Star Noir

by Paul Bishop

  They’d developed the concept ten years before when Chance thought his post-graduate work would focus on Hawking-Moorecock bubble cosmology and Alan was heavy into single malt Scotch whiskeys.

  “It’s all about isolating a fraction of time,” his friend had slurred one night in a pub they both frequented. Tanked to the gills, the bigger man in a rumpled suit had shooed away a few mutual friends and led Chance to a corner table with his arm around his shoulders.

  They sat across from each other and the amber liquid swirled like a cyclotron in the lowball glass.

  “You know about extraction?” Alan asked. “In the trade?”

  “Physics?”

  “Chemistry. The science of Kentucky bourbon. It’s the number of years that make the difference, you see. And the kind of barrel you age it in. Each year leaves its mark—a specific flavor. Age and barrel. It’s like a timestamp.” He laughed. “If you isolate the flavor, you isolate the year. Believe you me, friend—Einstein knew his whiskey.”

  He didn’t see the connection between The Macallan in the glass and the physics of time and space, but he listened patiently until the man got to the point. “Our mistake has been thinking of past time as a river to step into. Because, I don’t know about you, boyo, but it’s hard for me to step into a current without falling over.”

  “Right now, it’s pretty hard for you to step anywhere without falling over,” he retorted.

  “How much easier to step into a static scene?” Alan swallowed the remainder of his drink and became more animated. He raised both arms and said, “It’s about finding that fraction of a second in past time and isolating it relative to the traveler. Relativity, see?” He punched him on the shoulder. “Time stays put, a frozen scene in transparent amber while the machine phases through space with the traveler inside.”

  The man struggled with an old gel pen and wrote a sloppy equation on a napkin.

  “Check my math,” he said.

  “A machine,” said Chance and caught hold of the idea. “Or a suit.” He took the pen and sketched his own idea. “Something like the old Apollo astronauts wore but not a spacesuit that moves in time. It’s the exact opposite. A time suit that phases through space via hypertime.”

  On rainy days, he could still feel the impact of Roger Alan’s drunken fist on his shoulder.

  “You’re a genius,” his friend said.

  Within two years, they took their first step.

  A year after that, they brought Amy Hamilton on board because of her business acumen and Timestamp, Inc. became a reality.

  “I do envy your trip, Darrin,” said Amy from the swivel chair behind the desktop control panel.

  Chance tugged the zipper of his night-black leotard tight under his chin and winked. “Next time. I promise.”

  In an adjacent room, Roger Alan ran a diagnostic on the satellite feeds in the server bay and secured frequency permission for a GPS parameter of one mile in every direction around the accident scene. While no one thought he’d need to travel more than a few yards around the impending collision, it was good to have some wiggle room.

  Within minutes, a green light blinked on Amy’s console.

  She tapped a panel and half of one wall lit up with the frozen image from the Atkins’ truck dashcam. The impending vehicular collision seemed uncomfortably real in that size.

  At the top of the screen in green, the timestamp read, May 23, 2019.

  3:02:15:01114.

  “Alan says we’re a go,” she confirmed.

  Chance had learned a considerable amount about time travel in the past five years.

  For example, you could step back and be a silent observer in any frozen moment of time or place. But you couldn’t travel into the future.

  Or, at least, that was the assumption because it hadn’t happened yet.

  While you could record with amazingly accurate precision what happened in your kitchen yesterday at a specific moment, the array of possibilities for tomorrow was prohibitive.

  It only stood to reason. The past was objectively established. Every point in space and time was occupied by what had already occurred and there was no changing it. And so, like an old movie or TV show—except in three dimensions, and static—you could observe it. More importantly, you had to timestamp it to precise locations so that you had a clear landing field. Without a visual timestamp on film, digital video, or photograph, it was impossible to know where you’d end up, whether it be an open field or in the middle of a castle wall.

  And anchored as they were to the past, you couldn’t carry any material items.

  Inside the time cubicle with its luminescent blue walls, he stepped up to the suit with Amy close behind him. It hung open, motionless in the magnetic field the room generated at its chrono-frequency. In the end, it looked almost identical to one of the old moon-flight suits, complete with heavy radiation shielding and mirrored helmet visor.

  It took them an hour to secure him into it and another twenty minutes to run through the startup procedures and test fires. He double-checked the suit’s evidence-gathering holographic cameras.

  “Are you guys ready down there or should I send out for pizza?” Alan asked over the earbuds.

  “We’re set,” Chance confirmed.

  “Rule number one,” Amy reminded him.

  “Don’t turn the suit off,” he said in unison with her. “You don’t need to remind me,” he added. “I’m the guy who invented the thing.”

  “And you’re the guy who gets crushed like a bug if the suit loses power.”

  He didn’t give her warning another thought because he wasn’t about the past. Rather, he was all about the future.

  “Countdown at your leisure, Roger,” Amy said and kissed the visor for luck.

  The imprint of her lips lingered and tugged at his heart as Chance watched them fade from view.

  He stepped back and stood on loose white gravel facing north, perpendicular to both lanes of traffic with the east-bound lane of the rural asphalt highway closest to him.

  The blurry dashcam image hadn’t prepared Chance for how green everything looked.

  Across the road, short grass was cropped by a dozen white-and-black cows.

  Beyond that, long grass had gone to seed and stood frozen in a rolling wave behind hundreds of feet of white fencing.

  Acres and acres of emerald hills extended into the distance, so green it slowed one’s heartbeat by half and so majestic it brought tears to one’s eyes.

  The sky was a blue hardpan blasted clean by a benevolent springtime sun and mounds of white candy clouds swept to the horizon.

  He could only imagine the fresh, clean smells and the sound of a warm south wind. In his mind, a hawk screeched above a forest of cedars banking the road behind him and to the left.

  Locked inside, there was nothing to smell but the purified air of the time suit.

  And nothing truly existed outside either, not really. Not with time absolutely frozen for everyone but Darrin Chance who existed outside of normal chronology in hypertime.

  Beyond his cocoon, nothing moved. Not grass, not birds, and not even air molecules.

  His mission was to explore this precise slice of time and he could take as long as he needed to.

  Well, as long as the batteries held out on the suit, and that was a long time indeed.

  Even though he knew he alone traversed the static landscape, habit forced him to look both ways before he stepped into the roadway.

  There were two sides to time travel. Isolating the timestamp and holding a doorway open to it had been Roger’s wheelhouse.

  Developing the suit was all Chance.

  The trick was to move through fixed-position molecules of air but not through more dense materials like the roadbed he walked on or the vehicles he intended to inspect. With too much phasing, he would pass through everything like a ghost. Too little meant the very air surrounding him would crush the suit like a tin can in a vacuum.

  Calibrating that phase effect
had been both time-consuming and expensive but it was the key to putting someone back in time.

  Ten feet away, the red Audi convertible was in position. Lisa Denise Hubbard sat behind the wheel and her long, chocolate-brown hair trailed behind in a horizontal taffy mass. The Atkins truck loomed over the windshield, less than three feet from the front of the car.

  “Are you okay?”

  He held his breath for a moment, then released it.

  “Darrin? Are you okay?” Amy demanded in his earbuds. “Your heartbeat spiked. Adrenaline too,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m good.” He glanced to the left and then to the right. Helmet readouts scrolled up and down, etched in blue light. He saw the red indicators that had manifested on Amy’s console in the future.

  “It’s not anything to worry about.” Even as he spoke, he felt his pulse slow and his breathing calmed within seconds. “I’m at the scene of the crash. All systems check out.” He tried to put into words what he felt. “It’s only that when you’re here…when you’re really here and you can walk around and see these two living, breathing people stopped in midflight, paused for an instant, and you know what’ll happen next, that in a split second their lives will be over—”

  “One-point-seven-five-five-five-four, exactly,” said Alan and cut into the conversation. “It’s history, Chance. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Yeah. I appreciate the empathy,” he retorted.

  “Have you learned anything yet?” his friend asked, ever practical.

  He walked along the shoulder of the road until he stood directly across from the narrow space between the front of both vehicles. He gazed at the square white panel truck. It reminded him of the old furniture-moving vehicles his grandpa used to drive. The trademarked swoosh of the Atkins’ logo swirled across the side.

  “Other than it’s a gorgeous day to die back here in 2019? No. Not yet.”

  “Okay.” A loud click echoed through the helmet to indicate that a switch had been thrown in Los Angeles, a century ahead. “I’m ready to download your information feed. On your word.”

  “Give me a few minutes. I want to get the lay of the land.”

  He double-checked that the suit’s input sensors were off and that he wasn’t broadcasting back to the mission room.

  Because he’d lied to Alan. One glance at the cab of the truck, and he had learned something. Ben Atkins was slumped against his side window, either asleep or passed out.

  The truck had already clearly veered across the yellow lane—case closed.

  Chance decided he could crawl up onto the passenger side and, if he was lucky, see an open flask or bottle of alcohol. That was the kind of detail clients hired him for.

  It was like being an archaeologist, digging around, probing. But it took a special kind of skill because nothing could be moved. Everything was stuck in time. He could crawl all over the scene, climb up and down the truck, jump into the convertible, or walk among the trees wherever a pathway was clear.

  But he couldn’t open a door, couldn’t move a latch, or even so much as flip a pebble on the road.

  Because what had happened had already happened and he was merely a friendly witness to the event. This time, though, maybe not so friendly.

  He didn’t think the client would be too happy with his testimony.

  The senator’s presidential bid wouldn’t be helped by the revelation that his great grandfather’s mistake had killed a young woman and derailed a series of criminal convictions.

  Chance smiled grimly to himself and decided he’d let Alan deal with that part of things.

  He had no doubt Mr Empathy could handle the fallout.

  That settled, he moved to the business at hand and established a commlink to the future. “Amy?”

  “Here,” she said.

  “Incoming.” He activated the suit’s recording apps. “Start the download.”

  “Aye, aye, skipper.”

  With everything now recording, he moved around the back of the truck, pulled himself up level with the passenger side window, and looked inside the cabin.

  It appeared this was his lucky day. His cameras zoomed in on the empty bottles on the seat beside the driver and the wikis in the suit cataloged the colorful alcoholic labels.

  Chance made several portraits of Atkins—his shoulders relaxed, hands off the wheel, and utterly peaceful in his midday slumber. He made sure to capture imagery of the dash camera for later corroboration. The camera that even now archived the passage of time and made the record they would use to step back to the scene.

  Still standing on the sideboard of the truck with one outstretched hand grasping a side-mirror, he glanced at the Audi.

  “Amy? I’ve finished with the Atkins’ truck. That’s one vehicle accounted for,” he said. “Moving on to the Audi.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you get the files I sent?”

  “Not yet. Alan says there are some minor power fluctuations on our side. I’m still buffering data.”

  “I haven’t seen any power fluctuations.”

  “They’re on our end,” she assured him. “The suit is one hundred percent.”

  “I can see most of your panel,” he reminded her. “The power looks good.” He tapped his left gauntlet’s thumb and forefinger together to activate a different screen inside the visor. “Hang on.”

  The readings scrolled left to right in his field of vision—purple and white.

  “Something’s not right. A block has been put in place.”

  “A block would have to originate here,” she noted.

  “Check on it,” Chance instructed. “Line two-three-four.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  “I’ll move over to the car.”

  He jumped down to the shoulder and walked to the driver’s side of the Audi. His progress was so sluggish that he instinctively checked the suit’s phase output.

  No warning lights generated any concern so the extra weight wasn’t about the suit. It came from the depths of his soul. He realized he was stalling because he didn’t want to look at the girl.

  His personal feelings had no place, so he pushed them aside and did what he had to do.

  In the last seconds of her life, Lisa Denise Hubbard was young, vibrant, and fully alive. She had shining hazelnut eyes flecked with gold-leaf, clear skin, and a wide, even smile that put three perfect lines at the corner of each eye. The exuberant expression on her face contrasted sharply with her impending doom.

  In real time, at the speed she was going, she had yet to react to the all too brief image of the Atkins truck in front of her. It was all happening too fast for her.

  My God, she was happy—almost laughing.

  What could have brought her so much joy?

  “Are you there, Chance?” Alan’s voice echoed through the helmet.

  “Here.”

  “Have you seen it yet?”

  “Seen it?”

  “Lisa Hubbard’s distraction. The reason for the accident.”

  “Lisa didn’t cause the accident,” said Chance. “Atkins did. He’s asleep at the wheel. Didn’t you get the data I sent? Amy said she—”

  “Amy’s not in charge here.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means exactly what I said.”

  He scowled, cleared the commlink, and flagged Amy’s station. “Amy?” he said.

  “I told you, she’s not here,” the other man insisted. “It’s only you and me. Partner.”

  He coughed the last word out—partner—like a piece of gristle he’d choked on.

  “Put Amy on.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Did you find Lisa Hubbard’s distraction?”

  “I want to know what’s going on, Roger.”

  “What’s going on is I’m not about to let you screw this up, Darrin. We absolutely cannot lose the senator’s account. We need a win here, buddy, and we’re going to get it.”

/>   Chance didn’t need the monitors to tell him about his elevated pulse or adrenaline levels. He didn’t need to hear the whisper of the suit’s cooling system activate when beads of sweat broke out on his forehead.

  He and Roger Alan had never been close friends but they’d always worked well together. They were professionals, after all—businessmen breaking new ground.

  Alan was a son of a bitch, but as the saying went, he was Chance’s son of a bitch.

  “Do you have any more questions,” Alan asked. “Or can we get on with the mission?”

  “There is no mission,” he said, put one foot in front of the other alongside the Audi, and rounded the rear bumper to stand in the open road behind the convertible’s trunk.

  In the sky above, far from Earth, a silver reflection indicated the glint of sunlight on a passenger jet stalled at thirty thousand feet. That, he decided, was exactly how he felt.

  He tapped a sequence of buttons in his gauntlet and sent the commands that would carry the suit across the decades and at the same time, fifteen hundred miles to Los Angeles.

  “Mission abort,” he said.

  Nothing happened. The setting didn’t fade and the vista remained, a high-definition green and blue panorama with Lisa’s Audi and Ben’s truck teetering on the edge of impact.

  “What’s going on, Alan? Mission abort,” he said. “We’re done here.”

  “Mission override,” the man countered. “We’re not done until I say so.”

  Chance bit an expletive back and remained silent.

  Arguing wouldn’t help. He ran through his options as if they were command prompts on the readout inside his visor.

  In all honesty, he didn’t have many choices. If Alan had taken command of the mission room, he was the only way back.

  “Ben Atkins caused the accident,” he said quietly. “I understand that’s not the result you or the client was looking for.”

  “I’ll make the argument that Lisa Hubbard was distracted,” the man said. “That she caused the accident. And when you send the proof back, I think the law will be on my side.”

  “All right, have it your way. What distraction? What proof are you talking about?”