The 9/11 Machine

by Greg Enslen

  “Trivial?” Clinton said loudly, and the agents looked over—the president knew they were watching every movement from the table. “How is the outcome of an election trivial? It sounds like Bush’s kid steals it from Al, all because of…”

  “I’m saying that it doesn’t matter, sir,” Ellis interrupted. “I am not here to talk about the election of 2000 or Whitewater. I could care less about Monica and her constant need to give you gifts, like the tie. Hugo Boss, right?”

  Clinton looked at him sharply.

  Ellis leaned in.

  “Mr. President, something horrible is going to happen. And you have the power to prevent it.”

  3.3

  Brooklyn

  At a large warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront, a young Dr. Donald Ellis looked up at machine. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. The machine, and all of the ancillary production facilities that took up at least half of this warehouse in Red Hook, had gone from an abstraction to a reality in days.

  He’d never have believed it, if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

  Things in his life had been getting odd since two weeks ago when he’d received a strange invitation to lunch. Don had been quietly working in his office at the university, talking to his T.A. about grades and working diligently on the syllabus for next semester. There had been a quiet knock at the door, and a Mr. Stevens had entered the office and introduced himself, saying that a group of investors wanted to meet with Dr. Ellis over lunch to discuss monetizing some of his research.

  Intrigued, Don had agreed. Following the man out to the faculty parking lot, Don had found a large limo waiting.

  It had only gotten stranger from there.

  The ride into town was odd—Mr. Stevens had refused to answer any of Don’s questions. Expecting the car to continue into Manhattan, Don was surprised when it turned south into Brooklyn and stopped a few minutes later in front of what looked like an abandoned warehouse in a very shady-looking area of Brooklyn.

  Of course, a closer look—and the armed guards—made it clear that the location wasn’t abandoned.

  Mr. Stevens had led him inside, waving the security guards away. Don had noticed the strange looks the guards had given him. He was whisked inside and down a hallway to a normal-looking conference room.

  There was already a man in the room, seated at a table strewn with papers and drawings. Don noticed that the drawings looked like schematics. As Don reached to shake the seated man’s hand, he realized that the man looked almost exactly like him. Older, sure, but the same…

  “Hello, Dr. Ellis,” the older man had said, a smile on his face.

  Don shook his hand and, unsure of what else to do or say, sat down.

  “You,” he began, stammering. “Are you and I… related?”

  The older man nodded, smiling. “Yup. We’re more than related, I can assure you,” the smiling man said. Don could tell he was enjoying this. “I’m you. In about fifteen years.”

  Don remembered nodding and stammering for a long minute, eventually saying something stupid. And then the older man had spent a solid hour peppering him with details only he could know about “their” shared history. It was bewildering.

  Now, two weeks later, Don was spending a lot less time at the school and more here, getting up to speed on the machine. Don was still trying to get his head around it, of course—he thought it would take several more months before he got used to the idea of another version of himself driving around the streets of New York.

  It was even crazier to think that they were building a time machine together.

  Don hadn’t been surprised by the concept, of course—he’d already done a lot of preliminary work in the field. Fourth-dimensional space theory was his specialty as was wave formation dynamics. The older Ellis had gone on to explain the role that quantum entanglement played in the machine, something that the younger Ellis had never considered, even though the concept had been around for years. Don was now spending every moment at the warehouse, pouring through the schematics and drawings, absorbing as much as he could of the machine’s unique properties. Don was working with a guy named Terry and Mr. Stevens, the facilities manager, and he was helping out where he could, trying to get up to speed so as to be useful.

  The schematics were leaps and bounds beyond the crude drawings that hung on the walls of his basement office in Jericho. Those hasty drawings were of a mythical, theoretical device—these drawings were of a final product, one that was quickly approaching completion. They had already begun testing the device.

  But Don understood the reasons the machine had been built. He hoped that he would never again have to look at the videos and pictures and newspaper headlines of the 9/11/2001 event. It was almost more than a person could take, reading the horrible details of what could come to pass. Reading multiple versions of it somehow made it seem less real—it was impossible to imagine the first version, from Ellis’ original timeline, with the destruction of the Capitol building and the loss of half of the U.S. Congress.

  Reading though the accounts of that day had been bad enough, but listening to the older Dr. Ellis describe what was to come had been enough to convince Don that it was all very real. There was a disaster coming, one that would change this country and the world forever. Don would do whatever he could to prevent it.

  Even now, the older version of him was in Washington, D.C., approaching the Clinton administration for the first time to provide information about future events.

  “Don?”

  He turned to see Stevens, the facility manager, walk up to him. Stevens and the others had taken it in stride to have another person working on the project that looked like and sounded like Dr. Ellis—in fact, they’d immediately started calling the younger man “Don” and the elder man “Dr. Ellis.” Don thought it was because the older man commanded more respect.

  Stevens had been working for Dr. Ellis since 1995 and had always called him “Dr. Ellis,” so it was easiest. Evidently, Mr. Stevens and Terry had also worked for Dr. Ellis in the other timelines, though of course, they had no knowledge of that. It made Don’s mind swim with the idea of alternate versions of everyone in the world.

  Ellis had found Mr. Stevens in this timeline and hired him again to oversee staffing, logistics, and security for the facility.

  “Yes?” Don said.

  Stevens handed him a clipboard. “Dr. Ellis called and asked me to give these to you as soon as you arrived today—there’s another scheduled test in about an hour, but he wanted you to work with Terry on the phasing equipment, if you could.”

  Don looked at the clipboard and nodded, feeling completely out of his element.

  3.4

  Donuts and Coffee

  A dozen customers came and went in the time it took for the tall man to spin his story—Clinton knew the Secret Service agents were checking each one before they were even allowed into the bakery.

  Clinton sat back, nodding slowly. The man across from him had just spent ten solid minutes spinning a fantastic story, and some part of Clinton prayed that it was all fiction. But parts of the story...

  “Well, part of that makes sense,” the president said quietly. “Osama bin Laden has been coalescing power for many years. First in Sudan and now Afghanistan. We think he was behind the Khobar Towers bombing last year. We’ve had the opportunity to take him out, on a few occasions, but didn’t. Not enough evidence.”

  Ellis glanced around at the interior of the bakery.

  “Yes, that will be a topic of discussion for many years to come.”

  “What will?” Clinton asked.

  “Your apparent inaction,” Ellis said. “It’s in the congressional record—you had several opportunities to act and did not, especially after Khobar. Your apparent reticence allowed al Qaeda to continue growing, especially when shielded by the Taliban. Training camps, unrestricted movement, support. The 1995 Bojinka plot to blow up airliners in flight between Asia and the United States. The plans for 9/11/2001 are alrea
dy on the drawing board, even now.”

  “And how do you know this?” Clinton asked, his eyes narrowing.

  “Now that—that you wouldn’t believe,” Ellis said.

  The president finished his third donut and smiled, brushing crumbs from his sweatshirt. He stood, nodding at Ellis.

  “Come on,” the president said, nodding to the agents.

  The president walked over to the door but didn’t forget to thank the folks that worked at the bakery. As he and Dr. Ellis walked outside and climbed into the black Suburban, President Clinton was reminded again of just how important it was to keep close to the people on the streets. If any of the stuff that Ellis was saying were to come true, Clinton would need as many friends—and supporters—as he could muster.

  3.5

  A New Reactor

  The machine sat in the middle of the concrete floor of the warehouse. Most of the rest of the space was taken up with battery packs and other mechanisms needed to power the device.

  This version of the machine was notably smaller than the previous versions he had seen in pictures. They had all been constructed in the same warehouse, so the scale was easy to judge. Each time Dr. Ellis built the machine, it got smaller and more efficient. In this third version, the machine took up a smaller footprint—it was about the size of two semi trailers, side by side, in the middle of the concrete floor.

  The particle accelerator, so massive before, now hung at a 45-degree angle above the target area, a large circle painted white on the concrete floor next to the machine. Ellis had found a way to utilize more efficient materials by bringing some advanced technology back with him. He’d patented a few materials and released them into the world through his shell corporations and, in turn, had used that money to advance materials science, in this timeline, by several decades, in a matter of months.

  They were also implementing an alternate power source for this version. The last two machines had run off of massive storage batteries, which had drawn energy from the city’s power grid over a period of weeks and then released the stored energy in one massive jolt. In the second timeline, power outages and fluctuations in the availability of power had almost doomed the project—it had only been by dumb luck that someone had been able to keep the power on.

  For this version, the elder Dr. Ellis had spent ten months creating a miniaturized nuclear power plant to power the device. The tiny nuclear fission reactor, smaller than those in use on nuclear submarines, was years ahead of its time.

  Actually, the idea of mini nuclear power plants had been around since the early 1950s, when scientists had envisioned using nuclear power to propel rockets into space. It had been theorized that if a nuclear reactor could be sized to meet the needs of a rocket, then the inexhaustible power source would make quick work of powering men to the moon and beyond.

  Advancements in miniaturization had worked for electronics and other components of rockets, but creating a viable combustion chamber that could withstand the effects of nuclear fission turned out to be more difficult. The project, known as NERVA, was officially scrapped in the mid-60s.

  Like in the other timelines, there were massive rows of industrial batteries, taking up a good portion of the other end of the warehouse, feeding power into the machine through massive cables strewn on the floor. Today they would power up the reactor and begin preliminary testing.

  Don carried the clipboard over to Terry, who was standing next to the control station—it was smaller than before, only a desk with two monitors and a keyboard. All the switches and dials that had controlled various aspects of the earlier machines were now handled internally by the custom software that Terry and a group of programmers had spent a year writing.

  The preliminary testing phase of the machine was almost complete, and now they were incorporating two new variables—the alternate nuclear power source and an alternate “setting” for the machine.

  This secondary usage for the massive machine was something that the other machines had not been able to do—not only could this device project items in time, it also had the capability to move them through three-dimensional space. It was a time machine, and it was also the first operational teleporter.

  Don could hardly believe it.

  In fact, once they had been able to get a handle on the power-consumption issues, the teleporter aspects of the machine had been not been terribly difficult to work out. The physical location of the object or person could be “adjusted,” but the timeframe adjustment was left at zero. A positive value moved the item “up” the time stream into the future and a negative value moved it “down,” or backwards into the past. But a value of zero simply caused the item to dematerialize and rematerialize at the same moment, but in a different location, as determined by a new set of coordinates implemented in this iteration of the machine.

  Incorporating these additional physical parameters had sent the code programmers back to the lab. They needed to come up with a fourth-dimensional descriptor to assist the machine in determining where to “place” the physical object in space-time. Terry and Don were testing a new iteration of the software today, along with using the nuclear plant for the first time to power the machine.

  Now, they were brainstorming ways to monetize the teleportation aspect of the device without creating a time machine in every garage. The machines would be massive and insanely expensive when they went on the market—only large corporations and governments would be able to purchase them, and only entities with very deep pockets would be able to power the devices and use them to transport goods around the world. It would disrupt almost every business on the planet—when shipping became almost free and instantaneous, how would many industries react? Don was convinced that the first industry to go under would be the airlines, but the older Dr. Ellis wasn’t convinced—he didn’t think that many people would want their “molecules rearranged” in such a way.

  Nothing was set in stone, but Don thought he had figured out a way to permanently disable that aspect of the machine’s variations—the elder Dr. Ellis didn’t like the idea at all. The country was full of tinkerers, and the man was convinced that someone would eventually figure out that moving items in three dimensions was pretty much the same as moving them in four.

  “Terry,” Don said. “We ready for the test?”

  Terry looked up and smiled—the man looked older than his 28 years. Don had read about Terry in the other timelines, and he was always the same—goofy, playful, always quoting movies. It was amazing, thinking about different versions of this man running around in different versions of this warehouse, working on duplicates of the machine.

  “Yup, Don,” Terry said, nodding. “We ran that first test of the teleport function from batteries last week, but they couldn’t put out enough power. It’s stunning, the amount of power needed.”

  Don nodded.

  “I’m glad the reactor’s done,” Terry said. “It’s been humming along now for a month, putting out a steady power stream. We’ve been using it to augment the power coming from the city and for our internal systems,” he said.

  “Well, let’s get started, then,” Don said.

  3.6

  White House Counsel Meeting

  Three days later, on the morning of January 26, 1997, President Clinton called a meeting of some of his most important advisors. Vice President Gore sat on one of the couches across from Cheryl Mills. Clinton sat in a chair at one end, near the massive Resolute desk, used by so many other presidents before him.

  Between them, on the floor, was the famous presidential seal embedded in the carpet of the Oval Office.

  Dr. Ellis felt out of place on the couch next to Mills—he kept flipping through his papers as if to organize them better, but in reality, he didn’t want to make eye contact with any of these folks. They had no idea their world was about to change.

  And Ellis couldn’t believe he was here—it had gone far better than he had ever hoped. The president had listened to what he had to say at that b
akery and then had invited him back to the White House, where they had talked at length about many topics. Mostly 9/11 and the Lewinsky affair, but Clinton had been curious about other things as well. Now they were going to discuss the topic with some of his senior staff members and the VP.

  The last person to enter the room had done so by wheelchair—it was Charles Ruff, a famous D.C. lawyer that had just joined the staff as White House Counsel, brought in after the previous Counsel had left the job. Previously, Ruff had been a Watergate special prosecutor and top Justice Department official before being selected to oversee an office that was dealing with several crises at once: ongoing inquiries into the Whitewater affair, the 1993 firing of the White House travel office staff, and the improper collection of FBI files. Recently, the White House had been dealing with questions about the White House’s role in helping raise money for the Democratic National Committee.

  The woman next to Ellis on the couch was Cheryl Mills, a young black woman and the Deputy White House Counsel under Ruff. Historically, the 33-year old attorney had worked behind the scenes, defending the first family’s interests and keeping their secrets. She was famous for keeping as much information as possible from the press—and she was famous for her arguments with other staff members.

  None of them knew why they were here.

  Ellis knew the Lewinsky information wasn’t public yet, but he also knew that the White House staff was well aware of the situation. In fact, Lewinsky had been moved to a new job at the Pentagon in April 1996, because staff members felt she was spending too much time with the president and that, if word got out, it would look bad and affect his chances for reelection on the November 1996 ballot.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Clinton said, smiling.

  He was a cool customer—Ellis could see why people continued to put their faith and trust in him, even after the litany of scandals and problems that had come before. He was a fiercely honest person, of a sort—he told you what you needed to know, and no more, and drew the line at his personal life. Ellis had read several biographies on the man, even before his 2004 assassination—interest in the former president had peaked after he was killed. In most cases, the biographies all said the same thing—Clinton believed with every part of his being that the private lives of public figures were off limits and had nothing to do with what kind of job the person was doing.