Chapter 86


    Oxy''s Doubts


    After leaving the room where the others were gathered Oxy had shuffled her feet toward the room where she had stayed when she arrived at the base on Tuesday. She had some pretty heavy luggage in her turtle backpack and much of it she had unpacked, even if she had hardly used any of it.


    The day before the airplane case occurred, she had judged that she would have some free time to read old books from her collection, but that had not turned out as expected under the circumstances.


    Now she used the time loading the books into their respective compartments, to finally compress them again. She liked to go everywhere with books in case she got bored.


    But at the moment it was other things that were on her mind. She had tried to distract herself with it, while waiting for Thor''s message for them both to leave. Because of what had happened at the lake, Mai did not want to send her alone on the trip to Edinburgh. Even more so when it was still not clear who had kidnapped her and the professor Reubens at the lake. And still those two criminals named Michael Levin and Rumenia Ruzicka had not been caught.


    It had taken her only twenty minutes to pack everything and all she had to do was wait.


    Finally she lay down on the bed and sighed looking at the ceiling.


    “I''ve been an idiot not to notice,” she said to herself.


    She had known Jim Stuart in college. Always a bit absent-minded but smart and intelligent.


    The day she had met him, she saw him and his friends playing with magic encryption codes, to create faster mental circuits for summoning. Although Jim Stuart had no innate capacity for magic, he was good with designs for creating magic circuits among his friends. And he applied encryption to it, so that there would be no interference if magic of another type was invoked by a nearby user. Just that day Oxy had taught him in just a couple of minutes how the oldest encryption codes that existed in mankind could still be used on a day-to-day basis to create new ones.


    The simplest of all. The Caesar cipher.


    A simple cipher that consisted of replacing some letters with others, it could be moved a place or two to the left or right.


    It seemed ironic to her that that cipher now became the key to solving the riddle of her heart.


    Jim Stuart had traveled back in time and changed his identity. By removing one letter from his name and replacing the others using the cipher, he had adopted a new identity.


    Zuriqth.


    That artificial intelligence that Gehirn had supposedly brought from Germany.


    A lie on Gehirn''s part. But Gehirn had also fallen for a lie. Zuriqth had never told Gehirn that he was human originally either.


    Gehirn found that out after Tokyo, by checking the contents of that rectangular device that was left by Zuriqth himself, in case something happened to him.


    That device had a message and apology for Gehirn. As well as all the data of the fractus attacks that would occur in the coming months. Data that changed the war.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Ironically, Mai herself was part of it without knowing it. Because part of the data that Zuriqth left were the ones that ended up with her participating in the final battle in Siberia. Too bad Azusa was no longer there to ask her if she even knew about it. But it was more than likely.


    The second message inside that device was encrypted and Gehirn left it as such. It was a message to Oxy. The encryption was so complicated that the slightest attempt to crack the code could result in the message being lost completely. So Gehirn left it that way for its future recipient. Oxy was able to unlock that encryption easily. It was something she knew based on one of the magic encryption courses taught at the university but applied to quantum computers. It had not been developed at the time the message was recorded, so Gehirn could not know how to decrypt it.


    It had all happened as an orchestrated plan a long time ago.


    After the Tokyo disaster, Gehirn used the data left by Zuriqth to change many of the confrontations, or better to say to make everything happen as it was known in the future. But at the same time he felt betrayed by Zuriqth. Nevertheless, Gehirn fulfilled Zuriqth will and left the data in that special block, before fleeing to deep space years later, to be activated when the time was right. Gehirn himself knew that this was necessary for the retrocausality to take effect. Everything had an order.


    That data was what Thor had now brought back along with the dog that now had a name.


    Oxy lay in a fetal position on the bed and cried.


    “Nevermore,” she said.


    An opportunity, an event that would never happen again in her life.


    She would never have imagined that the entity for whom she had feelings in the past would be her student in the future. She had always felt that there was something strange about that AAI in that dog''s body. Always looking at her out of the corner of his eye, almost as if in some way he had been watching over her from a distance, but at the same time seeking her company. Moments of peace and stress during the experiments.


    But she also had no idea that Zuriqth would be one of those who would cause the disaster in Tokyo when he died. Now she knew better what had caused the disaster to begin with.


    Oxy checked once again the Edinburgh FRT branch bulletin board on her Neurowire. It had been almost three days and Jim Stuart''s body still hadn''t turned up.


    But she had no doubt that the message Jim Stuart-Zuriqth had left was a farewell message and that it had been recorded prior to the Tokyo disaster. So why had his body disappeared? Who had hacked into the security system of the FRT station in Broxburn?


    Had the explosion experiment really sent Jim''s consciousness back to the present?


    Oxy knew. The time travel in the case was synchronized with those mysterious savitronic particles. That was what had happened on all the trips. With each emission of the sun those particles were activated inside the fractus that allowed different times to be connected.


    It was what had happened with Janus to awaken his consciousness, which they now knew thanks to Osmia.


    It was what had happened with the plane that connected three different years.


    Had the same thing happened in the Tokyo experiment? Had Jim Stuart''s consciousness really returned to the present?


    If so... what had he seen during the time those accelerator particles hit his body?


    If he really was back... Why had he run away?


    The guilt for the death of all those people in Tokyo? The guilt for lying to her and Gehirn? Was it because of the punishment and grief he would suffer?


    Or was it something else?