part0022

Freedom Plaza, adjacent to the Ebenezer Baptist Church, is the resting place for Martin Luther King. A long rectangular fountain surrounds the great man’s tomb, and a covered walkway along the length of the fountain, known as the Freedom Walk, provides shade and a quiet place for visitors to contemplate. A small chapel sits at the west end of Freedom Walk, obscuring the view from the rest of the plaza, and a concrete wall blocks the view from a parking lot in the other direction.

It was a perfect choice for a safe jump point to the future. Being a memorial, none of the architecture would likely change over a thirty-year period. It was open to the street but concealed from view, and there were no doors or elevators that could be locked or wouldn’t function while in empros time.

Griffith, Chloe and Daniel gathered in a tight circle with no one else around. Even if someone in the plaza saw Daniel suiting up, they wouldn’t see much. Just a guy getting ready to ride his motorcycle.

Even in broad daylight, it would hardly be noticeable as long as he returned to the same spot. He’d pop out of existence and return a split-second later. Chloe had done something similar; she’d just changed positions while flowing empros.

“Glad I only have to do this once,” Daniel said to his companions as he cinched the belt around his waist. “I doubt this time travel kit is going to hold up much longer.” One of the staples had come loose, allowing a wire to dangle. Of course, if he was successful, the belt, loose wires and all, might end up in the Smithsonian.

“Try this,” Chloe said. She pulled a C-shaped gold piercing from her lip and jabbed its pin through the leather. She threaded the loose wire through the opening of the C and capped the jewelry’s pin on the other side. Secure against the leather, it did a pretty good job of holding the wire in place.

He looked at Griffith, then Chloe, took a deep breath and flipped the switch to the on position. Lights came on just as they’d done for Chloe.

“Remember, flow empros, then initialize the anchor and set the node. When you’re ready to go, compress forward,” she said. “Any problem, just come back, and we’ll talk.”

“Pretty straightforward,” Daniel said, “but I’m glad you’re here.” Chloe gave him a hug, and Griffith provided a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

It was true that he wasn’t likely to screw up the belt’s operation, though what the universe might throw at him could range from a mild hiccup to a major schism between today’s world and every possible future. He took another deep breath and donned the motorcycle helmet, visor up.

A few people wandered through the plaza. A man and woman positioned themselves for a selfie in front of the King tomb. The chapel blocked most of the view. No one would notice.

“Okay, time to rock and roll.” He flipped the visor down and selected the first command from the small display.

His finger hovered over the Enter key. His heart beat a little faster. Chloe nodded her encouragement and gave a delicate wave goodbye.

A rising tone, followed by a flash of yellow light that exploded inside the helmet, much brighter than expected. Temporary blindness lasted several seconds. A sharp tingle made the hair on the back of his neck stand up with a feeling of electricity running down his back and into his arms.

Chloe and Griffith hadn’t moved, but their expressions were now frozen. Their eyes stared straight ahead, unflinching. He’d expected as much. But the sudden darkness was unnerving. Not completely dark, but like a late twilight.

Daniel scanned the walkway and the plaza, seeing only outlines of buildings that had been in bright sunshine only a moment before.

He took the helmet off. No sounds. Still air where there had been a slight breeze. Even the midday humidity was gone, replaced by a slight dampness inhaled with each breath.

“It worked,” he whispered to his companions. They wouldn’t hear him. No one would, but he spoke aloud anyway. “Flowing empros. Just as you said, Chloe, forward time has collapsed to quantum.” Her fingers were still positioned in a goodbye wave.

The experience of a new reality was as exhilarating as Mathieu’s demo, but daunting to be doing it alone. He picked up Griffith’s duffel bag, stowed the helmet and retrieved a flashlight, an addition suggested by Chloe.

He walked across the plaza, passing frozen figures. The couple still posed for a selfie that from Daniel’s perspective would never happen. A young man was in midstride, one foot levitating above the ground, his arms held out but not moving.

Daniel continued out to the street, Auburn Avenue. A car appeared parked in the middle of the street, headlights off in the darkness, the driver holding the steering wheel and looking straight ahead. Daniel knocked on the car window. No reaction from the very stiff driver.

Further down, Auburn intersected Jackson Street with cars frozen in both directions. The dark intersection reminded him of a power outage at night. No lights anywhere. He looked up and easily found the sun, a somewhat brighter circle in the sky. He could stare at it without discomfort, like those odd occasions when the sun can be seen through thick fog, presenting its shape but without any of its brilliance.

In front of the Ebenezer Church, a man and woman walked hand in hand, their right legs extended and heels just about to touch the sidewalk. A young girl by their side was frozen with both feet several inches above the sidewalk. Perhaps she’d been skipping or jumping, as kids often do. Her leap would be a record breaker and she’d never know it.

He circled around the family, noting the frozen positions from all angles. The woman had her mouth open; maybe she’d been talking. Or was still talking. These people were still in motion, but their pace was now a billion times slower.

Anyone would. The effect was startling and the options for exploration endless. He was free to go anywhere and do almost anything without anyone noticing. For the people on the street, he wasn’t even a blur. He could take the phone from the man’s hand. Reach into the woman’s purse. They wouldn’t have any idea. The bank down the street was no better guarded.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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, each 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.

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.

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.

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.