36: A Novel Read online

  Her blonde hair was cut short, almost mannish, and she wore a white lab coat over a wildly printed blouse. A thin gold chain was around her neck, suspending a pair of battered reading glasses against her chest.

  Johnson nudged me again and I turned to look at him.

  “What?”

  “When someone comes in a room and tells you it’s a pleasure to meet you, you respond. Don’t just stand there like a dork.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, grinning when I saw the storm cloud pass across his face.

  “You’ve been locked away from society for a long time,” he said patiently. “You’ve forgotten how to act around anyone other than convicts. Pay attention so when the time comes, you don’t draw attention to yourself. You’re going to need to be able to move in any circle. You’ve got the lazy, redneck asshole part down pat. Now, let’s try something new.”

  He grinned back at me, knowing what he’d said had hit home by the sudden blush that started at my neck and went all the way up. I looked into his dark eyes for a few moments, then nodded.

  “Very nice to meet you, too,” I said, turning back to the woman. “But I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage. I don’t know your name.”

  We had TV in prison before I was put on death row. Between the manners my mother had tried to instill in me, and watching TV, I knew the words to say. They just weren’t automatic.

  The woman looked me in the eye and smiled. A genuine smile of surprise.

  “Very well done, Mr. Whitman. My name is Doctor Johanna Anholts. I will be briefing you on our little project. And don’t let Agent Johnson get under your skin. He’s really just a big, soft teddy bear. Now, gentlemen, if you’ll please take your seats, I’ll begin.”

  I started to sit, but Johnson reached out and grabbed my upper arm, preventing me from lowering my ass into the chair. I looked at him and he nodded at Dr. Anholts. I glanced over and saw that she was still standing, connecting a laptop to a projector. Once she was done, she pulled a chair back and sat down. Johnson released my arm and I slowly lowered myself onto the upholstery.

  The projector flared to life and displayed an image on a screen attached to the front wall. A stylized logo of a clock face with streaks of light swirling around it steadily sharpened as the device auto-focused with a faint whine. Arcing across the top of the logo were the words Athena Project. Completing the encirclement of the logo at the bottom was a Latin phrase, Adhuc Hic Hesterna.

  “Welcome to the Athena Project, Mr. Whitman. The things of yesterday are still with us.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, wondering if she wasn’t just a little bit touched.

  “The Latin, Mr. Whitman. Adhuc hic hesterna. That’s what it means.”

  She pressed a button on the keyboard and the logo was replaced with a photo of me standing in front of a large 18-wheel truck. Well, not the me my parents would recognize. The new, surgically altered me.

  “This is Joseph Ryan Whitman,” she said. “Long haul truck driver living in Dallas, Texas. Single. Does nothing other than drive and keep to himself. He is actually an undercover FBI agent who volunteered for this project. Your new features were modeled after his.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I have a lot to tell you. I just wanted you to see this man first. To understand the amount of effort that has been expended to get you here and looking like you do.”

  “I got that,” I said. “But I don’t understand why you want me to look exactly like an undercover Fed.”

  “So you have a real identity, Mr. Whitman. Robert Tracy is gone. You have to be someone if you’re going to interact in the world again. And, despite popular fiction, it really isn’t that easy to create an identity from scratch. Not for an adult, at least.

  “A competent detective, or reporter, would be able to find holes in whatever legend we tried to concoct. There should be birth records, immunization records, school records, photos in yearbooks, bank accounts, old girlfriends… Oh, my, the list goes on and on. The agent’s name is not Whitman, any more than yours is. The real Mr. Whitman passed away quietly two years ago from terminal cancer.

  “He was a loner. No friends or family. It was much simpler to model the undercover agent after him. To pick up where he left off when he died, if you will.”

  “You’re telling me the agent also had plastic surgery to go undercover?” I asked.

  “Precisely, Mr. Whitman. He assumed, and has maintained, the identity that is now yours. Once the surgery was complete and he was healed, we inserted him into the life the real Mr. Whitman had built. His absence, and spotty memory, were easily overlooked since he operated as an independent driver. This was done in preparation for the next male asset to join the project. It was done for you.”

  She smiled at me, giving me a moment for the information to sink in.

  “Why? Why would you do all this?” I asked incredulously.

  “Do you read science fiction books or watch the movies, Mr. Whitman?”

  “I read some while I was in prison, but didn’t have the chance for a night out at the cinema,” I said sarcastically.

  “Of course,” Dr. Anholts smiled. “Then let’s just jump into this. Project Athena is the result of a fantastic scientific discovery that came shortly after the superconducting supercollider in Texas was started up. I know, you’re probably thinking about the reports that the project was killed by Congress. But that’s only what we wanted the public to think. It’s up and running as I speak.”

  I had no clue what the hell she was talking about, but decided to keep my mouth shut and listen.

  “I’m going to simplify this as much as I can since you don’t have an advanced degree in particle physics. Once the collider achieved full power, we began detecting the presence of micro Black Holes. At first we were terrified. Even a micro Black Hole, in theory, has a gravitational pull of sufficient force to suck the entire Earth inside and collapse it to the size of a basketball.

  “But no such thing happened, obviously. Once we analyzed the data, we noticed a small, yet significant, discrepancy in several of our time keeping instruments. Instruments that are incredibly precise in the measurement of time were suddenly showing a variance depending on their proximity to the collider.”

  She stopped, looking at me with a glow of excitement on her face. Her eyes danced behind the reading glasses.

  “So… a couple of clocks were wrong. So what? You’re talking about gravity. Maybe they slowed down because the gravity was pulling on their hands,” I said, not having a clue what this woman was trying to tell me.

  “No!” She cried. “These weren’t clocks like you’re thinking of. These are extremely sophisticated devices that keep time by using the microwave signal from an atom’s electrons when they change energy levels. That makes them the most accurate method known to man for measuring the passage of time.”

  She paused when she saw me shaking my head.

  “OK. I’m sorry. I’ve given this briefing before and I always struggle with getting the concept across to laymen. No offense.”

  She took her reading glasses off and leaned forward, resting her arms on the table.

  “We affected time, Mr. Whitman! Not by much, but the steady progression of time was impacted. We turned the collider back on a few months later, and did it again! Only this time, we kept it running and created a stable, self-sustaining micro Black Hole.

  “We studied it. Observed the variances in different atomic clocks. Then with that mountain of data, we shut it down for several more weeks. We learned more about the Universe and how it works in those few weeks than in all the rest of human history combined. But the one thing we couldn’t see was what was on the other side.”

  “The other side?” Despite myself, I was being drawn into the story.

  “Of the Black Hole,” she said, beaming at me. “You see, nothing escapes a Black Hole. Or at least that’s what we thought. We devised a test plan and restarted the collider. Once the Black Ho
le was stable, we inserted a probe into the event horizon.

  “The event horizon is the point in spacetime, at the edge of a Black Hole, where nothing that is inside can be seen or measured because of the overwhelming pull of gravity. Even light cannot escape. That’s why they’re called Black Holes. Anyway, what do you think happened to that probe?”

  “It was sucked in and lost?”

  “Partially correct, Mr. Whitman. Sucked in? Yes. Lost? We thought so at first. We didn’t expect to be able to communicate with it while the collider was running and maintaining the gravity well of the Black Hole, but we hoped to be able to track its signal and find where it went once the collider was turned off. So, we powered it down. And guess where the probe was?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, struggling to not say something really sarcastic like “up your ass”.

  “It went to the middle of the Amazon jungle! But that’s not the most amazing part. It came back. And one of the instruments on board the probe recorded something truly fantastic. Something we didn’t believe until we replicated the test. Multiple times. That probe was not only transported thousands of miles before being returned to us, it went back in time. Precisely thirty-six hours!”

  I just sat there. Staring at her. She was touched! This was fantasy. I wasn’t the most educated guy in the world, probably not even in the room, but I did remember seeing a PBS special about Einstein and how he had proven that time travel was impossible.

  “I’m quite sincere, Mr. Whitman,” she said after a long stretch of silence. “We successfully sent the probe back in time.”

  “OK,” I finally said. “I’m not saying I believe the bullshit you’re shoveling, but if you sent something back, how did you find it? Wouldn’t it be in your past?”

  “Mr. Whitman! How intuitive of you! And you are exactly correct. At first, we thought it was gone. But it returned, thirty-six hours later. We analyzed the data from the onboard instruments and realized that it had traveled backwards in time by thirty-six hours. Existed in past time. Then snapped back to our current reality. You see, we have always theorized, and now proven, that time is elastic. Like a rubber band.

  “What happens if you stretch a rubber band to its limit without breaking it? It pulls against you. Wants to return to its normal state. Only you’re stronger than a rubber band. But when it comes to time, it can be stretched, but it can’t be held. At least not yet. There’s a calculation I could show you to explain this, but it would take up every wall in this room.

  “The instant time is stretched by an object being sent back, the fabric of spacetime begins trying to restore equilibrium. At the exact moment an object arrives in the past, force starts building. And continues to build until the object has been in the past for precisely the amount of time that it traveled backwards. At that instant, it is snapped forward to what we refer to as real time, or the timeline the object was in before it was sent back.”

  My head was spinning. I thought I followed what the crazy woman was saying, but it was so far beyond my ability to grasp that it was easier to dismiss her as a loon.

  “Wait,” I said, growing more confused by the moment. “You’re saying that you sent something thirty-six hours into the past?”

  “Yes,” she cried. “The probe went back thirty-six hours. When it arrived, exiting the Black Hole, it once again became subject to the laws of physics and began moving through time as everything does. Only this was time that to us, the observers, had already occurred. Past time! Are you following me?”

  “Kind of,” I said, not sure I was at all.

  “Because of the way the Universe always exerts force to restore balance, when the object reached the point from when it was sent, it defaulted back to real time. It just reappeared, exactly where it had been the instant it crossed the Black Hole’s event horizon. Thirty-six hours had passed because time is a constant.

  “We continued to experiment, and our understanding of spacetime grew exponentially. Old theories were tested. Some were proven and others were discounted. New theories were developed, and the beauty of it was, we were able to immediately test them.

  “Soon, we could control where an object arrived when it was sent back. Precisely control, as long as the desired location was properly mapped. We could drop an object anywhere on the face of the Earth with absolute precision. We played with how far back we could go, and determined the boundary. Thirty-six hours. We haven’t been able to exceed that mark, but we learned how to control what we call distance, which is nothing more than how far back we go within that thirty-six hours. And we can now do that as precisely as the location.

  “The next logical step at that point was to begin trials with living tissue. Lab rats were embedded with trackers and sent. None survived more than a few hours after arriving in the past. We theorized that the stress of being pulled through the Black Hole had killed them. Careful analysis of the data proved that was the case.

  “Their mitochondria were severely damaged by the gravity well. Mitochondria are responsible for the respiration and energy production within your body at the cellular level. Without them, your body shuts down very quickly. We were stumped, but one of our team suggested bringing in the preeminent scientist in the world who specializes in cellular diseases.

  “With his help, we continued tests and observed that some of the rats lived longer than others. Using that as a starting point, a genetic marker specific to the longer lived subjects was identified. A very small number of the rats had this marker. The difference was their mitochondria’s ability to withstand the forces at work during transport.”

  She paused and rummaged through a large purse for a bottle of water. I didn’t want her to stop talking. Wanted to hear more.

  “To shorten the story some,” she continued after drinking half the bottle. “We eventually found a rat that survived. Out of well over 100,000 rats whose DNA was reviewed, we found one. And it survived with no ill effects! Now that we knew what to look for, we moved on to other mammals. Pigs. Cats. Dogs. Again, only those with the very rare and specific genetic markers survived.

  “The next phase was primates. Chimpanzees. This was a daunting task. We requested and received the DNA panels for every chimp in captivity, pretty much anywhere in the world. None of them had the marker. Expeditions were sent out to capture and take samples from populations in the wild. It took over a year, but we found one. And he survived!

  “We finally felt we were ready for human trials. We had already been going through vast genetic databases. And the genetic marker in humans is just as rare as it is in Chimps. Our calculations estimate that only .000001 percent of the human population has it. Out of seven billion people on the planet, that’s only seven thousand.

  “Out of that seven thousand predicted, we’ve been able to identify eighty-three that have their DNA on file. And you, Mr. Whitman, are one of those eighty-three people we’ve found.”

  17

  “Hold on right there,” I said when her statement sank in. “I’m not about to be one of your fucking guinea pigs. No way in hell.”

  “Relax, Mr. Whitman. We’re well beyond the “guinea pig” stage.”

  I was startled to realize a man was standing just inside the room. The story had so captured my attention that I’d completely missed the door opening as he entered.

  “Mr. Patterson. I wasn’t expecting you to join us,” Dr. Anholts said, looking over her shoulder at the new arrival.

  “I had some time and wanted to meet Mr. Whitman,” the man said.

  He was in his late 40s with a severely receding hair line and a perfectly round little belly that was almost disguised by his well tailored suit. Everything about him looked soft, until I saw his eyes. Hard as flint. There was definitely more to him than a casual first impression would reveal.

  Stepping fully into the room, he settled into a chair at the head of the table.

  “I’m Ian Patterson. The Director of Project Athena,” he said, not holding his hand out to greet m
e. “Dr. Anholts, please continue your briefing.”

  There was an awkward moment of silence. Her body language revealed that the good Doctor was uncomfortable with Patterson’s presence. She covered by taking another long drink from her bottle of water, then after a moment to compose her thoughts, continued speaking.

  “As Director Patterson accurately stated, we are well beyond the testing phase. That was completed a long time ago. We’ve been routinely sending humans back in time for over five years.”

  “What?” Was all I could say, stunned at what she’d just said.

  “The purpose of Project Athena,” Patterson cut in. “Something bad happens. We go back in time and stop it before it happened.”

  “What?” I said again, looking back and forth between him and Dr. Anholts.

  “Allow me to demonstrate,” she said, waking her laptop and clicking the mouse several times.

  I looked up at the screen when an image of a burning airport was displayed. Then a large room that looked like the interior of a government building with dozens of bodies scattered across the floor. The crash site of an airliner. An aerial shot of a shopping mall parking lot, littered with bodies. The mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb boiling into the sky, the Statue of Liberty in the foreground.

  “What the fuck is this?” I breathed, staring in horror at the final image.

  “These are terrorist attacks on the United States that were successfully carried out over the past five years,” Patterson said, staring at the screen. “Attacks that were retroactively stopped by sending Project Athena assets back in time. Stopped them before they happened, so in effect, they didn’t happen.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the fireball captured in a still image as it consumed Manhattan.

  “Assets are the people with the rare genetic marker that work for Project Athena,” Agent Johnson spoke for the first time.

  “Correct,” Dr. Anholts nodded her head as if she needed to confirm what he’d just said. “Let me explain.”

  She turned in her chair and gestured at the screen.