The Forgotten Room by Child Lincoln

Author:Child, Lincoln [Child, Lincoln]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Fantasy, Suspense, Historical, Thrillers, Fiction
ISBN: 9780385531412
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2015-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

29

Kim Mykolos was so busy with a minute examination of what they had begun to call “the Machine” that she did not hear Jeremy Logan enter the forgotten room. When he softly cleared his throat, she swiveled around with a brief, sharp cry, almost dropping the video camera.

“My God!” she said. “You scared me to death!”

“Sorry,” he replied, setting his ubiquitous duffel down on the nearby worktable.

Mykolos peered closely at Logan. His eyes looked a little puffy and red, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well, and his movements weren’t the usual quick, deliberate ones she’d already begun to expect from him. He seemed preoccupied, even anxious—also uncharacteristic. Perhaps he was upset about the events in the dining room that morning; she had not been there to see Dr. Wilcox, but she’d certainly heard about it. If so, it was understandable: the whole place was on edge. But in her brief acquaintance with Logan, she hadn’t pegged him as the excitable type. Quite the opposite—which was a good thing, given his line of work.

“So,” she said, “you got my message?”

He nodded. “What do you have to report?”

She turned back toward the Machine. Since they had first begun analyzing it, Logan had managed to remove several more cover plates, and it now sprouted nearly a dozen devices, large and small, mostly metal, with the occasional piece of rubber hosing or Bakelite knob, all remarkably preserved in the almost-hermetic atmosphere of the room. The process had reminded her of peeling back the layers of an onion—removing each one simply revealed something else. They had not tried turning the device on again since that first examination.

Mykolos switched off the camera and walked around to what she thought of as the business end of the device: the narrow side closest to the hanging metal suits. She pointed toward the two labels, BEAM and FIELD, and to the attendant rows of buttons, meters, and knobs arrayed above each. “Something about those terms, ‘beam’ and ‘field,’ has been bugging me from the beginning,” she said. “As if they were familiar somehow. Then, just last night, it hit me.”

“What did?” Logan asked, moving closer.

“I realized there might be an analogue in computer science.”

Logan’s eyes drifted down toward the bank of controls. “Enlighten me.”

She considered how best to explain. “In an object-oriented programming language like Java or C Sharp, you have—in the simplest of terms—two kinds of variables, local and global.”

Logan nodded for her to continue.

“Local variables have a scope limited to an individual function, embedded within a larger program. When that function is called, the local variable is created on the fly; when the function ends, the local variable ceases to exist. On the other hand, a global variable can be seen by all functions in the program.”

She paused.

“I’m waiting for the punch line,” Logan said after a moment.

“Well, I’m no electrical engineer, but think about it. Beam and field. Local and global.”

“So you’re saying…” Logan frowned, considering. “You’re saying the Machine has two modes of operation?”

“Exactly. A local mode, very specific and sharply directed: a beam.

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