“Like cheating at a poker game. But I doubt I’ll learn anything, other than you have beautiful eyes.” He stood up. “No worries, I’ll find my own way.”
He set the duffle bag on her desk and tried the hallway to the left. It too was lit down its length by every fourth overhead light. The hallway led past a few interior offices and finally connected to a large open area filled with people. On one side, floor-to-ceiling windows provided a view out over darkened Atlanta, including the street he’d just walked up.
In the center of the room, a low table was covered with plates of food. Lounge seating surrounded the table, each seat filled by people dressed rather formally and frozen in conversation with one another. Many others stood in small groups, some holding soft drink cans, others biting into potato chips, carrots, and other hors d’oeuvres. It looked like an office party.
Not quite, though. An office party from the 1960s.
Their clothes were noticeably retro. The men wore gray or brown suits with thin lapels, skinny ties, and shiny black shoes. The women were in long slender skirts and ruffled white blouses. Some wore a yellow satin sash around their waists, but in general, the personal decorations were sparse. Perhaps clothing styles had gone backward. They all looked very prim and proper, like watching an old black-and-white rerun of The Dick Van Dyke Show.
A glass partition on the far side separated the partygoers from a large conference room where a few more people stood around a long table. A banner over the conference room entrance made it clear he’d found the right place: Welcome, Dr. Daniel Rice.
Theory confirmed. Note to all future time travelers: not only do they know you’re coming, they even know the day and hour you’ll arrive. It’s all documented somewhere in the history books.
Another strange thought popped into his mind, and he scanned the faces of every man in the room. There was no one that looked like him, which, in a way, was a relief. Meeting yourself, even if frozen in time, would be deeply disturbing. Much better to gather whatever information they had regarding nuclear launches and get out.
Daniel leaned against one of the lounge chairs, inserting himself in a three-way conversation between an older man and two women. The man looked like he’d walked out of a cigarette commercial from the early days of television, his mouth wide open in some long-winded oration. The much younger women wore blouses buttoned up to their necks, the expressions on their faces feigning interest in whatever the old geezer was saying.
“Sir, ladies. I’m here. What’s next? Shall we put a record on the phonograph and dance the twist? Maybe I made a wrong turn somewhere. This is 2053, isn’t it?”
He shrugged at their steadfast silence. Perhaps others might offer clues, even if no one could speak. He glanced toward the conference room, his eyes drawn immediately to something on one wall that he hadn’t noticed before. A small red light.
The light was blinking.
He hurried through the open conference room door, stepping past a man leaning against a whiteboard. Embedded near the top of the whiteboard, a small red LED flashed on and off with regular pulses. Scrawled across the whiteboard surface was a message clearly written for his eyes.
Join us by flowing forward now. It is your only path.
Flowing forward. Dangerous words, at least according to Zin. Flow forward while time is still compressed, and you’ll never make it back alive. A one-way trip to the future, as Zin had said. Yet that was exactly what these people were asking him to do.
Below the handwritten note was what seemed to be a computer link, even though it was just more words on the whiteboard’s surface.
Touch here for more information.
Maybe it wasn’t just a whiteboard. It might be a wall-sized computer operating in empros time just like the lighting. Daniel pressed a finger to the lettering. A black dot appeared and expanded into a rectangle containing a page of text and several drawings.
He scanned the text and examined the diagrams, his pulse quickening as he read.
“Oh, shit.”
Daniel read further and let out a lungful of air once he’d completed. “Holy crap, we’ve already fucked up.”
It was bad news. Very bad. But he wasn’t ready to accept it without confirmation. He scrawled a quick note on the whiteboard, took a picture with his phone and left the conference room. Grabbing the duffel bag from the reception desk, he pushed through the office doors and into the dark hallway, beginning to run.
The words on the whiteboard were stark and clear, and the predictions were frightening:
Unfortunately, you will need to make this decision on your own.
Daniel called the elevator and dropped to the street level, racing out of the building and back into darkened Atlanta.
Can history change so easily?
He took the same route along Auburn Street back to the Ebenezer Baptist Church, but at a run-trot. His breathing was heavy, and his legs ached when he finally reached the church.
Retrace your path. Exactly.
The whiteboard had warned of changes. Things he might not even notice. Daniel fumbled getting the helmet on his head. He flipped the belt’s power switch. He selected the command that would bring him home, though what that home now looked like was anyone’s guess.
tcs_decompress_forward
The command would return him to the anchor point in his own time. The yellow light flashed, and a shock ran down the back of his neck. Still flowing empros, he flipped the helmet visor up, scanning for differences.
The frozen cars on the street were back to their 2023 styles, though possibly in different positions than when he’d left. He wasn’t sure. The large tree on the far side of Auburn Street had returned to its original sapling size. At least the tree confirmed he’d returned to his starting point thirty years before.
But the family with the skipping child was nowhere to be seen on the sidewalk. A small difference, but any difference was unsettling. The anchor point was precise, to the second.
Daniel picked up the duffel and ran around the corner into the plaza. The couple taking a selfie by the pool was gone too. Instead, a heavyset man sat by its edge, a person he hadn’t noticed at all when he left. His heart pounded.
They’d better be there.
Daniel sprinted across the plaza toward the quiet location behind the chapel where Chloe and Griffith would be waiting. He skidded to a stop.
They should have been standing there, frozen, just as he’d left them. But they weren’t.
He scanned in every direction. No Chloe, no Griffith.
“Damn!” He jerked the helmet off, very nearly slamming it to the ground before he thought better of it.
He’d initialized a precise anchor point just as Chloe had described. The decompression should have returned him to the time he’d left. Chloe had done the same thing back in Geneva with no issues. She and Griffith should be standing right there.
It wasn’t any flaw in the belt or how he’d set the anchor. The explanation on the whiteboard had predicted this turn of events.
Deep compression is more than a simple adjustment in the frequency of a standing wave.
The past had already changed in subtle ways, caused simply by his initial act of compression. Worse, the words on the whiteboard had given Daniel an explicit warning.
Decompress if you must to verify that the world of your anchor point has changed, but do not attempt to flow forward into that altered world. Temporal dislocation will result, a most terrible way to die.
Daniel stood alone in the plaza, contemplating the very explicit warning from the future.
Do not flow forward into your own time.
The command itself was simple. He even pulled it up on the belt’s display.
tcs_flow_forward.
His finger hovered over the Enter key.
If he pressed the key, he’d be back to normal. Forward time. His phone would work. He could call Griffith and find out where they’d gone. He could call Reverend Clure or the FBI headquarters.
He could find out what subtle changes might have occurred to his own time.
But he might also die before he had the chance to reach anyone. Becton had.
The prediction on the whiteboard had just been validated. With Chloe and Griffith missing, something had changed in his own time, and the risks of this mission had jumped dramatically.
Daniel turned the belt’s power off and stowed the helmet in the duffel. There was no hurry; he could remain in empros time indefinitely and think this through.
Death by temporal dislocation. Likely the same thing Zin had called snapback. Almost certainly what killed Becton. Yet Chloe had survived. How?
The explanation on the whiteboard wasn’t clear, though it did use the words “deep compression.” Perhaps Chloe’s one-day jump to tomorrow wasn’t deep. Too small to bring on snapback? A thirty-year jump might be different.
Daniel desperately needed another discussion with Zin and Chloe, but it might be too late for that now. Zin was back in Geneva, impossibly far away for a man stuck in empros time. Every airplane in the world would be frozen in place. Chloe might still be somewhere in Atlanta, but finding her without a working phone seemed like a long shot.
And what would he do if he found her? Stick a note in her pocket? He would have to wait a lifetime for her response. Living in empros time had its drawbacks.
Daniel pulled up the photo he’d taken of the whiteboard and reviewed its message once more. The page on the whiteboard wasn’t all bad news, it also offered hope:
Join us by flowing forward now. It is your only path.
The words on the page continued. The people of the future had learned much about time compression since the early days of CERN experimentation, it read. They had learned how to avoid temporal displacement. They had developed methods to examine and control the subtle changes that resulted from deep compression. Jumping to the future and returning safely to your anchor point was still possible. They could help.
But to take advantage of their offer, Daniel would first need to flow forward into the future. Exactly what Zin had told him not to do.
20 Reception
Daniel sat in one of the conference room chairs, surveying the frozen people around him. The same people, even in the same positions, just as he’d seen it in his first jump. He’d jumped to precisely the same time in the future, June 2, 2053 at 1:00:00 p.m. To the second.
The oldest man in the room still leaned against the whiteboard, apparently thinking. A second man sat on the far end of the conference table, staring into space directly in front of him, possibly examining something hovering in the air. What the apparition might be Daniel couldn’t determine. There was nothing there.
A younger woman sat at one side of the table, a tablet computer lying on the table in front of her. She wore the same conservative 1960s-style clothing that everyone in the party zone wore. Muted colors. Understated style. If this was modern fashion, someone must have confused Vogue and GQ with the Sears Roebuck catalog.
Outside the conference room, the party was still in progress just as before. Whatever had changed in the past wasn’t significant enough to cause downstream ripples. At least the major points in the history books hadn’t been rewritten. These people were still expecting him.
He studied the pages on the whiteboard once more. The details weren’t fully explained, but there were links to other documents that matched the summary, including one document that explained how the first CERN teams investigating quantum time had missed several key relationships. It even mentioned Aastazin’s failure to identify these issues and suggested humans were better off when they relied on their own scientific research.
As predicted, the decision to flow forward would be his alone to make. He could sit and watch frozen people forever, but they weren’t going to tell him any more than was on the whiteboard.
No chance of getting in and getting out. No coin to pick up and take home.
A disappointment, but as Griffith had suggested, if preventing the nuclear launch was simple, they’d have explained it with the first coin. There was also no sign of his older self. He’d checked the side hallways and offices. No other Daniel.
You could study this to death. Get on with the show.
The next step might be irreversible, risking everything. His job, his past life, Nala. But he’d always been a scientific optimist with an intrinsic confidence in the technological advancements of the future. These people had offered to help.
Daniel powered up the belt.
He took a position in the main office space, just in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Thirty or so partygoers stood in groups chatting and eating. “This ought to turn some heads.”
He donned the helmet and selected the critical command on the belt controller that would send him into their time.
tcs_flow_forward
A rising tone came from the belt and the light flashed in the helmet. He opened his eyes to a room fully lit by the sunshine streaming through the windows behind him.
The sounds of dozens of people in conversation died quickly as everyone in the room pivoted toward Daniel. He removed his helmet, and cheers erupted.
“It’s him!”
“Dr. Rice!”
“He’s so young!”
“Oh my God, it really happened!”
“The first time traveler!”
His newly animated audience burst into applause. Daniel gave them a bow of the head.
This might not be so bad.
Several men came over to shake his hand. “Let me be the first to welcome you, Dr. Rice,” said the geezer who’d earlier been the centerpiece for his bored female companions. His face now beamed with enthusiasm. “I’m Brother Timothy, the social functions director. I can’t tell you how honored we are that you could join us.”
“Happy to be here,” Daniel said. “I think.” The surroundings looked and felt normal, even if everyone dressed differently. But the bizarre notion that he’d really jumped to the future hadn’t fully sunk in yet.
“I’m sure you’re confused to be here, but don’t worry at all about the so-called perils of time travel,” Timothy responded. “The Committee has that all figured out. They’ll take good care of you. You’ll see.”
Another man shook his hand, introducing himself as Brother John. Another odd title, but then so were their clothes. John seemed an amiable guy, offering Daniel a cola, the can labeled with the same script font from his own day. Some things never change. He accepted the drink, puzzled for an instant about whether 2053 forward-flowing atoms would be okay to consume, and then took a big swig of the ice-cold drink. It certainly helped to quench the thirst from his run.
“Thanks,” he said. “Have you been waiting for me long?”
“Years,” answered another man who introduced himself as Brother Jake. He patted Daniel’s shoulder. “Just kidding. The party started about an hour ago. We knew your arrival time might vary a bit, so we decided to enjoy ourselves by starting a little early. Hope you don’t mind.”
They seemed pleasant enough people, even if they were all monks or strict Baptists. But they’d promised to help, and socializing wasn’t his priority.
“I know this is a big occasion and I’d love to party with you, but I do have some critical questions,” Daniel said.
“Of course, you do,” Timothy said. “And we want you to feel comfortable knowing that everything is under control.” He pointed to another man coming out of the conference room. “Look now. Brother Christopher is right on time to help.”
It was the older man who had leaned against the whiteboard. He had longish gray hair and wore circular wire-rimmed spectacles, almost like John Lennon’s, or maybe Ben Franklin’s. He walked purposefully toward Daniel, a broad smile on his face.
“I’ve been waiting for this day, Dr. Rice,” he said, shaking Daniel’s hand. “All of us have. Even you.”
“And where am I?” Daniel’s future self was still nowhere to be seen.
Brother Christop
her’s expression was somber. “We’ll get to that. It’s a bit complicated.” He motioned to the conference room. “There’s much to cover, Dr. Rice. Would you care to join me?”
Daniel nodded, and Brother Christopher led. The rest of the partygoers quickly formed a receiving line to the conference room door, each person reaching out to shake Daniel’s hand and wish him well as he passed by. The women even curtseyed as if he was royalty, and their handshakes were just as dainty, mostly fingers.
The love pouring from the room was a little overwhelming. Never good at being a celebrity, Daniel had always been awkward in his television appearances back in his own time. Fans encountered individually on the street or in a restaurant were much easier, but he completely understood why movie stars sometimes ran from crowds.
With the conference room door closed, he felt an instant release of tension. Christopher introduced Daniel to two other men in the room and motioned to the only woman present. “Sister Angela will capture our conversation.” Angela tipped her head. On the other side of the glass wall, the crowd dispersed, returning to their office party even though the guest of honor had left.
Brother Christopher put a hand on Daniel’s shoulder and nodded to the crowd on the other side of the conference room glass. “Thanks for indulging us. You enjoy your privacy, I know.” He motioned to Daniel to select a chair and then took a seat at the head of the table.
“We’ve met before?” This time travel thing would require some unnatural conversations.
“Once. Last year. You looked very well then, but you look much younger today.” He smiled, flashing perfectly white teeth. A very handsome man, probably in his late sixties.
“Then I’m at a disadvantage. You’ve met me, but I haven’t met you… until I’m much older.” Did his older self remember meeting Brother Christopher in this conference room during his jump to the future? Sorting through the convoluted logic for which memories might exist in another version of himself was a surefire way to end up with a headache.
“Brother Christopher Holloway at your service. You might say I manage this level of our office. I’d give you my e-card, but you’re not yet equipped to receive it. We’ll take care of that in a minute.”
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 74