The Escapement Mechanism, Part 9
Wemly ran a fast Fourier transform, and the waves reduced to distinct lines on the screen, the bar-code of her thoughts, catalogued but undecipherable. 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 and then disappeared, 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.
Just as she was sure it had all been in her head, a new window popped up, with what Wemly assumed to be the result of the compiled code. An oddly familiar sequence: twenty five blank squares, separated by a hyphen every five. 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 device appeared to be providing its own interface, compiling a program, and running it on the fly.
It was incredible. The new window hogged the screen real-estate, with the outlines of her analyses barely visible behind them. What looked very much to her like a product activation code from a generation ago when such things were necessary, did not respond to any mouse clicks. When she typed on the keyboard, nothing happened.
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 it. Twenty five numbers mixed with capital letters in an odd-looking font, separated by hyphens every five. It had to be what the window was requesting.
The problem now wasn’t determining the sequence, but 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.
Maybe the program was modal, like some older text editors, and entering the code was dependent on some transcendental mental state to switch it into input mode. But from what she recalled of her grandparents, that would have made it impossible for them to use. 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 the required thoughts were 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 banged on the keyboard, but hadn’t simply tried to type in the code in full in one uninterrupted go. It wasn’t responding to input, but it might be evaluating it.
A surge of excitement tempered by the chastisement of her own idiocy flooded through her. It was the same feeling she remembered from ripping open the decision letter of her graduate scholarship application. It was the sureness of success held confidently at the core of her being—an island in an ocean of fear that dared her confidence to dive in. She knew she was right. She had to be. Yet 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 was now at least on the road to figuring out what it did.
It was only then that she realized she was still connected with cables. She yanked them off in contempt, their purpose served. Night was fading into day, and her eyes burned.
Tomorrow she would investigate a new world, but now she needed to sleep.