by M. L. Banner
“Based on what Einstein postulated this must take a ton of power, far more than just what the accelerator requires.” Monty shot a look up to the ceiling’s giant power cables. His eyes closed for just a second, enough time to do the mental calculations. “How the hell did you get the okay to pull power from the grid?”
“I didn’t.”
Chapter 4
Aug 9 (19:23)
Simon Ransacker punched the number on his desk phone, and heard it ringing on the other end. He waited for an answer, impatiently gnawing on his cigar.
The other end picked up, and the recording began playing immediately. “Thank you for calling the laboratory of Stoneridge Research. If you’re calling during laboratory hours, we are busy changing the world. Please leave a message—”
He slammed the phone down, severing the connection.
For the fourth time in as many days, the Dallas-Fort Worth grid had almost gone down. The first two times occurred the morning of the 5th, and the third in the wee hours of the 7th, and those had been somewhat of a mystery. Earlier today, his team traced these to the University of Texas and some research being done there. They had received the okay from ERCOT for a one-time draw from the grid, but the other one on the 5th and the one two days later were unsanctioned. Plus, they certainly had underestimated their power usage in their waiver proposal. Then, twelve hours ago, another power drain, worse than the other three, pulled over 50% of the entire grid’s power. This time his team had a name to pin on the guilty party: Dr. Ronald Stoneridge. And this time Stoneridge had gone too far. It was one thing to exceed the limit during a research project and extend the research past the end-time specified on the waiver. It was another to blatantly break the law, like that jerk just did. “And on one of the hottest days of the summer… That just chaps my hide.” He threw his half-chewed cigar against the wall.
Now that he knew who the culprit was, he wanted to confront him before going to the authorities. He wanted to know what this Dr. Stoneridge was doing with all this power. More important now, he had to stop him from taking any more before the stupid bastard brought the entire Dallas-Fort Worth grid down.
“You are in for a shit-storm now, my friend,” Ransacker grinned while banging in the phone number of the person who would bring this shit-storm down on top of Dr. Stoneridge.
“Ransacker? That you?” yelled the voice on the other end.
“Sir, we have a 52% power drain caused by some crazy scientist at UT who doesn’t have waivers. Do I have your authority to call the DPD Chief and cut him off before he brings the grid down?”
“Sonofabitch! Are you sure Ransacker?”
“Yes, sir. I’m 100% sure.”
“Who is it?”
“A Doctor Ronald Stoneridge from Stoneridge Research.”
A long silence was broken by the sound of the phone on the other end being dropped.
“Sir, are you all right?”
“Eh, yah, I’m here. Better give me the details then. I’ll make the call. Good work, Ransacker.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Chapter 5
Aug 9 (21:10)
“Yes.” The man who had no name answered his cell and lowered the volume of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor so he could hear better.
“I need you to speed up the job,” said a hurried voice filled with nervous energy.
“When?”
“Tonight!”
“My price just doubled, then.” The man tossed that out immediately.
The other person hesitated for just a moment. “Money’s no object. Just get it done.”
“The doctor will be removed tonight, then.”
“And the data from his computers?”
“As agreed.”
“Fine. Just be sure—”
The man ended the conversation with a click and tossed his phone onto his bedside table.
“Continue, but be quick. I have to work tonight,” he told the prostitute, who smiled at him, and then fixed her gaze downward and hurriedly unzipped his pants.
The man responded with an extra measure of pressure on the remote’s volume up button. The sonorous voices of the choir filled every space of his hotel room. They reached climax with their “Amen”, just before he did.
Chapter 6
Aug 9 (21:20)
“You want to do what?” Monty bellowed almost hysterically. Dr. Ron and he had just completed their analysis of the drone’s data. It operated perfectly and sent back almost a terabyte of data. After seeing the portal in person and reviewing the data, it seemed conclusive enough: they really could generate a time portal, or what Dr. Ron referred to as a time slip to the future. That’s when Dr. Ron told Monty his immediate plans to go forward in time to save his Betsy.
“We’re going to send me forward in time by five years. Then you’re going to send another drone forward in approximately three months, and maybe one more—assuming you have time—another three months after that. With a little luck, one of those two times, I will find a way to get you the information Betsy’s physician will need.”
“You mean a cure for her cancer?”
“Yes.”
“Aside from the obvious moral problems with what you are asking me to do, how do you expect to come back?” As soon as Monty asked this, he realized the answer: his friend wasn’t coming back.
“You know this is a one-way trip since we established that you can only move forward in time.”
“So, all of this about needing someone to provide testimony before you publish your paper is crap, isn’t it? You just need me to be your messenger boy, to communicate with your brother-in-law for you.”
“You know it’s more than that.” Ron’s voice rose as desperation set in; without Monty’s help, the plan wouldn’t work. “Yes, this is the real reason I asked you to join me in these experiments. I not only needed someone I could trust, I needed someone to send in the probes, and…”
“…deal with the consequences, like the police, who you said would probably be coming soon to shut this down?”
“Monty, I am really sorry to throw this on you, but I have no other choice. And if I have to—”
“Dammit Ron, don’t even say it or you’re going to piss me off more than I already am. I know you know me well enough. So regardless of what I say, you’re going to jump through, knowing that I’ll be forced to help you or your jump will be for nothing and I will be in some way responsible for your wife’s death.”
The two men sat in silence, looking at the work table, covered with printouts and their pages of notes.
“So how do you know this will work?”
Dr. Ron considered divulging the images he had seen of himself earlier, images he had removed from the data he had shown Monty, but decided against it. Monty was already on board. They needed to take the next step.
“Because it has to,” he finally answered.
Chapter 7
Aug 9 (23:05)
Dr. Ron pressed “Enter” and the machine came to life for a fifth time, humming through a precise warmup cycle, surging from a thump-thump-thump beat into a mighty rumble. It sounded to him like some massive primeval lion whose morning yawn gradually increased in cadence until it became a thunderous roar. His own heartbeat followed in sync to the rhythm of the collider, waiting for the machine to reach its apex. When his heart was practically leaping out of his chest, the doorway into another time opened, and without hesitation, he stepped into it.
“Amazing” fell from his lips, an unheard whisper not because of loud noises but a complete absence of sound immediately upon entering the slip. Little pins of brightness surrounded and accelerated toward him, slowly at first and then speeding up. After a few moments, thousands of pins were rushing at him from all directions. Then his world was awash in millions of white laser beams—pins of light with long tails, a glittering spectral blast of luminescence. It reminded him of the sparkling diamond-like glitter of a seascape at sunset, but a thousand times that and all at once. The
re was so much brightness he had to shield his eyes. Should have worn sunglasses, he thought. It wasn’t like he could use this information again: it was a one-way trip into the future.
An enormous flash erupted everywhere at once: a brightness that would have put a lightning strike to shame. Then, for just a moment, it was completely black, an absolute absence of light. If it were possible, it was as if every atom of light was being sucked out of the world around him. Am I actually witnessing the infamous dark matter? His thoughts carried no further before his stomach turned and ended up in his throat as weightlessness consumed him, like on the Racer, a roller coaster at Kings Island from his childhood memories. Even though he had almost puked each time, he loved it so much that he had ridden the damn thing twenty-seven times.
Then the feeling was gone, instantly replaced with a wave of emotions. It was the strangest of feelings; he was experiencing the emotions of a thousand different events at once. Each emotion was attached to an image or group of images —seemingly disjointed memories from another person’s life, or were they his? It was a life’s worth of movies in an instant. His brain ached and exhaustion consumed him; it was far worse than any multi-nighter research binge.
Then the weightlessness and flood of information abruptly stopped and everything around him was still and black.
As if he were in a dining room in which the dimmer switch was being turned up slowly to reveal the main course, he could start to see. Perhaps my personal space and time are catching up with this future space and time? Within a span of a few seconds his surroundings looked… normal.
He had a suspicion and turned around to confirm it. His assistant, Monty, was nowhere to be seen. There was no doorway to that place in time he had just come from—just a muddy blur where he stepped through, a distortion, but nothing more. Suspecting that Monty could see him through this one-way window in time, Dr. Ron gave him the thumbs-up. Then, as if on command, the blur disappeared. Ten seconds! Yet for him, at least two minutes had passed. His head hurt more as he considered this. He had work to do.
The space around him looked familiar, yet very different.
They had reasoned that he would end up five to ten years into the future, but at some unknown location; it could be down the street or in Poland, for all he knew. They could only assume he was years into the future—that was his hope anyway. Their data had confirmed three assumptions: this was some sort of laboratory similar to his own; it was ruined, damaged by some event they couldn’t possibly foresee—they just didn’t have the time to run more tests; and they knew that radiation increased the farther forward in the future they went. This final point they assumed had to do with the timing of their time slips, suspecting that they were looking at some point on the calendar farther along in the summer—albeit years ahead, when solar radiation levels would be greater.
The nausea finally passed, so he decided to take his first steps in this future world. He immediately had a sense of what the first astronauts must have felt like landing on the moon; it was at once both scary and exhilarating. There was very little light in this space, as there were no overheads and the natural light was mostly blocked by the boards covering the lab’s elevated window. He walked directly to it, tripping over debris along the way, intending to rip a board off and allow more light into this space. The debris included both drones he had sent previously, a little banged up, but otherwise untouched.
He yanked with both hands, poking his right hand with one of the hanging nails in the process. Should have gotten a tetanus booster last time I was in to see Pete. A creaking bray as the last nail gave up its fight, and the light poured in like a springtime flood. He saw it right away, between the slats, just outside the window: the billboard he had stared at for years, its advertisement changing every few months. Today, or rather the day he left in the past, the advertisement was—or had been?—exactly the same as he saw it now: a topless model, her back to her onlookers, with skin-tight blue jeans temptingly being pulled off by another woman. “But that can’t be, unless…” Words leapt out of his mouth as he pivoted in one motion and was hit at once with complete realization.
“It couldn’t be,” he mumbled out loud, his mouth agape.
This was his laboratory.
Chapter 8
Aug 9 (23:10)
Monty watched Dr. Ron step into the time window, but it was far more surreal than him merely stepping through a window frame: he watched him step into a reality TV program, but through the television. Monty observed his friend look around first before Ron turned and gave him the thumbs up. Then the window disappeared, the machine abruptly stopped, and all the lab’s lights went out. Only the computer’s drive and the UPS’s warning beeps sounded, loud in the silence. Monty’s shadow was cast on the floor by the lab’s only light, coming from the computer monitor screens. At that moment, the only other sound was a slight ticking from the collider’s heated metal surfaces being cooled by liquid nitrogen.
The momentary quiet was shattered by a loud thumping on the outside door. Then he noticed the strobing blue and red lights flashing through the single chin-high basement window facing the highway outside. He knew what was coming next.
“This is the Dallas Police Department. Open up. You have ten seconds or we will break down this door.” The voice and banging were somewhat muffled by the door’s thickness. This lit a fire under Monty, who blasted out of his seat, grabbed the portable hard drive out of the computer, and pushed on a flat wall panel on the side of the laboratory beneath the stairwell. It gave way and he stepped through the opening into Dr. Ron’s hidden office, where they had been earlier. He pushed back against the bookcase, concealing the doorway, and it returned to its place, clicking satisfactorily. At the same time he heard, more faintly, “This is your last chance …”
The room was pitch black, but it didn’t take long for him to grope around for the exit and open it, the smell of grass and the hum of crickets immediately filling his senses. Monty ascended a flight of concrete steps with caution, looking around to make sure the police weren’t here. The field was dark as well, but he had a loose familiarity with it from their breaks of “fresh air” earlier today. Already his eyes were adjusting, and he could make out the shape of the ellipse and the electrified fence in the distance, where his safest escape route lay. He turned his head back to confirm that the overhead spots were out, and therefore the power, and jogged straight back, over the hump of the ellipse—the only part of the particle accelerator visible to the world—and over the electric security fence. He was thankful it was off and he had parked his car off the road, away from the laboratory and the police.
Chapter 9
Aug 9 (23:50)
The rented Escalade was parked on the side of a frontage road beside a billboard telling highway motorists to buy some brand of blue jeans painted onto some mostly naked model. The vehicle was like some elegant but powerful black animal that had been stalking its prey, the Stoneridge Research Laboratory, and got bored waiting. So it rested, ready to spring when it was time. Its form was barely visible under the dusky light cast from the city’s reflections and the evening stars. This entire surrounding area was experiencing a blackout.
The man watched from behind the slick vehicle’s dark eyelids; a small flash of light from his lighter was the only indication the Caddy was occupied. Unconcerned about being seen, the man took a deep puff, lowering the side window slightly to let out his exhales. He peered at the scene in front of him, an experienced hunter waiting patiently for his moment to pounce.
The police were looking for the same man he was. Best to let them do his job for him and not get in their way. Sometimes, the police presence forced a target to move. In these cases, watching and waiting always worked best. He took another long drag from his Dunhill, eyes unblinking.
A smoldering anger bubbled up inside him. His handlers hadn’t told him police were involved, and he doubted it was a coincidence. It certainly was not a complication he had accounted for when quo
ting his fee. The simplicity of the job was heavily weighted by his target: a pudgy scientist who did little else aside from testing his research at his lab or spending time at home with his wife, and on a rare occasion teaching a class at the university. He knew his target well, having successfully completed another job for the same handler over a decade ago, involving simply the theft of some “trade secrets about gamma radiation.” Now he was back and his target was older and pudgier but better funded this time. This bred complications, but none he hadn’t accounted for: increased security and questions about the target’s benefactors and their own motives. For all he knew, his own handlers paid for the doctor’s research and they wanted a return on their money now; perhaps it was the competition. It really didn’t matter who was funding him or what the research was about. He just hated the police being involved.
More arrived, rolling past him with their sirens silent, telling him what he suspected; his target was not here. He could always return if he had to, when there were only one or two officers, to find the data his handler wanted. He would go to the target’s home next. Most likely the researcher was on the run and would quickly gather a few things to hide out somewhere. He had to move before he lost his target’s scent.
The man took a final drag and flicked his cigarette onto the road as he slowly turned the black predator around, lights still out, and stalked off in the other direction.
Chapter 10
In The Future
What had happened to his lab in just a few short years since he left? Fear started to take hold… Maybe it was much later in the future than they had calculated.
Dr. Ron’s mind searched for an answer as he stared at the ruins of what was his laboratory. Time travel was far from an exact science. They had only been guessing that by pushing an increasing amount of power to the collider, the fields would reach light speed quicker, thereby generating a doorway leading farther into the future.