Chapter 9

He decided to forgo the planned ‘shock and craze the triplets’ session for the night. They flew straight home. Conversation was minimal, each person sorting his or her thoughts and impressions.

They arrived without incident. Alice sent the Observer to orbit, shielded, to begin the survey of the scientific areas. The others stripped out of the tech rigs and settled to rest and ruminate.

“What if we do nothing to interfere or influence the direction the population takes? Let them stand or fall as they will?” Kevin tossed out to the group. “No matter what.”

“Natural selection, or Mother Nature if you prefer, does exactly that. There are no moral judgments, only live or not.” Patty answered. “Nature doesn’t care of you are cruel or kind, only if you can reproduce and feed your offspring.”

“Giants and monsters will roam the earth as the legends say they did in the past.” Jade whispered. “But this time they might be smarter than the dregs of humanity.”

“If we weren’t here, it would be as you say.” Amber meekly said, still culturally conditioned to keep quiet. “Perhaps, we should watch but not guide.”

“The Master wished to stamp out bad traits, but could we do such worldwide? Would we not upset a balance?” Ruby added, “Would not those we assisted consider others to be less than blessed and eventually lesser beings?”

“Being careful not to fall into the same mindset.” René warned. “We could be gods.”

“Kevin, I would not feel good if we failed to aid people equal to what we were before the Chaos in technology and social maturity.” Marly countered. “But we would have to establish enclaves with a separate evolutionary path.”

Andrea picked up the idea. “And the rest of the planet would develop a separate civilization eventually if they did not destroy themselves. In the meantime, who’s to say that those we nurtured wouldn’t treat the ones we ignored as pets or livestock to be used?”

“Societies advance as necessary, inventing solutions to problems as they arise. If we make it too easy, we stifle normal creativity and make them weaker or stagnant.” Kevin concluded. “Which brings us to another, perhaps more serious, issue.”

René laughed, “More serious than the future evolution of our species? This has to be big.”

“OK, serious to our immediate future.” He grinned back. “The year is 4510. What if people were thrown to 4511 and aren’t here? We haven’t arrived at their arrival time yet. What happens if they were in a nice new car and are attracted to this very place? We could find a soccer mom or a bank robber. Or they land here and stay. We can hide, of course, but do we help them?”

“You make things complicated on purpose.” Marly said, not completely kidding. “If they get here by chance, we could be looking at anyone from a Zulu tribesman to an Argentine cowboy. If we involve tech, we could meet a computer girl from Silicon Valley or an Iranian jet pilot.”

“I suggest we keep hands off generally. But evaluate new arrivals on their own merit.” Kevin said, “If they seem able to deal, let them move on and be assimilated or start their own community. Someone who was dangerous in his or her time could turn out to be a stabilizing influence here. We can’t know.”

He smiled at the Bright triplets. “But we could discover people who have no chance to survive here. Or who, like our triplets, are on the edge, and might be welcomed into our family.”

“So, if we don’t think they are a good match, can we put them somewhere they might survive without revealing ourselves?” Patty asked. “Put them to sleep and spirit them away.”

Andrea became clinical, “Mostly let Nature do her job. Of course we want to help individuals in the short term, but will it matter in 10,000 years? This is going to sound cold and heartless, but look at it this way. How many couples have difficulty conceiving children? Tens of thousands, right? They spend millions of dollars in hormone treatments, IVF and mechanical insemination to have children and defeat nature. People think they have a right to bear offspring. That is selfish and dangerous. They have a right to try, only. You can’t conceive without help but you want to pass that trait on so you get all warm and fuzzy holding kids who will have difficulty conceiving. Nature is trying to select your genes out to make the species more viable while you are consuming resources to keep the species weak.”

She continued, “That’s near but not over the eugenics line Malincroft and company practiced. They were trying to create an artificial super race by manipulating genes. Mother Nature simply wants a viable race by allowing imperfections to deselect themselves. It’s the same with congenital diseases, missing senses, less than ideal shape, etc. If some mutation or variance from the norm gives you an advantage, you get to pass it on. If it doesn’t, you don’t. It’s going to be like that for the foreseeable future.”

“And, like Patty said, Mother Nature doesn’t care. If we break the rules, we pay the penalty down the road. But we’re not merely concerned with the long term. We’re sympathetic, living in the present. Can we look in an individual face and turn our backs?” Marly asked. “Someone who could make it in a different environment?”

“Marly, Patty and Andrea are right. I can’t turn away from a starving person. I would feel less than human. So when Alice has enough of the global survey complete, we find a more pleasant place to relocate them. Maybe together they can learn how not to die.” He relaxed some. “Now we don’t have so much a plan as a pattern to follow. Bad, indifferent, good and exception, and wiggle room. Not a rigid framework, but somewhere to start when uninvited company drops in.”

Kevin asked the air, “Alice. Anything out there we need to worry about tonight? Wait, let me rephrase that. What have you found and should we deal with it tonight.”

“The sites you wanted to know about first are silent. No radio traffic, no emissions, and no motion. The remains of Cheyenne Mountain have collapsed, what would be the rest is a lake of lava. Oak Ridge is not there. The area could be the Bonneville Salt Flats of your era. Area 51 is Area 17. Two thirds is dense forest that should be in the northwest.”

“Good and bad, mostly bad.” He did not sound happy. “That is what has been bothering me. Geography was thrown to the four winds, too. Some chunk of landscape may pop into existence any second. Likewise, an original piece of 4510 gets sent to the year 25,000 BCE.”

He grabbed a laptop and started typing furiously.

Marly, in her quantum theory zone, jumped up. “We need to have taken action already. Alice, tell me where I go wrong. Kevin’s machine sent us here naked, just our organic selves. Patty and Dr. Solomon, expanded the web, included the machine and she got here naked but all the inorganic material traveled with the machine except what was in contact with her skin. The plywood sheet and her clothes went back into the developing chaos on a tether. The rest of everything that will be won’t change until its time arrives.”

“Pardon me, love. Alice. Priority. Find metals and metal ore deposits. Conductors and magnetics for now. Iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, gold and aluminum to start.” He smiled grimly. “Marly, you have the floor.”

“Kevin’s figured it out. This world is going to be unstable until the year 50,000 CE. Our area is jumbled now but more pieces may travel or get displaced. If we want to keep the cave and store room, we need to do a ‘Patty’ on the walls out there.”

“In four dimensional physics, everything happened simultaneously. We perceive it subjectively. The chunk of 4510 arrives in 2010 in 2010, but doesn’t leave its present until 4510. Around us are the dregs of shifts whose time has come. How many pieces of the future are waiting their turn/time?” He explained. “The Interruption may have changed the future but not until the future arrives for the outside witnesses.”

“Holy Crap!” René squeaked. “We are in danger every second we are either outside unshielded or shielded and apart. We could have lost our home. How many bullets can we dodge before one hits?”

“Alice. Expand the shield 10 inches in all directions immediately. The store room, the entrance, everything. If air touches it in the future, make it appear to be stone.” Kevin ordered. “Give me a two door airlock at the cave opening.”

“Done, boss. That will keep everything inside intact, but, according to the historical record, will not of itself anchor us in this time.”

“Give me an evaluation of the materials survey. Goals are enough raw metal to make as much CoFeCu wire as we have used to date, estimated time to transport sufficient ore to process if you can’t do it on site, and complexity of obtaining and transporting the metals.”

“Transportation can be done with an AG unit and shield generator as a scoop. The first loads should include additional elements to build another replicator for processing on site, enabling us to move ready-to-use webbing and other rare elements we can store for future needs.”

“Estimated time?”

“Not known until I locate sufficient resources.” Alice hesitated for a second. “Part of the burned out area became an ice sheet. You were right, Earth is a bad neighborhood.”

“Great. The hits keep coming. We don’t need an AG engine time flipping without us. Can we extrude tendrils of the force field from here to the mining devices to keep all of our remote devices tethered?”

“We can and I am putting the Observer on a leash now.” Alice responded.

“Thanks. We can make more if we have the supplies. However, getting the materials exposes us to unacceptable risk if we travel far afield.” He addressed the girls, “Having the technology show up sometime else is the larger problem. Ivan the Terrible with an anti-gravity machine is not a happy thought.”

Ruby perked up. “What about the wormhole the Originals used? According to Alice, it allowed them to travel vast distances by walking through a door and anchored the terminus points together in the timeline. We can assemble materials in relative safety and cut the travel time to zero.”

“We have the information to do it in my data banks. Actually doing it is the issue. You need a substantial power source at each end and at least a minimal AI at the remote site to get it activated. Once operating, one power source can support both ends, but you have to start with two. We don’t have the means or the means to make the means.”

“It’s a very good idea, Ruby. We need to think of all possibilities and all variables. Not only is the wormhole very labor and resource intensive, it punches a hole in the already raveled fabric of the space-time continuum. I don’t know if it will knit time back together or ravel it faster.” Kevin explained. “Please be free to throw out ideas, no matter how extreme. These are extreme times. Just because this won’t work now, it might be the best course in an altered future.”

Marly came in at this point. “We don’t need another wormhole. We already have one, anchored to the spacecraft Alice’s creators used to leave this world. The details are in your memory banks, Alice. Would you access and evaluate?”

Kevin laughed, saying, “It’s going to get very esoteric, very soon. Originally, I wanted to have the additional CoFeCu wire to connect the whole habitat to our time machine, and still do. Jumping forward to 50,000 CE, as Marly indirectly indicated, would get us to a time when all of the fragments were settled into place.”

“And the world will be whatever it was going to be without us. Humanity will be extinct, evolved or mutated. It will be what it allows itself to be.” Patty injected. “We need to travel through not only time but also space to get above the turmoil. Materializing inside a mountain is not so good, exit-wise.”

Marly interrupted quickly, “Worse than not so good. It could be catastrophic. I think the Chaotic instability suspended a few laws of thermodynamics, letting things switch places. Maybe it illustrated exceptions, but whatever, the old rules might be in effect when we arrive. Two things cannot occupy the same space. There is a good chance the whole shebang will convert to pure energy. Mega-boom. Or not.”

“Matter, anti-matter, doesn’t matter? That casual ‘or not’ is the key.” Kevin added, “Others have time traveled. What happened to the air displaced? Maybe that changed. Even if we don’t become background radiation, what do we do? Functionally, we’ll have a spaceship. Do we leave? Do we attempt to repopulate?”

“Where/when will we be in relation to the rest of the universe, and more importantly, in relation to the folks who gave birth to Alice?” René asked loaded questions. “The theoretical temporal event horizon will be gone. Perhaps we can find out what the rest of everything has been up to while our backs were turned.”

“We might be able to wrap the wormhole portal in our field and go visit the neighbors.” Marly smiled, “That is, if they are accepting guests. Their previous guests did not have a good record of playing well with others.”

“Alice how goes the survey?” Kevin asked.

“I’ve located sufficient ores to begin transport here and extrude the alloy. Not enough other elements to replicate another replicator. Let me rephrase that, not enough to retrieve conveniently.”

“Concentrate on the web. We want to take the entrance when we time travel, if we do.”

“On it, boss.” Alice responded cheerfully. “You can start in the morning.”

He wanted to solve a mystery bugging him for a while. “Alice, why is it that the toilet and showers still work?”

“Change the subject much? The whole system is inside the web. Of course it came with everything else.”

Patty said. “It is a self-composting system behind the shower wall and below the floor with a 1000 gallon clean water tank. Before now, I never understood why Dr. Malincroft had the entire mechanism electroplated in the CoFeCu alloy. I guessed he wanted a nice place to pee when they began their world conquest.” Her eyes got huge. “What else is it connected to? What did I bring?”

“If you are right, we may have a fair percentage of whatever the Bad Doctor considered important behind that wall. ‘Not-so-absentminded’ Malincroft was evil as evil gets, but he was not stupid and very goal-oriented. If we have anything, we have foodstuffs, weapons, scientific equipment and possibly my entire lab.”

“That explains another little puzzle I should have mentioned earlier. He had a crew spraying the walls and floors with a metallic paint, even parts of the outside walls. Now, I am sure it was the alloy. Perhaps he planned for the lab to follow when every one else departed, leaving one guy to travel with it or be sacrificed if the attempt failed?”

“Wonder if his eager to please recruits painted my lab too early? He would want to transport everything at once, and then kill the device so the inorganics couldn’t yoyo away. Last flunky would spray the lab and activate the time machine.” Kevin guessed. “I’ll bet he didn’t think he could take the machine. He probably wanted to send it to oblivion so no one could follow. Rat bastard. I don’t think it would have transported itself, anyway. Too maladjusted thanks to me. And the sequence would have stopped soon after the power was cut.”

“That suggests they further adjusted the controls to get results they could live with, or they wouldn’t transport their brain trust.” Patty said, “Doctor Doom would not risk himself. But he didn’t know we had another time machine, self-powered, either.”

“He didn’t want a nice place to take a whiz. He wanted to destroy any technology left behind!”

Amber gasped. “Patty, did we also bring the bad people? Are we going to have to make the unpleasant philosophical choices now?” Kevin was overjoyed that she said ‘we’ and not ‘you’. The triplets, even as they seemed to consider themselves submissive to him as Master of the house, were becoming part of the whole. He could live with that. They had interdependent sharp minds, fresh contributions to make and valid questions that needed answers. Amber, at least, included herself in the bad as well as the good.

Cultural diversity is a good thing.

“If we find them at all, I’ll bet they are dust. If they had time to react, they still hadn’t solved the glitches Kevin installed.” Patty shrugged. “What else can we brainstorm?”

“You initiated the machine before the event and departed before it affected your immediate space. They would have suffered a power loss prior to activation, because they did not have the Solomon reactor.” Kevin listed options. “My extra device would have superceded theirs and brought everything in the new web forward.”

“That is, if they tried or even had a chance to try.” Jade, to her credit, said. “In their place, I would go to someplace more familiar than another person’s space. We had a safe, defendable place in our house in case vandals or gangs attacked us. Perhaps warlike people think the same and they had a safe place?”

“You’re right, Jade! We had isolation and decontamination chambers in a freestanding blast shelter that would have been too much trouble to enclose in the alloy web. Too many heavy doors, too many airlocks, too much distance to either coat or bypass.” Andrea advised. “I had to do drills all the time because I’m a bio-engineer. I can make scary stuff you want to keep contained.”

“I know Malincroft was in his office waiting to ‘interview’ Dr.Solomon. Reichert said so.”

“So, anyone left in the lab traveled with Patty. Or if the machine was powered up already and the immediate vicinity was affected in some as yet unknown way, they may be in limbo or liquefied.” Kevin posited, “It had no effect on Patty. She got where she was going with the store room intact because she and Soloman made her lab area tight.”

The triplets were catching on. Ruby asked a very good question. “Did they make a bubble in a bubble? I don’t understand the science. Maybe no one does, but this is like a mental exercise more than a math problem to solve. You said it would stop soon after the power was cut. Did your machine have a temporary battery like the little computers?”

“Yes. It let me have a few minutes to do a properly sequenced shut down to avoid damage. Under full power, the machine might run a half a minute. Keep talking, I think I know where you’re going.”

“To Patty, the transition was instant. But if one of your ex-associates managed even briefly to activate a flawed and weaker machine, might they have created a local counter effect? Perhaps blowing a bubble of real time within Patty’s stronger bubble of advancing time. Even if Master’s battery was drained instantly in their time, that is an eternity next to instantaneous. Especially if ‘instantaneous’ is divided into 2500 parts.” She shuddered and went on, smiling “What I’m trying to say with words that don’t work anymore is that if they even turned the machine on, they may have lived a thousand years of real time inside Patty’s instant. Or lived three weeks of that thousand years. Starvation doesn’t take that long.”