by James Renner
And then there was a fabulous breakthrough in 2022, in the study of the properties of light, and I came really close to solving Katy’s murder. A scientist at MIT had invented a method to slow down photons. Actually, she was able to not only slow down light, she found she could stop it … and reverse it. I took a sabbatical from the paper and, through a grant from a wealthy upper-crust Manhattan family who had reason to thank me for the revival of their patriarch’s cold case—a story for another day—I was able to work alongside the scientist and her team as they developed a practical application for their discovery. After many nights, I proposed the idea for the first Light Collar, a device that has now become a standard tool for homicide detectives. If the scientists could capture light they produced in a lab, I figured they could modify their instrumentation to capture light in the field. What they built was a sort of collar, about the size of a dinner plate, which could be bolted together and taken apart. It could be wrapped around an existing beam of light. Can you see the importance of such a contraption for my obsession? Let me explain. You see, I knew Katy had been abducted in front of Big Fun in Coventry, a toy shop with big floor-to-ceiling windows out front. We rigged the collar to wrap around the light reflected off the glass. Its digital innards relayed a feed to a nearby computer, which converted the patterns of light pulled back through it as images, frames, pictures. Essentially, we were able to play back the reflections. We saw images of people and cars and bugs moving by the window up to five years in the past, back to the point when management had replaced the window. It was very promising. We tried every window in nearby shops. But the furthest back we ever saw was 2009.
I became depressed after this failure. I was no longer a young man. More than half my life had been spent chasing a killer who eluded me and, I’m sure, laughed at every article and book I wrote about the crime. I had sacrificed any real life for myself. Though I had been married three times, none of the women I brought home accepted my obsession. Each eventually became jealous of the time I devoted to Katy. I don’t blame them. I know it was unhealthy. Believe me, I have tried to stop. I have.
Then I heard of a man named Tanmay Gupta, an entomologist from Case Western, who, through studying the unique chemical reactions that take place within cicadas during their seventeen-year hibernation underground, developed the first viable method of sustained human stasis. He had a simple shot that could put a person into a deep sleep indefinitely and another shot, an antidote, if you will, that woke the person back up. During the hibernation, the body’s metabolism slowed down so that it only needed about fifteen thousand calories a year to survive. Gupta was funded by an eccentric entrepreneur who owned several underwater hotels and properties in the Gulf of Mexico, but whose secret love had always been outer space. Anyway, this weirdo, on live iRis, injected himself with Gupta’s cocktail, immersed himself in a sealed vat of protein goop, and pointed his private shuttle toward a star thirty-five light-years away that may—and I stress may—have a planet roughly the size of earth rotating around it. If he makes a return trip, he won’t be back for two hundred years. After his ship passed Pluto, most people lost interest.
When I learned of Gupta’s discovery, and watched the launch on my iRis, I thought about another theory that was the big to-do of the physics world at the time. For a century, we had accepted that the universe had begun at the Big Bang and was enormous, but finite. For instance, if some matter was ejected from the epicenter of the Big Bang at near the speed of light, and we know the Big Bang was about fifteen billion years ago, the universe must be something like thirty billion light-years across, if matter is somewhat evenly dispersed. But a growing number of theoretical scientists were suggesting the physics during the first moments of creation allowed for an infinitely large universe. And, in physics, infinite is the magic word. With infinity, you get all kinds of cool things. In an infinitely large universe, where matter and energy are arranged in infinite ways, there must be worlds out there not just like our own, but mirror images of our own. Think of the old cliché, if there were an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters, one of those monkeys would be writing the collected plays of Shakespeare. If the universe is infinite, there is an earth out there in which Katy’s murder has been solved—or, even better, has not yet played out. With Gupta’s discovery, it might only be a matter of finding that lost world. Unfortunately, on earth, our vision is limited by the speed of light—we only see fifteen billion light-years in any direction. In an infinite universe, chances were that the earth on which Katy’s murder had not yet occurred was beyond that horizon.
Blah, blah, blah, science, science, science, right? I know. I was always a writer, not a physicist. My mind got bogged down in the details, too. But I had many years to study these theories and I was bent on finding a solution at any cost.
A few weeks after my fifty-eighth birthday, in the summer of 2036, I learned of a man named Victor Tesla. Tesla was a distant begotten decedent, or so he claimed, of Nikola Tesla, who designed some weird electromagnetic wonders around the turn of the twentieth century. Victor Tesla was a scientist and protégé of a theoretical physicist named Ronald Mallett. In 2019, Mallett and his team had attempted to send a single neutron five minutes into the past. While the project was an inspiring success, the energy requirements appeared too great a hurdle for any large-scale device. Tesla had solved the problem, he claimed, in an interview with the Times. He was set to make a major announcement in the new issue of Science. As luck would have it, Tesla’s lab was located in Ohio, not far from where I grew up.
It took some doing, but I convinced my editor to let me write the profile that would be appearing on the Slipstreams, Sunday, beamed to five billion iRises instantly.
* * *
The drive to Tesla’s lab took me farther north than I’d traveled in many years, into that part of Ohio between Akron and Cleveland that had come to be called the Scrubber Barrens.
The roads were empty. What was once Interstate 77, a six-lane highway, had surrendered to nature. It had become a two-lane road of sparse gravel thrown atop cracked blacktop. Gargantuan Russian thistle grew like green cliffs on either side. There were no trees. They had been replaced by endless fields of more efficient Lockheed Scrubbers: man-made towers as tall and wide as redwoods with branches of triangular nanofilters that scrubbed the carbon dioxide from the air and replaced it with breathable oxygen. The government had reclaimed this land after the Fed foreclosed on Cleveland and five other failing cities in order to avoid another countrywide depression in 2019. President Boehner had likened it to amputating a limb to save the body. The state evicted the entire city. Refugees moved south, into Akron, Columbus, Marietta, disappearing into patches of clapboard slums wherever they finally landed. Demolition crews leveled houses and factories all along the east side, replacing them with fields and fields of these hauntingly mechanized trees.
Where the exit sign to Independence once stood, a dirty marker hung crooked on a single bolt. NEW CLEVELAND, COMING 2027, it read. But Cleveland was never coming back. Too expensive to clean up. It was a vacant wasteland now, like Detroit and Baltimore, lost to the excesses of the twentieth century, its only inhabitants vermin—animal and human. Though there was no sign advertising Tesla’s lab, I turned off here, and headed due east along a winding dirt access road set between rows of scrubbers. Their nanofilters fluttered like synchronized leaves.
My car was so quiet I could hear those damned scrubbers doing their thing above me. Shooshshooshshooshshoosh. The Barrens creeped me out, to tell the truth. It was like they were telling me to be quiet. I hated driving up there. I always had the feeling these machines were aware of my presence. They were too big. They would still be standing, scrubbing up the greenhouse gases we put there, long after we humans had finally managed to completely destroy ourselves. That seemed to make them condescending somehow.
Tesla’s lab, a sprawling warehouse that had once been a post office, appeared over a rise. Mounted sur
veillance cams captured my approach. As I neared, a gate opened and shut behind me. Two men sat on stools inside a guardhouse, watching some reality show on an old wall screen.
I parked in the lot and strapped on my old leather satchel, which held my earwig, voice recorders, notepad (mostly for show), and a few other items I needed for this particular interview.
It occurred to me that there was a real chance I would die here.
I thought that was acceptable.
* * *
“Mr. Neff, it’s a real pleasure to meet you,” said Victor Tesla, taking my hand and pumping it three times. He was a harsh-looking character with ebon eyes and a jutting chin so sharp it could cut meat. He had dressed the part, with a long white lab coat.
“Pleasure’s mine, Mr. Tesla,” I said, meaning it.
“I can’t wait to show you my egg,” he said. “You’re the first civilian to see my presentation. Please, come with me.”
He led me through a set of double doors at the back of the marble entryway and into a gallery that reeked of ozone and roses, of sterility masked by human comfort. Tesla’s assistant, a waif of a woman named Ilsa, glided behind. She wore an earwig and occasionally muttered to it as she recorded our meeting for the lab’s legal team. The gallery was high-ceilinged and sparse in décor. A military-issue gunmetal-gray desk sat to one side, topped with neatly piled paperwork. A new Apple Boomerang hung suspended in the air above, relaying the day’s local news feed. The center of the gallery was occupied by a pedestal that looked quite Draconian in this tech-heavy setting, a squat Doric column. Above this objet d’art rested a wide circular mount made of heavy metal with tiny displays of some sort set into its rim.
“Not quite what I expected,” I said.
Tesla laughed. “The greatest inventions tend to be underwhelming, at first glance,” he said.
“What do you imagine Einstein would think of Tesla’s Egg?”
“He’d have a coronary,” said Tesla. “Come.” He ushered me to the pedestal and motioned for me to set down my satchel on a chair beside it. He cleared his throat and adjusted his coat as if preparing to pose for a picture. Perhaps he thought I did that sort of thing. “Would you care to hear a little of my history and how I came to work for Professor Mallett? It is a long story, but I believe a necessary one if you are to understand my inspiration.”
I held up my hand. “If you don’t mind, could I see a demonstration first? I’d hate for your life story to prejudice my expectations.”
“Of course, of course,” he said. He pointed at the empty space above the circular contraption. “The egg is there. Probably.”
My heart sank. Another crazy. I’d been here many times during my relentless and damnable search. I never expected this scientist, whose credentials appeared solid, to be part of the company of madmen and psychics who pretended to know the unknowable.
“Do you believe?” he asked.
“No,” I said shortly.
He shook his head. “You must believe. Otherwise the egg will never appear.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think you’ve got the wrong reporter. I don’t have time for this.” I turned from him and started to leave.
“What we’re talking about here, Mr. Neff, is intentionality. Your intention, your faith in your future actions, is key to this little experiment we’re conducting.”
I stopped. “Intentionality?” Once, a millennium ago, it seemed, I had argued against intentionality with this man’s mentor.
“Mr. Neff,” he said. “You have to decide now that you will, no matter what, follow my instructions to the letter, no matter how bizarre. Nothing will hurt you. I promise. Just a few simple steps. If you decide now to follow the instructions, I guarantee you that the egg will appear.”
I looked back at the pedestal. It was still empty.
“Will you do as I say for the next five minutes?”
After all these years, what was five more minutes?
Tesla smiled. He reached toward the empty space above the pedestal. When his fingers crossed the top of the circular disc, something odd happened to the air there. It wrinkled. It bent. Suddenly there was a loud POP! as if a pistol had fired. Then a louder one. Then the rippling abruptly ended and standing motionless in the center of the disc was a black egg, about the size of a goose’s egg.
“There,” said Tesla.
“What…” I began but could not get my words in order.
Tesla reached out and took the egg. But didn’t. Or did. All I knew for sure was that Tesla now held an egg in one hand, while another remained atop the pedestal. It was as if one egg had suddenly become two.
“Listen closely,” he said. “In a few seconds I will ask you to walk over to my desk and open the top drawer. In that drawer is the egg. It has been there all day. You will bring the egg over to this pedestal. Then”—and here Tesla handed me a device that looked like a garage door opener—“you will push this button. The button is what turns the egg on. When the egg is turned on, it stops moving forward through time and begins to exist—that is, to move—backward through time. Go now.”
I was numb. For just a second I could not move. Then I pulled myself forward and toward the man’s desk. There, in the top drawer, was what looked like a third black egg. I picked it up. It was heavier than I had expected. Dense. And shiny.
“Come here,” he said.
I did as told, carrying the egg in one hand and crossing the room slowly, mindful of any small bump in the concrete floor that might cause me to trip.
“Place the egg on the pedestal,” he said.
“But there’s already an egg on the pedestal.”
Tesla shook his head. “It’s the same egg, silly. Not to worry. It will exist in wave form until you place the egg on the pedestal. There will be no crashing of eggs and eggs dropping to the floor.”
I didn’t understand what he was saying, exactly, but I had promised to follow his instructions and so I gently reached out with the egg toward the other already there. As I felt they were about to touch, I watched the two merge together, as if the one on the pedestal were but a hologram of an egg. I let go. Two eggs had become one. But Tesla still held a black egg in his hand.
“Now turn it on,” he said, looking at the remote in my hand.
I pushed the button and suddenly there was no egg on the pedestal. I felt a wind rushing to the point at which it had recently been, the air filling up the void it had created when it disappeared. The only one that remained—in fact, the only one that had ever existed—was in Tesla’s hand. He held it out to me. I accepted it. It appeared to be the same black egg.
“Explain,” I said.
“Professor Mallett hypothesized that he could send information back in time. Think of it as two tin cans attached by string. One tin can in the past. One in the future. Someone in the future may “talk” to the person on that phone in the past and relay information. Essentially, that is what Mallett’s invention was, a telephone to the past that sent neutrons as information, something like binary code. The problem, of course, is the information can only be sent as far back as the machine was turned on. So, no calling Mr. Lincoln and telling him to skip the play.
“I surmised that perhaps a machine could be made to exist backward through time, like those neutrons. A machine built of those neutrons. A car instead of a telephone. Something that only needed a relatively little push of energy to send it in the right direction. It required the discovery and understanding of gravitational particles, of course, which Mallett never had access to. Look. When you turn the egg on, a field is generated around it. The egg becomes the message you send back in time. All you have to do to make the egg exist forward in time again is to turn it off. I have designed this one to turn off by touch.”
I blinked and tried to process the mash of words he was stringing together.
“Let me explain what you witnessed in the chronology of the egg,” he said. “The egg is picked up by you from my desk and is brought over to this ped
estal. You turn on its field. Boom! The egg reverses its direction in time. To us, it’s as if it disappeared because we are continuing down the highway of time at the same speed we always traveled, whereas the egg just shot into reverse.
“It stops moving backward when I touch it and again travels forward like us—this is when it seemed to us that the egg magically appeared. For a moment, there are two eggs occupying the same space. But one is in wave form. Think of it like two windows on your computer’s desktop overlapping each other. They’re both there. But you only see one until you pick it up, and then you see two. The egg that appeared to remain on the pedestal was, in fact, the egg you would eventually place there, already traveling backward through time.
“It’s like this,” said Tesla, withdrawing from his pocket a long piece of string. “This is the natural flow of time. The past over here”—he jiggled his right hand—“to the future over here”—he jiggled his left. Then he twisted a loop in the middle. “This is the black egg’s progression through time. Any questions?”
“It’s hard to think about,” I said.
“It is,” he agreed. “And harder to see, but there it is. You have witnessed time travel.”
“So what you’re saying is that we really could go back and warn Mr. Lincoln about his assassination if we wanted?”
“Well, yes and no. First you would need a much bigger egg. One that was big enough for a human being, right?” Tesla’s eyes drifted over my shoulder for a second before he continued. I had interviewed enough people to know what that look meant, but I let him continue. “You don’t want to just send a letter back for something that important. What if it got lost? There is another problem. You move backward in time at the same speed we move forward in time. You would have to be in that egg for, what? A hundred and seventy years. Not only could you not pack enough provisions, you could not live that long. You would grow into an old man inside that egg. Short-term problems? Yes. Perhaps we could fix those. But I’m afraid Mr. Lincoln will remain dead.