Jose looked around the group and said, “I have two personal announcements. First, you won’t have Lieutenant Colonel Valenzuela to kick around anymore.” He paused for effect. “I’m resigning my regular Air Force commission and I’ll be working here full time for Interspace.”
He put his arm around Rae, “Second… starting right now, Doctor Astronaut Rae Dunnan will no longer be available as the object of your daydreams.” This led to a few scattered groans and boos from the audience. “Starting this morning she is wearing an engagement ring. And yes, you will all be invited to the wedding.”
After some applause, laughter, and several off-color comments from the audience, Ted and Sally opened the floor for a question and answer session. There were many questions and fewer answers, but they managed to set the right tone.
---
Later, in Jose’s office, Ted commented, “Resigning your commission is a tough decision, Jose. You could be giving up a lot.”
Jose replied, “Oh, believe me; we’ve talked this over and over. But, the pros and cons are pretty clear. First, I believe in the mission of the Project… or Interspace if you will. Even with the frustration of not knowing what we did when we did it, this is the most worthwhile thing we think we could be doing.
Second, after all I’ve seen, I have no respect for the civilian politicians in DC. The military still has honor and honesty, but when I see the way the politicians steal and lie, I can’t respect them. Finally, there is a very nice Air Force Reserve unit at Creech Air Force Base up on the other side of Las Vegas. I could put in some time there and still eventually get a military retirement.”
During Jose’s explanation, Rae was giving him support with her body language.” Ted turned to her. “Rae, I know I said it over the telephone, but let me say congratulations and best wishes for the future in person. Is the plan for NASA still in place?”
“You know that I agree with Jose about the politicians in charge,” Rae said. “I picked a terrible time to be an astronaut. The space agency is so screwed up that they are perfectly happy with me being parked out here in the desert. Out of sight out of mind.”
Sally entered the conversation, “Rae, I suggest you play your relationship with NASA on a month by month basis. If we win more federal contracts, we might need you to leave NASA and join Interspace… if you would be willing to do that.”
“A married couple working together?” Ted asked. “Isn’t there an Interspace company personnel policy about that?”
“Yes, there is,” Sally replied. “We think it’s a very good idea.”
Rae followed up the laughter with, “Another consideration is that NASA has an excellent maternity leave policy.”
“Already?” Sally asked.
“No,” Rae replied, “but we’re going to start working on it during the honeymoon.”
Chapter 22: "Voting Rights"
1005 Tuesday November 2, 2010
Riverdale, GA
Excerpt from the Personal Narrative of Mr. Jose Valenzuela
Recorded April 2014
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET/ TA
"It’s not likely that we will ever know the full story of what happened on election day in 2010. We do know that on that day we sent a lot of items back to a specific spot in Georgia. We don’t want to stir up too much interest, but it would be interesting to know what happened in some other loop in time.”
Chandra Williams loved politics. The 22 year old was in her element when she was motivating people to get out and vote. Today, voting day, her job as a volunteer was to make sure that the people supporting her party outside the polling places in South Atlanta had everything, from water to banners, they needed to make a good show. Standing outside the Frank Bailey Senior Center a few miles south of Hartsfield Airport, she was under the shade of an elm tree on the south end of the parking lot using her Blackberry on Twitter. She just sent a Tweet asking for more afternoon shift volunteers when the bomb went off.
The car containing the bomb sat in the first short row of parking spaces closest to the door of the modern community building. The blast shattered the front of the building and the shrapnel and car fragments blew apart the bodies of the voters standing in line. Despite being protected by the tree, the other cars in the parking lot, and the distance, the pressure wave and sound still stunned her.
With her phone still in her hand, she typed, “Explosion here. Many people hurt. Send help.” Chandra had more than a hundred general followers on Twitter and today she was sending all her messages to a special group address, specified by an @ prefix, of people following the election minute by minute. Some of these people read her Tweet and used their phones to dial 911. Others re-Tweeted Chandra’s message to a group called @BreakingNews on Twitter.
The @BreakingNews group is a special Twitter group for news junkies. Within seconds, the news of a car bomb explosion at a polling site in Atlanta spread across the world.
At the same time, Jason Abrams, a 43 year old IT manager, Website designer, and blogger, was in his car at the back of the building. When he arrived to vote, parking spaces were scarce, so he circled the building and parked next to a dumpster in the back. After voting, he went straight back to his car. He hadn’t yet turned his ignition key when the bomb went off. He felt the explosion inside his car and was shocked as debris flew over the roof of the building and pelted the car. Metal, pieces of the building, dirt, and what appeared to be scraps of clothing came down on his car and the dumpster like hail.
While he tried to understand what was happening, Jason reached for his iPhone 4, turned it on, hit the camera icon, and snapped pictures of what he saw through the windshield. With three more touches of the screen, he sent one of the photos to the Twitpic site with a caption that was nothing more than the word “EXPLOSION” and a string of exclamation points.
Silence replaced the hail of debris and smoke rose over the building. Jason opened the door of his car, stepped out carefully, and slowly walked around the side of the building toward the front. As he neared the front of the building, he heard screaming. A man wearing only pieces of bloody clothing leaned against the front corner of the building. Jason switched modes on his iPhone and tried to call 911, but he couldn’t get a cellular connection. The bloody man, who Jason was afraid to touch, slid down the wall and moaned. Jason said, “I’m sure help is coming,” but his voice sounded funny in his own ears. He didn’t know what else to do, so he shot more photos and sent them to Twitpic. About nine minutes later Jason sent out pictures of the arriving fire trucks and ambulances. Four minutes after that his pictures stopped as shrapnel from the second explosion shredded his camera and his body.
__________
Early voting for the national elections started on October 16 in Nevada. For weeks Jose pushed his people to vote early so they would be available in case something happened on the official Election Day.
The polls were open for five minutes in the Pacific Time zone when the news of the first causalities in Atlanta hit the screen in the operations room. Jose stood next to the operations console and noted that the national news agencies were only a few minutes behind the Government’s National Incident Based Reporting System in breaking the story. But, even NIBRS was a few minutes behind Twitter @BreakingNews. The @BreakingNews Twitter feeds came from CWilliams and others who were near enough to see and describe what was happening outside the polling place south of metropolitan Atlanta. Some of the Twitter users posted at the same time other people called 911. People posting on Twitpic sent photos of the burning car, the damaged building, and bloody bodies across the Internet while the emergency fire and rescue services were still in route.
Jose looked at the duty controller and said, “Call Doctor Wirtz and ask both he and his wife to come in a-sap.”
The Twitter network servers failed under the load of so many people hitting the servers about ten minutes after the blast, but Twitpic carried on. Photos with captions appeared on Facebook, but the “friend” system on Facebook makes it
a slower platform for following news.
Fifteen minutes after the first explosion, about four minutes after the arrival of the first fire trucks and medical units, the second bomb at the same site went off. Two of the first responders and a bystander were killed and several others were injured when the backpack filled with nails exploded.
An hour later, Janet and Bill were standing next to Jose when word of the car bomb explosion outside a polling station in Cincinnati flashed on the NIBRS network. A few minutes after that, a third car bomb in Orlando destroyed the front of the library serving as a polling site along with many people standing in line to vote. The second and third bombs didn’t include the follow-on bomb designed to kill and wound first responders, but each site had to be treated as if a secondary explosion was possible. Innocent people suffered and died as first responders made sure the scene was safe before starting work.
As the Internet became less useful as a source of information because of server overloads, the national news services picked up the slack. Although the heads of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice took to the TV to express their opinions that this wasn’t a terror attack, they had no credibility.
The panic in the eyes and fear on the faces of the TV talking heads was all it took to close down voting in the United States. At polling places around the country, municipalities and counties brought in tow trucks to move every parked vehicle to the nearest open area. Public buildings were evacuated and searched. Sirens echoed through every city and suburb in the country as emergency units looked for suspicious cars near any polling place. Bomb sniffing dogs and their handlers were heroes wherever they showed up.
Local responders worked hard, but the damage to the democratic political process was done. The TV talkers filled the air with photos of bloody bodies and fractured buildings. There were seventeen deaths and more than two dozen serious injuries at the three bombsites and with one mind voters across the U.S. decided to stay away from the polls for the rest of the day.
At noon Pacific Time the leaders of the Project, they still didn’t really think of it as Interspace, gathered to review what they did and didn’t know. Ted Arthurs joined in by secure voice from Homestead.
Bill Wirtz began by saying, “The people who made these bombs were good. According to our analysis, and experts on the NIBRS network agree, each bomb was a powerful fast explosive. Even from the Internet photos it’s easy to see that there was a lot of blast effect and a relatively small amount of flame. This isn’t from a slow explosive like propane, fertilizer, or black powder. It’s some military grade explosive like the tritonal used in a Mark 82 general-purpose bomb. One Department of Defense analyst estimated that each explosion had the power of about 20 pounds of tritonal. That’s about a third of what is in each Mark 82.“
“So, “Jose observed, the bad guys didn’t make the explosives in a bath tub. It was either brought into the country or moved cross country.”
“Exactly,” Bill agreed. “That also means we probably can’t disrupt the explosive or set it off prematurely by throwing hot glass beads at it.”
“Let’s back up a minute,” Ted Arthurs said over the speaker. We can’t go righting every wrong in the world. Some people were killed and that’s a shame, but is this a threat to the country? Is this a threat to the Constitution?”
Bill Wirtz nodded his head, invisible to Ted, and then said, “There is that potential, Ted. We’re talking about a lot of hotly fought elections across the country. As a minimum, every losing candidate is going to sue to invalidate the election. Every candidate who won based on early voting and absentee voting is going to fight the idea of having a second election day. Cities and towns are going to complain that they don’t have the money to run another election. The importance of these three bombs will depend on how the Department of Justice reacts and that will depend on how some key elections turn out. But, if the Justice Department and the court systems don’t appear responsive to the people, we’ll breech what we project to be a major point of trust in the government.”
Janet added, “Ted, the people in this country don’t trust the federal legislative branch and there is active and growing distrust of the federal executive branch. The political class is alienated from the voters. The judicial branch, the court system, is holding the whole thing together. If this doesn’t turn out well, we project civil unrest and, in some scenarios, states trying to leave the Union.”
“But,” Bill hurriedly continued, “I’m not proposing that we do anything more than Darkspot right now. I really don’t think we have any other actionable alternative.”
Rae had recently learned about Darkspot. The concept and the physics fascinated her, but, as Sally had briefed her, Darkspot might better be called Long Shot because it usually didn’t work. As Sally told the story, back in the 1990s when Ted and Sally recovered some of the glass beads that had been transported through time and emerged into empty air, they noticed those beads were colored and even flecked. The beads were clear before they were kicked back in time. Other recovered beads that had gone through time and emerged inside of something were dark. Microscopic optical analysis and a year of computer analysis proved that when the bead emerged, at that instant it captured available light and that the light could, through optical expansion, filtering, and computer interpolation, be reconstructed into a 360 degree spherical image of the surroundings at the time the bead emerged from its backward kick.
Sally’s lesson stressed that the first practical problem with Darkspot is collecting the bead. The Project’s technology can only send things back in time and so far they have no proof that it’s possible to go forward. There is no way to make an object return like a yo-yo on a string. Once it appears in the past, it must age normally to be available in the present. Recovering the bead involves going to the location and searching for a small glass sphere that emerged in the air at some time in the past. If someone can physically access the location, which often isn’t possible, the small bead could be lost in the dust, cleaned up, blown away, crushed, or simply not found.
As another practical problem, it takes a lot of time and processing power to recreate the image from each bead. Like an ordinary camera, lighting and distance are a big part of getting a good image. Unlike an ordinary camera, there is no lens, no pixel size, and practically no limit to how their computers can enlarge a section of the spherical image.
“Ted,” Bill Wirtz said, “you and Sally have a lot of experience bead hunting. You might as well leave for Atlanta right now.”
Ted Arthurs simply replied, “Yup. We’ll fly commercial out of Miami as soon as possible.”
Rae spoke tentatively, “Can I try to logic my way through this one?”
Bill said, “Go for it.”
“We’ll shoot some beads into a spot above that parking lot at some time before the bomb goes off in order to capture images. We’ll find exactly when the car arrived and see who delivered it, Right?” she asked.
Bill and Jose nodded while Janet said, “Exactly.”
Bill added, “The polling machines and tables were installed in the senior center the evening before the election. One county employee stayed there all night as security. He said he went for a walk around the building around ten pm and no car was there. He says the car was definitely there when the first poll workers arrived at about five thirty in the morning. He thought the car belonged to the arriving poll workers and they thought the car belonged to him.”
“So,” Rae continued, “We have to do an hourly survey and then, when we find the right time frame, we have to do a finer survey to try and see the driver.”
This time, everyone in the room just nodded. On the telephone, Ted said, “Here comes the hard part.”
“We haven’t sent the first bead yet, but Ted and Sally are ready to get on an airplane to go there and gather the beads we haven’t yet sent, right?”
Bill closed his eyes, hugged himself, rocked a little and said, “Yes to all that.”
; “But,” Rae went on, “that’s okay because in the future we will send the beads back in time and so they will be there today when Ted and Sally arrive… even if we haven’t sent them yet. It doesn’t matter when they were sent, the beads all appeared over the parking lot many hours before Ted and Sally will arrive. In fact they are there now.”
Bill opened his eyes, “Congratulations, Dr. Dunnan , you are now as convoluted as the rest of us! We intend to do it, so it is done? Maybe. But, because I don’t ever want to find the limits on the self-healing powers of foamy space-time, let’s start shooting as soon as possible, eh?”
Janet added, “We have to make something happen so the rest can happen. Or something like that.”
A hypothetical observer with a God’s-eye view sitting in a segment of neutral-time space, would find the next days interesting. That observer would see an initial time line where Ted and Sally recovered four beads from under the trees at the south end of the parking lot. They took those four beads to Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport and flew to Las Vegas and drove to the site in Boulder City. After Bill Wirtz inspected the four beads, he ordered more recon shots. The observer would now see a twist in time form where Ted and Sally collected ten beads. After Bill completed the inspection of the ten beads and made two more recon shots, the observer would see a loop where Bill and Sally had returned with twelve beads.
A Twist in Time Page 14