Casey looked at Frank. She was nervous, but also curious. “Cape Canaveral,” she finally said.
Nodding, Frank looked back at the globe and began to drag his fingers over it. As he did, the room around them seemed to disappear. The wide white walls began to take on blurry color that slowly changed into blurry shapes that finally sharpened until it appeared that the entire group was standing among the clouds high above Florida. The globe was a high-tech virtual reality machine.
Disoriented for a moment, Casey stumbled, throwing her arms out to try to keep her balance. As she did, the entire perspective changed. Her movements were acting like a mouse on a computer. Every time she moved, so did the image on “screen.” So did that mean…
“The interface is oriented to your hands and the center of your head,” Frank said, confirming what Casey had started to suspect.
With growing excitement, Casey pushed her arms down. In a flash, they were flying through the clouds and toward the ground. She smiled as she moved a hand and they leveled off right above the ground, shooting through backyards and over fences. It was like being inside a virtual map!
A few more movements and then Casey slowed their flight down as they entered her neighborhood, and finally, her house. In the kitchen, Casey’s mother was sitting with Nate. Their mouths were moving as they talked to each other, but no sound came out. It was like watching a movie on mute.
“What is this?” Casey asked after a moment. Her family clearly had no idea that she was somehow there watching them while at the same time not there.
“We’re millions of exponential deviances away from the dimension you know as home,” Nix explained. “Frank had the novel idea of building this machine so we could…keep in touch.”
“This is happening right now?” Casey asked, her mind reeling.
“It is. Relatively,” Nix said. Casey looked at him blankly and he sighed. “That’s space-time humor.”
Casey shrugged. Humor or not, that was pretty darn cool. She wondered what would happen if she touched the globe. Unable to stop herself, she reached out a finger and gently ran it backward along the globe.
Inside Casey’s house, day rapidly became night and then day again. She saw her family rushing around the house—all backward and at impossibly fast speeds. Casey smiled. It was amazing. And then her smile faded and she lifted her finger off the globe.
Sitting at the kitchen table, eating her cereal, was Casey herself. Her family bustled around her: Dad was on the phone; Mom was making lunches. It was the exact thing that had happened just three days earlier. In fact, it was three days earlier. “You can see backwards in time,” Casey finally said, the revelation exhilarating. Turning to Frank, she opened her mouth to begin asking the thousand questions racing through her mind. But his expression stopped her. He was staring at the image in front of them, his expression somber.
“Not just backwards,” he said softly.
“You’re kidding,” Casey said, not understanding why Frank seemed so upset by their ability to see the future. That was the most incredible thing she had ever heard. Just think of all they could see and know! That gave her an idea.
She pushed her hands forward and the group burst out of Casey’s house. They traveled over the ground at an incredible speed before Casey lifted her hands once more and they came to a stop in front of the launch platform. It looked exactly as it had last time Casey had seen it: half-dismantled and abandoned. But maybe…
She reached down to the orb, and that time, she rolled it forward, the way she used to roll the old world globe her father had in his office. Once again, the scene in front of them began to move rapidly through time—only now they were going forward, not backward. Days and nights passed; the sun was replaced with storms only to be replaced with more sun. On the platform, work crews flew through the disassembly of the entire thing, taking it apart piece by piece. Still, the sun kept rising and setting, rising and setting, zooming into the future. And then the whole image turned to static, like that of a TV losing its reception.
Casey lifted her finger off the globe, confused.
“Don’t stop,” Nix said, his green eyes cold. He knew that what was about to come next wasn’t good. But Casey needed to see it. They all needed to see it.
Taking a shaky breath, Casey put her hand back on the globe and gave it just a gentle nudge. All around them, the static began to clear, until finally, they were once again looking at the launch platform. But now the platform was completely dismantled, and the earth around where it had once been was scorched and dying. The sun was barely visible through dark, angry clouds. The whole place looked like a nuclear wasteland.
Casey’s heart began to beat faster as a horrible thought crept into her mind. Needing to see if she was right, Casey waved her hand again, zooming them up the coast. She stopped when they were above New York.
The scene was the same. New York City was in ruins. She saw skyscrapers submerged in murky water while others had toppled over onto each other like dominoes. Not one landmark was visible, not one avenue or street spared from the destruction. And above was the same horrible dark sky.
Casey shook her head. No, she thought. This can’t be! Her pulse racing, she waved her hand again, taking them to another city. But no matter where she took them, the scene was the same. The world was devastated. Torrential rainstorms slammed the deserts in Africa while sand storms whipped through what had once been the Dead Sea. Earthquakes rumbled, and lightning struck over and over again. It was the Apocalypse come to life.
Casey didn’t realize she was shaking until she felt Frank’s hand on her wrist. He slowly pulled her hand away from the globe. “That’s enough, kid,” he said gently.
“How?” Casey asked, not taking her eyes off the dark landscape.
“We don’t know, exactly,” Nix replied, his vague answer causing Casey to glare at him. “It could be anything from catastrophic climate change to nuclear war. Whatever the cause, it unleashes massive levels of radiation that cause enough interference to blind us for the three months leading up to the Inevitability.”
“The…‘Inevitability’?” Casey repeated, raising an eyebrow. She was getting awfully sick of not knowing what was going on.
Nix stepped forward, his eyes focused on the wasteland in front of him. “It wasn’t always like this,” he said. “At first, the Oracle only showed worldwide Armageddon one out of every ten times we took a look.”
He paused, letting his words sink in. Casey looked back at him, her head spinning.
“Time marched on, but whenever we glanced at the future, no matter what we did, the probability of Apocalypse increased,” Nix went on. “One out of every five views. Then fifty percent. Seventy percent. And finally, it was the only thing we saw. One hundred percent of the time.” He paused, the destruction behind him even more devastating as it became clear what he was about to say. “Scientifically, we call this a conclusive outcome. In layman’s terms? It is simply fate. Either way, it is certain.”
Casey’s mind raced a million miles an hour as Nix’s words sunk in. A part of her wanted to believe this was some horrible, cruel joke. But she knew that everything Nix had said was true. That left only one question. Turning to Frank, she softly asked, “When?”
There was no pointing trying to sugarcoat it. “Fifty-eight days from now,” he said.
Fifty-eight days? Casey thought. That was less than two months away! “Why aren’t you telling anyone?” she asked, whirling on Frank and Nix who were talking to each other in hushed voices. “The whole planet’s going to die and you’re just…sitting here?”
“Well, we’re not going to die,” Nix said, gesturing to the scene around him. “This is your world, not ours. We’ll be perfectly fine right here.”
Casey couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Why don’t you share it?” she asked, trying to make sense of the man’s heartlessness.
This time Frank answered for Nix. “Because he doesn’t want to,” Frank said.
Nix rolled his eyes. “Oh, Frank…three decades of exile and you haven’t come up with a new argument. If we had told them about this place, that”—he pointed over his shoulder at the destruction—“would happen here. To us. Then nothing would survive.”
Casey had thought of many scenarios of what would happen when she got to Tomorrowland. None of them had included discovering the day the world would end or finding out that everyone could be saved if not for one stubborn, egotistical man. “If you can’t change the future, why do you keep looking at it?” she asked.
“Because it is history, young lady,” Nix said condescendingly. “If we don’t observe it, we are doomed to repeat it.”
“But it hasn’t happened yet,” Casey argued.
Nix shook his head. “Actually, it has. You just haven’t accepted it.”
Rage filled Casey as Nix just stood there, smug and unconcerned. Humanity was not some experiment or lesson! He was talking about letting the entire world end. It was disgusting. “I don’t accept it!” Casey finally screamed, unable to leash her anger any longer.
Nix opened his mouth to tell her it was no use to have hope, but then it happened. The one thing he had never thought he would see. A flicker. A flash where the destruction disappeared and the dark sky turned blue. A moment of exactly what he thought was dead—hope.
Frank saw the same thing, and his eyes lit up. Next to him, Athena smiled. The only one who looked confused was Casey herself. She had seen what had happened but had no idea why it had or what it meant.
Turning, Frank looked at Nix and grinned. “Ha! See?” he exclaimed. Nix didn’t say anything, his face betraying nothing. “I know you saw that! What did I tell you? This means there’s a chance. This means we can…”
As Frank spoke, Nix reached into his jacket pocket and removed a tuning fork. Before either Casey or Athena could stop him, Nix tapped Frank on the forehead. A look of confusion crossed Frank’s face, followed by anger, and then his legs dropped out from underneath him and he passed out cold.
The next thing Frank knew, he was waking up in small room with an oversized door and a pounding headache. Casey and Athena sat against a wall. Neither of them looked particularly happy.
Seeing that Frank was back among the conscious, Casey stood up. “Oh, hi!” she said, falsely chipper. “Welcome back! Things are going just great!”
Her loud words made the pounding in Frank’s head intensify and he groaned. “What happened?” he asked groggily.
“What happened is Obnoxious British Genius Guy wasn’t buying what you were selling!” Casey informed him.
Frank turned to Athena, hoping for a slightly less teenage-angst filled answer. “You’re being deported,” she said matter-of-factly. “Again.”
“Well, that’s David Nix for ya,” Frank said, slumping his shoulders in what was clearly utter defeat. He had tried…and failed. Again.
Casey began pacing around the room, not interested in having a Frank pity party. She was far more interested in having a Casey pity part. “You know,” she said briskly, “you’d think somewhere in the zillions of questions I was asking, you could’ve said, ‘Well, Casey, that stuff’s not really the issue, because our future-predicting machine says we’re all gonna die!’”
“We did sort of hint at it,” Athena said.
Casey turned and glared at her. Now the robot wanted to use her snarky button? That was just priceless. Casey reached into her pocket, pulled out the pin, and held it up in front of Athena’s face. “Why did you give me this?” she asked. Athena didn’t respond, which only made Casey angrier. A few days earlier she hadn’t even known about Tomorrowland. She had been blissfully unaware, and while not over-the-moon happy with her life, she had been at least ignorant of the horrible future in store for mankind. And now? “You showed me a place that was amazing and incredible—and it was a lie. If you’re going to zap an idea into people’s heads, you should just make sure it’s the truth. You can’t just—”
Suddenly, Casey stopped talking, the fight draining from her body as a new thought began to form in the back of her mind. She blinked, images from the past few days flashing through her head.
She remembered that there had been a satellite dish at the TV station in Albany. And she remembered the Eiffel Tower, with its room full of futuristic mechanics, and the huge array of wires leading into and out of Frank’s house, all attached to TVs showing images of an Apocalypse yet to happen…
And then it all clicked into glorious place and a slow smile spread across Casey’s face. “You were pirating the signal. How?” she asked, focusing on Frank. He looked at her blankly. “At your house. All the TVs—your Doomsday Room?—you were boosting that feed from that Oracle thing, right? So how did you do it?”
Frank shook his head, not following Casey’s line of questioning. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “They’re running so much power through it now, a ham radio could pick it up. It’s just a matter of finding the right freq—” Frank stopped, his own words echoing back to him. Then he looked at Casey and smiled. He was beginning to get it.
She smiled back, happy to have him on board. “You grabbed a signal from another dimension. From a machine here. That means it’s transmitting there.” She paused, making sure Frank was still following. “What if it’s not just predicting the future…”
“It’s broadcasting it!” Frank finished.
Standing to one side, Athena grinned. It was all coming together, just as she had known it would.
Casey looked down at the pin in her hands. “I touched this thing, and for a few minutes I felt like I could do anything. It gave me hope. So why can’t the opposite happen? Maybe the Oracle is just a giant pin”—her voice lowered and she finished the sentence quietly, almost to herself—“convincing the world to feed the wrong wolf?”
Frank and Athena didn’t say a word, letting Casey follow her idea to its conclusion. Her eyes blazed as what they needed to do finally became crystal clear. Looking at them, she took a deep breath, and then…“We need to turn that thing off,” she said, her voice ringing with certainty.
There was a long pause, and for a moment, Casey wondered if she had gone too far. But then Frank turned to Athena, his eyes shining with emotion. “It’s her, isn’t it?” he asked.
Athena smiled. “She’s half of it,” she answered. Frank was as much a part of the solution as Casey. He was the push she had needed and the reason she was there in the first place.
Unfortunately, it was at that particularly wonderful moment when the door opened and three armed guards entered the room.
NIGHT HAD fallen over Tomorrowland as Casey, Frank, and Athena were escorted toward one of the Bridgeway gates. Nearby, blue energy crackled and sparked around the tower and sphere, both beautiful and ominous.
Reaching their destination, the guards jerked the trio to a stop. David Nix stood in front of a large control panel. Behind him, one of the massive gates loomed, dark and silent. But then Nix pushed a series of buttons and the gate began to hum and glow. A moment later a sandy beach leading into turquoise water appeared on the other side.
“It’s uninhabited and uncharted,” Nix said, gesturing to the portal. “I don’t think rescue is likely in the next two months, but it should be a nice place to spend your last days.”
The guards pushed the group closer to the portal. Frank and Casey struggled, shouting with each step, trying to tell Nix what they had figured out. “The Oracle is acting as an antenna!” Frank called over his shoulder. “It’s not just receiving tachyons, it’s taking a possible future and…” One of the guards shoved Frank hard and he stumbled.
But Casey kept going. “Transmitting it,” she explained. “Amplifying it like a feedback loop…”
“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy all coming from right there!” Frank finished, pointing up at the tower. He was rewarded with another shove from the guard.
“That thing isn’t just showing us the end of the world…it’s giving us the idea!” Casey
cried, pleading with Nix. “You need to turn it off.” She, too, was rewarded by a hard shove from the guard. A few more feet and they would be pushed right through the gate and onto some deserted island in the middle of God knew what sea.
“Wait.”
Nix’s voice stopped the guards. They looked at him, waiting to see what would happen next. So did Frank, Athena, and Casey. Had Nix actually heard what they had to say and understood it? Seen that there was a solution? A way to avoid the inevitable? Did he, perhaps, care?
He didn’t. He just couldn’t stand not to be a know-it-all. Even then. “Young lady,” he said condescendingly, “despite your delightful precociousness, I am going to assume you don’t have a working knowledge of tachyonic fusion, so allow me to put this in terms you might understand.” He paused. “‘Turning it off’ would permanently shut down this entire city. Every system. Every project. All of it runs through this tower. Do you really think I’m going to set us back to the Dark Ages on the whim of an adolescent?”
His words struck Casey like a slap to the face. It wasn’t a whim. “I don’t get it,” she finally said. “I don’t get why you’d even bring me up there and explain everything in the first place! I’m telling you what it’s doing—I know what it’s doing. Why don’t you care?”
Nix just looked at Casey, unmoved by her impassioned plea. Frank, on the other hand, looked at Nix. He stared at the man who had once been his mentor and had since become his enemy. A genius with the power to do so much good. A man who had helped make this world beautiful once. And as Frank stared at Nix, it suddenly became sickeningly clear to him why Nix didn’t care. There was only one reason the man would let things unfold as they were unfolding: he had put it all in motion.
“He’s the one doing it,” Frank finally said, answering Casey’s question.
Nix turned and looked at Frank. He didn’t look sorry. He didn’t look upset. Because he wasn’t. “Let’s imagine,” he said, speaking to all three of his “guests.” “If you glimpsed the future and were frightened by what you saw, what would you do with that information? Go to who? Politicians? Captains of industry? How would you convince them? With data? Facts?” Nix shook his head. “They’ll debunk you. But what if you could just skip the middleman and go straight into everyone’s head?” As Nix spoke, his voice grew more measured, more even, as though he was repeating an argument he had had in his head ten thousand times over. “The probability of widespread annihilation kept going up. The only way to stop it was to show it to them. What reasonable human being wouldn’t be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they had ever known or loved?”
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