2088
Before self-driving cars had become mandatory, people had sometimes crashed their vehicles, Sally had once told Chris. And, as regularly as inexplicably, the other drivers would slow down, even on the opposite lanes, to get a better look at the wreck... maybe hoping to catch a glimpse of the people being squeezed to death in their mangled machine.
Chris had been horrified and disgusted by that behavior, but right now, he began to understand the strange fascination people felt in the face of catastrophe.
He replayed the simulation again.
On the screen, he could not just see the Perdix, like the viewers of ANSA's real-time feed, but also the Hasslein fields generated by their modified drive. The Perdix' ring lit up as the generators sprang into action; the fields unfolded, in front of and behind the ship, deforming space...
... and tearing the probe to shreds.
How?
How could their engine suddenly destroy its carrier, when fourteen years ago, it had opened a perfect wormhole for the Icarus?
Never fix a running system.
Except that the system hadn't been running as specified when it had hurled his father into the depths of space... or time. Chris leaned back in his seat and raked his hands through his hair. In trying to remedy their original mistake, Hasslein's team had introduced a new one into the field equations. He had been tasked to find it and eliminate it. So he really should get down to it and call up the code, but he just couldn't tear himself away from the silent display of utter failure playing in an endless loop on his screen.
"Screensavers are so last century!"
Helen was suddenly poking her head over his right shoulder, and Chris heaved an annoyed sigh.
Helen ignored it, as always. "And besides, shouldn't you have started working on that code an hour ago? How long do you want to meditate on that thing?"
Chris swiveled his chair around to glare at her. "That thing was worth several million dollars, and was the result of over ten years of tinkering - all to find Dad! So yeah, I was meditating on this clusterfuck, and you know what I suddenly remembered during my meditation? Who inserted herself into our team and was so eager to be one of the programmers!"
He still wasn't over it. He could still recall every moment of that day, when the professor had introduced her to the team: the child prodigy who had won some physics contest... and his own surprise at that - he hadn't known there were contests for that. The professor had never told him, and Chris had always been too busy with studying, and writing simulations in the lab, to even notice...
And Lennie's smug smile. That he remembered best.
Right now, her face was contorting in enraged disbelief. "What? Are you saying it's my fault that the probe went kaboom? You gotta be kidding me! I'm only an intern, every breath I take is chaperoned! And besides, 'several million dollars' is totally exaggerated."
"You could've slipped any number of mistakes past Leo," Chris said stubbornly. "He only has eyes for your butt, not for your script!"
"Oh please!" Helen flipped her hair back. She had their mother's dark, straight hair, but Alan Virdon's striking blue eyes, and if she'd been a normal teenager, instead of burying herself in an ANSA lab, she'd have been beleaguered by suitors.
Hell, if he'd been a normal older brother, he'd be busy batting them away with a stick. For a moment, Chris became acutely aware how sick that whole situation was.
We're both freaks. Thanks, Dad.
No, that... that wasn't fair. It hadn't been Dad's fault. And they were trying... he was trying to bring Dad back, to return things to normal.
Helen was just meddling, like she'd always done, ever since he had caught her balancing on his desk, trying to catch his spaceship models that had been dangling from the ceiling.
"Maybe it's not us," Helen interrupted his brooding. "Maybe something's just utterly wrong with the whole, the whole..." she gestured wildly, "maybe something's fundamentally wrong with those equations, you know? Ever thought about that?"
"That's a brilliant idea, Einstein, go and tell the professor about it," Chris snapped. "Maybe he'll rethink his decision to let a child play with his million-dollar equipment!"
"I'm as old as you were when he recruited you!" Helen retorted.
"But I wasn't half as cocky," Chris growled. "You should keep your mouth shut and not assume you're smarter than the professor. You've got loads to learn before you can join the conversation."
"He's not God!" Helen said, clearly exasperated. "Because if he was, he wouldn't have lost a ship with three people on board in the first place!"
Before Chris could react to that blasphemy, she continued. "Something was wrong about those numbers, but it wasn't my programming. Sometimes I think something with the basic axioms is wrong, but I don't know what..."
"Nothing's wrong," Chris muttered. She was too calm all of a sudden, too serious. "Stop nagging."
He turned away from her, killing the simulation loop with an impatient swipe. He'd get to the bottom of this. And the next probe would succeed. There would be no more setbacks. No more delays.
"I don't want anything to happen to you," he heard Helen whisper behind him. "Like what happened to Dad..."
He pretended not to hear her, wishing she'd go away already.
The professor couldn't be wrong. He couldn't. There was a way to find his father, to bring him back, to make things right again.
Suddenly, the old yearning was back, clawing at his heart, choking his breath.
He called up the simulation again.