“Can you explain again why this is a problem?”

Adelaide took a deep breath before responding, looking out the windows of the bridge. She knew it was right, and frankly inevitable, to call Ray in on an issue like this. And it wasn’t unreasonable for him to take the time to understand the confusion, even if she wasn’t sure she had another explanation in her.

Unfortunately, Percy didn’t wait for a breath before saying, “Ray, I think we need to accept that this is beyond you, and you need to trust us that this is inconsistent with our calculations.”

Adelaide flinched, Ray handled it better than it deserved. He ignored Percy, turning to Adelaide and saying, “You already knew these things could be in the middle of the ocean. So here we are, it’s in the middle of the ocean, why are we worried?”

“Because we aren’t getting a signal,” Adelaide responded. “Yes, you’re right that the Node could be on water. But we passed the point it was supposed to be, and we didn’t get a reading. That’s not supposed to happen.”

“Could the detector be broken?”

Adelaide looked to Percy, who shook his head. “That’s impossible to be certain about,” he said. “I checked it. It seems to be working. But how would we know if it malfunctioned in some unexpected way? It’s not like I have a Node in my pocket to test it against.”

“So it might be broken?”

Adelaide sighed. “Yeah. But if it is, that means this whole voyage was wasted, at least from a data perspective. And, again, we have no reason to think the detector is broken.”

“Other than that it’s not detecting anything?”

“Other than that, yes.”

“And could we be in the wrong place?”

Percy interjected. “We’ve been over this —”

Adelaide waived him off. “We mapped the Nodes when we entered, and we’re relying on the ship’s navigation beyond that. So unless you think the ship’s systems are extremely off — in which case we will never find our exit Triangle and we will die out here — this is where the Node is.”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Can it have moved?”

Adelaide was halfway through rolling her eyes when she realized she had never thought of that question before. A Node was mathematically derived — it was like asking if the local maxima of a graph could move, that would just be a different graph. But that wasn’t to say it was impossible — just that it wasn’t anything they’d considered.

Adelaide looked at Percy. “I know our model doesn’t really fit it —”

Percy nodded. “But it’s not impossible. We could test it, I suppose — let me rerun this.”

Percy seemed to have transitioned from insulting Ray to testing his ideas with no friction and no sense of either pride or guilt. Adelaide would have brought up the rudeness in the interest of crew cohesion, but Ray was so obviously unbothered she decided to let Percy work.

While Percy worked, Captain Mattson jumped in. “I still don’t understand what these Nodes are, but I’ve been happy enough to let you route us to them. But if we start spending time in the middle of the ocean, not hunting, not generating any value… profit is an important thing!”

“I get it, Captain. But this is worth testing. We need to understand this system. And I’m not looking to endanger us or derail the trip.”

“I don’t doubt you! But it would be good to understand better what we are all doing out here. Beyond waiting around!”

Adelaide was spared from answering that by Percy, who showed them the updated Node display. “Ok, yeah - it’s moving. Or it moved, at least. I can’t tell if it’s still moving yet, but I’ll run again now to estimate the momentum.”

Adelaide wasn’t sure how to react to that — the possibility of Node movement was not only outside of her theory but also a huge practical issue. They calculated routes on the assumption that Nodes were stationary. If the others moved — “Percy, did any other Nodes move?”

“No, just this one. That’s how I know there wasn’t just an error in the last round of calculations.”

“How far did it go?”

“Not far, relative to our speed. We can be to its current position within a few hours. But what we’ll find there, or how much farther it will have gone… there’s no way to know.”

Captain Mattson turned back to Adelaide. “We’ll go, if you really think it best. But these sorts of detours, without a hope of profit, are challenging on the crew!”

Adelaide thought about it. On the one hand, it was entirely possible that they would waste time traveling, find nothing, and miss their window to see the other Nodes. That would be a disaster by itself, independent of the lack of profit that might kill the entire project. On the other hand, it seemed important to understand how a Node could move, even independent of her curiosity.

It should have been a harder decision. But Adelaide was smiling when she asked, “Come on, Captain. Haven’t you ever wanted to have a real chase?”