Chapter 3
“Sam?” Mark asked hesitantly.
Sam had not said a single word in the more than five minutes since Mark told her about the tv contract his father insisted on, but the expression on her face began to change. The rage that had lit her eyes at first morphed into deep thought, then a slow smile began to tug at the corners of her mouth.
“I’m sorry, it’s just…” Mark began to explain but Sam cut him off.
“No, this is good Mark.” She said as her smile grew. “In fact this is perfect!”
“Ok,” Mark said sarcastically, “who are you and what did you do with Samantha?”
Sam laughed as she clapped Mark on the shoulder. “Don’t you see? If you write the contract right, and we turn this into television.” She paused to laugh, “Nobody can stop us, no matter what! No more rush to get back to the machine, or to get the thing above ground or figure out how to make it profitable for the board.” She smiled as she thought about it. “TV will pay pretty much anything as long as we keep it entertaining. No more funding issues.” She grabbed him by both shoulders and squared off to look straight into his eyes. “Ever!”
“Which brings us right back to at least six relay camps.” Mark folded his arms with satisfaction. “The TV crews have to man them in order maintain their feeds throughout the cave system, so they will have to provide a medic, resources,” Mark paused as he raised his hands, “and everything else needed to maintain the camps. Freeing up our resources, and funding for that new Quantum Interferometric Grava…”
“Gravimeter Array.” Sam finished with a smile. “And that sir is why you are our planner, I didn’t even think of dreaming big, but you just plan it.”
“Like I said, contracts and planning…” he mock pounded his chest. “Mine!” Mark shot back with a grin, then leaning into the booth as he grabbed another slice of pizza. “But don’t be fooled Miss Roche, I do dream big! I just hide it in spreadsheets so nobody notices!”
Sam laughed as her eyes returned to scanning the pages in her lap, tracking sheets, satellite imagery maps with topographical overlays and even a structural layout for the planned base camp. Mark knew that look all too well, the same one she had the day Victor died and so many times since then, eyes narrow and brow knitted as she scribbled notes in her own made up shorthand.
“Six relay camps might actually be conservative,” she said, almost to herself as she poured another mug from their third pitcher.
Mark paused, pizza slice still hanging from his mouth, “Conservative?”
Sam reached for a napkin and stuffed her pen behind her ear as she dug out a blank sheet of paper, grabbed the pen again and started scribbling.
“Think about signal attenuation,” She said as she wrote, “we know copper is out, we’re talking nearly twenty miles just to the chasm, you figure ten decibels every thousand feet?” she paused, brows knitted as she mentally ran the calculations. “We’d need a repeater every few hundred feet, that’s what…” she scratched her forehead, “thre… no, four hundred repeaters.” She made eye contact with Mark to gage his reaction. “That’s not a network Mark, that’s a failure chain waiting for an excuse to happen.”
“Ok,” Mark wiped a smudge of pizza sauce off his chin, “so we go fiber, that’ll carry the bandwidth without the need for a repeater the whole way. So why the extra relay camps?”
“Redundancy!” Sam said loudly. “We assume that there will be issues, so at each relay camp we backup the data, then with the monitoring equipment at each station we add to it and send it on to the next station until we reach base camp at the mouth of the cave.” She paused before continuing, “yeah, exactly… Base camp has the full comms hub, power distribution, staging for inbound equipment and supplies and one for anything outbound to your fathers office building.
Mark nodded. “That’s where the TV trucks will want to park anyway. Easy access, wide bandwidth.”
“Exactly.” Sam clapped her hands excitedly. “Let them build it out there on the surface. Satellite uplinks, backup generators, mobile clinics—whatever they want for filming. Then we piggyback our data.” She tapped the napkin. “Between Base camp and relay camp one is where we transition from conventional wireless systems to hardened equipment.”
“Hardened how?”
Sam hesitated for just a second, then shrugged. “We don’t know yet. That’s the point, shielding, added redundancy, modular components we can swap out quickly. If the machine is affecting electromagnetic fields—and I’d bet my life it is—then we’re going to see drift, noise, maybe even complete signal collapse, even on the fiber!”
Mark’s planner brain was already spinning. “So each relay camp becomes a buffer zone. Diagnostics, recalibration, maybe even a repair station.”
“Exactly.” She drew another mark lower on the napkin. “The central chasm is where things get… interesting.”
Mark smirked. “That’s one way to put it.”
“No, I mean it.” Her voice dropped slightly, the excitement sharpening into something more focused. “Relay camp one is where we start deploying the gravimeter arrays, then again at each relay base until we reach the forward operating base. That way each station will be adding more layers of data to the collection, we’ll be able to track everything from the epicenter of the anomaly all the way to the surface.”
Mark’s eyebrows shot up. “Added layers of data, not to mention the modular adaptability for opening new side tunnels.”
“Exactly!” Sam said again, “If we wait until we’re at the machine, we’ve already lost data, We need a gradient. Measurements from the surface all the way down so we can map how the field changes with depth. If you think about it, in order to get any real meaningful data from any of the cave system as a whole, explored or not, we need the extra data that we’ll get.”
Mark leaned back, letting out a low whistle. “That’s… actually brilliant.”
“I know,” she said with a grin. “Try to keep up.”
He chuckled, then pointed at the page. “Okay, so camp one is our first science hub. What about power? That array isn’t exactly low-draw.”
“Neither are the TV crews’ lights,” Sam laughed. “We lighten our load by having them bring more than they need, then we tap into it. Do you think you can get a dozen or so portable reactors for them?”
Mark blinked. “Portable reactors?”
“Small ones,” she clarified. “Research-grade. Expensive, yes—but if your father wants a show, that’ll make sure he gets one. Nothing says ‘must-watch television’ like cutting-edge tech in a dangerous environment.”
Mark laughed. “You’re terrifying when you get like this.”
“Good.” She slid the page toward him again. “I expect mostly normal readings from the relay camps, but the FOB…”
He picked up the pen this time, playing along. “Let me guess, this is where the gravimeter starts going crazy?”
Sam’s smile faded just slightly. “If I’m being truthful, yeah. That’s what I expect.”
Mark drew a deeper mark on the page. “So what changes?”
“Scientifically? Everything,” she said quietly. “That’s where we start layering sensors. Not just gravity—magnetics, radiation, acoustic mapping. We throw everything we have at it, right up to the edge of the hole and then right over into the void.”
“Because that’s where the machine’s influence really ramps up.”
She nodded. “That ‘push and pull’ we felt? That was too subtle to notice until we reached the chamber where the chasm is. If it scales the way I think it does, the Forward Operating Base is where it starts becoming… measurable in ways we can’t ignore.”
Mark tapped the pen against the table as though a brand new though just jumped into his mind. “So we need shielding. Real shielding.”
“And tethers,” Sam added immediately. “Physical lines. Not just for safety—for orientation. If spatial perception gets distorted…”
Mark’s grin faded. “You think that’s possible?”
She met his eyes. “I think we’d be idiots not to consider it, Victor was not the type of climber to allow himself to start spinning the way he did. We can’t risk another rapel without tethers anchored every six feet, no slack to bounce us around on.”
For a moment, the noise of the bar seemed to fade around them—the clatter of dishes, the low hum of conversation, the occasional burst of laughter. All of it felt distant compared to the weight the conversation had taken on, as though what they were planning suddenly became real for the first time.
Mark broke the silence first. “Okay, everything gets bolted down at the FOB.” he said, more softly now. “Let’s talk about camps five and six.”
Sam exhaled slowly, leaning back as she considered the question. “Camp Five is where we stop pretending this is just an expedition.”
Mark raised an eyebrow. “And start admitting what it is?”
“First contact?” she asked.
That hung between them for a second, were they really talking about aliens?
“Contact with what?” Mark asked, though he wasn’t really sure he wanted the answer.
Sam shook her head. “I don’t know. But that machine isn’t just sitting there for decoration. It was placed there and it’s doing something. And whatever it’s doing… Whomever placed it there? For the first time ever, we’re going to be close enough to feel it in a way we didn’t before.”
Mark nodded slowly. “So Camp Five is… containment?”
“More like, a failsafe” she corrected. “We’re not containing anything. We’re watching. Measuring. Recording everything. And we have to be ready for anything.”
“And hoping it doesn’t notice us.”
Sam gave him a sideways look. “Oh, it’s going to notice us.”
Mark let out a nervous laugh. “Great. Fantastic. Love that.”
She reached across the table and nudged his arm. “Hey. This is what we signed up for, right?”
“I signed up for caves and rocks,” he laughed in mock indignation. “You’re the one who brought the inter-dimensional mystery machine into it.”
“And you love me for it.” She pushed his shoulder.
He smirked. “I tolerate you for it.”
She laughed. “Liar.”
Mark shook his head, then looked back down at the page. “Alright. Camp Six.”
Sam’s expression shifted again—less excitement now, more something like awe.
“Camp Six is as close as we can safely get to the machine without committing to full exposure,” she said. “Do you remember, that’s about where we all started feeling it? It’s our final staging point.”
“For what?”
“For the first direct study,” she replied solemnly. “The moment we stop observing from a distance and start interacting. For when we go back down the hole.”
Mark’s fingers tightened slightly around the pen. “And that’s where the gravimeter array goes full deployment.”
“All of it,” Sam confirmed confidently. “Every sensor, every system, top to bottom. We map the field in real time. We track the light cycle, the polarity reversals, the intensity fluctuations. We throw every sensor we can get our hands on down into that pit.”
“And we figure out what it actually is.” Mark said.
Mark set the pen down and leaned back, staring at the paper as if it were a blueprint for something far bigger than the two of them.
“Six relay camps,” he said quietly. “A full comms network. Integrated science platforms. TV crews handling logistics.”
“And thanks to your fathers television dreams, unlimited funding.” Sam added with a small smile.
Mark glanced up at her, unsure of his next words. “Have you found a new Climb Master yet?”
She hesitated as the thought crashed into her thoughts. “I think it’s the only way this works…” Sam let a tear escape the corner of her eye. “I just… I can’t bring myself to replace Victor.”
Mark studied her for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “Alright,” he said, softly. “Then we do it, together.”
"You want to help me do interviews?” Sam mock-gasped with a laugh. “I thought you hated talking to people, it’s why you prefer text and emails.”
“You might be in charge of personnel, but you’re not alone.” Mark smiled. “We are a team! Well we will be once all of this gets finalized.”
He straighted the stack of papers they had been working on all night into a tidy pile with small yellow flag tabs sticking out from the side indicating pages that need signatures before sliding them across to her and looking up.
“What do they need?”
“Project Manager signatures.” He smiled as he watched realization dawn across Sam’s face.
She hadn’t given the new arrangement enough thought for it to have ocured to her until now, but a slow smile spread across her face.
“Project Manager.” She tested the words softly, then with a satisfied smile she said out loud, “Project Parallax, Samantha Roche Project Manager.”
“Feels good eh?” Mark asked as he raised his glass.
Sam raised her glass to meet his. “To Project Parallax.”
“And its new Project Manager!” Mark echoed.
They drank, and for a brief moment, it felt simple—just two friends, a wild idea, and a plan scribbled on a spiral notebook. They felt like those two veritable kids straight out of college again and it not only felt good, it felt right.
“Mark,” sam said suddenly.
“Yeah?”
She tapped the bottom of the page rythmicaly about once every half second, right where the machine would be.
“We’re going to need more than six camps.”
Mark blinked. “More?”
She met his eyes as a new thesis took shape in her mind, chasing out her earlier excitement and leaving a shiver edged with something sharper.
“If that thing is doing what I think it’s doing,” she said slowly, “then six camps just gets us there.”
“And?” he asked.
“And getting there,” she replied, “is just the beginning of how far we might be about to go.”
Mark didn’t laugh this time.
Instead he froze for a long moment trying to figure out what she meant.
Finally he decided not to ask and gulped down the last of his beer, hopeful that she would wait at least until morning to explain what she meant.
“Three pitchers and two pies,” he mocked, “you gettin’ old on me or something?”
“Huh?” Sam had already gone back to scribbling in her notebook as she looked up. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” Mark laughed. “I’ll get the bill on my way out, see you tomorrow?”
“See you tomorrow.” Sam said as she started scratching her shorthand notes again.