Chapter 1
Cover Image courtesy NASA on FlickrCommons.
This is for my Dad, who came up with the original idea many years ago.
He was sixty-six and about to die. On his farm it was September of the year 1900. But he remembered everything like it was yesterday. Back in 2040.
**
NASA-Langley Research Center
Virginia
Joint KPA Project
6 June, 2040
He stood by the Apple control pad in his white lab coat, not realizing he was sweating. They were almost ready to go. Both his boss and his co-developer Sean, also in a lab coat, stood nearby. His neck prickled. Like it was hot in here. Was the a/c broken? It was June.
He struggled to keep his right hand in his pocket, to maintain his “engineering cool,” to keep his itchy index finger from hovering above the sensitive go-button so it couldn’t tap it too soon. This was exciting. And top secret. So what if the designs had come from found schematics inside the private hard drive of an old dead KPA scientist? Kugrens, KPA chairman and his boss, was giving them a chance to try them. Nothing in his generation like this had ever been attempted, and oh what it could mean for the army. Drones of all kinds transported in seconds to frontlines. A way to strike early to keep nuclear weapons from being deployed. He hated nuclear weapons.
Dee’s voice came over the control pad speaker. “Ready, Bailey?”
“Ready.”
Kugrens looked at serious, dark-haired Bailey and pudgy, blonde Sean cleared his throat with a grin as twenty feet in front of them along the wall the machine glowed a soft blue. It was still crude and extremely large, the shape of a small train box-car with a couple of carton-shaped compartments on top, but for initial testing it would do.
The voice of older scientist Dee came over the speakers. “Ready test one, joint KPA‑Army teleport project, test subject a bronze, seven-inch A. Lincoln statue with scratch on the bottom. Sunday, 4 June, 2040. Time eleven fourteen hours. Countdown. Five, four--”
Bailey’s right hand flew out of his pocket, index finger trembling, hovering.
“… three, two, one, go.”
The tap on the go-button was slight, the box-car glowed green for two seconds, then back to blue.
“Blue to green and back again,” Dee’s voice reported from his end. Dee was a forty-something man. Short for Damocles Bowman. Over the speaker Bailey and Sean then heard the faint but distinct sound of the panel on Dee’s machine sliding open. They held their breath.
Rhodes’s sweet voice, clearly excited but slightly farther away than Dee’s voice, said, “Bronze A. Lincoln statue…scratch on the bottom!”
And they all breathed. Bailey inwardly rejoiced at the clapping coming a few feet away from Sean and from over the speaker, and a solid smack from rotund Sean’s hand almost put his back out of place.
“Thank you, geniuses Bailey and Olson, if I may say so myself! And A. Lincoln whoever that is,” said Sean. He was the Olson in that equation, Sean Olson.
Kugrens said, “Computer. Rhodes. Olson. Top‑secret photo doc mode. Password…” She keyed in a code on a silent keypad. That meant the top‑secret surveillance equipment for the labs and Olson and Rhodes to photo‑document the results. Olson and the female scientist Rhodes would be using their locked and quadruple‑authentication classified Apple phones. Olson took pictures of the empty inside of the boxcar. Bailey pictured Rhodes a mile away taking a dozen pictures of the statue inside their boxcar.
Beautiful Boss Kugrens in her high heels angled over across the floor, stopping a few feet in front of Bailey and Olson, her blue eyes glistening hard, not soft like the machine. Her icy jaw, which always seemed to be smiling but never really was, said a little loudly so Dee and Rhodes a mile away in Building 1205 with the other machine could also hear her over the speaker, “Now you gotta send it back.”
“Will do, Boss,” said Dee. They heard the soft sound of the panel door on the other machine sliding open again.
Bailey’s adrenalin and joy finally caught up to him. In a rare moment of giddiness in this tension-filled top‑secret workspace, he blurted out and then chuckled, “Watch that trigger finger, Dee! You don’t wanna vaporize Rhodes! She’s too cute.”
Dee chuckled. “Cute she is, Bailey. Roger that. Watching trigger finger on go‑button.”
Did I just flirt? In a top-secret environment?
Bailey cleared his throat, choking joy back to the edges where it belonged. He now sounded almost angry. “Ready, Dee?”
I’ve never flirted in my life! What’s Rhodes thinking. And Kugrens!
“Wait one.”
Focus on saving the world, Jim, Bailey’s mind reprimanded him. Focus on the countdown—
Unclear murmurs came over the speaker between Dee and Rhodes, and Kugrens barked, “Everything ok, Bowman? What. Does she have to go to the bathroom?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Bailey heard Dee say, obviously talking to Rhodes before raising his voice for them. “We’re good to go, Boss, Bailey.”
Bailey began the countdown, sounding less angry now, his professional tone back in control. “Ready test two, joint KPA-Army teleport project, test subject a bronze, seven-inch A. Lincoln statue with scratch on the bottom. Sunday, 4 June, 2040. Eleven fifteen point two hours. Countdown. Five. Four…”
Of course test two was a success.
Sean held up the statue with the crude engraving of “A. Lincoln” on the front edge and the large scratch on the bottom.
But then something strange happened.
Over the Apple speaker Dee cleared his throat. “Uh…did you get it?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“’Cause we got something back…”
Only it wasn’t a thing. It was a man.
Wow! You're really talented in writing. Keep it up.
The visuals and concept are really impressive. This would translate beautifully into a cinematic teaser.