by Jake Bible
“It took some doing, and a lot of lives lost, but the bubble was studied well enough that Mr. Thompson was able to build infrastructure and basically an entire empire around the predictability of the turn.”
“Not to mention that time flows the same in both locations,” Thompson interrupted. “That is a key element to all of this, Mr. DiCenzo.”
“I was getting to that, sir,” Mike said. “Because that’s our problem.”
Mike toggled and the image switched to the destroyed Flipside FOB. He zoomed in on the severed arm that had been determined once belonged to Operator Lucas Haskins.
“Amanda?” Mike said and moved aside as Amanda stood up and walked to the monitor closest to her chair.
“I made a mistake when I identified this arm,” Amanda said.
“It’s not Haskins?” Cash asked.
“No, it is Haskins,” Amanda replied. “My mistake was in not recognizing that it can’t be.”
“Explain,” Thompson demanded.
“She is,” Tressa snapped.
“I’ll explain faster,” Amanda said and tapped at her ear. “Come on in.”
The operations room door opened and in walked a man geared out in tactical equipment. He nodded to all present then looked at Amanda. “Ma’am?”
“Ladies and gentlemen, some of you know him, but some don’t,” Amanda said. “This is Operator Lucas Haskins.”
“Wait,” Cash said and stood up. He walked to the monitor closest to him. “So this isn’t Haskins’ arm?”
“Excuse me, what?” Haskins asked and swiveled his head as he took in all the images of what was supposed to be his arm. “My what now?”
He crossed to the monitor Cash was looking at, leaned in, squinted his eyes, then drew back quickly.
“That’s my wrist tab,” he declared. “What is that doing there? What’s going on? What happened to Flipside FOB?”
“All good questions,” Amanda said. “I’ll fill you in shortly. You can step outside now, Haskins. But go nowhere. I’ve cut your comm off in case you want to get chatty.”
“Chatty? Ma’am, what is that? Why is my wrist tab on that arm?” Haskins asked, his voice rising.
“She said she’d fill you in,” Cash said and patted Haskins on the shoulder. “Wait outside and we’ll call you back when it’s time.”
Haskins looked around the room then nodded and left.
Cash sat back down once the door was closed and a chime rang out that the room was secure once more.
“Okay, Mike, you have my attention,” Cash said.
“Mine as well,” Thompson said.
Mike stayed seated, but the images on the monitors began to shuffle through variations of the destroyed Flipside FOB until it stopped on an image of a completely undamaged version.
“This is now,” Mike stated. “We think. Do not quote me on anything. This is all uncharted territory, so we could be completely wrong.”
“You believe that?” Cash asked.
“No,” Mike admitted. “I’m pretty sure my people have analyzed this correctly.”
“And what is this, exactly?” Thompson asked.
“Let him finish,” Tressa said.
The first image returned of the severed arm.
“This is the future,” Mike said and shrugged. “Or the future in the past, as it were. At some point, Haskins is at Flipside FOB when it all goes to shit. He loses an arm.”
Mike cycled back through the other images.
“All of these are future past except for the one we think is now,” Mike said. He stopped cycling and rested on one image. “We are getting these in micro-bursts. The turn is happening, folks. It’s happening every seventeen seconds and only lasting one-tenth of a second before turning back.”
The image was of what Mike thought was now. The Flipside FOB was fully intact, but there were no signs of anyone.
“If this is now, then the FOB is deserted,” Mike continued. “Educated guess before anyone starts to argue. At some point during the year, Raff ordered a full evac.”
“They could all be inside the buildings,” Ivy said.
“Could, yes, but we don’t think so,” Mike said and pointed at parts of the image. “See here, here, and here? Signs of wear and tear caused by neglect, not by normal use. The evac happened a few months ago, at least.”
Mike looked to Tressa. She sighed and nodded.
“This one you haven’t seen,” Mike said and a brand new image came up on the monitors.
Cash froze in his seat.
“That’s me,” he said, staring at the image on the monitors. “And Mandy and Ivy.” The image was of the Flipside FOB. It looked worse than the image with Haskins’ arm. Nobody looked like they were in great shape. “And what the fuck?”
Cash got up again and studied the image.
“That’s Olivia Herndon there. She looks…different,” Cash said and nodded at two other figures. “I don’t know that woman or that man. No…hold on. She looks familiar. Who are they?”
“Barbara Chin and her cameraman,” Tressa said.
“What are they doing Flipside?” Thompson snapped. Everyone turned and stared at the man. “Right. Yes. None of you know. Carry on.”
“Ready for the big surprise?” Mike asked.
“Just show them, Michael,” Tressa said.
Mike panned left on the image and zoomed in. The snout of a familiar-looking Ankylosaurus could be seen grazing on singed grass just past one of the buildings.
“Elvis has left the now,” Mike said.
“I think my head is going to explode,” Cash said. “How is any of this possible?”
“No clue, dude,” Mike replied. “We’ve never figured out how the turns happen in the first place. No one has. Not one single country has come close to explaining the phenomenon of time bubbles. We’ve studied them, we’ve mapped their patterns, we’ve exploited them for monetary gain, no offense, Mr. Thompson.”
“Why in the hell would I be offended by that?” Thompson asked.
“My point is we don’t really know the whys of any of this. We never have. We’ve figured out the whats, but never the whys or the hows. There is no reason we will start now,” Mike said.
“But how can we be seeing something that hasn’t happened?” Cash asked.
“Because it has happened,” Mike said. “Back there, it has happened.”
“Wait a second,” Ivy interrupted. “I thought that the timeline then parallels the timeline now. If time passes for a year here, it also passes for a year there.”
“That’s been true,” Mike said hesitantly.
“I also thought that there’s no paradox,” Ivy continued. “Time is locked. We could go back Flipside, murder every single creature on the planet then, and it has no influence on our time now.”
“Yes,” Mike said, sounding more confident. “The phenomenon has been tested a bajillion times.”
“Is that your scientific opinion? A bajillion?” Thompson asked.
“Give or take a gazillion,” Mike replied with a weak chuckle. No one joined him. He cleared his throat. “Yes. Time is static. There’s no paradox because when something happens, it is set. We could go back in time and stop Cash from being born, if we had a way to that period of time, which we don’t, but say we did—”
“Michael,” Tressa said.
“Sorry. Getting to it,” Mike said. “Say we sent a team back and killed him has a baby, not that we would, but say we did, when that team returned to now, Cash would still be alive. Because he was born and he did live and he is here now. You can’t change that. Cash was born. That happened and can’t unhappen. If time paradox was a real thing, then the second one molecule from now interacted with itself from then, all time and space would cease to exist. But that hasn’t happened.”
Mike pointed at Cash.
“Why am I the example in this shit?” Cash asked.
“That shirt Cash is wearing,” Mike said. “It has synthetic materials in it. Those synthetics
were made from petroleum products. Petroleum that didn’t exist yet because the raw ingredients hadn’t died and turned to mush then turned to oil over millions and millions of years. Conceivably, Cash could go back to Flipside and his shirt could come in contact with the very original components that would later make up part of the oil that later ended up as the petroleum that created the synthetic material. If time paradox was real, then all of existence would have winked out at some point in the past thirty years. Maybe not because of us and our bubble, but odds say that someone, somewhere, would have caused it at one of the many bubbles across the globe.”
“Unless that’s what’s happening right now,” Thompson said. “Unless, what we are witnessing is the result of a time paradox. We have no idea that time and space actually will end if a paradox occurs. To use your own words, Mr. DiCenzo, we truly do not know any of the whys or hows. This might be what a paradox looks like.”
“I don’t think so,” Mike said.
“But you don’t know,” Thompson said.
“True,” Mike said and sat down. “But I don’t think so.”
“Okay, so what now?” Cash asked. “Do we follow that image and send everyone that’s in the picture Flipside? Or do we defy it and all stay here?”
“I wish we could,” Tressa said and glanced at her father. She stood up and looked back to Cash. “There’s one more issue. Michael?”
Mike gulped then put a new image up on the monitors.
“That is here, that is now,” Tressa said of the image of a crawler cut in half.
“The turn sliced it because it’s happening so fast,” Ivy said. “They couldn’t get out of the way.”
“Yes,” Mike said.
“I thought we’d pulled all personnel out of the bubble?” Cash asked.
“We did,” Amanda said. “That was the team monitoring the energy field.”
“The crawler was outside the bubble?” Thompson asked.
“Yes,” Amanda said.
That revelation sunk in fast.
“It’s growing,” Cash said.
A map of the globe popped onto the monitors. Each bubble was highlighted in red.
“They are all growing,” Mike said. “Every last one.”
“Holy shit,” Cash said. “How fast?”
“A millimeter every few minutes,” Mike said. “If the current rate stays constant, it could speed up or slow down at any moment, for all we know.”
“How soon until the bubble reaches the wall?” Thompson asked.
“Three days,” Mike said.
“Which means it’ll reach this base in what? Six days?” Thompson asked.
“About that, yes,” Mike said.
“So how do we stop it?” Cash asked.
No one seemed willing to tackle that question.
Except Tressa. “We don’t. Not here and not without help.”
Cash’s shoulders sagged. “That’s why we’re there,” he said. “We go Flipside to bring back Brain.”
“Hopefully, dude,” Mike said. “Brain’s the only thing that might be able to think of a way to stop this.”
The image of the destroyed crawler returned.
“Again, I say hopefully,” Mike added. “Otherwise, everything on this planet is going to end up sliced and diced to nothing.”
Six
Barbara Chin was waiting at the fence when Cash returned to Elvis’s pen.
“There you are,” she said with a wide, reporter’s cultivated grin.
“Here I am,” Cash said as he walked past her and opened the gate. “Hey, buddy.”
Elvis was lying on his side, resting. His eyes were wide open and the one visible flitted back and forth between Cash and Barbara.
“Don’t worry about her,” Cash said to Elvis. “She’s leaving.”
“I hear I end up Flipside,” Barbara said.
Cash hesitated as he reached to turn on the water spigot above Elvis’s watering trough.
“I should play poker with you,” Barbara said and laughed. “You don’t hide your surprise very well.”
“I’m surprised that bribes work that fast, yes,” Cash said. “I’m also disappointed that you were able to get intel from people that know better. That was my hesitation. Just figuring out who’s the leak and how they had better run their ass off before I find them.”
“Why?” Barbara asked.
Cash turned from the trough and faced the woman. “Excuse me?”
“Why are you the one to go after the leak? You’re a security consultant,” Barbara replied in a tone that made “security consultant” sound dirty. “You aren’t Head of Security anymore, so not really your job to hunt down leaks or even be disappointed.”
“I still care about what happens here at Topside BOP,” Cash said. “I’ve spent nearly half my life at this base.”
“Yikes,” Barbara said as she leaned against the fence.
“That could have been electrified,” Cash said. “You took a risk leaning like that.”
“I already checked,” Barbara said. “It’s set up, but there’s no hum and obviously no current.”
“You never know,” Cash said as he went back to filling the water trough.
“Actually, Mr. Cash, I do know,” Barbara said. She opened the gate and stepped into the pen. Elvis raised his head in interest. “I grew up on a cattle ranch. Not too far from these parts, to be honest. Not Wyoming, though. I’m a Montana girl, born and bred.”
Cash glanced over his shoulder and looked the immaculately put together woman up and down. “That so?”
“That is so,” Barbara said. “Did you know I wasn’t the network’s first pick for this assignment?”
“How in the hell would I know that?”
“It was rhetorical.”
“You want to skip the rhetorical crap and get to the point?”
Barbara stood there for a second then shook her head and closed the gate. Elvis rolled up onto his belly, his legs tucked under him as his long, dangerous tail began to swish back and forth, digging a wide furrow in the dirt.
“I think he likes me,” Barbara said as she cautiously moved closer to Elvis.
Elvis gave a quiet bleat. Barbara smiled.
“He does like me,” she said.
“He likes lots of people,” Cash said as he finished filling the trough and went to the rack of tools. He came back with a large, wire-bristled brush. Elvis’s attention shifted from Barbara to Cash and his tongue rolled out and hung from between his beak. “See how easy it is to make him happy? He’s looking forward to a brushing, so wagging at an attractive woman that obviously poses zero threat isn’t exactly a breakthrough.”
“It is for me,” Barbara said. “I’ve never been this close to a dinosaur before.”
Cash held out the brush. “Then today is a day of firsts for you. If you did grow up on a cattle ranch, then you grew up around horses. You know how to brush an animal. Here ya go. Get crazy.”
Barbara stared at the brush for a minute then nodded. She held up a finger, slipped off her expensive heels, and traded heels for brush. Cash looked down at the heels he just took then shrugged and set them on a small shelf next to the tool rack.
“Where’s your cameraman?” Cash asked as he flipped over a bucket and took a seat, watching as Barbara slowly approached Elvis with the brush. “Don’t worry about him. Get in there.”
Barbara paused then moved to Elvis’s shoulder and started brushing. The huge dinosaur started to hum with delight.
“See? He’s a whore for attention,” Cash said. He waited a few moments before asking the question again. “Where’s your cameraman? Wouldn’t this make a great moment? Intrepid reporter soothes savage beast?”
“No offense, Mr. Cash, but Elvis is old news,” Barbara said. “The public has tired of him. He was a novelty when he was first revealed, but now, so many years later, he’s no more amazing than a surfing bulldog.”
“Surfing’s hard,” Cash said. “Respect to the bulldog.”
“I do and I disagree. You should have seen the crowd at the hotel parking lot.”
“Those are fans. Those are people that came here to witness the turn. They are the rabid one percent that eat up anything about dinos or about Flipside or this base. They are hardly a control group to extrapolate data from.”
“Well, excuse my false extrapolation,” Cash replied and picked up a rock from the ground. He bounced it in his hand then looked toward the horizon and the setting sun. “I have a feeling those folks are highly disappointed. No turn for them to see.”
“Only because they can’t see one-tenth of a second,” Barbara said as she moved down Elvis’s side with the brush. Elvis closed his eyes and his happy hum grew louder. “I know the turns are happening every seventeen seconds. They’re happening right now. I also know that the bubble is growing and that poses quite the safety issue for this base.”
“You know a lot,” Cash said. “Your source really laid it all out for you.”
“Considering I’m about to risk my life to document everything for posterity, then yes, Mr. Cash, my source laid it all out for me.” Barbara eyed Cash, but he was still looking at the setting sun. “No reaction?”
“Nah,” Cash said and tossed the rock out of the pen. “You going Flipside isn’t my call, as you have pointed out. I really have no calls in any of this. I’m just a grunt with a gun on this mission.”
“Do you really believe that?” Barbara asked. “You are the son of one of the wealthiest men in all of history. Your father dies and you split more than half a trillion dollars with your sister. Half a trillion, Mr. Cash. No one going to inherit that kind of fortune can honestly say they do not have influence over what is happening here.”
“I didn’t say that,” Cash responded, still watching the sunset. “I said I’m not making the call as to who goes Flipside or not. I know I have influence or I wouldn’t have been involved in the little meeting you already know about.”
Cash scrunched up his face then relaxed and looked at Barbara.
“I am also not going to inherit half of my father’s fortune,” Cash added. “I’ll get a piece, but the majority goes to Tressa. As it should. She’s worked her ass off for Topside Industries.”
