Rewrite Redemption (33 page)

So far, nothing really bad had happened. Maybe this was the worst of it. Maybe the Indian would protect me. I looked over at him, sleeping against the log. Except for the snoring, he seemed so peaceful. The sight of him relaxed me. It was reassuring to have him between the Gross Brothers and me.

I glanced over at the campfire. The campsite was empty. I felt a quick jolt of adrenaline whip up my spine. Joe and Edgar were gone. I didn’t see them anywhere. What—

A filthy hand slammed across my mouth, slapping my head hard against the tree. For a second, I think I lost consciousness. Because when I opened my eyes, there was Joe, approaching in stealth mode. He was grinning wickedly and fiddling with the buttons on his pants.

Son of a bitch!

We were still sprawled on the sofa. Lex was sitting sideways, cross-legged, and I was on the other end facing her. She was waiting for answers. Once again, I was searching for a good opening line. I didn’t find one. “Earlier, you asked me if we were aliens,” I said finally. “We aren’t, but we do have alien technology.”

“Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack. It’s extremely advanced. For one thing, we have enhanced computer capabilities…things that would blow your mind. The most important is a grid system for tracking travelers and changes in the timeline. Each Editor has kind of a signature, like a fingerprint that can be tracked and monitored. Or blocked…” I stopped that line of thought. I didn’t want to get into my disgrace yet. “But the really vital part is something we call a Hitchhiker Mechanism.”

“Which is…?” She rolled her finger.

“You know how tech just keeps getting smaller and smaller all the time—exponentially?”

She nodded.

“Well, imagine how small things might be, say, a thousand years from now. The aliens are light years more advanced than we are. They created a device so incredibly small it can hitchhike on a strand of DNA and get passed down genetically.”

“No shit!” She seemed like she believed me.

“So are your parents Editors?”

I shook my head. “No, they know nothing about it. The HM is programmed to just express sporadically. They didn’t want power condensed in families.”

She got up and opened a window. “That’s a pretty big secret to keep from your parents. It must be hard.”

“Tell me about it,” I said as the breeze from the window blew cool air across my face.

“So how does it work?” she asked, sitting back down.

“Have you ever heard of ‘junk’ DNA?”

“I took biology. It’s the left-over pieces that don’t do anything, right?”

“Right. Well, the Hitchhiker Mechanism codes our junk DNA for the alterations that give us our abilities.”

“How does that connect with time travel?”

“Ever heard of string theory?”

“Yeah, it’s one of Ipod’s favorite things. But I ignore most of what he says when he gets on one of his rants. So I’ve heard of it, but I can’t really say I know much.”

“It deals with subatomic particles.”

“Not a geek here, Dude, simplify.” 

“Okay, well, you know about atoms, right—the basic units of matter? Every atom has a nucleus with electrons zooming around it, like little planets around the sun. There are different kinds of atoms and they’re incredibly small. For instance take a helium atom, you know, the stuff you fill balloons with.” I picked up a pencil lying on the table. “You could line seventy million helium atoms in a row across this eraser, that’s how small they are.”

I stood and grabbed a round pillow off the sofa. “Pretend this pillow is an atom, blown up. The nucleus in the center would still be smaller than this grain of salt.” I licked my finger and picked up a grain of rock salt that had fallen off my Hot Pocket. “I’m talking really, really small. Still with me?”

 “Okaaay. And this matters, why?”

“So you have the pillow or the atom with this tiny grain of salt for the nucleus. The nucleus has electrons spinning around it. But most of this pillow is filled with…
nothing
. Most matter is really empty space. When we travel, we move through the empty spaces.”

“Strange,” she said, “it just doesn’t seem possible.”

“Yeah, I know. It gets even stranger. The building blocks of everything are increasingly small. Even smaller than the atom is a quark. Even smaller than a quark is a string. These strings are the building blocks of everything, including us. We used to think that these building blocks were points…like dots. But now we know that they’re really unimaginably small, vibrating strings.”

I walked over and plucked a string on Ipod’s violin. “Like this string, these strings have specific vibrations, tones so to speak. Well, Editors can control the vibration of their strings.”

“And that’s important because…”

“It lets us do very cool things,” I said, sitting back down. “That’s where it connects to the time travel. There’s one more component. You know how trees have rings.”

“That I know. A ring for each year, right?”

“Right, as a tree moves through a year of four seasons, it marks time with a ring. Like everything else, trees at their basic level are just a mass of vibrating strings. Each cell on that ring was formed at a specific point in time. That point in time corresponds to a particular vibration. Editors can match their “strings” to the exact vibration of the tree at that specific point in time. They harmonize with it and use gravity to pull themselves through the empty spaces to that point in time.”

“Whoa…”

“Yeah,” I said. “Cool, huh? We’re traveling through an alternate dimension when we’re in the vortex.”

“Ipod will be in geek-heaven. He’s been trying to figure it out forever. He’s always speculating about what scientists are going to be able to do in the future. Too bad he’s not here to hear this.” The mention of Ipod’s name must have gotten her thinking again because she teared-up a little.

I felt bad for her. “You okay?” I asked.

She sighed and then was silent for a second. “I’m dealing. A.J.’s not my only disaster.”

“Want to talk about it?” I asked.

“Maybe later,” she said. “What I want to know is how you got the alien technology. And are they friendly or are they going to enslave us?”

“No worries,” I said. “They’re peaceful. There have been visitations, but only on a small scale. We call their planet Kepler-22b. They call it Oreon. And they’ve been observing us for centuries.”

“That’s a little scary,” she said, getting the wrinkle between her eyebrows.

“We’ve just been conditioned by Hollywood that aliens are evil warmongers that want to take over our planet. The Oreonians mean us no harm. Think about it from our perspective. We wonder what’s out there in the cosmos. We’ve been searching for signs of extraterrestrial life for decades. Finding it would be the news of the century. The whole world would be fixated on it. Well, the planet Oreon is fixated on
us
.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“They wondered what was out there, too. Only, they’re way more advanced than we are, and they’ve actually gone looking. We spend the bulk of our resources on weapons and wars. They spend theirs on science and learning. They’ve been searching for life on other planets for centuries, and they’ve found it. The reason they find us so fascinating is that we’re the only planet they’ve found that has both technology and humanoid life.”

“Humanoid life?”

“Walks upright, has limbs, opposable thumbs. They’re obsessed with us. In the beginning, they just had our airwaves. But once we developed the internet, they had everything. Their linguists deciphered our major languages. They study us at their universities. They have what could only be called fan clubs. Their kids play with Earth dolls. Seriously…we’re like their reality TV.”

“Shut the front door!”

“I know, right?” I couldn’t help grinning. It was incredibly liberating to just say it out loud. I started getting into it. After all the times I wanted so frickin bad to tell Daniel. Telling Lex was kind of making up for that. She was a good audience.

“For a long time they just watched us,” I said. “But then they began to get concerned that we weren’t going to make it through the technological age. We too readily use war to settle our differences, and we continue to build more and more powerful weapons of destruction. We give no serious attention to climate change. We just aren’t evolving fast enough to keep up with our technology. They didn’t think we were going to make it. They instigated the Editor Program to give us a fighting chance to survive the next century.”

“How so?”

“Over the years, there have been disasters that, in hindsight, were preventable. They felt that if we had a way to go back in time and reverse some of them, we’d have a better chance to evolve.”

“Is our government involved in this?”

“No. They wanted nothing to do with our government. They introduced the Hitchhiker Mechanism into a random selection of people in several of the most advanced countries. Since an Editor has to be formed from birth, the Oreonians set up the Guild to collect them when they reached adolescence and draft them into the program. They gave the Guild sensitive equipment to detect and monitor them. I don’t really know all the details of the early days.”

“How did they get to Earth without us detecting them?”

“Ha! You’ll love this. They’ve developed the capacity to harness the power of stars. They open a wormhole to the far side of the moon and sneak in a little ship. But they open the wormhole in the past to before we had radar. They zip down to Earth and park the ship somewhere remote. Then they travel through the trees to the present and to where ever they want to go.”

She threw out her hands. “Who knows about this?”

“Only Editors and now you. Guild members keep everything on the down low. Editors who leak get wiped out of the program. Then the Guild goes back in time and repairs the leaks so we’re pretty protected. Besides, who would believe it?”

“Yeah, I know. I’m a little on the fence here.”

“Cross my heart,” I said, making the slashes across my chest.

She laughed.

“What?” I asked. “I’m serious. Everything I’m saying is true.”

“I lie—I die,” she said, making a cross on her chest.

“Excuse me?”

“I lie—I die.” She kind of shook her head and gave another little laugh. “It’s just this thing we did when we were little. The three of us had it pretty tough. We really relied on each other. ‘I lie—I die’ was our solemn oath. You’ve done it twice now. You didn’t say our words, but I think the sentiment is still the same. We never question it. I guess I’ll just have to trust you.”

“Hey, I have a lot on the line here,” I said. “There’s a lot of trust coming from this side too. I lose big if this gets out.”

In just a few hours, Lex and I had an affinity that usually comes with, well, maybe not years of friendship, but at least months. I guess we were both so committed to saving A.J., that it cut out all the games and bullshit. She didn’t flirt with me and I didn’t come on to her.

Don’t get me wrong. She was a stone, cold fox. Admittedly I had a random thought now and then—I am a guy. But my interests lied elsewhere. And it was sorta refreshing, just being with her that way, person to person. If I couldn’t trust her, who the heck could I trust? She’d protected A.J.’s secret most of her life.

That was good enough for me.