The 9/11 Machine

by Greg Enslen

  Ellis had been impressed by the audacity of the plan—Gore was taking a different tack to solve the long-term problem. But Ellis wasn’t sure if it would work—besides, he was more worried about the short-term.

  And today was 9/11. The terrorists were missing, and Ellis was on edge, waiting to see what, if anything, would happen.

  He climbed from bed and walked to the window. It was already almost 9:00, and the towers were fine—if events were repeating exactly as they had gone before, the first plane would have already impacted the North Tower. He’d been awake since 5:00 a.m., listening for far-away sirens.

  Ellis turned and did what he did first every morning—he flipped on the TV and tuned it to CNN. While he watched, he pulled clothes from the small closet and got dressed.

  He missed his LCD flat screen, the one that hung on the wall of the family room of his old house, the one he rarely visited now. That TV had been huge, a 55-inch Hitachi LCD he’d picked up in January 2008 at an after-Christmas sale at Best Buy. Here, they didn’t have LCDs yet—the first flat screens were just starting to come out, but they were plasmas, expensive and prone to burn-in that could ruin the screen. The best he could do was one of those old projection screens, the ones in the huge cabinets that stood out 18 inches from the wall.

  And they didn’t have high-definition TV yet, either—to his eyes everything looked grainy. He had enjoyed watching his news and 24 and Fringe in hi-def. In this timeline, 24 was supposed to premier its first episode in the fall, and he wondered how it would be received in this world. In his timeline, the nation had been reeling from the terrorist attacks and needed to fight back, even on the TV shows. Jack Bauer had been a salve for the nation’s wounds, fighting terrorists with fierce determination and the occasional beheading.

  In this timeline, Lost and Fringe were still years away from being on TV. J.J. Abrams was still working on Felicity, and Alias was set to premier in a couple of weeks on September 30. Ellis wished there was a way for him to bet on the outcome of the shows that he’d enjoyed years ago. For him, all the things that had taken place on Alias—the adventures of Sydney Bristow and the red matter and the connections with ancient history—it was all a memory.

  And in this timeline, for many of his shows and movies, the screenwriters had yet to put pen to paper. He wondered, could he get hired in Hollywood with all his great “ideas?”

  And how had Ellis affected things? Would Gore as president change pop culture? Surely Hollywood would embrace President Gore more than they had President Bush—he remembered in his timeline, how Alec Baldwin had threatened to move to Canada if Bush won the 2000 election. Surely things would smooth out, but would they be the same? Had he already changed too much? He wondered idly which movies he remembered would get made in this timeline and which ones would not. Michael Moore’s proudly anti-Bush film Fahrenheit 9/11 would never be produced in this timeline, making Ellis the only person in this reality who had ever seen it.

  Sometimes, he wondered if the changes he made behind the scenes could cause any problems. So far, in two different timelines, he’d arrived and immediately begun setting up shell companies and investment accounts. He had access to all the financial information for the next fifteen years, so it wasn’t difficult to predict stock prices.

  The difficult thing to do was to not make too much or to draw too much attention to himself. He used several different companies to do his investing and several different corporations to hide his money. He employed the same accounting firm from California, a group of people he had never met but who were in charge of making sure he paid the minimum in taxes and maximized his returns.

  Ellis had made a few bad bets as well—it looked too suspicious if all of his holdings skyrocketed in value, but he always knew when to cut his losses before things went south. And his losses were dwarfed by his gains.

  But was he taking money out of the system that should have gone to other people?

  He didn’t think so—that was one of the market’s strengths, the liquidity. His buying stocks didn’t necessarily mean someone else didn’t get that stock; more likely, it meant that they would pay a penny or two more for their shares. Ellis had been diligent, and if any stock deviated too far from the “historical” data, he would slowly move out of the position, no matter how lucrative it had been. He didn’t want to do anything to upset the market.

  Of course, if someone were to get really curious, they could trace all the money back to him. But it was all under a fake social security number anyway, one of several that he’d brought back from the future.

  Ellis finished dressing and walked out of the small room that he used for an apartment. No one was in—he’d given Terry and the others the day off; in fact, he’d sent them all to Atlantic City for a much-deserved mini-vacation. They had no idea why—where he was from, today was a national holiday, a day of mourning. Ellis didn’t want them downtown, either, if there were to be an attack.

  He walked over to the machine. It was beautiful.

  And small, compared to his earlier machines. This one was compact, sturdy. Much smaller than even his last machine, but that came from building and rebuilding and rebuilding—Ellis had long ago figured out how the machine operated, so now, with each iteration, it was just about making it smaller, more compact, more efficient, without affecting performance.

  All the recent tests had gone well, and with the ideas and plans he had jotted down, this should be the most powerful machine ever. He’d been working on it for seven years, ever since he’d arrived in the timeline. The teleportation aspect of the machine made it even more powerful, but it hadn’t added any size to the apparatus—in fact, if he ever had to build it again, he thought he just might be able to make it portable.

  He smiled and tapped on the computer panel, inputting a series of coordinates, and then stepped into the center of the white disc painted on the floor beneath the accelerator. He strapped on the bulky arm controls—it looked like half of a cast for a broken arm, but instead of being covered with doodles and good wishes, this large glove was interwoven with several dials and a large control pad.

  Dr. Ellis tapped at the pad, and immediately the machine fired up. The room filled with the sound of cracking ice, and he felt the room begin to spin. As many times as he tested this machine, he never quite got used to it—

  The warehouse faded out of reality, replaced with a dense group of trees.

  As the world solidified around him, he fell slightly—a quarter inch, straight down onto the grass beneath his feet. He looked around at the cemetery—no one had seen him. And that was a good thing.

  Ellis looked at the control glove—everything looked fine. A small monitor showed the machine status: “Awaiting Return Request.”

  There were two major problems with teleportation: the ground beneath your feet and other people.

  Terry had worked out the other issue with teleportation, which had been a doozy to fix—appearing somewhere where there was already something else, like a tree or a car. The coordinates entered into the targeting computer told the machine where to move his pattern, but it took some tweaking with the software to make sure he wasn’t fused with an object. Terry had finally figured out the trick—an instantaneous pre-teleportation phase testing, which scanned ahead of the incoming object to ensure there was nothing “in the way” when the teleported person or object arrived. The phase testing automatically adjusted horizontal or vertical positioning on its own, with no operator guidance, trying different locations within a few feet of the desired coordinates that were “unblocked.”

  But it didn’t help with the ground beneath. Local fluctuations in elevation, ground height, paved and unpaved roads, and buildings with multiple floors made it very difficult to predetermine the vertical positioning of the object or person. To prevent accidents, the machine did two things—the phase testing also scanned the ground out ten feet in each direction of the optimal arrival location and extrapolated the height of the surface, and then it added
a quarter inch, just as a safety precaution.

  There was no way to know if any witnesses would be around, which is why they tried to materialize test subjects in forests or inside small rooms—it made the likelihood of encountering witnesses less likely.

  But no matter how many times he did this, Ellis was always worried that he would be spotted.

  Ellis stepped from the small stand of trees and made his way into the quiet cemetery. The sun was just coming up, and there was no one else out yet, but he still walked quickly over to where he needed to go.

  The ground was empty here, but he knew it well. The headstones weren’t here—in fact, in this timeline, they never would be. But Ellis remembered the graves of his wife and daughter as if they stood before him. He knelt, touching empty air where, in some other universe, the cold marble headstones stood, their names carved in the side. On some other hillside like this one, another him stooped over their graves, weeping.

  Ellis knelt for a long time, wondering what had happened to them. They weren’t here, but the Sarah and Tina that lived in this timeline were not his—he had not been there at this Tina’s birth or been able to spend much time with Sarah. He longed for her great stories, but any time he spent at the Ellis home in Jericho was just awkward. They all treated him like a strange uncle. His past was different from theirs, his future radically altered. They spoke stiffly around him.

  Dr. Donald Ellis wondered exactly how old he really was. Ellis still celebrated his birthdays on August 31, just as he had always done, and had just celebrated another one two weeks before. But it wasn’t as simple as it had once been. He’d been born in 1968 and it was 2001, so by normal reckoning that made him chronologically 33, the same age as the Ellis who lived in this world, the one who had invited him to Thanksgiving dinner last year.

  But Ellis had done the math, counting up the number of August 31s that he had experienced, and this past week was his 53rd. Looping through time, reliving the same years over and over, it could make things difficult to follow.

  Like the music, or TV, or the movies. He found himself craving particular songs by artists whose bands hadn’t even been formed yet. Coldplay had been a favorite, but they had only released “Parachutes” last year—“The Scientist” and “Clocks” and “Warning Sign” only existed on Ellis’ iPad, for now, and possibly had begun gestating in the mind of Chris Martin, their lead singer. They would be released on the 2005 album, A Rush of Blood to the Head. Ellis knew the music would come in a few years, and he still missed it. Martin would meet Gwyneth Paltrow backstage next year at a concert, and they would marry in 2003. Their daughter, Apple, would be born in 2004.

  It was disconcerting, sometimes, the extent of his knowledge. But acting on the knowledge had the dangerous side effect of changing the outcome. What if he conspired to meet Chris Martin backstage at that 2002 concert and somehow prevented his meeting with the Hollywood starlet? Would he and his band still go on to write the music Ellis remembered? If not, then those songs would exist only in his memory and on the iPad in his safe.

  He’d brought some stuff back with him, but not a lot—there hadn’t been room on the iPad to bring the Lord of the Rings trilogy or Iron Man. Really there had only been room for Inception and a smattering of Seinfeld and Modern Family episodes.

  Ellis flipped on the TV again. It seemed like so much of his time lately was spent watching, like those bald Observers on Fringe. But, on this September 11, nothing happened.

  3.13

  Holiday Plans

  Gore released his cap-and-trade system in October 2001. On the news, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost almost 9 percent of its value, one of the largest one-day declines in history. The fact that the market fell as far as it did told astute market watchers two things.

  First, the cap-and-trade system was a “harbinger of doom” for U.S. industries still clinging to old ways. American companies that designed and produced heavy industrial goods, along with the companies that transported, marketed, or supported them, were looking at a sea change—a government-mandated tax of at least thirty percent on top of their other production costs and taxes.

  American competition took another body blow—after unions, and taxes, and tariffs, and a host of other costs, the American companies simply could not compete with the prices of items made in other nations. The cap-and-trade systems, which were quickly labeled “Gore-nomics,” would signal the death knell for American manufacturing and other heavy industries.

  The second things that astute market watchers took away from the massive drop in the Dow was that the legislation was likely to pass Congress and be signed into law—the market was already baking that information into their valuations of stocks.

  Caterpillar and Rio Tinto and a dozen other companies that were involved in or supported heavy manufacturing were hammered on that first day after the new initiatives had been announced. For a week straight, the market continued to drop. It was well into its sixth straight day of major losses when Dr. Ellis was escorted into the Oval Office to meet with the president.

  Gore was sitting on one of the couches that flanked the large seal on the floor in the middle of the room. One thing Ellis had noticed was that the seal was always changing—each president redecorated the office to his own personal style, and that included the massive presidential seal that took up the majority of the rug that spanned the middle of the room. Couches and low tables were aligned on the rug as the president preferred, but Ellis always wondered why they, the presidents, went to all the trouble to get new rugs made. He guessed it had something to do with making their mark on the office.

  “Dr. Ellis,” Gore said, standing and taking his hand. He sat back down and indicated the TV, which he’d been watching. “What do you think about the market?”

  Ellis sat, glancing up at the TV. “I don’t really follow finance that much,” he lied, looking back to the president, who was still staring at the TV. Ellis and his corporation had betted big that the cap-and-trade system would send the market into a tailspin, and they had profited handsomely from it.

  “Well, I don’t know what to make of it,” Gore said, shaking his head. “I’m trying to put us on a new path toward a more independent future.”

  Ellis nodded. “It’s tough medicine. But a lot of folks are just looking at the short term.”

  Gore nodded, agreeing. “So, September 11, right?” The president sat back, smiling. “Bet you were glad when nothing happened that morning.”

  Ellis leaned forward and helped himself to a cup of coffee from the tray on the table in front of them. Silence hung awkwardly between them as he poured, and then he sat back and sipped.

  “You guys always have the best coffee here,” Ellis said. “Bush’s kitchen made their coffee a little differently. Have you ever had Chicory coffee?”

  The president shook his head.

  “Chicory? Nope, I’ve never had that.”

  “It’s a southern thing,” Ellis nodded, setting his coffee down. “I’m surprised you haven’t had it, being from Tennessee. Anyway, chicory is a plant, and you can dry and grind it just like coffee beans. In some places in the south, a cup of coffee is really half coffee beans, half chicory. It gives it a unique flavor.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment, neither wanting to speak. Ellis sipped again at his coffee.

  “My point is things change,” Ellis said. “You and Bush did things differently but ended up with the same result. Bush spooked the terrorists with too much surveillance, and the attacks happened on Black Friday, November 24. Now that the terrorists have disappeared, your team needs to be working doubly hard to find them. We’re not out of the woods yet,” Ellis added.

  “I agree. Finding the terrorists, before they can act, is the first priority of this administration—”

  “I doubt that,” Ellis said quietly.

  “What do you mean?” Gore asked, his eyes narrowing.

  Ellis pointed a finger at the financial news broadcast on the TV.
“Knocking the market on its ass with your cap-and-trade system is clearly the first priority. And it’s taking your focus off 9/11.”

  “There was no 9/11. There will be no 9/11,” the president countered.

  “But there may be,” Ellis answered. “I don’t know when it will come, or from what direction, but as long as Atta and his team are in the country, they will continue to plan this attack until they can carry it out. Your team, and you, should be spending all day, every day, looking for these people. If you don’t, the country will be brought to its knees, sooner or later.”

  Gore shook his head.

  “We’re doing everything we can, Dr. Ellis,” the president said. “The terrorists are on every watch list and on the radar of every police officer in the nation. They will be caught, I guarantee.”

  Ellis held his tongue.

  “And my cap-and-trade system is not my only focus,” Gore continued. “Though it has been taking up a lot of my time. But I’m trying to fix the long-term problems that cause al Qaeda and other groups to send teams of terrorists to this and other countries in the first place.”

  Ellis wasn’t sure what to say.

  Gore stood and began pacing. “We, as a nation, need to get out of the Middle East, now that there is a relative peace. Our policies do no good, and we wouldn’t be bogged down in their affairs, if it weren’t for oil. Look at Africa—a hundred countries, and we’re not in there, supporting one nation over another, befriending, bombing, supporting, rejecting. We don’t meddle in Africa, and that’s a good thing—those nations should be free to follow their own destinies. And, in the same way, I think the Middle East needs to set its own course.”

  “Without our involvement,” Ellis added.

  “Right,” Gore said. “Our support of regimes that provide us with natural resources has retarded the growth of the region, making the fight a one-sided affair. Nations that agree with us and sell us oil get better toys, more tanks, more money, and those that don’t get bombed. I’m telling you, every time we bomb another country in the Middle East, we create a hundred new terrorists.”