Aliomenti Saga 6: Stark Cataclysm (21 page)

They downed plates of cold unidentified meat and soggy vegetables in the mess hall. Fil listened to the clanking of metal utensils against the plates, ate without feeling a sense of nourishment or refreshment. He found the conversation more interesting.

“Ever wonder what caused it all?” One of the men next to him, whose name Fil couldn’t remember and didn’t want to know, speared a cooked carrot and used it as pointing device, aiming it toward the side of the tent. “Why so many cities collapsed, so many died?”

I could tell you
, he thought.
But you’d never believe me. And if you did, you’d probably try to kill me.

Another man grunted. “Earthquakes, wasn’t it?”

The woman next to him snorted. “No way that many earthquakes occur that fast, that large, all synched up like that.”

He glared at her. “Then what was it?”

Her eyes brightened. “Aliens. They’re softening us up for the main invasion. It’s like a book I read years ago, but in that one they sent a virus to kill us first. But now? They’re using weapons to level our cities before they arrive and engage the few remaining survivors in combat.”

General laughter, derisive and cruel, met her pronouncement, and her excited look turned sour.

“I’ll give you the weapons idea,” another said. “But it wasn’t some green-skinned alien. Nah. Some kind of secret weapon the government was building. They tested a bunch of ‘em out. Some general got overzealous, set it to full power, and boom. Instead of one going off, all of ‘em go off at once. Instant Armageddon.”

Fil winced.

One of the people noticed and nodded at him. “You got any theories?”

Fil shrugged. “I doubt it was something natural, like earthquakes or tornadoes. Probably something went wrong, very wrong, some kind of accident. Most of us lost people we cared about that day and we’re trying to rebuild. At this point, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“Mmm.” The woman nodded. “I still think it was aliens.”

Fil finished putting the last bit of carrot into his mouth and stood up, took his tray to the designated drop off location, and headed outside.

The humans had no idea what had happened. The Aliomenti—specifically, Arthur Lowell—thought his father responsible. Will had managed to go eleven centuries without laying waste to even a single city, while Fil had taken out thirty of the world’s largest metropolises in a single fury-filled day. Some son
he’d
turned out to be. He wondered what Will thought of him now. He moved out of the primary camp into a grove of nearby trees, wanting to be alone.

The Mechanic sat on the grass just outside the main clearing, leaning against one of the trees, making marks on a computer tablet. He looked up as Fil approached, showing no sign of surprise at the encounter. “Food gotten any better since I finished an hour ago?”

“No. Just colder.” Fil motioned to the spot next to him. “Mind if I join you?”

The Mechanic shook his head. “Not at all. Adam should be here shortly. Something was said in conversation over dinner that got us both excited. We’re going to talk it through.” He gave Fil an appraising look. “He went looking for you and Angel.”

Adam appeared just then, nodding as he “found” Fil. “Good, you’re already here.” He glanced at the Mechanic. “Are we ready?”

Fil waved his hand to gain their attention. “What’s the topic of conversation?”

“We’ve been working with your sister over the past few decades trying to solve a problem that’s going to become a huge deal in about another hundred and thirty years,” the Mechanic replied.

Fil nodded. “Time travel.”

“Exactly. We’ve hit a bit of a standstill. If we can’t work through the problem, you and Angel and Adam won’t be able to make a very important trip.”

He glanced around. “You said Angel’s going to join us for this conversation?”

Adam nodded. “Eventually. She’s working in another section of the city, targeting monuments that haven’t fallen. She said she’d join us when they finish for the day.”

As if on cue, Angel walked up, brushing dust off her clothing, and beamed as she saw Fil. She sat next to her brother. Adam sat as well, completing a circle with the four present.

Adam glanced at the siblings. “The Mechanic and I overheard a comment while eating dinner in the mess hall about an hour ago. It might not solve our larger problem directly, but we suspect it will push us toward that ultimate solution.” He paused. “It would also be a technological advancement that’s worthy of research on its own.”

Angel motioned for Adam to continue.

The Mechanic spoke instead. “Two of the men eating dinner were moaning about the fact that it took them a long time to get here, and how they wished they could walk through a door here and be back at home in an instant.”

Angel looked intrigued. Fil shrugged. “Okay. And?”

“Physics deals with a number of dimensions. We’re all pretty conscious of the first three, because we have control over them. Those three dimensions represent the physical plane. You walk in two dimensions and fly in three. What that man described—walking through a door and arriving at a three dimensional point not directly connected to his present location—is teleportation.”

“Which all of us can do.”

“Right,” Adam said. “The comment triggered a memory of a description of the dimensions. Essentially, you could theoretically
bend
lower dimensions and move through a higher dimension. Put two dots on opposite sides of a piece of paper. Fold the paper in half—bending a different dimension—and the ends of the paper come together, putting the two dots in direct contact with each other.”

Angel’s eyes caught fire. Fil scowled. Perhaps he ought to have spent more time discussing time travel. Then he wouldn’t feel left out of the understanding the others had achieved. “What does folding paper have to do with time travel?”

The Mechanic shrugged. “We don’t know. Not yet. But what if we fold the paper along the first three dimensions and bring two fourth dimension points together?”

Fil’s heart skipped a beat. “Time travel.”

“Exactly.”

“Which means if we can reproduce teleportation with machines—and we have our own innate abilities to study and model to figure out how—we have a starting point for time travel.”

Angel beamed. “Right again, big brother.”

“And remember, Will has to travel from South America to northern England,” Adam noted. “I suspect we won’t build the time machine in future Pleasanton and travel back in time along a fixed three dimensional point. We need to know how to do this.”

The Mechanic smiled. “Not to mention that a transporter of this type would be invaluable to the world’s recovery.”

Fil grinned. “I couldn’t agree more. The ability to ship goods and services quickly can only help the recovery. Think of the historical impact of domesticating horses, and then automobiles, and then airplanes. The impact of instant global transport would be immeasurable.” He paused. “So how do we get started?”

“Let me show you something,” the Mechanic replied. He finished tapping on the screen of his tablet computer, and then used a gesture to project his work as a three dimensional hologram. Numbers and equations filled the air, and the Mechanic swiped at them, moving the display around, until a sequence of numbers glowed back at him. “See that?”

Angel nodded. “Sure. What of it?”

The Mechanic circled a small section of the massive set of equations. “Remember that.” He swiped at the display again, moving to a different section highlighted in a different color. “See
that
?”

Angel opened her mouth to respond, and then paused. “But it’s… the same thing.”

“Ah, but not
exactly
the same thing. And it’s something I didn’t notice or think of until that simple overheard comment.” He circled numbers in the two highlighted sections of the equation. “See it now?”

Angel’s eyes flicked back and forth, then widened as she clapped a hand to her mouth. “Could it really be that simple?”

The Mechanic smiled. “Answers are often simple. We simply refuse to accept them. We have a belief that complex problems and challenges require solutions far too complex to see through to completion. Yet in the end, the simplest solutions work best.”

Fil and Adam glanced at each other. “Can one of you mathematical wizards explain what’s going on?” Adam asked.

“Sure,” Angel said, grinning. “The Mechanic’s right. The effort to move through
time
is the same thing as the effort to move through
space
. There’s only one thing that’s different.” She paused. “Energy. Moving through time takes an amount of energy many orders of magnitude greater than moving through space. The mechanism otherwise works exactly the same.”

Fil nodded, understanding rippling through him. “By working on a machine that offers the world a chance to teleport, we’re simultaneously moving closer to having the time machine we need to save Dad.”

Angel patted him on the back. “See? You understand math.”

“Enough to do my job.” Fil paused. “How much energy will we need for time travel?”

Angel told him.

He felt his breath shorten. “That… that’s impossible.”

The Mechanic laughed. “Nothing’s impossible. We can do things our human teammates would consider impossible. We just dissolved huge slabs of concrete, clearing space without the need for cranes and other heavy equipment. Until they saw that, they would have told us that was impossible without using dangerous acids.” He shrugged. “It’s a lot of energy. But generating it is now just another basic problem to solve. We’ll be fine.” He nodded towards Fil. “I think your energy keg work will serve us well in that regard. It will just need a few minor enhancements.”

Fil snorted. “Minor enhancements? Of course. I’ll just discharge all of my Energy into a battery and we’ll be good to go.”

He froze at his own words.

The Mechanic grinned. “See? I told you it was just a minor enhancement.”

They laughed, and Fil felt a level of calm he’d not experienced since before the Cataclysm.

Only one of them could produce sufficient Energy to generate the quantity of energy needed to travel through time.

His life had taken on added meaning. For without him, the time machine would never enable his father to travel back in time to save his mother’s life.

XIII

Transporter

2140 A.D.

She heard the rustling of clothing and the murmuring of voices gathering in the main auditorium. It took her back to a time decades earlier, when she’d hidden in a back room, dressed in fancy clothing, dreading the noise she heard. Back then she’d been convinced that those gathering would be witness to a great tragedy, the marriage of her brother to a woman not worthy to call him husband. She’d been wrong then. Terribly wrong. In the years that followed, when tragedy struck, she’d looked back on her years of petty resentment with deep regret. She’d missed out on two years with a woman she’d become proud to call sister. And now Sarah was gone.

She hoped this event wasn’t the prelude to a similar tragedy.

She smoothed down the business suit. Fashions changed; she’d lived through this particular business trend twice. Thankfully, high heels had gone out of style a century earlier and never returned.

She glanced at Fil. “How do I look?”

“I still would have gone with the pigtails.”

She elbowed him, but the joke had the desired effect. The stress of the moment lessened. She’d helped him work through his demons, the nights without sleep when he’d drift off only to wake screaming as he replayed the moment his wife and daughter had been slaughtered. He’d never forget it, never wanted to forget it. Now, seven decades later, he could sleep soundly, could recall the positive memories for joy, the negative memories for motivation. When he felt fatigue while helping with the never-ending rebuilding, he’d recall the casualty estimates after his grief had obliterated at least thirty of the greatest population centers in human history. He felt obliged to help better the lives of as many as he’d ended.

Adam watched from the other side of the stage and looked over. “It’s time.”

“Break a leg,” Fil whispered.

She offered a fake scowl in response. She took a breath, set her face in a confident smile, and emerged onto the stage.

They’d built the auditorium from rubble reclaimed from a dozen buildings that had once stretched to the sky. She didn’t remember the original name, knew only that the city near a large freshwater lake had caught the edge of one of Fil’s Energy blasts. That meant there was rubble available. The new city center was smaller, more intimate, less crowded than its previous incarnation. Plaques showed pictures of the old skyline, retold stories of survival, explained that the convention center auditorium tied the city’s past to its present.

Fil had avoided looking at the plaques.

Nervous anticipation filled the space, electricity she suspected the humans in attendance felt. Their claims were audacious, incredible, impossible. Those in attendance were deeply skeptical. But they wanted to believe, to hope, to see the impossible become reality. It was the type of positive experience that these men and women, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Cataclysm survivors, still needed.