Strike

by D. J. MacHale

  “I was talking to Olivia,” she said curtly. “Can you do this?”

  Olivia nodded.

  “The timetable is going to accelerate,” the woman said. “Keep them here until you hear from me.”

  Olivia sat up straight as if bracing herself to take on a new challenge.

  “Got it,” she said with confidence that seemed genuine.

  The Colonel looked back to us. “Are we good?”

  “Not even close,” Tori said coldly.

  “Stay with Olivia,” Pike added. “She’ll tell you everything you need to know and probably more than you’ll want to hear. If you don’t want any part of us after you hear what she has to say, we’ll get you back to your time safely.”

  “And into the hands of Feit and Bova,” I said.

  The woman shrugged. “Or you could stay here, but you’d be on your own.”

  “I really hope there’s a third choice,” Kent said.

  “There is,” the woman replied. “That’s what you’re here to talk about.”

  Olivia sighed and quickly got out of the car. She was done with conversation.

  “Go with her,” Colonel Pike said to us. “Try to keep an open mind.”

  I was done with conversation too. I got out of the car and went right up to Olivia.

  “Give me one reason to trust you,” I demanded.

  “Sure,” she said without thinking for even a second. “I didn’t stop you from sabotaging the drone fleet at Area 51 and nearly died saving your life. How’s that?”

  Tori and Kent joined us as the Colonel sped away.

  “It gets our attention,” I said. “No promises after that.”

  “Fair enough,” Olivia said curtly.

  She walked toward the building and disappeared through the grimy double glass doors.

  “What do we do?” Kent asked.

  “We have to hear her out,” I said. “If she can tell us what this is all about, it’ll be worth it.”

  “Is it possible?” Tori asked. “Did we really come through a doorway into the future?”

  “If it’s true,” Kent said. “The future sucks.”

  We followed Olivia into the building, where she waited for us at an open elevator. We all boarded and rose to the top floor. The fifth floor. At the end of a long corridor was a doorway marked with a similar bar code as the signs we saw on the street. Olivia pulled a black communication device from her pocket and waved it in front of the door. A short hum followed and the door swung open.

  If we truly were in the future, rather than having evolved into something amazing, the world had become a sad, tired version of itself.

  “This is my home,” Olivia said. “My real home.”

  “So you were lying about living in New York City too,” Kent said with disdain.

  “No, I lived there with my mother until I joined the Air Force. She’s still there. In this time, that is. I lied about living there in your time.”

  “This is making my head hurt,” Kent said.

  Olivia led us into a dark, simple apartment that had no personality whatsoever. There were no pictures on the walls or books on shelves. The furniture was functional but plain. There was one main room, a kitchen, and a bedroom. There was nothing about this place that seemed like Olivia at all. Then again, we didn’t know who Olivia really was.

  “Depressing, isn’t it?” she said, as if reading my mind. “This is standard quarters for lower-level personnel. I’m an Airman. First Class, for the record, as you’d say Tucker. I just got a promotion for making it back from your time alive. It’s not great but I don’t spend much time here anyway. Who’s hungry?”

  She headed into the kitchen.

  “Are you serious?” Tori said, incredulous. “We’re not here for afternoon tea.”

  “Good,” Olivia said as she reentered with a cardboard box. “I don’t have tea. Or anything else delicious. These are nutrition bars. They taste like dirt but they’re loaded with nutrients.”

  She dropped the box on a low table, took one for herself, and gnawed on it.

  “Yum,” she said with fake delight. “Not like an Arbortown lobster roll but better than going hungry. Eat.”

  Kent took a bar, shrugged, and ate. Tori and I passed.

  Olivia plopped down on her dusty couch and propped her feet up on the plain table in front of it. All of the furniture was bland and functional. There was nothing made from wood. It all looked to be molded out of some sort of synthetic material.

  “I’m guessing the future isn’t exactly what you thought it would be,” she said. “I can’t complain though. I’ve got this place to myself. Most people have to bunk four or five to an apartment. It’s one of the sweet perks I got when I risked my life by going undercover.”

  “How is this possible?” Tori asked. “That thing in the dome is a time machine?”

  “Not exactly,” Olivia replied. “It’s a time bridge. A gateway between different ages.”

  “Uh. . . .” Kent muttered. “What?”

  Olivia sat forward and slid back a panel on the table to reveal what looked like a keyboard, but with symbols I didn’t recognize.

  “Quick history lesson,” she said. “January 27, 1951.”

  Her fingers danced over the touchpads and an animated three-dimensional holographic image appeared in the air over the table. This future world made no sense. Most everything looked like a tired, dirty version of the past. But every once in a while some amazing piece of technology appeared that would never have existed in our time. It was like all the efforts of mankind had gone into advancing technology and the weapons of warfare while everything else was left to decay.

  The hologram grew from the tabletop and slowly rose until it became a recognizable form. It was a three-foot-tall mushroom cloud . . . the result of a nuclear detonation.

  “The first atomic test explosion at the Nevada Test Site. That’s where we are, by the way, in case you hadn’t figured it out.”

  “We hadn’t,” Kent said.

  I watched in awe as the perfectly rendered image grew with incredible detail. The image was so realistic I took a nervous step back, afraid the growing cloud of smoke might actually be radioactive.

  “Hundreds of nuclear devices were tested right here. At first they were set off above ground. That was until they realized the radioactive fallout was spreading cancer. Duh. After that all the detonations were done underground. What doesn’t get mentioned in the history books is that there was an interim step. Project Alcatraz. Named after the prison I guess. Not sure I get the connection.”

  Olivia touched a few more pads. The mushroom cloud disappeared and was replaced by a two-foot-high hologram of the familiar dome. The gateway to hell.

  “The idea was to create a structure that could contain the force of the blast and the radioactive material. They only made one test. January 24, 1952. The bomb went off inside. The dome didn’t blow apart. No radioactivity escaped. Everything went as planned except for one tiny little detail. When they went into the dome, they discovered that by containing and concentrating the blast they had accelerated matter to such an incredible degree, it produced an event even Einstein couldn’t have predicted. I can’t explain the science but what they had done, by dumb luck if you ask me, was to blow a hole through time. A kind of black hole right here on earth. When somebody finally got the guts to go through it, they found themselves still here in the desert, but three hundred years later.”

  She touched a few more pads. The dome disappeared to reveal a miniature version of the glowing frame we had stepped through.

  “It was as simple as that,” Olivia explained. “The Bridge was permanent and safe. They built a big old frame around it but that was just for looks. Travelling back and forth between these two eras was as easy as stepping through a doorway. A doorway between times.”

&
nbsp; I knelt down to take a closer look at the image of what they called the Bridge. It seemed impossible, yet explained so much.

  “It’s incredible,” I said with awe. “Can it be controlled? I mean, can you pick what time you want to go to?”

  “No. I told you, it isn’t a time machine. We were briefed on the physics once. It has to do with nuclear fission accelerating particles past the speed of light and countering gravity and the actual shape of the dome and I don’t know what else. They don’t even know why it ended up opening the door to this particular time. But it did, and that’s why we’re sitting on the edge of disaster.”

  “Why didn’t anybody know this happened?” Tori asked, incredulous. “You can’t keep something like this a secret.”

  “Well, yeah you can. And they did,” Olivia said. “Think about it. If people found out they could step into the future, it would have destroyed every known concept of science and God. People’s basic beliefs would be blown out of the water. And who wouldn’t want to see their own future? You could find out how you died and avoid the circumstances that got you there. Heck, you could find out who won the next thirty Super Bowls. Or invent the iPad before Apple. Knowledge of the future was the most powerful weapon ever imagined. You gotta give credit to the U.S. government. They kept it quiet for over seventy years and only shared it with a few select people.”

  “Did the people of this time know about it?” I asked.

  “Not at first. The U.S. government on this side stepped in and sealed the area. It had been a secure military base since the 1940s so keeping the Bridge a secret was fairly simple. Knowing what to do with it wasn’t.”

  She worked the controls again. The frame disappeared and was replaced by a detailed globe of planet Earth that slowly rotated before our eyes.

  “The years haven’t been kind to our little planet.”

  “Seriously,” Kent said. “There’s lots of modern stuff but mostly it looks like everything just got old and crappy. Was there a nuclear war or something? What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Olivia replied. “That was the problem. Nothing happened. Things just kept on going the way they were. I’ll throw some highlights at you.”

  She stood and pointed out specific areas on the globe. It was definitely planet Earth, but the landmasses had changed.

  “Climate change melted the polar ice caps, flooding low-lying regions all over the world. Lower Manhattan is underwater. So is much of Los Angeles. New Orleans is gone along with a dozen other major cities. Pemberwick Island no longer exists. Sorry. The population continued to grow while livable space shrank along with farmland.”

  I stared at the image of the globe and the reality of what Earth had become. It was a devastating reality that, unlike everything else we’d seen, seemed possible.

  “Living in a city is like being jammed into a crowded ant colony. There are no private homes, only government-controlled housing. Don’t even ask about crime. These buildings we’re in? These beautiful buildings? They’re all made from recycled plastic and other waste. They’re trash. Literally. Tori ran her hand along the arm of the chair she was sitting in, trying to grasp the concept of a world that was made from recycled junk.

  “If that weren’t bad enough, the inevitable happened. Fossil fuels dried up. Natural gas, oil, coal . . . all spent. That threw the world into chaos. The Middle East spiraled into anarchy because the money dried up along with the oil. The stock market didn’t just crash, it crumbled and disappeared because the rules of normal commerce didn’t apply anymore. Fortunes were lost, big and small. The world came dangerously close to going dark. Everyone saw it coming, the same as with climate change, but no practical alternative energy had been developed. Private industry didn’t bother trying to develop anything because it was too expensive. The only realistic alternative was nuclear power. Now it’s the prime source of energy. Everything you’ve seen, like the planes and the cars and the weapons and even this computer right here, is nuclear powered. It’s convenient and practical and there’s an endless supply. That’s the good news. Bad news is that it needed to be developed so quickly that precautions weren’t taken. After all, the lights had to be kept on. But there was a cost. The radiation from billions of nuclear powered devices increased the cases of cancer a thousand fold.”

  “What about the miracle medicine?” Tori asked. “Doesn’t that help?”

  “No. It regenerates tissue, but it doesn’t cure disease. People are physiologically better off than ever. They’re more athletic. They’re stronger. They never have to worry about injury. It’s great, except that the average lifespan for a man living in the United States is now only forty-two years old. Women live slightly longer. Forty-three. Haven’t seen many elderly people around, have you? With the lack of farmland, growing enough food to feed the population is next to impossible. What we get is mostly beans and rice. Yum.”

  “It’s a nightmare,” Tori said.

  “And those are just the highlights.”

  “No wonder everyone’s walking around like robots,” Tori said. “It’s like mass depression.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” Olivia said. “The number-one concern on everyone’s mind is survival. There’s no value put on art, music, or literature. We all just live day to day, waiting for the next disaster to strike.”

  “With no joy,” Tori said.

  “It’s everyone’s worst fears come true,” I said.

  “Not everyone’s,” Olivia said. “That’s where things got really ugly. By stepping into the future, the government and military leaders of your time got a glimpse of what was to come. But they didn’t do anything about it. I can’t say they didn’t try, but they failed. They didn’t push for the development of safe alternative fuels, because the business community didn’t see the potential for profit. They didn’t press the issues on climate change because they couldn’t convince enough people that it was real. People still drove their big cars and kept burning coal to create the electricity that kept the factories pumping out goods. The population kept increasing while the food supply dwindled. They saw what was coming, but it didn’t make any difference.”

  “That seems . . . impossible,” Tori said.

  “But it isn’t. The fact that nothing changed is at the very heart of the war we’re fighting. The people of my time live in hell, and they hold the people of your time responsible. There were nearly seventy years of diplomacy when the United States Governments from two different eras worked together to try and avert this nightmare. They failed. Miserably. The people of the past were given a gift, a chance to reverse the fate of the world. That stupid bomb test offered a chance to get it right . . . but they didn’t. It was out of desperation that my government, and the military, quietly devised a plan to try and save our people. To save our planet.”

  “They invaded the past,” I said, hardly believing the words.

  “They went public a few years ago,” Olivia said. “They revealed the existence of the Bridge. They told us about the years of futile negotiations to try to get the people of the past to change course and how they were met with nothing but resistance. It was all part of the plan. They were building up hatred for those who were responsible for the horror. It was the only way to get the people to accept . . .”

  “Genocide,” Tori said.

  “Yeah. Genocide.”

  “Whoa, wait,” Kent said. “What if the people in the past listened? If they made any changes, even small ones, it would have completely altered the future. What’s it called? The Butterfly Effect? Everything would have changed. Different people would have been born. People from here might suddenly disappear because every little change would create an entirely different future. If the people of the past made big changes it might have actually destroyed the people trying to save their own future.”

  “Except it didn’t work that way,” Olivia said. “They did simple experimen
ts to see how changing the past would alter the future. What they found was it didn’t. Nothing changed. They planted time capsules in the past and when they went to dig them up in my time they weren’t there. They planted newspaper articles in major publications back in the fifties and sixties but when they searched for them in the archives of the present, they no longer existed. They finally concluded that if an event happens, it can’t be altered. The two eras exist completely separate from one another. The past is yours. This future is ours. The two can’t be mixed. It’s like they’re two different worlds.”

  “Or two different dimensions,” Kent said softly, trying to allow the reality to take hold in his own brain.

  “So then what was the point?” I asked. “If this future couldn’t be avoided, why did they even try to get people from the past to change?”

  “Good question,” Olivia said. “They said they were doing it for the good of mankind. It was the right and noble thing to do, even though we wouldn’t benefit. That’s what they said, but they were lying. It was all part of the plan.”

  Olivia changed the hologram from the globe to a bird’s-eye view of an airfield that was filled with ominous black attack planes.

  “Nobody in power admits it, but invasion became an option the moment they realized changing the past wouldn’t help the billions of diseased and starving people of our time. It’s a story as old as history. If a tribe can no longer sustain itself on its own land, it must expand. Since we never created colonies on other planets, there was nowhere for us to expand to.”

  “Except the past,” I said gravely.

  “Exactly. Once that decision was made, my people continued trying to convince the people of the past to see reason and change their ways, but it wasn’t to try to fix our world, it was to make sure that once we conquered and colonized the past, the new future would be a better one for us to live in.”

  “Why didn’t they just tell them the truth?” Kent asked. “People from the future could just filter back and live in the past, right?”

  Olivia gave Kent a sideways look and said, “Seriously? Filter back? Overpopulation is already a problem in your time. The world’s population has quadrupled since then. Where exactly would they go? You have some extra room at the Blackbird Inn?”