Chapter 1

James Marlow began as a promising physics grad student and that was really all he had going for him ... At six feet in height on his twenty-fourth birthday not even his blond hair and blue eyes helped him get any girls, even though someone would have thought the girls would be throwing themselves at him.

Truthfully James had only one thing wrong with his appearance. When you looked at him your mind screamed NERD. As such his sex life sucked. Not that he had time for a sex life while working on his degree.

Sure he may have been able to get laid in college. After all you go to a few parties, have a few drinks. The next thing you know you wake up with some girl you don't know, much less remember how it was, or for that matter if it was.

Because he had his nose buried in the books most of his time he also suffered from a case of terminal shyness. So as soon as he did wake up with a girl, he would panic and forget how to ask for a repeat performance. Then again the few girls he did wake up with didn't seem to remember anything either. In James' mind that probably meant he was too drunk to perform. And since he never remembered anything he still considered himself a virgin.

James was working on his doctoral thesis utilizing the new micro collider technology. He had identified a quirky little particle whose behavior was a bit odd. Well ... odd was a bit of an understatement. You see ever since the development of the micro collider when James was still a high school student, more and more discoveries in particle physics were taking place daily.

What once took a mile of magnetic pathways and tons of electricity to research could now be done at any university with a device no bigger then portable dishwasher. Granted these units still cost a million dollars a copy, but even at that price every college in the country that wanted one, now had one. What with the reduced cost, research now took place all over the country. It definitely made James' research easier.

James had stumbled around for months trying to identify his discovery. The particle was easy for him to recreate with regularity. However its behavior varied for no apparent reason. James was sure that the sometimes light producing particle could be identified, once he understood why it sometimes produced light and sometimes did not.

To that end James had decided to hook up a high-speed video camera rather then the standard still camera. He wanted to record the process from beginning to end. When he collided the catalyst particles together, this strange little circular squiggle would appear. No other catalyst element he had tried resulted in the squiggle showing up. It also explained why no one else in the field was reporting this anomaly. James figured that it was just because most researchers were done with heavier elements. After all why would anyone use hydrogen? It was the lightest and smallest on the periodic table.

James began the mini colluder run with the camera. When the two atoms collided together, he was pleased to see that the particle was producing light. His surprise was to come when he viewed the recording in ultra slow motion.

You can just imagine his mouth hitting the floor as he viewed the screen. What he saw in the image was a view of beachfront property, complete with topless female sunbathers. When he replayed the tape, sure enough he was able to freeze frame the image. James didn't understand what had happened.

He ran the experiment twenty more times, each time seeing a different view captured on the screen. He couldn't explain it, and knew better then to tell anyone about it. He had made that mistake with a different particle he discovered, only to have the professor scoop him on it and take the credit. What ever was happening, James was sure it was Nobel Prize material. Not only would he earn his doctorate, but winning a million straight out of college was sure to be one giant boost to his future. If only he had known then, what he now knew at seventy-two years of age.

It had taken James three months to figure out that the mini-collider was actually creating a micro-wormhole. The random images were the result of the pinhole affect created by the iris on a camera. The fact was, all you needed was a pin-sized hole and you could image anything given the correct conditions.

Once James understood what was going on and what he had truly discovered he was able to work out controlling the behavior of the reaction. By careful manipulation of the chamber's magnetic field James was able to steer the micro-wormhole. After another three months, he had worked out how to control the viewpoint to be anywhere he wanted to steer it. He could view the Eiffel tower or the Grand Canyon at will. By creating a constant stream of collisions he could maintain a stable view of an area.

One day James spent a half hour with the micro-worm whole imaging the girl's shower area in a college half way around the globe. It was odd that the erection in his pants was not caused by the image as much as his sense of accomplishment.

James decided to publish his findings, not just as his doctoral thesis but also in the magazine Physics Today. In a sense he was using the magazine to keep anyone else from claiming credit. James had no idea that one of the magazine's editors was a former CIA operative until a few government types showed up and seized everything he was working on. After his professor blew a gasket or two, James was given a chance to defend his thesis before a classified board, was awarded his doctoral degree and drafted into a six-figure-a-year job, working for the CIA's department of espionage. Because of his little discovery James had spent the last forty-eight years of his life, stuck working in areas of which he disapproved.

So now, at the age of seventy-two, Dr. James Marlow was still in good heath all things considered. He had spent his life working for the CIA after they drafted him into their ranks. A detail that had always bothered James, even if there was nothing he could reasonably do about it. He still regretted that he had been so open with his research in micro-particle physics.

Actually, the CIA took notice of him after he received a scholarship. It was a scholarship that he had earned for his insightful work on his high school science project. All thanks to another young science student's discovery.

The development of the mini-collider had enabled him to study the affects of particle physics long before he finished high school. This led him, in his college years, to the discovery of the micro-wormhole particle.

The micro-wormhole was the ultimate spy device. It didn't take long for the CIA to classify his discovery. Within the CIA, at least, he was known as the father of the micro-wormhole. It was just one of his many regrets because he should have gotten a Nobel Prize by age twenty-five for his work. Instead his work was so classified that not even the president of the country knew about it. He never cared much for the use of his discovery for spying, except of course when he would tune into a girl's locker room, somewhere. There were so many other applications that it could have been used for. James always regretted not being able to expand his research into the areas his mind wanted to take him. Of those areas most would have made life better for mankind. Instead however James found his CIA handlers directing his work into areas he despised.

For example the last ten years he had been forced to pursue making his discover into a weapon. Work that disgusted him so much that when he accidentally discovered a way to use the wormhole technology to view into the past, he withheld it from everyone but his closest colleague.

That colleague of the last ten years had become his best friend. Even though James had never married or had any real relationship in his lifetime, his best friend was now actually making him question his very sexual orientation. Despite his feeling for Chris, he never acted on them.

Dr. Chris Weston was in fair heath for a 71-year-old man. Actually that is not technically correct. Chris was actually a gender altered individual. Chris had started his life as a girl, however after fighting to be recognized for her accomplishments and the frustration of being ignored in her field. She had chosen to be surgically altered. She'd had a sex change at twenty-seven years of age, purely for her career enhancement.

It was also a very closely guarded secret. So much so, in fact, that even her best friend James didn't know about it anymore than did the CIA. Though Chris often wondered why someone in the organization hadn't pulled his clearance for it already. After all, it was a blatant breach of protocol for him not to disclose it. Unlike James, Chris received his first Nobel Prize at age thirty-eight, for his work creating the AI intelligent computer. He was the father of the flash memory cyber-transfer technology that was now making androids reality. Chris had received his second Nobel Prize at forty-five, in medicine: flash memory repair for brain trauma cases.

Now Chris found himself forced into the CIA's black book project for the last ten years. The CIA wanted not only a flash memory spy device, but also a weapon that would let them strike a victim with out having to kill them directly. There was a way to use the flash memory technology as a weapon, even if it made the good doctor's stomach churn. Until Chris was introduced to James' discovery, even he did not think it was possible to do what the government wanted. Now however, it was only a matter of time before the two would make it happen.

Chris and James had been working together for over ten years. They both were working well after retirement age, because the CIA wouldn't let them retire. Both men were certain that the only way they would retire, would be in a pine box.

The CIA never let people go at this level. You worked until you dropped or you dropped shortly after you stopped working. After all, the two of them were bigger security risks then the president of the United States. They both had knowledge that could cripple the country politically, to say nothing of the havoc that would spread around the world in the aftermath. Both men figured that they would have been dead long ago if they weren't still so useful to the Company.

During the last ten years the two had grown into the best of friends. They even took their vacations together. Of coarse that was convenient for the CIA shadows that watched over them. Besides they could only go to approved special locations in the first place. Despite the restrictions placed on them by their government, the vacations were always first class. There were some perks for working for the CIA after all.

The other thing the two men managed to do was hide all kinds of progress from their superiors. They were delaying manly to keep themselves alive, but also to keep the potential weapon out of the hands of the government. Just imagine the government being able to flash the combined memories of criminally insane individuals into another person. It would result in a complete and permanent mental break down for the victim, at the very least. At most, the victim would commit suicide.

Both men had seen the CIA's reports on lab testing. And both had been thoroughly disgusted with it. Chris felt betrayed by his government the most. After all, it was his flash memory transfer procedures that had been corrupted by them. In many ways, he wished he had never developed it.

Since both men were working in the secure environment at the facility. They were the only two people allowed access to the R&D room besides the project director and a highly cleared Janitor they had come to know well. So secure was the room that even the wormhole spy cam could not see inside it. Powerful electro magnetic shielding prevented this. So strong was it, that it had to be shut off for research testing to be done inside the room.

That was until James figured out how to phase the wormhole frequencies with the shielding. This fact was reported of course, and proved to be an annoyance to their superiors. However, they were also pleased that no one in their organization could spy on the developmental work taking place. The CIA is a paranoid bunch after all. Besides it was rumored that one operator had sold the technology to the Chinese. A rumor that was probably true given that the Chinese military took control of all the micro-colliers in that country.

That being the case, there was a very real risk that the spy cam could be used to spy on the very developers that created it. So the spy free environment in which they worked was approved in the end. This fact allowed the two of them to hide their breakthroughs in research from the very people that were paying for it. Oh, the two slowly disseminated information on the new discoveries that took place, just not the ones that would prove to be deadly.

However, the light speed or real time communications capabilities had real practical applications to the ISA (International Space Agency). Not that the US government was volunteering that such things were possible. If it weren't for the fact that their supervisors saw the practicality of breakthroughs of this type, they would have had to work under a much more structured setting that wouldn't have allowed James to expand the true uses of his discovery.

James was speaking into the recorder, "Test number 5482, we are attempting to lengthen the micro-wormhole and collapse the length upon itself, in an attempt to widen the inner diameter of the wormhole. Began test."

Both men watched the view screen hooked to the end of the Micro-wormhole generator. It was basically a miniature super collider used to create 'the little beasties', as the two men now called them.

"So is that really the surface of Io we are looking at?" Chris asked.

James checked the readout's and responded, "Twenty-one minutes of lag time, so we are seeing something that will take light twenty-one minutes to reach earth. I am impressed."

"So am I. So let's collapse it." Chris said.

James selected the software routine on the AI computer system, and watched as the screen seemed to fall back onto itself. Chris was checking the readouts. "Looks like that did it! The diameter inside the wormhole shows it to now be one hundred twenty angstroms in width. Congratulations, that's enough to give them what they want."

The view on the screen changed to the inside of their lab. Both men were seated before the display in the image.