Time Frame

by Douglas E. Richards

  “The kettle will have the ability to disrupt cameras, but based on our intel, this won’t be necessary. He has multiple women in his bedroom—frequently—engaging in acts of debauchery that make Sodom and Gomorrah look like Disneyland. He’s a man of large . . . appetites. He likes his privacy. So no cameras and no sensors. He locks his room at night more securely than a vault. And he is secure. From anyone but us. Because outside of his room, and throughout the palace, he has explosive sensors, poison gas sensors, and guards who are well paid and loyal.”

  Cargill paused to see if Blake had more questions. When he saw that none remained, he went in for the close. “So what do you say?” he asked. “Are you in? I promise this will be the last mission of this kind. You’ll have removed two of the biggest threats the world has ever seen. After that, the world is on its own. We go back to helping little old ladies cross the street.”

  There was a long silence. “Okay,” said Blake finally. “I’m in.” He rolled his eyes. “Of course I’m in. You had me at Kim Jong-un.”

  Cargill grinned. “I can’t thank you enough, Aaron.”

  Blake pursed his lips in thought. “You made it a point to meet with me in private,” he noted. “Even Joe Allen isn’t here. Is it your intention to keep this Op just between the two of us?”

  “Yes. Why not err on the safe side? If no one else knows, no chance of a leak.”

  “And President Janney?”

  Cargill shook his head. “Not so much,” he replied. “I’m not exactly on his good side at the moment. I need to tread carefully. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d involve him anyway. The less he knows the better.”

  “If I succeed, you’ll have to tell him,” said Blake. “He’ll need to direct forces to act on the intelligence we get from Kim.”

  Cargill sighed. “I’m well aware. That day will not be pretty for me, I can tell you that.”

  “No, I’d imagine not,” said Blake, unable to keep himself from taking satisfaction in the thought that Cargill would suffer also, even if it was the tiniest fraction of what he would be forced to endure. “I guess we all have our crosses to bear,” he added with the hint of a smile.

  PART 3

  “To everything there is a season,

  and a time to every purpose under heaven:

  A time to be born, and a time to die;

  A time to kill, and a time to heal.”

  —Partial excerpts from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, King James Bible

  “Time flies like an arrow . . . but fruit flies like a banana.”

  —Unknown (often attributed to Groucho Marx)

  14

  Aaron Blake was strapped into a jump seat within the nearly empty hold of a small cargo plane, on approach to Beijing Capital International Airport. “We’ll be landing in ten minutes, sir,” said the pilot, his voice coming through the tiny comm embedded in Blake’s ear.

  “Acknowledged,” he replied to the head of a military piloting duo. He had never met either pilot, and neither had been told anything about him other than he was a VIP—whom they assumed was also military.

  He suspected they were eager to drop off their unknown passenger, with his unknown cargo, and get their asses out of Chinese airspace as quickly as possible. Active military pilots flying with false uniforms—those of the cargo company they were pretending to work for—weren’t treated particularly well if discovered on foreign soil, especially if the owners of this soil tended to be rivals of America on the world stage.

  After Blake had agreed to the Op, Cargill had wasted no time whisking him back a split second, creating two Aaron Blakes an instant earlier, and prepping one of these Blakes for a one-way assassination/kidnapping mission. Despite his preparation, Blake spent the first six hours of the flight continuing to study up on the mission, the six hours after that making sure he slept, and the final two hours playing through various ways the mission might go wrong, and planning out the best way to react if this did happen. Since it was a rare mission that went precisely by the numbers, this exercise had saved his life a number of times.

  He was wearing a gray jumpsuit with the logo International Freight Services stenciled on the pocket in bright yellow, and was carrying a relatively small leather bag. He felt naked going on an Op without body armor and without weapons of any kind, but this was par for the course for a spy mission behind enemy lines, and he would acquire these other items soon.

  Blake pulled a small plastic well from his right pocket, opened it, and considered the contact lens inside, floating in an unknown fluid. He fished out the small lens, carefully set it on the tip of his index finger, concave side up, and touched it gently to his cornea, where it remained.

  The tiny device was insanely impressive. He had practiced with it during the early stages of the flight and had quickly become adept at controlling its functions with simple voluntary blinks, which sensors inside could easily differentiate from the involuntary variety.

  Numerous companies were working on smart contact lenses that would do Google glasses one better—Google, Sony, Samsung, and a host of others. One version of such a lens had even been put on the market fairly recently, in 2023, but this one only had a rudimentary functionality. Not that it wasn’t a miracle of technology, but it was primitive next to the smart lens Blake was now wearing.

  Cargill had told him he had gotten his hands on this tech under the table, without going through proper channels and without going through his old boss, Hank Vargas, although he didn’t specify how he had managed this sleight of hand. Blake was beginning to appreciate the varied skills Cargill brought to the table more and more as time went on.

  The lens contained a nearly microscopic onboard computer and an invisible antenna, allowing it to connect to a peripheral device like a phone. In this case, since the kettles Blake was bringing with him in the cargo hold possessed supercomputer level processors, both his phone and contact lens connected to the outer kettle of the nested pair, which he had named K-1. Once the inner kettle—K-2—was sent back in time, his lens and phone would connect to this one, unless he specified otherwise.

  Along with an in-eye display and access to computer programs carried on the kettle’s supercomputer that were extraordinarily advanced, the lens could send pulses, invisible to the human eye, that would prevent video cameras from recording a clean shot of Blake’s face, and also allow him to see in the dark, using thermal imaging. Both capabilities were truly extraordinary.

  “Where have you been all of my life?” said Blake affectionately to the lens, blinking in such a way as to temporarily deactivate it until they were on the ground.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Only seconds later he felt a momentary jar as the wheels touched down, followed by a rapid deceleration.

  “We’ve landed on runway six of Beijing Cargo Transportation Station, sir,” said the pilot, unnecessarily. “We’ll be coming to a stop shortly.”

  “Thank you,” said Blake.

  He looked up the station on his phone. “Beijing’s Cargo Transportation Station,” he read, “undertakes warehousing, loading, delivery, transit, and land transportation for international and domestic air cargo. In addition to other types of cargo, the Station is capable of handling super-big and super-heavy loads, freezing, refrigeration, hazardous materials, live animals, valuables, and air mail.”

  Blake noted in amusement that time travel machines were absent from this list.

  Not anymore, he thought, as his smile vanished and he braced himself for the true beginning of his mission.

  15

  As planned, Blake was greeted by a man named Zhang Ping on the runway before moving on, alone, to a nearby inspection station. The inspection and approval of Blake’s passport and false papers went smoothly, as expected. Zhang had assured Cargill before the mission had begun that the inspector had been bought and paid for, threatened and rewarded both, and would rubber-stamp Blake’s arrival and onward trip even if he were Attila the Hun.

  Even so, he was relieved when he w
as finally waved on.

  Blake forced an appearance of relaxation as he supervised the transfer of his time travel devices to Zhang’s plane. Both nested kettles had shells of stainless steel. The inner kettle was identical to the outer, just a fraction smaller. Both contained two doors that opened in the middle, and both had been engraved with the words, Sub-Zero Commercial Refrigeration, Final Prototype.

  The Final Prototype part had been a nice touch on Cargill’s part. Had Blake flown all the way from America with what appeared to be a single commercial refrigerator in his cargo hold, and nothing else, this may have raised some eyebrows. But if this refrigeration unit was marked as an advanced prototype, such special treatment would be expected.

  The kettles had been designed to look just like actual Sub-Zero restaurant units, with the exception that refrigeration motors and coolant systems housed in a closed-off section on top had been replaced with whatever technology allowed for time travel, and an electric power system replaced by a connection to a power source the Sun would envy.

  The inside of the second kettle, the inner layer of the time travel onion, was large enough to fit four men inside, or, more importantly, one glorious North Korean leader sprawled out unconscious, even if said leader were to double in size.

  Both kettles also included a tiny, stainless steel video camera and mic, centered above the doors, blended to look like they were part of a design flourish. These would provide Blake a much-needed window on the outside world, especially important when he arrived at the palace inside K-2, since he would be deaf and blind otherwise.

  During the cargo transfer, Blake appeared as carefree as a tourist at the beach, but inwardly he was at full attention, prepared to issue a one-word code that his phone would transmit to detonate the kettles, which had been rigged with octa-nitro-cubane.

  This explosive was impossible to synthesize in the quantity needed. Q5 could only acquire enough for their needs by putting an infinitesimally small amount of it in a kettle and running it through billions of duplication cycles. This resulted in pushing back a local eddy of the universe forty-five millionths of a second, not once but billions of times. Even so, since the local reality reset each time, from the perspective of the universe and all observers this extensive duplication occurred without any time passing at all.

  The kettles contained less than a gram of octa-nitro-cubane, but this was enough to create an explosion that would obliterate them and take out a significant portion of the surrounding area. Importantly, this would also disrupt the kettles’ connections to the dark energy field, leaving no evidence that they had been anything but a Sub-Zero prototype—albeit one that would no longer be moving toward the market.

  Blake wasn’t an expert, but he had to believe that an appliance that could spontaneously explode and take out half a city block would not be highly valued by refrigerator connoisseurs.

  While Blake waited for his cargo to finish its short journey to Zhang’s plane, he passed the time testing out the advanced capabilities of his smart contact lens and phone. He blinked three times in succession to activate the lens’s translation feature, designed to allow him to read Chinese with flawless efficiency, and couldn’t help but grin as his eyes sought out Chinese signage at the airport. The system worked like a dream.

  The lens was now in constant communication with K-1, the outer kettle’s supercomputer, which converted any Chinese characters Blake spied into English with breathtaking speed. The lens then displayed the translated words in perfect clarity just beyond his retina.

  His phone could perform the same task with spoken words. When activated by a single touch, it would open a two-way connection to the kettle supercomputer, which would listen for the Chinese language, once again converting anything it heard into English and transmitting this to the comm in Blake’s ear.

  After twenty minutes of testing both systems, he marveled at the speed and precision of this technology. The translations, at least from Chinese to English, were nearly flawless, and the military translation software far surpassed any civilian efforts Blake was aware of. He knew enough about the severe challenges inherent in this type of flawless translation to be more impressed than most would have been.

  The hardware was one thing, but perfecting a program that could accurately translate complex ideas from one language to another, idiom included, was astonishingly difficult. Languages were hard. Even without idioms and adages, words had multiple meanings, and only an intimate knowledge of a culture and word-context, learned since birth, would allow full comprehension.

  One example of why perfect translation was so difficult was the phrase, time flies like an arrow . . . but fruit flies like a banana, which demonstrated just how many wildly different meanings a simple sentence might convey.

  What would a non-native speaker of English make of the five-word phrase, Time flies like an arrow? Did this mean that time moved quickly, like an arrow? Or was this advice to use a stopwatch to time flies, just like one would time an Olympic sprinter, or an arrow?

  Or was a “time fly” just another fly species, like the housefly? If so, did these time flies happen to harbor affection for arrows for some reason? And just how much did time flies like an arrow?

  What about fruit flies like a banana? Did this mean that all fruit, when thrown, flew through the air as a banana would? Or did members of the fruit fly species just happen to have an affection for the yellow fruit? Or did fruit flies like bananas only in the sense of wanting them on their personal dinner menus?

  Putting the two phrases together would probably melt the most accomplished translation computer ever created.

  Although of questionable veracity, additional urban legends of translation follies had become widespread, suggesting that using a computer to translate English phrases into other languages and then back again could yield ridiculous results. Out of sight, out of mind, could come back simply as blind idiot. Or maybe invisible insanity.

  The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak might come back as the alcohol is good, but the meat is rotten.

  Blake continued to experiment with his new toys until the nested kettles had been transferred to Zhang Ping’s jet, secured, and he was ready to board. The entire process, from landing to being ready to take off again, had taken just under an hour.

  16

  Junior Technician Yang Tan jumped as if he had been stung by a hornet. He shook his head to be sure he wasn’t dreaming and checked his monitor once again.

  Sure enough, the upper left corner of the screen was still flashing red and beeping noisily. He had just returned from lunch, but the monitor indicated this had been going on now for almost an hour. His initial shock subsided as he realized that this must be a glitch. The next test wasn’t scheduled for three more hours, so the odds of this being a real signal were probably one in a trillion—and that was on the conservative side. A SETI researcher would have been less shocked to receive a message from deep space saying, “We’re aliens from Tau Ceti and we’d like to pop over for a visit.”

  Yang checked the settings once again, and when these checked out he rebooted his computer. Yet the flashing and beeping remained.

  Yang was just an ant in an enormous colony, a sprawling campus at which China was trying to out-DARPA America, invest in breakthrough technologies of all kind, even those believed by most scientists to be decades away or so outlandish as to not be taken seriously. DARPA’s mission statement was “to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security,” and China had plagiarized this statement almost word for word.

  China’s Advanced Science and Technology Institute had been hastily constructed in 2021, twenty-five miles from Beijing’s city center, and only five miles away from Beijing Capital Airport. This airport proximity facilitated the rapid comings and goings of important members of the Chinese military, as well as Chinese scientific consultants working at labs throughout the country and around the world, and even the occasional Politburo member, underscoring the
facility’s importance to the future of China.

  But of all the wild science and technology projects being pursued here, Yang was a tiny cog in the most speculative wheel of all: one whose goal was to tap into dark energy.

  As expected, after two years of employing China’s best minds, the Institute’s Dark Energy Initiative, or DEI, had gotten exactly nowhere. Not a millimeter of progress had been made, and most scientists thought the project made less sense than one devoted to surpassing the speed of light. How could they tap into something they couldn’t measure and didn’t understand?

  The only breakthrough had come in the development of a sensor array, the size of a small home satellite dish, which the groups’ scientists believed would detect dark energy, confirming their success if they did somehow manage this impossible feat. Maybe. Again, not knowing precisely what they were dealing with, the array operated on theory and educated guesswork alone. They would never know for sure if it worked until they managed to tap into a local dark energy field, and if it didn’t work they would never know it.

  Still, it was the only tool they had. So they forged ahead and deluded themselves that the sensor array really would magically indicate if they had achieved their impossible goal. They tried one pie-in-the-sky experiment after another, sometimes several in a single day, each a wild-assed attempt to tap into the field, taking a page from Edison, who tried over a thousand filaments for a light bulb before finding one that worked.

  Perspiration over inspiration. And if there was one thing China could do well, it was perspiration. It was throwing ridiculous amounts of manpower at a problem for as long as it took to solve it.

  They tried using lasers in combination with magnetic fields, controlled explosions within chambers cooled to near absolute zero, exotic electromagnetic pulses, and endless other blind attempts to achieve their goal, each ending in failure. It was worse than shooting in the dark. They were blind men trying to locate a single off-color piece of hay in a haystack the size of Jupiter.