Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (34 page)

The Hideki Line

It was two in the morning on a Saturday when I finally got back to the office. Nothing seemed wrong when security passed me through the gate, nor the booth at the front desk, nor even the checkpoint at the mouth of the tunnel. I took an electric buggy down to Accelerator level and didn’t realize something was up until I walked through the doors into the main lab and found two women and one man with silenced, semi-automatic pistols aimed at my face.

“What the—” I said, reflexively putting my hands into the air.

“Stay quiet,” one of the women commanded. “Don’t move, and keep your hands where we can see them.”

Whoever they were, they weren’t security. Their uniforms were digital camo, temperate forest pattern. Third-generation Army Combat Uniform. Not too different from what I’d once worn in Iraq. The way they held their weapons and the coolness in their eyes made me suspect they were
some
kind of military. But without name tape, unit insignia or rank, I could only guess.

Still frozen in place, I turned my head gently—so as not to spook the people with the weapons—and saw at least a dozen other ACU-clad men and women. They were busily unloading huge backpacks and duffels off the beds of several other electric buggies which had been driven in through the service corridor. They worked without speaking—their actions fluid and rehearsed. Nobody bothered to look up at me.

Well, almost nobody.

“Lil,” I said to her as she stared at me, swallowing thickly “what the hell is going on?”

“Cody—” my co-worker and sometimes girlfriend began to say, but she stopped short and dropped her chin to her chest. “Oh jeez …”

When she looked up again, her eyes brimmed with tears.

Doctor Lilith Kensing’s face was contorted. She looked both frustrated and sad. Very sad. But even in sadness, her sunflower beauty tugged at my imagination. Full mouth, golden brown hair, bright eyes, and high cheeks patterned with freckles. She looked strange in the ACU, which was a bit too big for her. Her hands reflexively found each other, and twisted together nervously.

Another woman, who had been standing next to Lil, finally looked at me. She was trim, with pepper-colored hair that had been buzzed short. No makeup. No jewelry. Fiftyish. It seemed I knew her from somewhere, and couldn’t quite recall her name.

She spoke.

“Who is he and what’s he doing here?”

“Cody Cranston,” Lil said regretfully to her companion. “Computer programmer and robotics specialist. Among … other things.”

“I forgot to load my conference presentation onto my thumb drive,” I said. “VPN was down, and my flight for D.C. leaves in five hours. So I had to come back and get the file. Lil, did you let these people in here? Where is security?”

“Another Code Orange?” said one of the women with a pistol.

“No, not yet,” said the woman standing next to Lilith. “We don’t want to hurt anyone else if we don’t have to.”

Finally, it hit me.

“Senator Petersen,” I said.

She nodded at me, if just slightly.

Without her hair, and without makeup and camera lights, it had been hard to tell who she was. Now I remembered. She’d come out to the facility and toured, just two years before. I hadn’t met her then, but I’d been told afterward she really liked what she saw. So much so she became the project’s most aggressive backer in Washington D.C.

Which was odd—for an environmentalist politician. She was on the short list for the Democratic Presidential ticket in November. A real fire-breather on green energy, and fighting industrial corporate lobbyists.

Now here she was in my lab, dressed like G.I. Jane.

I wondered if the people with pistols were Petersen’s security detail? I also wondered if any of my co-workers on the graveyard shift had found out what “Code Orange” meant. They were nowhere to be seen.

“Let’s finish this,” said the armed male.

The muzzles of the pistols advanced on me. I backed up.

“Stop!” Lil yelled. “We can … he can come with us. He’d be valuable.”

“Sorry,” said the Senator. “I told you before. We don’t need computer people where we’re going.”

“And I told
you
he’s prior service,” said Lil. “Right Cody?”

“Two deployments,” I said. “Once for OIF and once for OEF.”

“See any combat?” Petersen asked.

“My purple hearts and CAB say I did.”

The Senator seemed to consider me more thoroughly, while I continued to flick my eyes from her, to the armed trio, then to Lilith—who looked impossibly bothered—and finally to the others who were hurriedly working. Petersen’s people still ignored me and kept lugging heavy backpacks and duffels through the orifice into the heart of the lab’s cube-shaped reaction chamber.

I wondered. Was it sabotage, or espionage? Were those explosives? Environmental activism writ large?

For an instant I thought Lil and the Senator—who was obviously calling the shots—might actually be working for the Chinese. Or maybe that ancient bastard Putin?

But as I watched the big bags and backpacks being taken into the chamber, I intuited that none of these men and women had any intention of leaving the Experimental Retryon Accelerator Facility. Not through a door, anyway.

I drew a deep breath.

“It’s the Hideki Line, isn’t it Lil?”

My girlfriend’s chin trembled, and she averted here eyes. Which was all I needed to see from her, to know the answer to my question. We’d been together long enough for me to tell when I’d guessed something correctly; something she didn’t want to say with words.

I looked around at them all, and then back at Senator Petersen.

“Ma’am, I suggest you think twice. We don’t know exactly how far back the Hideki Line goes. You have no idea what might happen if you take it. We were going to send a robot next month. I was flying to Washington this weekend to brief the funding committee. Looks like that won’t be necessary.”

“No,” said the Senator. “It won’t.”

“But
why?
” I asked, finally spreading my arms in appeal, despite the pistols in my face. “What are you hoping to accomplish?”

“They’re cutting the project, Cody,” Lil said angrily before the Senator could speak. “You would have found out on Monday. The committee made up its mind already. That’s why Catherine called
me.
”

“And where do you figure the Senator plans on
taking
you, Lil?”

“It doesn’t matter, Cody. The Hideki Line goes back at least ten thousand years or more. That’s plenty.”

• • •

Bill Hideki, along with Dan Stadtler, was one of four Nobel-winning theoretical physicists who had been with ERAF from the beginning. It was Stadtler who discovered the Lines, and Hideki who extrapolated upon Stadtler’s math. It took a large room of supercomputers to do the rest, and the end results were the Stadtler Lines: mathematical corridors through time itself. They could only be calculated backwards, since variables for future Lines were impossible to nail down. In the three years since ERAF had gone live, the supercomputers had spit out a new Line every couple of days, and each of those lines had ranged in “length” from a few millionths of a second, up to two minutes into the past.

Except for The Big One. The one Hideki himself had reported, four months ago.

That one went off the chart, back across millennia.

We checked it four times with the machines, and each time got the same result. Hideki and Stadtler agreed it was a singular phenomenon. Something we weren’t likely to find again. Not in ten or a hundred years. Maybe not ever again. And as we learned through experimentation—sending objects, mice, dogs, and even people—once a Line got used once, it was
gone.
The energy necessary to open the Line and send anything back, disrupted the brane of the universe just enough to erase that particular Line from existence. And the longer the Line, the more juice it took to send stuff back.

Opening the Hideki Line was going to suck every bit of power we could crank out of the project’s attached fusion reactors—enough electricity to keep the west coast lit from British Columbia to Baja, for the entirety of time the reaction chamber was energized.

Naturally, Bill’s discovery was decreed TOP SECRET and very few non-project people, beyond the D.C. committee which managed us, had even known about it.

Sending a robot probe was my idea. I argued that we needed to use the Hideki Line as quickly as was feasible, both to test the max envelope of our operational capability, and to ensure that such a long Line got burnt before one of our competitor projects used it first. Here in the States we could be sure that such a discovery was used for scientific purposes only. No untoward disturbances in the historical record. No time terrorism.

Or, at least, that’s what all of us on the project had assumed.

• • •

Seeing the Senator and her little commando group taking the last of their belongings into the reaction chamber gave me the queasy feeling that Bill, Dan, me, and all the rest had been spectacularly naïve.

I began to get angry. The feeling of betrayal was hot in my throat. I glared at Lilith, but I addressed myself to her apparent boss.

“What’s your plan, Senator?” I said, beginning not to care about the guns. “Go back in time, set up your own little kingdom? What are your people humping in those sacks? Weapons? Ammunition? Enough to carve out an empire in the late Pleistocene?”

“Maybe that’s what a
man
would do,” Petersen said, arms crossed over her chest. “Conquer. Dominate. Use. Destroy. The entire history of our species, down through the ages. A product of the male drive to feed, screw, and control. If that’s all your imagination can conjur, I think it’s best if we leave you here. Where you belong.”

“No,” Lil said. “Cody’s a good man. Catherine—”

“That’s
Senator
—” Petersen hissed at Lilith, but Lil kept talking.

“Not anymore it’s not!” She said. “Catherine,
he has to come.
We have room and supplies. Please. I know we can use him.”

“Who says I want to go?” I said, perhaps too sarcastically. “What’s waiting for me in ten thousand B.C? No doctors, no dentists, no hospitals. No antibiotics or hip replacements. No electricity, nor industry. No grocery stores. No hot showers. No satellite high-def television. Lil, we’ve talked about this before, you and I. We both agreed that the distant past was a place we’d probably like to visit, but
never
live in. The Lines are one-way. No coming home. And what about the damage that can be caused? The
brane
damage? That’s why we agonized over the design and programming for the probe, so it would bury itself. Keep out of sight and—”

“Cody,
shut up!
”

I shut up. Lil looked frantic enough to break something.

She walked towards me.

“Cody, I know you’re angry. But you have to understand. The project is being
cancelled.
They’re going to introduce a treaty at the United Nations to have
all
of the retryon facilities in
all
countries closed
permanently.
Further research will be monitored and blocked. Protections and safeguards are going to be erected. It’ll be like the nuclear ban in space. No nuclear rockets to Mars. No expeditions to the past, either. So it’s now … or never.”

I didn’t say anything after that. I could tell by her eyes how absolutely Lil believed what she was saying. In addition to my feeling of betrayal, there now came grief. My budding romance with Lilith had been the happiest discovery of my post-divorce years. And now I was going to lose her, one way or the other.

“It won’t work,” I said softly.

“Why won’t it? We don’t have to take a lot of people. Just enough to get the ball rolling. We’ll find a tribe, or tribes. With modern weapons and science we can establish ourselves as chiefs, shamans, and teachers. We take the children and we teach them. They teach their children, who teach their children. They’re still human. All they lack is the knowledge. We take tough, solar-powered computers. We teach the tribe how to use and access the databases. By the time we’re dead, they’re on their way. And they’ll be able to avoid all the pitfalls. Manage their environment. Fight off enemies and bring in friendly tribes. Grow food and mine ores responsibly. No need to cut down all the trees. Industry without poisoned lakes and rivers. Electricity.
Civilization!
In harmony with the natural world. No extinct species. No deforestation. No pollution, overpopulation, or global warming.”

“And what about everyone left behind? What about me? What about
us?
”

Tears finally sprang from Lilith’s eyes and ran down her face.

“I wanted to bring you. I begged them to let me bring you. Catherine said you’d never agree to it, and would blow the whistle. She said if I told you, I’d be off the team.”

“She’s right,” I said. “I’d have tried to stop this.”

“Cody, oh God, why couldn’t you have just gone home and gone to bed?”

Lil turned from me and walked away, weeping. I called after her and she ignored me, heading instead for one of the buggies where she struggled to put a pack onto her back, and then walked towards the reaction chamber.

I felt tears on my own cheeks, and redirected my anger towards the Senator.

“It’s mass murder,” I said coldly, “and you know it.”

“You can’t murder people who never existed.”

“Convenient,” I said.

The Senator regarded me for another moment, then let out a long sigh and said, “Code Orange.”

The male with the gun grinned, and suddenly they were backing me up again, muzzles unwavering. For the first time since I’d walked into the lab, I began to sweat profusely. My heart rate jumped and time slowed perceptibly as adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream.

Ghosts of Kurdistan flirted with the present, and I was seeing double.

• • •

My truck commander, grinning and telling a story about his kids. The growl of the humvee’s tires as we moved up the packed earth highway. Our Kurdish interpreter bouncing quietly in the back seat, next to an equally quiet PFC whose name I never did remember. Dirt spewed into the air like a geyser, as an IED took out the humvee in front of ours. I reflexively stamped on the accelerator, turning onto the shoulder so as to maneuver past the ruined truck, when an RPG slammed into the passenger side of my own vehicle.