Time Frame (Split Second Book 2)

by Douglas E. Richards

  Once Knight had landed in the past, there would be two of him. When he arrived, the very slightly younger version of himself would still be in the semi awaiting the computer command to send him back, which would commence in less than the blink of an eye.

  But Knight’s arrival in the past would instantly trigger the computer to abort, so his younger self would now never be sent back, ensuring that a third edition of Edgar Knight didn’t come into existence. Instead, his younger self would be locked inside the trailer, soon to find himself a prisoner in a luxury resort.

  Scientists, logicians, and science fiction writers had always believed that the universe had two primary choices when it came to dealing with time travel. It could branch out into two separate universes, beginning at the point in the past that had been changed due to time travel.

  Or it could fight to stay self-consistent.

  Neither had turned out to be correct. It turned out the universe found branching into multiple universes wasteful. And it didn’t care a whit about paradoxes. When Knight’s arrival in the past changed events, aborting his future time travel jump, he should have disappeared. After all, he had changed things so he was never sent back. So how could he still be there?

  The universe used a different logic. It could not have cared less how the second Knight had come into existence. It just accepted his presence in the new reality, resetting time in its general vicinity and moving forward once again from there, as if there had always been two Knights—forging a brand-new future. If the computer had not aborted, when the universe moved forward forty-five microseconds it would send him back in time yet again, introducing a third copy into the past. And then a fourth. And then a fifth . . .

  If future time travel was then aborted after the fifth, the five Knights would remain, and the universe would move forward on this basis.

  If Marty McFly had changed past events so his parents had never married, so he had never been born, neither he nor his image in a photo would have vanished. The universe would have reset in the local vicinity of 1955 Hill Valley, where Marty had disturbed the timeline, and created a new future from there. It wouldn’t care that Marty was an interloper from an erased future, and that his parents had never, and would never, give birth to him.

  He was there, and that was good enough for the universe. It wasn’t checking birth certificates.

  Six times Knight had sent himself back into the past, each time imprisoning and eventually killing the version of himself that he joined there. Just over a week earlier, Knight had begun this exercise for the seventh time. And like the six versions before him, who had each lived their allotted month before being erased in favor of a fresher face, the seventh would soon die. An irrevocable death sentence, perhaps made even worse from the knowledge that he had bestowed it upon himself.

  The idea of becoming a disposable backup was horrifying to Knight, but far easier to swallow in the abstract than when his head was locked inside a guillotine and the blade was inching its way toward him.

  Star Trek had made it clear from select episodes (although this was never brought up directly) that Kirk and Spock died every time they used the transporter, with a new, identical version materializing in the new location, constructed from their patterns.

  In principle, Knight’s own situation wasn’t that different from the use of such a transporter device. One version was killed to make way for another—identical—version.

  But at least in the case of the Star Trek transporter, this was instantaneous, which was a lot less troubling. Vaporize the original man or woman on the Enterprise’s transporter pad, copy him or her on the planet below, and no harm, no foul. When Kirk beamed down to a planet, he could convince himself that he hadn’t really died, that he had just disappeared and reappeared.

  But it was the cruelest of tortures to remain alive after such duplication, to know that death was imminent, and the exact time it would take place.

  Knight wanted to scream at the top of his lungs. There was no way out. His death sentence was immutable, and the means for carrying it out unstoppable.

  One of dozens of speakers hidden throughout the residence came to life. “Edgar Knight?” said the male voice of Lazlo, his personal digital assistant, so advanced it made earlier PDAs, like SIRI, seem like pull-string talking dolls.

  Knight was instantly at attention. Lazlo was always there in the background, awaiting his instructions, but for his AI to initiate an interaction on its own—well, this was highly unusual.

  “Yes,” responded Knight, letting the AI know he was listening.

  “Sensors show a recent cessation of all life signs coming from Edgar Knight One. Video footage streaming from his office, along with my personal observations, indicate that Knight One was killed in a massive explosion at the Lake Las Vegas compound. Just to be sure there is no mistake, this has been confirmed by seismic sensors and news reports. I would have informed you sooner, but I was housed primarily in a mainframe on this same site, which was also vaporized. It took me almost two minutes to fully reconstitute all of my functionality within the mainframe housed at the Wyoming site.”

  Knight’s mouth dropped open. His namesake had been killed? How could this be?

  It was a huge setback, at least when it came to achieving the goals that he shared with the version of himself forty-five microseconds older, whom he and Lazlo had dubbed Knight One. But he couldn’t help but be elated. He was no longer expendable. Instead, as Knight One’s only backup, he would now be running the show.

  It was time for the understudy to take the stage, for the heir to ascend to the throne.

  The king was dead.

  Long live the king.

  Knight blew out several deep breaths in relief, and if he had believed in God he would have been thanking this deity profusely.

  “Full control of all operations has now been transferred to you,” continued Lazlo, “and I will respond to your commands only. You also have sole access to all of the deceased Knight One’s assets, financial and otherwise. I have sent a signal to the capsule in your skull, and it has been fully nullified. You are now free to leave the premises and operate at full autonomy.”

  A slow smile crept over Knight’s face. “Tell the two girls on-site I won’t be needing their services further and they’re free to leave. Organize all information you have on what Knight One has been up to since leaving me here. Transfer it to the computer in the home theater.”

  Knight paused in thought. “Does the video taken before the explosion contain any clues as to how this happened? Who might have been responsible?”

  “More than clues,” replied Lazlo. “I am sure you will find it very illuminating.”

  “Good. Get rid of the girls and send the footage to the big screen in the theater. I’m going there now. Also, to save time, prepare an executive summary of all information you think will be relevant to my full understanding of the events culminating in Knight One’s death?”

  “Prepared and ready,” said Lazlo immediately.

  4

  Knight’s strategy for creating, and dispensing with, his understudies was ingenious, ruthless, and unstoppable, three adjectives that fit him well. He would begin the process by entering a trailer and setting the computer to send him back in time. As soon as he arrived a split second in the past, a signal would be sent aborting time travel for the version of him who was still in the trailer, on the verge of being sent back again. The signal would not only abort time travel, but cause the release of a knockout gas inside the compartment.

  Once the Knight inside the trailer was out cold, the Knight who had landed fifty-eight feet away would use a robotic device to inject and implant a tiny titanium capsule into his skull. The capsule was divided into two equal compartments. One contained a toxin that, if released, would kill the younger Knight instantly. The other compartment held an agent that could be combined with the toxin in the first compartment to nullify its effect and render it harmless.

  Knight called this h
is table salt strategy. Sodium by itself was deadly. So was chloride. But combine the two into sodium chloride and you ended up with a crystalline substance that was not only harmless, but delicious when sprinkled on french fries and pretzels.

  Once the capsule was in place, the backup Knight would awaken in the main building of the Wyoming compound, where he would be forced to wait out his month. Lazlo was set up to monitor his every activity. If he made any attempt to leave the general vicinity of the mansion, the AI would immediately send a signal releasing the left compartment of the implant, killing him instantly. If he found a way to shield the capsule from Lazlo’s signal, the same thing would happen automatically. If he stayed put, at the end of a month, the capsule would be triggered as well.

  The only way out was for Knight One to die. If this happened, Lazlo would do as it had just done—open the partition between the two compartments and allow the neutralizing chemical to mix with the toxin, thereby defanging it.

  The chemistry and mechanics of the system had been perfected by several members of a large group of geniuses Knight had dubbed his Brain Trust. These were acclaimed scientists he had sent back into the past without their knowledge, effectively making copies of them for his own use, while the originals went about their lives, none the wiser.

  The duplicates—or, more accurately, the versions brought back from a split second in the future, often multiple copies of the same scientist—represented the greatest collection of human ability the world had ever seen. Knight provided them with unlimited funding, the ability to work with the best people in the world on the most challenging problems, and treated them like royalty—at least for the most part.

  While they were technically prisoners, their only responsibility was to pursue their passions, and many wouldn’t have left if they could have.

  Knight made sure the two call girls had left the premises and took a seat in one of ten cushioned, reclining chairs in his private theater. “Lazlo, give me the executive summary you prepared,” he ordered, feeling giddy from having just escaped death row.

  “In short,” began Lazlo, “Knight One’s people managed to capture Aaron Blake and Jenna Morrison out from under Lee Cargill and bring them to Lake Las Vegas. Cargill and several other members of Q5 were killed in the process.”

  Knight’s eyes widened. Outstanding. And completely unexpected.

  Not long before the Knight in Wyoming had come into existence, Lee Cargill had intercepted an email message that indicated a leading physicist named Nathan Wexler had come up with the theoretical basis for time travel. The physicist’s short email left no doubt that the work was groundbreaking. Monumental. Because Wexler had arrived at the period of 45.15 microseconds based on theory alone.

  This was extraordinary.

  Knight had stumbled across time travel and had discovered that the length of time traveled back was always of this duration. Always. But he knew this due to experimental measurement only. Neither he, nor anyone else, could ever figure out why this was the case.

  Until now. The intercepted email indicated that Nathan Wexler’s purely theoretical equations had pointed to this exact interval of time as being special. More importantly, his theory indicated that the reach of time travel could be extended. It should be possible to travel back in time, in forty-five microsecond intervals, to a maximum distance of almost half a second.

  Half a second! This was more than ten thousand times farther back than Knight had achieved.

  This was huge. Being able to effectively send a person or object fifty-eight feet away was one thing. But in a half-second, the Earth moved over a hundred miles, dramatically increasing the system’s scope and versatility.

  When Knight’s moles within Q5 had alerted him of this development, the race to acquire the brilliant physicist was on. But as he and Cargill battled over the man, Wexler was killed, leaving his fiancée, Jenna Morrison, as their only hope. She possessed a flash drive that contained Wexler’s work, but had hired a man named Aaron Blake to protect her, an ex-special forces operative turned private detective.

  Even so, both Blake and Jenna had ended up in Cargill’s hands, and Knight had been convinced Q5 would soon have Wexler’s work as well, giving his former boss a tremendous advantage in their ongoing struggle.

  But Knight One had apparently managed to wrestle Jenna and her hired protector from Cargill, after all, killing him in the process.

  Everything appeared to have been going Knight One’s way.

  So how had he ended up dead?

  “Rather than continue with an executive summary,” said Lazlo, “I recommend that you watch the recording of Knight One’s meeting with his two captives. I believe it will tell you what you need to know. It was streaming to the cloud right up until the instant of the explosion.”

  “Understood,” said Knight. “Show it now,” he ordered.

  5

  An ultra-high-definition image of the inside of Knight One’s lavish penthouse residence in Lake Las Vegas appeared on the massive home-theater screen in perfect 3D. On the screen, Knight One’s men strapped Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake to two of four steel chairs at one edge of his office and left.

  As Knight watched the footage, he was struck by just how unimposing Blake seemed to be. The man was just over five foot seven, and looked harmless, like a man who might get sand kicked on him at the beach. About as dangerous as a nursery-school teacher.

  But Knight had learned the hard way that this impression couldn’t be further from the truth. Aaron Blake was a highly decorated ex-Army Ranger, seventy-fifth regiment, who had served within various counter-terrorism groups in Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq before deciding to leave the military to become a private detective in LA.

  He was smart, tough, and brave, and had bested some of Knight’s most talented soldiers. His appearance couldn’t have been more deceiving.

  Knight took a moment to study Jenna Morrison’s 3D image on the screen as well. This was the first he had ever seen of her, other than a few stills. She was almost as tall as her PI companion—which, at five foot five or so, wasn’t saying all that much. Her brown hair was cut short, and while she wasn’t classically pretty, she was still in her twenties, and there was something attractive about her. Perhaps it was her perfect complexion, or the easy intelligence reflected in her brown eyes.

  “Where are the others we were with?” she was demanding as he watched.

  “I’m afraid they’re all dead,” replied Knight One. “Including my old friend Lee Cargill.”

  “All of them?” said Jenna in horror. “But why? They were helpless.”

  Helpless? thought the Knight watching in annoyance. Cargill may have been a lot of things, but he was hardly helpless. The man had been a sleeping lion, and Knight One had just applied the law of the jungle.

  Just as these thoughts flashed through his mind, Knight One denied that Cargill had been helpless, right on cue. “When you’re being stalked by a lion,” his predecessor was now saying, “and you chance upon him sleeping, you kill him. The difference between me and Lee Cargill is that I’m willing to make tough choices, own up to tough realities.”

  Knight couldn’t help but smile. Great minds thought alike. Especially when those minds were identical up until one week earlier, when their life experiences had begun to wildly diverge. Even so, he and the man on the screen would be expected to have virtually identical reactions to anything the prisoners might say.

  With one caveat. The Knight in Wyoming knew something his predecessor had not known. He knew that Knight One only thought he was in full control of this situation.

  “Compassion is great,” continued his predecessor. “I’m all for it. But if we let it paralyze us from making rational, logical . . . necessary decisions, we deserve to go extinct as a species.”

  “Just the opposite,” said Jenna. “Compassion will make sure we don’t go extinct.”

  “If everyone were compassionate,” said Knight One, “this would be true. But there are ruthles
s people in this world. People who relish the idea of Armageddon and are moments away from having the means to make this happen. Compassion in the face of that is suicidal, which is the exact path we’re on.”

  “I agree with you in many ways,” said Blake. “But the answer isn’t setting one man up as absolute dictator.”

  “Why not? Right now we have democracies in the world, but we also have any number of countries run by dictators and worse. Irrational, power-hungry people, with only their own interests at heart. At least with me running the show you’ll have rational decisions.”

  “Like sterilization of anyone below a certain intelligence level?” said Jenna.

  “Yes. First you wipe the barbaric, destructive extremists from the planet. Simple decision. Kill them, or they’ll kill you later. As for controlling the coming swarms of unintelligent, ignorant masses, our planet is a tiny lifeboat in a vast ocean universe. But our boat is getting overcrowded and taking on water. When the crew members who aren’t capable of bailing any water reproduce ten times faster than those who can, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the boat will eventually sink.”

  “Well said,” whispered the Knight watching, fascinated by the restraint his predecessor had shown in referring to those he planned to weed out as crew members unable to bail out water, rather than calling them what they really were: ignorant, dim-witted slobs reproducing like cockroaches. He couldn’t help but wonder how many kids his nine moronic siblings had produced. He hadn’t checked in with any of them for over a decade, but even then they had collectively brought more than forty new mouths into the world. He wondered how much this number had grown in the time since.

  Even though Knight didn’t have any children, he had engaged in reproduction all the same. Only he had reproduced exact copies of himself, and copies of the best minds the planet had to offer, rather than swarms of high-school dropouts who were future reality-show stars.