Chapter 1

OK, he admitted. He was showing off for his girlfriend and her roommate. Not every budding scientist was working on a secret government project and even fewer had a drop dead gorgeous fiancée. Not one in a million had top-level clearance. He was a beyond lucky guy who had his fiancée and her roommate working in the same lab complex.

“You are not going to believe this! Dr. Malincroft asked me, in his non-verbal way, to let him stash his lab rats here while he went to lunch yesterday. He just blew in, put the cage on the field coil housing and walked away, absent-minded as usual.”

“That’s not news. Kevin. He lives in his own world. He’s lucky we work in the middle of nowhere or he would get run over in traffic.” Marly said. (Did he tell you his girl’s name was Marlette? Flawless English with a cute French accent he adored.) “So what’s the big deal?”

“The big deal was he closed the door five seconds before the autotimer went off energizing the field coil. There was no time to do an orderly shutdown. The capacitors were fully charged. I chose to risk the rats rather than blow up the equipment. I was safe enough in the control room, behind the blast glass. The recorders were running so if the rats died, it was his fault.”

“Did the little mouses accelerate to light speed with the protons in the field?” René, Marly’s roommate and lab partner asked.

“I have no real idea. They disappeared for twenty minutes after I got the coil turned off.” Kevin answered. Actually, his arcane theory had been confirmed. “They were still alive when they popped back into existence here. So whatever happened, it passed the organic living being test.”

Marly zeroed in. “Maybe that is a big deal. Where did they go or did they get shoved forward in time?”

“Odd that you should mention ‘time’, Sweety. René, I think this might partially confirm the rumors you’ve been hearing. None of us is allowed to see the real goals here. We all are working on a single piece of something huge. The unnamed agency bankrolling our lab isn’t telling anyone the whole story.”

“Can you say ‘conspiracy theory’, class?” Snark from Marly. Jeez.

“Hush, ye of little faith. This ‘field generator’ seemed to be more than a way to push particles in a circle. Why did the mice disappear? I think I know how, but not why.” Kevin explained. “The cage is made of a cobalt-iron-copper alloy. Woven into a mesh, it must have attenuated, enhanced or been affected by the field effect.”

“Now that you have us in your lair, what is the surprise demonstration?” Marly quizzed.

“Mwahaha, my dearies. The Mad Scientist ‘borrowed’ a rabbit in a larger cage from Malincroft’s lab assistant. Allow me to place the subject rodent on the coil housing and accompany me into the safety of the control room.”

He could hear the raised eyebrows as they women followed him in. “I’ve preset the start timer for a one minute delay. It will initiate an orderly shutdown after ten minutes. We can then begin to extrapolate the ‘away’ time of our volunteer rodent. There is a windup watch in the cage, affixed to the rabbit.”

Kevin pressed the ‘go’ button’. “Here goes the big deal.”

“You are hoping the contents of the cage, not just the organics, are influenced by the mystery effect.” René asked, “What happens if there is a mash-up between the two?”

“We have a rabbit who can tell time, a rabbit whose time has run out or the world comes to an untimely end. But to avoid the attention of the Bunny Liberation Front, we hope a fourth option presents: both the rabbit and the watch return unharmed, still synched with the timer in the control room, but missing time.”

The last seconds counted down and the rabbit vanished. The watch clattered to the cage. “So much for inorganic material.” Marly unnecessarily observed. “You sure know how to show a couple of girls a good time, mister. Now we wait for the coil to do its thing. Whatever that might be.”

“Uh, girls. Check the monitor.” He zoomed in. “The watch is running backwards. It will stop soon. No way to wind it. The recorders are catching this. Things inside the cage seem to stay connected somehow wherever they are.”

“Or whenever.” René said. “We have eight minutes to go. Is the subject going to return before we sent it?”

On the video, they could see that approximately six hours regressed for every minute lapsed on the tape.

“Something changed. My mouse appeared after I turned the device off. Our might-be-a time machine sent it forward. If the rabbit reappears 60 hours ago, it creates a paradox. How can it return before we sent it?” Kevin figured. “We have four minutes to work this out or our ‘world coming to an untimely end’ option comes to the top of the list.”

Thinking furiously, Marly suggested, “Can you reverse the field polarity before the timer begins the shutdown? Then override the timer to bring the bunny back?”

“Theoretically, but there never was a reason to do a simulation. I never simulated any of this.” He opened a service panel and exclaimed, “Planck’s skateboard! The rabbit is running backwards because some clown already did.”

“I disengaged the timer, dear. Our only gauge is the video time stamp. Your turn to look in Schrödinger’s box. Flip the switch. We’re either dead or not.” She said as her accent got just a touch more pronounced.

“Or both. That’s not a joke.” He flicked the switch and flipped the poles seconds before the timer would have turned the equipment off. The power meters complained but the machine settled down.

“The watch started working at the 3.5 minute mark. Turning clockwise, but still too fast. That’s good, right?” René asked.

“Yes. We avoid the paradox, but do we bring it back to now or when we sent it back fifteen minutes ago?” Marly wondered.

“It isn’t here yet, so we brought it back to whatever the time will be when we brought it back.” Kevin answered. “No wonder Einstein gave people headaches.”

“It was easier to agree with him than argue. Doing the math. Ten minutes out, ten minutes back, less the few seconds of turnaround, plus the few seconds to initiate the shutdown. We started at noon. Initiate Project Save the World as close to 12:20:05 as possible.” Marly calculated. “Assuming math still works, we should see Easter several minutes later.”