The 9/11 Machine

by Greg Enslen

  “Something bad is going to happen, Al. Very bad. And Bush in the White House just makes it worse. We need to make sure you’re the president, and that you’re ready to deal with the situation.”

  Gore looked at Ellis. “What’s going to happen?”

  Ellis reached into his stack of papers and took out a small file.

  “September 11, 2001, will start out just like any other day…” Ellis began, taking out the pictures and handing them to Gore.

  3.7

  A Reporter

  Cassandra O’Neil sat at her desk, reading through a stack of reports and taking notes on a small yellow pad. Her desk was surrounded by dozens of others, and hers was a complete mess. A stack of books was piled up precariously on one edge, threatening to fall at any moment and block the aisle between her desk and the next one.

  She was staring at a pile of papers, trying to decide where to start. The Clinton administration had certainly kept the press hopping, with one scandal after another, and it made Cassie suddenly wish she had a mole on the inside, someone to leak out an occasional lead. It was very difficult to cultivate those types of contacts, which was why reporters and journalists didn’t like to share their sources.

  She’d been toying with the idea of doing an overview of all the scandals that had taken place so far, but wondered if it was just beating a dead horse. She wanted to go back and dig more into the plane crash that killed Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others in Croatia last year and see if she could tie it to technology transfers to China. She thought there might be a series in it, or at least two good columns, but others she’d pitched the idea to said it had already been done to death.

  Cassie decided to pitch it to her new editor—he’d only been brought on a few weeks back, but they were getting along great, so far. Of course that would change soon, if she didn’t start bringing him some ideas of her own instead of waiting around for story assignments.

  She set the report down and stood, knocking over another small pile of books on the floor next to her chair. She stepped over them and was walking to the editor’s room, when she passed Billy, the mailroom clerk.

  “Ms. O’Neil?” the boy said.

  She turned. “Yup? Oh, hi, Billy. Just call me Cassie, OK? It’s fine. I promise.”

  He looked at her blankly—he was wearing enormous glasses that looked like the bottom of Coke bottles—and then nodded, grateful. She’d told him a dozen times in her two years here, and it still hadn’t stuck.

  “Thanks, Ms. Cassie. Doing anything for Christmas?” he said, smiling. It was mid–December, and most people were taking off for holiday plans, but Cassie shook her head.

  She looked down at his cart. “What do you got for me?”

  He turned and handed her a thick manila envelope, already opened. It looked stuffed full of papers.

  “Don’t worry,” Billy said, smiling. “It’s been checked. Some very strange stuff in there. The pictures are scary.”

  She nodded and took the envelope as Billy turned and walked away, continuing to deliver mail to the other desks. Cassie knew that the mail room routinely opened suspicious packages, and this qualified.

  On the front was written “For Cassandra O’Neil’s Eyes Only!” in big bold handwriting. That was a big red flag, right there.

  The full mailing address of The Washington Post below it—no matter how crazy the rest of the envelope was, the wackos always got the newspaper’s address perfect. Why go to all the trouble to spill out all your craziness and then send it to the wrong address? Every reporter in the bullpen probably got two or three hundred wacky pieces of mail a year—they jokingly referred to it as “fan mail.” Cassie pitied the folks that wrote about anything even slightly mysterious, like UFOs or Bigfoot—they got easily ten times as much crazy mail.

  As for a return address on the thick envelope, it said only “New York City, New York.” The postmark read December 12, 1997, just a few days ago.

  Cassie reached in and pulled the items out of the envelope.

  It was a stack of papers in a manila folder. On the cover was scribbled a short note.

  “Cassie, you don’t know me, but we met once. You told me about your editor, Mike Foreman. You told me over drinks the story of how his cousin Abe was murdered in a small town in Virginia this September. You said it was a serial killer, and then you laughed and said it sounded made up, like a movie.”

  A chill ran up her back.

  She didn’t know Mike Foreman that well—he’d only just arrived, really—and knew nothing about a story like that.

  Biting her lip, she set the envelope down on her desk and walked down the hallway. She stood outside his office for a long couple of minutes before knocking.

  “Come in,” he said from inside.

  Cassie entered the office—it had a great view of downtown, with the Capitol and Library of Congress peeking out above the trees.

  “Hi, Mike,” she said. “I was going to run a story idea past you, but I wanted to ask you a question first.”

  Mike nodded and indicated the only open seat in the office—every other surface was covered with either newspapers or open boxes, still filled with papers and books.

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “I just heard a strange story about you, and I wondered if it might be true,” she said.

  He looked up at her—she had his full attention.

  “What?” he asked quietly.

  Cassie looked out the window. “Do…do you have a cousin named Abe?”

  Mike looked at her for a moment and then turned, looking at his computer monitor. “Yes, I did. He passed away.”

  He was not looking at her, so she leaned forward, one hand on the desk.

  “Did he die recently, just a couple of months ago?”

  Mike turned and looked at her. “Congratulations, Ms. O’Neil. You’ve cracked the case. Yup, that’s my cousin—he was killed this pastSeptember in Virginia.”

  Cassie stammered. “Oh, Mike, I wasn’t trying to pry or…”

  “No, pry away. Yes, it was that serial killer with the white van,” Mike said. He was staring at her, almost challenging her to ask him another question about it.

  Cassie decided to let it go. She knew enough about it now to prove that the person who had sent the envelope knew what they were talking about—in fact, they knew more than she did.

  She stood to leave. “I’m sorry, Mike. I didn’t mean to…”

  “How did you find out?” Mike asked. “We share the same last name, but—”

  “I got a tip,” Cassie said, shaking her head. “It’s not important. And really, I didn’t mean to pry. It’s none of my business.”

  Mike’s shoulders sagged as he looked back down at his desk. “I’d appreciate it if you keep this to yourself.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s just…his death really affected me, for some reason,” Mike said. “It was just so out-of-the-blue. And then I needed to leave where I was and get a new job—that’s why I’m here.”

  Cassie nodded. “And we’re happy to have you. You’re a great editor.”

  Mike nodded and smiled. “Ok, stop kissing ass. What’s this story idea?”

  She spent the next few minutes pitching her idea on the Croatian plane crash, and he approved her moving forward. After that, she stood to leave.

  “Cassie, one more thing.”

  She turned. “Yes?”

  “I’ll tell you the whole story sometime, I promise,” he said. “I just need more time to process it all.”

  She nodded and left, pulling the door shut behind her and letting out a big sigh on the way back to her desk.

  When she got back to her desk, she read through the note again just to be sure. That was all the note said; she turned it over, but the back was blank. She flipped the folder open.

  The first page was a photograph of the World Trade Center in New York City.

  The massive building was in the process of collapsing to the ground. />
  Cassie recognized the building immediately—she’d been to New York enough times to have been up in the buildings. The photograph showed the second tower, behind the first, but there was a blackened, jagged scar near the top of the building, and a fire burned out of control. It looked like something had crashed into the side.

  Cassie sat down at her desk and began poring through the contents of the manila folder. There were so many photos, and so many questions—each photo was more terrifying than the last.

  On the last photo was a short note:

  “Meet me at the Starbucks at the corner of K and Elm, 2:00 p.m., Friday the 22nd. I have much more information.”

  3.8

  Teleportation Trials

  Testing of the Red Hook machine continued throughout 1997 and for the next two years. They worked hard to finalize the process and worked through the variations—time travel upstream and downstream, retrieval of items from the time stream, and simple teleportation of items without a change in the time variable. It started out slowly, with failure after failure, until they were able to perfect the energy levels required. Taking what the elder Dr. Ellis knew about the machine, and adding in some new ideas from the younger Dr. Ellis and a few recorded ideas from “Trish,” Ellis’ grown daughter from the last timeline, they were able to increase the machine’s output and make teleportation attempts possible—and repeatable.

  They improved the machine between the elder Ellis’ frequent trips to Washington, D.C., and other locations to meet with representatives of the Clinton administration.

  In Red Hook, portions of the machine were constantly being improved, to the point where the machine would sometimes be out of commission for a week or two as a subsystem was swapped out with a smaller, more efficient replacement. Each time, the machine would undergo testing to ensure it worked as well as before, or better.

  By the fall of 1999, the Ellises were engaged in a debate—how best to monetize the teleportation aspect of the machine without letting the time travel variant out into the wild. Teleportation would revolutionize the world—communications, travel, shipping, manufacturing, healthcare—almost every aspect of human existence would be changed. Even if the machine was the size of two large tractor trailers and would retail for something north of 530 million dollars.

  The Ellis’s argued about how to reveal their machine to the world, what impact it would have, and how they would determine who purchased the first machines. It was an ongoing debate, without resolution. Often Stevens and Cassie O’Neal, their new communications coordinator, got involved in the conversations as well. Cassie had been brought aboard Power Blossom in a part-time capacity to help market and publicize the company’s advancements in materials and battery technology. She still remained a reporter at The Washington Post, where Dr. Ellis had found her and brought her into the fold on the machine and its planned and potential uses.

  “You know, the military will take it first, as soon as they get wind of it,” Cassie argued at one of their discussions in late 1999. “They’ll call it National Security and take it for use only by them and the federal government.”

  The elder Ellis nodded. “I know. We have this amazing breakthrough, one that could revolutionize humanity, and we can’t move forward with it.”

  The younger Ellis agreed. “Right. We have to control it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the elder Ellis replied. “The whole point of this is to ensure that 9/11 doesn’t happen and that you and your family and the hundreds of other families impacted on that day are protected. Getting into the teleportation business is a side issue, at best, and, at worst, a distraction from our real mission.”

  The younger Ellis shook his head. “I disagree. We’ve moved beyond that issue, I think. My family is safe, and we’re well aware of what’s coming. It’s been pounded into my brain, and my wife and Tina know enough of the situation to avoid the World Trade Center for the next twenty years. I don’t think I could get them to go in there if I had to.”

  Stevens nodded. “Same goes for most of the crew—they’ve all heard the stories. No one is going anywhere near the downtown area anymore.”

  “Good.”

  “And you said the president is on board,” the younger Ellis continued. “You said he managed to avoid the scandal that brought him down in the other timeline. That never happened, and the other details never came out, so he’s in charge, with no impeachment issues. Gore will win, and with his foreknowledge, rounding up the 9/11 perpetrators shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “But it wasn’t a problem last time either, and it still happened,” the elder Dr. Ellis said. “All I’m saying is, why can’t we wait until after 9/11 comes and goes? Hopefully, nothing will happen, and we can take the machine public.”

  Stevens and Cassie nodded their approval.

  The younger Ellis glanced at them and then agreed. “OK, that makes sense. But I think we should start working on a retail version now. And this machine should be moved to a more secure location. Just look at what happened last time!”

  The elder Ellis nodded.

  “This machine is our insurance policy,” the younger man said, gesturing at the machine. “It exists as a second chance for this timeline—if anything were to go wrong, we or someone we instruct could use the machine to go back and do a reset. It wouldn’t fix this timeline, but it would give others a chance to move forward. It just seems stupid to have our insurance policy located 10 miles from downtown New York City. Regardless of what happens with al Qaeda, a population center like downtown Manhattan will always be a target.”

  “Where would you move it?” Stevens asked. “That would be a major operation.”

  “I don’t know,” the younger Ellis said. “Somewhere on the East Coast. You could put it in the middle of nowhere, Nevada or Kansas, but as soon as the feds detect the reactor, they’re going to know something is up. You could put it in a Navy town, like Newport News or Groton.”

  “And Stevens, it won’t be as big a task as you think,” the elder Ellis said. “The machine will have to be disassembled and physically moved, of course, but most of the other equipment, machinery and interior items in the warehouse, we can simply teleport to the new location.”

  Stevens nodded, smiling. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “You need to be located near an operating nuclear power source,” Cassie said. “Or near an operating nuclear power station, like Indian Point.”

  The elder Ellis shook his head.

  “That just introduces another problem—any incident, like Three Mile Island or Fukushima would irradiate the area and make the machine inaccessible for a hundred years.”

  “Fukushima?” the younger Ellis asked.

  “Oh, sorry. In spring 2011 a Japanese earthquake and a massive tidal wave decimates central Japan, and the tidal wave inundates the four reactors at the Fukushima power station, located on the coast. It goes into meltdown—takes them months to get the reaction under control, mostly by dumping in seawater, which gets contaminated. After that, there’s a major debate about nuclear power, especially from plants that are built right on the ocean.”

  The younger Ellis nodded. “That makes sense, but I think it’s too dangerous to let the government locate the machine. You said that after 9/11, the government started scanning large urban areas with helicopter-mounted radiation detectors?”

  “Yup,” the elder Ellis said.

  “OK, let me look into moving the machine,” the younger Ellis said. “Send me your input, and I’ll come up with a short list of alternate locations. And you think about how we’re going to sell the teleporter.”

  The older Ellis smiled. “I tell you, if we could figure that out, we’d have more money than Midas himself.”

  Stevens leaned forward. “I have a question—if we can teleport, why can’t we just take care of 9/11 ourselves? Couldn’t we just locate Atta and the other hijackers and teleport them out into the middle of the ocean? Or into a jail?”

  “Well,
” the younger Ellis smiled. “That’s one way to prevent 9/11.”

  “Or strand them on an island,” Cassie added. “No one would even know, and it would take a while before al Qaeda replaced them.”

  Ellis smiled. “That’s not a bad idea. Maybe there’ll be a smoke monster on the island with them, like the crash survivors from Flight 815. That would be funny.”

  The younger Ellis made a face. “Huh? What’s a smoke monster?”

  “Lost. The TV show,” the elder Ellis said. The others were just looking at him. “The show with the creepy island and John Locke and the smoke monster? That hasn’t started up yet?”

  No one seemed to know what he was talking about.

  “Wow,” the elder Ellis said, glancing out the window. “It seemed like that show was on for a long time.”

  3.9

  Election Night

  “And how does it look?”

  Ellis turned—it was President Clinton. He looked a lot happier than he had three years ago, when Ellis and the White House staff had worked so diligently to keep the Lewinsky scandal from surfacing. Clinton had gone on to sign several pieces of important legislation, including a historic expansion of healthcare coverage for less fortunate Americans. It was amazing what one scandal could destroy or derail—and it was amazing how removing one speed bump like the Lewinsky scandal could smooth out a president’s legacy.

  But Ellis had happily worked to change history—Clinton had also taken the al Qaeda threat more seriously and had, in the last year, bombed their Afghan and Philippine training camps on four occasions. Ellis didn’t know if it would be enough to shut down al Qaeda, but at least this President Clinton was doing something about the real problem, instead of getting caught up in another pointless scandal.

  Ellis thought Clinton must have come down from the residence to the Situation Room, located in the basement of the West Wing of the White House. Don knew that Bill loved all the TVs, of which there were seven—up in the White House residence, there were only two. Or maybe he had just gotten lonely. Hillary was out on the campaign trail, trying to help get out the Gore voters in the final push over the top.