by Lee Burvine
The driver glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. He reached back and slid open the Plexiglas divider between them. "There will be cameras at the toll plaza. Is there blood?"
"No. Nothing to see."
The driver nodded and slid the divider closed.
Faraj understood how the data and artifacts from the Kafir Project could be indescribably valuable to the right party. For very different reasons. And of course Doubleman's client wasn't alone in wanting to possess them. An Islamic group had already hired Faraj for exactly the same purpose.
So when Doubleman contacted Faraj with useful information just a few hours later? Well, the poor man had unwittingly signed his own death warrant right there and then.
Practically speaking, Faraj could not have gained these important leads from Doubleman tonight and also allowed him to live. Doubleman would eventually have figured out he'd been betrayed. And you did not double-cross the group that called itself the Office.
At least not without making sure that no one still breathing knew it.
That meant the Office operative who handed Rees over in San Francisco would have to die now as well. At least Faraj would have time to prepare for that. He would not let that man down as he had Doubleman.
Faraj had no idea what the Kafir Project's output would eventually reveal. It interested him, of course. Not nearly as much as it interested his clients. They most certainly had, as they say, a dog in that fight.
Would it affect his life? Quite possibly. But it could not alter his purpose. Nothing science could reveal would change the fundamental truth of existence.
Life is fleeting.
Outrageously so when compared to eternity. Long life or short, it made no difference. The largest grain of sand is still but a grain of sand, lost on an infinite beach. So to long for more life, as most did-that was pure foolishness. What mattered was the depth of feeling one reached while alive.
And no other feeling approached the enormity of pain.
The greatest joy imaginable could never come anywhere close. Those who knew the depths of pain had felt life as completely as it ever could be felt.
They alone knew its full value.
Faraj gave this gift to his charges, whenever he could. That was his purpose. What piece of scientific data could ever change that?
CHAPTER 19
REES DIDN'T THINK Danni would mind him using the computer in her spare bedroom and he had an idea he wanted to check out. He held Fischer's little flash drive in a hand that was still shaking, and read the brand name and model number.
An internet search quickly turned up a description of the drive in Google Shopping.
Rees pumped a fist in the air. "Yes. It is waterproof. All right, then. Let's see what the hell we've got here."
He plugged the flash drive into one of the USB ports. An external drive icon popped up on the desktop. The title read: Assembled sets A-20. He double-clicked the icon.
Files, three of them. The file names just strings of digits.
Rees clicked on the top file. It had been created fairly recently. A media application opened, but not the file itself. Rees clicked the file name again. This time the application crashed. The file seemed to be corrupted.
And maybe not so much waterproof.
He clicked the next file. This one a little less than a year old.
The same media application reopened. But this time a video played.
"That's better."
An image appeared in a circular frame, the edges blurry. Within the frame a man with a full beard was speaking a foreign language. Something Middle Eastern, Rees thought. The man was more or less in focus, but not much else. Very little depth of field on this lens, apparently.
An indoor setting. Not large. Natural lighting from a skylight or windows.
The bearded man stood before an audience seated on benches. Their clothing looked rough, coarse. The man intoned to them in a mellifluent voice, rhythmic, rising and falling. At intervals, they responded to him in unison.
This was a religious ceremony.
The bearded man read from a book. A codex, to be more precise. Shining metal covers of copper or brass. In fact, the codex seemed to be the focal point of the shot. It certainly was the sharpest object in view.
The bearded man lifted something. Held it high. It was ... bread. And next, an unmistakable gesture. One that had been reenacted innumerable times down through the ages. He broke it.
A celebration of the Eucharist here. Holy Communion.
The image began to pixelate in an odd way. Then it faded to black. The recording had ended.
Fascinated, Rees clicked on the next file. This one closer to two years old.
A forest scene this time. Again the circular frame.
Difficult to gauge the scale in this one. There was nothing in the shot but vegetation. Ferns mostly, and some trees that could be magnolias. As before, the edges of the frame and the background were out of focus.
Rees heard footsteps coming up behind him and remembered that he'd set the gun down on the desk. Out of reach.
He jumped up, knocking his chair over and grabbed for the gun.
"Whoa. Easy, easy."
He recognized Morgan's voice, and nearly collapsed in relief.
When he turned around, Morgan and Danni were both there in the room with him. Danni had changed clothes, and her dark skin didn't have that grayish tone it had taken on back there in the kitchen.
Morgan held out a hand. "Why don't you give me that, Rees?"
Rees noticed the gun was pointed right at Morgan. "Sorry, sorry." He grabbed it by the barrel and gave it to her. "I guess I'm a little jumpy still."
Danni was staring at the computer monitor. "What is that?"
Rees righted the overturned chair. "Oh, I have a flash drive from Fischer. There's some video."
"No, I mean, that. What is that?" She pointed at the screen.
Rees turned back to the video. At first, he couldn't quite put together what he saw there. Familiar somehow, though.
"Is that a bird?" Morgan leaned forward. "It looks too big."
And then Rees remembered. Where he'd seen this creature, recently too. The colors were different. No way to guess the colors. "Is it a bird? Technically, no."
The animal onscreen had brilliant blue and red feathers arranged in a striking pattern. It stepped slowly across the shot with a bipedal gait. Head down. Hunting maybe. Either it moved silently or this recording lacked a soundtrack.
As they watched, the animal seemed to spot something in the vegetation. Its crested head whipped down, then came up with a wriggling lizard in its bite.
Rees heard the strike. So there was sound here too.
Danni stepped closer to the screen. "That's ... a dinosaur."
Rees smiled. "It certainly is."
Morgan crowded in too. "So, what is this? CGI?"
"Well, that's what I would have thought," Rees answered, "if this file wasn't about two years old. And if that wasn't a species of oviraptorosaur called Anzu wyliei. The first composite skeleton of that species was assembled, oh, maybe two months ago. So no, it's not animation."
Danni kept edging in closer, as if the screen had a gravitational pull. "But if that's not computer animation ... I'm a little confused. What are we watching here?"
"Well, based on the animal," Rees said, "I'd guess we're looking at what became the Hell's Creek rock formation. A little more than sixty-six million years ago."
As they watched, the dinosaur strutted off screen, rustling through the foliage, its lizard lunch still wriggling in its beak.
The image pixelated out. The video ended.
Wide-eyed, Danni shook her head. "What the hell was Fischer doing at Fermilab?"
Rees just couldn't stop smiling. "Bending spacetime."
Danni's jaw literally dropped. "He built a goddamn time machine? Like, for real?"
Rees knew how incredible it sounded,
but could imagine no likelier explanation. "I suppose you could call it a time machine, from what I can make of his notes and now this video. Maybe what we just saw is, they sent a camera back to the Cretaceous somehow."
Danni looked as stunned as Rees had felt when he first grasped the direction of Fischer's work. She paced back and forth along a short stretch of the bedroom carpet. "But it's not possible. You can't actually do that."
Morgan shrugged. "Why not? If you had a multi-billion dollar facility like Fermilab, and DARPA funding, and a mind like Edward Fischer's..."
Danni stopped. "Okay, I'm no Edward Fischer, and neither is anyone else. But there's paradoxes. You go back in time and you're gonna change history. Maybe just a teeny bit. But over a long period that little deviation turns huge. Eventually you get a whole different universe. One where there's no Edward Fischer around to build a time machine. So then you can't go back and change things, right? And so then there is an Edward Fischer. And so you do go back ... and on and on."
It was Rees's turn to shake his head. "Okay, yes, but there's the Novikov self-consistency principle. Closed time-like loops might, in a self-governing way, reduce the probability of any paradoxical action to zero. All other actions are permitted. And there's also the multiverse scenario in which-"
"Hey, guys." Morgan raised her voice just enough to cut them off. "I have a question."
"Yes?" Rees and Danni both answered at once.
"If the Kafir Project is about time travel, why would DARPA fund it? How would you weaponize this research?"
"That's a damn good question," Rees said. "And the first thing that comes to my mind is, you could assassinate any enemy. Before they even came to power."
"Yes, but the past is the past," Danni countered. "If someone travelled back in time, then that already happened. Right? Along with whatever changes occurred. You can't go back and kill Hitler, 'cause if you did, that already happened in like 1939, or whenever. We'd all know about it. And then you wouldn't have gone back to kill him. Even if you'd still been born in that new timeline you made, which isn't very likely."
Rees didn't see any way around the paradox either. "She's right. The only backwards time travel that's remotely thinkable would have to be a scenario where you didn't change the timeline at all. Not in the universe you left from, anyway. Hard to see the military use in that."
Danni walked to the door of the spare bedroom, stopped and looked back. "C'mon, let's go."
"Go where?" Rees asked.
"To Livermore, to get on the secure computers. The data could still be there. Or we can just sit here till whoever wants this all to go away finds us again." Without waiting for a reply, Danni left the room.
"She made up her mind before we saw the video," Morgan said. "And I think she's right. This is the best way forward."
Rees agreed, and in minutes they were all in Danni's car and headed to Livermore.
Fischer had said that Herodotus would have a copy of the project data. Getting their hands on that would be wonderful. But right now they weren't even sure where Herodotus might be.
All that would cease to be a problem, if they could find another copy of the data on the computer at Livermore.
And Rees had another motivation for finding that data.
Even if getting it all in the open wasn't the surest way out of trouble, he would still need to understand all this.
He'd still want to know what made it possible to record events that happened over sixty million years ago. He would need to explore that for the same reason he spent his life trying to understand how the universe, and this galaxy, and all the stars and planets in it came to be exactly the way they were.
Because he was curious.
Rees was intensely and profoundly curious. It's what drove him today and it always had.
CHAPTER 20
IN HER THREE years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Danni had been subjected to a random vehicle inspection exactly once. As she pulled up to the campus gate with two uncleared visitors hiding in her trunk, she hoped this would not be the night to make it twice.
"You're working late, Dr. Harris." The guard swiped Danni's ID and pass card, logging in her presence at a secured Defense Department site.
Danni smiled as she took back the ID. "Up against a deadline."
"That's a lot of real bull."
Danni felt her breath hitch. Jesus Christ, I'm caught already?
The guard was looking into her car. "What is that there, sixteen ounces?"
She followed his eyes to the giant can of energy drink resting in her cup holder. He said a lot of Red Bull, you idiot. Red Bull.
Danni smiled again. "Yeah. Yeah, gonna be a long night."
"Well, better get to it then."
"Right, 'cause it's gonna be a long night." You already said that, Harris. Shut up and drive.
The gate lifted and Danni drove onto the LLNL campus with her heart beating in her mouth. Note to self-forget about becoming an international drug smuggler.
* * *
Rees couldn't make out the conversation through the trunk lid. He assumed it was Danni talking with a guard. Moments after it ended the car lurched forward.
He lay curled up with Morgan curled up in front of him. Spooning, essentially. Regardless of her sexual orientation and the surreal circumstances, he had to admit ... it felt nice.
There were drawbacks to not doing close. He had to admit that too.
It didn't surprise Rees, how easily he and Morgan had just been smuggled onto a US Defense Department secure facility. To settle his anxiety, Morgan had explained earlier how it was the University of California that managed the Livermore facility. The security services here were essentially campus cops.
A couple minutes later the trunk lid popped opened and Danni stood there waving them out. "C'mon. Coast is clear."
Rees crawled out after Morgan, then reached back in and grabbed Fischer's leather pouch. They might want to cross-reference something they found here with the notebook in there.
Rees and Morgan followed Danni to the door of an unmarked and unremarkable looking structure.
Danni pulled out her pass key. "So, this is the quantum computing building."
A camera over the door reminded Rees of something else Morgan told him. Their presence here would not remain a secret if anyone had a reason to look. Video images of all of them would be available until the recordings were overwritten. Seventy-two hours.
Danni slid her pass key. An electronic lock clicked. She opened the door, and turned back to Rees and Morgan. "Remember if anyone's working a late shift, they're just gonna assume you were cleared through security at the gate. Everybody's kind of isolated in this building anyway, because we had to block out all external radiation."
"To shield the quantum effects from interference?" Rees asked.
"Yeah. So no phone or radio signals in there. Now, technically all visitors should be wearing pass badges, but people do take them off. If someone asks, you left it in the car."
Rees desperately hoped they didn't run into anyone. He suspected he'd start sweating like a sumo in a sauna. James Bond he was not.
Danni walked in first with Morgan behind her. Rees entered last, letting the door close after him with a too final sounding thunk.
The empty lobby was brightly lit with recessed fluorescents. Except for the lack of a poster or two on the walls, it looked like some very unpopular dentist's office. Magazines scattered across a coffee table. A faux leather couch. Bottled water dispenser.
The only thing unusual here was the climate. It was a cool night out to begin with. Inside, the temperature had dropped a good ten more degrees.
Goose bumps prickled Rees's arms. "You weren't kidding about this place being cold."
Danni led them over to the only door the room had, other than the one they came in. "You're lucky we're just after records in the mainframe." She positioned herself in front of what looked like a r
etinal scanner. "It's a lot worse when you're near the Core, working with Alan."
Rees heard the soft whir of machinery. Danni opened the door and held it for them as they walked through.
"Who's Alan?" Rees asked Danni as she slipped by him to take the lead again.
"Oh, the quantum computer. You know, after Turing."
They walked down a long white hallway. Nearly every door they passed had an additional security lock.