A Glint In Time (History and Time) (24 page)

Jose said good night, but he stayed in the den for a while with his glass of wine and set aside the urge to go outside to think. He didn't doubt the general's parting words for one moment.

COMPARTMENTS AND CODE WORDS

Tuesday, June 7, 201 1

1000 Eastern

TCA Headquarters

Homestead ARB, Florida

Excerpt from the Personal Narrative
of Brig Gen Fred Landry, PhD, (USAF Ret)

Recorded July 2015
UNCLASSIFIED

“.
. . . .
he picked up the technology immediately."

Excerpt from the Personal Narrative
of Colonel

Jose Valenzuela

Recorded July 2015
UNCLASSIFIED

. . . . I
was snowed. I felt like I was trapped inside a Sci-Fi

book.

red and Bill, this is Major Jose Valenzuela. Jose, this is Dr. Fred Landry, Brigadier General US Air Force Retired, and Dr. Bill Wirtz, also retired, but you would never know it. Both of these guys are still working for us and, as a matter of fact, for you. They've been building your alternate operations site and they'll be your shepherds and trouble shooters for the next couple of weeks. . . or

however long it takes."

"I've read the personal narratives that each of you wrote." Jose said. "It's simply amazing to meet you in the flesh."

"We'll see how amazing." Bill Wirtz replied.

"Jose, Doctor General Landry, I never know what to call him, is going to brief you on the thing you asked about last night. The defensive side of the project. It consists of several code word compartmentalized topic areas. Listen well because he's the guy who has done it all and created it all."

"That's hardly true." Landry replied. "We have had some brilliant help out of Sandia Labs and other government laboratories. But, even they don't have the total picture of the Project. In fact, even the President and Chairman don't know it all."

"I've been there and done that." General Arthurs said. So I'll leave you in their hands. Oh, but come back to see me when you want to learn about our little flying club. I think you'll be very very happy." Arthurs smiled and left the three of them in the hallway.

"General," Bill Wirtz said addressing General Landry. "Why don't you take him first and do your Harry Potter thing. Then, I'll show him the real science."

"Yes, certainly Bill.The good stuff firstThe by-guess and by-gosh can wait."Landry smiled, but Jose got the feeling that he was seeing a long standing contest.

"Ouch!" Wirtz said. "Jose, I'll see you soon."

After they had arrived at the TDA building that morning, Jose had spent a couple of hours on in-processing paperwork and security briefings. He had a sore spot in his forearm where a security technician had buried a subcutaneous chip. "We can track you anywhere inside the building." he was told.

The building security briefing was also interesting. He learned that the hardened structure was attached into the bedrock of Florida and that it was capable of keeping everyone alive and relatively comfortable even if they were hit by the 300 knot winds of an F5 tornado or submerged by a hurricane surge or Tsunami for several hours. The downside was that they were more hardened than the nuclear power plant that ran their systems and certainly more survivable than the power substation that fed their building. They had emergency generators, but those generators couldn't power their mission equipment.

He was told that the building's artificial intelligence security system only allowed people with the proper access clearances into specific sections of the building. Doors wouldn't open if someone with less than the appropriate access was within five seconds of a doorway at a dead run, so building etiquette called for people to be careful where they

paused or even walked. Jose sucked up these facts because he knew that he would soon have his own building to run.

Now, Fred Landry, PhD and General, was opening a door that lead deeper into the building. He didn't start speaking until the door had closed with a firm thunk. "So, you are up to speed on the Bose-Einstein condensate and the glass beads, right?"

"I first read about it yesterday afternoon.That's my total amount of getting up to speed."

"Okay, we'll look in on that offensive area after while. There's not much to see. It reminds me of a dentist's office. But, here is the latest on the defense on the physics side. Keep in mind that Bill Wirtz has defensive analysis systems, but he imputes while we actually report."

Landry led him into a room that was relatively small, only 10 feet by 10 feet, but three walls were covered with a wrap-around visual display. There were no chairs, desks, or consoles. There was only the screen and space to stand in front of it. Landry waved his hand, looking something like a beardless Dumbledore from Harry Potter, and the screen came to life.

I'm not going to take you into all of the physics, but we. . . and I mean the people at several government labs, have pushed the science of quantum physics to levels where the theorists have to struggle to create the math that proves what we can do. And, I mean the best theorists in the world. Theories and explanations are stumbling along behind demonstrated fact."

"We can do some things with light that we can't do with more ordinary physical matter. If we have two identical atoms at a distance and then we bring them together so they collide, they give off photons. A spark. Each source of photons, each atom, is slightly different because it is a picture of the last point where the atom was at rest. The two sets of photons create an interference effect with each other. Now, if we can control or duplicate the burst of photons from one source, we can cancel it out from the total interference pattern caused by the collision, and get an image from the other atom.The big secret, classified codeword DARKSPOT, is that we can take pictures of things back in time."

"Pictures?Moving pictures or snapshots?"Jose asked.

"Just snapshots. We have to be very very lucky with the placement of the atoms at the distant end of the time space geometry, but once we bring them back and do all of the complex wave cancellation, we get a complete hemispheric view. . . three hundred and sixty degrees in every plane. It takes luck, time, precision, patience, tremendous processing power, more luck, and more precision, but it works. We can take snapshots back in time." With a wave of his hand he brought up a picture of Ted, Sally, Bill, and himself on the screen. It was incredibly sharp and they all looked younger. He touched a corner of the picture with his finger and moved it around so the view showed up at the ceiling, down at the table cloth and salt shakers, and all around at what appeared to be a restaurant. "This picture shows an event in 2001 . We captured it last year."

"My God."was all Jose could say.

"But wait, as they say in the knife commercials, there's more. This is code word HEARTBREAK. The secret is that we can see when and where time displacement has been used. Time displacement doesn't take place in an isolated way. In fact, when we were sending hot beads back in time we were cutting up everything and we left a trail. Have you ever seen a cloud chamber?"

Jose just shook his head.

"A cloud chamber has been around in physics labs since the 1900s. A Scotsman named Wilson was originally trying to study the weather, but he found that ionizing particles, radiation like alpha and beta particles, interact with the moisture and makes visible tracks in the cloud inside a chamber under low pressure. We have something like a cloud chamber for time displacement actions.We have carefully scanned specific frequencies of the energy in space within a light year of Earth looking for straight line patterns of disruption in phase, frequency, and amplitude in the radio background.The straight lines are the big clue. About a year ago, thanks to some new satellite based sensors, we found them."

Landry pointed at the screen and around the room the screen became misty white. There were grids superimposed on the screen with scales of numbers along the bottom and sides and curved colored lines for interpolation. It reminded Jose of an old handheld computer used for finding mach number while considering speed, temperature, and air pressure.

"I've lived with this long enough so I know what most of the tracks mean."Landry said. At the left of the room's screen he pointed to a constellation of short lines emanating from one point and going out in every direction. "Those are the original experimental shots from Malaysia. They never went as far back in time as they intended and they were ridiculously inaccurate. Really, they were a long way from success on the physics side, although they understood the theory pretty well."

Landry moved toward the center of the screen. "Those are our first shots of beads we did from Sandia Labs. Note that we were getting what a marksman would call pretty good groups. We could reproduce our shots with good consistency. Here are the first shots from Homestead. This group of beads went to Fort Jefferson in the Keys as an experiment and this beautiful short group went to the space shuttle as a stunt."

Jose noticed other groups of shots going back pretty far into time. Some to the 1960s, as well as he could interpolate the curves without being obvious. Landry didn't mention those shots. But, Jose already had the understanding that he would be told about some things and that it would be best not to ask about other things.

"See all of this activity ten years ago, just days after the 9/1 1 attacks?We were all here, but none of us remembers any of it. The logs for this time show no evidence of activity. As far as we know, objectively or subjectively, it never happened. But, we have evidence from the energy of surrounding space that we were really busy. So busy, in fact, that some of these shots overlapped the minimum charge cycle of the system.

They overlapped each other in the threads of time. It all seems impossible, but it happened. We were really busy, but we don't know what we did. Except, of course, for the beads that Ted saw in the tires of the cancelled flight in New York."

"This, Major, is what keeps us awake at night. This is the big scary monster. Something. . . several different somethings. . happened right here right after 9/1 1 and we don't know for sure what they were."

Landry moved on. "After we stopped using the offensive, I mean we stopped sending beads back, we worked on our defensive capabilities. These tracks show our photon sampling missions. The energy levels are very different. We now can see and plot all of our bead missions and photon activities."Jose saw a lot of recent photon sampling tracks going back to late in 2001. Obviously, the Project was going back and spying on itself and on the events of September 1 1, 2001. He wondered what they had learned, but again, he knew better than to ask.

"The really important thing to take away is that we don't see any tracks coming from facilities that we don't know about. Of course, it's possible that we are missing them in some way. We have teams working on other ways to look for disruptive patterns. We complete a scan about every seven days, depending on how much access we get to the satellite sensors. So far, we've been able to report that no one else is doing what we can do."

"But," Jose observed, "as you said. You still don't know what you did."

Landry was silent. Jose took the cue.

After he left Landry, Jose found Bill Wirtz. "My main job now," Wirtz said, "is to figure out the impact of every shot that Landry reports. I'm the bomb damage assessment team. You tell me what went boom and when and I'll try to tell you the results. The computer system we use is a combination of a historical database, socio-economic reference system, and an odds maker. Of course, predicting the impact of an event far upstream in time is a crap shoot. But, we can usually spot a critical turning point of a past event. If critical turning point coincides with a time displacement shot, then we have a smoking gun."

"I get the feeling that there are things I'm not supposed to ask about." Jose said. "But, how about Cuba? General Arthurs said you had some pretty strong theories about what would have happened if the Castro brothers hadn't gone off that road in their car."

"Yeah, it's funny how they went off that road in good weather and broad daylight, isn't it?"Wirtz observed with a blank face. "Some in the escort car say the driver of Castro's car just mysteriously lost control. The inside of the Castro car was a bloody mess, so others think they were all shot. . . assassinated. Kennedy was riding high until his brother used US Marines to keep the Mafia from going back into Cuba. The Mafia leaked the dirt on Kennedy sharing a mistress with

a Mafia Don.The people turned on him and the Republicans took over. Here, let's look at the timeline database around those dates."

Bill took advantage of that topic to take Jose through a detailed demonstration of how the present might be different if just one thing had changed in the past. Without the death of the Castro brothers in early 1963, Cuba might have become a base for Soviet missiles. A nuclear exchange might have taken place in the Florida Straits. Cuba might have been a home for Communism and a disruptive influence in the Caribbean and in the Southern hemisphere for decades.

Jose was shaken by the projections Bill had shown him. Eleven million Cuban Communists willingly or unwillingly living 90 miles from the US into the 1990s at least?Considering the Cuba he knew, a tourist destination and financial center that rivaled any in the world, it was a ridiculous image, but he had just seen how it was possible. He didn't even want to know if the Project had done something to cause the Castro brothers to drive off that road in 1963. He knew it had taken his parents until 1966 to recover most of their property after US Marines helped the reform government stabilize Cuba. No wonder his parents had wanted him to have US citizenship.

After a break to get settled in the Visiting Officer Quarters, Jose sat down with Wirtz and Landry to learn more about his new responsibility, the alternate operations site. "NASA is demanding that we have a survivable backup facility." Landry began. "The President agreed, the Chairman found the money, so we built one. Here it is."