The 9/11 Machine

by Greg Enslen

  “Paid,” Don asked. “You said you paid for a newer unit?”

  Teague smiled. “I was there for 30 days, remember. I was only gone from the warehouse in Buchanan for moments, but I was in Seattle for long enough to pick up a little of the dialect. I also sold a few of the ‘ancient’ items I had with me. The most popular item, by far, was the iPad.”

  “You had one of those?” Don asked.

  “From my original timeline. Anyway, that fetched a pretty penny, as it was a still working antique and loaded with all the original applications. The guy at their—well, I guess it was like a pawn shop or consignment store—took the iPad and handled it very gingerly, like it was from King Tut’s tomb. He said he was going to sell it to a museum.”

  The young man led them to a set of doors, where they stopped.

  “And with the money, you bought…” Don asked.

  “A new skinputer. And the fusion core. And I went back and paid the hospital bill.”

  Don turned and looked at him.

  “Fusion core?”

  Teague nodded. “Yup. We’ve back-engineered what we could from it, but it’s still years beyond our technology. But we’ll get there,” he said, smiling. “Or you will, more accurately.”

  The doors opened, and Teague and Don followed the young man out onto the dais, where dozens of other dignitaries were seated, including the mayor of New York City and several borough presidents. Arrayed in front of them, standing and filling every inch of Ground Zero and the new 9/11 memorial, was an audience of thousands—citizens, residents, people who had lost family members on 9/11, and anyone else who could crowd into the space.

  Towering above them was the first thirty floors of the new Freedom Tower. It was being built on the same site as the World Trade Center. And below the podium, in between the two halves of the audience, one of the two new memorial pools sat, filled with gurgling water that ran down into the subterranean museum that would open in early 2012.

  “Teague MacMillan and Dr. Donald Ellis of MacMillan Enterprises,” someone said over the loudspeakers. “MacMillan Enterprises oversaw construction of the 9/11 Memorial,” the voice said. The crowd applauded as Teague waved to the crowd and followed Don to their seats.

  After they were seated, Don leaned over. “So they sell fusion generators in the future? Like in a 7-11?”

  Teague looked at him as other dignitaries were introduced. “No, but the guy who bought the iPad knew he was getting a great deal. I had no use for the future currency, so I traded him for the core and the skinputer upgrade. I think he made out pretty good—I did read somewhere that those fusion cores were used to power lots of small things. I doubt they were as common as batteries, but they certainly weren’t expensive.”

  Don nodded and sat back. After a few minutes, the loudspeaker introduced the president of the United States, who stepped up to the podium from somewhere that Don couldn’t see. Teleprompters rose up out of the stage, and Obama asked for a moment of silence for the victims in the first plane to strike the World Trade Center. After a few moments, he began to speak.

  “Our nation rose to this great challenge. We were tested, but we rose to the call. In this fateful place, ten years ago today, there was only tragedy and loss, death, and mourning. But we persevered, and the struggle continued…”

  The speech continued, but Don wasn’t paying much attention—he was looking in the crowd. Finally, he spotted Sarah. Tina was standing next to her, now sixteen and almost as tall as her mother. The twins, Dylan and Abigail, were clinging to their mother, who smiled at Don and made her “this is crazy” face.

  “You took my advice,” Teague said quietly, looking at Don’s family.

  Don nodded. “Live in the now, right?”

  Teague smiled, looking around.

  “This is a nice timeline—things turned out well.”

  “I think so,” Don answered. “You did good.”

  After the speech, Ellis and Teague walked down into the crowd. Over the past ten years, Teague had been actively grooming Ellis to take over the company, so Don received almost as many congratulations and handshakes as the company founder. People seemed to really like the memorial, with the twin pools in the footprints of the fallen towers. The water fell away into darkness, an element that Don thought gave the memorial a haunting feel.

  They finally made their way through the crowd to Sarah and the kids.

  Tina hugged the older man.

  “Hi, Uncle Teague,” she said, smiling. The other kids grabbed one leg each and hugged the man they knew only as their father’s brother. Teague picked up the smaller kids, in turn, and gave them pecks on the cheek. Then he smiled at Don and leaned over to whisper in his ear.

  “You’re a lucky man, Don.”

  Don heard the sadness in his voice and looked at Teague for a long moment.

  Teague was looking at Sarah and Tina and spoke, his voice low.

  “I tried to save my timeline,” Teague said. “But that was impossible, I think. It had already happened, and now I’m the only one who remembers that world.” He looked at the other people around them in the plaza. “It’s still there, somewhere, but inaccessible, like a distant planet.”

  Don looked at him and nodded—Teague and he had talked about this often. Don had his wife and family, and Teague didn’t spend much time with them. It was just too painful—to him, they were like copies of his family.

  Or ghosts.

  “This is your family, not mine,” Teague said. “They are exact copies, mirror images, but not the same. And I could save a thousand Sarahs, and it would never be the same.”

  Teague fished out his wallet and removed a laminated scrap of paper that Don had never seen before. Carefully, he held it up for Don to read. The paper was wrinkled and yellow, sealed inside the plastic, but he recognized his wife’s handwriting immediately:

  Gone into the city to visit Elaine at the Trade Center. Be back for lunch. Tina was excited, so I took her too.

  Love you,

  Sarah

  Teague turned to leave.

  “Where are you going?” Ellis asked him. “Are you riding back with us?”

  Teague glanced up at the podium, where the president had spoken and then up at the unfinished Freedom Tower.

  “Enjoy your life, Don. Cherish your family. Live in the moment, do the things you want to do. You deserve it, and I wish you the best. But this isn’t where I belong. We both know that.”

  Teague looked up at the skyscraper under construction, then turned to look at Don. Teague opened his coat, and Don saw the edge of one of their new prototype backpack machines—they were still in the testing phase, but they allowed a person to travel through time and space.

  “She’s out there, somewhere,” Teague said, looking deep into Don’s eyes. “They both are—I know it. Maybe if I go all the way back to the original timeline, then immediately forward without changing anything, I can save her. I don’t know. I just have to figure out how to find her.”

  Don hesitated and then finally nodded in agreement.

  Teague smiled and began tapping at his left forearm. Instead of the sounds of ice shattering, these smaller machines only emitted a low, dull rumble, like distant thunder. Teague looked back up at Don and smiled.

  “Good luck,” Don said as Teague MacMillan quickly and silently faded out of existence.

  In the busy crowd, no one noticed.

  Don turned and put his arm around Sarah. She smiled and looked for Teague and saw that he was gone.

  “Where did he go?” she asked, her face close to Don’s.

  Don leaned in and kissed his wife.

  “He’s gone. I don’t think he’ll be back—he’s gone to look for her. For them.”

  Afterword

  In researching this book, I read everything I could get my hands on about 9/11/2001 and the events leading up to that day. Of course, like everyone else who was alive, I remember that day—I had actually taken the whole week off from my job at Compu
ter Sciences Corporation to get some writing done. I was working on my first book, Black Bird, and gearing up for a productive Tuesday morning when I started getting calls from my family and people at work to turn on the TV. I watched, along with everyone else, as it dawned on us what was happening—at first, people assumed the first plane into the North Tower was nothing more than a horrible accident. As the day progressed, it became obvious that we were under attack.

  I remember waiting to hear about more attacks—I was relieved when they announced on the news that the FAA had grounded all flights over the United States. At one point, I remember them reporting that an additional seven or eight planes were “missing” and unaccounted for, raising the specter of more attacks.

  The thing I remember most vividly from that day was the fact that I wanted to talk to my family and my friends. The events of that day drew our nation together and helped people better appreciate the miracle of life.

  Inevitably, as part of my research, I became immersed in most of the popular conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 9/11. One cannot research the event without running up against a huge group of people—writers, filmmakers, videographers, and bloggers—who are convinced that the “official story” is filled with too many coincidences and leaves many important questions unanswered.

  After my research, I am convinced that there was no overall conspiracy carried out on 9/11, other than that of the terrorists, working together to carry out the attacks. I do not believe that the U.S. government had any knowledge of the attacks ahead of time or that the government was, in any way, involved in planning or carrying out the attacks.

  My basis for this supposition is not that the idea sits outside the realm of possibility. I am sure something like this could be planned and carried out, but I do not think that was the case on 9/11, for one simple reason: Too many people would have to be in on the conspiracy. Thousands of government officials, airline company employees, air traffic controllers, military personnel, first responders, and medical personnel would have had to have been in on it, and no one has come forward, in over ten years, to say they know the truth.

  That does not change the fact that, in several cases, there are strange coincidences or discrepancies between the fabric of the story and common sense. In the course of the book, I have used fiction to answer some of these questions, explaining them by having Dr. Ellis have enough foreknowledge to intervene in very specific ways to reduce the number of casualties. If you are interested in reading about other 9/11 conspiracy theories or urban legends in general, try www.snopes.com as a good jumping-off point. They do a great job of summarizing most of the relevant issues.

  But as for the real-life events that took place on 9/11, who is to say that we have heard the whole truth? Maybe we have not heard the whole story of 9/11, and maybe we never will.

  The Pet Goat

  President Bush’s visit to a second-grade classroom in Florida has raised a bevy of questions around the timing and handling of the situation by the president, Secret Service, and others involved. Many in the conspiracy press have questioned the president’s behavior, pointing to a timeline where, it appears to some, the president is unconcerned about the worst terrorist attack on the United States. Here is the established timeline for the president’s visit to the second grade class in Sarasota, Florida, on that fateful morning.

  8:48 CNN and other news stations begin live reports, covering the events in New York City, beginning with the first plane crash. (Video footage of this crash would not surface until much later in the day.)

  9:00 Bush’s motorcade arrives at the school.

  9:03 Bush sits down with the class and begins a pre-planned, twenty-minute visit and photo opportunity with the students.

  9:08 Bush is told of the second plane going into the World Trade Center. He reacts calmly and remains in the room, listening to the students read The Pet Goat.

  9:10 The president asks the students several questions, smiling and chatting and unrushed. He also answers questions from the students and poses for a picture with the teacher.

  9:16 Bush leaves the classroom.

  9:29 President Bush makes a live television address.

  9:55 Air Force One takes off from Florida.

  The timeline, established by several sources, raises a few questions. Some conspiracies assume the government’s complicity in the attacks (and some even assume that the government carried out the attacks themselves) and point to the relaxed tone of the elementary school visit as proof that the president was not threatened, because the government already knew about the attacks.

  Why would the Secret Service allow the scheduled school visit to happen, if the country was evidently under attack? The Secret Service must not have been fully aware of the extent of the hijackings. Clearly, they did not perceive a threat against the president, even though there were planes unaccounted for, and the president’s visit to the school had been highly publicized and was, by at least one account, being broadcast live on local TV.

  Why did the president linger for an extra eleven minutes after being informed of the second attack? My feeling is that he was making a conscious effort to stay calm and not alarm the students or faculty.

  Bush stated that, while waiting to go into the classroom and meet with the students, he was watching a TV and saw the first plane hit the North Tower. Critics point out that he could not have seen the first plane strike, because that video evidence did not appear until much later on the same day. If he had seen the first plane strike, then it is a video or recording that no one else has seen in the past ten years or the government was somehow involved, and an agency of the government was recording the events. Therefore, he must be talking about the second plane strike—but if that is the case, then why did Andrew Card enter the classroom several minutes later, and what did he tell the president? And if the president was aware of the first and second plane strikes on the World Trade Center, why did he linger at the school?

  Doesn’t the president remaining in the elementary school endanger the very lives of the students and the 2,000 other students and faculty in the building? Another question raised about this delay, points out that the president stated that he did not want to alarm the students. If the president and Secret Service were truly concerned about the students, surely it would be better to leave the school, making it less of target. For safety’s sake, the students could also have been evacuated from the school—at the time, no one was sure how many planes had actually been hijacked.

  World Trade Center and

  Building 7

  In my fiction, I have architects working for MacMillan retrofit and improve safety and evacuation procedures from the World Trade Center by winning the post-1993 attacks contracts, allowing many more people to be quickly and safely evacuated from the buildings in the time between the plane strikes and the collapse. In fact, there is no evidence that systems were upgraded.

  Why weren’t there more casualties at the World Trade Center? By a series of happy accidents, there were only 20,000 people working in the towers when the planes struck. Had the attacks happened later in the day, there would have been upwards of 50,000 employees working in the towers. Because the planes struck very early in the day, many people had not arrived at work yet, and there were few shoppers in the expansive mall at the World Trade Center under the towers. And a primary was being held that day, so many people had stopped to vote on the way to work.

  What knocked down WTC Building 7? Building 7 of the World Trade Center was a 47-story steel-framed skyscraper located over 350 feet away from the North Tower. The official NIST reports say that WTC 7 fell after being severely damaged by portions of the North Tower that fell onto Building 7. The 9/11 Commission Report stated that raging fires inside WTC 7 caused it to collapse at 5:20 p.m., several hours after the North and South Towers collapsed. When the building fell straight down in what looked like a controlled demolition, neither of the buildings on either side of it were damaged. A state-of-the-art Emergen
cy Command Center for the City of New York was located on the twenty-third floor, yet the mayor chose to set up a makeshift, temporary command center at street level.

  Did someone order the building destroyed? One of the most curious aspects of the WTC 7 story is a comment made by the building owner, Larry Silverstein. During a PBS documentary titled America Rebuilds, which aired originally in September 2002, he recounts what happened:

  “I remember getting a call from the fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life. Maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made the decision to pull, and we watched the building collapse.”

  I am not sure how else to interpret this other than the building was in fact “pulled,” the industry term for a controlled and intentional demolition. Although it normally takes weeks of planning to carry out a controlled demolition, I suppose it is possible to assume that the FDNY was able to bring down the building, but it takes a huge leap of faith.

  Hardened Pentagon

  By most accounts, there were about 20,000 people working in the Pentagon when Flight 175 struck.

  Why weren’t there more casualties at the Pentagon? By an amazing coincidence, the Pentagon had indeed been undergoing the series of structural upgrades described in the book. Amazingly, the hijacked airliner struck Wedge One, the only portion of the Pentagon that had been upgraded with reinforced concrete, new blast-proof windows, and improved construction techniques. The construction techniques used in the rest of the building dated to World War II, and if the plane had struck anywhere else in the building, casualties would have been much higher. As it was, only 125 Pentagon employees were killed that day.