Temporal Exploring 101 - First Transit

I.21 The blue notebook

The chance to get a look at Natalie's notebook came sooner than expected.

On one of our visits to Arlesten, Natalie and I were surprised by a rainstorm. Our initial plan was to wait it out, huddled on the sidewalk by the storefronts, close to the bookstore. But when it continued to rain cats and dogs for more than half an hour, Natalie lost her patience. She feared that the record store might close before the rain ceased.

"Would you hold on to that for me?" She thrust her weird bag at me and sprinted across the plaza, through the pouring rain.

I looked at my roommate's bag, bemused, as valuable minutes went by. Eventually I took the notebook from Natalie's bag and opened it.

As it turned out, entries into the blue notebook could be roughly divided into two categories: math and non-math. For obvious reasons, I decided to begin by focusing on those entries which were in  some way or other related to mathematics.

As expected, the latter constituted the bulk of the journal's content. Lots and lots of mathematical equations. There were derivations and calculations related to our math and physics lessons at St. Albert's, part of it our homework. But in addition there was plenty of stuff that my roommate had been working on independently. Among other things, it appeared that Natalie had started to  explore differential geometry. In particular, there were expressions involving differential forms and their exterior derivatives all over the place.  Also, some general relativity: equations containing metric tensors, Christoffel symbols and curvature tensors.

I turned another page, and caught my breath. Here they were: the Fogg solutions. Or were they? On closer inspection, these equations differed considerably from their famous cousins that could be found in any standard textbook on Temporal Physics..

For a moment, I felt dizzy with anxiety. What was going on? A blue notebook rather than a red one, and now a set of solutions vaguely similar to, but different from the standard Fogg solutions?

Was it possible that my transit had gone terribly wrong somehow, that I had ended up in some alternate universe after all? Impossible, I told myself. No ansible connection between universes ought to be possible, or so I had been taught. Not unless we failed to correctly understand the fundamental concepts of physics.

It occurred to me that it was conceivable that the equations written down here comprised a preliminary, faulty version of the ultimate solutions. Perhaps Natalie would write the final, correct results into a different notebook, one with a red cover, at some time in the future, and then bury that other notebook in a small box in a London park. Or, in an even more mind-boggling twist, could it be that those odd new solutions were not faulty at all but merely differed from the standard Fogg solutions? And if that were so, what would it imply?

Bemused and bewildered, I shook my head to clear it. I decided to postpone any further thoughts about this and have a look at the non-math content instead.

Scattered between all the math there were a lot of brief personal entries, not unlike what one might expect to find in a personal diary. They were few and far between, and many of them concerned Natalie's borrowing of money – for the most part, but not exclusively from that girl Browning. There were entries such as 'Browning, three pounds', together with a date. But there were also entries about Natalie's interactions with students and teachers. Typically, the latter did not carry a date. Some of them were rather cryptic, such as 'Turns out Mallory is a big jerk'. Others were far more elaborate. As a case in point, consider the entry Natalie must have written on the day I arrived.

'My new roommate is a girl from Nebraska. The name is Cathy. Cathy Hart. The Nebraskan forgot to pack pjs, so she sleeps in the nude. All I can say is, I wish I had her boobs or, for that matter, her butt. Anyway,  she isn't going to stay here for long. Not if I can help it. The last thing I need right now is a new roommate.'

Fascinated, I read on, concentrating on those entries that referred to myself.

'Interestingly, C. knows quite a bit of math.  So now I got a roommate I can actually talk to. Definitely a first.'

And, immediately following the latter entry:'Cathy poses a bit of a mystery. Comes from the states, but appears to never have heard of either folk or rock music. A puzzle waiting to be solved.'

It was vastly amusing to learn that Natalie, the ultimate mystery girl, was considering me a mystery. I skipped to the next entry.

'C. saved my butt today. Or rather, she saved this notebook from being burned by bloody Browning. C. was amazing. Single-handedly scared off Browning and her minions. By pulling B.'s hair, for fuck's sake. What's more, it looked for all the world like she was threatening to bite off B.'s ear. B. and her minions turned tail and ran. Glorious.'

Immediately afterwards, embarrassingly, this:

'Woke up this morning to find C. doing you-know-what. Quite enthusiastically, too. I did not want to ruin it for her, so I pretended to be asleep until she was done. C. normally does that only at night, just before going to sleep. She tries to be discrete about it, with her hands under the covers and all that, but it would be hard not to notice what she is doing.'

Boy was I glad that this was not the Red Notebook, after all. Granted, a girl has her needs, we can all agree on that. But try to explain that to 23rd-century historians and to the general public.

The next entry read:

'Got my butt beaten by Watt. Again. After yet another confrontation with Gablins. Allowed G. to goad me. Bloody stupid of me.'

Then:

'Cathy remains a mystery. Yet I find myself trusting her, for some obscure reason. Probably a mistake, that.'

Suddenly I felt bad about what I was doing: reading what for all intents and purposes was Natalie's personal diary, behind her back.

The last entry read:

'Today C. got her butt spanked. By her tutor. Old Haskins sent her there, after she as good as told him that he did not know what he was talking about, in front of the entire class. Cathy returned from her tutor's office looking indignant and pouty. Almost as if she had never been spanked before in her life. Odd.'

I closed the notebook. Before I put it back into Natalie's bag, I read the name she had written on the inside of the notebook's front cover: Natty Fogg. Not Natalie, or Nat, but Natty.

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A / N :  Thanks a bunch for reading this new chapter. If you enjoyed reading it, please consider voting or adding your comments. As always I am looking forward to read your thoughts and reactions.