The feeling of power was overwhelming. Daniel began to understand Mathieu’s decline into voyeurism. With no one watching, he could literally do whatever he wanted. What’s more, he could remain in this state indefinitely. For all practical purposes, forward time had stopped and any time he spent in this state wouldn’t delay his mission at all.
Chloe picked up a snack from the café.
It wouldn’t be hard to step up to the next level of theft. A free round of golf down at Augusta National? Maybe a quick stop at a jewelry store to pick out something nice for Nala? The bank wouldn’t miss a few stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Accounting error.
Simple, but amateur shoplifting. With technology like this, why not go right to the top?
Walk right past security at the Vatican Library and hold Galileo’s original letters in my hands.
Of course, reminiscing with Galileo would require transportation to Rome. The frozen cars were solid evidence that anything beyond a mechanical bicycle would be non-functional. Still, he could spend a whole year roaming around frozen Atlanta and it wouldn’t matter in the slightest to the president’s urgent request. The year 2053 would still be there when he chose to make the jump.
But a nagging thought advised him otherwise; his personal health was on the line. He was breathing air that did not move within his new timeframe. Down at the atomic level, the electrons might be frozen in orbit.
Conceptually wrong. Daniel corrected himself. Electrons don’t orbit; their position is a probability computed by the Schrödinger equation, unrelated to the passage of time.
Physicists around the world would have a field day with this new discovery. So many new questions to explore. The scientific side of Daniel managed to subdue the voyeur or the bank robber within him.
Get in, get the job done and get out.
Breathing molecules of air that flowed in a different time frame was unavoidable. Drinking water or eating food might create their own set of digestive issues, though Chloe hadn’t worried too much about the croissant. Zin would probably say these issues would only be of concern for extended stays, but Zin’s easy-going attitude about everything didn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
It would be fascinating to explore this world, but not worth the risk.
Daniel looked into the unblinking eyes of the frozen couple, the woman’s mouth forming a word that Daniel would never hear. “I think it’s time to peek into the future. Agreed?” Their expressions didn’t change, and he patted the man on his shoulder. “I thought you might say that.”
Daniel backed up against the wall of the church. “I’ll just stay off the sidewalk, just in case there are other passers-by.” He pulled the helmet from the duffel and put it on.
He scrolled to the second command on the list.
tcs_initialize_anchor
As Chloe had explained, it would set his anchor point to the current date and time. The display even showed the very precise anchor point: October 9, 2023 at 11:04:16 AM.
Daniel pressed Enter. The device seemed to accept the command, but nothing else happened. Expected. It had simply stored a value.
The next command was no more difficult.
tcs_set_node
He typed at the prompt it provided: 06/02/2053 1:00:00 PM
The final command was just as easy to select, though its consequences would be vastly more impactful. If Chloe was right, it would send him thirty years forward in a flash.
tcs_compress_forward
This time, Daniel didn’t hesitate to press the Enter key, and the yellow light flashed once more.
The family on the sidewalk vanished. The cars in the intersection too.
The sudden changes in the scene before him were easy to spot; like flipping between before-and-after photos, the differences stood out. On the opposite street corner, a tall building now stood where a single-story restaurant had been. He looked up at the neon sign for the Ebenezer Baptist Church, unchanged. The wall behind him was still a dull red brick, perhaps a little darker than it had been.
But across the street, a large birch tree now filled the small park where the sapling had once stood. Undeniable evidence. Daniel shook his head in amazement. “Thirty years passed in the snap of a finger. Wow.”
He stepped into the street. The metal tracks embedded in its surface weren’t new, but a half block away, a sleek metal-and-glass streetcar paused motionless even though its aerodynamic shape suggested it could move at high speed. The cars occupying the street were stylish and streamlined. At the street corner, a man dressed in a bodysuit rode a three-wheeled motorcycle with sleek curving surfaces that partially surrounded him. The ultra-modern motorcycle could have come straight out of a Batman movie.
The sky had brightened slightly. Still twilight, but with stronger contrasts. The air was warmer too. Perhaps the June date could explain both. He put the helmet back in the duffel and opened the door to the old church.
Dark inside, Daniel guided his flashlight’s beam around the entryway. A park service employee stood frozen in conversation with a woman. He wore a sidearm. Perhaps NPS policy had changed over thirty years.
On the ranger’s belt was a key ring. Daniel unfastened the man’s belt and removed the ring. “I’ll just be a minute.”
He dropped the duffel and started up the stairs, still creaking, but now the only sound in this impossibly quiet world. The old boards seemed to provide a soundtrack for a horror movie, and Daniel half expected one of the human statues to slowly twist its head while he wasn’t looking. They didn’t, though Daniel’s heart beat a bit faster from the eerie notion.
At the top of the stairs, the door was still locked. He tried each key until one fit and the door swung open. What had been a mostly empty room was now filled with junk: stacked boxes, an old radiator, an empty bookcase. He threaded his way through the collection to the closet door on the other side. Moving a few boxes, he opened the door and pointed the flashlight inside. The shelves were now bare. He ran a finger through a thick layer of dust. No one had been here in years.
Hopeful, he stood on tiptoes and reached to the top shelf, feeling at the northwest corner. His fingers brushed against what might have been a frozen spider, then touched metal and plastic. He retrieved his watch and marveled at his luck.
It was covered with dust, and cobwebs spanned the wristband. “My brand-new watch. Now a relic.” He brushed it off and pressed a button on the side. No power remaining, of course.
The incredible had occurred. He’d placed the watch there less than an hour before. Yet thirty years had now passed. He didn’t need to see a newspaper banner to confirm this fact. The tree out front was enough.
He twisted the old watch in his hand. “What happened in all those years?”
If only it could speak. But it had, in a way. The configuration was the same as he’d left it. Northwest corner, wristband pin in hole number seven. Strong evidence that this future was derived from the same past held within his memory. It seemed intuitively obvious, but there were other options, and Daniel had considered each one before the jump.
In the simplest case, there was one, and only one, future. One past, one future, one memory. But the universe might allow for more. A branching timeline where decisions and events created entirely new worlds. Perhaps a braided timeline where branches merged at later points. Maybe even some branches that were dead ends where time had stopped altogether.
The existence of the watch didn’t resolve every question of contradictory futures, but it did confirm that whatever future he’d just stepped into was directly downstream from a point, now thirty years ago, when he’d placed the watch on the shelf.
What was more, if his coin flipping and number picking had somehow spawned forty different multiverse timelines, he had just jumped to the one and only future that matched his past memory, not any of the others. This was not a random future occupied by some alternate Daniel. This was his future.
The concept of a multiverse hurt the brain. Multiple Daniels, e
ach believing they had set the watch to a different configuration. The idea was absurd, and perhaps his test had just ruled it out. If there were forty futures generated by his coin-flipping decision, there was only a 2.5 percent chance he’d randomly jumped to the specific future that matched his memory.
“This is my future, the one that I will experience along with everyone else that lives in my today.” Nala, Marie, Mathieu, Chloe, everyone. It would be their future too.
“Unless, of course, we change it.”
********************
Come to 89 Peachtree Center, floor 97, Atlanta, Georgia on the afternoon of June 2, 2053, the video voice of a future version of Daniel had said.
Trouble was, that building didn’t exist. The address was just a parking lot, at least in 2023. The FBI had concluded that a new building would be built there and that scheduling a meeting at a location that didn’t currently exist was intentional. It might be a warning not to stand at that spot and jump to the future, lest you materialized inside concrete. Or it might have been more symbolic, a way to impress. None of the existing buildings in Atlanta were nearly this tall.
He’d already checked the route. The walk from the church to Peachtree Center would take no more than twenty minutes.
Daniel pulled his phone from a pocket. A no service light blinked. No internet connection either, and no GPS. While these communications protocols might be obsolete in 2053, the more likely reason was that every electromagnetic packet of energy was now moving in a different dimension of time. Not much chance of receiving anything when you’re flowing empros.
I could still take photos. But should I?
Any information brought back to his time could result in unintended changes. It might even result in the dreaded ontological paradox, if such a thing was possible. A photo of this street scene could theoretically give an engineer in Daniel’s day the idea to create the Batcycle he’d just seen. Then, who was the original designer?
An object with no discernable origin. The ontological or bootstrap paradox was one of the reasons scientists proclaimed time travel to be impossible.
He put the phone away. Focus on the mission and return with information that had been vetted as necessary to prevent a nuclear war. It seemed to fit within Zin’s boundaries of what other civilizations had successfully accomplished, though it was an open question whether anyone—alien androids included—really knew what they were doing.
He walked alone through a city in twilight, using the flashlight as needed to avoid tripping over curbs. Though mostly empty, a few people stood immobile along the sidewalk, some in midstride, precariously balanced on a single heel, others on both feet. None of them so much as twitched.
Just as strange was the utter calm of the air, feeling more like being inside a closet than outdoors. Absolute quiet too. No birds chirping, no background traffic noise, no wind rustling leaves. This was no ordinary walk.
Daniel walked several blocks, passing under a freeway and along the edge of the Georgia State University campus. For a Monday afternoon, there were surprisingly few students out. Perhaps the summer session had already started. He passed several students wearing long shirts that hung to their knees with muted colors, mostly grays and greens, though colors were harder to detect without the flashlight. Some wore earpieces, possibly Bluetooth phones or maybe just music players. It struck Daniel as odd that everyone he passed was male. Not a single female among them.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” he asked one of the students who waited at a train stop. The young man didn’t answer.
Daniel turned up Peachtree Center Avenue, and several tall buildings came into view, silhouetted against the brighter sky. Some were typical corporate towers from his day. He’d probably seen them in any photo of downtown Atlanta. But one stood out, unlike anything else in the skyline.
Daniel stopped and gaped upward at a spire that soared to the clouds, far taller than any of the surrounding buildings. Circular and wide at its base, the spire tapered to a point of solid gold. A row of windows just below the golden tip stood out, not because they represented the top floor, but because they were lit.
Light poured out like a beacon across the darkened city.
Photons moving. Electricity flowing. But how?
This was no mistake, no random fluke. The building stood precisely at his destination, 89 Peachtree Center Avenue, and although Daniel didn’t take the time to count the rows of darkened windows below, he had little doubt where the bright light originated. The ninety-seventh floor.
19 Spire
Ninety-seven floors up without a working elevator. Daniel was in good shape, but a couple thousand steps would be a three-hour marathon. Not that elapsed time meant anything in this nonsensical world, but presumably his empros-flowing body would eventually need some empros-flowing sustenance. He’d brought two bottles of water and a few snack bars. It would have to do.
He panned the flashlight around the dark lobby, looking for the stairwell entry. The beam reflected off a security desk, where several people were gathered. Behind them was a bank of elevators and more people waiting for a ride up. No point in joining them. From Daniel’s perspective, the elevator would never arrive.
Further down a hall, he found a door marked East Stairway. Taped to the door was an envelope with a name written in bold letters: Daniel Rice.
“I’m expected. That’s good news,” he said, peeling the envelope from the door. The physics of quantum time might be complex, but communication between dimensions of time turned out to be easy. Just leave a note. He opened the envelope. The single piece of paper inside read:
Use the service elevator at the end of the hallway.
Helpful but puzzling. Electricity wasn’t flowing. Or was it? The top floor of the building was clearly lit, taking advantage of some kind of an exception to the time-related boundaries that Mathieu and Zin had described. Empros-flowing electricity? His flashlight worked, but its battery—and the lithium electrons within it—were already flowing empros just like his body.
Daniel walked to the end of the hall, found the service elevator and pressed its call button. Surprisingly, the button lit, and a minute later the door opened.
Inside, a man in workman’s coveralls partially blocked the doorway, his rigid stare looking straight ahead.
“Sorry,” Daniel said to the motionless figure. “You probably wanted a different floor.”
It seemed best to leave him where he stood. Daniel squeezed past and pressed 97, the highest number available. This button lit too, and the doors closed.
The elevator accelerated, its brisk motion feeling perfectly normal. His silent elevator companion seemed normal too. At floor fifty, Daniel finally spoke to the unmoving form. “You know, it’s funny. Why are we always so frosty to each other in an elevator? Must be some kind of weird dynamic that only applies to confined spaces.”
The man’s lack of response was expected, but creepy. Daniel felt like an undertaker in a mortuary, speaking with the dearly departed. The man’s brain synapses were no doubt firing in the extreme slow motion of forward time, unable to perceive the elevator doors opening and closing or Daniel’s question.
The elevator slowed, the door opened, and Daniel hurried out. “Catch you on the way down.”
Get in and get out.
Another darkened hallway, but at the far end, light streamed through a glass door. Photons moving at their usual speed. Normalcy, but unaccountably so.
He walked the hallway, passing dark doorways with organizational names on the name plates. The Humanity Preservation Society, Angel Number Ninety-Seven, Disciples of Nations and others. One of the doors was slightly ajar, a frozen person on the other side. A good reminder that it was not midnight, and this was not a closed office building.
At the end of the hallway, light poured through the upper glass portion of two large double doors. The sign on the wall read Committee Reception. Daniel let his eyes adjust to the much brighter light and peered inside. An empty l
obby.
No, not quite empty. A reception desk with a woman’s head barely visible above the desktop. She seemed to be in deep concentration, not moving.
Daniel pulled the door open. “Hello?”
There was no response, not from the woman or anyone else along two hallways at either side of the reception desk. Apparently, only the light was flowing empros. Not the people.
The light came from three recesses in the ceiling, but there were other recesses where the lights were not turned on. It felt like emergency lighting during a power outage. Daniel recalled the battery-operated lamp in Mathieu’s lab that was within the boundaries of his targeted space. Perhaps this was something similar. Some portion of their electrical system had managed to make the transition to the empros timeframe.
He walked around the backside of the reception desk. The young woman stared at a dark computer display, her fingers hovering over two ovals that rose in smooth hemispheric curves from the desk. Possibly a keyboard of some kind, though the ovals showed no markings.
To one side on the desk was a paper document. Daniel picked it up and leafed through its ten or twelve pages. The first page included a letterhead showing a flying eagle and the words The Committee printed in gold. The document itself seemed to be a list of office procedures. About halfway down the second page, Daniel spotted his name.
Arrival Day Plan. Our welcome for the esteemed Dr. Daniel Rice.
It went on to describe what was clearly a planned event, for today. It mentioned advanced preparations that were underway for the main conference room.
“Perhaps you can direct me to this conference room?” Daniel asked the woman. He squatted and looked directly into her motionless eyes. He noticed an odd glint in each eye, a white rectangle. A reflection, likely of the computer display just before time had frozen. He moved closer, his nose almost touching hers. The white spot glistened on the surface of her eye, but any markings within were far too small to make out.
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