Chapter 35: Simple Ain’t Easy

“Yeah. It’s confirmed. The sarge couldn’t match this guy to any records in the lab directories.” The unit soldier was waiting on additional orders from the sergeant and also going over other pictures of the man they saw hopping the fence and going into George’s garage through the back door. He had called the sergeant and informed him of someone jumping the fence who was welcomed by the three in the house. He had also emailed the clearest pics they got of the man while he was looking around the neighboring backyards for anyone watching. Now they were waiting for instructions on what to do next.

“Listen, Johnson, just stay put and maintain surveillance. While it’s sure fuckin’ strange behavior, it’s not against regulations to hang out with friends in the garage. While this guy may not be from the lab, he may be a neighbor or something. Maintain your cover and, if you can get a better picture of the guy ... without getting caught, by all means, but do not get caught! You got me?” Sergeant Thomas ordered the two-man recon team staked out in the empty house a couple of houses down from George’s house. It offered great views of all the backyards as well as the alley in between the houses.

“Affirmative, Sergeant. We will keep watch and let you know if anything else happens.” The corporal pushed the end button on his cell phone and put it back in his pocket. The other corporal was adjusting the FLIR images from the cameras they had pointed at George’s home.

“Well, what did he say?” Corporal Johnson asked Corporal Smith.

“What ... you c-c-c-couldn’t figure it out from my side of the conversation?”

“Ah, shove it, Tommy. I was just a-a-a-askin’. You don’t have to be a dick about it, besides I was f-f-f-foolin’ with the FLIR.” Corporal Eddie Smith hated the superior attitudes from some of the guys in the unit because of his stuttering, but his friend and fellow corporal Tommy Johnson was one of the few who didn’t make fun of him about it ... until just then.

They had drawn the normally shit duty of watching the backyard of the lab’s head of security’s house. It was easy work, but outrageously dull. Just wait for when George Johnson came home, note anything out of the ordinary and watch to see if the escapee tried to make contact. If anything REALLY out of the ordinary happened, then they were to call it into the sergeant. Once the CID-SI took over operational control of the interrogation and the subsequent escape, the unit put surveillance on each of the three who interacted with the prisoner before their taking over. They had a two-man team watching over each man’s home twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. No one from the CID-SI was sure any of the three had helped in the escape, but those three blossoming friendship was the only thing out of the ordinary since they arrived.

“Sorry, Eddie, I was just fucking with ya. Sarge says to keep an eye out because there is no one matching the picture who works for the labs, but they will check if this guy is a neighbor or something. We wait until something else interesting happens, and then we let the bosses know and, if we can get more pics without getting caught, then go ahead, but he made sure we know to not get caught. So it looks like we ain’t gonna be able to catch some z’s tonight, my friend.”

“Shit.” They both said it at the same time. Both men enjoyed a snicker at their perfect timing.

The motion sensors around the house alerted the watchers that George Johnson was returning home. The car parked under the carport and the headlights shined through the opened curtains inside the house, and that was when an additional sensor went off indicating someone in the alley. They noticed a man looking around for anyone was watching, and then he hopped over the fence and up to the garage door.

The lights in the house were turned on and George Johnson, along with Mike Thompson and Mike Jensen, the two scientists working the night the guest broke into the secret lab, approached the house. The three men had developed a friendship of sorts and meeting at George’s home for a couple hours of drinking beer and swapping stories were par for the course, but this fourth member of the group was new, and no one knew who he was. The three friends were not surprised, though, when he stepped into the light of the garage, just outside of the Faraday Cage that George built in his garage. The cage actually looked like a wooden storage shed built inside the garage. The door locks on the cage were stronger than the locks on the house.

The two-man recon team had seen the man hop the fence when the first lights inside the house turned on, and the three men walked in. They watched as he made his way quickly up to the garage and he waited while the door was opened from inside. They were able to get a few good photos of the man before he jumped the fence and before making his way toward the house. They contacted their Sergeant and sent him the best pictures of the man as he looked around and hopped the fence. The man’s face was clear and easy to see, but no one could place the face with anyone working in the secret lab.

“Say, Tommy, maybe we can get some fingerprints off the fence or something. He did grab the top bar as he hopped over,” Eddie asked his friend.

“Nah way, man. Do you know how to do that shit? I sure as hell don’t.” The two sat quietly for a few more minutes waiting for anyone else to show or for something exciting to happen. Tommy felt maybe he had gone a little too far with making fun of his friend. Eddie was considered by the others in the squad as a little slower but, when it came to being in a firefight, there was no one else any of them would rather have to watch their backs.

“You know what, Eddie?” Tommy said to his friend.

“What?”

“We can keep track of where he grabbed when he jumped. That way when the next team comes, then they can do it. I mean, maybe Sarge knows how to get fingerprints.” Tommy wrote down where they saw him grabbed the fence pipe to jump over. They also pulled up the photo they took of him in mid-jump and attached it to their notes as something to possibly do since neither of them knew how to do it. Besides, it was not something to risk a call to the Sergeant and ask him about.

“Yeah ... he knows everything.” Both men laughed slightly louder.

The reconnaissance teams knew, since the incident, the three men had become friends and often spent nights playing cards or watching sports on the security chief’s large-screen TV. They had bugged each room of the house except for the Faraday cage in the garage because there was no way to get a signal out. Plus, the chief was a bit of a freak when it came to checking for counterintelligence devices in his home, but he only checked the garage for any devices. He apparently did not care if they could hear what was happening inside his house.

After Tim accepted a refreshment from George via his garage refrigerator, the questions came rapid-fire. Tim held up his hands and gave a “time-out” sign to the three men sitting around the table. “Guys, I know I promised that you could ask all the questions you want, but I think that first I need to tell you what I know and what I think has happened. Put everything into some sort of context, you know? Then y’all be able to ask your questions, although I’m sure I don’t have the answers for some of them.”

After a healthy swig of beer, Tim gathered his thoughts and continued, “Or maybe even most of them, but I’m hoping together we can figure them out.”

“Did you guys see the news last night?”

The other men at the table looked at each other and nodded their heads. “Yeah, they said something about some big gang shootout up northeast of town,” George added.

Tim popped the latches on the luggage simultaneously and dramatically opened the case re-revealing the stacks of neatly bundled cash. He let the three men gaze at the large bag full of cash on the rickety card table at the center of a haphazardly assembled Faraday cage.

“Yeah, there were a bunch of drug dealers found dead, and they said it was like a war out there,” the more naive of the trio and also the youngest, Mike Jensen, wound down but quickly caught back up. “Holy shit! You killed all those drug dealers!” He paused for a moment letting that idea settle on his brain then realized something else. “You killed them all by yourself!?!”

“Well, that wasn’t exactly what I was planning on doing,” Tim hesitated, “but it just sort of happened.”

“Actually, Tim, I think you need to go even further back. Why don’t you go slowly and start from the beginning? We can come back to the drug dealers and their missing suitcase full of cash,” George urged. “Just start from why you came here in the first place.”

“Okay, that sounds good.”

“Well then, go ahead.”

Tim took another swig of his beer. “What do you guys know about nanotechnology?”

“I’m no scientist, but I’ve heard about it from science fiction books and on TV and the movies. Are you telling us nanites are real?” George asked, but he noticed the youngest of the two scientists was nodding along as if knew about them already.

“Well, it would seem where I originally came from, we are a bit further ahead scientifically than this, well, I guess I have to call it a new timeline,” Tim added and, with a swift move, he reached behind his back and released one of his Karambit knives from its sheath. The other three men jumped back in their seats. George reached underneath the table and pulled a revolver from a hidden holster attached underneath the table and pointed it at Tim while also jumping further back for added space for a fight.

“Oops! Sorry about that,” Tim offered as a simple apology for making everyone nervous. “Trust me, fellas. I don’t want to hurt anyone here. I’m not going to do that. You guys are my only friends,” Tim confessed as he lowered his head almost shamefully.

“I’m guessing a demonstration can help more than trying to explain everything. Do you have any more light we can use here?” he asked George who was cautiously sliding the handgun back into its holster underneath the table. He nodded yes and then reached into a utility drawer full of everyday items found in a garage and pulled out two flashlights. George handed one to the older scientist Dr. Mike Thompson and kept the other. While awaiting additional illumination, Tim closed the suitcase of cash and placed it on the floor in between his feet.

Tim smiled at the three men. He put his hand in the middle of the table and asked the two with flashlights to focus on his hand. “Now kids, don’t try this at home.” He pressed the finely-honed edge of the blade across the palm and sliced deeply into the meat of his hand. Once done, he shifted the angle of the knife and sliced again into his palm. The blood began to puddle up forming a gory “X” in his palm while simultaneously cascading around each finger and off the hand, dripping onto the table.

The gruesome scene colored in and filled the Palmer flexion creases of Tim’s palm. He tilted the hand slightly to allow the puddling blood to flow off and drain to the side but kept the hand palm-up for the men to see the miracle for themselves. Of course, the nanites were too small to be seen by the naked eye, but the the progress of their work repairing and closing the two wounds was easy to see. The blood flow was visibly reducing as the men stared in awe. After a couple minutes, the two cuts were closed, and the color of the repaired skin was quickly matching the flesh tones around it. In under five minutes, evidence of either cut was nearly impossible to see.

“Wait a second. What the fuck was that, Tim?” Mike Thompson, the elder scientist, was barely able to get out since he was still a little dumbfounded. “I kinda want to see that again but, then again, I really don’t want to see that again,” he added with a nervous snicker.

Mike Jensen, the younger scientist, added, “Well, I’ve seen some preliminary stuff about constructing molecular-sized robots programmed for very simple functions, but these are just barely out of the preliminary phases – just barely past the mathematics; nowhere near the drawing board. Just an idea that looked do-able. At least twenty to thirty years before first applications.”

“I didn’t know anything about that. Where did you read that?” Dr. Thompson asked his younger colleague.

“Well, when I was recruited for the position in the lab, they offered me a choice of several different assignments to work on, and one of those was nanotechnology. I chose the time travel because at the time it seemed much more plausible that, some time in my life, I’d see it work.” Thompson nodded his understanding. “I could always go on to nanotech after we figured out time travel. That was, what, six years ago? They have to be pretty far along on that one. I don’t know where that research was being done.”

Both scientists were now openly pulling and twisting Tim’s hand while looking for evidence of a trick. George saw the look on Tim’s face and knew it was getting uncomfortable. “Alright guys, hands off the merchandise, will ya?” Both men realized what they were doing and meekly let go of the hand, offering head-nodding apologies to their guest.

“Tim, please explain, why did you show us that?” George was indeed in charge of the meeting. His house. His rules.

“Well, in my original timeline, nanotechnology was achieved but was still in its infancy. It was being used on only certain military and secretive military projects. I had my nanites for a few months before I made my trip into the past,” Tim continued to explain why he was there.

Even before he could finish his sentence, the nanites, paying attention to the conversation, offered their own experience to the discussion. “We were ingested by you via the pill form on the fifteenth of January of this year. We activated and began our programmed improvements to your body at that time.”

Tim looked up and started talking to someone who apparently hovered several feet in the air above the table everyone was seated. “Yes, I remember when I swallowed the pill, but an exact date for this story was unnecessary for expediency in the storytelling.”

“Um, Tim, who are you talking to?” George demanded.

“Oh, sorry about that. The nanites were telling me the exact dates when I first swallowed the pill carrying them into my bloodstream and when their programming kicked in.”

“How do you talk to them? Are they sentient?” Jensen sat up straight and asked, “Are they artificially intelligent?”

“No, not exactly. They had a narrow set of parameters to work within but, without instructions to the contrary and a few weeks after I arrived, they decided on their own that they needed to grow in order to survive. If I died, they died. They don’t want to die. Well, now that I think about it, I guess you could claim they are becoming self-aware and are actively working to keep both of us alive.”

“So that is who you were talking to just now?” George asked again.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. They communicate with me via, I guess the best description would be closed-captioning on the bottom of my line of sight. I can read what they type very quickly, and no one is the wiser.” Tim looked up at the ceiling once again. “Sorry about getting the facts wrong. I’ll try not to do that again.”

After a brief pause, “end of message.”

“While being questioned, they helped keep my morale high and also blocked all pain signals from reaching my brain. They essentially cut off my brain from receiving any pain impulses before it could happen.” He turned to look at George. “The only time I actually felt the pain was when that fuckin’ sergeant hit me in the face with the butt of his rifle.”

A nervous laugh escaped his mouth. “That. Fucking. Hurt. But, I kept my wits about me because the nanites were able to stop the pain from overflowing my thinking, and I was able to keep from losing control until they restricted the flow of blood into my brain and knocked me unconscious. They woke me up once the assholes had me prepped for interrogation.”

“I can testify to that. Those guys were livid. I don’t think they were used to not having things go their way.”

“George, you keep saying those guys and talking about things like torture. I’m not saying you’re lying or anything, but we,” Dr. Thompson said while pointing to himself and Dr. Jensen, “never heard anything like that going on in the lab. I had heard some scuttlebutt about him being held in the small cell of the lab across from your security office, but I didn’t know if anything was being done to him there.”

“Well, of course, you guys never heard anything about that stuff. The bosses needed you guys working on the different tasks,” George explained.

“Initially, the bosses used locals to interrogate him at the lab but realized they needed experts at getting information out from ‘non-cooperative guests.’ A military medical training base is not the best place to house a squad of high-value interrogators. Besides, they didn’t believe what Tim was telling them.”

“Which was what?”

“The same story he told us. He was a time traveler. He didn’t understand what had happened but, when he made his return trip, he saw us and had no idea who we were.” George looked at Tim. “Is that about right?” Tim nodded.