by J.P Jackson
The holo-lens was no longer fused to his eyeball, in fact his vision, along with the rest of his body, felt almost as good as new. Dressed only in jeans, Taylor squinted at Hippocrates, feeding his veins with a mixture of antibiotics, painkillers and hydrating fluids.
Professor Karl Lanza moved around the bed, stuffing notes into his lab coat as he took readings from the machine. Lanza was dishevelled and sweaty, looked like he hadn't slept in days.
"You're still dehydrated," he said, offering Taylor a glass of icy water. "I was observing your progress through the drone. It made for tense and unpleasant viewing.”
"Nightmares are in the post,” Taylor said, sitting up.
He relaxed on one of ten beds, each with its own Hippocrates unit. The state of the art med-lab was lined with cold metal and outfitted with ample supplies, including holo-net access and old fashioned textbooks, enough to turn any layman into a serviceable medic.
Taylor sipped the water and chewed on the ice. Over Lanza's objections, he pulled the intravenous line from his hand and hopped off the bed.
"How long have I been under?” he asked, catching his rough reflection in a cabinet. “Where's Donald?"
"You have been under for just over 90 minutes. Your brother and his family are close. The children you brought here are also safe."
Taylor breathed a sigh of relief. “And the comet?”
Lanza hobbled toward him with a pronounced hump on his back. “4 hours from impact.”
Taylor closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cabinet. "The machine, it's here?"
Lanza set his hand on Taylor's shoulder. "It's a very long story."
"The abridged version then."
Lanza turned and sat on the bed. "The Corporation," he began, "set up the meeting in my study. They've been watching you for years."
Taylor faced him. "How long have they owned you?"
Lanza wiped a cold sweat from his face. "You may not have any respect for authority, Hamilton, but these people offered me everything. They protected my family, they gave me a penthouse in Patriot Towers and the green light for any project my heart desired."
Lanza scrutinized his withered hands and the wedding band around his swollen ring finger. "My task was to build your machine. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to change the world. Unfortunately,” he paused to clear his throat; ”the task took more from me than I could have imagined. First my health, then my marriage."
Lanza wrapped his arms around his chest to hold himself together. "Lorraine left me shortly after the...incident."
Taylor came close, passing Lanza his glass of water. "Why didn't you reach out to me? We could have built it together, from the ground up. Why keep me in the dark?"
Lanza snickered involuntarily, as if the answer was obvious. "Hamilton these people know everything about us. You were simply too radical for their tastes, too unpredictable."
Taylor raised a hand to protest but Lanza pressed his point. "Less than two hours ago you threatened the president with impregnation in front of the entire planet. What sort of behaviour is that?"
Taylor dug his hands into his jeans. “I was going to call her a cunt but thought my mum might be watching. Karl I worked my arse off to get the world to notice this work, TV shows, articles and interviews, even a Nobel Prize couldn't get me funded!”
"Honesty was your mistake. You cannot go public with a time machine. Naive for you to think so. Projects this dangerous belong in the dark, and since you had too much light on you, the corporation found someone they could trust."
"And control," Taylor concluded, sitting next to his old friend.
"The machine," he added, peering into Lanza's pale eyes. "Show me."
The chamber door resembled a submarine hatch, opening after several cranks of the wheel. It screeched inward and standing at the threshold, Taylor placed a hand over his chest to feel his racing heart. He smiled, pleased to know there was still some things in the world that could get him going.
He took a step inside the spherical chamber and a tangerine coloured light danced over his face. Taylor was inside a pressed globe, copper plated and polished to a glossy sheen. The surrounding chamber had no nuts, bolts or obvious seams, only vents, and plenty of them.
"The jump room," Taylor whispered, his pupils dilating as adrenaline circulated through his blood. "Beautiful."
Lanza kept his distance, giving Taylor time to savour the moment. Taylor ran his hand along the sweeping metal curves and marvelled at the time consuming attention to detail. It was the scientific equivalent of the Sistine Chapel, yet Taylor couldn't help but feel a tinge of disappointment.
"What's wrong?” Lanza enquired, noticing Taylor's wounded expression.
"Nothing,” he lied, keeping his thoughts to himself. Truth was, Taylor missed the build, the testing, and the realization of a dream. This was his baby, and he had missed its precious first steps.
"So,” he exclaimed, voice echoing around the ellipse. "Why can't you make her work? What's wrong with her?"
Lanza moved to a red circle inlaid at the centre of the chamber. Mounted inside the circle were two carbon fiber rings, each fitted with a looping harness.
"She works," Lanza retorted, with satisfaction. "What we need is a man with the brains to use it. We need the mind that created it."
Taylor chose his next words carefully as he bent to inspect the red circle. "The incident. Lanza I understand you don't have the clearance to share everything, but I need to know what she did to you?"
Lanza bent beside him, conceding without argument. "The first test on a live subject went as planned. The subject vanished as expected but the energy contained inside the chamber was so...ferocious.” Lanza swallowed the lump in his throat. “We held eternity in this chamber, Hamilton. I will never forget the light. We managed to contain the power for a minute at the most before the steel warped and a cataclysmic meltdown occurred."
Lanza trembled at the visceral memory. "A lab assistant and two security guards were vaporized. I was the lucky one, escaping with my life and a crippling dose of radiation even Hippocrates could not mend.” He exhaled. “The walls needed reinforcing. We required more funding and got it. For them, the power and potential of this machine is simply too staggering to ignore."
"And the live subject?” Taylor asked, picturing the poor mouse or brave chimp.
"No sign. Gone without a trace.”
Taylor gestured around them. "I'll need to study the data before we proceed. I need complete transparency before we fire her up again."
"This is a black project, Hamilton. The data you require has either been buried or destroyed, thus I prefer we focus our efforts on the future. Time, after all, is running out."
Taylor scratched his stubbly neck. “What are your plans? What do you need?"
Lanza glowered as if caught by a stabbing pain. "A warning,” he grimaced, returning to his feet. “I need at least a year to work on a solution that might save us from the comet. Are you willing to go back in time one year?"
Taylor shrugged, thinking it over. "We screw everything up eventually, Lanza. Maybe it's mankind's destiny to die young and stupid."
Lanza shook his head with a passion Taylor hadn't seen in years. "If destiny, fate or God wanted mankind to perish so prematurely then we would not have the ingenuity to create the tools to save ourselves. Hamilton," he stated; "Dr. Taylor: we are standing in the heart of a time machine that you conceived. We are the masters of our own fate."
Lanza returned to the open hatch. "Follow me. I have something wonderful to share with you."
Lanza guided Taylor through a dimly lit tunnel to an adjacent control room. A sign above the door read Janitor's Office, but there were no buckets or brooms inside. The door clicked open to reveal a room of blank displays and a large console covered in switches and levers. There was a metallic shield above the console which rose when Lanza sat at the controls. Once the shield had risen, it exposed a 5 inch thick pan
e of glass and the copper clad jump room behind it.
Lanza typed into the console, opening a video projection over the glass. It was footage of the jump room, timestamped from earlier that morning.
"This is a document I made while you were receiving medical treatment. Watch..."
The crisp footage showed Lanza entering the jump room and placing a plump red apple in the red circle. Unsure what he was supposed to be looking at, Taylor stepped closer to the feed as Lanza unfolded a pocket knife and cut two words into the side of the apple.
"It works," Taylor hissed, rubbing a growing pain at his temple.
"Your brother's apartment," Lanza clarified, over the console. "The centre of the dining room table I believe, at least...that is what I aimed for."
Taylor backed off, put his hands over his eyes and fought off the pressure in his head.
"The migraine you are experiencing," Lanza explained, "is a type of temporal déjà-vu. There!" he proclaimed, pointing at the projection. "Here come the waves!"
Taylor worked through the headache to focus on the display. The jump room hummed as the chamber began to heat, expanding and contracting like a living breathing thing. Moments later, a celestial energy fired from the vents around the chamber, blasting into the apple. This was the first of four waves, the apple absorbing the energy like a strange photosynthesis. The second and third waves hit and the apple burned bright like a red star.
After the fourth wave, the apple vanished completely, along with Taylor's migraine. The hum settled and died, leaving Taylor in awe and the empty chamber in darkness.
"Lanza,” he said, frowning, “that apple blew up in my face.”.
Lanza shrugged, as if it was a simple matter of miscalculation. “It is time travel.”
An open folder as thick as a phone book lay near the console. Lanza groaned as he past it to Taylor. "These are the calculations required to send an apple back only a few hours. You can imagine how immensely difficult it is to send a person back one year."
"I hate calculus," Taylor said, rifling his fingers through hundreds of pages and thousands of formulas, equations, charts and graphs.
"There is one more thing I need to show you Hamilton, something you never thought of when you dreamed up this machine."
Taylor peeked up from the folder, doubting very much if aged Karl Lanza could teach him something new. Lanza typed in a command and brought up a 3D rendering on screen. The animation depicted a golden gauntlet fastened to the wrist and covering the entire forearm. It had a power gauge, a holo-display on the face and a keypad below.
"This is my contribution to your genius. It is the most advanced portable supercomputer in existence, and it's value cannot be underestimated."
Lanza paused to savour his own ingenuity. "I call it the torch. Your machine may initially jump a body though time and space, but my torch tells that body where they've landed. It's database has the location and rotation of every known star in the galaxy. The computer crunches that data in an instant to co-ordinate one's precise location in the past, present or future. Without the torch, one would be essentially lost in time."
Lanza folded his arms and waited for a quietly impressed Taylor to throw him a compliment. He got a question instead.
"How does it work?"
"The torch is the key to your engine. It allows the man and machine to work in perfect harmony. It also has an audio log for posterity.”
Taylor put his face an inch from the animation, a warm smile spreading over his face. “Karl...it is wonderful.”
Lanza beamed. It had been a long time since he heard Taylor address him by his given name. Their bridge was under careful restoration.
"Thank you, Hamilton. An operation is required to connect the gauntlet to your nervous system. This would be a permanent bind. Only amputation will remove the torch." Lanza let the thought hang a while before sharing some of the finer technicalities. “When you step into the jump room, the four waves will simultaneously infuse your atoms and charge the torch 100%. You will expend half a charge reaching the inputted destination, the other half returning to our current one.”
"How do I activate the return?” Taylor asked, concerned by a growing list of complications.
Lanza shared his concerns. ”The torch is set to a timer. I have given you approximately 74 hours in the past to get the job done. After that, the torch will auto-initiate and the remaining 50% will boost you back to the future.”
Taylor felt the hefty weight of the folder and remembered the taste of exploded pulp. “Is there a way to charge the torch without the machine?”
Lanza folded his arms and chuckled. “You would need a power source equal to the sun. The jump room is currently the only power on Earth that will charge the torch.”
Taylor gave Lanza a stern look. "Realistically, what chance do I have of pulling this off?"
"If I was a betting man...then I would not take this bet."
Taylor agreed. "Not even worth the punt.”
Lanza pulled a napkin from his lab coat pocket and coughed into it. "I would send a message instead," he added, "but they can be altered or disregarded entirely. How many unread emails are stacked in your inbox? How many files waiting to fall off your desk?"
"When I had a desk."
"A person, however, especially a man one trusts, would receive my complete attention."
Lanza stuffed the now blood stained napkin deep into his lab coat pocket. "I would do this myself but...I would not survive the trip."
Taylor opened his mouth to reply when Lanza tapped a finger to his temple, he was receiving a message.
"I have to go," he replied, wincing at another pain in his back. "General Wertz demands my presence."
"Wertz?” Taylor scowled. “Tell him I said he's a piece of -"
Lanza patted Taylor's back. "He knows. I'll be back very soon."
Lanza opened the janitor's office door and was surprised to see the curly haired Donald waiting on the other side.
"They said my brother would be here," he mumbled, nervously raising his hand.
Taylor's relief was palpable as he pulled his skinny little brother in close. "Come here you fucker!"
They embraced while Lanza hobbled down a dark tunnel. Donald broke down, yet Taylor, despite feeling his eyes sting, kept it together.
"How did you get here?" he asked, brushing Donald's tears with his thumbs. "Are they treating you well?"
Donald nodded and smiled. "A helicopter collected us from the roof of Washington Tower. They took as many as they could but some got left behind."
"Including the Mayor," Taylor uttered to himself.
They left the janitor’s office and walked down a lonely corridor of stacked shipping containers, keeping their voices low to muffle any echo.
"The boys?" Taylor asked, taking Donald's elbow. "They must be scared."
"They have no idea what's going on in the world and I don't know how to tell them. Right now they think they're on holiday." Donald pulled Taylor back, stopping them on the spot. "The president said they built your time machine, and that you're going to save us all somehow. Ham I read your book and I know you're brilliant, but these days you can't get through the day without a drink. I don't even know where to start with this." Donald glanced carefully over his shoulder. "It's pretty un-fucking-believable."
"It's true," Taylor said, his steely gaze fixed ahead. "They built my machine and I'm going to use it."
Taylor walked and Donald followed.
"Will it hurt you? Time travelling, I mean."
"Donald you don't turn the human body into light and expect everything to be okay on the other side." Taylor grimaced. "It's bound to fuck me up. I'll tell you this though, if they want me to save the world then it's going to fucking cost them."
"What do you mean? Cost them how?"
Taylor's next words, quiet and sincere, were only for his brother.
"I'm going after Penelope. They want me to go back a year but I'm
going further - to the night she disappeared. I'm going to find out what happened. I'm going to save her!"
Donald took a step back but Taylor pulled him close. "I'll warn Lanza about the comet and set things right, but first things first. Penelope is my world, and she's all I care about."
Before Donald could express an opinion or argument, Taylor set off excitedly down the corridor. "Masters of our own fate," he yelled back. "And when I'm through, time is going to wish Ham Taylor was never born!"
