4 Jan 2008
Final Destination, Chapter 16: August 23, 3094
As it turned out, I found the next message before he did. While I was waiting for the ice to melt (who knew it took so long to melt ice?) I was able to extract another message from a wall panel:
We tried: we tried so very, very, very hard. It is heartbreaking to fail after coming so close, but there is no question that we have failed.
We did our very best to build a wormhole transporter. Ever since I got the idea five years ago I have been pursuing it, first via theoretical mathematics and computer simulations and afterward through direct experiments. The breakthrough came on April 22, 2814 when we had the accident in the lab upstairs. Once I realized why the accident had happened and what I had achieved I realized where we had gone wrong, and from there it only took us four months to have a miniature working model of a wormhole transporter.
At first all it could do was move a mouse a few inches, but as we refined our theories we made tremendous progress. By mid-September we could living transport objects weighing hundreds of pounds over a distance of two hundred miles. From that point we continued to make steady progress, and it looked like we just might make it – until Flora died.
When she died my hopes for success died as well. She was the only person in the world who could keep Charlie together, and as soon as she was gone Charlie’s matrix collapsed and we never got him to work properly again. A lot of people suspect that foul play was involved in her death, and I’ve been suspicious myself, although I have no idea what anyone could hope to gain by her death.
We kept trying after she died but we all knew it was hopeless. We had to use Charlie to refine our calculations, and without him there was nothing we could do. You can’t build anything by random chance, especially a wormhole transporter.
But we kept trying, right up until today. We promised that we would try until the end of February, and today the end of February has come. We haven’t made an inch of progress since Flora’s death and it’s very clear that we’re not going to. It’s maddening: I all but can guarantee that all we have wrong are a few parameters, but there’s no way we can find those out now.
Today is February 28, 2815. The blast will hit the planet on March 28, exactly one month from now. During that month we will prepare the best we can. God may still save us yet; it’s impossible to say what might happen, and His might, which created the universe, is certainly far more than sufficient to save us from it.
I wish we could build a safe haven on this planet, but it’s impossible. Jay Cheves in the astronomy department has told me that there are just too many unknowns to make any accurate predictions. We don’t know what the shockwave is composed of, how it will hit us, or how big it will be, and without knowing any of those things we can’t possibly determine how the shockwave will break up the planet.
Well, all I can say is that we tried. From here on out, as always, the future rests in the hands of God. Remember us, Lord, and have mercy on us.
Posted by Dr. Henry Durant on February 28, 2815
That really seemed to clinch it, in my opinion: there is no way these people could have survived. My initial fear, sadly, was correct.
Still, though, there was still the wormhole transporter under the ice; perhaps it would yield some information. I couldn’t go home empty-handed – I just couldn’t. I saw that the ice was almost melted and calculated that one more night of heat should do the trick.
Tomorrow, I thought, we would discover the secret of Larson’s Folly.