by Mark Harritt
The night moved on, to the sound of insects, wind rustling through the grass, the smell of coffee and roasting bird.
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The next morning, Rob found Bobby McFarland. With Bobby’s help, they searched the internet pages to find what was nagging at Rob. Rob was a smart guy, with one hell of a memory. He had a ninety percent retention of everything he read. Last night, when he looked at the moon, he remembered something that he learned in an elective astrophysics class about the solar system.
Once he found the information that he was looking for, and did the calculations, he brought the information to Mike and Everett. Mike, being the mathematician of the group, ran Rob’s calculations again. Mike wasn’t happy with the results. Rob’s calculations were correct. Mike approached Pang and Jondreau. They in turn talked to Colonel Mitchem, Dr. Randall, Major Nosstrand, Bob Leitz, Dr. Humphreys, and Dr. Nachman. A meeting time was set. They all came up to the surface. What Rob had to say was important, and, if spread through the facility without proper socialization, could cause major problems. When everybody was topside, the crowd moved out into the meadow. Tom and Mickey were on guard to ensure that nobody walked to the crowd and interrupted. Rob Stein was inside the mech armor on watch.
Mike started, “First, I want to thank you for coming out when we asked.” Mitchem and Randall didn’t look happy, but when did they ever. When they heard there may be an explanation about where they were, they reluctantly agreed to come out. Mike didn’t think he would ever get them on his side. He really didn’t care, but he needed everybody’s support, to include Mitchem and Randall.
“I wonder if Mitchem knows about his new nickname,” he thought, “Probably. Kind of hard to avoid it.”
Dr. Nachman spoke, “Well, if you have an explanation for how we got here, then I think everybody is willing to listen.”
Major Nosstrand spoke, “And if we find out how we got here, maybe we can figure out how to get back.”
Mike paused for a moment, “Well, we’ll see.”
He continued, “Since its Rob’s theory, I’m just going to let him talk.”
The group looked at Rob with anticipation. He cleared his throat, “Well, I don’t know if any of you know anything about the moon and its relationship with earth,” He held up his hand as a few looked ready to speak, “Ah, just let me finish, then we can go ahead and talk about it in general.” They settled down, and he continued, “We took some pictures of the moon face last night, and this moon is our moon. There are some new scars on the face, but you have the same craters, and the dark spots from its early history. They correspond with the same spots we have on our moon. So I can say with high probability it is our moon.”
Bob asked, “So, this means that we’re in a parallel universe or something?”
Rob answered, “Well, more ‘or something’ than parallel universe.”
The crowd looked confused so he continued, “What a lot of people don’t know about the moon is, due to tidal forces, and the transfer of angular momentum from the earth to the moon, the moon is actually moving away from the earth a small distance, about one and one half inches per year.”
Mitchem spoke, “What does that have to do with anything?”
Rob continued, “Well, due to this energy and momentum being transferred to the moon, the earth’s rotation is actually slowing down, a few milliseconds every year.”
They didn’t connect the facts.
Rob broke it to them, “The earth’s rotation right now is about thirty three hours, which means that we have an additional nine hours added to our day.”
It connected to the ones with the science backgrounds. Groans sounded, ripped from the people that caught on. Bob sagged to the ground, squatting as he put his hands over his face. Dr. Nachman leaned back, looking up at the sky, his arms folded against his chest.
Major Nosstrand looked like she was going to throw up.
Mitchem, since he was more of an administrator than a scientist or engineer, looked confused, “What the hell is going on?”
Randall looked at him like at Mitchem as if he was a child. Randall looked at Rob, “Have you done the math? How long?”
Rob looked very unhappy as he nodded at the question, “Yeah, I did the calculations. And since Mike is a mathematician, I had him run them as well. Nine hundred thousand to a billion years.”
Mitchem was really confused now, “A billion years for what? What the hell are you all talking about?”
Mike took pity on him and explained, “It means, that we’re about nine hundred thousand or a billion years into the future from our time.”
Mitchem’s face cratered, “How is that possible? That isn’t possible? How could that happen?”
Mike looked at all of the scientists before him, “I don’t know. I was hoping that one of you might.” All he saw was confusion on the faces around him. “Look, you’re the people that created the quantum computers. You created the batteries that seem to suck energy out of nothing, quantum batteries that create energy by tapping into the vibration of quarks. So, since you’re messing with the basic laws of physics, I wonder if one of you knows something about what’s happened to us.”
Mike looked at Nachman, “I hear that you did of work with some physicists for the quantum battery that we use in the mech armor and the big battery that is running the facility.”
Nachman nodded slowly, “Yes, but that couldn’t do this.”
Mike asked, “Do you know of anything that they were proposing that might have touched on this?”
Nachman thought, “Well, I helped with the structures that they needed to tap into the quantum fields. The only thing that I can think of was a discussion on the quantum Zeno effect, the Turing paradox, stochastic systems, and the Bekenstein bound.”
Mike thought, “Great, I have no idea what the hell that might be.”
Mike spoke, “This was pertaining to what?”
Nachman said, “Well, they were trying to figure out how to keep the mech armor from being defeated by large energy delivery systems.”
“Energy systems? Like what?”
“They knew that the enemy would try to figure out how to defeat the mech armor. One of the ways they thought this might happen is if somebody figured out a way to pulse a large amount of energy at the armor to defeat the graphene fibers. They wanted to defeat or channel those pulses away from the armor.”
The group stood and thought about this for a moment. Pang was the first to break the silence, “Well, a nuclear attack is a large pulse of energy. Were they trying to figure out how to defeat a pulse of energy that big?”
Nachman slowly shook his head, “I don’t know. I know they were thinking about every type of battlefield conditions that the armor might run into. This was all theoretical, however.”
Bob added, “Yeah, and two years ago, quantum computing was a theory. Then we had the quantum computer and they figured out the quantum battery. What the hell else would they be able to figure out with the help of a quantum computer?”
Mitchem spoke up, “There’s no place that it could be. We only have the quantum battery and quantum servers for our computers in the facility. That plus all of the fabrication equipment. We don’t have anything else.”
Mike thought about Jamison, “Would Jamison put anything in the facility without telling you?”
Mitchem thought for a second and replied, “Well, he couldn’t put it in. Smith, Crandall, and Weitz would have to help get everything put into place. They designed all the systems in the facility.”
Pang spoke, “Then let’s go ask them if there’s anything we should know about.”
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They called and got Luis Garcia and John Smith to come up for a conference. Luis and John were the main electrical engineers that designed the systems of the Area 19 facility. Before they climbed the ladder to come upstairs, John sent another tech to find Josh Weitz and tell him to come up. The two men wa
lked out to where the group was standing. Since so many people were out of the cave for such a long time, Tom climbed into his mech armor and moved forward to cover for them.
Luis was in front of John when they walked out. He greeted everybody and then asked, “So, what’s up?” John caught up and said hello, then listened as Mike started asking questions.
“We were wondering if anything has been installed recently in the facility.”
Luis thought, “Such as? I mean, we install new computers, servers, work on upgrading the electronics, put new things into the mech armor. I need a little bit more to go on.”
Mitchem spoke, “Something that may be unusual, or different than what you have done in the past.”
Luis thought, and then John spoke, “Well, we did do that upgrade to the servers.”Luis agreed, “Yeah, we received some new components that had to be added to the main servers.”
Mike looked at Mitchem, “Did you authorize this?”
“Authorize it? No, I didn’t even know that there was going to be an upgrade.”
Bob was facing towards the cave, “Hey there’s Josh. If there was a computer upgrade, he would know about it.”
Josh came over, unhappy that he was there, his petulant teenager persona in the forefront. Mike wondered how he had ever kept a job back in the world. Mitchem, unwilling to deal with his whining, cut to the chase, “Josh, has any kind of system upgrade been done to the computers?”
Josh shook his head, “Upgrade, no. No upgrades were authorized through me. There are no upgrades available right now. They were talking about some new capabilities they discovered that were going to be incorporated into the new system next year, but not right now.”
Smith looked at Garcia, “Then what the hell did we install?”
Mike asked, “Who told you to add the new equipment to the computer?”
Weitz looked concerned, “Wait, what, somebody added more equipment to the computer? What the hell, nobody ran the specs by me.”
Smith turned to Weitz, “Well, there was a box on the third floor, and Jamison came down and told us that we needed to add it to the existing servers.”
Weitz spoke, “This didn’t come through me. I haven’t seen anything new, no additional traffic or energy spikes on my diagnostics.”
Mike thought, and said, “I think we all need to go downstairs and take a look at the computer system.”
The group agreed. It took a while, and in hindsight, Mike should have just held the meeting downstairs. It was much easier to get physically fit soldiers down than it was to get out of shape scientists up the ladder. Rob stayed upstairs, with Everett. As the group walked past the cots in the play room, he looked at Jamison, who was drooling and muttering to himself and thought, “What do you know, you crazy bastard.” Jamison couldn’t move the left side of his body. Joan Nosstrand saw the direction of his gaze, “it has to be a tumor. I don’t think that anything else could be affecting him like this. He’s lost a lot of motor function.”
They walked on past to the stairwell, following Mitchem and the Brain Trust upstairs. They navigated the stairs to the third floor. This was going to be the first time Mike saw the battery that was running the facility and the servers that ran all the software. He was disappointed when he saw what was actually in the room. Luis pointed out the different components to the group. There were racks of electronic and computer transmission equipment. It only took up a quarter of the room. The racks were right up against the back wall, and next to it was a cube that was about three feet on all sides. Electrical cables led to it. Evidently that was all that was needed for the quantum battery. Next to it was a narrower cube, maybe two feet wide and a foot and a half deep, also about the same height as the quantum battery, with computer on top of it. Along one side of the quantum computer was a smaller panel that was removed. A power cable was plugged in, and about twenty fiber cables led from it to the computer racks that held the transmission equipment.
Weitz walked forward, “What the hell is that?”
Garcia replied, “That’s what Jamison had us install.”
Weitz looked at the cube on the floor. Compared to the elegant quantum battery and the quantum computer, it was a behemoth. It was six feet long, Four feet wide and five feet tall. It was in the same type of black graphene cabinet that the other two were in. It had no power source. It only had a single USB cable running from it to the quantum computer.
The group of people looked at them and watched as the three engineers conferred.
Weitz continued, “Was there any paperwork, anything that could tell you what the hell this thing is?”
Smith nodded. He walked over to a desk and grabbed a thin book and then gave it to Weitz.
Weitz opened up the book, “What the hell is a null generator?”
He looked up at everybody else, “Does anybody know what a null generator is?”
Bob answered, “I don’t know, but in light of what we have experienced, I don’t like the name.”
Mike spoke, “Can you please disconnect that damn thing to ensure that we don’t suddenly end up floating in space on a charred planet as the sun explodes?”
Nachman said, “We don’t even know if that’s what got us here.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to take any chances. I don’t know what a null generator is, but I think, if you people don’t know what the hell it does, I would prefer it be unplugged.”
Weitz raised his hand, index finger pointed towards the ceiling, “Wait, I want to check something.”
He walked over to the computer, and started to run some programs.
“Okay, I think I found the code when you plugged it in. Was it on Monday, the 13th?”
Smith and Garcia both nodded their heads in the affirmative. Luis replied, “Yeah, that was the date.”
Mike thought about the date. That was after the Saturday he and his team unloaded the truck and brought the equipment downstairs. He mentioned that to the group.
Mitchem started talking, “So, Jamison used people that aren’t ordinarily used to unload the truck, and he didn’t tell Josh that this piece of equipment would be plugged in.” He breathed in deeply and then exhaled, “What the hell.”
Weitz kept looking at the information on the screen. He spoke, “Well, it looks like, a few days ago, right when we experienced the incident, the null generator suddenly had a spike of activity. A command was sent to it, then it started gathering some additional information.”
Mitchem asked, “What information?”
“Telemetry information, about missiles.” Josh looked some more, “actually about missiles heading towards our location. Then there was no more information.”
Josh looked up, “I think we were cut off from everything after that. No more information was available.”
The group thought about this. Mitchem spoke, “It sounds like it was monitoring to find out if we were about to be hit, then it did whatever it does. Then we ended up here.”
Mike looked at Humphreys and Nosstrand, “If Jamison becomes lucid, you might want to talk to him about this.” They both nodded. Mike had another idea. He looked at Weitz, “Can you read the emails of Jamison?”
Weitz looked at Mitchem, for permission. Mitchem nodded.
“Yeah, I can do that. What are you looking for?”
Mike answered, “Anything that can tell us what the hell that thing does.”
Weitz nodded.
Mike looked at the group, “Now, I need to talk to you about moving.”
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They were reluctant to move. Everybody was hoping that there was some way that they would be able to stay. Their situation was untenable, though. Mike used the recorded battles between his team and the dragons. He had Bobby pull up the files on the big screen TV in the play room so that he could run the last battle past the entire group.
“Now look, right there, that large bastard. And that’s not the largest one out there, according to M.A. He said that
there are bigger ones. If they were fighting each other, I wouldn’t have a problem, but you notice back on this recording,” He switched back to the recording from the first fight with the three dragons, “They cooperate, when something attacks them, or if they go into hunting mode. If we run into two or three of them like that big male that fell on me, we may not survive the encounter.”
Smiles broke out at that memory. Mike continued, “Yeah, pretty funny, but it highlights one thing. It took three of us to take that damn big ass lizard out, and it put one of us, me, out of commission. God forbid, but what if there are more than three.” He had their attention now, “Truth is, we’re running out of ammunition. I only have thirty-five rounds of .50 caliber, and ten rounds of .338 Lapua left. As for the .308 or .556, that just tickles them. We need to find more iron for the rail guns. Now, that isn’t a problem, because we have plenty of rebar in this building. So, we can wreck the rebar out for the metal. And we can use some of your more esoteric building materials for wherever we end up at. We need a place where we can hunker down, and fortify. Maybe we can find a place that is naturally fortified.”
He got arguments from the scientists and techs. They couldn’t find any weaknesses in his arguments, though. They finally conceded that he had a point, but it took a while to get to get there. They just couldn’t stay here. Now that they were convinced, he came up with a plan.
They couldn’t just move. They had to have a place to go. He sent Rob out with Matki Awrani, Pang, Murph and Joseph for the scout team. Since Rob was a construction and structural engineer, he was the best fit for the mission. Rob drove his mech for team over watch. They went into the mountains to find a new home. Lenny created an app, with Weitz’s help, that translated between English and M.A.’s language. They were out scouting for two weeks before they came back.
In that time, Mike suited up three times to kill dragons. Luckily, they came in as singles. Then they fought and killed ten grasnigs that smelled food and came hunting. There were as many as three in a pack, and they never came with less than two of the beasts hunting. The large predators kept coming. Soon, even the people that were griping about moving started to realize that their position was untenable. Trips up and down the ladder to defecate and urinate enforced this realization.