part0015

The bright yellow light flashed once more. Daniel blinked a few times and let his eyes adjust.

He looked around. The room was brighter, photons moving at full speed again. Chloe stood ten feet away, grinning at Daniel as if they had just shared an inside joke. “Bienvenue . Welcome back,” she said.

Daniel took a few steps forward. Chloe’s eyes blinked normally. The slight motion in her chest revealed each breath. Her grin widened. Griffith watched from behind her, the look of anticipation still on his face. He reached up to scratch his head. Griffith didn’t understand what had just happened. Chloe did.

Daniel approached the young woman as he’d done a few minutes before. Empros minutes? Forward minutes? This insanity would be hard to get used to.

She gently rubbed her right shoulder, and Daniel understood why. “I’m sorry, Chloe, I believe I made a beginner’s mistake by repositioning your throwing arm. I hope I didn’t hurt you.” Mathieu remained mute regarding his part of the transgression.

She shrugged, still smiling. “A spasm, uh, like the muscle…” She made a motion with her fingers as if she were squeezing something.

“Contracts?” Daniel offered.

She nodded. “Little bit, yes. Contracts. On its own.”

“Really, I’m very sorry.” He felt ashamed, and not just because he had touched her without permission. He had also been a witness to Mathieu’s indiscretions. She would have no way of knowing what had happened during what, from her perspective, had been a blink of the eye.

“It’s okay.” She stopped rubbing, her arm apparently unhurt. Her eyes lit up. “Did you catch the ball?” Griffith stepped closer, his brow wrinkled .

“In a way, yes,” Daniel said. “Pretty easy, almost like the ball was waiting for me.” He grinned, and Chloe grinned back. The personal connection made him feel better.

Her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. “Fun, yes?”

“Incredible. Remarkable. How is it that you haven’t announced this technology?”

“What?” asked Griffith, dumbfounded by their conversation.

“Oh, look,” Chloe said, twisting Griffith around and pointing to the rubber ball protruding from his back pocket.

Griffith reached around and pulled it out. “How’d it get there?” He held the ball up for inspection.

Chloe scowled at Mathieu, her look of scorn changing to a grudging smile. “Another game. This one a little bit nicer.”

Griffith wasn’t processing any of it. “Huh? Did I miss something?”

Chloe took the ball, held it at the tips of her fingers and pretended to grab it with the other hand, only to flip her wrist and hide the ball. She held out an empty hand under Griffith’s nose, a practiced demonstration of a magician’s sleight of hand.

She spoke to Griffith, her English mixed with hand motions. “You and I? We saw the ball disappear. Where did it go?” She pointed to Daniel.

“I plucked it out of the air,” Daniel explained. “Probably in less time than it took the photons to reach your eye. Did you see anything?”

Griffith still looked as perplexed as a fourth-grader examining college math on the blackboard. “Well, Chloe threw the ball to you. The light flashed. That’s it.” He felt his pants pocket. “I don’t get it.”

“I put it there,” Mathieu offered. “Daniel and I were gone for about five minutes. Flowing empros.”

Griffith’s brow lowered. “No. Really?”

“Yes,” said Chloe, beaming with excitement .

“Yes,” Daniel confirmed. Griffith seemed disturbed by this idea, but he didn’t have any further questions. A good sign he was coming around.

“They are telling you the truth, Agent Griffith,” said Zin, still sitting in a chair against the wall. He returned his phone to the pocket at his waist and joined the group. “And now that Dr. Rice has returned to ordinary time, I believe we should change the conversation.” He reached out to the lab workbench and lifted Becton’s leather belt.

“Your engineer in Florida did exceptionally well. I may have inadvertently given him one or two hints, but he produced much of this himself, mistakes and all. This circuit, in particular.” His finger hovered over a rectangular array of integrated circuit boards on one side of the belt. A needlelike probe extended from the tip of his finger to touch a metal connection point. A second later, the tiny probe retracted. “These electronics almost certainly manage time compression, though the circuitry lacks any safety overrides.”

“Then it is possible?” Mathieu asked. “Time compression?” Daniel had noticed the word as well, and it wasn’t the first time someone had explained that compression was the key to understanding a quantum technology.

Zin’s head bobbed up and down like a perfectly timed machine. “Now that compression has been discovered, I can explain further.” Zin stretched the belt to its full length while Mathieu and Chloe drew close like students gathering around the master. Daniel and Griffith stood a row behind.

“Will it compress forward time?” Mathieu asked, nodding to the belt. Chloe’s eyes were wide, echoing the question.

“Based on my circuitry analysis, almost certainly,” Zin said, “but we should test it to be sure.”

“Explain, please,” Griffith asked .

“I’d be happy to, Agent Griffith,” Zin said. Griffith looked a bit startled at his first conversation with an android, but most everyone had that reaction. “You see, flowing empros is what mathematicians call the trivial case. I don’t mean to say it’s unimportant, just that it’s the simplest form of time manipulation.”

Zin handed the belt to Mathieu and walked over to a white board hanging on one wall. “May I?” Mathieu nodded.

Zin examined the available marker colors, choosing green, and began drawing. “The first thing you must understand is that time is a frequency.” He drew a series of perfect sine waves and labeled the axis Forward with what looked like practiced calligraphy. He’d make a good graphic artist.

“What we experience as the flow of time is a physical wave with crests and troughs, essentially the ticks of the clock. We say that time passes , as this wave flows past us. What’s more, the wave of time has a natural frequency, set by the universe.”

Daniel held up a hand, but Zin waved him off. “Yes, yes. A frequency of time seems nonsensical because frequency, by definition, is cycles per unit of time. But what time? We must compare time against something else.” He paused, probably for effect, because the answer was obvious. “We need a second dimension of time, and that’s exactly what the universe provides. Humans call it empros, and once flowing in that direction, we can directly observe the frequency of forward time. ”

He began another drawing, this one more elaborate than the first. He drew two sine waves in two colors, one wave greatly elongated.

“This is what we see when flowing empros, as Mathieu and Dr. Rice have just experienced.” He pointed to the green drawing, labeled Forward. “The forward frequency is stretched out while empros time flows at its natural rate. Forward hasn’t stopped flowing, but the vibration of its wave is too slow to feel.”

Mathieu chimed in. “Like a plucked string on a bass. The frequency can be too low to hear.” His calm expression matched Chloe’s, making it clear that Zin had already gone through this with them.

“Yes, your musical instruments make good comparisons. When plucked, a guitar or violin string produces a higher pitch than a bass. But for dimensions of time, the difference in frequency is far more extreme. While flowing empros, forward frequency has dropped by a factor of more than one billion.” Zin looked at Griffith, who hadn’t said anything yet. “Good so far?”

Griffith shrugged.

“I can slow down, if you wish,” Zin said .

“No, no,” Griffith answered. “Keep going. I’m sure Dr. Rice is getting more of this than I am.”

Daniel had no problem keeping up. In fact, his mind raced ahead to where Zin might be heading. Time compression had certainly caught the attention of Mathieu and Chloe.

Zin’s brow ridge lifted, mimicking that human are you ready for the big reveal look. “Time is more than just a wave with a frequency. Just like space, time has a fabric. A background that gives the flow its definition. We might say that time’s fabric is the shoreline of the river, or the hose connected to the fire hydrant to use Mathieu’s example. Without this fabric, how can a flow rate have meaning?”

Daniel nodded. “I see what you mean. Flow must be relative to a fixed background.” Daniel pointed to the graphs. “In a way, you’ve already drawn it. The axis of the graph.”

“Precisely, Dr. Rice,” Zin continued. He tapped the marking pen in his hand to the green arrow. “If you agree that time must have both a flow and a fabric, then I can now share the secret of compression.” He flicked his brow up and down several times. “I do enjoy sharing, though I’m only allowed once you have made the fundamental discoveries on your own.”

“The belt?” Chloe asked.

“Yes, I’ll use the belt as my excuse, though you have been on the brink of discovering compression here in this lab. Your test results from last week?”

“Ah, yes,” Chloe answered. “The fluctuations we observed when we changed polarity!”

“Yes, your experiment tapped into the fabric of time. Allow me to show you.” He picked up the marking pens and started drawing once more.

“In this case, we’re still flowing empros, but we see a higher frequency for forward time. That’s compression. Forward ticks of the clock are now faster than normal. But how did we get that compression?” He looked around at blank stares from the physicists. Daniel didn’t know the answer either, but he was pretty sure they were all about to find out.

“It’s simple. Lower the frequency for empros. The frequency for forward must increase. The two dimensions of time are tied to each other. It’s the same as space, a subject you’ve already mastered. You even know the mathematical relationship.”

Mathieu snapped to attention. “The Spiegel formula! It also works for time?” The mathematical formula had become famous, just as Nala had predicted a year before. It precisely related expansion and compression but so far had only been used in the science of four-dimensional space.

“It does,” Zin said. “Time is the same as space. Your Dr. Einstein was quite correct when he created the term space-time. Many of the most advanced scientists in the galaxy believe that time and space are two aspects of the same phenomenon. ”

“You’re saying that with the Spiegel formula, we can compress forward time to anything we want?” Mathieu asked. “Bring the future closer to us?”

Zin looked like a proud father. He was clearly enjoying the interaction that came with his lesson. “Some call it jumping to the future, but your description is more accurate. Once compressed, the future comes to you. Instantly, I might add.”

“Like a thirty-second skip forward button on a video player?” Mathieu asked.

“Yes, exactly. Tweak empros just a little and you’ll see dramatic compressions of future time. Jump a day, a week, or many years. Whatever you want. It’s quite easy to control once you understand the mathematics. Any calculator could give you the precision to jump to almost any future date.”

There was such a calculator rigged to Becton’s belt, and it included a numeric keypad. Daniel tuned out the others as the details of this unlikely mission fell into place. Like quantum space, compression was the key—the crown jewel, as Nala had pointed out more than a year ago. Compression, as Nala had said, opened doors. If Zin was correct, time was the same, and a door leading to the future was now wide open.

With Zin cooperative, Daniel wasn’t going to let the opportunity for more specific questions slip by. “Okay, let’s say we jumped thirty years into the future. What would we see?”

Zin held a finger in the air. “Well, I’ve never done it myself. It’s tricky business, and I neglected to mention a key detail.”

He returned to his drawing and pointed to two black circles bracketing the green wave. “You’re familiar with a standing wave?” Zin glanced around at his audience. “It’s simply a wave that has been constricted by a fixed point on the ends. What humans call nodes . The wave moves from one end to the other, is reflected by the node and causes an interference going in the opposite direction. At certain frequencies, a standing wave is the result, a wave that doesn’t move at all.”

“You can see the same thing when two kids wiggle a jump rope or a slinky between them,” Mathieu offered.

“Or a guitar string,” Zin said. “The fastenings at either end of the guitar force the string to vibrate at a particular frequency. That’s a standing wave.”

A narrow smile crept across the android’s lips. “Standing waves can be created in time, too. Pin the time wave to the background fabric with two nodes and you’ll force the wave to oscillate in place. Now you have an anchor point and a destination. You could flow empros, then compress forward, and step out into a frozen world of the future, very much like Mathieu’s demonstration.”

“The space hasn’t changed?”

“No, just the time. Space and time are independent.”

Daniel exchanged a glance with Griffith. It seemed the science provided exactly the answer they needed. Daniel didn’t doubt what Zin was saying. He’d just witnessed the remarkable capability firsthand. But he still had more questions.

“So how do you get back?”

“Once you’ve set an anchor point, just decompress, return to forward time and you’ll be right back where you started.”

“That suggests there’s no backward time travel,” Mathieu said.

“Correct,” Zin said. “I wish I could visit your Dr. Einstein. I’d love to meet him, but you can’t set an anchor point in the past. Only from today forward.”

Zin’s answer made sense, and not only because most scientists had already ruled out travel to the past as being logically flawed. It also answered the question of why there were no time travelers from the future. If travel to the past was impossible, no one from the future could accomplish it either.

Becton hadn’t broken the rule. He really wasn’t from the future, as the FBI had already determined. If he had jumped to the future, he must have returned to his own anchor point.

The possibilities for repeating Becton’s achievement were beginning to line up, but if Daniel did as the FBI asked, his personal safety was on the line. “You mentioned tricky business.”

“Time compression is not without its dangers,” Zin replied. “For example, compression of a time dimension is independent of flow. While that seems simple, the implications are not. As I said, the normal procedure is to flow empros, then compress forward. But once compressed, you wouldn’t want to flow forward into the future. That’s a one-way trip. You’d be stranded. Any attempt to decompress would result in a devastating effect that humans might call snapback .”

“Which means?” Mathieu asked.

Zin paused in thought. “Imagine compressing time like tightening a string on your guitar. Flowing forward is like plucking that string. You’ll hear a high-frequency sound, but the wire might also snap. Flowing forward while time is compressed is almost certain to result in snapback once you return to your anchor point.”

Griffith perked up. “What exactly would snapback look like for a human?”

Zin thought for a moment. “Extensive damage to the atomic structure in your body, especially to the atoms in motion, for example, the liquids flowing through your body.”

Griffith hummed. “Bleeding from the ears and nose?” He was clearly paying attention.

“Yes, hemorrhage could be a possible symptom, though the damage would be to the internal circulation system. ”

Griffith glanced at Daniel. His point was made. Hemorrhage fit the description for Elliott Becton’s death. Zin had even pointed to one of the belt’s components, declaring it to be lacking any safety controls.

“Please understand, there are good reasons why the science of time is not included in An Sath. The ways in which it can be misused are varied. For anyone willing to manipulate time, death by snapback is probably the least of your dangers.”

“And the worst?” Griffith asked.

Zin hesitated. “It depends on the species and their tendency for self-destruction. The Litian-nolos, who inhabit multiple planets in what you call the Beehive star cluster, regularly jump forward as a method to guide their decision making. But they are careful to isolate the gain in knowledge among specific individuals they call Time Mentors. So far, it seems to be working for them.”

Zin let his head drop, shaking it back and forth. “I wish I could say the same for the poor Sandzvallons of Gamma Carinae, who also were manipulators of time. Such a tragedy. A robust forward-thinking species. They had so much potential.”