Teenage Mutant Ninja Torpedoes
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Mac was back at work in two days. She had a quiet conversation with Tiny, the retired soldier/giant bouncer she had hired who just happened to have contacts within the British Army's Special Forces. He listened to her, said "No problem," and the next day he handed her a somewhat bulky package. Mac was off work again the next day.
Mac's routine changed slightly after that. Once a week, she'd go to the roof of the building opposite Pug's flat and download the data from the bug that she had put in his flat. And every morning, she'd check the batteries in the little device that was always in her jacket's breast pocket – the device that would warn her if the gun that Pug normally kept inside his top bureau drawer was within a mile of her location.
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Chapter 12
From Will's journals: Early July.
When I had first created the slings, I had structured the filament's electronics into two dimensions. One dimension controlled a gravitational field, and the other controlled a magnetic field. At the time, I knew that a third dimension was available if I ever wanted to use it. Then I had forgotten all about it until I found myself with nothing to do in Franklin's prison cell. I spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen if I added a third dimension to the filaments. I'm reasonably sure that it will give the slings a time-travel function.
I have a good reason to add a time-travel function to the slings now. Wolf is falling apart in front of us. It's been three months since Mac left and even I can see that he hasn't gotten over it. When we were having our picnic in the meadow, and everyone was having a good time, Wolf was half asleep on a blanket. He does his Wilizy work without fail, but he's not enjoying it the way he used to. He's away every weekend but won't tell anyone what he's doing.
Mac had warned that asking her friends or relatives about her could prove to be dangerous for them and for her. So I wasn't going to do that. All I was going to do was go back in time to when she left the compound and follow her. When I learned where she was now, I'd ask her to come back. I'd tell her that we'd fix whatever it was that needed fixing. I figure if I told her how badly Wolf missed her, she'd come back. It might take me a week to get the time-travel machine working; then, one or two more days to find her.
But I had a problem. That problem was Izzy. No way would Izzy agree to me doing this. She'd argue that time-travelling was dangerous. I'd do something in the past that could cause the present as we know it to change. Perhaps catastrophically.
I didn't know if such catastrophic change was possible or likely. In a worst-case scenario, could you go back in time and accidentally kill yourself as an infant? That would be impossible. You wouldn't be alive, so how could you go back in time to kill yourself? Another catastrophe might occur if you went back in time, and your past self saw your future self. Would that change your past self's behaviour so that his future was changed? There were endless possibilities of theoretical catastrophes, I'm sure.
But these catastrophes weren't going to apply to my time-travel excursions. I am just going to follow Mac. I will be invisible the whole time. How can an invisible person who does nothing in the past affect his present self?
Will the knowledge I gain affect the future? You bet it will. If I find that Mac was forced to leave against her wishes, and that she really wanted to be with us, then I will try and fix it so that she can be with us.
Why would that be wrong? People make decisions in the present that will affect the future all the time. When we formed the Wilizy, we were making a decision that would affect the future. We made that decision deliberately. All I will be doing is using a time-travel trip into the past to solve a problem in the present. Very much like reading a scientific study that someone wrote in the past that will give me enough data to solve a problem in the present.
But as much as I'm confident that there'll be no risk, that won't change the situation with Izzy. She's not going to agree. Not without a major fight that could take weeks for her to get over. I've been through this I'm not going to talk to you reaction before. The most recent experience was a month ago when I stood up for myself about how a meeting should be run. We argued the night before; then we bickered about science versus strategy in front of everyone; then she stopped talking to me. She's so used to telling me what to do that she can't stop bossing me around. She's not bossy when I make my scientific inventions because she doesn't know what I'm doing. For example, she didn't tell me that I couldn't introduce the new slings with a magic show, because I deliberately didn't tell her what I was going to do. Why should I? I don't need her permission. So the easy solution to researching a time-travel function against her likely objections just jumps out at me. I won't tell her what I'm doing.
# # # # # # # #
I started my research into adding TiTr capacity to the sling by watching the three movies in the Back to the Future trilogy. I didn't view these film relics for their science. After all, no scientific data exist on time-travel. But science fiction novels and films treat the concept as possible, provided you have Doc Brown's flux capacitor or some other fabricated science.
I, on the other hand, am not a character in a science fiction series. I have real science in my filaments and I am confident that adding a third dimension to the sling's grid will produce the desired effects. But researching Back to the Future allowed me to identify the perils that might face a prospective time-traveler. Causing interruptions in Doc Brown's space-time continuum, for example. Or doing something in the past that would change what was happening in 2083. After considerable thought, I believe that remaining invisible and doing nothing while I'm in the past should take care of that.
Adding a third filament dimension to my test sling took less than a minute. I flew around a bit, tested the weaponry, flicked in and out of visibility, turned the gravitational field on and off, and turned the magnetic field on and off. Everything was normal.
One of the risks that had been raised in the Back to the Future trilogy was the potential danger of flying years into the future from a nice empty space, and then returning to that same space in the present. But what would happen if your take off spot weren’t empty an empty space any longer? What if it were now occupied by a solar powered tractor? Would you reappear under the tractor? On top of it? Or inside of it? What if you landed on yourself when you were time-traveling? I didn't know the answer to these questions and didn't want to find out. Trying to occupy a physical space that was already occupied probably would be fatal. I had an easy solution to these risks. I'd always start a time-travel trip from an empty sky and I'd return to a different location in that empty sky. Invisibly, of course, so when I disappeared or reappeared, nobody would notice it.
Our little river valley is isolated so I decided to take my first TiTr from a sandbar in the middle of our river several klicks downstream of our compound. If by some odd chance the TiTr function blew all the electronics in my sling, I'd only have a short walk back to camp. I was going to take off from one meter above the downstream end of the sandbar and travel into the future for one minute. After I emerged in the future, I would relocate to one meter above the upstream end of the sandbar, and return to the time that I had left plus a few seconds. Why only one meter high? If something went wrong, I could survive a one-meter fall onto a sandbar.
I pulled up the time function on my pinky ring computer. I needed an easy to remember start time. It was slightly after 1 p.m. I'd wait until it was exactly 1:11 and then go. I must admit that I was a little nervous as the seconds clicked by. I reminded myself that I should use a tiny bit of energy on the time-travel filaments as I only wanted to go one minute forward. The last few seconds clicked by and I sent the mental command to activate the third dimension at exactly 1:11.
My next coherent thought was Oops.
# # # # # # # #
By the time that I managed to stop the sling's travel into the future, it was 1:35. Twenty-four minutes is not a one-minute trip. I had become confused, and then flustered, and..
.well, call it a mess. Still I was safe, and I was confident that I could get back to about the same time that I left. As to returning precisely at 1:11, that could be iffy.
I had been expecting to have an easy ride into the future, just like I would if I were traveling a couple of klicks in real time. I'd keep an eye on the pinky ring clock and when it reached 1:12, I'd deactivate the third dimension. It didn't turn out that way at all.
First: The sling was bucking and sliding around in the sky the whole time. Also I was flying into some sort of particle storm. Some particles would miss the sling, but some were coming right at my face. I found myself ducking my head and shielding myself the whole time. It was quite disorienting and in the onslaught, I had forgotten to keep my eye on my pinky ring.
Second: That twenty-four minutes of real time went by very quickly in TiTr mode.
Third: I didn't know how much velocity I had given the TiTr filaments. I had released a tiny amount of energy and we had bolted into the future. I needed to find a way to control the velocity of the TiTr function. It would mean calibrating desired time passage against filament energy flow. This I could do easily. It would take a day or two to calculate the underlying math, but it was just math. I'd devise an input device on the sling functions where I could enter the date and time that I wanted to land in and a computer would do the rest. Just like Doc Brown had.
Fourth: Right now, I was in the future and I had to get back to when I left. I didn't know if I could return at exactly 1:11. I had twenty-four minutes to travel with an energy source that I couldn't control very well and facing flying particles the whole time. I could nudge the sling back into the past a tiny bit at a time, but I didn't have the necessary fine-tuning on the filaments that I would need to hit a precise landing time. What would happen if I arrived before I left? Two of me would be above that sandbar at the same time. Would we both blow up?
I remembered that in the third chapter of the trilogy, Marty had returned to 1955 and had seen himself performing on stage. The two Marty bodies didn't blow up. Plus at the end of the story, he had returned to his real present, but not at the exact time that he had left. Then I caught myself. I was basing decisions about how I was going to return to my present on what some fiction writer thought was time-travel? How stupid is that? I smacked myself in the head and tried to think logically.
Why did I have to return to exactly 1:11? I could understand having to be back in the present at an exact time if I had to meet someone at 1:12, for example. But I was away from the camp and nobody was expecting me. How would it hurt me personally, or how would it affect my present, if I arrived at 1:15? I would miss four minutes of my life in that present world. That's all.
What if I arrived early? At 1:05, for example. That could be a bit of a problem. Two versions of me would be in that present world for six minutes. But one version of me would be hovering over the downstream end of the sandbar, and the other version of me would be at the upstream end. Even if one of us looked sideways, he had nothing to see. Both of us would be invisible. The first version of me would be ignorant of what was going to happen to him; the second version of me certainly wasn't going to tell him.
So I shifted location on the sandbar, tried to protect myself from the particle storm by placing my arms in front of my face – the pinky ring clock clearly visible. I flew backwards in time, landed at 1:05, waited in that time until my pinky ring said 1:12, and turned everything off. The present seemed normal. I did have a slight itching around my face, but thought nothing of it. TiTr was possible. I had proven it. Now I had to figure out how to do it more safely.
Back in the compound, I went into the bathroom in our house right away. My face was very itchy now and I wanted to see why. I checked the mirror. No wonder it was itchy. My face was all red. My hands were too. Izzy came in right then, noticed me looking at myself, and said, "Whoa. How'd you get that sunburn?"
"Fell asleep in the sun," I replied.
"Huh," she said. "I have some skin cream in my drawer." Then she left.
I remember confessing to Izzy back when we first met that I didn't know how to lie. However I think I pulled this lie off. I didn't hesitate or anything. I didn't feel good about lying to Izzy, but it didn't do any harm. I decided to disappear into my workroom for a couple of days so that I didn't have to answer any questions about my face. I had a lot of calibrating to do. First thing I did was make a note that I must ensure that the baffles were shut as tight as possible whenever I TiTr 'd. I don't know what was hitting me in the face for the minute or two that I had been TiTr'ing, but I wouldn't want to see my face after a trip of several hours.
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Chapter 13
From Will's journals: Early July.
It took three days to prepare for the next experiment. I now had a control unit ready to test. If I wanted to travel into the future, I would enter the time in hours, minutes, and seconds that I wanted to leave as 18:25:14, for example. I'd also enter the desired stop time, for example 18:30:14 giving me a trip of five minutes into the future. The sling would activate at the start time, and the clock would show the progression of the sling into the future. The sling's TiTr function would stop automatically at the designated time. I hadn't tried to make an input device for more than one day forward or back; however, that would be easy enough and it could wait until I had completed all of the tests.
I also had designed a fine control mechanism on the filament energy. In the experiment I was going to run today, I was going to program an empty visible sling to go fifteen minutes into the future. I wasn't going to ride in the sling this time. I'd wait fifteen minutes for the sling to appear and then look inside to see what had happened. That particle storm that I had traveled through? I wasn't going to expose my body to it again. Not only was my face burnt, but I had also discovered tiny red marks all over the front of my body. When I examined the clothes that I had been wearing, I saw tiny pinholes in the cloth. This time, I'd load up the interior of the sling with electronic and physical sensors.
The sling appeared at the exact second it was supposed to. It did so with a bang. I mean a real live, loud bang! Loud enough to be heard for kilometers. That was going to be a problem, but I could deal with it by starting and ending my trips in desolate areas. Once I arrived in the time period I wanted, I would sling to where I wanted to be.
I had placed a ripe tomato in the sling next to a raw potato. The tomato was now pulp. The potato was warm to the touch. This was going to be a severe problem. I wasn't particularly keen to have my body reduced to pulp.
My motion sensors recorded a very bumpy ride. But the sensors I had used to measure the particle storm showed nothing. The tomato told me otherwise. I had some ideas for other experiments that I could run, but not today and not here. One sonic boom would be hard enough to explain. I prepared my lie ahead of time. The bang came from a drone that I had been testing and my speed controls hadn't been accurate enough. I'd have it ready for anyone who asked. If anyone mentioned that they had heard two similar bangs three days ago, I'd say that I hadn't heard them. That was true. I hadn't.
This was exactly the kind of incident that I had to avoid – an event from my time-travel experiments that could affect the future in ways we didn't want. For example: Izzy hears a sonic boom, suspects that the Alaskans had been spying on us, and does something that she never would have done otherwise. I figured the lie about a drone would prevent that. But I really do have to be more careful with my experiments. Will there be more surprises that I couldn't have anticipated? Perhaps. That means I can't run any more experiments in this river valley. I can't run any more experiments at all if I can't solve the particle storm problem.
# # # # # # # #
One of the projects on my to do list was to find out what The Citadel's planes were made of. We had spare parts for those planes stored in the prison. I had been planning on determining their composition so that we'd have a better idea what weaponry we'd need to shoot
their planes down. Now I wondered whether this kind of metal would serve as a barrier to the particle storms. With two possible benefits for the trip, it made sense to go down to Stanford. I grabbed a sampling of crates containing their shiny metal, loaded them onto several filament pallets, grabbed some food, told the group what I'd be doing (at least in part), and headed south. Winnie asked if she could come too, but I couldn't take the chance of her seeing my experiments and so had told her that I'd take her another time.
I hadn't told a real lie. I was going to determine the composition of the panels and that would help us in any war with The Citadel. But I was mostly going to Stanford to work on my TiTr project so that I could help Wolf.
I now knew what Wolf was doing on weekends because I had asked him. Wolf had learned that Mac had flown from Newfoundland to somewhere in Britain and he hadn't broken any of Mac's rules to find that out. After Doc had dropped the hint that St. John's was very close to Britain, Wolf had visited the copter supply businesses in the city. He asked them if their copters could make it that far. One owner reassured him that they could. In fact, one young woman had bought a copter for that exact purpose two days ago.
Wolf's plan was to sling into a city in Britain and walk up and down its streets, hoping to get a sense if Mac were near. He had said with all of the special powers floating around in his family, surely he had one too. Perhaps his power would be sensing where Mac had been.
Wolf had spent April and May searching the major cities of Scotland, which is where he had thought she'd hide. He was working his way through Northern England now. I asked him if he ever got discouraged. "We're destined to be together," he told me. "Something is going to happen that will bring us together. I can feel it." If I could make a safe time-travel machine, I figured I could be the something that happened.
Alaska's metal wings gave up their secret easily enough to Stanford's equipment. I found a significant presence of titanium. That was why the metal was so light and why solar power was enough to fly the Alaskan planes at high speed. Titanium is also resistant to salt water corrosion, which is why the Alaskans didn't mind their airplanes landing in the sea during their drills. I learned that other metals had been incorporated into the panels as well – aluminum being one, but once I knew about the titanium, I had everything I needed. Melting point, for example. I didn't let my hopes get up too high though. I started reading through Stanford's library looking to see how the metal had been used before the oil collapse. I found what I was looking for soon enough. Titanium had been used in American and Russian spacecraft. That meant that it had to be resistant to solar flares and other forms of space particles. Would those be the same particles as I had encountered in my time-travel?