New Alcatraz (Book 1): Dark Time

by Grant Pies

  “Most people left within a year after the main fertilizer plant closed down,” Beckett said. “Some stayed because they thought things would get better, but most just didn’t know what else to do. The town contracted with neighboring communities for police and fire services, but eventually there were so few people left in Ashton that they just stopped patrolling the area. There are still a handful of people that live here. But most of them are squatters or hiding out for one reason or another.” Beckett paused to let the last sentence settle in, testing Ellis’ reaction.

  “On the way here, you asked me what was in Ashton. Well, as you can see, not a lot.” Beckett kicked an old can that was on the ground across the street. “But that is the point.”

  “So you never told me what Wayfield gets out of helping the NACA create a future prison.” Ellis asked. Beckett glanced at Ellis like an old grandfather would look at his grandchild for not seeing the point to one of his rambling stories.

  “Well,” Beckett continued. His story was a well thought out monologue, and Ellis’ question forced him to improvise; but only slightly. “You mean what do they get besides money?” Beckett asked rhetorically. The two men walked until Beckett’s parked car looked like a toy in the distance. “Wayfield has been working on many new developments in recent years. Two of which directly relate to Project Oracle,” Beckett said the project name with the vocal equivalent of rolling his eyes. “First, Wayfield has long been developing microscopic nano-scale robotic cells,”

  “Wayfield created these robotic cells that were instructed to target and repair damaged human cells. They hoped to use the concept in cancer treatments and to repair radiation damage in humans. It is the same thing as what they use inside the new Delta model androids. The only problem is Wayfield can’t run around and shoot radiation into people’s bodies and then offer to try out an experimental injectable robotic cell to combat the radiation. Even Wayfield has its limits as to what it can do.”

  The further they got from the car, the more Beckett looked around, protectively glancing over his shoulder and looking down the alleyways as they walked. Once their car was out of sight behind them, Beckett made a right turn down a narrow side street.

  “What do we both know firsthand that exposes people to radiation?” Beckett asked with a grin.

  “Time travel.” Ellis replied.

  “Time travel!” Beckett echoed Ellis and slapped him on the back.

  “So you are saying that Wayfield is sending us to the future for the benefit of the NACA and to test out some robot cell invention?” Ellis asked, but couldn’t tell if Beckett was honest or a high strung conspiracy theorist with newspaper clippings all over his apartment.

  “Yes!” Beckett exclaimed. “You know that stuff they inject us with? What do you think that is?!”

  “And you just assume they are testing it on us,” Ellis asked. “Maybe it’s a proven concept. Maybe they know it works and they are protecting us.” Ellis responded smugly as if he just disproved Beckett’s entire theory.

  “Easy,” Beckett quipped back. “How often do they inject you?”

  “Every three weeks.” Ellis said cautiously as if his answer could either harm or help him, even though any damage would already be done.

  “You see!” Beckett said, as if by itself that proved his point. “They inject me every six weeks. They are experimenting on dosage. We make the same amount of trips to the future, so we’re exposed to the same levels of radiation. Why the different dosage if it isn’t an experiment?”

  Ellis looked away from Beckett, and hoped that three doses each week was enough to combat any long term effects his trips may have on him.

  “But that’s not all,” Beckett continued. “Once the deal between Wayfield, the NACA, and the Ministry was struck, and they started work on implementing it, all of the parties involved decided to make travel to the future worth their while…well more than it already was. You know the device they send you into the future with?” Beckett asked.

  “Yeah, the one that measures air and soil quality?” Ellis answered.

  “Yeah, the one that measures air quality,” Beckett said in a slight mocking tone.

  The two men passed buildings with large cracks that ran up their sides, and chunks of brick had crumbled to the ground. Tall weeds grew out of the sidewalk like they were trying to reach the clouds.

  “The device has nothing to do with soil samples and air quality. They don’t even care if you travel to different locations to take your samples,” Beckett said as he used his hands to create air quotes around the word ‘sample.’ “It is about time. They want time to pass between the times you activate the device. Not distance.”

  “So if not air and soil readings, what does this device do?” Ellis asked. Beckett’s story stirred a deep feeling of skepticism that rested in the pit of Ellis’ stomach ever since he signed up for Project Oracle.

  “It’s a device that Wayfield invented that takes a snapshot of all unsecured electronic communications. It captures anything floating through a network. Radio chatter. Internet activity. Phone conversations. All of it is captured on that device. Ten minutes’ worth. So they tell us to walk somewhere else because they want to get another ten-minute segment of information. Not just the same ten minutes.”

  Beckett turned corners and looped around buildings. He walked down back alleys and narrow corridors, zigzagging through the streets of Ashton and glancing behind them after each abrupt turn. Ellis noticed that they passed the same building multiple times and walked by the same streets, but not in circles, taking a different path every time.

  “So say your right,” Ellis said, further entertaining Beckett’s theories and further feeding that skeptical feeling of his own. “Say that we are collecting somewhere between thirty minutes to an hour of all Internet, radio, and phone chatter in a given radius...”

  “Two thousand kilometers,” Beckett interrupted. “They calculated our survey points with the limitations of this device in mind. Two thousand kilometers. Each surveyor’s device picks up all information within their given radius. The Ministry of Science plotted our course to maximize the information we pick up, and placed us in populated areas, careful not to concentrate the surveyors in one particular area. There is some overlap, but not much. The areas not covered aren’t valuable informational hubs to the Ministry.” Beckett motioned with his hand to indicate that Ellis could continue with his original question.

  “Okay,” Ellis continued. “Let’s say that the Ministry acquires, not counting areas not covered by a surveyor, all of the retrievable data in the world for that given thirty to sixty minutes. What then? What can they possibly do with that?” Ellis realized they had stopped walking and Beckett’s story had turned into a full blown debate. Ellis’ voice was growing louder and his questions became more forceful. The story that Beckett conveyed not only awakened the skepticism that Ellis had about Project Oracle, but it also generated an urge to defend the project and his own decision to join the Ministry of Science. But most of all he was angry that he wasn’t the one who discovered what Beckett was telling him.

  “We are talking about the people who created a time machine and microscopic cellular sized robots that they inject into humans, Ellis. And you think they cannot extract valuable data from this information?” Beckett said sarcastically. It was less like a question and more like a statement, and showed that he was disappointed in Ellis’ lack of imagination. “First they filter the information, and then scan for keywords or repeated words. They look for patterns, and reconstruct news stories. They capture a snapshot of stock and commodity prices. They know almost instantaneously which countries have risen in power and which have toppled. They can pull historical data from the internet and scan back for years and years.” Beckett listed these items rapidly.

  Ellis turned and walked down the street, even though he did not know the final destination. Beckett followed and caught up with Ellis, but for the first time since they left Denver, neither of them spok
e. Ellis needed to process this information and Beckett knew it. After a long pause of contemplation, Ellis asked Beckett for the second time, “So why are we in Ashton?” Included within that single question were several questions. Who was Beckett? How did he know all of this? What were they to do with this information?

  Beckett stopped walking and turned toward Ellis and pointed behind him. Ellis turned to see an old cracked and weathered door with rusted hinges that looked like it was squeezed between two buildings, like it occupied the space that used to be an alley way, but was bricked over at some point. A sign on the door hung diagonally and read ‘St. Anthony’s Orphanage.’

  CHAPTER 54

  2068

  ASHTON, IDAHO

  Immediately inside the door was a staircase that led down. Like a wine cellar or a bunker. A single exposed light bulb hung from the ceiling and cast just enough light on the stairs. The filament inside the bulb flickered.

  “What if I told you that I thought the alleged goal of the Ministry of Science and Wayfield Industries was a noble goal?” Beckett asked. “What if I told you that the public really does deserve to know what its own demise will be? And we are entitled to have the chance to prevent our species’ death?” Beckett walked down the stairs as he said this. Ellis followed him hesitantly.

  “You know, you were right when you said you were like an explorer in time. You,” Beckett said as he turned and pointed back at Ellis. “You and I,” Beckett pointed back and forth at Ellis and himself, “have the heart of an explorer. We seek knowledge and experience. But it is the Ministry and Wayfield that restrict the true pursuit of knowledge.” Beckett continued down the stairs until he reached the bottom and turned a corner.

  “Ashton will be the birth place of the real Project Oracle. With your help we can accomplish what the Ministry of Science only pretends to care about.” Ellis turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs to find a large dark room with bunk beds that lined the wall. Beckett walked through the room and approached another door on the other end of the room.

  “We can travel into the future. We can observe and note the changes in each part of the globe. We can actually interact with people in the future to truly discover what will happen to us. Here in Ashton, we can meet and recruit the brightest scientists and engineers who will help us map out what happens to our species in the future.” Beckett opened the door on the other side of the room. Inside was a sterile lab environment illuminated by bright lights. Inside, people in lab coats scurried back and forth, jotting down notes and peering into microscopes.

  “And hopefully, with your help, we will be able to prevent the ultimate demise of our species.” Beckett stepped aside as Ellis walked through the doorway. After Ellis’ eyes adjusted to the white light, they darted to everything in the room. Ahead of him was a circular lab station with large television screens suspended around it, displaying charts of data or mirroring what the scientists viewed in their microscopes. A refrigeration unit lined the back wall, and inside were Petri dishes, each with different substances on them.

  The scientists worked as if Beckett and Ellis had never walked in. Beyond the scientists, past the lab stations and the microscopes, through the bright overhead lights in the lab...Ellis saw someone. He didn’t expect to know anyone here besides Beckett, but there she was. She no longer stood in front of the large screen that broadcasted scenes from around the globe. Instead she stood against the backdrop of the plain sterile wall of the lab. Ellis saw the female Time Anomaly Agent who patrolled the hall where the surveyors were observed. She stood and met Ellis’ gaze. Much like they did before, but now there was not a glass wall between them.

  She smiled at Ellis, and he raised his hand in a subdued gesture of hello. For a brief moment, Ellis forgot how he ended up here in Ashton. He was not concerned about it anymore. He was just glad to see her familiar face, and as he took the first step towards her, Beckett came up beside him and slapped him on the back.

  “Ah, I see you recognize her.” Beckett said with a grin on his face. “You want me to introduce you?” he said as he walked him toward the female agent without waiting for an answer.

  Even though Ellis was anxious to meet the female agent, it felt as though Beckett was pushing him toward her. As the men approached the woman, she brushed her long bangs from her forehead off to the side. She stood in civilian clothing now, but she still had the posture of a soldier. Beckett positioned himself to the side of Ellis and the woman, like a pastor standing beside a couple he was about to marry.

  He looked at the agent and said “I think you have seen Ellis around, but I wanted to formally introduce him to you.” Ellis reached his sweaty hand out toward the woman and she shook his hand in return. “Hello Ellis,” she said. His name left her mouth as if she had said his name thousands of times before. “It is nice to finally meet you properly. My name is Emery.”

  CHAPTER 55

  2068

  ASHTON, IDAHO

  “Imagine you are looking at a drawing on a piece of paper,” a doctor said to Ellis, Emery, and Beckett as the four of them walked through hallways. The doctor was an old man with a face like a sock puppet, whose eyes sunk into his head, creating deep dark bags under his eyes.

  His thin face jiggled with each word and movement. He didn’t walk so much as shuffle through the laboratories. Despite his apparent age, he had a full head of thick white hair. His white lab coat swallowed his body, and his spindly fingers gripped a primitive clipboard. Pinned on his lab coat was a name plate that read ‘Adler.’

  Behind them were more hallways and corridors filled with lab stations. More microscopes and Petri dishes. More human organs in cold storage. Hotplates and Bunsen burners. Before they reached this particular hallway the group passed by nanofabrication units in an engineering lab. They passed welding machines and hydraulic presses. Parylene coaters lined the wall of one room, and a four-meter-long wet bench lined the wall of another room.

  Ellis had never seen such a collection of technology in the hands of private individuals. Before Ellis met Dr. Adler, Beckett explained to him that a group of businessmen, whose technology firms were shut down by the Technology Development Agency, pooled their resources. They managed to retain some tech components, preventing them from getting passed on to Wayfield Industries.

  They slowly and secretly acquired everything else they had in St. Anthony’s. These businessmen recruited ex-employees of their old firms, such as Beckett, that couldn’t find work with one of the few approved tech companies. One of the founders of this group was the old owner of the fertilizer plant that closed down in Ashton, Beckett told Ellis.

  On the stained concrete floor, swirls of blue, gray, and green blended together like a mixture of oil and water. The floors sloped in an ever so slight downward direction, Ellis surmised the four of them were far below ground level by now.

  “Imagine on that piece of paper is a person,” Dr. Adler continued. “A two dimensional person. Imagine that a two dimensional cage surrounds the person. A square. To them their entire world is to the left and the right of them. To that person he is trapped, but to an outside three dimensional observers like us, this person is not trapped.”

  Ellis walked through the halls alongside Emery. Of all that there was to marvel at inside the underground halls of St. Anthony’s, Ellis’ only interest was Emery. Every few minutes he glanced over at her. He would look down and quickly look over at her before returning his gaze back downward. But Emery spotted him many times, and each time she caught him, Ellis’ face glowed a bright red that was illuminated by the fluorescent lights that lit each room. He felt like a teenager again.

  “How would you save this person from his perceived captivity?” Adler asked the group, but looked at Ellis. Caught off guard, Ellis shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “You pull him into a third dimension, of course.” The old man said in a low grumble as if the answer was obvious. “You pull him off of the paper. Like peeling a sticker. To this two-dimensional person th
is seems so unlikely; so bizarre that it’s not even a possibility. But to us, it is simple. Once he is in the third dimension we can move him left or right, and then place him back into his two dimensional world. But now he is miraculously outside of his cell, and he is free. To him it’s a mystery, but we saw and understood the whole thing.” Adler, and the rest of the group, reached the back wall of, what appeared to be, the last laboratory inside the orphanage.

  When Ellis looked closer at the back wall, he saw a door. The hinges and the door knob were all painted the same color as the wall itself to make a seamless wall. Adler reached a withered hand out and grasped the knob. With a twist and a push, the door swung open, but Ellis saw only darkness beyond the doorway.

  Waving his bony arm at Ellis, Adler motioned for him to step inside the room. Unsure, he looked over to Emery, and this time he made proper eye contact. Emery nodded toward Ellis, and then mimicked Adler as she motioned her hand toward the door.

  Ellis stepped through the door, and spots flashed in front of his eyes as they raced to adjust to the sudden darkness. “Now imagine that there is a person, a three dimensional person this time, stuck in a cell. Not just a square, but a cube.” Adler continued his speech, and his voice drifted from behind Ellis and wafted up high before it reached the ceiling. Ellis eyes slowly adjusted to the dark.

  “The same concept holds true for this three dimensional person.” Adler’s voice was further away from Ellis at this point, as he heard Adler shuffling away from him. A loud sound echoed through the dark room, like that of an un-oiled hinge. Immediately after the sound, bright lights illuminated the once dark room. Adler stood against a wall with his hand on a large lever that operated the lights. Now Ellis’ eyes had to readjust to the sudden light, and even brighter spots drifted in and out of his vision. He rubbed his eyes and held his hand over his face to shield his eyes. Large spotlights were scattered around the room.