“Funny how the physicists tell us the past is gone. Inaccessible. Yet, here it is. Think of how many hands have touched the winding handle on this clock over the years.” It was probably better to think about the science that had brought them here than the nervousness that comes when meeting important people.
They weren’t kept waiting long. A second door opened, and a short man with glasses walked in. Daniel didn’t recognize him, but the three who followed were as famous as they come. Prime Minister Elaine Woodruff walked briskly, her gray hair classically tied up in a bun. President John Simonds followed her, acknowledging Daniel with a quick handshake. They’d had a working lunch once before. The man looked tired and older than Daniel remembered.
German Chancellor Gerhard Kruger followed. A heavyset man with wire-rimmed glasses and long white hair, Kruger recognized Daniel and took his hand. “Dr. Rice, it is a pleasure. Thank you for agreeing to this most interesting mission.”
“I, uh…” It was probably no use squabbling. If the FBI and the leaders of the Western world had already decided he was going to the future, his fate was fixed. Maybe every event in time and space really was predetermined, offering no opportunity for free will.
“I’m happy to be here,” was the most innocuous of responses Daniel could come up with.
The three leaders settled on one side of the table. Two additional men and one woman joined them, likely aides given the collections of papers that each set on the table. Griffith, Chloe and Daniel took chairs on the other side. The short man with glasses sat at the end, typing on his computer.
Prime Minister Woodruff glanced at a single page in her hand. She tapped in a steady rhythm on her chin, her no-nonsense expression the same as he’d witnessed watching Prime Minister’s Questions on CSPAN. The woman was more intimidating in person.
She looked up at Daniel with piercing eyes. “You seem to be a key player, Dr. Rice. Though the coin itself remains in Washington, we’ve viewed a recording of its remarkable message. But I’m still puzzled. Do you have any idea why you were selected?”
It was a good question, one he hadn’t really thought about. “I wish I knew, Prime Minister. It makes no sense to me. Why not ask a nuclear weapons expert? Or terrorism expert? Or someone from the military?”
Good to get the first question out of the way. His nervousness calmed.
“We’re told the belt is designed for one person,” President Simonds said. “But even if we could send an expert, as you suggest, we agree that for now it should be you alone, per the instructions.” No doubt about it. In their minds, Daniel was committed. He didn’t remember signing the agreement.
“Yes, sir. If I were to go to Atlanta and use this belt”—Daniel emphasized the if, even though it probably didn’t matter—“and, assuming it worked and I peered through some veil into the year 2053, what then? Are you asking for specific reconnaissance?”
“In a way, I suppose,” the president answered. “We need information. Just do what the video asked. Go there. What happens next is probably up to them.”
“Which is an interesting question in itself,” Daniel answered. “They’ll know I’m coming. Today’s meeting is being documented.” Daniel pointed to the man at the end of the table, still typing furiously on his computer. “The people of the future have already read his notes. From their perspective, this meeting is history.”
“A good point,” the prime minister said. “That’s to your advantage. They’ll be ready with whatever information they want to pass to us. There’s a good chance their plan to stop the nuclear attack will be based on intelligence that we cannot access, maybe even facts that wouldn’t otherwise be uncovered for years.”
“A postwar inquiry,” Chancellor Kruger said. “Germany did the same after World War II, and it took more than ten years to come to a satisfactory answer. People living thirty years into the future will have access to that data and expert analysis. They should have a very good idea how to stop this threat.”
Daniel recognized his privileged position. Across the table were three leaders representing half the military power of the world as well as some of the most capable intelligence agencies. They ought to know something. “You’re sure the nuclear threat is real?”
The president nodded. “No question. Of course, we’ve already taken prudent actions to eliminate the threat. We’re not going to unilaterally disarm, but I have spoken with the generals and admirals, and we agree that extra vigilance and additional security protocols will be enough to prevent unauthorized access. No one is going to launch a US missile without my express authorization.”
“But even though you believe we’re now safe, you want me to go to 2053 anyway?”
“Yes,” the president answered. “We want to know what they know. See if we’re missing anything. Find out who was involved in the threat and uncover any weaknesses in our security. A contact who has already lived through it seems like pretty good intelligence source.”
“They’ve already helped us,” the president added. “Israel recently reported that they captured a Hamas terrorist who was planning to detonate a bomb at precisely the place and time indicated in the coin’s message. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow to be sure, but it appears the predicted Tel Aviv attack has been prevented.”
“Proving that information from the future can be used to change the present?” Griffith asked. He’d been quiet until now.
“Yes.” The president nodded. “It proves that Dr. Rice’s mission will produce actionable information.”
Dr. Rice’s mission. Daniel rolled his eyes at the inevitability of it all. The only thing left was to give it a clever code name. DeLorean?
Daniel spoke to the stenographer at the end of the table. “Write this down.” The stenographer looked up. “Ask the people of the future if they recall anything about a Tel Aviv bomber. Now that we’ve prevented it, maybe they won’t remember telling us about it.” The man typed what would become a direct question, carried thirty years into the future.
The president smiled. “I like your way of thinking, Dr. Rice. You’re clearly the right person for this mission.”
Daniel shrugged. “I have more thoughts, too, but you might not like them as much.” He rubbed his chin. “What if I return with baggage? Something I saw or learned that might alter our path in unanticipated ways. Maybe even something physical. What if just by breathing future air, I contract a virus that doesn’t exist today but spreads rapidly across the population?”
“You’re suggesting we should quarantine you when you return? We can do that.”
“I guess what I’m saying is we don’t have any way to distinguish between before and after. That’s the illogical part of information transfer. We have no way to know how things might have been if I had not made the jump.”
The High Lords of Ignorance all shared facial expressions that matched their nickname. Daniel tried once more. “Even now. What if, by preventing the bomb in Israel, someone’s life has been spared who will now go on to even more atrocious actions? Who’s to say that we have improved the future?” It was an uncomfortable question to ask. Most people would agree that saving lives is always a good thing.
The president seemed to be one of them. “Dr. Rice, we already do this every day. We seek out the bad guys, infiltrate their organizations, and take action based on our intelligence. We regularly prevent deaths. Should we stop doing that just because we don’t know how things might have turned out otherwise?”
The president’s point was valid, but the plan still didn’t feel right. A known future, regardless of how well things turned out, felt unnatural. A suspense spoiled. Like reading the last chapter in a book and then jumping back to the middle. You learned something you weren’t supposed to know.
Daniel shook his head, acknowledging the predetermined plan and his central role in it. “Zin mentioned another civilization that quarantines their time travelers to isolate whatever knowledge they gained from the future. I guess that will be me.”
Daniel blew out a breath, acknowledging his fate. “I’ll do my best.”
16 Sagittarius Novus
Daniel yawned, shook off the drowsiness, and blinked as the first rays of sunrise streamed through the jet’s window. He rubbed the crick in his neck. Sleeping on planes was getting tougher with age.
Far below, the Atlantic stretched into the distance, a mix of orange-tinted clouds and blue water. Above, a much darker blue announcing the limits of Earth’s life-preserving atmosphere. In the distance, a few white specs floated on the water, probably icebergs drifting south from Greenland. No sign yet of the rocky coastline of Newfoundland, but it would be directly ahead.
Could there be a more beautiful planet in the galaxy?
Daniel peered over his shoulder. Behind him, Griffith slumped against a pillow propped up against the closed window shade. Chloe sat across the aisle, reading from a tablet. She looked up, making eye contact and smiled. “Bonjour. You slept well?”
Daniel shrugged. “Some. Enough, I guess.” They expected to touch down in Atlanta around 9 a.m. The start of what would likely be a busy day.
He unclipped his seat belt and moved to the empty seat facing rearward, a small table separating him from Chloe. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”
She set down her tablet. “Reading. Things to see in America. I’ve never been.”
“It’s a big country. Atlanta’s nice. But there’s a lot more.”
“I want to see New York.”
“Everyone does. A wonderful city. How’s your forward-facing body doing today? Any glitches?”
She scrunched one eye. “Sorry, my English. It is, uh… not so good.”
“My fault,” Daniel said. Her English was far better than his French, but that was no reason to assume perfection. “Yesterday you flowed empros with forward time compressed. Do you feel any different today?”
“Ah, yes, I understand. No, no problems. I feel fine.”
“You were brave to test the belt. Thanks.” Maybe a bit hasty too, but Daniel wasn’t complaining. She’d given him reason to believe this mission was possible. Pop to a future date, do some reconnaissance and return in one piece. Even measured in empros time, it might only require a few hours.
“My pleasure. I can’t wait to do it again.” She waved a hand before Daniel could speak. “Oh, I know. This technology, it is, uh… something that must be controlled.”
“You and Mathieu are close to duplicating time compression in your lab?”
“Yes. Already, I see what to do next. But, don’t worry. We have many controls. We also have Zin to make sure our work is safe.”
As an advisor, Zin hadn’t shown much inclination to supervise overly excited scientists. As a babysitter, he would let a four-year-old play with a chain saw. Would probably even point out the start button.
Their testing might be tempting fate, but it wasn’t Chloe’s fault. Like many scientists, she enthusiastically pursued new discoveries, following paths wherever they led. She was a natural explorer. Armed with the scientific method, humans had revealed many of the secrets hidden in nature, though human wisdom regarding the application of those discoveries was sometimes questionable.
Daniel reached into an overhead bin and retrieved Griffith’s duffel bag. He pulled out the belt and helmet and laid them on the table.
“Ready to make your jump?” Chloe asked with a grin.
Daniel fingered the on-off switch on the belt. “I wonder what would happen if I were to freeze time now?” He imagined an airplane suspended in midair much like the rubber ball.
Chloe shook her head with a smirk on her face. “You wouldn’t do that. I know you well enough already.”
Daniel nodded. “You’re right, I wouldn’t.” Testing the boundaries of this insanity at forty thousand feet wasn’t the best of plans. Daniel’s natural curiosity had its limits.
He lifted the helmet and examined the components glued to the inside of the visor. He tried it on. Though the helmet fit well enough, the stale smell of sweat was a downside.
“It’s easy,” Chloe said. “Just be sure to follow the order. Flow empros, initialize the anchor point, set a node, then compress forward. To return, decompress, then flow forward.” Daniel hadn’t tested the belt yet, even though Chloe had offered to assist before they’d departed London. The thing clearly worked. She’d reported seeing the future, even if it was only tomorrow… now today. But a thirty-year jump might push the limits. There were plenty of unchartered waters and no reason to risk the consequences more than once.
The device wasn’t his main source of concern. Time itself stood like an unexplored cave. Open, available for anyone to enter, but leading into dark passages. Did time branch? Were there multiple futures, each a result of decisions made today? Shadows of things that might be, as both Chloe and Charles Dickens had proposed?
Even if there were multiple futures, who was to say each one of them derived from the same past? Like tree branches, maybe Daniel was already out on one limb and the belt would take him to an entirely different branch derived from a different past.
All very odd questions and not very scientific. Yet the leaders of the free world had made a decision that could very well rearrange humanity’s future.
Daniel returned the tools of this folly to the duffel and left Chloe to her reading. He closed his eyes and pondered the next steps. Almost certainly, he would soon be in a position to glimpse the future. But what future? His future? Perhaps one of many. It would help to find a way to test time’s structure.
Create a breadcrumb trail, of sorts?
A connection between whatever future he would see and his known today. The gears turned in his head and a smile soon crept across his lips.
It can be done.
The more he thought about it, the more it made sense, if anything about time’s structure could make sense.
Leave a marker. But where? Daniel rubbed the whiskers growing on his chin. Someplace safe. Someplace that would remain undisturbed for thirty years.
The marker would need to be in Atlanta. He didn’t have time to go anywhere else. The president had been very direct in his order. Go to Atlanta, make the jump, and report back to Washington as soon as possible. Griffith was the chaperone to ensure Daniel performed the job as ordered. Chloe would be the technical consultant in case anything went wrong.
Somewhere in Atlanta.
Elijah Haugen Clure. The name popped into his mind, an obvious choice. Reverend Clure was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, the famed congregation of Martin Luther King. The old church in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood of central Atlanta was a historic site, well preserved, and would be for the foreseeable future. Through circumstance, Daniel knew the pastor well.
Were they friends? Adversaries? Debate opponents? It was hard to categorize their relationship, though it was certainly better now than when they’d first met at the Humanity Conference last year. The event had brought together leaders from all walks of life to discuss, debate and—if they could—agree upon how humans would become the newest member of the collection of civilizations known as Sagittarius Novus.
Twenty-three civilizations. Humans from the planet Earth would make it twenty-four. The home worlds were scattered across the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, with the cyborg Core as the gatekeeper and central communications hub. The first order of business at the conference was to learn something about the neighborhood.
Most people had no idea the Milky Way even had arms, much less named arms. Our little speck of dust in this vast assemblage of stars, planets, drifting rocks, dust, and gas is located on what humans had labeled the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Arm, an enormous swirl that extends from the galactic center toward the emptiness of intergalactic space. One arm further out is called Perseus. Interior is called Scutum-Centaurus.
The arms defined where life could exist. Habitable planets require atoms of carbon, oxygen and silicon, produced in the interior of stars and ejected in the cataclys
mic explosions of supernovas. Further out from the galactic center, densities were too low, with fewer supernovas, allowing for gas giants like Jupiter, but not so good for rocky planets like Earth. Closer in to the center, supernovas occurred too frequently—instant death for life that managed to get a toehold.
Earth, like most member planets, was in the Goldilocks Zone, a band of stars about halfway from the center of the Milky Way. Though less than a third of the galaxy, the zone of habitability still provided billions of suitable stars. Within the zone, life was everywhere. Any piece of rock close enough to a star and big enough to build a surface layer of water and gases almost inevitably produced microbes. More complex life took time, evolving only on rocky planets orbiting a stable star like Sol, our sun.
But even with life being common, advanced life turned out to be very rare. Only twenty-four civilizations scattered across a vast sector twenty thousand light-years long. There were, no doubt, additional civilizations not yet discovered. As Core had explained, the Sagittarius Novus alliance had known nothing of Earth until humans had stumbled upon the technology of spatial compression just one year before.
At the Humanity Conference, Daniel had been a strong voice for joining the alliance. We’d benefit from the information and technology exchange. There was no downside. It wasn’t like we could hide now that Earth had been revealed. They had no reason to attack us or even become overlords. We had nothing they coveted. Habitable planets could be found on every street corner of the galaxy. Water planets were a dime a dozen. Our technology was primitive compared to most other members.
But like many of his religious colleagues, Reverend Clure had argued from a different point of view. Humans were sacred, he’d said. God’s children fashioned in the likeness of our creator. If there were other sentient creatures out there, maybe they had their own god. We’d be better off, he argued, if we stayed in our own corner of the universe and focused on healing our own self-inflicted wounds: poverty, racial injustice, our local environment.
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 71