Lost in Yesterday

Mechanically extending his arm to grope around the nightstand, Howard North attempted to silence the sudden ringing that pulled him out of a peculiar nightmare. It was the same one that kept haunting him every two months or so. Although he had become acquainted to this surreal dream where he was hiding in an abandoned factory, he hadn’t found a way to escape. Even ten years later, the assassins were still able to locate him behind the desk of the manager’s office and lodge a bullet in his chest.

What time was it? The English man in his thirties couldn’t remember setting an alarm so early. He yawned, and continued to prove the wooden furniture for his vibrating phone. A call! Probably somebody from the United Kingdom who forgot about the time difference, he thought as he flipped the device against the table.

The room stayed quiet for a minute before the ringing resumed. Howard North, half-awake, answered after a few seconds of lethargy. It better had to be important!

“Hello?” said the man with a deep, warm voice.

As the exultant caller tried to walk him through his discovery, the latter peeked at the clock. Five.

“Hold on there, I didn’t quite catch that last part. A breakthrough?”

He brushed his black hairs as a multitude of thoughts sprouted in his mind.

“Really? But—Oh. Brilliant!”

The scientist couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Ever since he left his country in 2013, Howard North was inhabited with doubt and remorse. He knew had to move on, but adapting to the west was more painful than he expected. Even after almost a decade spent in the United States, the man still wasn’t ready to give up his gentleman habits—nor his British accent, for that matter—to pursue his American dream.

“You want me now—is that what you said? Oh, lovely! I will see you in an hour, then. Godspeed!”

The English psychiatrist shuffled his sheets away, stood on his feet, and entered the spacious walk-in closet of his hotel room. He picked a white shirt, dark costume pants, and his most elegant waistcoat, before proceeding to the bathroom. Mr. North was a sophisticated person who was taking very good care of his appearance. Looking pleasant was important for him—not only it would reassure and appeal to his patients, it would also attest the attention he brought to the smallest details, making sure that everything around him was absolutely well thought. The man had inherited this trait from his mother, a devoted nurse who strived to make her life as indefectible as possible. That, of course, meant a strict and impeccable education for her only child. Howard North could still remember the gleam in her eye when he received the letter confirming his enrollment at the prestigious University of Oxford, which she saw as a measure of success in that regard. That was shortly before she lost her battle against brain cancer and answered the final summons. Within a few weeks, the boy became lonely. Upon graduation, and once he was ready to write the next chapter of his life, Howard North contacted the former connections of his late father, a respected military officer, to get in touch with one of the most important national agencies.

“Good lord, do I look plastered!”

After taking a warm shower to wake his body, shaving, trimming his mustache, and applying a drop of the expensive perfume he bought in Paris last year, the English psychiatrist exited the bathroom and dressed up. He put on his Rolex, chose a bow tie that best fitted the black felt of his waistcoat, and grabbed his beret. Before leaving, he made the bed, cleaned the desk, and checked the content of his satchel—a notebook, a pen, and a Dictaphone. Howard North really didn’t need much to work.

As he stepped on the corridor’s stylish red carpet, the psychiatrist started to feel excited. Between two leafy green plants, Howard North glanced one last time over his reflection in the mirror hung on the modern tapestry. He wanted to look fantastic, today more than ever. If what his assistant told him was true, his life would very soon take an interesting turn. Although his job was to study the effects of quantum entanglement on the human brain, the psychiatrist was deeply involved with the team of researchers and kept asking that his presence be required for every experiment conducted. While most of his colleagues saw in him a passionate and curious individual, his behavior was irritating the head of the department. He always thought of her as the sturdy and very smart young woman that rose to success too soon to understand the hardships of her subordinates work.

“Taxi!”

Standing under the porch of The Peninsula to keep dry amid the pouring rain, Howard North waved a hand, attempting to catch a cab driver’s attention.

As one of the yellow cars finally pulled over, a drunk teenager halted right in front of him. She grimaced, and quickly retched in the artificial bush decoration.

“Ew...”

The young girl tucked her hair behind her ears and dabbed her mouth with a tissue she took out from her pocket. When she looked up and realized she smeared the handsome man’s shoes, she froze with a puzzled face.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s... It’s fine. Just go home. Get some rest,” he responded, calm as always.

The young lady obeyed and shamefully limped away. The few bystanders covered their nose, while Howard North hopped inside the taxi.

“Yuck. What is that smell?” asked the Latino driver as he closed the door.

“Somebody honked on my shoe.”

“Gee. Should we stop by the store?”

“No, thanks. I don’t think anything is open at this time of day.”

“Good point!”

The man returned to his seat and started the engine.

“Where to?”

“85, Saint Nicholas Terrace, please.”

“Okey-dokey. Hope you don’t mind some music.”

“Not at all.”

A jazzy song broke in the atmosphere, remembering the psychiatrist of his younger years when he used to spend evenings listening to his grandfather’s transistor. Although it was still early, Howard North could already catch a glimpse of the rising sun chasing away the moon as New York City engaged in its morning routine.

When she received the call, Lucy McKinley was up sipping her coffee in the fancy sofa of her new flat.

“Veronica, this is amazing news! Gather the team, I’ll be there in... fifteen minutes.”

The woman hung up, jubilant.

“Yes!”

She dropped her mug on the standing table of the kitchen and dashed to her room to get ready and take the earlier bus.

“Oh, Ul... Mommy woke you up.”

She stopped and crouched to pet the 2-year-old puppy stretching out as he left his wicker basket.

The research scientist was very close to Ulysses, the German Shepard that she adopted when moving out of Massachusetts after her husband’s death. She had given up her job, her house, her friends. The animal brought a presence, a companionship. His name reminded her of the suffering she went through when her maid was found guilty of killing the one and only person who gave her life a meaning. The young woman was left damaged forever, and swore to herself that she’d stay faithful to him and never fall in love again.

“Mommy’s team made a big discovery! We’ll soon be famous, Ul.”

The dog was frenetically shaking his tail. She knew he was able to sense her feelings. So could she. On that particular moment, Ulysses was happy for her.

“Come here, my cute little doggy!”

She grabbed and held him against her chest.

“You’ll see. Soon, we’ll find a big house out of the city with a huge garden. It’ll all be yours! You and I are going to have so much fun. We just have to hold on here a few more weeks until the program is complete. Okay?”

The twenty-seven-year-old woman beamed at her pet for a few seconds before she returned him to the basket and resumed her activities. And to think that, younger, she was afraid of dogs! All of that disappeared when she first laid eyes on Ulysses, weak, stray, begging for food on the streets of Manhattan. Human beings can be so cruel, she remembered thinking that day.

As she walked toward the vanity table in her bedroom, Ms. McKinley stopped in the hall to look at a portrait. The woman knew she owed a lot of her success to her grandfather, Leonard McKinley, who transmitted her his ardent passion for quantum science. The old man bequeathed the entirety of his research to his granddaughter, including the blueprints of the “McKinley device,” a machine he designed to enable entanglement. When younger Lucy took over his work, she saw in it an opportunity to make a breakthrough on teleportation by entangling particles in two separate areas and manipulating their state to convey information faster than light. That very theory coupled with recent discoveries on nuclear fusion could allow scanning a crystal’s structure in a first location and re-creating the same in a second before the original copy is destroyed using fission, thus effectively teleporting the aforementioned solid.

Ms. McKinley was applying makeup, the radio tuned on the daily news bulletin, when Ulysses joined her and started whining softly.

“You hungry? I’m almost done. Give me a minute, lil bud.”

She grabbed her eyelash extensions along with the glue to finalize her morning routine.

“Do I have time for lipstick?”

Ul tilted his head on the side.

“Okay, I’ll do it later. Come!”

She walked to the kitchen, accompanied by her faithful companion, and opened the leftmost cupboard door as the dog rose and put his front paws on the edge of the sink.

“There you go.”

The scientist poured feed in her buddy’s bowl under his attentive eye. Then, she proceeded to the back of the room and waited for him to sit before placing the feeder on the ground.

“Eat.”

At her command, the puppy stood and rushed to his meal. As Ul was enjoying his superior breakfast that Ms. McKinley had shipped over from one of the best pet brands in Canada, the latter penned a note for Lukas, Ul’s dog-sitter, who was supposed to visit in the afternoon. This word-passing had become a game between the two, where Ms. McKinley would sometimes leave some treats from the bakery downstairs for the man who was taking care of her dog while she worked, and would in return send pictures of them both in the park. Their strange relationship was bringing her a semblance of human connection that Ulysses, unfortunately, couldn’t substitute.

As she went on to raise the blinds of the living room, Lucy McKinley noticed the bus entering her drive.

“Dang it!”

The woman hurried and grabbed her phone, keys, and laptop from the table.

“Sorry, buddy, Mom has to go. Lukas will be here soon. See you!”

She kissed her dog goodbye, jumped into her gray sneakers, and proceeded to the door—not without taking a peek at her overall look in the glass, of course. No time to apply the cherry-red lipstick that her sister offered to her for Christmas. As much as she hated it, she’ll have to do this on her way to work. She took a rubber band, pulled her long black hair into a ponytail, and left her home.

Ms. McKinley ran down the stairs of the building and pushed the heavy front door as the bus halted in front of her was about to leave.

“Wait!” she shouted.

Fortunately for her, the driver heard her scream and stopped.

“Thank you,” she said once inside.

“Of course,” responded the man, trying to hide his blush.

Growing up, Lucy used to be annoyed by these incessant, sometimes disturbing, looks, whispers, and comments on her dresses. When she was in school, she felt that, because she was pretty, people weren’t actually paying attention to what she was saying, and kept dismissing her. All of that stopped after the incident, when she became a new person. The scientist decided to use it to her advantage, and achieve her ultimate goal: build the McKinley Device her grandfather had imagined, and fix her mistake. Of course, she didn’t reveal any of her plan to the laboratory that hired her following an hour-long interview with the Human Resources head around a drink. A very nice man, he turned to be.

“Next stop: Saint Nicholas Terrace,” chimed the PA system.

Lucy was pulled away from her thoughts. She pressed the button to request a stop, and moved to the back of the bus. As she watched the landscape slide behind the windows, she wondered if Mr. Perfect, the English psychiatrist that kept meddling with her experiments, managed to somehow learn about the news.

Ms. McKinley was surprised by the quiet as she pushed the heavy glass front doors of the laboratory. She was barely one hour early and yet, the lobby was empty. Only Charlie, the handsome security guard, but also one of the rare men that respected her for a reason that didn’t include her body, was here.

“Good morning, Ms. McKinley.”

“Good morning, Charlie.”

The head of the Quantum Department proceeded to the checkpoint. She handed her bag over to the fifty-year-old Asian and walked through the metal detector. Although she was convinced that this daily exercise was unnecessarily excessive for regular employees, the board of directors didn’t take a chance after a mentally ill individual caused a lot of fear few months from then. The senior, disoriented, stumbled inside the building and brandished a gun for no apparent reason. Thankfully, nobody was injured. The outcome would have been much worse if Charlie, whose role was seen as minor and almost insignificant, didn’t heroically jump on him before he had time to pull the trigger. The guard, who kept his legendary humility, was subsequently promoted, and people started noticing him.

“I heard you made a breakthrough,” he asked with a smile.

She grabbed her bag, and exchange his smile against one of her own.

“We did, and might be on the verge of a major discovery.”

“Amazing. It’s such a pleasure to work close to incredibly talented scientists.”

“You’re quite the charmer!”

Charlie beamed and moved aside to let her reach the elevator. She called the cabin, and turned back to the man.

“Has Mr. North arrived yet?”

“I haven’t seen him.”

Good, she thought.

The doors opened within seconds. The woman hoped inside and pressed the thirteenth floor button. The engine kickstarted and pulled her to the top—Quantum Research.

On the way to her office, Ms. McKinley caught herself wondering if Charlie had any grandchildren. Although she couldn’t recall him wearing a ring, a man as kind had to have a wife. Memories of her late husband suddenly resurfaced from a happier time, when the couple was living in the large and fancy manor they renovated in Boston. Ms. McKinley quickly dismissed the thought before a darker one came to pollute her mind. She was getting tired of walking the same tight rope every day, triaging her ideas to avoid the horror buried deep inside herself. That was the true reason behind her hectic schedule. The young woman was striving to immerse fully in her work, filling the gaps of her agenda with further research and skipping lunch breaks where the conversation tended to become personal. She was, in essence, trying to dodge her demons.

The bell rang, taking her back to the present reality. Veronica was right outside the elevator, ready to welcome her boss.

“Good morning, Lucy! Your team is waiting for you in the third experiment chamber.”

“Thank you, Veronica.”

“Mmhm,” she acknowledged with a nod as she extended her a hot coffee.

“You’re the best!”

Ms. McKinley followed her assistant toward the left aisle where the aforementioned chamber was located. Veronica scanned her magnetic badge on the reader and the two heavy doors swiveled, inviting the scientists to enter.

“How stable is the entanglement?”

“One of the interns started it around midnight. We haven’t observed any significant fluctuation in energy.”

“Could you give me his name? I’ll make sure he receives proper compensation for staying up late.”

“Of course.”

“I assume that they used my grandfather’s device?”

“Only the first half. Oh—they also scanned the crystal’s structure and loaded its primitive model in the computer.”

“I see.”

Veronica knocked on a large wooden door and waited until her boss stepped inside to close behind them.

“There she is, she who uncovered the secrets of Quantum teleportation.”

“Don’t pop the Champagne just yet, we still need to make the actual teleportation happen,” she put on a light tone.

She removed her coat and hung it in the entrance of the vast, white room. Then, Ms. McKinley joined the other four members of her team gathered in the middle around two almost identical man-sized machines, trapped in some sort of a glass dome.

“Talk to me, how are we doing?”

“We configured the devices per the parameters we agreed on yesterday and ran the scan.”

“First scan and it’s successful. Excellent!”

“Thanks. We entangled the particle group between this machine and the materializer. We’re now waiting for you to ready the latter and launch the procedure to re-create the atoms in real time through nuclear fission.”

“Phew. Let’s not lose a second, then!”

Ms. McKinley could feel the general excitement in the air, although everyone was trying their best to remain calm and professional. The most delicate part of the experiment was about to begin. Reconstituting the crystal’s structure required a tremendous amount of energy. The team of scientists feared that it would destabilize the quantum entanglement, causing corruption as the scanner transferred the atomic fields description to the materializer. It was nearly impossible to predict what would happen if the scenario concretized. For that reason, McKinley specifically asked to be alone under the shell made of special glass to operate the machine.

“Alright, time for me to go in. Prepare the computer for another scan. This time, we’re riding full speed through the quantum link.”

“Configuring,” confirmed a ginger youngling with goggles.

Judging by his face, he was probably the one who stayed up all night to progress the experiment.

Ms. McKinley put on a lab coat, entered the dome, and closed the door behind her.

“Materializer will be ready in a minute.”

“Roger that. Scanner is go. Checking the entanglement...” responded her assistant on the radio speaker.

The scientist typed a few commands on the rightmost machine while her team was remotely controlling the “source,” per their terminology.

The McKinley devices looked like a giant chandelier with many wires and strange shapes seemingly focusing the center. The “head” was held in suspension above a metallic circular platform on which a table was placed, surrounded by three colossal pillars. One of them embedded a terminal while the others were filled with various electronic components, including what appeared to be antique vacuum tubes. Large pipes littered the ground, running outside the glass dome through the thick wall of the chamber and connecting the two devices to an isolated generator in a nearby room.

“Ready!” she announced.

“Ready,” confirmed her peers.

The scientist’s heart was pacing. This had to work. She closed her eyes and said a quick prayer.

“Commence the transfer.”

At her order, the team activated the source machine which started making a humming noise, sign that the scanning process had begun.

Suddenly, a man irrupted in the room.

“You! Halt that.”

Ms. McKinley spun.

“Howard? What are you doing here?” she rebuked.

The English psychiatrist threw his beret in the entrance and rushed to the glass door.

“I’m a doctor. You’re my patient. I need to monitor your brain. That’s my job, for Pete’s sake!”

The woman sighed deeply. Somehow, she knew her colleague would come and delay—if not ruin—the experiment.

“Fine.”

He put his hand on the handle.

“No!” she shouted.

“Dude, the whole system could collapse if you open the door!” explained the team of assistants. “Quantum physics are extremely sensitive.”

“You don’t need to be in here with me. You can monitor from outside the glass.”

“Very well. Do you have the EEG cap?”

Ms. McKinley froze and looked down on the table next to Howard North, where lied a piece of cloth with dozens of electrodes and wires on it.

“Of course you don’t,” he murmured to himself.

The woman turned back to the computer.

“It’s too late, the procedure is almost complete. Medical stuff will have to wait.”

“Oh no, you don’t!”

“Howard, no!”

It was too late. The psychiatrist had entered the glass dome as an alarm went off in the laboratory.

“What have you done?” bellowed the scientist.

“Abort!” shouted Veronica.

“I’m trying! Nothing’s working,” said the ginger boy.

“What’s happening, Ms. McKinley?”

She turned to Howard. For the first time since he started two years ago, the latter saw fear in the woman’s eye.

“I don’t know,” she conceded.

Lucy McKinley dashed from one terminal to the other, sending keystrokes, pressing buttons, to no avail.

“The machine is not responding. As if—”

An intense light abruptly blinded the two researchers as a very loud and distant noise of glass shattering in a million fragments pierced their ears. They felt the ground shaking underneath their feet, and suddenly had the impression of falling, as if they were free from gravity. Howard North perceived it as a hallucination, while Lucy McKinley figured that they had entered a “breach,” as her grandfather observed in one of his own experiments. She never understood what he meant by that. Until now.

The rumbling stopped spontaneously, and their surrounding became silent again. Both were completely disquieted. It took them a few seconds to realize that they were lying on the ground. On grass, to be precise. And that sound... Birds?

“Good heavens. Where are we?”