2

Project Enlightenment

Monday in the vast emptiness of New Mexico is particularly empty where the Chihuahuan Desert crosses into Texas. Nothing would catch a passerby’s attention save for a small cluster of dusty buildings surrounded by wire fencing and aged trespassing signs.

Of course, appearances are often deceiving, and in this case very much so. For the cluster of buildings was the entry into the world of wonder that lay below, where scientific and military facilities spread through the cavernous lairs of one of the most highly secured facilities America had to offer. This setting was the hidden home of, among other things, Project Enlightenment, the code name for the American effort in time travel.

Lt. General Karlson was in his late fifties with a touch of gray in his hair. His military bearing left no doubt he was in command of this operation. When he walked into the command room with a nod to the one standing guard by the security door, the room was a small hive of activity, though most of the talk centered on the murders at the symposium.

The perimeter of the roughly circular chamber was lined with technicians and scientists at their stations, examining readouts from their monitors, entering new data, and performing various functions while discussing the news with each other. To the far left of where the general entered, the main display took up most of the wall; it looked like a very large monitor screen, but everyone knew it was a bit more. Currently it displayed glowing lines overlaying a map of the world.

To the right of the general was his current destination: a short flight of metal stairs up to a balcony running the length of the wall opposite the large screen, where two more technicians sat before another smaller bank of controls at an open alcove that stretched out from the center. Front and center was the general’s chair. He walked up the steps to take his place, a couple of soldiers a step behind him, while keeping an ear open for the conversations circulating in the room.

“Killers got away clean, and they examined everyone at that conference,” one man said.

“Just a bunch of eggheads,” a second man responded. “Who’d want to kill either one of them?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Graystein was working on bettering our resolution, and Miles was midway through that temporal map of his. Someone’s laying the way for some time travel without getting caught.”

“That’s pure paranoia.”

“In the kind of research we’re in? We should have expected this to happen at some point.”

“The data they brought with them was gone, and their laptops were missing,” a third man remarked. “I’d say that spells motive enough right there.”

The general let the cross chatter waft around the room as he examined his surroundings. Research scientists were hard at work taking readings and analyzing the various TWs as they came in, trying hard to keep their focus on their jobs and not let news of the murders distract them overly much. The task was a difficult one, though; many there had known Dr. Graystein personally.

“General Karlson, sir.”

He had barely sat down in his chair when the technician at the station behind and to his left called to him. He swiveled his chair around, and the technician sitting before one circle of monitors continued. “Security in and about the chamber has been tightened per your orders. We have also increased the alert status for all TW monitoring.”

“And the board?” General Karlson turned back around for a glance at the large screen as the technician gave reply.

“The board is clean, sir. Not a single blip in the way of‍—‍”

“Then what,” General Karlson said, his eyes narrowing as a large glowing red dot appeared, covering a good third of the screen, “is that?”

“By all the—”

“We have one,” came from the pit of the chamber below as one of the technicians cried out from his station. “An actual TDW!”

“Double-check that,” the general ordered. “I’ve been half expecting something like this ever since those murders. I want amplitudes and a trace immediately.”

Suddenly the pit below was a hive of scurrying activity. Equipment was double-checked, readings confirmed, as somewhere else buried in the facility the small mountain of sensor equipment was ramped up to the highest degree of sensitivity that the team could safely manage. Voices called back and forth across the pit as the general sat above it all, awaiting the results.

“Coolant temperature remaining optimal.”

“Speeding-sensor drum rotation up twenty percent.”

“Data coming in.”

One of the men below at his station paused for a moment, the rest of the room falling into an anticipatory hush, as he focused on his own private display before spinning around in his chair to call up to the balcony. “Confirmed, sir. We have an actual TDW. It looks to be a small one, but there’s no telling how big it could get in time.”

“Resolve time and location as much as you can,” the general snapped back. “I want to know when and where that came from as precisely as you can manage.”

“Yes, sir!” The technician on the floor spun back to his display, fast at work, while the rest of the room was for a moment stuck in shocked silence at the implications. But only for a moment before General Karlson snapped them out of it.

“I should be hearing people working.”

The quiet was broken, replaced by a buzz of activity the likes of which this facility had not seen since the detection of the first temporal wave.

“Looks like someone jumped the gun and turned their machine on,” the general muttered to himself. “But who? The Germans have that neo-Nazi movement building that may have a few over there wanting to ‘fix’ the Second World War so the Germans come out on top. But the Japanese have that Shinto thing going that might also have them wanting to recover their honor from the same time period. Hmm . . .”

He thought for a moment more and swiveled in his chair to once more face the technician behind him. “Lieutenant Marx, give me your assessment.”

The other man turned in his seat to face the general and give him his full attention.

“The German and Japanese teams: What do we know of their capabilities? Do either one of them have the capability yet to travel back and make changes? Does either team know enough of time travel theory to risk such a trip?”

“To be blunt, sir, that’s what we would have found out at the symposium,” Lieutenant Marx replied. “It was supposed to be an across-the-board exchange of information on current theory and technology.”

“Which the murders neatly put an end to,” General Karlson mused. “Which makes that the third victim in addition to the two scientists.”

He turned back around for a glance at the board. Currently the display was zoomed in on the northeastern part of the country, with various dates shown here and there, ranging from 1850 to 1960. The display was in constant change, the view zooming in a bit more from time to time, dates on either end of the range dropping away as the temporal resolution narrowed. A disturbing possibility was starting to go through his mind when a senior officer to his right rear spoke up.

“General, sir.”

“Colonel Matheson,” the general acknowledged.

“Even if we locate the place and time,” Colonel Matheson continued, “how can we ever track down what was changed? For that matter, how can we know if the changes even happened? We may already be caught up in the result of what someone else did and have no way to tell the difference.”

The other man seated in the alcove behind General Karlson replied, the general leaving them to their debate but listening carefully. He always listened to any and all cross chatter that came up from the pit; it was usually quite educational.

“There would be two possibilities, Kurt,” Lieutenant Marx stated. “One, if the change is already done, then we’re stuck with the results and have no way to tell the difference. Second”‍—here he turned in his seat to look at the glowing area of red on the board’s map as others homed in on the signal‍—“since we can still pick up that TDW, that means the changes to history haven’t caught up with us yet and there’s still time to go back and undo them.”

“Granted,” Colonel Matheson admitted. “But that brings up a host of other disturbing problems. I got a kid that just got into Stanford; if we send anyone back, how can we be sure that what they do won’t change something so my kid instead misses out on his opportunity? Maybe some changes have already been felt and that’s why he made it into Stanford.”

“Or, on the other hand,” Lieutenant Marx countered, “there might be some poor kid somewhere who could end up a lot better off. It works both ways, you know.”

Much the same talk was filtering up from the pit below as the map narrowed down to upper New England, the dates ranging now from 1890 to 1945.

“Even if we can get back there in time to stop whoever it is, we might make things worse,” someone called across the pit.

“Or maybe someone went back to make things better for all,” another countered.

“You’re dreaming,” said a third. “The only reason why someone would dare something this big is for purely selfish motives.”

“Then there’s the butterfly effect,” Colonel Matheson supplied. “Everything could go absolutely perfect as far as mission parameters go, but some small element of history that no one knew about gets changed. Some kid gets saved from drowning, and that looks good, but what if he would have grown up to become a dictator that makes Hitler look like a nice guy?”

“Or,” Lieutenant Marx countered, “time could be a lot more resilient than that. Some things may not be possible to change.”

“You don’t know that, and that’s the problem!”

The debate grew more heated in pace with the narrowing of the image of the TDW on the board. But General Karlson had been listening to every word, carefully weighing what was said against his single overriding consideration. “Enough,” he said, standing up abruptly.

All there knew that attitude; the general had made a decision, and now nothing on this planet would change his mind. The room fell once again into silence. A couple of the scientists continued to work on pinning down the TDW, while all other eyes focused on General Karlson.

“There’s only one question that counts in my view. What is the goal of that time traveler? What do they want, and how does it affect the security of this great nation? And if they did it once, what’s to prevent them from doing it again and again, continuing to wreak untold damage in our present time, and this country specifically? Can anyone answer me that?”

None could. Meanwhile the view on the board continued to narrow. It now displayed lower-state New York with a date range of 1905 to 1925.

“The possibility now stands,” General Karlson continued, “that one of the other teams out there may know something more about traveling through and manipulating time than we do. That is the only issue worth considering at this point. All else is peripheral.”

He turned to face Colonel Matheson on his right, snapping out an order. “For the last couple of years we’ve had a hot team on twenty-four hours’ notice for just such an occurrence as this. Notify the team that they have their notice and are to assemble immediately.”

“Yes, General,” Colonel Matheson replied.

General Karlson faced back to those in the chamber before him, his words precisely clear as well as the historic consequences they implied.

“Get that wormhole revved up. The mission is a go.”