The Quantum Series Box Set

by Douglas Phillips

  Torre drew a photograph from his briefcase and slid it across the table. “Recognize this man, Dr. Rice?”

  Daniel picked up the photo. It showed an overweight man with glasses, bald headed. Posed, perhaps for an employee badge or driver’s license. “I don’t think so.” Daniel passed the picture back.

  “How about the name Elliott Becton?”

  Daniel shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Should I know him?”

  Griffith picked up the line of questions without missing a beat. “Apparently Becton knew you.”

  “Knew?”

  “Yes. Elliott Becton is deceased,” Griffith answered. “Three days ago. Walked into an Orlando police station, collapsed on the floor and died.”

  “Sorry to hear,” Daniel said. “Of course, a lot of people know me. I do lectures, late-night TV. That kind of thing.”

  “Yes, sir, we’re aware,” Torre said flatly. Torre pushed another photo across the table. In it, a white oval doorway stood alone in a large facility. Daniel recognized the location immediately—the Operations and Checkout building at Kennedy Space Center and the portal to other worlds. “I believe you’ve used the alien transportation device that’s installed there?”

  “Uh, yeah. Once. A visit to Core.” Daniel recalled his impromptu and somewhat disturbing passage directly into the interior of the moon-sized gatekeeper to the galaxy. “Is my trip through the portal related to Becton?”

  “Possibly,” Griffith answered. “While you were at KSC, did you meet any of the NASA engineers?”

  Daniel shook his head. “No, I don’t recall anyone besides Zin. Aastazin. The android. Core’s representative here on Earth.” Daniel held up a hand at the steely look from Agent Torre. “But, you already knew that too, right?”

  Torre didn’t flinch, his face seemingly made of stone.

  Griffith asked once more, “So, no contact with any of the engineers at NASA while you were at KSC?”

  Daniel fished into his memory of the brief visit six months earlier. Jan Spiegel had joined him from Fermilab. Marie Kendrick, who regularly made jumps through the portal, had been there too. They’d gathered around the alien doorway while Zin explained the astounding technology that could whisk you to a planet a thousand light-years away. Daniel didn’t recall meeting any NASA engineers.

  “None that I’m aware of,” Daniel said.

  Griffith looked at Torre, who nodded. With any luck, they were ready to share the purpose of their little inquisition.

  “Dr. Rice,” Griffith said, “Elliott Becton was a NASA engineer, employed at Kennedy Space Center. A twenty-year veteran. He was one of the key people who installed that portal. Becton had access to some very advanced alien technology.”

  “And,” Agent Torre added, “we believe that he may have figured out how it works. A security camera recorded him walking out the KSC door. Ten minutes later he was dying in an Orlando police station—fifty miles away.”

  A three-hundred-mile-per-hour car? Teleportation? Or something else? In the quantum world, it was always something else.

  Daniel analyzed Torre’s statement in its entirety. A NASA engineer, with access to Zin’s portal technology—but not necessarily with Zin’s help—might have reverse engineered the portal’s function to obtain its secrets. And then he’d died.

  Unfamiliar technology, misused. Always a recipe for disaster, and Becton had paid the price. Surely he must have known that returning from 4-D space could be deadly; that much was common knowledge. In fact, it was the whole reason that the katanauts at KSC used the alien portal to jump interstellar distances.

  Griffith described the scene at an Orlando police station and showed Daniel a photo of a utility belt covered with electronics that Becton had probably assembled himself. Nothing on the belt looked remotely like the KSC portal, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t based on the same idea.

  Passing through 4-D space and coming out alive on the other side required a special trick. Zin’s portal could do it. The yin-yang object they’d recovered from Soyuz could do it too. But those were alien devices. As far as Daniel knew, humans hadn’t conquered this part of the technology.

  Until now?

  “Becton’s dead,” Daniel said. “Whatever he learned about jumping through quantum space, it wasn’t enough.”

  Agent Griffith shook his head. “We don’t think he was jumping through any kind of space, Dr. Rice.” He pointed to the photo of the alien portal. “As a scientist, perhaps you’re familiar with one aspect of this technology. It produces a temporal offset.”

  Daniel recalled a brief explanation from Zin. The trick to survive the return from quantum space involved a brief suspension of the flow of time. The lost Soyuz astronauts had been frozen in this time warp. Daniel had briefly experienced it himself during his trip to Core; the process had been unnerving but not deadly.

  “I’m familiar,” Daniel said. “They put you in a specially designed chair, a portal transfer station, they call it. A hood covers your face and a yellow light flashes. The flash repeats once you’re back in 3-D space.” No doubt there was more to it, but that was as much as Daniel knew. Zin hadn’t been generous in his explanation. “It’s really no big deal, even though it leaves you with an odd feeling. Like you’d just passed out.”

  Both agents nodded. “You know more than most people we’ve talked to,” Griffith said. “But the next question is the kicker, the reason we came to see you.”

  “And that question is?”

  Agent Griffith cleared his throat. “Dr. Rice, do you know how to travel to the future?”

  3 Coin

  The questions from the FBI agents were getting ever stranger.

  Time travel. Really? Are we going there?

  Daniel didn’t mind helping on the science side of their investigation, but educating these guys on time dilation, relativity and the limits theorized by Einstein, Hawking, Carroll, Thorne, Greene and others was going to take a lot more than twenty minutes. Nala was upstairs waiting.

  “Do I know how to travel to the future? Absolutely,” Daniel said. “We all do. We’re doing it right now. Ticktock. Now we’re in the future.”

  “Not exactly what I meant,” Agent Griffith responded. He looked irritated at Daniel’s rather flippant remark. Fair enough, but his was a beginner’s question.

  Daniel avoided further eye rolls and bit his facetious tongue. “I apologize. Of course, that’s not what you meant.” There was no reason to waste the agents’ time, but neither was there any reason to waste Daniel’s. “Maybe you can tell me the reason for your questions? I’m a scientist, but I’m not a theoretical physicist or a cosmologist, and I’m certainly no expert on the inner workings of the portal down at KSC. These might be good questions for Zin or Core, though I doubt they’ll tell you much. I can also recommend a few books.”

  Both agents sat stony-faced. Daniel gestured with both hands. “Look, I’m sorry to hear this engineer misused the technology to kill himself, but what does any of this have to do with me?”

  Without answering, Griffith looked at Torre. “Are you satisfied?”

  Torre nodded. “I believe so. I think we can proceed.”

  Griffith eyed Daniel. “Our apologies for the indirect questions, but we needed to uncover your relationship with Mr. Becton, both now and in the future.”

  “Mr. Becton is dead,” Daniel answered. “I don’t think he has much of a future.”

  “Not anymore, but he may have been to the future, possibly your future.” Griffith’s serious demeanor hadn’t changed in the slightest, even if the conversation had taken a turn toward the incredible.

  “An interesting statement. Your evidence?” As cosmologist Carl Sagan had famously said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This had better be good.

  Torre unzipped a compartment inside his briefcase. “Before he died, Mr. Becton told the Orlando police he was from the future.”

  “A little fanciful, wouldn’t you say?” Flippant remarks co
uld be set aside out of politeness, but not Daniel’s innate skepticism. “Your own investigation identifies Becton as an engineer at NASA. That’s today’s NASA, I assume.”

  “Perhaps Becton is not from the future but had recently been there.” Torre reached into the briefcase compartment and pulled out a coin. It glittered with gold and silver colors as he turned it. “He told the police to give this coin to you. He mentioned you by name. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen it?” He handed the coin to Daniel.

  Moving holograms popped from each side, iridescent with the full spectrum of visible colors. Daniel absorbed the elaborate details, including the writing around the edge. “Quite a beautiful object. It certainly gets your attention, but no, I’ve never seen it before. And as I said, lots of people know my name.”

  “Yes, sir. I think we’ve established that you don’t currently know Mr. Becton.”

  Daniel looked up. “But I will know him? That’s your premise?”

  “We’re not sure,” Griffith answered. “It’s possible Mr. Becton will become your associate.”

  Once more, Daniel glanced at the writing around the outside of the coin and turned to Torre. “My guess is you have a mirror in your briefcase?” On cue, Torre withdrew a circular mirror about the size of a dinner plate and set it on the table.

  Daniel nodded. “Okay, I’ll bite. You’ve done this before? Spinning this coin?”

  “We have.”

  Daniel smiled and reached out to the mirror, placing the edge of the coin on its surface. “Well, then, I feel left behind. Time to catch up.” He snapped his fingers and started the coin spinning.

  The coin spun, and not just for a few seconds as expected. It wound itself up, spinning faster and emitting a throbbing tone that grew higher in pitch. Clearly more than a disc of metal, Daniel felt his natural skepticism beginning to fray.

  “Fascinating.” He lowered his head to better examine the point of contact between the coin and the mirror. “Either it has an internal energy source, or it’s drawing reflected energy from the mirrored surface. Maybe a feedback mechanism creating an amplification. Nice science demonstration you have here.”

  “Stay tuned,” Griffith said, a grin appearing on his face for the first time.

  The tone’s frequency quickly surpassed the limits of human hearing. The spinning coin made an audible click, and an inverted cone of light illuminated the ceiling. Photographic images rotated within the cone, a man’s face as seen from different directions. The blur of images settled, each independent view coalescing into a single three-dimensional image of a man’s head as if a puzzle had self-assembled.

  The man, probably in his seventies, had long white hair pulled back in a ponytail and several days of stubble on his face. He looked remarkably like Daniel.

  Every detail of the face was depicted with the precision of a three-dimensional video. The eyes looked left and then right. The man smiled, and as the floating face began to speak, a chill went up Daniel’s body.

  “This message is for Daniel Rice at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.” Except for some scratchiness, the voice sounded like his.

  The older man cleared his throat. “This probably comes as a shock to you, Daniel. It did for me too. Like it or not, we’re one person, but at different points in time. Odd, isn’t it? Looking at a future version of yourself. You’re skeptical, of course.”

  His mind raced through every possible explanation. An elaborate hoax, an alien technology, or something else? He squinted at the hovering head, noting the crook in the man’s left earlobe. He reached up and felt his own ear.

  The floating head looked down. “It’s really not much different than watching any other recording of yourself. Of course, the time order is reversed, but you’ll get used to it. As I speak, it is April fourteenth, 2053. That’s a Monday, if you want to look it up. From your perspective, it’s thirty years in the future, but from my perspective it’s today. Of course, I could tell you things about the past thirty years that you can’t possibly know, but too much information isn’t wise, so don’t expect any stock market tips.”

  He cleared his throat again. “But I will bring up one event, and it’s the reason for this message. A tragedy that will soon happen… soon, from your perspective.” The man looked straight ahead and spoke with conviction. “It was a nuclear missile launch. Very bad, with millions killed and significant areas still uninhabitable even in 2053. But here’s the thing, Daniel. There’s hope. We believe this destruction can and should be prevented. In fact, we believe that you can prevent it.”

  Daniel’s skepticism slipped further. The older man spoke in the same manner and tone as Daniel. Even the word choices matched his style and thought process. If this was a fake, it was a damned good one.

  The gray-white ponytail was a stretch. Not my style. At least, not now.

  “I’m going to ask a big favor, both for myself and all those millions of people who lost their lives. Come to 89 Peachtree Center, floor 97, Atlanta, Georgia on the afternoon of June second, 2053. Use the belt to get here. It works, you’ll see. I know you’re skeptical about all of this. I was too. This message is only one piece of evidence. Examine the rest and I’m confident you’ll arrive at the right decision. You will come to 2053, because I remember doing it.”

  As the video concluded and the cone of light switched off, Daniel shook his head, believing in the clever technology but not remotely ready to accept the premise of the message.

  Quite impossible.

  Yet the conviction of his initial assessment was accompanied by an odd feeling of déjà vu. Standing in the Diastasi lab a year before, he had held a four-dimensional tesseract in his hand. Another impossible feat that had somehow found a niche in reality.

  4 Isotope

  Daniel Rice followed a nurse down a seemingly infinite hallway deep within the monolithic J. Edgar Hoover building, the decaying building still the headquarters for the FBI even after years of political wrangling for something better.

  Why the office needed a nurse on staff wasn’t clear, nor was the reason why he had been asked to accompany her. Agents Griffith and Torre had insisted, putting Daniel’s evening plans with Nala on hold. He would still meet her somewhere for dinner, they agreed, but that was more than an hour ago.

  The nurse opened the door to a small examination room that could have been lifted from any doctor’s office. “Have a seat, Dr. Rice. This will just take a few minutes.”

  Asian. Probably Vietnamese. Her ethnicity didn’t matter in the slightest, but his mind never stopped appraising almost everything around him. Ng on her name tag confirmed his instant assessment.

  Daniel sat on the paper-covered examination bed, his feet dangling like a child sitting in an adult’s chair.

  Nurse Ng withdrew a bundle of wires from a drawer. “We’ll start with the electrocardiogram. Just remove your shirt and lie down.”

  “Happy to oblige.” Daniel patted his chest. “But my heart feels just fine. What’s the purpose?”

  She glanced obliquely as she prepared the electrical bundle. “Just doing my job. They ask. I get it done.”

  He began unbuttoning his shirt. “Not your fault, of course. But the agents that brought me here weren’t exactly chatty. You look nicer.”

  The nurse smiled at the small flirtation. “I’d tell you if I knew. But I don’t.” She pushed him flat on the examination bed and peeled several adhesive tabs from a medical pack, sticking each one to his skin at various points around his chest and abdomen. “We’re doing an EKG and DNA samples. That’s all I know.”

  “More information than I had before,” Daniel said as she pulled down his socks and stuck a tab on each ankle. “So, nothing sharp?” He hated needles.

  “Nope.” She hooked up a wire to each tab and ran the bundle to a machine beside the bed. “Okay, lie still for a minute.” She pressed some buttons and watched a countdown on a screen.

  A buzzer sounded when the test was complete. She unclipped the wires
and ripped the adhesive tabs off one by one. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Daniel sat up again and reached for his shirt. “I rather enjoyed it. But why would the FBI need an electrocardiogram? Assessing my health for an upcoming mission they have in mind?”

  She shook her head and reached for a jar of cotton swabs. “Around here, it’s not likely to be about your health. Did you know that electrocardiograms are an excellent biometric? Better than your fingerprint or a retinal scan. Your heart has a very distinctive pattern, unlike anyone else’s.”

  “I had no idea.” Sometimes, even an accomplished scientist comes up short.

  She held out a swab. “Open,” she commanded and ran the swab under his tongue.

  “This is the DNA part?”

  “Yup. Saliva and hair.” She pulled out a pair of scissors.

  “Hair only contains mitochondrial DNA,” Daniel said. “It’s a poor biometric.”

  “Right you are,” the nurse replied. “But protein matching is the newest thing, and hair is almost like tree rings when it comes to recording the unique pattern of proteins created inside your body.”

  “Hadn’t heard of that one either.”

  She snipped just above his collar, the results of the trim falling onto a piece of tissue paper.

  “A little more off around the ears, if you don’t mind.”

  “Ha ha,” she said. “Are all of you famous scientists this funny?”

  “Ah, then you do know who I am.”

  “I’ve seen you on TV once or twice.” Her voice was blasé. Some science fans gushed when they met him; many wanted a selfie. But professional women tended to play it cool. At age forty-four, Daniel was still figuring women out.

  “That’s it, Dr. Rice. All done.”

  “I’ll miss our time together.”

  “You are funny,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. She pointed to the door. “You can go back to the lobby now, funny man. We’ll have the results in about thirty minutes, and one of the agents will take it from there.”