Murther raised an objection, which Auruthmer translated. Their measurements proved that breaches affected timeline integrity. So breaches must cause timeline malfunction, rather than being messages.

“Which is right,” Kay allowed. “But we’ve also all made a grand stinker of an assumption. One that is absolutely unconscionable in any serious scientist—correlation versus causation, right? What if we screwed the pooch right off the bat, guys? What if the medium is the message?”

Lee seriously doubted Khan’s metaphors were making it through translation intact, but at least they baffled any potential critics into silence. Kay grinned wildly and met Lee’s eyes. “What if maintaining timeline integrity isn’t actually the answer? What if the Ediacaran is trying to lead us somewhere different…What if—wait for it—we’re supposed to make the breaches worse rather than heal them?” She hastily waved down the swell of disagreement. “No, listen. They’re connections between different timelines, after all. Like, you’ve got a load of poles that don’t stand up straight, but you tie them together, cross-brace them, and they’re just fine. And the breaches are the only things we’ve got that link the timelines together. So we don’t get rid of them, we multiply them, make them our scaffolding.

“Huh?” she added, because the silence after her words was oppressively total. And then, after another few dragging seconds, “Well, how about it?”

“Do you have any models to support this?” Murther said mildly.

“Almost, yes. No. I have half of one.” Kay’s replies came in quick succession. “Look, this is all new thinking. I’m hoping you’ll come in with me to work on the numbers, or else I’ll still be plodding through them when the world ends. I have some preliminary equations that suggest it’s not impossible…that we could reach a stable state when the timelines are interconnected. We thought the same would happen when the worlds were separated. But we’ve tried that. It’s fallen over every single time. We can’t save just one world. We can’t save them all while maintaining an ivory tower isolation. So what are we left with?”

By that time, everyone else had caught up. Everyone had an opinion, too: they didn’t like it. The two government types were against it; Stig was shaking his head and slapping the floor. Even Cam seemed to be raising an objection. Kay was trying to argue with everyone at once from sheer force of personality, with visibly diminishing returns.

“But then we’ve got nothing!” she insisted. “We can’t keep repeating ourselves. We don’t know how many more goes around we’ve got left!”

“That’s right. We don’t!” Murther confirmed. “We cannot waste our time on this. We need to refine our existing plan.” She was jabbing at Auruthmer’s shoulder as though that would get the translation out faster.