Chapter 1

James Marlow began as a promising physics grad student, and that was 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 and drink. 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 the time, he also suffered from a case of terminal shyness. So, as soon as he woke up with a girl, he would panic and forget how to ask for a repeat performance. Then again, the few girls he woke up with didn’t seem to remember anything. 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, strange, that 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 required a mile of magnetic pathways and tons of electricity to research could now be done at any university with a device no bigger than a 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. With the reduced cost, research now took place all over the country. It 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 particle that sometimes produced light 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 than the standard still camera. He wanted to record the process from beginning to end. This strange circular squiggle would appear when he collided the catalyst particles together. No other catalyst element he had tried resulted in the squiggle showing up. It also explained why no one in the field reported this anomaly. James figured 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-collider run with the camera. When the two atoms collided, 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 imagine his mouth hitting the floor as he viewed the screen. In the image, he saw a view of a beachfront property with topless female sunbathers. Sure enough, he could freeze-frame the image when he replayed the tape. James didn’t understand what had happened.

He ran the experiment twenty more times, seeing a different view captured on the screen each time. He couldn’t explain it and knew better than 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. Whatever 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 would surely be one giant boost to his future. If only he had known then what he now learned at seventy-two years of age.

It had taken James three months to determine that the mini-collider was creating a micro-wormhole. The random images resulted from the pinhole effect produced by the iris on a camera. You only needed a pin-sized hole and could image anything given the correct conditions.

Once James understood what was happening and what he had discovered, he could work out how to control the reaction behavior. James could steer the micro-wormhole by carefully manipulating the chamber’s magnetic field. 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. He could maintain a stable view of an area by creating a constant collision stream.

One day, James spent a half hour with the micro-worm imaging the girl’s shower area in a college halfway 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 published his findings as his doctoral thesis and in the magazine Physics Today. 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 working in areas he disapproved of.

So now, at seventy-two, Dr. James Marlow was still in good health. 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.

The CIA noticed him after he received a scholarship. He had earned it 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 enabled him to study the effects of particle physics long before he finished high school. In his college years, this led him to discover 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 classified so severely that not even the country’s president knew about it. He never cared much about using his discovery for spying, except 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 humanity. Instead, James found his CIA handlers directing his work into areas he despised.

For example, in the last ten years, he had been forced to pursue making his discovery into a weapon. Work that disgusted him so much that when he accidentally discovered a way to use the wormhole technology to view 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 feelings for Chris, he never acted on them.

Dr. Chris Weston was in fair health for a 71-year-old man. That is not technically correct. Chris was a gender-altered individual. Chris 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 that even her best friend James didn’t know about it anymore, unlike the CIA. Chris often wondered why someone in the organization hadn’t pulled his clearance. 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 creating intelligent AI computers. He was the father of the flash memory cyber-transfer technology that now makes Androids a reality. Chris had received his second Nobel Prize at forty-five in medicine: flash memory repair for brain trauma cases.

Chris has been forced into the CIA’s black book project for ten years. The CIA wanted not only a flash memory spy device but also a weapon that would let them strike a victim without 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, he did not think it was possible to do what the government wanted. 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 worked well after retirement because the CIA wouldn’t let them retire. Both men were sure 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 dropped shortly after you stopped working. After all, the two of them were more considerable security risks than the president of the United States. They both had knowledge that could weaken the country politically, to say nothing of the havoc that would spread around the world in the aftermath. Both men figured they would have been dead long ago if they weren’t still valuable to the Company.

During the last ten years, the two have become best friends. They even take vacations together. Of course, that was convenient for the CIA shadows that watched over them. Besides, they could only go to approved unique locations. Despite the restrictions placed on them by their government, the vacations are 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 mainly delaying to keep themselves alive and to get 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 breakdown 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 were thoroughly disgusted with them. Chris felt betrayed by his government the most. After all, they had corrupted his flash memory transfer procedures. In many ways, he wished he had never developed them.

Since both men were working in a secure environment at the facility, they were the only two allowed access to the R&D room besides the project director and a highly cleared Janitor they had come to know well. The room was so secure that even the wormhole spy cam could not see inside it. Robust electromagnetic 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. The CIA is a paranoid bunch, after all. Besides, it was rumored that one operator had sold the technology to the Chinese. A rumor 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 genuine risk that the spy cam could be used to spy on the very developers who created it. So, the spy-free environment in which they worked was ultimately approved. This allowed them to hide their research breakthroughs from those paying for them. The two slowly disseminated information on the discoveries, not those that would prove deadly.

However, the light speed or real-time communications capabilities had practical applications for 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 in a much more structured setting that wouldn’t have allowed James to expand the proper uses of his discovery.

James told the recorder, “Test number 5482: We are attempting to lengthen the micro-wormhole and collapse the length upon itself to widen its inner diameter. Began test.”

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

“So, is that the surface of Io we are looking at?” Chris asked.

James checked the readouts 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 fell back onto itself. Chris was checking the readouts. “Looks like that did it! The diameter inside the wormhole shows it to be one hundred twenty angstroms in width now. Congratulations, that’s enough to give them what they want.”

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

James said, “Unfortunately, your flash memory theta waves will pass through the opening now.”