The Escapement Mechanism, Part 8
Notes and Introduction
Ah distinctly, I remember, it was in the errrr… what was I talking about. Memory? Something? Hmmmmm. A watch? No, that’s not it. Oh yes! A device. Let’s find out how it works in this episode, shall we?
Wemly poked around at the readings. Heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, circulating O2, brain waves. Nothing unusual, at least from her perspective as a researcher in rodent memory. She ran her standard set of statistical tests. Wemly the mouse, but this rodent was not giving up its secrets.
She ran correlations. The frequency of the light on the device and her breathing were a perfect match, but she already knew that. What was surprising was a suspected repeating pattern in the brain waves. To her eyes the peaks and troughs followed their standard paths, morphing along with her thoughts but containing no useful information; and yet, there was a non-random correlation score assigned to them. An apparent repeating pattern that she could not identify.
Wemly ran a fast Fourier transform, and the waves reduced to distinct lines on the screen, the bar-code of her thoughts, catalogued but absent a reader. She ran a single separation and pulled the repeating pattern out of the noise generated from her brain. It was numeric in nature, and when Wemly converted the spectra into characters, a blank window popped into existence, with what appeared to be a code-compiler running, based on the limited diagnostic output that she could read. The window existed for such a brief time that Wemly thought she had imagined it.
But then a new window popped up, with what Wemly assumed to be the result of the compiled code. And as crazy as it seemed, the only thing that made sense was that the source code for this program had been transmitted through her thoughts, and was structured such that her statistical tools had been able to easily separate it. The escapement mechanism was providing its own interface, compiling it, and running it on the fly.
It was incredible. And it held an oddly familiar sequence. Twenty five blank squares, separated by a hyphen every five. It hogged the screen real-estate, her analyses windows barely visible behind them. What could have been a product activation code did not respond to any mouse clicks. When she typed on the keyboard, nothing happened.
It was clear that her computer was no longer giving her information—it was requesting it. It was the same pattern Wemly had observed hidden at the back of her grandma’s locket. She pulled out her phone and brought up the picture she had taken of the locket before leaving it with her grandma.
The problem wasn’t determining the sequence, but rather injecting it into the device. It was somehow broadcasting through her thoughts, so her first instinct was simply to deliberately think the digits, one at a time. Wemly focused on each number for a good five seconds before moving on to the next. She decided the hyphens were placeholders, and didn’t need to be considered, but when nothing happened, she spent a read-through focusing on them as well. She tried to clear her mind of all other thoughts.
Was entering the code dependent on some transcendental mental state? From what she recalled of her grandparents, that would have been impossible. Nicotine and twitch reactions under stress were more their speed, and all situations seemed to require the former and elicit the latter. It was completely at odds with the meditative mind Wemly attempted to invoke before giving up.
For a device capable of reading her mind, Wemly didn’t think that concentrating on each digit made a lot of sense. If it could read her mind, it should operate at the speed of thought; however, what thoughts were required remained a mystery, and she spent nearly an hour deliberately thinking of opening doors, of turning keys in locks, and of typing on keyboards.
After all that thinking, it occurred to her that she had clicked around on her computer and run all sorts of analyses, but hadn’t simply tried to type in the code in full. It wasn’t responding to input, but it might be evaluating it.
A surge of excitement tempered by chastisement at her own idiocy flooded through her. It was the same feeling she had ripping open the decision letter from her graduate scholarship application. She had felt her success in the core of her being before reading the letter, but it was swimming in an ocean of fear. It was the same now. She knew she was right. She had to be. But she hesitated over the keyboard.
Her mouth went dry and her constantly cold hands were uncharacteristically sweaty. She typed in the twenty-five digits, glancing repeatedly at her phone, not trusting herself to hold more than five in her memory at a time, and double-checking them anyway. There was no indication on the screen that her typing was having any effect. A keypress did not fill in a box with a character, but she persisted, entering the entire string without stopping.
The response was immediate. Wemly was about to hit enter when an entirely new interface appeared on the screen. Software that she had not installed, and that was clearly of an earlier design paradigm.
“Property of the Department of Defence” was conspicuously placed across the top of the application, taking screen space away from the collection of windows that occupied the rest of it. Wemly gripped the mouse, and although her hand was shaking, was able to drag the windows around within their application. Resize them. Minimize and expand them. She knew she should close the program and figure out how to open it at will, but there was too much to explore, and she was worried it would all be lost if she wasn’t able to get the program up again into its current state.
Beneath the defence banner was a simple title: “The Escapement Mechanism”; and then in font that was scarcely big enough to read: “by Gertrude Gorland”.
So that’s what it was called. At least Wemly had an official name for the thing. She had grown to think of it simply as, “the stone”, or maybe just, “Stone”, but, “The Escapement Mechanism” definitely gave it an air of purpose. Wemly felt she was now at least on the road to figuring out what it did, but the blacktop met the horizon at the edge of her mind’s eye.
It was only then that she realized she was still connected with cables. She yanked them off in contempt, their purpose served. The day was now deep into night, and her eyes burned.
Tomorrow she would investigate a new world. Tonight she would sleep.
