Spruance Del Curtin checked the life-support monitor, reassuring himself that the temperature in the room had not dropped, that oxygen and carbon dioxide levels remained nominal. Intellectually he knew that it was just nerves, yet he couldn’t shake the sense that the temperature in the room had dropped suddenly.
For the first time since he’d begun this project, he was genuinely frightened by what he was seeing. And while he knew he really ought to tell Dr. Doorne, he was hesitant to do so. Not so much because she would be angry with him as that she would be disappointed in him.
So he’d decided to text Chandler Armitage for advice. Although Chandler was a pilot-astronaut, and normally off-limits for non-pilots to initiate interaction with, Sprue had two good reasons to call upon him. Not only were they both clones of Alan Shepard, but there was also the matter of Chandler’s secondary astronaut specialty being data processing. And familiarity with handling the enormous amount of data involved in astronautics would help with just about any kind of data analysis.
Like the data sets he’d been sanitizing and preparing for analysis every day for the last how many days? Sometimes it felt like it was just yesterday Dr. Doorne had called him into her office for that special meeting, and at other times it seemed like he’d been at this chore forever and a day.
One thing was for certain — it had been long enough for his subconscious mind to start picking up patterns in the data. Correlations that were leaving him profoundly uncomfortable.
Although he wasn’t supposed to look back at old data, or to look ahead, he’d decided to take a quick peek and see if it confirmed the sense he was developing. If anything, what he saw was even worse.
There were three basic types of data coming through. Although he had no idea what exactly it represented — that was important in his ability to do this work, so he would not introduce unconscious bias into the data by paying more attention to material that fit his expectations — he noticed that all of a certain type tended to change together. Not necessarily in lockstep, but certainly the trends would graph as pretty much the same kinds of curves.
Until recently, those curves had been showing pretty steady slopes. But now every last one of them was showing rapid sharp changes. One kind of data was suddenly shooting upward, while another was plummeting like it were falling down a black hole, and the third was fluctuating wildly.
Whatever that data represented, it looked very much as if the system was destabilizing rapidly. And he would never have noticed it if he had been looking at datasets in isolation. It made him think about that quote from HP Lovecraft on that plaque at the entrance to the IT department, about the inability to correlate the contents of one’s mind. Sprue had always thought it was there because Reggie Waite was such a huge fan of Lovecraft and liked to put HPL mementos everywhere. But now Sprue was wondering if it was meant as a warning about the peril of how Big Data could bring together disparate facts to reveal dangerous truths about a system.