Strike (33 page)

The Army had a real dilemma. What should they do with us? We had no families. We didn’t dare contact our grandparents. What would we tell them? We had no history. No birth certificates. We truly didn’t exist. In the back of my head I was worried that they would keep us hidden away in the middle of the desert for the rest of our lives, but that wasn’t the case.

New identities were created for each of us. Records were fabricated, complete with histories that said we were abandoned at birth and brought up in foster homes. The Army found wonderful families who were more than willing to take us in. Better still, they were all in the same area of the country. Los Angeles. It meant that even though we were being sent to different homes, we would still be close enough to see our true family: each other.

I once asked what had happened to Colonel Feit. Nobody gave me a straight answer. They would say things like, “He’s been taken care of” or “It’s best you forget about him.” I didn’t know if he was imprisoned, set free . . . or executed.

When the day came for us to leave the base, the commander of the unit gave us a final bit of advice. He asked us to do our best to forget the past, and the future, and to live our lives as normally as possible. He said that our records would be sealed and nobody would learn of our true identities. He also said that the Army would check up on us from time to time.

For the record, they never did.

When we left that base for the final time, it was the last contact we had with anybody who knew we had come from the future. I guess they felt it was better to pretend that we didn’t exist rather than to risk the truth getting out. I think they feared that every country who developed atomic weapons would try to duplicate the Bridge, or that we’d be constantly hounded by people asking us about the future. It would have ruined any chance we had at living normal lives.

My guess is they didn’t seal our records, they destroyed them.

As we were driven off through the desert in the vintage jeep, I looked back on the base for the last time and saw the final proof that the Army and the government wanted nothing to do with time travel.

The dome was being dismantled. There would be no above-ground atomic test. Project Alcatraz was scrapped, never to be resurrected. The secret of what had happened in another dimension and another time would die with those who we met there.

And eventually, with us.

Though we wanted nothing more than to live normal lives, making that happen wasn’t easy. Forget all the time travel and the near destruction of our world; we had lost our home and our families. Somewhere in another dimension my parents were mourning the loss of their son. When I was younger they had joined SYLO and moved to Pemberwick Island to protect me. Though they couldn’t know it, that was exactly what happened. If we had stayed living in Greenwich we would probably have been victims of the first Retro attack. I hoped my parents weren’t feeling any guilt over the fact that they had lost me. I knew they would be proud of what I had done. The solid B-minus student who didn’t apply himself at school had helped save the world. I hoped that would give them some consolation.

I missed them, and always would.

Tori, Kent, and Olivia were set adrift much the same way. Though we were all fostered by wonderful people, none of us felt truly complete unless we were with each other.

Living in the 1950s was a challenge. It was an age before digital technology. There were no computers or smart phones. Theaters only showed one movie at a time. The black-and-white television only received four channels. Without my iPod, I had to listen to music using plastic discs that spun on turntables.

For the record, they’re called records.

Regressing technologically was annoying, but expected. There were plenty of other things I didn’t expect, like not being able to wear jeans to school. I also had to keep my hair cut short because if your hair fell over your ears, they called you a girl. And most everybody smoked cigarettes. That took some getting used to.

It was also tough making new friends because I had to be careful about everything I said. I couldn’t tell them that Neil Armstrong would be the first man to walk on the moon or that the Beatles were about to rock the planet or that the World Trade Center would be attacked by terrorists. I couldn’t even tell them that there would
be
a World Trade Center. It was a huge pain, not only because it kept us from fully connecting with the people of that time, but because there were so many horrific events that we had the power to prevent, but couldn’t. We had to let history play out naturally.

I lived for the weekends. That’s when the four of us got together, usually at the beach, where nobody could hear us and we could be ourselves. We’d talk about our true pasts and the people we cared about. It relieved the pressure and helped keep me sane. But as time went on and all of our stories had been told more than once, we found ourselves talking less about the past and more about the future. Not the future we knew, the future that had yet to be written.

It was on a beautiful, warm day in Manhattan Beach, sitting on a blanket by the edge of the surf, that our lives were changed once again.

“We can’t ignore it anymore,” Tori said. “History is repeating itself.”

“Isn’t that the point?” Kent asked.

“But that means this world is on a path to the same disaster scenario that led to Olivia’s world in the twenty-fourth century. Only a handful of people know what’s coming and they’re pretending like they don’t. I’m not even convinced they truly believed we were from the future.”

“So the only people who understand what’s going to happen are us,” Olivia said.

“Who cares?” Kent exclaimed. “Those people from the twenty-fourth century are killers. They deserve whatever they get.”

“But they became killers because of what they got,” Tori said. “I’m not saying what they did was justified, but they were desperate. The same thing is going to happen again.”

“So what do you want to do about it?” Kent asked. “Go public? The Army will say they never heard of us and they’ll put us in a zoo. Or a loony bin. There’s no point. Nothing we say will make any difference because people are going to do what they’re going to do.”

“So we don’t tell them,” I said. “We change them.”

I had everyone’s attention.

“Uh . . . what?” Kent said.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Quinn,” I said. “Maybe I spend too much brain time on Pemberwick Island but I can’t help it. Quinn had plans. He wanted to leave that island and make a difference. I didn’t understand that. For me, living quietly on a beautiful island was all I needed. Neither of us got what we wanted and now we’re in the exact same spot, living on our own little island, hiding from the world. The difference is we have the knowledge that could change the future. We can make a difference.”

“We can’t tell people what we know, Rook,” Kent said. “They’ll treat us like freaks. Hell, we
are
freaks.”

“It’s worse than that,” Olivia said. “If we start monkeying with things there’s no guarantee it won’t lead to something even worse.”

“You might be right,” I said. “But I can’t imagine anything worse than what we saw in 2324. We risked our lives to save the world once. Do you really want to sit around and watch it fall apart again?”

They all exchanged nervous glances. I had hit a nerve.

“What is it you want to do, Tucker?” Tori asked.

I smiled and said, “I want to cheat.”

I had been forming the plan for months, trying to think of every possible scenario and pitfall. When I laid it out to the others, they quickly embraced it. Even Kent. They each may have had different reasons for agreeing to my vision, but the main thing was that they were with me. I knew they would be. It was the right thing to do. The only thing.

We had saved the world once. We were going to try to do it again.

The plan started with school. From that moment on we became the most dedicated students imaginable. Even me. It was all geared toward getting us into college, where the real work began. Kent took business courses. Olivia studied marketing. Tori took a double major in physics and chemistry. I studied political science and went to law school. We all received advance degrees to prepare us for the most important step.

We were going to cheat the system.

The four of us formed a company. At first, it was all about investment. That’s where the cheating came in. We knew where the money was going to be, eventually. IBM, Xerox, Microsoft, Apple, Walmart, Intel. In the ’60s the phrase “Made in Japan” had a negative connotation, but we knew that wouldn’t last. Sony, Toyota, Datsun (that became Nissan) were all companies we knew were going to be major players. We even invested in ExxonMobil (though it was called Esso back then).

There was no guarantee that any of those companies would develop the exact same way they had back in our other world, but it was a safe bet because we knew that no matter what happened, there would be a need for the products they created. We didn’t interfere, we invested. Quietly. What began with money we earned from after-school jobs slowly grew into a fortune.

An immense freakin’ fortune.

With that kind of money we had the freedom to use it for whatever we wanted, and what we wanted was the Holy Grail. Our main goal was to find an energy source to replace fossil fuels. We hired visionaries: physicists, chemists, biologists, and even sociologists. They worked for decades trying to find the practical alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

They struck gold with hydrogen. It is one of nature’s simplest elements. Our “H” team worked for decades to find a way to create a hydrogen fuel that didn’t require the use of fossil fuels or nuclear power to produce. It was clean, it reduced the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, and it only took a few billion dollars of our not-so-hard-earned cash to create.

It was a patented process that ended up making us even more money than all of our cheating did. Though making money was never the point. Most everything we earned was plowed right back into research and development. Once we got to the point where we could no longer predict future investments it didn’t matter, for we had hundreds of our own patents in place and it kept our production humming. Soon, over half the world’s cars ran on hydrogen fuel, as well as the power plants that provided electricity throughout the grid.

Simply put, we had done it.

We made a difference.

The ultimate result of what we achieved won’t be known for centuries, and since we didn’t have a Bridge to the future, we could only speculate. But all signs pointed to the fact that we had cracked the nut. We had set the world on a better course than the one that led to the horror of Olivia’s time.

Of course it wasn’t all work. We had lives to live.

Kent and Olivia got married.

Not to each other.

As much as they loved each other, I think they were too much alike. They both had big personalities and loved living the life of people who had fame and money. Oh yes, creating a revolutionary new source of power brought us fame. Kent had more girlfriends than I could count, but he finally married a girl who both fed his ego and kept him in line. Not an easy task.

Olivia married an Olympic skier. They travelled the world together and were on the cover of every sports and style magazine that existed. They had two kids who were both as beautiful and athletic as their parents.

Tori and I got married too.

To each other.

I think I fell in love with her the moment I first saw her on Pemberwick Island with her long curly hair and her University of Southern Maine baseball cap. She wasn’t like the other girls. Getting her to talk was next to impossible and I think that was because she actually had more to say than the other kids and knew they wouldn’t understand. But I did. I often wonder if we would have ended up together if not for the Retro invasion. It’s odd to find a silver lining in the nightmare we lived through, but if there was one, that was it.

Tori and I had a beautiful daughter who knows she will always be able to rely on us and trust us. It was everything to Tori that our little girl knew she had two parents who would always be there to love her. I couldn’t be prouder. Of both of them.

I’m not exactly sure what happened to Mr. Feit. He dropped off the face of the earth. Part of me wondered if the Army had him executed, or locked away for life, but that didn’t seem right. They had no evidence of the part he played in the atrocities. In fact, those atrocities never actually happened. Not in this world.

It was more likely that Feit had simply been released and forgotten, just as they had done with us. I’d often scour the newspapers and later the Internet, searching for signs of anybody who was having as much success in the stock market as we were. That would have been the tipoff. I didn’t find a thing. If he was still alive it meant he wasn’t as smart as I thought he was, or way smarter than I could have imagined.

There was one day, however, when at the beach in Santa Monica I saw a group of old-guy surfers with longboards headed for their cars. One of them was a dead ringer for Feit, right down to the long blond hair and the earring. He was older too, which fit. His hair had as much gray in it as blond. But since many older surfer dudes looked exactly like that I figured I was jumping to conclusions. The guy handed his board off to a friend and jumped behind the wheel of a sweet Maserati. He fired up the powerful engine and tore out of the parking spot with his wheels screeching.

As he flashed by where I was standing, we made eye contact. He smiled and gave me a small salute. As he sped off, I heard him laugh.

I try not to let the memory haunt me.

As much as Kent, Olivia, Tori, and I had our own lives, we never spent much time apart. We were joined together not only by our energy company, but by the bond that we had formed many years before. We were family. We had a goal. We weren’t going to let the world crumble and I believe in our own small way, we succeeded.

Quinn would have been proud.

It was the common desire to fulfill this goal that brought us all to my high school graduation. Or more specifically, the high school graduation of my younger self. The guy who was born in this dimension and had barely squeaked through Greenwich High School.