Extermination Day (14 page)

“It’s just like he says, sir. Wait, a large section of our satellite grid just went out. I’m not sure what happened. Satellites are going down all over the place. We have no control over much of the network.”

“What about ground-based communications through cell towers?” Demetrius asked. He stood just behind Paulson.

“Rerouting,”
Theobald said, flicking through more screens. “They’re nonoperational as well. Everything is being disrupted by some sort of electromagnetic field, originating from . . . This says from multiple locations above the planet.”

“What the hell could that be?” Paulson asked. “Is there a way to get a visual to see if there are weapons satellites firing on us or, God forbid, a detonation of some type causing this disturbance? Could the Chinese or Russians have already initiated a nuclear strike?”

There was the real possibility that the crazy General Wang decided he was going to attack the U.S. while he had the chance. Paulson was also terrified that they could be under attack by a rogue government. With so many leaders and government officials dead, there was no telling who was running the countries around the world. Or even whether countries were still in existence.

“I don’t know what it could be, sir.
Damn it, all our satellites are offline now,” Theobald said frantically. “Oh, wait, one just came back on. But . . . The configuration is all wrong. I can’t make sense of this code.”

Huge amounts of data flashed rapidly across the screen at
Theobald’s terminal.

“We’re being hacked!” Demetrius said. “Cut this line. Quick! They’re getting everything!”

“There is no line, sir. Everything is wireless and mostly housed on a centralized server in the main government cloud in Washington,” Travis told him. “It looks like they tapped into that and are downloading the entire database at an astonishing speed.”

Theobald
and Travis tried several times to move data screens up and out of the way and to access the system with keyboard commands, all to no avail. After several minutes of data flashing across his screen, Theobald pushed his chair back and threw his hands up in frustration.

“There’s nothing I can do here. I’m completely locked out. Even if I turn the computer off, they still have a link into the
GovCloud through the satellite.”

Paulson checked his portable to see if there was any Stream access at all. Nothing. Everything seemed to be down now, even ground-based communication towers. He knew what that meant: retrieve data from the enemy,
cut communications, then come in for the attack. It was a strategy employed in modern warfare campaigns throughout the world. Paulson knew what was coming next, and there was little they could do about it.

The computer screen went blank.

“They’re coming,” Paulson said.

A thunderous boom shook the room. Dust and small pieces of concrete fell from the ceiling.

Paulson looked at Farrow with knowing eyes. Farrow nodded, lips firm, back rigid, fists clenched. Paulson felt the bile building in the back of his throat. His heart started to pound. His senses heightened. His muscles tensed as the blood pumped through the veins of his old body.

The battle was at hand.

8:30 am local time, January 16, 2038

Project
Chronos

Jeff passed his physical with flying colors. He stayed in good shape by running, lifting weights, and playing basketball a couple of days each week. While in the MedLab, he was also able to get his broken nose reset and although it had stopped hurting physically, Jeff’s pride still smarted. He couldn't figure out how a seventy-something skinny old man could have gotten the best of him.

A short time later, when he was back in the cafeteria, he received word from Chen that there were no other viable candidates and, if he still wanted to do it, Jeff would be the other
chrononaut. He took in a long, deep breath, thinking of his kids, and accepted without a murmur.

After the horrible tragedy with the scientist and her baby, he was more determined than ever to go back in time and change their fate. He now knew that the whole disaster was real. Deathly real. There’d been no hacking of the Stream or fake videos from the Chinese. The virus was all around them and it was killing everyone.

Normally Jeff would be excited about the adventure he was about to embark on, making history as one of the first time travelers. He would be Neil Armstrong, Columbus, and Marco Polo rolled into one. But the tragedies of the past twelve hours had taken their toll. He’d lost everyone and everything he’d ever known. The United States had been cavalierly destroyed by an unidentified terrorist force or hostile foreign government, one that had brought the fight to them. They’d been blindsided, and Jeff was reeling.

Where excitement should have had him jacked up and buzzing, dread and apprehension filled him.

He wasn’t heading out on a lark, seeing what he could discover from a trip back in time. He was responsible for convincing men and women of the past to believe that an attack force would one day destroy the people of America in mere hours.

He was tasked with saving the country, possibly the world.

Laughing harshly, Jeff pushed his coffee cup away. The sad thing, the very sad thing, was that he wasn’t being melodramatic. There’d been no word for hours from any of the government bases scattered around the world. He didn’t know what had happened to NORAD, the CDC, or President Paulson. It was highly likely that they’d succumbed to the virus. The only chance they had now was to go back and change the past, prepare the world for the coming virus, and then fight like hell. They wouldn’t be exterminated like rats. Jeff would do everything in his power to see to that.

T-minus 35 minutes and 29 seconds until launch

Jeff and Holly were suiting up in the clean room in preparation for the time jump. The metallic silver bio-suits they were using came fully equipped with the latest Combat MedKit, which included a highly advanced artificial intelligence program.

The suits were precisely measured for mass, and decontaminated so that no foreign material could cling to them when they entered the vortex. The vortex itself would be generated in the dome in the center of the cavern. Everything had to be precise because the slightest variance in
mass would throw off their jump and they’d come out at the wrong time. The more mass they had, the shorter the time jump would be.

Jeff had been thinking about some of the topics the lead scientists had been talking about in their last meeting. Specifically he was curious about time travel paradoxes and what would happen when they went back and started changing events.

“So, Holly, what will happen after we time jump?” Jeff gestured toward the cavern with a wave of his hand. “Is all of this just going to disappear?”

Holly cleared her throat. She hadn’t said anything to Jeff since they’d both watched the grieving woman pull her dead baby from the crib. Clearly she was still shaken. And he knew nothing about her friends and family; maybe she was grieving over the loss of dozens of loved ones.

“I have a whole book on the equations and the theory behind it, possibilities and conclusions that I developed during my time here on Project Chronos, but it basically boils down to this: the time stream is extremely strong. If you think of it as a river, think the mouth of the Amazon or the Mississippi. You throw a pebble in, or even a hundred pebbles, and it keeps on flowing unchanged. The same is true with time travel. Sending people or information back in time can create ripples, but the basic current and nature of the river of time are not changed.” She turned to him and lifted one brow. “Unless, of course, you make a drastic change.”

“Like damning the river or digging an artificial tributary?” Jeff said, continuing her river analogy. “What would that take? And what about the so-called butterfly effect I’ve read about, where you step on a butterfly in the past and come back to find Hitler won World War Two.”

“Well, I’ll answer your butterfly-effect question by saying there is no butterfly effect,” she said matter-of-factly. “To make any significant and noticeable change in the time stream, you need a much more dramatic impact than simply stepping on a butterfly. Killing one butterfly even in the distant past would have almost no impact on the future, just as throwing a pebble into the Amazon would have no effect on that mighty river. However”—she held up her finger to emphasize her point—“the farther back in time you go, the less powerful the event needed to impact the time stream. So if we had the ability to go back to the Cretaceous age and wipe out all the butterflies, then we’d likely see a significant change in our time period.”

“But how do you know this?” Jeff asked incredulously. “Have you tested it?”

“For some of the extrapolations used to explain time-change impacts to the main time stream, we of course use only theory and mathematical modeling. But we’ve been able to test some of the concepts as well. Think of it as testing on a small stream that branches out from the Amazon.”

“What do you mean you’ve tested it? How do you test something like that?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard of the classic time-travel paradox where a time traveler goes back in time and kills his father so that he could never be born, right? So if the traveler was never born, then how could he go back in time to kill his father? Hence the paradox. Now, there have been all sorts of theories and speculation to explain this. There’s been talk about alternative dimensions and such, that for every infinite possibility throughout time there is a separate world or dimension where it’s happened. Each choice we make or each random event that takes place spawns a new dimension. Sounds like it could be plausible, right?”

Holly didn’t wait for an answer, just took a deep breath and plowed ahead.

“Well, I’ve always had a problem with that explanation. For one, I could never get my head around the equations that were being thrown around to explain it, and I’ve never found an equation that didn’t make sense to me. Then there’s the energy and matter issue. With a new dimension or universe essentially being born every instant, there would be tremendous amounts of energy and matter being created in a constant flow of Big Bangs. We’d be able to detect that, just as we’re able to detect the residual echo of our own Big Bang. And many of these new universes would essentially be unstable and hence detectable in some way. We haven’t been able to find anything like this. Anyway, I’m always open to new ideas, but until someone proves it either mathematically or through empirical observation, I’m going to say that the multiple-dimension theory to explain time-travel paradoxes is rubbish.”

Jeff rubbed at a spot over his left eye. He found this whole talk of parallel alternative dimensions and time-travel paradoxes confounding . Perhaps there were math equations that could explain it better than mere words. Of course to him those equations would be a foreign language. The one thing that intrigued him about this whole thing was that time travel made
any
thing possible. You could go back in time as often as you wanted to change events and mold the future to your desires. With a time-travel device you’d have unlimited power over the path that the human race would take. It was god-like power. He’d never been particularly power hungry, but something about that much power stirred a kernel of desire deep down inside him.

“Okay, so how do you account for the time-travel paradox then?” he asked, still not understanding that piece of the puzzle. If he was going to be involved with time travel, he wanted to make sure that he wouldn’t just be erased out of existence if some careless time traveler happened to bump into his grandfather walking down the street.

“In one of my experiments I created a paradox and was able to show what happened.”

“You mean you sent someone back to kill their father?” He didn’t bother to mask his sarcasm.

“Yes, I did exactly that.”

Jeff stopped dressing and blinked.

“We didn’t send a person back, we sent a rat,” she said. “We set up a series of experiments where we sent baby rats back to kill their fathers, before they were born, to see what happened. The results were surprising, to say the least. Each time we also sent back cameras and sophisticated recording equipment. The father rats were hooked up to a lethal IV of drugs that would peacefully and painlessly kill them. The baby rats simply needed to press a lever that they’d been trained to press, which would then release the toxin.

“Each time we sent the baby rats back, they accomplished their task and each time their fathers died. But nothing happened to the baby rats, at least not immediately. It wasn’t until the exact moment was reached
when we’d sent them back in time
that we saw something happen. The baby time-traveling rat was replaced by another rat instantaneously. The baby that was sent back no longer existed and was replaced by another rat from the colony. So basically the paradox existed for a short time, then disappeared or righted itself. The knot was untied.”

“So it was as if you had sent the other, new rat, back in time?” Jeff asked.

“Exactly. And the curious thing to the observer in real time was that nothing appeared to happen. The change was instantaneous and only observable through the recording equipment that traveled with the baby rat through the time vortex.”

“So rats were swapped out, but you didn’t really change anything else. A rat still killed a rat.” Jeff wondered what the point was. And it still looked to Jeff like if they’d done this experiment with a person, that person would cease to exist, just like the baby rat.

Holly wasn’t done.

“For small changes there is no discernible effect on the time stream. It wasn’t until phase two of the experiment that we really started to see some strange results. In that phase we hooked up
the entire colony of rats, a dozen or so, to the same lethal dose that we gave the one rat father. Since the replacement baby rat was coming from within the colony, we wanted to see what happened if the time-traveling baby rat went back and killed off the entire colony. Well, everything was the same as the other experiment, right up until the time we sent the baby through the vortex. Then, well, everything changed.”

Holly held her gloves in her hand and slapped them down onto the side of her seat to emphasize her point.

“We didn’t know it ourselves in real time. It wasn’t until we viewed the recording devices and were able to see our future selves conducting the experiment. The future me and the other future scientists had actually sent back a cockroach who had killed a colony of cockroaches, not rats. A major and significant difference. There was no trace of the cockroaches at all—in our memories or in any other real-time recording devices. We remembered only the rats and sending a baby rat back in time. It was as if the cockroaches never existed. The rat colony that we originally thought we’d altered was fine. The baby rat we thought we’d sent back was there in the colony, like nothing happened.”

This time Jeff pressed two hands to his head. “So what you’re saying is that time can be changed, but the people who didn’t time travel, those that are in real time, as you say, have no knowledge of it?” Jeff asked. “How do you know that some future Holly Scarborough hasn’t already tried to change things here?”

“We don’t,” she said. “It’s entirely possible that we’ve been on this very spot before having this same discussion.”

Jeff whistled. “Talk about déjà vu.” And migraines. The possibilities were endless and mindboggling.

Even though Holly said that you needed to make dramatic changes in the past, like killing off an entire population, to have an impact on the future, Jeff wondered if smaller, more precise, surgical changes would have the same impact. For instance, there was the old time traveler’s dream of going back in time to kill Hitler to prevent the Holocaust and World War Two. Jeff wondered if killing just one man would have prevented all that or if one of Hitler’s deputies would have risen to power and filled his role. Did the circumstances create the man, or did the man create the circumstances?

Jeff had read about the so-called “Great Man” theory. The theory stated that a few significant men and women throughout history were in fact the drivers of the future, that without them our history would look dramatically different. Then there were the proponents of the opposite case, the theory that proposed that the great men and women were in fact just by-products of the times. Had they not existed, another person would have risen to the occasion and filled that particular role in history. Jeff wasn’t sure what the right answer was, but he tended to lean toward the Great Man view. He didn’t think that just anyone could fill the role of a George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in U.S. history. He also believed in the power of just one man or woman to make a difference, to take control of their own destiny and with the force of their own will, move nations.