Winston Chase and the Alpha Machine

by Bodhi St John

  Winston nodded. “Understandably! Holy cow, Mom!”

  “So, we put a decade between us and Devlin, and you became a one-year-old in the year 2000. Your father healed up. We made our way north, but we were always nervous about Devlin finding us again. We never stayed too long anywhere. You weren’t going to stay a toddler forever, though. We knew what had to happen, just like we knew what the wrong people could do with the Alpha Machine.”

  “Like Devlin Bledsoe.”

  “And whomever he found to help him.” She stared at the metal ring on the bed. “I think Devlin went to the government and found whatever was left of Project Majestic. Then, somehow, he found us, despite all the help your father tried to give.”

  “Whoa! Whoa!” Winston sat up, hands pressed to his temples. “I need a flowchart or something to get through this. What help?”

  “Yes, it’s convoluted,” she said patiently. “Your father decided to go back by himself. He spent years, a lot of years, helping us from afar. He got us money. He found ways to get us official records and new identities.” She ran a finger over her nose and cheeks. “We both got plastic surgery.”

  Winston couldn’t help but study her face. “Really?”

  “After he left, he only visited once. It was at a…tough time for me. I was lonely, just being with you all day every day, in a strange town with no friends. So yes, I got to see him once, but in another way it’s like he was always there, dropping me gifts and notes when and where I least expected them. Although I haven’t heard from him in a long time.” She paused in thought, then added. “But he’d told me to always be ready, just in case.”

  “In case today happened, you mean. How long have they been watching us?”

  His mom shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe years. I did everything I could not to draw any attention to us, but I couldn’t keep you in a cage. I had to let you be a boy. Otherwise, why did we escape? What was living for?”

  “But if they knew we were here,” Winston said, “why not grab us? Why…” Then it hit him. “We were bait. Bledsoe or whoever figured that if they just let us sit here, my dad would come looking someday.”

  She nodded and wiped at her eyes.

  Winston pushed himself off the bed and began pacing the floor, trying to keep everything straight in his head. “There’s a part I don’t get. If you didn’t trust this Bledsoe guy, or even like him, why’d you bring him on that first jump?”

  “We didn’t.” His mom’s hands curled into fists. “There was supposed to be a group of us, before things went wrong. Not Devlin, though. We didn’t know that he’d also injected himself with QVs. According to Bernie, injection was necessary in order to use the Alpha Machine. Just when we were going through, Devlin ran at us out of nowhere and…I guess you could say he hitched a ride.”

  “But this guy had been your friend?”

  “Not at the end.” She shook her head mournfully. “He was jealous of your father. And he was…damaged. He lost a lot of his family in the wars. I think it changed him, especially losing his brother, who had been captured and killed. When his work in Area X revealed what might be possible with the alien technologies, Devlin dedicated himself to it completely.”

  “Sounds scary.”

  “He is scary. His ambition is terrible. That’s why your father vanished into the past. He hid the Alpha Machine pieces so that they’d never be found, except by you or me, and only then in case of extreme emergency.”

  The story defied imagination. Knowing the truth now, or at least some of it, made Winston regret much of his past anger. “Poor Dad,” he muttered.

  How could he have been so selfish? Some evil, time-traveling quack wanted to find his father and presumably do what all bad guys did: kill the good guys and destroy everything. And Winston was worried about keeping his date with—

  Alyssa!

  Winston snagged his phone from the bed, copied out the number Shade had sent him, and started composing a text.

  Alyssa. Extremely sorry, but I have to miss…

  “Winston, what are you doing?” his mom asked.

  “Sending Alyssa an apology. One sec.”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” she said, obviously irritated. “Only the fate of the world, but it can wait.”

  Winston shot her a Mom, really? look and kept typing.

  …have to miss our date…

  He deleted that last word.

  …our appointment tonight. Family emergency. I really hope you’ll let us reschedule soon.

  He read it over for typos or any other embarrassing word choices. Was it too polite? Too well punctuated? Shade always made fun of him for how he composed his messages like a finals essay. Winston hit Send and stared at the phone in his palm, reading the words “Message Sent” over and over until they faded away.

  “We’re not going home again, are we?” he asked. “Ever.”

  A stern edge crept into her voice. “I don’t know, honey. Every day of my life for the last thirteen years, I wondered if this day would come. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I definitely didn’t make plans around visiting with girlfriends. I don’t know how much of our rainy day fund we’ll have to use.”

  “Rainy day fund?”

  “I have a little emergency money stored away.”

  “How much?”

  Winston’s mom gazed out the window. “A couple million,” she said quietly. “Or so. Of course, I had to put it in an offshore account.”

  His jaw swung open. “Mom! We’re millionaires? Are you kidding? I thought we were poor!”

  “You’d rather we lived high on the hog? Drew a lot of attention? Had people wondering, ‘Gee, I wonder how a diner waitress made all that money?’ Where I came from, there were no credit cards, and people quietly saved their money for rainy days.”

  He smirked. “This is pretty rainy.”

  Her irritation melted, and she smiled back at him. “We should’ve built an ark.”

  They laughed together. Winston’s mom got up from the bed and wrapped her arms around him. They hadn’t had a good hug in a long time. Winston now stood taller than her by three or four inches. He remembered being able to rest his cheek high up on her chest, just under the collarbone. Now he could almost rest his cheek on top of her head. The difference took something away from the closeness. He was no longer a little boy nuzzling inside of his mother’s protection. He’d become something else, changing, growing.

  His mother felt it, too. She leaned away from him slightly and studied his face, her brows wrinkled with concern as the last traces of her smile creased the corners of her mouth.

  “My little boy. Not so little now.”

  Winston shrugged. “Not much I can do about it.”

  “Most things are that way.” She glanced at the contents of his backpack spread out on the bed. “But not everything. Come on.”

  She gave his shoulder a pat and backed away from him. Winston realized he didn’t want her to go.

  “Let’s see what toys your father left for us.” His mom browsed through the money, then fingered the cash. “Why are these bills new?”

  “I had the teller change them out. I figured it would draw less attention.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him and ruffled his hair. “Smart kid. Did you show them anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  She peeked inside the drawstring bag containing the blue marbles and drew one out, holding it between her thumb and index finger. Even in the dim lighting, the sphere’s white flecks sparkled brilliantly.

  “Why marbles?” Winston asked.

  “Because they’re batteries.” She held up the oddly shaped object fashioned from silver rods. “For things like this.”

  “Ummm…OK. What’s it do?”

  The shadow of some memory darkened her face. His mom seemed to want to hand the device to Winston, but instead she set it down between them.

  “I’m not really sure. I never got to experiment with it. If I rec
all correctly, the team never settled the debate on whether it conducted electricity or generated plasma. But we had a chimpanzee who accidentally used it to blow a hole through a foot-thick cement wall.”

  “Ha!” For a second, Winston thought she was joking. Her face said otherwise. “Wait, a chimpanzee?”

  “The closest thing to a human on the evolutionary ladder. We saw some success, if you can call it that, injecting them with QVs.”

  “And it blew up a wall?” Winston lifted the device, slipping his right hand through the ring to grasp the crosspiece, as he’d done before. It seemed the natural thing to do. “This is an alien ray gun? Are you freaking kidding me?”

  “Winston Franklin! Language.”

  “Sorry. It’s just…” He clenched his hand tighter around the silver tube. He felt the beginning of his tinnitus in his left ear. It was only the faintest ringing, barely audible, then it went away as he relaxed his hand. That was no coincidence.

  “I have a laser blaster!” he crowed.

  Winston’s mom put one hand over his forearm and lowered the device to point it toward the floor. “I don’t know what this is, but I do know that it’s more than that. And this is not a toy. We’re not in some video game.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “I’m not sure you do. Honey, people have died over this. And if I’m right about Devlin, and there’s still a Project Majestic, then a lot more people could die, including us. If they’ve found your father, there’s no more reason to spare us. And Devlin…he was never kind or merciful in his drive for answers. The things he did to those animals, he… Do you understand?”

  Winston nodded. Not wanting to meet her eyes when she was angry, Winston gently took the marble from her hand. He wondered how it might fit in the device given that there was no opening in which to insert it. He turned his arm over, intending to tap the marble against the bulge to see if he could hear any clues in the device’s construction. Before the marble and ring touched, though, Winston heard a small snick sound, and a round, quarter-sized hole opened in the bulge’s middle.

  “Cool!” said Winston, and without a second thought he plugged the blue marble into the hole. The hole closed as quickly as it had opened. Winston felt and heard the ball roll around for a moment within the bulge — and then it vanished. No sound, no weight. Somehow, the ball seemed to have evaporated inside the device.

  Simultaneously, Winston felt as if someone had flicked on a power switch. The connection between the device and his brain came alive. A tingling similar to what he’d first felt from the metal ring began in his palm, but the sensation went beyond that. If anything, it felt like two attracting magnets snapping together. Some invisible connection formed between these silver tubes and his head, and they belonged together. He’d never felt anything like it.

  “What is it?” His mom reaching toward him. “Are you OK?”

  Winston turned the device over in his hand, pointing it this way and that. “I think so,” he said.

  When he brought the tips of the device close to the metal ring, their one piece of the Alpha Machine, the tube tips moved. They bent and swayed stiffly, like slow tentacles searching for something to grasp.

  “Whoa!” Winston cried, instinctively pulling away. The tubes immediately resumed their original tapering shape. He looked at his mother. “Did you see that?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I never saw it do that before.”

  Winston nodded appreciatively at the device. “Alien blaster, new and improved.”

  Slowly, Winston used his free hand to pick up the ring. He meant to bring the two objects together to see if anything would happen, but as soon as his fingers closed around the cool metal, his vision seemed to blur, and then…

  Winston gasped. The world around him faded. In computer photo editing, he would have called it desaturating. What little color existed in their room faded into gray and became slightly transparent. Something else materialized all around him, something green and splotchy and shifting chaotically. He blinked, confused, but the changes remained when he opened his eyes.

  “Winston?” He heard his mom’s voice distantly, as if halfway into a dream.

  He tried to relax and ignore the hotel room, instead focusing on the green. Gradually, the edges of the splotches started to sharpen. He began to see texture within the green and a greater awareness of light streaming through the blots. But it wasn’t the low, orange light of their evening. It was overhead sunlight, which made no sense.

  Winston continued to let his eyes adjust. It felt a lot like staring at one of those “magic eye” pictures, where the viewer could see a 3D object pop out of the 2D pattern of shapes if he peered at it just right. Winston did, and he recognized the object before him: a tree. They sat on a bed in their motel room, but they also rested high up in the boughs of a tree, leaves spinning and weaving on some unfelt breeze.

  “Oh, wow,” he breathed.

  “What is it?” she asked, still strangely far away.

  Winston turned his head and realized he could see through the foliage. Between the shifting branches, he could see other trees and below them a two-lane road, right where the four-lane Sandy Boulevard ran outside their motel. Beside the road squatted a rust-spattered gas station with two old-fashioned pumps in the covered drive-up before the building. A Shell gas station sign showed prices above the words REGULAR and UNLEADED.

  “Mom, when did gas cost thirty-nine cents a gallon?”

  “Why?” she asked. “A long time ago. Maybe the early ‘70s?”

  “Whoa.”

  “Why?” she repeated.

  “Because I think I’m looking at the spot we’re in now how it used to be…back then. It’s like I’m in a tree looking down at a gas station and a small road.”

  “Stop,” she said. He felt her hand over his forearm, tugging at it. “Please stop.”

  Winston let her pull his hand away from the metal ring. The instant he lost connection with it, Winston felt a pressure release in his head, like his ears popping when driving down a mountainside. He blinked several times, letting his eyes and mind refocus on the motel room and his mom. She had a hand on his cheek, and she was scanning his eyes and face for any sign of trouble.

  “I’m OK,” he said. He took a deep breath and smiled. “It’s energy. I can feel it flowing from me into the Alpha Machine thing and back. It’s sort of like electricity…but different. There’s this pressure, and it’s up to me to decide how to direct it. Like the gates are in my mind. Does that make any sense?”

  “Not much.”

  There was only one item left for them to study. Winston put the two metal devices down and lifted the powder-blue photo album onto his lap. It smelled faintly of dust, which seemed odd for something locked away from any dust for the last few decades. On the first page, he again saw the two photos, only now he viewed them with a new perspective. Apparently, his mom felt the same, because she gasped when she saw the first image.

  The black-and-white image showed a man in a collared shirt and slacks, his fedora hat shadowing most his face. He stood in front of a river and bridge blurred in the background. Winston felt fairly sure that this was the Broadway Bridge downtown because it was made of steel girders in low arches, and the two middle sections were raised to allow a freight ship passage through. It helped that the man held a street map in one hand with the word “Portland” clearly showing at the top. In his other hand, he held a thick metal ring with a round bulge exposed. Winston realized this must be the next piece of the Alpha Machine.

  That thought remained overshadowed by fact that here, right before him, lay a full photo of his father. Not just a hand reaching into the frame. A real image, showing a man doing something, existing within a life, gazing through the camera at Winston across all the years.

  His mother must have felt something similar, because they reached for the photo at the same time, touching its edges gently for similar reasons.

  “Oh,” she whispered.

  “Pla
stic surgery?” Winston couldn’t get any more words out. His throat constricted as he felt hot tears stinging his eyes. His mom nodded.

  Winston had always wished for two parents, the same as every kid who only has one, but he’d never had a face to put with that wish. Suddenly, his long-buried dream flashed back into life. He saw the three of them together, standing there on the edge of the Willamette River, watching ships pass under the bridge. Just another lazy family afternoon. So ordinary. It wasn’t only an idle dream, though. In a second of complete crystallization, the dream consumed him.

  Could he make this happen? If he had a time machine, could he somehow create the family he’d always wanted but had always been beyond his reach?

  Maybe.

  Winston knew in that moment that he would put his life on the line to find out.

  “What’s that second picture?” she asked quietly.

  Winston swallowed hard and found his hands were sweating. His head lowered and his nostrils flared, as if he were preparing to step into a fight with Brian Steinhoff.

  He forced himself to relax and concentrate on the photo album. He flipped ahead, but there were no other images in the book, only empty squares with little holders at their corners for mounting more images on subsequent pages.

  He returned to the second photo. At first glance, it seemed like bunch of construction workers in front of a dirt pile. But there had to be more to it. Five men in dirty overalls stood in a crescent behind the dirt, smiling, hands on one another’s shoulders. Three of them smoked cigarettes. Before them, a sixth man wearing a hard hat crouched at the dirt’s edge, leaning forward so that one hand could grip the handle of a shovel thrust into the pile. A piece of paper had been taped to the end of the shovel handle, crayon-colored in red with five gold stars in the corner — the national flag of China. The man’s other hand rested on his knee for balance…but his index finger stuck out, pointing at the shovel. Oddly, the dirt pile wasn’t mounded, as if it had been dumped by a truck. It was flat, and its edges, while wending and bent, appeared to have been purposefully shaped.