The 9/11 Machine

by Greg Enslen

  Don rolled on the ground and banged on the leg with his gloved hands, but nothing happened. He couldn’t reach inside to his leg and couldn’t massage the knee or anything. The leg stayed ramrod straight, pulsating with pain, and Don could do nothing but lay on the ground in agony.

  Outside, he heard the helicopter engines slow as they circled the warehouse. Someone must have seen the emergency lights, or maybe they’d spotted the boat from the air.

  After another few moments, the pain in his leg passed, and he was able to stand. Wobbly, he staggered to the control PC.

  The diagnostic had come back clean. He was ready.

  But he didn’t have time to set up. If he left, right now, they would find the machine. He needed more time to set up the explosive device and wipe all the computers. It was a horrible choice—stay here and set up the explosives and maybe get caught by the soldiers and go to jail forever or leave this timeline and give the U.S. government a fully operational time machine? God only knew what they would do with it.

  Don needed to stop them before he could leave. Pulling off his gloves, he tapped at the keyboard.

  He’d never tried this before, but they had done a few experiments. The computer could track him well enough, and it should work. Don was going to use the machine to teleport him into the air above the warehouse, then retrieve him after two seconds. He would be falling, but the machine would be able to compensate for that and retrieve him. He hoped.

  It was either that or attempt to “grab” the helicopter in midair with the teleporter and send the whole aircraft somewhere else in the world.

  Don pulled on his heavy gear and activated the machine. He pulled out the blue gun from the duffel bag and checked the gauge—it was fully loaded. He hated the idea of hurting more people, but there was no way to avoid it.

  Kicking the leather satchel clear, Don stood in the middle of the circle painted on the ground and waited as the machine powered up. The lights inside the warehouse flickered. The sound of ice, cracking loudly, filled the room, and then—

  —he was in the air above the warehouse.

  Don had set the height at 1,000 feet with a five-second delay. In those seconds, Don saw several things.

  He saw the warehouse below him, and the boat and river beyond, and the western glow of the horizon. He saw a few exterior lights on the warehouse. Dim as they were, they were very noticeable as the only lights for a mile in any direction. And he saw a helicopter approaching, black against the darkening sky. He could hear the rotors chopping at the air.

  Don spun as he began to fall, and aimed the blue gun at the helicopter.

  The gun made its odd coughing sound, and Ellis watched the gun fire its cloud of individual miniature projectiles. The cloud of mini-bullets fanned out as it approached the hovering helicopter, and then he was—

  —back in the warehouse.

  3.43

  Demon

  “No, it was a man, I think!” the pilot shouted.

  They had been approaching the warehouse, looking for a good landing place, when the copilot had noticed a flash of light off to his side. He’d turned, thinking it was a bird, and then shouted—it looked like a black demon, hanging in the sky. The demon turned and pointed something at the helicopter, and the pilot reacted instinctively, turning sharply and putting the bottom of the helicopter between his soldiers and whatever that thing was floating in the air. The pilot felt the helicopter buck as it felt like several waves of projectiles hit the underside of the copter—sparks flashed up as some of the projectiles burst through the floorboard, and immediately he began to lose control of the aircraft. The pilot glanced over at his copilot, but the man was dead.

  The pilot leaned on the stick and looked for an open spot on the ground. It would be a hard landing.

  3.44

  A New Plan

  Ellis was back in the warehouse, sitting on the floor in the painted circle. He’d collapsed as soon as he’d returned.

  He’d lost sight in his left eye.

  Outside, he heard the helicopter’s engines whining, struggling to keep the bird in the air. He hadn’t wanted to fire on them, but he had no choice. Now, they would be busy for a few minutes, and he needed to get out of here.

  He blinked and struggled to his feet. His leg tightened up again, threatening to cramp. He slapped at the leg of his metal suit, willing his leg to cooperate.

  Walking to his office, he retrieved the bomb from the safe. Carrying it back, he stumbled, catching himself before he fell. The radiation was setting in—he could feel his insides quivering. Ellis put the bomb down between the control PC and the machine and set the timer for 1:00:00. After a moment’s hesitation, he started it. At least now, if he died, the machine would be destroyed.

  His plan had been simple: jump back into the past again. But that wouldn’t work now—he was far too sick. He’d arrive in the warehouse in Red Hook and die within minutes on that cold concrete floor of radiation poisoning.

  He could teleport to a hospital, but he wasn’t sure if his condition was treatable with present-day medical technology.

  That was it, he realized in a sudden moment of clarity.

  He would die if he stayed here or went into the past. He needed to go somewhere where he could be successfully treated, somewhere where they could cure him.

  He needed to go into the future.

  It made sense—in this timeline, they were dealing with radiation exposure over vast populations, both in the United States and in the Middle East. Some of the fallout cloud was supposed to travel all the way to Europe and Asia, and the Israeli cloud had been expected to expose millions to low levels of radioactivity throughout the Middle East and Asia. If anybody was going to be good at treating radiation poisoning, it would be these people, and their descendents.

  Outside, he heard the helicopter crash. It sounded incredibly close. The sound of the engines and rotors spinning was cut off and followed by an explosion and then nothing but sudden silence.

  His leg began cramping again, and Don made up his mind. He leaned over and began doing rough calculations on the computer in front of him, trying to not look at the blisters and oozing pustules on the backs of his hands.

  Don scanned a geographic database and found the coordinates for the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle—the city had great universities, schools, and industry. The city had not been affected by any of the nuclear attacks, so it was as good a guess as any. Hopefully, global warming hadn’t swamped the city. And hopefully, the university still had a good hospital—and offered universal, no-questions-asked healthcare.

  Ellis set the machine to auto-retrieve him from the same location in 30 days, returning him to this date and time plus one minute. Ellis was also taking the glove, but he’d seen enough time travel movies to know that things never went as planned. If he had the glove, he could tell the machine to retrieve him, but it also made sense to have the machine auto-retrieve him, in case something went wrong.

  If not, the machine would be destroyed one hour from now. If it tried to retrieve him and nothing came back, then the machine would be destroyed. It was too dangerous, leaving an operating time machine behind.

  He grabbed up his leather satchel, putting the little blue gun inside as well—who knew if people were nice in the future.

  The machine powered up, humming loudly, and as he stepped into the circle, he suddenly felt like vomiting. The feeling was overwhelming. He ignored it and pulled the NBC hood over his metal suit and saw with the one eye that was working that the air began to waver around him. He heard the cracking of ice, louder than ever before, and then a strange series of pops—that was different. Maybe the radiation was affecting the internal systems. He should have run another diagnostic before using the machine again. He glanced back at the bomb and—

  3.45

  Splash Down

  The helicopter splashed down in a low body of water, coming to rest near the shore in about five feet of water. The pilot hadn’t
really had time to plan the landing. He’d taken his bearings and factored in the uncontrollable spinning of the fuselage and tried to land the chopper as close to the shore as possible.

  He pulled himself free of the helicopter and checked the others, but they were all dead. Two of the soldiers had been thrown free in the air and were nowhere to be found. Working free his handgun from inside the NBC suit, he grabbed the side of a small boat that was tied up to a tree and used it to pull himself up onto the shore.

  “Base, this is 11-Charlie.”

  He tried several times but got nothing but static. It had been the same with the helicopter’s radio. Comms rarely worked on the ground in the Exclusion Zone.

  He climbed down between two trees and out into a parking lot, his pistol out. There was a circular drive in front of what looked like some offices, attached to a large warehouse. The light from several external lights showed a trail of heavy footprints leading up to the doors. He followed them and made his way to the door and pulled, but it was locked. He used the butt of his gun and broke the glass and entered—inside, it looked like ordinary offices, except for the bodies lining the hallways.

  The pilot made his way down the hallway—it looked like a company was just moving in. There were lots of boxes, most of them still sealed, and everywhere was the “Power Blossom, LLC” logo, slapped on walls and boxes and computer towers. There were no pictures on the walls.

  The pilot worked his way through the offices and then passed carefully through a set of double doors out into a massive warehouse.

  He wasn’t sure what to expect—maybe some big trucks, or a set of large machines for building cars or sorting mail. Once, when he was a kid, his school class had toured a box plant, where they made big cardboard boxes—there had been machinery for making the cardboard, rolling it out, and then cutting it into different sizes.

  This looked nothing like that.

  It looked like some sort of futuristic power generation device, or a massive CAT scan machine. There was scaffolding surrounding the machine, with innumerable pipes and wires leading to and away from it. Off to one side, he saw a large object that looked like a generator—it had a handle and wheels, so that it could be easily transported—but it made no sound and was filled with a weird blue glow. Large cables ran between it and the hulking machine next to it.

  The pilot walked over to what looked like a computer console—the display was filled with numbers. It looked like it was scanning for something, but for what, he couldn’t guess.

  On the ground next to the machine was something he did recognize—an explosive device. As the pilot watched, a digital readout on top appeared to be counting down to zero—right now, it read 0:52:45.

  Unsure of what else to do, he reached up and touched the Abort button on the top the device, and the countdown stopped.

  3.46

  In a Park

  —the world changed into something else, something bright and wonderful.

  He was standing in a beautiful green park, looking at an odd sculpture of what looked like a person. Actually, he wasn’t standing—the teleportation had left him levitating about a half-inch above the grass, and he’d fallen straight down, stumbling to the grass.

  He looked up and saw a river behind him and more of the city of Seattle beyond. The sunlight hurt his eyes, and he put his hands up to shield him from the sun when he saw the back of his hands—they looked like the skin was starting to break apart. It was horrible.

  As he stripped out of the metal suit, Don looked down at the ground, trying to burn the location of this six-foot-wide circle into his mind. He had 30 days to get treatment—the machine would auto retrieve him once and only once—and get back to this exact location, or he would be trapped here in the future forever.

  Leaving the suit, he bent down and dug at the grass, burying one of the metal gloves in the exact spot where he’d appeared. He then stood and turned and walked to the sculpture, counting paces and using a pen to write it all down on the skin of his forearm. He turned and looked at the teleport location, memorizing it in relation to the sculpture and grass and river beyond.

  When he was done, he walked across the expansive grass park, toward the tall buildings on the other side of the lawn. His leg cramped up twice, and he stopped to rub the muscles. The skin on his hands burned.

  The building was large, beautiful, and covered with large sheets of incredibly clear glass. Don, feeling weak and dehydrated, looked up at the building with the one eye that was still working and hoped it was what hospitals looked like in the future.

  3.47

  Back From Seattle

  —Dr. Donald Ellis materialized again in the circle painted on the floor, carrying his black leather bag, the blue gun in his hand.

  He stood tall and looked happy, and all of the signs of radiation sickness were gone. The backs of his hands were completely healed. He also looked years younger—his face seemed brighter, more animated.

  The first thing Don noticed was the man.

  He was bent over, covering his ears, his gun forgotten. He was dressed in black, in one of those hideous radiation suits that Don had almost forgotten about.

  Don lifted the blue gun.

  “Don’t move,” he said.

  The man stood and looked at him. He looked like a pilot from the markings on the flight suit that Don could see underneath the NBC suit. Don kept his gun on the man and glanced around—the machine, the control PC, even the bomb on the ground, right where he had left it a month ago. On the bomb, the countdown had been stopped.

  “What is all this?” the pilot spoke up.

  “It’s a backup cycle, an insurance policy,” Don said, smiling. “Let’s just say when things go square, I can use this to make everything shiny again.”

  The pilot looked confused. “Shiny?”

  Don nodded. “Sorry. I can make things better. My vernac is a little off. So, what should I do with you?” Don asked. “You can’t stop me from going, but I need to destroy this machine after I’ve gone. That’s why the explosive device was on a timer. But I don’t want to hurt you, or anyone else.”

  “You killed my crew,” the pilot said, nodding out the doors. “How did you appear in mid-air like that?”

  Don smiled. “It’s complicated, but believe me, I’m not here to hurt you, or anyone. Actually, I’ve been trying to help. None of this,” he said, indicating the warehouse and the world around them, “is my fault.”

  Don could see the pilot wasn’t buying it.

  Ellis had an idea. “OK. Step into the circle, please,” he said, indicating the circular area on the ground beneath the machine.

  “No,” the pilot looked at him.

  Don pointed with the gun.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. In fact, I’ll help—if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?”

  The pilot looked confused.

  Don nodded at the machine above them. “It’s a teleporter. That’s how I appeared up in the air. Wow, I’d forgotten about that. It must’ve looked strange, me just blimping in the air.”

  The pilot didn’t seem to know how to answer.

  Don shook his head. “Wow. That was a long time ago. Anyway, where do you want to go? I need you out of the way, but I don’t want to hurt you.”

  The pilot didn’t speak but walked slowly over to the machine, standing in the circle.

  “OK, well, I’ll pick, then,” Don said, smiling. He felt so much better, it was hard to remember what he’d felt like the last time he was here. He was also grateful to know that, no matter how long he chose to linger in this irradiated timeline, he would be fine. The medical treatments and inoculations he’d received would ensure his future health for years to come.

  “How about Disney World?” Ellis asked. “I love that place. Have they finished Villains Park yet?”

  The pilot didn’t seem to indicate any interest in answering, so Ellis tapped in the coordinates and pressed the big green button.

 
The sounds of ice shattering and cracking filled the warehouse with deafening sound. It was clearly louder than ever before, and Don wondered if the machine was being affected by the radiation. He remembered being worried about that last time, just before he’d left.

  In a moment, the machine cycled up, and the pilot, his eyes wide, was bathed in an ethereal blue light and winked out of existence.

  “There, that’s better,” Don said to himself, looking around. “Oh, what am I thinking? They haven’t even started on the Villains Park yet. Good thing I sent him to that lake in Epcot instead.”

  He’d thought about killing the pilot—it would have been easy to set the coordinates and have the man appear in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles from the nearest island. Or send him a thousand feet underground—the machine safeties were easy to override. But Ellis didn’t think it would matter, one person knowing about the machine. It would be destroyed moments after Ellis left, anyway. And the warehouse was well inside the Exclusion Zone, so any machine wreckage removed from the site after it was destroyed, would be heavily irradiated, making it more difficult to examine and reverse engineer.

  Don looked down at the backs of his hands and smiled, remembering how they had looked when he’d arrived at that strange looking hospital in Seattle.

  Don tapped at a what looked like a freckle on the back of his left hand. The skin on his left forearm faded away, replaced with an embedded, skin-computer readout. The colors were amazing, deep and true and stunning for something that was only a few microns deep and essentially painted onto the surface of his skin by a powerful computer chip.

  Actually, Don had no idea exactly how the “skinputer” worked; he just knew that everyone had them in the future. They were something akin to a digital tattoo—he still had the layer of skin there, but the “screen” existed just under the level of the epidermis. He tapped at the interface that appeared with the fingers of his right hand, swiping the image. Don smiled at the collection of pictures that wheeled across the implanted viewing surface. After a moment, he tapped at the freckle again, and the skin on the back of his forearm reappeared, making his arm appear completely normal.