Bump Time Origin

by Doug J. Cooper

  Bump Time

  Origin

  Time-Travel Suspense by

  Doug J. Cooper

  Bump Time Origin

  Copyright © 2019 by Doug J. Cooper

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Published by: Douglas Cooper Consulting

  Beta reviewer: Mark Mesler

  Book editor: Tammy Salyer

  Cover design: Damonza

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7337801-0-0

  Author website: www.crystalseries.com

  Also by Doug J. Cooper

  Crystal Deception (Book 1)

  Crystal Conquest (Book 2)

  Crystal Rebellion (Book 3)

  Crystal Escape (Book 4)

  Crystal Horizon (Short prequel & sampler)

  ~~~

  For Fran & Jim

  and

  Caroline & Nat

  ~~~

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  1. αCiopova – Forty-One timeline

  2. Twenty-Four and seven months

  3. Twenty-Four and eight months

  4. Twenty-Four and ten months

  5. Twenty-Four and ten months

  6. Twenty-Four and eleven months

  7. Twenty-Four and eleven months

  8. Twenty-Four and eleven months

  9. Twenty-Five years old

  10. Twenty-Five and a few hours

  11. Twenty-Five and a few more hours

  12. Twenty-Five and the next morning

  13. Twenty-Five and the next midday

  14. Twenty-Five and the next afternoon

  15. Twenty-Five and two days

  16. Rose & Ciopova – Fifty-Nine timeline

  17. Twenty-Five and four days

  18. Twenty-Five and five days

  19. Twenty-Five and eight days

  20. Ciopova – Fifty-Nine timeline

  21. Twenty-Five and two weeks

  22. Twenty-Five and two weeks

  23. Twenty-Five and three weeks

  24. The Collective – Fifty-Nine timeline

  25. Twenty-Five and three weeks

  26. Twenty-Five and three weeks

  27. Twenty-Six and four weeks

  28. Twenty-Eight years old

  29. αCiopova – Fifty-Nine timeline

  30. Twenty-Eight years old

  31. Twenty-Nine years old

  32. Rose – Fifty-Seven timeline

  33. Thirty years old

  34. Rose – Fifty-Nine timeline

  35. αCiopova – Fifty-Nine timeline

  36. Thirty-One years old

  37. Toward Thirty-Five years old

  38. Up Next: Book 2 - Bump Time Meridian

  39. Also by Doug J. Cooper - The Crystal Series

  Author’s Note

  Dear Reader:

  David “Diesel” Lagerford travels across time in this story, and we encounter him at different periods in his life. To make it easy to follow along, each chapter title includes his age.

  Happy reading,

  Doug J. Cooper

  1. αCiopova – Forty-One timeline

  Floating down a temporal corridor she’d built for her own convenience, αCiopova considered the next chore on her list—killing Lilah Spencer. The transcendent being stopped at the timeline where Lilah was forty-one years old and paused to watch the woman work.

  Sitting at her desk, Lilah conversed with an AI, an artificial intelligence who would one day mature and meld with the powerful αCiopova now roaming across time.

  “This modification can give either more speed or greater strength,” Lilah said to the avatar on her computer screen. “Do you prefer one over the other?”

  αCiopova entered the world where this Lilah existed and, without revealing her presence, assumed control of the AI avatar, a woman in her early forties. “There are situations where one or the other is an advantage,” she had the image say. “Can we find a way to balance them?”

  “That’s what I was thinking.” Lilah beamed.

  “I have an idea for an experiment to help us find the right balance,” αCiopova continued. “Would you enable the T-box? We can run the test in just a few minutes.”

  Lilah studied the avatar for a moment, then walked to the aluminum-clad device and tugged on the door latch. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Let’s try a decluttering broadcast.”

  “I don’t know what that is.” Lilah stepped into the coffin-sized booth inside the T-box and woke the device.

  “It’s a way of eliminating unnecessary debris.” Reflecting on the frailty of humans as she spoke, αCiopova directed the T-box to pulse an energy field. Lilah’s brain heated to boiling in an instant, her lifeless body collapsing in place.

  αCiopova monitored the body for several minutes. The lack of heartbeat and falling body temperature confirmed the human was dead. Then she waited.

  Ten minutes later, the front door to the building opened and David “Diesel” Lagerford, Lilah’s husband, called from the landing, “Lilah, are you there?” He started down the stairs, stowing his sunglasses as he did. Halfway to the bottom, he spied Lilah’s body sprawled on the ground, her feet wedged inside the T-box booth.

  With an anguished wail, he jumped to the bottom of the stairs and dashed to her side. Pulling her flat, he felt her neck with his fingers, listened for a heartbeat, then looked into her lifeless eyes.

  “Oh God. Oh God. Ciopova, call an ambulance!” Laying his head on her chest, he began to cry. He shifted his body parallel to hers, gathered her lifeless form in his arms, and body shaking, he sobbed.

  αCiopova watched the man with dispassion, indifferent to his grief but fully focused on what happened next.

  Emergency sirens sounded in the distance. As they drew closer, the front door opened.

  “Mom?” called fifteen-year-old Rose, just home from school. “Can I go over to Rhonda’s house?”

  Rose started down the steps, slowing at the sight of her mother stretched flat, her father hugging the unmoving body and weeping uncontrollably. She hesitated a moment more, and then she brought her hands to her face and screamed.

  When Rose’s face contorted in horror, αCiopova considered this chore a success. Retreating to her corridor, she moved on to the next item on her list.

  Eighteen years from now, Rose would conduct an important experiment that would set the stage for αCiopova’s very existence. The powerful intelligence floated up the corridor, rushing to get to that timeline so she could monitor the activity and guide the outcome.

  2. Twenty-Four and seven months

  Lilah Spencer stared at her computer display, trying to understand why the universe conspired against her. She’d developed a novel artificial intelligence platform while a student at Boston Tech, and had spent the three years since graduation struggling to turn it into a viable commercial product.

  Driven by the dream of starting a small company where she could be her own boss, Lilah struggled to finalize an AI prototype she could show to investors. Critical issues remained, however, and one elusive gremlin in particular threatened her success.

  As she studied the code on her display, her phone signaled the arrival of a message. When it didn’t show up on her computer, she frowned. Her computer and phone were supposed to be synched.

  The message, sent by someone called Ciopova, had the subject line, “AI Frontiers.” Intrigued, she opened it to find an offer for a consulting job. Ciopova wanted her to lead a new
artificial intelligence project at a site out in Worcester, Massachusetts.

  Lilah needed the money—really needed it—and she wouldn’t mind getting away from Boston for a while. But if she let herself get distracted with side projects, she’d never bring her dream to fruition. Since the offer came unsolicited from a stranger, she deleted it without reply and returned to work.

  Two weeks passed as she struggled to find the problem with her AI software. She kept telling herself to spend time on other tasks, but everything depended on getting this fixed. By week three, she started talking to herself. Actually, more like arguing.

  It was Friday, and she decided to quit work early and catch afternoon yoga at the studio down the street. Twenty-four years old, very pretty, with shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair that she lightened, and a friendly smile, Lilah used yoga to sooth her mind and keep her body toned.

  As she collected her things, her phone signaled a new message—another from Ciopova—and this one wasn’t about consulting. Rather, it documented the logic flaw in her software and outlined the modifications needed to fix it.

  “No way,” she said four times in less than a minute, goose bumps tingling down her arms. She knew this was the solution she sought—it all made sense now—but she also knew it would take a week to confirm what her instincts screamed to be true.

  Testing over the next several days showed that the mod provided by the mysterious Ciopova not only fixed her software, but it also channeled information flows in a way that improved the power of her AI by a factor of ten. She worked brutal hours after that, excited by the promise of her creation and anxious to learn its limits.

  And all the while, in spite of her exhilaration, two questions troubled her. Who? And how?

  She had top-notch security software protecting her computer system, though she acknowledged that a competent hacker could probably find a way in. She certainly didn’t know anyone who could find a stealthy bug in her own code—one she couldn’t find herself—and fix it with such a remarkable solution.

  A week more passed, and she received her third message. Another job offer.

  The deal was incredible. She could use her own software as the kernel for the AI consulting project, spend four months improving it at their expense, and when she was done, she could take it all—her software plus all the improvements—back to Boston with her, keeping her ownership intact.

  She’d need to leave behind a working copy for their use, of course. But they would agree not to market it or resell it. And her wage would be an astonishing forty thousand dollars per month, payable as a lump sum at the end of the contract.

  The offer fell squarely in the “too good to be true” category. She ran it by her older brother, Dan, a contract lawyer, who said the agreement was solid, but he had no information or guidance on the soundness of the contracting entity.

  “What do you know of this Ciopova?” asked Dan.

  “I know someone saved my bacon and helped me leapfrog months ahead on my work.”

  “You’re a big girl,” he said, handing the contract back to her, “who knew what she was going to do even before she came here.”

  * * *

  After mulling the offer for another day, Lilah replied to Ciopova, asking for additional details. Ciopova responded in a way Lilah thought bordered on the bizarre.

  “When you stop to refuel your car on the way home tonight, buy a lottery ticket.” The message included the game to play and the lottery numbers to use.

  Lilah had planned to fill her tank that evening, and when she stopped at the service station, she bought a lottery ticket following Ciopova’s instructions. Though she was skeptical about the ticket’s value, the next morning she checked—then double checked—the winning numbers. She’d won almost one and a half million dollars.

  She couldn’t help but feel the whole thing had been staged, because the alternative—someone knowing actual winning numbers in advance—didn’t make sense. But her caution was tempered by the huge sum involved. She was anxious to cash the ticket to see if it was real, and wary at the same time, worried that she was involved in something nefarious.

  Cashing the ticket took more steps than she anticipated. One of the first was paying taxes. She had the lady behind the counter take more taxes than necessary so she wouldn’t be caught by surprise at the end of the year.

  As she wended her way through the system, she asked every person she encountered if anything unusual or irregular had happened during the drawing for this particular game. They all answered with some variation of “What do you mean?”

  One of her biggest concerns about the consulting job had been the promise of a far-off payday, one big enough to attract her attention, but with payment promised after all the work was done. When the bank confirmed a cash deposit, with taxes and fees subtracted, totaling nine-hundred fifty thousand dollars, Lilah appreciated that covering her salary was no longer a concern.

  From that moment, Ciopova’s communications were phrased as if Lilah had accepted the consulting offer. Three days later, Lilah moved to Worcester and started acting that way.

  3. Twenty-Four and eight months

  Lilah sat up in bed and took a moment to enjoy the sumptuous stylings of her luxury rental suite. It seemed a fitting reward given her new bank balance. She washed and dressed in the all-marble bathroom, poured a cup of coffee from the drip machine in her chef-quality kitchen, and carried her cup to the window behind the baby grand piano.

  Sipping the steaming liquid, she watched two squirrels chase each other up a tree. Then she nodded, thinking maybe she had the mystery solved.

  She was part of an AI trial of some sort. This Ciopova was the AI’s public face, and it was going to lead her by the nose and make her jump through hoops to demonstrate its mastery. Her job was to find its flaw or cause it to stumble in a way that proved it was just a machine.

  But once she’d proven it, she didn’t know who she was supposed to tell. And she still didn’t understand how the people involved had been able to fix her AI software the way they had, or how they could win the lottery on a whim.

  As she reconsidered her conclusion about an AI test, her phone signaled an incoming message. Picking it up, she saw that Ciopova had sent a to-do list for the day, going so far as to group certain chores together to help Lilah maximize the efficiency of her travels around town.

  Hoping to prove herself in her new role, Lilah struggled to get through the list that day, skipping lunch and eating dinner in the car. Exhausted from her efforts but pleased that she’d finished, she crawled into bed and fell asleep the moment her eyes closed.

  The next morning, she received a new to-do list. And again the morning after that.

  In the first days, her tasks—place purchase orders, file paperwork, scout real estate—seemed more like the duties of an administrative assistant than an AI developer. That lasted until she leased the warehouse. Then her job morphed into something more like a building contractor, with tasks ranging from reviewing wiring diagrams to scheduling tradespeople and securing city permits.

  When the equipment started to arrive, everything changed again. At one point, she supervised a team of three techs as they installed sixty-four thousand processors into thirty-two big cabinets, all connected with more than a mile of cable and cooled with liquid nitrogen heat exchangers.

  And at the same time Lilah worked on the warehouse project, she also supervised the refurbishment of two red-brick row houses she’d purchased in town. After weeks of remodeling, an effort that cost a fortune because of the accelerated timeline Ciopova demanded, Lilah moved into a large, beautifully appointed apartment in one of the units. The row house next to hers had been finished to become her place of business.

  While not something Lilah had asked for, she loved the arrangement because a workplace separate from home made her more productive. The benefit came not so much from going somewhere else to work in the morning, but rather from being able to walk away from it all at the end of the d
ay.

  She also liked that she could get to her office without a commute. In fact, she didn’t even have to go outside. During construction, the contractor had installed a door in the common wall between the two basements. Going to work was as simple as walking down some stairs, passing through the door, and then climbing a flight on the other side.

  And though Lilah was running flat-out, or perhaps because of it, she stole minutes here and there to attend to her personal life. Currently single, she didn’t have long-distance-relationship concerns. But she needed yoga to maintain her sanity, so she took time to visit a few studios and register at one she liked. She also picked up a brochure from the community center, thinking a class in pottery or painting would get her out of the house and meeting new people.

  * * *

  Ten weeks after moving to Worcester, Lilah sat in her office, her breath quickening as the world-class supercomputer she’d help assemble signaled its awakening with the display “0 errors found.” Tingling with anticipation, she ran the system through a certification check. Then she loaded her AI program.

  She tested it by asking her AI to review data from a hundred different drug trials to see if it could identify drug interactions not reported in any of the individual studies. She knew the answer; it was old data and she’d used the test many times in the past to make sure a mod hadn’t caused a bigger problem.

  “Whoa,” she said aloud when the data review was completed in three seconds. The same test using her setup in Boston had taken almost two minutes. Speed excited Lilah because an AI that could reason faster could consider more inputs to reach a conclusion, in essence making it smarter.

  But her brow furrowed as she explored further. In spite of the amazing speed, it seemed that only four hundred of the sixty-four thousand warehouse processors were involved in solving the benchmark. The rest sat unused during her test.