New Alcatraz (Book 1): Dark Time

by Grant Pies

  CHAPTER 34

  2070

  FAYETTVILLE, AK

  Hamilton was a small boy. He was late to develop physically, and, to make things worse, he was intelligent enough to start school early. The other students were always much bigger than him. Boys shoved him, punched him, and tripped him. Girls laughed at him, or worse, ignored him. He ate lunch alone at school and walked home alone. If there was a field trip he wandered the museum, the library, the aquarium, or wherever they went, alone.

  Hamilton stayed inside and read a lot. His mother bought him a chemistry set, which occupied him for the better part of a year when he was ten. The lack of sunlight gave his skin a pallor that wasn’t quite corpse like, but close to it. His body was so frail that if Hamilton ever actually engaged in any physical activity his bones would have surely snapped like dry brittle driftwood.

  Hamilton skipped the ninth grade entirely, and passed the tenth in half the time. Maybe he was smarter than the other students, or maybe he just had more time to study. He applied for college at the age of 16, and he obtained a doctorate in chemistry by the time he was 22. While there he met a woman, Elsbeth. A fellow classmate in a biochemistry lab. Even his mother was surprised. They shared a love for science and solitude. For the first and only time in his life, he found a person that he would rather be with than by himself.

  After college, Hamilton worked as a chemical engineer in a small company that was eventually acquired by Wayfield Industries. Hamilton arrived at his job early and left late. He worked through lunch, worked weekends and holidays, and he snuck away during after-hour’s office parties to work; he felt less anxious in the lab.

  His wife was a botanist. When she wasn’t working in her lab, she stayed in the only park in their city for hours and watched the trees sway in the breeze. She ran her hands through the cool grass and marveled at the bees pollinating flowers. She loved lying on the ground in that park. The moisture on the grass seeped up through the ground and soaked into her blouse. The roots of trees poked and protruded up from under the ground. Elsbeth followed the roots with her eyes and imagined the life running through them. Hamilton watched his wife lay in the park. Her joy was his joy. Her amusement was his.

  After they married and found a home together, Hamilton built Elsbeth a small greenhouse in their backyard. The plants in the green house bloomed and flourished. Their leaves sprouted and the flowers grew, at first, but, like all things, they eventually withered. The buds of the flowers fell, and the soil dried up. The leaves turned brown and gray, and they crumbled off the stems. The life was pulled out of the plants by an unseen force that was both all around and within the flowers. So too did Hamilton’s marriage suffer from the same draining force.

  An urge pushed and pulled within Hamilton, and he assumed inside Elsbeth as well. It was like a fist grabbed his insides and moved him in whatever direction he wasn’t going at the moment. Sometimes it pushed him forward. Other times it held him back. Always counter to what he thought he should do, and always counter to what logic dictated his life to be.

  After years of marriage, in the mornings Hamilton and Elsbeth barely spoke. They both prepared themselves for the day ahead of them. Their days were no longer shared. They were separate, distinct, and unconnected. In the evening, Hamilton came home long after Elsbeth was asleep. When they were both home they neither avoided nor sought each other out.

  Early in their marriage Elsbeth anchored Hamilton to this life. With each day they became less connected, so each day he became less anchored. The push and pull of the fist inside of him became more powerful. It wasn’t so much the emptiness in his life that ate away at him, it was his paranoia that his wife felt the same way he did. Years went by. Sometimes Hamilton went months without feeling the fist in his gut wrenching at his insides. Other times it was unbearable.

  Eventually, the hand that used to only tug and push at him was now emptying out his very being. It was tearing away at old feelings he held for Elsbeth. It was altering memories, and throwing others out entirely. It became obvious that Elsbeth either felt the same, or she sensed how Hamilton felt.

  Avoidance grew into frustration, and neither husband nor wife could ignore the pain they caused each other. Or at least the pain they blamed each other for. Eventually, the only time the two interacted was when they fought. The fights were over nothing in particular, nor did they have any sense of origin.

  They seemed to always be in the middle of a fight. There was never a beginning, and definitely never an end. They spewed insults and hurtful comments at each other. They slammed doors and slept in separate rooms. Hamilton never hit Elsbeth, but he thought about it. With each fight, the pulsing hand inside of Hamilton shook him. It urged him to walk out and not return. More and more the force pushed or pulled him, and rarely held him still.

  The two separated. It was simply the next logical progression. Like the third act of a play. Hamilton left and Elsbeth stayed. His new home was half empty, and his old house only half full. Just as when he was with Elsbeth, he came home and spoke to no one, but no longer by choice. The comfort of just her being in the house with him was absent. He sat in his house at night with only one light on. He sat still, and inside of him was nothing. No hand or fist gripping at his insides. No push or pull. Only stillness.

  He sat there, held his breath, and concentrated on his body. He begged for this feeling to return and guide him, to tell him where to go now that he was free to follow. Tears welled up inside his eyes when he finally realized that there was nothing. Whether it left him or if it never was there didn’t matter; it was gone.

  Hamilton wept for himself. He wept for the loss of this feeling that he fought for years, and the loss of whatever was in store for him that would no longer be. But most of all he wept for Elsbeth. He wept because he believed she felt the same emptiness now that they were apart. He wept because the push and pull inside of him did not push and pull him alone. It was pushing and pulling them as a couple. It was guiding him to what they could do together; what their life would have been. It was their fate as a singular unit that he had fought this whole time. Late one night, Hamilton contacted Elsbeth and talked of reconciliation.

  The two agreed to meet the next day at a spot high above the city. The sun ducked below the horizon and shed orange and purple light onto a lookout point. The two arrived and didn’t speak until they finished embracing each other, and then they walked to the edge of the cliff and sat on the ground together. She sat in front of him and Hamilton wrapped his arms around her. He realized how much he missed the familiar way Elsbeth fit into his arms, and the smell of her hair. The two sat and held each other and watched the sun dip completely down below the horizon.

  Just after the sun was gone, and a slight haze of light still filled the night air, they decided to leave. They wanted to go back to their home; together. Hamilton stood and brushed the dirt and leaves off of him and he held his hands down toward Elsbeth to help her up. She stood half way and reached up to clasp Hamilton’s hands, but with no warning, her foot slipped on a loose stone, which tumbled down the cliff behind her. Elsbeth’s legs shot out from under her and her knees smashed against the rock at the cliff edge. The sudden pain and act of falling forced her hands to jolt open; she released Hamilton’s hands and slid towards the edge. It all happened so quickly that Hamilton could only watch as her face made contact with the edge of the cliff. Her nose split, and blood sprayed into the night air.

  Her body bounced up off of the gray stone and tumbled backwards; her arms and legs, limp and lifeless, as she began her fatal fall. Hamilton made a final attempt to grab her arm, but she was gone. He could only watch in horror as her back slammed into the cliff as she bounced her way down. The sound echoed throughout the valley, like someone biting into a fresh apple. Elsbeth rolled and fell; she crashed and slammed into the side of the cliff. With each contact against the vertical earth her body split and ripped open. Her clothes tattered, and her hair matted against large bloody divots in her he
ad.

  By the time she settled at the bottom of the cliff, Hamilton only saw a mound of blood and flesh. Hamilton stared at her body as the sound of her fall still echoed throughout the valley, and tears welled up inside his eyes. He stood frozen; as if he concentrated hard enough he would reverse what just happened. His chest heaved in and out, and his heart raced as it beat out of his chest. At the top of the mountain he looked down on his dead wife, and he felt nothing inside of him. No push. No pull. No drive. That feeling was lost forever.

  CHAPTER 35

  5065

  NEW ALCATRAZ

  DAY 7

  “The rest is nothing special,” Hamilton told us. “Investigators said Elsbeth was going to leave me, that she was going to take everything I had, and so I pushed her off the cliff. The jury agreed, and the judge sent me here.” Hamilton looked up at the rest of us. “In a way it was fitting to be sent to a place as empty as New Alcatraz.” A long silence sat around the campfire.

  “Sorry to hear that,” Red said. For the first time his words to Hamilton weren’t sarcastic. Hamilton returned to his secluded self and didn’t speak the rest of the night.

  “How about you?” I asked Ellis. “How’d you end up here?”

  “You mean the first time or the second time?” He replied. The four of us sat around the fire near the beach. Ellis was deep in thought. Not about what to say, but about where to begin. He replayed his story in his mind at a rapid pace. I saw that he didn’t know if he should start in the beginning, middle, or end of his story. Maybe it didn’t matter; I understood the feeling.

  “I was convicted of performing technological experiments that weren’t sanctioned by the Ministry of Science, unauthorized possession of technological components, and conspiracy to violently overthrow the North American government,” he said.

  CHAPTER 36

  2066

  DENVER, CO

  Ellis went to engineering school in Oregon, specializing in applied engineering and mechatronics, and graduated at the top of his class. The Ministry of Science recruited him right out of school to work for the Technology Development Agency, but he quickly realized that he wasn’t actually developing any technology.

  Eventually, he was approached by the Time Anomaly Agency. They wanted to speak to him about a new revolutionary project. On the day of the meeting, he was summoned to a large conference room in the Capitol Building, where men in drab suits and neckties, and men in pressed military uniforms with medals that spilled onto every part their chest sat around a large conference table. Ellis sat at the head of the table; or maybe it was the end. The men in suits stretched a forced smile over their faces, and the military men stared at him as if he were uninvited. On the table, in front of Ellis, was a folder filled with papers. He opened it briefly, lifting one corner and saw large portions of the text blacked out. The front of the folder read “Project Oracle”.

  One of the men in a suit was the first to speak. He was a large man whose nose was bulbous and red. Miniscule red veins crept around his nostrils, and his pudgy cheeks were blushed.

  “What is the greatest issue facing our society today?” the man asked Ellis authoritatively. Ellis looked upward in an effort to appear as though he was pondering an answer. Financial Instability? World War? Overpopulation? Pollution and land erosion? There were too many issues to only settle on one.

  “The truth is we don’t know,” the large man proclaimed before Ellis could offer his response to the question. “Are you familiar with Pythia?” the large man asked with more than a touch of arrogance. Again, he gave Ellis no time to reply.

  “Pythia was the Oracle of Delphi. It was believed that she was able to make prophetic predictions of the future. Precognition, it was called, and it was said that she could communicate directly with the Gods. She was a portal.” The man continued his rambling explanation as if he was some pompous professor.

  “Pythia predicted that there was no human smarter than Socrates. Not a single one. But Socrates, ever humble and ever a skeptic, did not believe this to be true. Socrates knew that he was not the smartest man. In fact, he denied all knowledge of the arts, science, and philosophy. In an effort to prove Pythia wrong, he travelled and searched for any person who knew more than he did.”

  “He spoke with politicians who only pretended to have knowledge. He spoke with poets who, although they could evoke emotion from people, knew nothing as to what caused such emotion. Finally, at the end of his search, Socrates realized that Pythia was correct. Everyone is equally uninformed, yet Socrates was aware of his ignorance. It is the one person who realizes that we all know nothing that is the smartest man in the world. To realize your ignorance is the most intelligent thing a person can do.”

  The man recited this story with his chest out and his hands clasped behind his back. He spoke not paying attention to the words, but reveling in the sound of his own voice.

  “We,” the man said as he stretched his arms outward, palms up, looking around at those seated at the table, “are Socrates. We are the only ones who realize that we do not know what the real threats are that we face. But we went one step beyond Socrates.” The man let his last words linger. He stared at Ellis and nodded his head in agreement with himself. “We have developed a way to learn of these threats. We have found a way to not only look into our future, but to go there. That is the essence of Project Oracle.”

  CHAPTER 37

  2066

  DENVER, CO

  Ellis couldn’t help but be intrigued by the man’s speech, in spite of the arrogant delivery. He had heard rumors of time travel amongst the various agencies in the Ministry of Science. He heard that the Ministry was working with Wayfield Industries to develop the technology to either see into the future, or, better yet, travel into the future. There was talk of military compounds, underground vaults, and the government diverting power from entire cities for their experiments.

  Some people claimed that the sole reason the Technology Development Agency was created was to confiscate all technological components to aid in the agency’s pursuit to achieve the ability to time travel. Other people claimed that the agency had found the necessary technology buried in the earth from long ago. Some thought it was left there by an ancient species.

  “Now we are asking you,” the man said with a nod toward Ellis. “We are asking you to go one step further. We are asking you, as a service to your country, to help us learn what we do not know. We are assembling a small group of travelers…explorers if you will, who will blaze a trail through time,” the man said as he picked up a remote and pointed it at a screen at the other end of the room. The screen blinked to life and displayed a time line dating back to the 6th Century. A horizontal line ran from one end of the screen to the other. Short vertical marks with brief descriptions lined the timeline; some small and some large.

  Ellis glanced at the screen as the man used the remote to scroll through the timeline. With each press of the button the line advanced centuries and new marks appeared. The Gothic War of 535. The siege of Constantinople in the 7th Century. Other smaller marks were too hard to read. In 866 Nordic Vikings invaded Northumbria. The timeline was devoid of any achievements in society. There was no mention of peace treaties, innovations, artistic achievements, or discoveries.

  “You see, Ellis, human history is filled with events that decimated the existing population,” the man said with a grin. This was the first time he addressed Ellis by name. “Sometimes these events occurred more frequently. Sometimes less. But no major length of time, beyond a couple generations, has ever passed without some major event occurring that could have wiped out the existing civilization of humans.”

  1337 the 100 Years War begins. 1347 Black Death wipes out fifty percent of Europe. 1507 the first encounter with smallpox on the Island of Hispaniola. The Plague in 1509.

  “Some of these events were natural; others were caused by our own...” the man hesitated, “distrust of each other.

  The man scrolled on through the
timeline on the screen. Hundreds of hash marks scattered over the timeline. Dates and names crammed onto the horizontal line. Percentages of the population that was wiped out by each event listed.

  1601 Russian Famine kills at least one third of Russia. Bohemian Revolt in 1618. War of Spanish Succession 1701 to 1714. The Great Frost of 1709. American Revolutionary War 1775 to 1783.

  “Any one of these events could have dealt the final blow to human existence. A war could have sent a rippling effect throughout the entire globe. Economies could collapse; resources become scarcer, and cause even more fighting. Or perhaps a plague could have spread just a little more rapidly, been a little more virulent, and devastated the rest of the population. The global freezes, floods, and famines could have been just a touch more severe or lasted just a little bit longer...and ended the lives of small groups of people who managed to survive. Any one of these events could have been an extinction event.” With these last points it was the first time the man didn’t seem to take pleasure in his speech.

  The Year Without Summer 1816. The Black War almost caused the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines. The American Civil War 1861 to 1865. All of these events flashed on the screen in a blink. They were stories people had read about and retold rather than events that really happened. As our technology advanced the outbreak of sickness and famine lessened but the casualties caused by war increased exponentially. The First World War. Chinese Floods in 1931. The Great Depression and World War II. The more recent events were more real to Ellis. The various conflicts in the Middle East. The Second Korean War of 2018. The tsunamis off the Ivory Coast and the subsequent viral outbreak on the continent in 2023. The most recent was the collapse of the North American economy and subsequent riots that plagued the entire continent.