a category error, and I had written that rule down for myself two pages back in my own handwriting, and the rule was binding in the same way the cesium was binding, by the simple authority of being more honest than I was.

I set the next mark.

I sat with my hand on the desk and listened to the bubble.

The acrylic groaned somewhere behind me, low and uneven, the new vocabulary of a hull that no longer had a sensor reading its closure. I could not tell from the groan whether the closure had advanced in the last hour or whether the hull was just settling its load against a slightly different point. I could not tell because there was nothing to tell me. I had used the antenna sensor to rebuild the line and the line was dead and the boundary was where it was and I was where I was.

I keyed the next keep-alive on the mark.

The line did nothing.

I waited.