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“No, but I tried to skim it as lightly as possible. What about you? You read it too.”

“Same,” she said, letting go of me and flopping on the bed. “I’m scared of you even dragging that thing out and turning it on to find out what the hell happened.”

“I am too,” I admitted. “Unfortunately, I have a feeling that it will be the only computer in America that can get on the internet. Maybe the only computer in the world.”

I went to the closet and pulled out the case and the monitor and set them up on the desk. After plugging in the power cell, I pushed the power button on the front. I was wary of any voice commands that the computer might misinterpret and really screw things up. I wasn’t sure if that was even possible, but the pit in my stomach warned me to be careful.

Once it hit the desktop, I touched the future browser icon and dragged the window off to the right extension. I touched the normal browser and it opened to Google. I wasn’t sure if the page was cached or not, so I typed in a random web address. The information window on the bottom of the browser said it was trying to connect to www.cheesycats.com, a goofy site with a ton of cat memes, videos, and animated gifs. Thirty seconds later, the browser timed out.

I grunted and switched to the Qwerry page. I typed in tomorrow’s date and watched the results scroll down the page. I chose the BBC website and began to read the headlines. Kassi knelt next to me and read as well. The information seemed jumbled, incomplete. I thought it was most likely because less than twenty-four hours after a major terrorist attack wasn’t enough time to get a complete story. I went back to the Qwerry page and looked at February 15, 2016.

The news was grim, but not just because over a hundred Americans died in the five total refinery attacks. There were conflicting reports of who was responsible. Half of Congress was screaming that it had been Iran, the other half screaming it had been Al-Qaeda. Somehow, another half of Congress was screaming that it was Bashar al-Assad who was responsible. When I looked at what others who weren’t on Capitol Hill were saying, I got dozens of different stories.

It wasn’t really any terrorist group, it was our own government, according to some of the louder conspiracy sites. They latched onto it even harder than they did about 9/11. Alex Jones seemed to be shouting the loudest, but others, respected journalists included, were digging deep, as deep as Homeland Security and FEMA would let them before shutting them down, and coming back with disturbing results. Some journalists weren’t coming back at all.

We read a news report from Al-Jazeera that detailed how two reporters, one their own, one from Reuters, had been shot in Galveston while meeting at an Applebee’s. The president’s Chief of Staff lamented that it was a tragic accident, and that a few overzealous FBI agents had been given misleading information and had determined the two men were an immediate threat that needed to be neutralized.

The more we read, the worse it seemed to get. The government hadn’t shut down the internet, according to official news statements. Anonymous and other less famous hacking groups had chosen to time the refinery attacks with their own all-out blitz to bring the American communications infrastructure to its knees. Anonymous, on the other hand, was working overtime to uncover the truth, claiming they were being falsely accused. Even they were starting to jump on the bandwagon that it was an inside job, and had vowed to either expose the lies or go to prison trying.

Or be shot down in the middle of a street, which had happened on February 9, 2016 in San Fransisco. Anonymous wouldn’t confirm that Travis Michael Leonardson was ever a member of their organization. The FBI, on the other hand, claimed to have proof, and would release it once their forensic teams had poured over the laptops, tablets, and mobile phones found on Travis’ body and in his apartment.

Kass and I finally stopped reading after two hours, both of us mentally and emotionally exhausted. She wanted to cuddle, and I wanted the same thing. We talked for another hour or two until we both fell asleep, mostly about how we needed to find out if we had been in some way responsible for whatever was happening. I repeatedly assured her that it was impossible that me winning the lottery and doing well in the stock market could possibly have any affect on a major terrorist attack, inside job or not, and the disruption of the entire country’s internet access.

She reminded me that it was impossible to order a computer, receive some weird components that weren’t what had been ordered, and have that computer somehow be able to look into the future. I couldn’t argue with that. I couldn’t really argue with anything she suggested, since at this point, we were in the dark about a lot of things. Being able to look a month and a half into the future to find out details of what had happened less than six hours before kind of blew the door off what might or might not be impossible.

Chapter 14 - Future News Is Bad News

January 23, 2016

I was seven years old when 9/11 happened. I don’t really remember much about it other than being scared to the point I’d cried while my mom held me. I cried because she spent three days crying. My father was a bit more stoic, but even at seven years old, I saw worry in his face for the next few months. As I grew up, 9/11 became some kind of strange hot-button topic that could get your face pounded in by someone at school if you said something they didn’t agree with.

Muslims were evil, it was an inside job, hell, even a race of lizard aliens got the blame and backlash. A ton of videos, both regular DVD and bootleg, homemade stuff that found its way to YouTube and a million other conspiracy sites were produced. In my early teenage years, I barely paid attention to such things. By my later, brooding teenage years, I went through a phase where I spent an entire summer reading and watching every ounce of information I could about 9/11.

I wouldn’t say I was a believer in the conspiracies. I really don’t know what I would say I felt about the things I learned. The deeper I got in it, the more confusing it became, the harder it was to separate truth from nonsense. Some people might call me an unpatriotic piece of shit because of some of the things I thought I believed, while others would call me a tool of the New World Order secret government, brainwashed by the consumerism shoved down my throat to disguise the real world going on in the background.

I’d always had a small thread in my mind, after finding out what the computer could do, that one day when I had nothing else going on, no pressing matters to attend to, I’d use it to go rooting around to try and find out the truth about that terrible day. I had no preconceived notions about what I’d find other than I was sure that the whole story would be much more complex than anything I’d learned to that point. That day would probably never come now.

The internet came back up on January 2nd, and more than a few nodes immediately crashed when the crush of traffic flooded it, seeking answers, uploading videos of the burning refineries, shaky camera phone pictures and videos of shootouts and raids. America wasn’t in ruins, as it had only been five major oil refineries, not two massive office towers full of unsuspecting citizens. But it wasn’t pretty.

On January 7th, the President signed into law an emergency order putting caps on all fuel sales. He stood before the American public and told us how the enemy had struck a crippling blow not only to our economy, but to our infrastructure as well. There would be ugly fuel shortages and rationing until other refineries could increase output and new ones could be built. Fights, both fist and gun, had broken out at a few places in the larger metro areas when customers couldn’t get precious gas for their cars.

Then the heating oil shortage hit. On January 16th, one of the coldest polar storms on record came out of Canada, reaching all the way down into southern Florida. The eastern seaboard suffered ice storms, freezing rain, and temperatures below zero for three straight days, followed by two more days of sub-freezing high temps. As of today, there had been eleven hundred deaths from the lack of heating oil to stay warm. I knew that the number would climb to more than two thousand by next week.

I was in overdrive with the computer. Kassi and I spent far too many hours searching and reading everything we could that would tell us what happened, what was coming, and maybe even what to do. The worst of the panic from the country, and from us, was starting to subside. No new attacks had occurred, but we’d begun bombing Damascus and Hamah again. We’d also launched over a hundred cruise missiles into Iran. Just to be thorough, and to make sure we got everyone’s attention. Nico got a message to us saying that he’d be heading back to Syria by the end of the month.

“This is not good,” Kassandra said to me from the computer while I laid in bed and half-dozed, my head and eyes hurting from staring at the projection screen for too many hours without a break. My head was full of noise from all of the news reports I’d read.

“What now?” I asked with a groan.

“The House is going to introduce a bill called the Internet Security Act, pass it on the first vote, and then the Senate is going to pass it within hours. The President will sign it by midnight, and things are going to get really bad after that.”

“The Internet Security Act?” I asked, my mind clearing for a moment as the name rang a bell. “ISA?”

“You know about it?” she asked, looking at me with a frown.

“There was something about it being a really restrictive law, to the point that the U.N. was crying about it. But that was when I was first seeing what the computer was capable of. I read about it but didn’t really believe it, and didn’t think much of it until just now.”

“Tyler, this kind of shit is important,” she said, chastising me, but not with any real malice. She sounded more like my mom did when reminding how terrible of a kid I was when I forgot to make sure the fridge door was closed, or the front door, or when I drank out of the milk carton. “What else do you remember about it?”

“I don’t remember. I’d have to look at it again. If you search for ‘Arab Spring’ you’ll probably find it.”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” she said ten minutes later, not finding anything useful.

“Huh,” I said, trying to remember how I’d found it. “Oh, yeah. Arab Spring 2020. I remember that’s how I stumbled onto all of this. I put the wrong date in.”

Kass read for a while, and I turned on my side, facing her, but kept my eyes closed. I couldn’t stop seeing spots and the retinal imprint of the computer’s monitor. After a few minutes, I heard her shift in the computer chair.

“Okay,” she said, her face cloudy. “This is not good. That BBC story wasn’t that helpful, other than knowing Gregory won’t be but a single-term president. Not really digging an all-out ground war across the Middle East though.”

“What about the ISA bill?” I asked.

“Yeah, not good. So it seems that this thing makes the Patriot Act look like a rule you learn in kindergarten. By 2020, it’s basically being used to suppress just about anyone who speaks out against the government.”

“Censorship? No way. America is too freedom-loving for that shit,” I said, thinking of everyone I knew and how they all railed against censorship. It had always been a big topic on the internet, and it seemed too hard to enforce on a population of four hundred million citizens, ninety percent of them having internet access of some kind or other.

“That might be true right now, it gets really crazy during Gregory’s presidency. Seems there are a few more terror attacks within our borders. More than half the country starts going after the rest of America that isn’t patriotic enough to allow the government to restrict our communications and even our movement.”

“For our own safety, of course,” I said, feeling a pit in my stomach.

“That’s not even the worst thing, Tyler,” she said, looking frightened.

“Lay it on me,” I said, rolling on my back. The implications of the Internet Security Act were scary, enough to make my stomach queasy, but I couldn’t believe that the country would swing so far in one direction as to be perfectly fine with censorship of any kind.

“A dirty bomb gets detonated in Jerusalem in August of 2019.”

“What the fuck,” I said, almost shouted, sitting straight up in bed. “What the fuck?”

“I… I don’t know if I want to read anymore.” She looked like she was ready to cry.

“Jesus,” I breathed. A dirty bomb? In Jerusalem, one of the most secure cities on the planet that probably had five hundred radiological detectors scattered around it and outside of it?

“I can’t read anymore,” she said and left the computer chair, slipping into bed next to me. I could tell she was crying even though she was doing her best to pretend she wasn’t.

“I’ll read it,” I said, feeling the pit growing in my stomach. “We need to know what is going on.”

“Why? Why do we need to know? Are you having some kind of fantasy that we could stop something like what happens in the future?”

“No,” I said.

I knew it would be impossible to stop a chain of world events from going out of control without fucking over my entire family, including myself, as we rotted away in a dungeon in some CIA black torture site, the government getting a chance to play with the computer. Even if the computer’s security wouldn’t allow anyone but me to use it, they’d make me use it. I wanted to believe I was tough, but in reality, the first time they slipped a hot knife into my anus or sucked out one of my eyeballs with a vacuum cleaner, I’d do anything and everything they asked. Worse, they’d hurt my mom, dad, and Kass before it ever got that far. I’d break long before they would need to torture me physically.