One Second Per Second Read online

  I cross town, get onto the Interstate, and take an exit that must mystify most travelers as it seems to lead only to semi-arid wasteland. I merge onto the road that takes you to the site.

  I park and check my phone before throwing it onto the passenger seat, leaving it in the car as security protocol requires. Late again. The shift director won’t comment. They never do, but I sense that records are being kept. I enter and no one approaches me, not even Kasper. That’s a pity since I’d decided to be nice to Kasper today having felt a bit guilty about yesterday. It’s unusually quiet. I never did get my tea so I make a beeline for the kitchen.

  Something seems wrong. I turn and notice there’s no motion in the control room. In fact, no people in the control room. In fact, no people anywhere. I enter the control room. Confirmed. No one. Even the Big Chair is empty. In my years at TMA I’d never seen the Big Chair empty before. Protocol requires it never be unoccupied except in the instant of a shift change or a toilet break swap-out. I’m panicked and jump into the chair. I have no qualifications or authority to be in this chair but it being empty is worse. I now notice several green lights on the map. Germany, Australia, Venezuela, Japan–two in Japan. Worse still I see a cluster of green. That’s an event correlation if I ever saw one. Not good. And what makes it worse than not good is that the cluster is in southeastern Washington state. It’s right here. As occupant of the Big Chair I need to order “Affirmative to Echo,” but there’s no one to say it to. The tachyons are streaming in but I can’t do a thing about it. I can’t echo them to neutralize the events. I don’t know how. It’s an art and it’s never been my job. I jump up and look into the console from where the echo is triggered, but the controls are soft and not even slightly intuitive. I’m nauseous. What’s happening out there? What happened right here? The cold sweat of a hangover has turned to the icy sweat of panic. I’d give up a limb to see a red light right now, but it’s all green. Just green. Another green light illuminates.

  I need to call someone so I burst out of the control room and run toward my cubicle. Then the Earth shudders and I fall. There’s a roar that shakes and deafens me and I clutch onto the ground as the control room glass shatters, cubicle walls collapse and the ceiling lights swing violently. I’m going to be sliced, crushed and buried under a mountain of rubble. I hear myself scream. I hadn’t intended to scream but my body knew it was called-for. There was another roar and whatever had been left standing now hit the ground all around me. I cover my eyes as debris rains on me, but it seems light and fragmented rather than heavy and deadly. I look up and the ceiling is still where it should be. If that comes down, it’s over. I need to get out of here because where there are two explosions there may be three. I lope toward the main entrance, hurdling over debris. The main door is no longer standing and I run straight out into the parking lot. The other smaller buildings are in various states of collapse. If I’d been in one of those ... The concrete pad of the parking lot is a web of cracks and craters, some a foot across. In all directions I see plumes of rising smoke like a Dickensian landscape of billowing chimneys. Those must be from the elevator shafts and ventilation ducts serving the labyrinth of corridors that navigate the tachyon detector array. I wait but there’s no third boom. I notice that my right arm is cut. There’s a lot of blood but it doesn’t look deep.

  Now there’s silence but for the geyser of water erupting from one of the collapsed buildings. The detection array has blown up. Why had it taken so long for this to occur to me? An explosion, two explosions, half a mile down is what just happened. But there’s nothing in the array that could cause an explosion. So someone did this–blew it up. Something else that had not occurred to me until now is that the parking lot contained a full complement of cars, some of them tilted in craters. I try to focus on the implications, but vomiting comes first.

  FIVE

  I approach the site gate at the legal speed limit. I need to play this cool–to get out and think. Should I have already called the other Washington? I can’t remember the procedure, but I’m pretty sure that I haven’t followed it. I need to think. Just think.

  I pass the guard house through the exit lane and wave without taking my eyes from the road. They must have felt what just happened and they must see the plumes, but no one tries to stop me. Maybe they’re frantically calling the Risley Fire Department. Good luck with that. A fleet of four fire trucks dealing with the aftermath of colossal explosions half a mile deep. That’s not one of their drills.

  Once there are miles between me and the site fence I take out my cell and call Bess. She may be hearing news of ground-shaking explosions from the site and I need to let her know I’m okay.

  “Must be party time!” It’s not her. It’s a man’s voice.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Party Loft. Is it time for a party?” asks the voice without curiosity.

  “Sorry,” I say and hang up. But that was speed dial. How did I get the ... Party Loft? This time I key in the numbers.

  “Must be time for a party–” I hang up and decide to figure this one out later. Now I need to do my job. So what is that? I bring up the roster for last night’s and this morning’s shifts. I start calling, Jenn first. Voice mail. The next name, voice mail. The next name rings out. I look for names that were off-shift. Voice mail. Voice mail. Voice mail. No one there. No one. I tap the cell on my chin. I have to make the call. Protocol requires that only a director can call this number, but protocol probably didn’t anticipate this. I take a deep breath and mentally compose a sane opening sentence as I call the number. It rings. It keeps ringing. And keeps ringing. My fear deepens a fathom. This is THE number, our communication trunk with HQ. This number can’t just ring out.

  So if I’d been on time for my shift ... would my phone be ringing-out too? Where the hell is everyone? Who’d be snatching TMA staff and why? And where are they? I not going to think the worst.

  I need to be somewhere I can think. I can’t go home. Why can’t I? Because something may be waiting for me there. I used to fear that that something was Den. That was a simpler time. Joe Alvarez has a small place on the river, and now that he’s probably wherever the rest of the TMA team are, it’ll be available.

  I park in his drive and walk around the back of his bungalow. It overlooks the Yakima River, just a few feet from its bank. I shield my eyes to look into the glass porch door. There’s no one there and no obvious sign of a struggle. I sit on a porch chair and look at my bloodied arm. There’s nothing for it but to break in and find something to clean the wound. It seems security was not at the top of Joe’s mind because breaking-in consists of sliding open the porch door and taking a step. The wound is easy to deal with - a couple of band aids. Barely any seepage out of the sides.

  I collapse onto the couch and a bag of chips crunches beneath me. I look out the window and the river is serene, oblivious to the circumstances. It flows steadily and calmly while seagulls hover above and a family of ducks paddles by.

  So someone has taken out the TMA Tachyon Array team. Why? Do they know what we do? They must; otherwise, why do it? But why do it? What’s the motivation? Jenn had always described us as the time police. We enforce the one second per second rule. So with us out of the way, the rule can be broken with impunity. But why would you? I walk to the window and stare out as a dingey of raucous kids passes by. The why is obvious. I’m so conditioned to think of time acceleration as a disaster to be avoided that I’ve never given clear thought to what someone might consider an up-side. But the answers are obvious. You could go back a decade with perfect knowledge of the future and make a fortune. I shake my head. But that’s wrong thinking, isn’t it? One thing TMA has ingrained in me is the complex, inter-related, chaotic, unpredictable consequences of tinkering in the past. Yet someone who hasn’t been trained to think that way just wouldn’t ... think that way. They’d see the vista of possibilities.

  But surely everyone has heard about the paradoxes. Paradox 1: I go back in time and kill my
grandfather as a child. So then where did I, the killer, come from? The fact of the matter is that we know all about these paradoxes, but as we look around ourselves, there’s no evidence of any weirdness going on. Then again, what would evidence look like? Do we somehow adjust to accommodate it? Maybe these paradoxes are resolving themselves continually right under our noses and we’ve no way of seeing it. Maybe understanding what’s happening means understanding time itself, and we’re close to clueless about that. The great Einstein gave us a little false hope for a while, telling us that time is no more than an extra dimension–the fourth one–but all that fell apart, at least for those of us in the know.

  So because time’s this mystery, what TMA is protecting us from isn’t clear. But we know our mission: one second per second, whatever it takes. If we keep that in check, whatever the consequences of forward or backward time acceleration are, we won’t need to deal with them. I can live with that. Keep it simple: one second per second. Yet it seems there’s someone who can’t live with it and the entire team who understands the first thing about any of it has vanished. My first two solid ideas of the morning comes to me. Joe must have tea, and a piece of toast wouldn’t go amiss.

  My body soaks in the sugar. Whoever these people are, can they reasonably expect to manage time to their benefit? Even I’d be hard-pressed to know how to do that. But that’s because I know what I don’t know. That’s rare knowledge.

  Two things happened in the late 1980s. The first was the fuss about cold fusion. Until then, fusion was a process deep in a star happening at millions of degrees. It’s the ultimate source for all energy and chemical elements. There are attempts to duplicate the conditions in the middle of a star and create a manufactured source of energy for the planet, but we’re not there yet. Then along come two chemists (this pains a physicist) who claim they’ve achieved fusion at room temperature in a big test tube. It’s cold fusion. That was unbelievable and mostly unbelieved except by credulous journalists.

  Around the same time, and much more distressingly, two other scientists find that a reaction involving certain chemicals in certain proportions at certain rates of addition produce a burst of tachyons that accelerates time within a limited burst radius. Whatever object is within that radius is temporally accelerated forward or backward, back then in an uncontrollable way, until it comes to rest at somewhen in the future or the past of when it should have been. They had all the evidence that this was happening, painstakingly analyzed and documented. First it was rudimentary evidence - a glass flask whose design post-dated its first discovery was found sitting on the scientists’ lab bench, encrusted in several years-worth of gunk. It was in old photographs. The manufacturers confirmed its production date, although they didn’t know why they had been asked. This was crude evidence at first, but then they began to put the pieces together in a rigorous way. The one second per second rule had been violated. Test after test of growing sophistication confirmed what was happening. Quantum coherence analysis, carbon-14 dating, a slew of other methods all cross-validating and confirming each other. And from a chemical reaction of all things: not from some hyper-energetic event like a nuclear blast or a collapsing star, but from boring chemistry in a small, underfunded Midwestern lab.

  By this time, like cold fusion, the circles who became privy to the research shrunk drastically. The evidence fed to the broader scientific community justified both findings being laughed off. But in a small inner sanctum, the science of chemo-tachyonics–tackychemistry to most of us–was born. It was the science of time travel, and more importantly, the science of its prevention.

  I pace Joe’s living room to the extent that the tiny living space allows. What to do now? There are thirty-some people in the world by my count who are close to understanding tackychemistry, and we’re the ones with even an outside chance of resolving this catastrofuck. Thirty-some minus one of them are missing. It feels like something can only be up to me. So that’s a shame, because I’m clueless. And now that I think about it, being in the home of another TMAer is a really bad idea.

  SIX

  It’s a problem and there’s no solution that involves just me. And anyone who could help is now part of the problem. They’ve gone. So my idea is one of withering stupidity that violates, in word and in spirit, every TMA regulation in the sizable volume that sat on a recently collapsed book shelf. The fact of the matter is that I already have a list of violations to my name; this idea would be just one more. If all came to light, and if the world is not sucked into its own ass of temporal paradoxes, and if I was on trial, I’d just ask for the new crime to be taken into consideration during sentencing. I drive toward home. I know there may be someone waiting for me, but I’m going to take the risk. I have to.

  It didn’t take long after the discovery of temporal acceleration for the question to be asked–can a person be transported? And it didn’t take long after that to try it. There was great care taken that the first hapless volunteer wouldn’t be ripped and flung apart–eyes to 1995, spleen to 1912 and gonads to 2500. There was already a growing understanding of how the parameters of the chemical reaction affected the transportation radius, the temporal acceleration rate, and the terminal point. Objects of increasing complexity and structure were used as guineas pigs: a bottle of Perrier, an electric kettle, a microchip, a living plant, a cockroach, then an actual guinea pig if I remember right. And then the first person.

  She took no convincing. They aimed for an hour forward, but overshot by a day because it was, and still is, an art. Yet she arrived intact and in rude health. Then, enter the temporal logicians. Different animals altogether from tackychemists. We are entirely focused on the How? while the temporal logicians were about the Why? and Why Not? with emphasis on the latter. After tortuous deliberation, the Why Not? could be boiled down to simplicity itself: Because we don’t know what the hell could happen. The rest is embellishment. So temporal acceleration became absolutely taboo, and the TMA was born.

  The car behind me honks and I look up at the traffic lights. Something, although I can’t tell what, is confusing me. I pull into a side street and step out of my car. I look around to get my bearings, reading the street signs and scanning three-sixty for landmarks. I confirm I am where I think I am. So then, why is there a park where there should have been a strip mall?

  Thick white cedars, a pathway and park benches border the central rectangle of grass at the center of which is an ornamental basalt column surrounded by flowers. This is where there should have been my favorite Thai restaurant, a barber shop, a bakery, and a movie theater. I drove past them just this morning and I did not drive past a park and a basalt column. My heart races. I look at passers-by. A woman with a dog, teenagers walking hand-in-hand. None of them seem bewildered, looking around themselves in shock. It’s only me. Two boys run by me into the park and begin to toss a frisbee. My legs feel shaky and I lean back against my car.

  As I drive on I am now looking side-to-side for signs of weirdness, of anomalies. Now and again I convince myself I’ve seen something–that building was never there before, that crossroad is new–but it’s just my paranoid imagination. These things haven’t changed.

  I get to my neighborhood and slow down to a crawl. Are there cars I don’t recognize? Pedestrians in black suits and sunglasses? It all looks normal and I pull into my driveway. Bess’s car isn’t there. More importantly, neither is Den’s. I notice the place is looking a little run down. My fault, of course. I’ve lived here since childhood and I held onto the place after my parents passed. When I moved back to Risley with my new bride, she was never keen on us living there, but after a while it got comfortable and Bess made the place her own.

  I enter and quickly step back out. I look along the street to my left then to my right and then again into the house. It’s wrong. But not completely wrong. That’s the most disorienting type of wrong. It’s dark instead of light, dank instead of fresh. The furniture is in the wrong positions and is the wrong furniture. But I recognize
this stuff, or some of it anyway. It’s stuff we trashed years ago. Our bright, airy decor is now replaced by my old, dark junk, and a picture window in the back wall has been ... uninstalled. It’s oppressive and airless.

  I had always assumed that when I was first confronted by a temporal anomaly that I’d think to myself Of course. That’s how these anomalies resolve themselves. It’s so obvious. Why didn’t I predict that? But that is not what I’m thinking. I’m bewildered. The other possibility I’d taken on board is that an anomaly would carry me along with it and I’d be oblivious to any weirdness at all. I’d just be part of it. But that isn’t happening either because my head and my memories are in how it used to be and not with how it now is.

  I remember I’m here on a mission and navigate the dilapidated furniture toward the main bedroom. At least I assume it’s still the main bedroom. It is. It contains an unmade bed and several sticks of furniture that should have been, in fact were, dumped long ago. Instead of the fancy French blue drawer chest that Bess bought there’s a bookcase with yellowed, peeling paint. On top of it is not the porcelain Imari vase that had been inherited down generations of Bess’s Japanese family, but a flexible desk lamp contorted to illuminate a wall photograph of my mother and brother.

  I try to set this all aside. The question is, is it still here? I slide open the closet door and look into the shadows of the interior. All my stuff. Nothing of Bess’s. I slide shirts along the wardrobe rail and pull clothing from shelves. Nothing of Bess’s. More importantly, I’m not seeing it, the thing I’m here for. I slide the door closed and open the adjacent door. I feel relief as I see it. The safe is half-concealed by draped clothes and I sweep them away. Next question is, is the safe’s combination the same? Hand slightly atremble, I jab in the numbers and I’m relieved to hear the whirr of the locks. I exhale, swing open the door and remove the black canvas roll-on bag. I’m about to unzip it when, in the corner of my eye, I detect motion. I turn cold as an exclamation escapes me. There’s a figure in the doorway. It takes a step toward me. I squint at it, a silhouette at first.