In The Face Of An Enigma

Adam Singh And The Mystery Of Omega

Photo by Anonymous on Unsplash

The clock above the front door of Professor Leopold Broderick’s laboratory at the University of London read 9:05 and fourteen seconds when Professor Broderick opened the front door. Adam Singh, his new assistant, was sitting at a desk facing the door, with a stack of mail sitting on his desk.

“Good morning, Adam,” he greeted in a courteous upper-class accent.

“Good morning, Professor,” Adam responded.

Adam was doodling on a small yellow notepad, mostly omegas of various sizes randomly scattered across the face of the page.

“I see you’re a doodler, Mr. Singh,” Leopold noted.

“It’s just a nervous habit, giving my hands something to do while I contemplate.”

“Well, I suggest you train your hands to doodle something else, given what you told me about your association.”

He looked down at the notepad and saw all the omegas.

“Oh, I see what you mean.” He ripped the paper out of the pad and waddled it into a ball and he put the ball into his pocket.

“So, what is in the itinerary for this morning?” Leopold asked.

“I’m going to respond to several of these letters. I must run an errand to a hardware store, then I’m supervising a Physics Class laboratory.”

“I meant the question for me, Mr. Singh,” Leopold asserted.

“For you, Professor,” Adam opened an appointment book and flipped the pages. Today you have two lectures one at eleven o’clock in Advanced Physics and the other at three o’clock in Quantum Dynamics and there is a department meeting at five o’clock.

“We have computing devices now, Mr. Singh. Maybe you should consider putting your calendar on the computing device?”

Leopold walked toward the rear of the building to where his offices were. Though he wouldn’t have spoken it publically, he was happy that Adam was now working in his laboratory. Adam was still uncertain what his role was to be in the coming days.

After Leopold went to his office at the back of the laboratory, Adam began to open the mail that was waiting in front of him on the desktop. The first letter he opened was strangely enough a letter from Dr. Erin Dykstra, on a University of Pennsylvania letterhead, the same Erin Dykstra who was Marcus Ryerson’s injured colleague from Philadelphia. He began to read.

“Dear Professor Broderick,

I read with interest your paper published in the British Journal of Physics, an article entitled** “Fractal Quantum Electron Fluctuation in Nitrogen Atoms,” and it opened a whole new avenue of understanding for me as to phenomenon we have been studying in our laboratory over the last two years. The relationship of fractals and quantum electron fluctuations to certain wave phenomenon in brain waves. The underlying physical processes involved in neural firing have always interested me. I would greatly appreciate any insights you might have to illuminate our studies in neurophysiology. Please advise if in your busy schedule you could find the time where we might discuss these issues in greater depth.**

Sincerely,

Dr. Erin Dykstra,

The Sleep Disorder Institute

Adam set the letter on the table to begin a stack of mail for consideration by Professor Broderick, though he knew the Professor was overextended and reluctant to consider any additional obligations. Adam spent the rest of the hour placing most of the mail in a discard pile, until he reached his eighteenth piece of mail which was a personal letter from Adam’s former mentor, Michael Haynes. He would never dare to open Professor Broderick’s private personal mail. The last letter in the stack had no return address only the word “Memory,” written in the upper left corner and it was addressed not to Professor Broderick like the others but to Adam C/O The University of London. The paper of the envelope was thicker than normal and was clearly woven-like like cotton paper of a U.S. dollar bill, rather than pressed like ordinary paper. Adam had worked two summers as an undergraduate in his uncle’s offset printing shop, so he had become familiar with the differences in paper. He carefully opened the flap to see what was inside. He found a folded piece of paper made of the same woven cotton threads. He knew how much such paper cost. He carefully pulled the paper out of its envelope. He was surprised when he folded it open, and he saw what it was. Someone had created a drawing in vivid colors with the detail of a photograph of a three-story building that he vaguely recognized. Beneath it was an address in Central London, 654 Barrett St. and beneath the address were the words, “Compassion and mercy, welcome.” He had no idea what this meant or why this building was important or why the word “memory” was written on the envelope. The postmark was not from London at all, but from New Zealand, across the world.

“Is this some kind of joke?” he asked himself. “I’m not going to some strange building alone. Not after I’ve been shot.”

He folded the drawing and put it back into the envelope and simply set the envelope aside. He had duties to perform and couldn’t take the time to speculate what this meant.

At ten thirty Adam got up from his desk and entered the large laboratory near the back of the building. Eleven undergraduates were already preparing their workstations for their experiments.

“Just continue on with what you were doing last session,” he told them. “In thirty-five minutes, I will be back to check your results.”

“Can you check the calibration on my voltmeter, Dr. Singh?” Katrina Lacy, one of the young women asked him. “I don’t think it’s functioning properly.”

He came to her desk station and looked at the device. After turning the switches on and off, and rotating the dial back and forth, he recognized it was malfunctioning.

“Alright, Ms.”

“Lacy. Katrina Lacy.”

“I’ll see if I can find you another one,” he answered.

The other students were already working. Adam went to the cabinet in the back of the laboratory and took nearly five minutes looking through shelves before he finally found another voltmeter. He brought it back to her station. She had lost nearly eight minutes.

“Am I going to get extra time, Mr. Singh?” she asked,

“I don’t think so,” he answered. “Professor Broderick is pretty strict about deadlines.”

“It’s not bloody fair,” one of her male colleagues commented.

“Just work a little faster, Ms. Lacy. We all know you’re the smartest one in this class. I’ll be back in seventeen minutes to check your results.”

It was mundane work for Adam. But it was one part of many of the routine duties he performed for Professor Broderick. He returned to his desk at the front of the laboratory building and sat down there to wait out his next fifteen-minute interval. Like Liam McShane in New York, he had grown accustomed to thinking of his life in fifteen minutes pieces, though he didn’t’ keep a written diary of his days. Instead, he found himself conspicuously looking at clocks precisely at the hour or a quarter past, or half past or three quarters past, as though his brain were somehow keeping time and turning his attention to the clock at the proper moment. This precise cerebral calibration was a phenomenon that would interest Erin Dykstra, M.D, PHD. She would struggle to discover how this neural net coordinated this operation. She had spent ten years of research studying the brain precisely to answer this question.

When Adam returned to the laboratory to check the student’s results, they all seemed surprised that the thirty-five minutes had passed. Only Ms. Lacy seemed to have finished the experiment before time. He watched them one by one finish their tasks and shut down their machines.

“Time’s up,” he announced, and everyone stopped. “Now let’s see what you all accomplished.”

“I don’t really see the point of this experiment. It seems more like a voltmeter introduction than a physics experiment,” one of the male students, Gavin McClintock, complained. Gavin was the only one of Dr. Broderick’s graduate students who had come from a lower-class background, and he often felt shunned by the others because of his cockney accent. But he was as bright as any of the upper-class students and even if the others were a bit standoffish, Adam liked him. He had a sense of humor when everyone else was a bit of a bore.

“Knowing your way around a voltmeter is an important life skill,” Adam answered. “Now let’s see how effective you were.”

One by one he began to examine their results with some he shook his head, with others he bit his lip. When he came to Ms. Lacy, he seemed surprised. He withheld comment until he had examined all twelve of them. This whole process took ten minutes and he instinctively looked at the wall clock and it read 11:45 “Eleven forty-five,” he repeated to himself.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” he began.

“The good news is that no one completely screwed up the test, which was more than I expected. The bad news is that three of you made simple math errors. You need to check your addition, three times if you must. I suggest you do it now, before I give each of you an individual grade. There is one bit of great news among you. Ms. Lacy’s work as per usual is stellar. Congratulations eight minutes lost because of faulty equipment, you came through, Ms. Lacy.”

He began to clap his hands and she was embarrassed by the attention. He could see everyone checking their math again.

“Just imagine what a math error might mean in a truly important project.”

“Have you made such an error before, Professor Singh?” Daniel Buxton, one male student asked.

“Yes, I’ve made many mistakes in my life, but nothing catastrophic, thank God,” he paused. “OK, the second time around for the record books.”

He proceeded counterclockwise around the desks this time and found that three students had corrected their errors.

“Good work,” he told them. “You now could work on an assembly line testing automatic coffeemakers.”

This was a reference to one of Adam’s summer jobs as an undergraduate.

“I’ll post your grades tomorrow. Thank you and see you next week.”

He watched them one by one leave the laboratory classroom. Ms. Lacy was the last to leave.

“That was an important lesson about our mistakes.” Ms. Lacy told him. “I’ve learned some of my best lessons in my life from my mistakes.”

“Some of the greatest discoveries in science have come from mistakes,” Adam asserted.

“I really want to understand how the world works,” Ms. Lacy acknowledged.

“I don’t know how much we really understand about how the world works. But I think we might be able to learn about how our little neighborhoods work.” He paused. “See you next week, Ms. Lacy.”

Then she left him alone in the classroom. He stood a moment looking at the empty workstations wondering if he had made the right decision in leaving Professor Haynes. Then he walked to the front of the building, returned to his desk and continued working. His duties for his position as Professor Broderick’s assistant were repetitive but finally demarcated. His duties for his more important vocation, his pledge of protection for Professor Leopold were ambiguous and less delineated. He didn’t even know how he could protect Professor Leopold when he didn’t know who might want to bring harm to the Professor or what methods they might use. The police had provided Adam few clues as to who had shot him. He was beginning to experience a profound paranoia. Also, the one question which troubled him as he returned to his desk was whether someone from Omega had sent him the drawing or someone else?