They filed into a large security room, which led to a large door with controls on either side. Claire explained, “This is the second step in the security process. So we can safely get you as close as possible to the real thing, this security corridor is designed identically to the corridor to the one that leads to the time portal – so you’ll experience the same security measures as we do when we time travel. Only, of course, this corridor leads somewhere else.”
Landon watched as Claire did retinal and thumbprint scans, and the door slid open, showing a long corridor, as she’d described, on the other side. With his help shepherding, Claire led the students into the long, bright, white hallway, talking as she walked backwards in front of them. “This corridor is essentially a quarter-mile CT scan,” she said. “While it’s a long walk, it’s necessary for SATP security to be able to do a full scan of anyone approaching the time lab. There are some really clever criminals out there, and this corridor allows our security team to run 121 different tests on anyone inside, even if they were the fastest person in the world running at full speed the entire time.” Landon found he was listening as intently as the students were, and wished he’d been given his own orientation before getting the one created for middle schoolers.
“When SATP engages in time travel experiments,” Claire continued, “we do so in a highly-secure, highly-regulated environment. Short of boring a hole through the ground underneath the facility, there are only two routes to get anywhere near the time lab – all of them manned with armed security. This corridor provides access to the viewing area. For us, the scientists at SATP, there is another access to the actual time lab.”
“Do we get to see that one?” someone from the front of the crowd asked as they reached another door equipped with biometric entry devices. From the back of the crowd, Landon couldn’t see who had asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” Claire said, opening the door. “But this access is identical to the real one, so you can see exactly how secure the time portal is.” Once inside, she motioned toward the guards manning the security room. “This is Agent Mariacher and Agent O’Brien. It’s their job to make sure that nobody gets past them who isn’t supposed to be here. And they can do it. Trust me. Agent Mariacher served in the 6th Command during the Coalition’s defeat of the Syrian Legion, and Agent O’Brien is a former member of the NYPD who before that was a professional wrestler called Calvin Crush. The good news is that because we already cleared all of you before you even got here today, we’re going to be able to walk right past.” She laughed. “Remember this moment, because if you ever find yourself in this hallway again, you’ll have to have security clearance.”
Landon watched as the kids two-by-two nervously walked past the guards. He followed behind the crowd and, out of his own tentativeness, flashed his badge as he neared the guards. Since Claire was obviously familiar with them, he guessed that the team would have a decent relationship with the guards. He thought about introducing himself, but with the tour moving, decided to save it for a later time.
Through the doors was the viewing room. Though he was as anxious as the kids were, Landon again lagged to usher everyone in before excitedly entering the room himself. He’d questioned for the past several months why he hadn’t been given a full tour of the facility when he’d visited Greensboro while applying for the position. But he understood the dangers inherent in allowing the smartest people in the world inside, only to tell all but one of them that their services would not be needed.
The room was another auditorium-like facility like the one upstairs, with a couple hundred seats facing an enormous rounded window. Though, through this window was where the magic happened. The room on the other side of the window was egg-shaped, and on the far wall, almost a football field’s length away, were seven capsules attached to plugs coming down from what appeared to be an enormous generator hanging some thirty feet in the air. Getting his bearings, Landon recognized that the generator was what they’d been seeing from the other room they’d been in, before lunch.
As the students settled once again into their chairs, Claire approached him from the side. “I’m going to keep this short and sweet and get them back down to the train,” she said. “Let’s try not to engage them in chatter.”
He shook his head. “I really wasn’t planning on saying a thing,” he said.
“Good.” She turned and faced the crowd. “You may see things outside this window that you recognize from the room upstairs. And you’re right – only we’re now eight floors below where we were before. That’s six floors underground. What you were seeing up there was the top of this device behind me and the computers that run it.” She pointed behind her. “This piece of equipment is what makes time travel possible. It is the largest electromagnet in the world. Over the past hundred years, humankind has worked very hard to make technology smaller and smaller. Which is why the devices in your pockets run on the same power that supercomputers did fifty years ago. But in this case, SATP engineers revealed that the larger the electromagnet, the more powerful it can be. And since time travel uses more power than just about any process on Earth, voila!… The world’s largest electromagnet.”
Now, she turned and took several paces away from Landon, entrenched in her presentation. “Across the way there, you see seven chambers. You can see they’re connected to the magnet. These are the time travel capsules for outgoing missions. We can run seven people at a time, though we never have, to a single destination. What happens is… The electromagnet generates an incredible level of power that is transmitted down those tubes and into the capsules. That level of power is equivalent to the energy created by fourteen nuclear bombs. But don’t worry – it’s contained, and it’s not radioactive, because it’s being created by a magnet. Earth’s own natural, renewable energy. What that level of power does when it encounters anything inside those capsules is immediately speeds up the velocity of every atom in the chamber, turning it into light. Sounds scary, huh?”
It did sound scary to Landon, which was why he was never going put himself through that process.
“Well, because of the science, it’s actually very safe,” Claire said, continuing. “And it’s absolutely fascinating. Picking up from where I left off upstairs… It’s going to sound crazy, but once a subject’s molecules are turned into light, there’s an awful lot you can do with them. In our case, however, we use a series of satellites orbiting around the sun to pinpoint the exact time and place that the time travel mission will be and ‘bounce’ the light off them. When those supercharged molecules reach their destination, they are slowed down and take their original form.”
She paused for a moment and several hands shot up. Landon started to jump in and play sergeant-at-arms, but Claire usurped him and took a question.
“How do they take their original form?” a freckled girl with long brown hair in the third row asked.
“Good question,” she said, pointing at the girl. “And there’s a good answer. The beauty of utilizing living things – such as humans – for this process is that every cell in every one of our bodies has something in it called DNA. And the DNA of each cell is unique to not only you, but to that cell. So, when a human’s molecules are supercharged and scrambled to create light, that DNA is imprinted. When they’re slowed down again, the DNA remembers what it’s supposed to do. It knows what role it has in the body, and is able to… Pick up where it left off. It’s like millions of tiny, little miracles.”
“Miracle” was one way to put it, Landon thought as Claire spoke. The description of the SATP process that she was giving was the rote one that they presented to those outside of science, as it was elementary in nature and had enough “wow factor” to get people to buy it and move on. While he was new to the facility, and this was his first time sitting through the official SATP public presentation, Landon’s expertise in the physics of time travel rivalled anyone else’s on the team. He was sure of it. While in theory what Claire was saying was accurate, in practice it w
as a bit more complicated. Because the satellites in the SATP system were required to help pinpoint where the Earth would have been in its orbit at any time in its history, they were positioned at strategic locations along its ellipsis around the sun. Technically, “satellite” was a misnomer, because they didn’t orbit anything. They were more stations. As such, some were upwards of 200 million miles away at any given time. A beam of light the size of a human being could never travel so far without fizzling out, so SATP’s technology was designed to collect the supercharged molecules and project them into a stream the thickness of one molecule, propelling them into space to connect with the satellites, which then redirected them to the target point. At which point, they would collide and reconstitute. As scary as Claire’s story was, the truth was much, much scarier.
“You’ll notice the size of the time lab,” Claire was saying when Landon turned his attention back to her. “It seems like a lot of wasted space, doesn’t it? Well, that space is important for the return trip.” She turned and motioned to Landon, pointing past him at a table against the wall that he hadn’t noticed. On the table was a time cloak, something he’d studied but had never had the opportunity to see up close. He retrieved it and handed it to her. “This is what we call a ‘time cloak,’” she said. “It’s how our scientists return to this location from wherever they’d traveled.”
Landon retreated to his post off to the side as Claire handed the cloak to the first student in the front row and asked him to pass it along. “The scientist carries this cloak as an essential piece of his or her equipment. You can see it’s pretty heavy, so you understand the importance of hanging onto it over anything else they might be carrying.”
A Hispanic boy in the middle of the front row was inspecting the cloak, and asked, “But how does this turn back into a cloak again if it doesn’t have DNA?”
“Landon?” Claire said, catching him off-guard.
Fortunately, he could answer questions about the process, if not the facility. He smiled warmly at the kid as he passed the cloak onto the next student. “The cloak is made from organic material,” he said, “so it does have DNA. In fact, when a time traveler uses the capsule behind me there, everything he or she is wearing must be organic material or it won’t rematerialize in the same manner as when it left.”
“There’s another advantage to using an electromagnet to create the power, as opposed to a nuclear reactor or cyclotron,” Claire said. “It’s that it’s a magnet. And what does a magnet do?”
Several students shouted out some version of “it attracts metal.”
“That’s right,” she said. “The electromagnet can pull out inorganic material as the process is happening. Which is why debris or any other metal in the capsule doesn’t make the trip, and limits the risk of improper materialization.”
“So how does the cloak work?” someone asked.
Landon caught a glimmer of a sneer on Claire’s face, and surmised that she wanted to begin to wrap things up. He jumped in before she could speak. “When the time traveler is set to return to the present time, she puts on the cloak and depresses a button, which is located on the inside right pocket. Don’t worry – the cloak you have is not activated. At least, I think it’s not. Right, Dr. Devereaux?” Claire nodded at him and some of the students laughed. He continued, “When that button is pushed, the machine here at SATP picks up the signal. You’re wondering how you pick up a signal from hundreds or thousands of years ago? Well, we’re already looking. SATP is already sweeping the space-time continuum to look for that unique symbol. When it finds it, it calls the cloak – and whatever’s underneath it – back to the facility here.”
“The reason for the vast amount of space behind me,” said Claire, “is to ensure a safe landing for up to seven travelers at the same time. While we can control what happens to the molecules as they are intensified and then slow back down, what we must be extremely careful of is letting them meet each other. As you’ve learned in your science classes, atoms and molecules bond with each other, and we can’t allow atoms and molecules to bond among different time travelers. The space in the time lab affords us the room to operate safely.”
Though a slew of hands were in the air, Claire cut them short. “I apologize, but that’s all the time we have,” she said. “We have to get you back to the maglev and Landon and I have to get back to work.” She searched the room for the head teacher, finding her on the left side, and called to her, “I spoke with Robert Mulvaney and he sends his apologies for having to cut his visit short. As the students leave, he’s left something special for each of them at the front to make up for it.”
The teacher made her way to the front of the room and turned to the students. “Seventh graders. Seventh graders! Let’s thank Dr. Devereaux and Dr. Tripathi for spending their day with us, and for their presentation.” A round of applause went up from the crowd, and Landon smiled, waving his appreciative politician wave. The students then began to queue at the side door.
Landon walked to Claire, who was watching the students line up, but whose mind was clearly elsewhere. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s just get them out of here. Be in Reilly’s office at 4 p.m. and we’ll catch you up.”
He hadn’t been expecting to immediately be pulled into the director’s office for anything, but rather than push for more information, he temporarily changed the subject. “What did Robert leave for them?”
“Actually, it’s pretty cool,” she said without looking at him. “They have t-shirts with a list of everywhere he’s been – like a rock band would have for a concert tour. He autographed them.”
“For everyone? Wow.”
“No more questions,” she said abruptly, then turned and led the students out of the viewing area.
CHAPTER 18
Meeting with Chester Davies was not among Keegan’s favorite ways to spend an afternoon, a thought that echoed in his mind as Davies pulled his thick framed glasses down from his nose and looked up at him. There was no valid reason to hate the guy, beyond his arrogant elitism and his unwavering disdain for anyone born outside of Great Britain. But he did.
“Well, look what the bloody cat drug in,” Davies said, setting the glasses on the desk in front of him. “Today must be a special day, to have the aristocracy, here mixing among the commoners.” He laughed at his own brand of humor, while Keegan faux smiled and nodded in a classic “you got me” style.
The “commoners” were the vast staff of researchers under Davies’ charge, housed on this floor and the one beneath it. The entire block of floors – about ten in total in the Curie building – was dedicated to research, with server farms, paper catalogues and the world’s largest collection of historical volumes. Keegan had read somewhere that the resources in Davies’ department had been accrued over close to two decades and were currently valued near $15 billion. Which was why the Curie building was the complex’s second most secure facility – after the time lab, itself.
A Brit of African descent and ample girth, Davies, himself, had served as chancellor of Oxford University in his last role before joining SATP, with a renowned career as a researcher and administrator at various name brand universities prior. He’d been wooed to the program by the work – Oxford chancellors generally didn’t leave unless they were retiring for good. It was the promise of an opportunity to study history in a way it had never been studied before, through real-life, hands-on experience and to the most intricate levels of detail. Davies was one of the earliest members of the SATP team, recruited while the facility and the time lab were only in construction phase, and the Board’s selection over a dozen other top minds being considered. Member nation Great Britain was pleased to have its representative in that role. Keegan often joked that they should’ve mandated a personality test part of the selection process, but couldn’t deny the positive impact Davies had had on the program.
“We need your help,” he said, noticing Davies looking at Amy. “Can we tal
k privately?”
Davies was nodding. “You must really need something, or you would’ve come alone.” He smiled warmly.
“Good afternoon, Chester,” Amy said, with a hint of flirtation, to Keegan’s surprise. Had he convinced her enough that she was willing to play the role?
“And good afternoon to you, too, my dear,” Davies said. “It’s a pleasure to have you here in the nerd asylum.” Amy laughed, and Davies stood, pushing his chair backwards against the wall with the back of his legs and causing many of the cubicled researchers behind him to look in their direction. “I was just in the conference room for two hours and would prefer not to spend any more time in there. Talk outside?”
“Whatever works best for you,” Keegan said.
Davies led them through a maze of cubicles to the far side of the room, where an area the size of three or four offices had been carved out of the floor and lined with glass. The outdoor patio was built at the request of the research department as an escape from the thought-intensive work they performed on a daily basis, and was a stroke of architectural genius, constructed years after the Curie Building had originally been completed. From the viewpoint of the ground off-campus, the patio appeared to be a giant hole in the side of the building, as if a giant lumberjack had taken a hatchet to it. But to the research team, it was their safe haven.
They stepped outside into the warm air. North Carolina in July was hot, and Keegan, with his body mass, felt it worse than most. He liked the short winters, certainly, but outside of December to February, he’d much rather they’d located SATP closer to home in Brooklyn. He immediately began to sweat, and while he appreciated the fresh air – something none of them got enough of – he had to not let his discomfort distract him from what was a crucial conversation.
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