chapter 5
August 19, 2097
Jake arrived at the bar before Mitch and chose a booth near the door. He recognized several faces from work but sat down without acknowledging any of them. Only a few blocks away from the base, this bar was a favourite five o’clock hangout for many NRD employees. It reeked of stale beer, and the grunge/country-western motif had aged to the point of becoming trendy again.
As the server arrived at the table, Jake saw Mitch enter the bar and waved him over.
“Wow, you two look like you’ve had a rough day. And, if that’s the case, this is the place you want to be. The longer you stay, the better things seem to get. Well, ‘til the morning that is.” The server smiled warmly and tucked her tray under her arm. “What can I get you handsome gentlemen this evening?”
Mitch read her glittery nametag, “Ange.” He also noticed her perfect figure and how she dressed it to maximize her earning potential. Her short, black skirt showed off tanned, toned legs. A tight, v-neck t-shirt showed off what he assumed to be the two attributes that earned her most of her tips. Mitch also noticed that Jake paid her no notice at all.
“A Kokanee is fine, thanks,” said Jake. A burst of laughter from the back of the bar drew his attention to a rowdy group sitting around an oversized booth.
“Same,” said Mitch.
“Thanks, guys, I’ll be back with those in a sec,” said Ange. She spun on her spiky heel and strode to the bar. Within moments, she returned and placed two beers in front of the men.
“I’m going to be completely up front with you, Jake. I need you on this op. I need your expertise with the mechanics, but more importantly, you’re good with people. I need the lead of Team One to be reliable, experienced and good at managing inexperienced subs.”
“I didn’t realize you wanted me to be the lead,” said Jake. He spun his glass of beer on the coaster. He shook his head and laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion. “I’m in no shape to be a lead. You know that.”
“You were doing great with those kids today,” said Mitch.
“Yeah, because at the end of the day, they leave and they’re not my problem. I can’t be a long-term lead right now, Mitch. I don’t have the energy or the patience. I can’t deal with people slinging question after question at me because they can’t make a decision for themselves. Not to mention the inevitable egos and drama that come with a six-month op.”
“I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit,” said Mitch, who knew being a lead came as naturally to Jake as swimming did to a fish. “I’ve got all of the key positions filled except yours, and we were lucky, we got some pretty good volunteers. I don’t think you’d have any problems with any of them. They’re all good-natured and very dedicated.”
Mitch leaned over the table and spoke quietly so neighbouring tables would not hear. “Look, I can understand if you’re not interested in doing this. This is a long op, but it’s not particularly complicated. And like most ops, a million things could go wrong. But sitting around doing nothing all the time isn’t going to bring them back, and the old Jake I know would have jumped at this opportunity.”
Jake watched little bubbles float to the surface of his beer for several moments. He sighed heavily. “You’re right.”
Hope sparked in Mitch’s chest like the flick of a lighter; he needed Jake more than he wanted to admit. Jake had been Mitch’s top pick for this role and there were no second choices. If Jake declined, Mitch would need to promote one of the subs within the existing team. Even though they were all hard workers, none of them had the experience to lead a complex, six-month op. Generally, people clamoured to participate in ops but no one wanted to come near this one, which left several key redundancy positions unfilled. Every person who applied was accepted.
“You’re right,” said Jake. “About all of it. I can’t live like this forever. They’re gone and they’re not coming back. Dragging my ass around like this isn’t doing me any good, and my wife would kick me in the ass if she could see me. It’s just hard to remember how to live sometimes. You kinda forget how to put one foot in front of the other.” Jake saw the look on Mitch’s face and he turned to look out the window. It was the same expression that appeared on everyone’s face when they tiptoed around the topic of his dead wife and children. He knew it was a normal reaction and people were naturally sympathetic. He had probably given that same look to others in the past but now that he was on the receiving end, it was too much. “Tell me more about the op. If I’m gonna commit to this, I should probably know what I’m getting myself into.”
“That’s a fair request,” said Mitch, daring to smile. “Operation TimeShift is a 185-day mission consisting of three teams for a three-part solution. Each team is going back to a different point in time to accomplish a particular goal. When those goals are successfully completed, time should rewrite itself and fix our little problem.” Mitch made air quotes with his fingers around the words, little problem. “The three teams will then return to 2097, arriving just twenty-four hours after they left, from the present day perspective.”
“That sounds risky. Not to mention it breaks about half the time-travel laws.” It had never occurred to Jake that the plan would involve time travel. The thought made him uneasy.
“We’ll be breaking more than half. Operation TimeShift is being executed in bonded time.”
Jake exhaled loudly and swirled the contents of his glass as he processed Mitch’s words. Regret flooded him for having told the level seven he would participate. Bonded time was only a theory he had heard bounced around in scientific documentaries as he channel surfed at night. It was something about altering the present day by linking pockets of time together and simultaneously manipulating past events, geography or human interaction in different time periods. Now he wished he had paid more attention to those late night documentaries.
“We have no choice. We can’t predict the outcome any other way.” Mitch saw doubt growing in Jake’s eyes and continued talking before he backed out. “There is logic behind the ‘one group, one time period’ law. If two groups travelled to two different time periods at the same time, the group farthest in the past could do something to disrupt the lives of the other group.”
“Yeah, but I don’t see how bonded time will make a difference?”
“At the moment the three teams go back in time, a 185-day window of bonded time will be opened. During that time, the changes each team makes in the past will be bonded together as one change. Is it dangerous? Absolutely. But because the teams are working on completely unrelated tasks, the work they do will never overlap or affect one another until the very last moment. That last moment is the timeshift. It’s imperative that the changes each team makes coalesce at the exact same moment in the bonded time window, otherwise, who knows what the results will be. Once the timeshift has occurred, from our perspective in 2097, time will have been rewritten without the problems we’re having. Or, that’s the theory anyway.”
Jake swallowed a few mouthfuls of beer as if the alcohol would tune his brain in better. “Right. Otherwise, if the tasks were done in the regular sequence of time, as history naturally progresses, you wouldn’t be able to predict how the first change would affect the other teams making changes. And you got an approval on this?”
Mitch nodded. He set his pint glass down on his coaster.
“So what is each team doing?”
“Well, part of the problem is that the Artificial Emotional Intelligence programming is flawed and it needs to be reworked if we want to salvage the project. One of the teams is made up of three robotic engineers who were a part of the AEI Project the first time around. They’re going back to 2095 and will reintegrate into their jobs to fix it.”
“How are three people going to assimilate into a project where the roles have already been assigned?” asked Jake.
“Actually, it’s not as hard as you’d think.” Another burst of raucous laughter rang out at the back of the bar distracting
the men from their conversation. They looked back at the crowd, huddled around a table in a large booth. “Well, speak of the devil,” said Mitch. “There’s two-thirds of Team Three right now.”
Mitch and Jake watched as Logan Grayson, in the centre of the group, laughed and pointed to playing cards that he and some of the others had stuck to their foreheads. His brother Asher was trying to convince Ange to let him do a tequila bomb shot off her stomach.
Jake took in the brothers as he sipped his beer. “Really? That’s Team Three?” he asked, one eyebrow arched in disbelief.
Mitch chuckled. “It’s not as bad as it looks. They’re actually both pretty damn smart. If they got their shit together instead of screwing around all the time, they could actually make something of themselves. But they were chosen not for their brilliance but because of who they’re related to.”
Jake looked at Mitch with surprise; nepotism seemed out of his character. Choosing those two—especially those two—solely as a favour seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.
Mitch read Jake’s thoughts in his expression. “No, it’s not like that. Actually, they don’t know who their lead is and their lead is even less pleased with their appointments.”
“Sounds messy. Who’s the lead?” asked Jake. He swallowed the last gulp of his beer and waved his hand in the air to distract Ange’s attention away from Asher. Seeing Jake hold up two fingers, she nodded in acknowledgement and made a beeline to the bar.
“Their younger brother, Spencer,” said Mitch. “He is their polar opposite. He has concerns that they’re beyond anyone’s control, but he’ll be fine.”
Jake shook his head and chuckled. He looked back at the two brothers again and saw they were clearly the centre of the group’s attention. “So how are these guys going to go back and insert themselves into a project when the past versions of themselves are already involved? I think people might notice.”
“Simple. By sending the past versions of themselves away.”
“I think that just broke the other half of the time travel laws.”
Mitch shrugged. “I think you’re right, but it’s our only chance. Desperate times and all.”
“What about Team Two? What are they doing?”
“We’re going to kill a couple birds with one stone here. As you know, Elevanium has changed our country in a lot of ways. Some of them good, some of them not so good. It’s created a lot of problems domestically, as well as internationally. And then, of course, there’s the more immediate problem of the robots destroying anything in their path to get to it.” Mitch stopped talking when he saw Ange coming their way with a bowl of soy nuts. He resumed when she was safely out of earshot. “Team Two is helping resolve the Elevanium issue. NRD has made a decision to eliminate it.”
Jake thought he had misheard. Using Elevanium as the country’s primary source of power meant billions of dollars were brought in from the export of domestic wind and hydro-generated power. Getting rid of Elevanium seemed like a very drastic measure.
“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s the best thing for the planet. How many wars have nearly broken out over it? It’s not like there’s enough of it to share with the world. Any country that could afford the high cost of the security it requires wouldn’t really need it. The countries that do need it can’t afford to protect it, and it would be just a matter of time before it fell into the wrong hands. Then we’ve got a whole other set of problems to deal with. It was a hard decision to make, but the planet will be better off if it had never been discovered.”
“So how are they going to get rid of it?” asked Jake.
“Well, that’s the question. We’re not quite sure yet. Nobody wants to get near it, so to date, nobody’s tried to figure it out.”
“I’ve heard people say it’s cursed or something, but I wouldn’t think that scientists would buy into superstition.”
“I agree,” said Mitch, “but I don’t think I blame them. Too many people have died trying. Consensus is that there’s some kind of self-preservation quality about it that we don’t fully understand, and no one’ll get close enough to it to try to get to the bottom of it. The numbers don’t lie. Seventeen dead and seventy-two injured.”
“But someone has obviously figured it out to some degree. I mean, it’s in all of our homes. People have obviously worked with it enough to commercialize it.”
Mitch nodded in agreement. “Nobody who’s developed it commercially has died. It’s only the researchers who tried to gain a full understanding of it who have died. No real research along those lines has been attempted since that last string of deaths in the seventies.”
Jake seemed sceptical and drank his beer. “So you’re telling me that fifty years after the discovery of Elevanium, there’s not one person who can tell us how to neutralize it?”
“Well, there may be one, but it’s a long shot. The very first person to research it, but he died at thirty-eight.”
“What year was that?”
“2016.”
“That’s about thirty-five years before it was actually discovered on Earth. How could he possibly know anything about Elevanium? How would he know how to neutralize it?”
“How good are you with history?” asked Mitch. “A few years after the turn of the century, the International Space Coalition launched a program to seek out other Earth-like planets.”
“Right. And that’s when they found Key Eleven,” said Jake. Everybody knew that. It was in every third-grade science book.
“Owen Taylor was the guy who actually first learned of Elevanium. He named it, in fact.”
“Never heard of him,” said Jake.
“Well, he didn’t get too much credit for the project because he was hit by a bus before he could start compiling his findings. His notes and data were reviewed and compiled by other ISC scientists after his death. He’s the guy who proved that parts of Key Eleven had struck Earth by matching light signatures from Key Eleven and parts of other meteors found around the planet. In fact, he thought it was highly likely that part of Key Eleven’s core was buried deep in the Earth’s crust with the rest of the meteor remnants.”
Mitch had researched Owen’s work with Elevanium extensively. Owen was the ideal candidate for Operation TimeShift. He had never physically seen Elevanium and, therefore, had none of the bias or superstitious beliefs of the scientists who came after him. Mitch had tracked down Owen’s original notes and was impressed with the man’s estimations; many of his theories had turned out to be accurate. He possessed a genius-level intuition for Elevanium considering he never had any physical contact with it.
Mitch finished his beer as Ange came with another round. “The beauty of Taylor is that he’s extremely familiar with Elevanium and unaware of its bloody history.”
“You’re risking a lot of marbles on one hell of a long shot, don’t you think?” said Jake.
Mitch sighed. “He’s the best chance we’ve got. He’s got enough knowledge of the element to know what won’t work and what could, and that’s more than what we’ve got at this point. In the interim, we’ve found a couple of people with past Elevanium experience who have agreed to provide some of their hypotheses. They’ll share their knowledge about it, but they refuse to conduct any experiments. They’re working with Riley Morgan right now and bringing her up to speed.”
“Riley Morgan?” Jake coughed after swallowing beer along with a mouthful of air, having been taken by surprise. He knew that like Mitch, Riley Morgan was in Black Ops. The elite of the elite. She was a Field Op Lead, level five or maybe six. He knew she was young for her level, but if half of the stories that had leaked out of Black Ops were reliable, she had earned her rank fairly. Jake had never worked with her directly, but she ran many of the covert operations that his Mechanical & Infrastructure Recovery Unit picked up after. Although she had been friendly on the few occasions they had met, he had heard rumours that she was a ball buster, expecting absolute perfection and unwavering loyalty from her team.
From what he knew of her, she was fearless, had an uncanny intuition and a flawless record of successfully executed operations. Even though this operation was very different from her typical assignments, Jake took a certain amount of comfort in knowing she was involved. Her success rate made the endeavour feel more achievable. “This is a bit of a different assignment for her, wouldn’t you say?”
Mitch chuckled. “Yeah, for her this will be like a vacation. But she heard we were in a jam for leads and volunteered. Said it would be fun to do something quiet and low-key.
“So Riley and her partner, Finn, are going back to 2016 to work with Owen for a few months to figure out how to neutralize the Elevanium. Then they’ll join up with you and Team One about half way through for the remainder of the op. The goal for your team is to excavate diagonally down and expose the Elevanium deposit so they can execute their plan to neutralize it.”
“How many people are on Team One?”
“Seven, including you.”
Jake’s eyes widened. “Yeesh. That can’t be enough.”
“That’s all that volunteered,” said Mitch, “but you’ll be adequately staffed. You just need enough people to keep the machines and a camp running. I mean, that covers your key positions and when Team Two shows up, you’ll have a few more bodies. Sure, a few more people would have been nice, but realistically, all of the heavy work is done by the machines. A smaller team means you just can’t run them twenty-four hours a day and that’s fine. I want you guys to take your time and make sure the job is done right. Six months will be more than enough time. Plus, one of the members is an excavation expert. The others, while willing and eager, are not trained for this kind of mission. Some of them will be out of their element, and this drilling equipment pre-dates all of us.”
The men discussed the finer details of the project as the evening dwindled away. The crowd at the back grew rowdier. Jake looked back to see the Grayson brothers playing Rock-Paper-Scissors for the last shot of tequila. One of the twins held a lemon, the other a salt shaker. Jake chuckled as he watched the two, reminded of his youth. He guessed the men to be only a few years younger than himself, but he felt decades older. At forty-two, he was by no means old, but the nights of bars and partying had long since passed him by.