I took a deep breath myself, though mine was more to to ready myself. “So…” I added, as calmly as I could manage, “…are we ready?”
Milton raised his eyebrows and curled his lip slightly. “Well, that’s where it all gets that little bit more tightly cut, I’m afraid. You’re about half an hour early and Mike is on the desk tonight. He has cameras on the whole building, on rotation. If we leave this lab and head to another he’ll know about it in seconds and I don’t really know what orders he has what with everything going awry of late. You yourself said that it’s surprising the whole building isn’t locked down and guarded already. And, whilst Mike is a good guy and we might share a chat on occasion, I doubt he would cover for us for this. He’s a company man.”
Suddenly, he saw the look of realisation on my face. I knew Mike. Everyone knew Mike. And yes, Mike was a good guy. At least, he seemed to be. “Don’t worry.” he added, “He’ll be alright. I’ve already sorted it.”
“Sure?”
“Sure.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait,” Milton explained. “He’ll do his ground check at two, on the nose if I know him, and probably head past here about five past. About five or six minutes after that he’ll pass through into Red and we can start to head down. But we can’t hang around when we do; we’ll have around a two minute window, tops.”
I looked upward at the clock; 1:20am. It was identical to the clocks in both of ‘my’ labs; the one downstairs from which I had been charged with sending Alison and my ‘real’ (day to day) similarly windowless lab up on five. Same size clock; smaller lab. Than Milton’s, I mean. Not that I’m in any way bitter by that, of course. It’s just that… well, he had a bigger lab. And fewer staff. In a bigger lab. And I’m fairly sure he was slightly younger than me.
For a moment, however, I seemed to be forgetting two key points: firstly, that I wouldn’t have a use for any kind of lab in less than an hour and secondly, that it was possible that neither of us would have labs soon anyway. At all. I had no idea just how damaging the rigged explosives might be because Nick Lambert had been very unspecific about that aspect in his notes to Victoria. Deliberately so, I think. Which meant that they might take out the lab or they might even take out the building, deliberately or otherwise. Either way, it reminded me that getting the chance to experience it first hand was never going to be a pleasant experience. Not for anyone.
“You really need to get well away from this building lab before three,” I said. “Seriously, get as far away as you can.”
“Believe me,” he replied, seemingly unfazed. “I intend to.”
I took another deep breath; a combination of trepidation, preparation and what was very probably just about to become - I checked the clock yet again - nineteen minutes of sheer boredom and waiting for something inevitable to happen; something that I now just wanted to get firmly out of the way. I felt as though I was in a crushing queue for a roller coaster I was actually way too afraid to ever ride, the weight of responsibility squeezing me from all directions. It was too late to turn back and I was caught too deeply in the throng even if I had wanted to. Now I just wished I could speed the clock forward, get the damn thing over with, probably soil myself extensively on the journey and just pray that I was still alive to be embarrassed about it all when I got to the other side.
Alison had done it. Hell, I had done it to Alison. Now all I had to do was convince myself that I could do it to myself.
I wandered, or rather paced, around the lab for a few moments, glancing at the endless number of machines. Some I recognised: spectrometers, pervasive network transceivers for handling ubiquitous computing over cellular networks and sDLTs, or Superheated Diode Laser Transmitters for high-end fibre optic work. Some I did not. There was a lot of seriously high-tech stuff here though, all piled high. Eventually I wandered over to a steel-looking contraption sitting in an unholy mess of wires and boxes on one of Milton’s reinforced tables. It was about eighteen inches in diameter, spherical in shape and heavily riveted and reinforced around its equator where, I suspected, it had been joined. It appeared to be almost Victorian in appearance, like some old steam kettle and looked as though it would be extremely heavy indeed, like some pimped-up steam-punk cannon ball. Through connectors, thin fibre-cables and platinum-nichrome wires ran into the structure from a number of seemingly random directions and the whole thing appeared to be ultimately connected to a box at the side with a small screen and keypad. It actually looked extremely amateurish, if I am honest, as though it had been cobbled together from some spare parts as part of a school science project. I assumed it had been created purely for testing and would only see production and refinement if whatever it was actually trying to do actually worked. It reminded me in some ways of pictures I had seen of the very early computer systems assembled by home-brew computer clubs in the late 1970s.
“What the hell is this?” I asked, skeptically. “Is can’t be the neutrinos thing you mentioned?”
Milton took a leisurely walked over and almost stroked the steel orb. “This,” he said with no shortage of warm pride, “is how we aimed to tell the past just how cool the future is.” He looked to me. “And we were close, Peter. Very close.”
“I don’t follow,” I said. Because, in simple terms, I didn’t.
“It’s not something I should really be discussing but, given that tonight is our final curtain call anyway, I don’t suppose it really matters any more. I will tell you this straight off, though: I wish I had more time - just another week or so - just to know whether or not the darned thing actually worked.”
And now I was intrigued. As scientists, the phrase: ‘whether or not it will actually work’ is pretty much our lifeblood. It’s what our egos gorge on like laughing, scavenging hyenas. When things don’t work, as they quite often don’t if I am honest, then obviously we go hungry for a while but when they do… well, for a time we eat like goddamn kings.
“Whether what worked?” I asked.
He looked at me knowingly, like he had a deep, dark piece of gossip and was figuring how best to deliver the story. “OK, well…” he began, clearly thinking how best to explain. “You know about neutrinos, yes? They send messages to your phone, your pads, your mediascreens screen etc. etc.?” I nodded. “And they do this by having the relevant information tied to them at a subatomic level. Like a kind of DNA coat, if you will, that’s bound by complex electromagnetic forces and therefore has no choice but to follow the neutrino wherever it goes.”
I nodded. I perhaps did not understand it quite to that degree, because unlike Milton I didn’t work in neutrinos, but I did at least understand the basic principles.
He looked to the device again and tilted his head slightly, changing tack. “OK,” he said cryptically, “now explain to me how Alison got sent back…? The processes that happened, I mean…?”
I looked at him, unsure as to what relevance this might have. One eye narrowed as I thought it through.
“Go on,” he said. “In detail.”
“Well, okay,” I said. “We have the siberium sphere. Basically a very dense element which, on a very, very small level, exerts its own gravitational pull. Nothing too strong. In our first test with Charlie sitting in - our accident if you will - when we placed the sphere in a vacuum and bombarded it with, well, shit-loads of electricity to be fair, we found that the inherent gravity then increased to almost incomprehensible levels. Just for a split second. The kind of gravity you might expect from a black hole, which is kind of where we think the siberium itself might have originated anyway. So, like a black hole, the gravity produced by the sphere was powerful enough to pull in light but it did it at such a speed that it actually, just for an brief instant, accelerated it immeasurably. It was still light, but it was running at speeds way in excess of the speed of light. That, using Einsteinean theory, had the effect of running sequences of events backward to any living thing capable of comprehending them. So then, after that split second, gra
vity - and therefore light-speed - returned to normal but living things in the vicinity of those forces - things such as Charlie the mouse - did not. He remained rewound - locked in the past, however far back that past had been. We reckoned on 1776.” Lecture speech over, I held my hands open and shrugged my shoulders slightly. “I’m not really sure what any of this has to do with neutrinos, though..?”
He looked at me suspiciously. “Really?” he asked. “Because it seems to me really quite obvious.”
Was it? He looked at me like it was.
I looked back at him like it really, really wasn’t.
“Well,” he explained, “if your siberium, under certain conditions, can exert that amount of gravity on light, enough to speed it up to the point where it actually seems to bend back on itself, chronologically and perceptively speaking, then why could we not see if that same principle could be applied to, say, neutrinos..? Light is, after all, just photons so, like neutrinos, it is essentially just particles, albeit atomic as opposed to subatomic.”
He placed his hand on the spherical apparatus. I had avoided doing that throughout for the simple reason that, by virtue of looking like some antique steam generator, I had actually thought that it might be hot. I would soon learn that, in actual fact, the temperature inside was somewhere around -75˚C.
“In here,” Milton continued, “is one of the smaller fragments of siberium that the PCAST allocated to KRT many years ago, in addition to the larger fragments like the one you got. It was a piece that Gill Semiconductor wanted and never got and it is currently floating free as a bird inside there, held and repelled by magnetism on all sides. It sits in a vacuum already and so all we had to do is feed electricity directly into this casing in quite massive amounts. So, whilst it might differ in some respects from what you know, primarily in terms of how we bombard the siberium with pre-cloaked subatomic neutrino particles, what we actually have in this little titanium sphere is essentially a quite miniaturised version of the lab you have downstairs.”
“To what end?”
“To the end of sending them back in time.”
“Sending what back?”
“The neutrinos.”
I took a deep, frustrated breath. “I hate to be repetitive, Milton, but… to what end..?”
Milton smiled. It was actually quite a dark, Machiavellian smile. “So that we could send messages back.” He looked to the machine again. “Take a moment to imagine those possibilities. It would be like winning the lottery because, even if it wasn’t, you could then just send yourself a message with the numbers and make it so that you did win the lottery.” He paused again, thinking and rubbing his hand gently across his chin. “The reason we do not know if it will work, despite all the theory being watertight, is that the first live test was scheduled for later in the week with Klein supposedly here to oversee, gloat, clap his hands, whatever. The plan was that, having already received a message say, an hour earlier, he would already know that it worked. Kind of weird, but it makes sense in a way. Now, given that he’s dead anyway and, according to you, this place probably won’t even exist in just over an hour and a half, then none of that is going to happen. And I know it is untested because no-one has yet received a message. So, until we manage to rebuild, which I hope we do one day, we will never truly know if any of this actually worked.”
I caught my breath. First rule - broken - right there.
“That would be changing history, though,” I said, with no shortage of exasperation. “It breaks the first rule of sequence. Not winning the lottery yesterday and then winning the lottery yesterday..? Jeez! What happens to the person who hadn’t won the lottery? The future self? Did they win or not?”
“Yeah, he won the lottery.”
“But he hadn’t at the point he…”
“I know, I know,” Milton said. “It was early days and, like I say, it’s never yet been used, so who knows? Really? It’s theory more than anything. Who knows, perhaps the same rules still apply? Perhaps only messages that were actually received yesterday can be sent today? Maybe, for reasons we don’t yet understand the sequence takes care of things and all other messages fail?” He shrugged. “There’s more work to be done.”
“Maybe this lab disappearing tonight is the sequence taking care of things? You ever think about that?”
He smiled. “It had crossed my mind.”
I didn’t like it. not a bit. Alison had been very clear on the whole ‘not changing history thing’ and she was by far one of the smartest people I ever knew. As I understand it, she gave her life for the principle.
“How would you even know whose device you were sending it to?” I asked.
Milton shrugged. Again, like it was somehow obvious. “The particles are already programmed from a standard waveless device. The ‘caller’s phone’, if you will. Here…” He pointed to the hastily cobbled box with the screen and keypad, shrugging slightly, “To that end it’s just as if you were making a simple call. Here, now. We don’t have to do anything to the neutrinos at all because they’re already programmed by the sending phone. The only thing we need to do is steal them and temporarily place them at many thousands of times the speed of light. Of course, we have to do it with attosecond precision because, once launched, the little buggers are more than capable of escaping this sphere. So, with perfect timing, instead of them being thrown out immediately, they get sucked in for a very brief instant and then thrown out at a point in time of our choosing. Of course, there’s no sphere back there, but then… there was no sphere where you threw Alison or any of the other ‘mice’ you told me about. So, the second the gravity snaps back, like with your Alison, the particles behave normally again and fly off looking for a phone to call. All we would alter is the time they are ‘sent’ so to speak, nothing else.”
My jaw dropped. Not so much at the prospect of what he was trying to achieve here, as that was no more or less ridiculous to a right-thinking individual than anything that had happened with say Mason, or Alison, or Davies. No, my mind was on another thought. A thought just as dark and Machiavellian as Milton’s own smile had been.
Maybe the sequence really did look after itself? Just like nature always seemed to do? Like physics? Evolution? Indeed, maybe this whole sequence ‘thing’ we had stumbled across was far cleverer than I, and perhaps even the likes of Alison, had ever given it credit for..?
“So how far do you think you could send the neutrinos back, if it did work?”
Milton pursed his lips and thought for a moment. “Well, it’s a different process to your, albeit using the same basic tools. Because of that, we could not possibly achieve anything like what you guys achieved downstairs because these are very, very tiny particles and so they’re much, much harder to push. It would be like trying to hurl a feather to a touchline, but we were estimating anything up to a week. Two if we were lucky.”
“And how accurate could you be?”
He looked at me like I was stupid. Like Victoria had a habit of looking at me. “The speed of light is a constant, Peter. At least it was until you guys came along. So, if we multiply that constant, and we know precisely how much we have multiplied it by, then the particles have no choice but to speed up to the precise degree we request and then get thrown back out at the exact point we pre-determine. In that respect, we can be extremely precise. In the confines of a fully achievable throw, one that isn’t pushing too close to the boundaries where it might lose some strength and get a little bit wayward, we could be precise with a tolerance of…” he pondered for a moment, “…between around fifteen and twenty milliseconds either way.”
I didn’t need that level of accuracy, nor anything like. At least, I didn’t think I did. I closed my eyes for a moment and thought, carefully. Trying to remember precise details and do mental arithmetic in my head. Because I figured that if I could get the beginning to click into place, which presumably I did already, then surely the rest would just click into place as well? Like that already did as well? I looked at t
he clock once more: 2:24am.
“So, if I were to make it really easy and say ‘5 days, 11 hours and 20 minutes precisely’, you could do that?”
He nodded, skeptical. “Of course. In theory we would just set the precise power levels and everything would happen as planned.”
“Except it’s no longer theory,” I said, adding my own dark smile. “Is it?”
He looked unsure. Again. Perhaps even a little worried this time. “No..?”
“No,” I said, “because this…” I pointed to the sphere - titanium it seemed, not steel normally Victorian iron - and smiled. “This thing actually fucking works.”
FORTY-FOUR
Thursday, July 20, 1645.
Manningtree, Essex, England.
When she awoke, Prudence felt truly wonderful; alive and buzzing like a honey bee on a day of fresh blooms. She was facing a nice warm, crackling fire; framed exquisitely by a fine hand-carved surround. Beautiful treasures and trinkets sat upon the mantel and above them hung a beautiful painting depicting a woodland glade at night, all rendered in flickering shades of orange. Everything around her glistered like pure gold in the firelight. The colours were simply beautiful.
She was seated in a very fine and regal chair in the midst of a most ornate bedchamber. Rich green half-drawn velvet curtains hung on the far wall and between them lay the further curtain of a beautiful July night. As she looked around and took in its splendour, a handmaiden slowly brushed her hair with a soft boar-bristle brush, readying her for an imminent appearance at the great ball that was being thrown for... for... something. Or someone. Whatever, she was to look her best if she was to be seen on the arm of The Master, mixing with the gentried folk. She would put on her finest dress and pick out the finest jewels from her pearl-encrusted case once her hair was looking at its best.
[Sequoia] Page 34