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“I see you’re wearing your uniform,” Swenson said with a thin smile, taking a seat. “More comfortable?”
Dani nodded and sat in the same chair she had previously occupied.
When they were all seated, Swenson placed the silver tube on the table between them again, as if it embodied the group’s subject of interest. “This is going to be hard for you to understand, Daniella. But please try to keep an open mind. We’ve decided to trust you.”
Moon snorted, causing Swenson to amend her statement. “I’ve decided to trust you.”
“Even though there are no records we can check to attest to your character,” Moon grumbled.
“What do you mean?” Dani asked. “You can check with the police department. You can check my academy records and my DMV record. You can even look at my Facebook page if you want to. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“We could have checked those things,” he replied, sounding disgruntled, “if we’d known you were coming. But not anymore. You, Officer Barsetti, are now a blank page, and all we’ve got to go on is what you say.”
“Huh?”
“As you can see,” Swenson intervened, “Mr. Moon has some misgivings, but he did agree to bring you in. So he’ll keep his objections to himself.” She stared him down, then turned her attention back to Dani. “I believe that you being here is an accident and that you played no part in Frank Bryan’s mission failure or his death.”
“I was on his side!” Dani insisted. “I was trying to help him.”
“Yes, I understand. But you don’t really know what he was trying to do. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to be completely honest with you. But there was no way he could have foreseen this outcome. His intention, and our intention, was to create as little disruption as possible. You and your colleagues were never to have known the truth about Frank Bryan’s mission.” She rolled the device under her forefinger, averting her eyes, as if she were still reluctant to trust Dani. Eventually, she said, “This item is a sort of homing beacon. When it’s activated, the person holding it is transported back to wherever he or she came from. Frank was trying to get home—back here, you see. He must have activated this after he was shot, but then dropped it.”
Dani looked around the drab room. “And where exactly is home for Frank Bryan?”
“This is…was his workplace. This is a scientific research facility that houses the equipment that transported you here.”
“You’ve got a transporter?” Dani laughed, looking from one grave face to another. Nobody else looked even a tiny bit amused.
“Yes, we do. It’s what we do here. We experiment and refine this transporter technology.”
Visions of Spock and Captain Kirk fading into sparkly dust played across Dani’s mind. Apparently she was not understanding what Swenson meant by “transporter.” And she still didn’t know who these people were. “Is this a government project?” she asked.
“Not directly, but there is government funding and oversight. We’re an independent collective of scientists. At least Dr. Hale and I are. Mr. Moon is a government representative.”
“So he’s here to make sure you’re not wasting the taxpayers’ money.”
Moon grunted.
“Something like that,” Swenson replied.
“Well, it’s really cool that you’ve got a transporter and all that.” Dani stood, anxious to get away from these people. “Considering how lousy it made me feel, I think I’ll just call a taxi to take me home, if you don’t mind, and skip the whole beaming back experience.”
“Please sit down, Officer Barsetti,” Swenson said commandingly. “There’s a lot more you have to know.” She held her hand out to indicate the vacated chair. “Please, Daniella,” she urged more softly.
Dani reluctantly took her seat, thinking it had been a mistake to let this woman call her “Daniella.” Because of it, she felt obligated to obey her.
Swenson pushed a lock of auburn hair back from her forehead, sweeping it behind her ear. Dani saw that she too was wearing an earpiece like the others. “You can’t take a taxi back to where you came from.”
Hale huffed, seeming amused at the taxi reference.
“I thought we were in San Francisco,” said Dani.
“We are.” Swenson hesitated, focusing her gaze steadily on Dani. “But you’ve traveled forward in time. This is the year 2221. You’re over two hundred years from where you were earlier today.”
Dani glanced around the room, ready to burst out laughing. Again, nobody else seemed to think this was funny. Did they really think she was going to believe this?
“Look,” she finally said, “if this is some kind of con, you can’t pull it over on me. I’ve seen them all. My grandfather Antonio Righetti was a master con artist. He taught me how to spot a con from the word go. And this is an amateur job. You lock me up in a windowless building, give me some weird food to eat and wear funny-looking clothes, and based on that lame demonstration, you expect me to believe I’ve traveled into the future? I suppose next you’re going to show me a newspaper with the year 2221 on it.”
“There are no newspapers,” Hale said haughtily. “There are no printed magazines or books anymore.”
Dani slapped her palm to her forehead. “Of course. What was I thinking? Two hundred years into the future, everything’s digital, right?”
“I told you she was too ignorant,” Moon remarked.
“Hey!” Dani objected.
“That isn’t helpful,” Swenson said pointedly to Moon. She turned back to Dani. “Obviously, anything digital we show you won’t be convincing because we are all aware of how easy it is to manufacture digital information.”
“Sure. Even in my time we’ve got Photoshop. So take me outside and show me the cool flying cars and robocops. I’d love to take a look at the skyline and see if I recognize anything. Is Coit Tower still there? What about the Golden Gate Bridge? Still standing? At least it was in the Star Trek movies set in the twenty-third century.” She chuckled. “I don’t know what you’re after or why you’ve targeted me, but I do know a con when I see one, and I’m pretty sure you’ve given me something to dull my reasoning so I’ll go along with this line of bull. Well, it’s not going to work. So why don’t we just cut to the chase?”
“It is still standing,” Hale said with a hint of a smile.
“What is?”
“The Golden Gate Bridge. Beautiful old relic. It suffered some damage in the great quake of…” Moon clamped his hand down hard on Hale’s arm and gave him a terse shake of his head. He smiled sheepishly, then returned his focus to Dani. “Yes, it’s still there and it still gets its regular coat of paint. It’s not used for transportation anymore, of course, but people do still walk on it because of its historical significance. It’s a tourist attraction.”
“Unfortunately,” Swenson said, “we aren’t authorized to show you anything. Moon hasn’t yet reported your presence to his superiors because we don’t know if you’ll be going back. This doesn’t happen every day, a visitor from the past, so we’re not completely sure how to proceed.”
“It’s never happened before,” Moon corrected. “We don’t have a policy for this. It could get very messy.”
“If I’ll be going back?” Dani asked. “What does that mean?”
“That’s what we’re here to discuss, whether or not we will be sending you back.”
“With your nifty time machine?”
“Right. We’ll need some time to prepare you, equip you properly and brief you on your suspect. It shouldn’t take too long, so we were thinking tomorrow. We can send you back to the same day, nearly the same time, so you won’t have lost the time you’ve spent here. But there’s a catch.”
“There always is.” Dani leaned back in her chair with a sigh.
“You can go back temporarily, but you can’t stay in your own time for long.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll die,” Hale offered bluntly. “When you came through the portal, you were imprinted with a temporal signature for this time. It’s part of the process of reentry. We never expected anybody from the past to come through. It wasn’t designed for that.”
“Sorry, you’re going to have to explain that so a cop can understand it.”
“Yes, well, how to explain temporal mechanics to a…cop.” He regarded her with disdain.
“I’ve seen it done in movies,” she offered.
He turned beseechingly to Dr. Swenson. “Oh, Pamela, this is hopeless. How am I supposed to convey even the simplest concept of our work to this woman?”
Swenson gave him an impatient frown. “According to the scans Lara made, this woman is of above average intelligence for her time.”
“For her time,” he repeated. “Yes, exactly, that’s my point.”
“Just try…please.”
Hale released an exasperated sigh and turned to Dani with a thin smile. By now, she had pegged him as a smug little prick.
“Okay,” he began, talking with his hands. “About the movies, that’s just going to confuse you more. Your popular culture is full of time travel fictions. In those old films, people went back in time and met themselves at a younger age, for example.”
“Sure.”
Hale shook his head. “That’s not possible. People or animals or any life form can only exist at one point in any temporal plane. If you leave one position, you can appear in another, but you can’t exist in both at the same time. There’s only one of you after all, and you’re traveling through time, traveling being the key. Just like if you were in a train going from Chicago to Los Angeles. Once you got to Los Angeles, you wouldn’t still be in Chicago. Despite the theories of infinite dimensions and infinite universes and the Belchner hypothesis of refractory mirror planes...”
“Gavin!” Swenson gave him a stern look. “The point, please.”
He nodded, looking slightly miffed. “Even if there are infinite universes and all of them contain one of you, they don’t intersect. A parallel universe is not the same thing as another point in time, that’s what I’m saying. We’re talking about the time dimension, time along one plane in one universe. All of our experiments, theoretical and applied, have proven that there can never be more than one of you in a single timeline. If it’s possible, we haven’t yet imagined how. We would be the first to admit that we still have more to learn about time and time travel. But what we do know is that when you left your time, you became a reality in ours and ceased to exist back then. Right now, you are not living your life in the twenty-first century. Not only did you cease to exist there when you came here, but you never existed there. You exist here now and, for all practical purposes, you always have.”
Did they really think she was going to believe any of this? She pondered his words while the three of them silently observed her, seeming anxious for her response. For the purpose of hearing them out, she said, “So if I go back, I’ll exist there again. Right?”
Hale, who seemed to be playing the resident expert on time travel, took up the question. “No. You don’t understand the part about the temporal signature. Sending you back in time doesn’t alter that. The process assumes you belong here, that you originated here. If you go back, you can’t stay in the past for long. Because you don’t belong there, because you’re out of temporal sync with your environment, you’ll begin to degenerate, atom by atom, until you die from the breakdown of your organs.”
Wow, they had really thought this wild story through, down to the fine details.
“What about Bryan?” she asked. “How was he able to live in the past?”
“He would have come back as soon as he completed his mission. He was there about a week altogether. The degeneration begins immediately. The shorter the time spent in the past, the better.”
“The longest anyone’s been gone is two weeks,” Swenson added. “There was significant neurological damage and major organ failure. She was an intern who volunteered. A young woman. She was unforeseeably detained during her trip to the past. We didn’t yet know about the effects of temporal asynchrony, as we had never sent anyone for more than a couple of days.”
“Temporal what?”
“Temporal asynchrony,” Hale said. “Being out of sync with the temporal environment you’re inhabiting.”
“Unfortunately,” Swenson said, “the young woman died a few hours after coming back. There was nothing we could do. So, you see, we’ve lost two people already. This is a dangerous endeavor. It’s not something we do casually. The danger to us and the danger of unraveling an important historical timeline are both critically important. As you can see for yourself, Frank is…gone and here you are, permanently ripped out of your time.”
“And Darius is still a threat,” Moon reminded them.
“If time traveling is so dangerous,” Dani asked, “why did Bryan do it? What’s the big deal about Darius? He’s just a punk eco-terrorist. We can take care of him ourselves.”
“A punk eco-terrorist,” Moon sputtered to himself.
“If you can go back and change something,” Dani asked, “why not go back and stop Hitler or Osama bin Laden or save JFK?”
Hale looked disgusted and shook his head. “You’re still at the movies, Barsetti. What makes you think we didn’t already go back and stop Hitler? Did he win? And what about JFK? Maybe we or somebody in our future went back to assassinate him. Maybe that was our solution to something worse. How do you know that his death didn’t stop a nuclear war?”
Dani was alarmed. “Did it?”
“That was just an example. It might even have happened that way. We would never know it. If someone in our future went back and altered reality, we’d be completely ignorant of it, so there’s nothing I can say about history with absolute certainty. As far as we know, it could have been changed already innumerable times by time travelers yet to come. That’s the thing you’re not getting. Once it’s changed, there’s no record of what it was before. That reality never existed. Just like you never existed back there. Your own mother has no knowledge of you now because she never had you.”
Thinking about her mother not knowing her, Dani felt a painful jab at her heart. That was inconceivable. Tension gripped her body before she remembered what a load of crap all of this was. She shook off the unease.
Swenson appeared momentarily sympathetic as she gazed into Dani’s eyes. “Leo Darius,” she said, “concerns us because, although he may seem like a punk eco-terrorist so far, he will become something much worse in the future.”
“We must stop him now while we can,” added Moon emphatically. “Before he kills millions of innocent people.”
“Millions of people?” Dani asked. “A future Hitler?”
“Worse than Hitler,” replied Swenson, her expression somber. “If you judge evil by the number of lives taken. Darius is an evil genius, a maniac.”
“How did he do it, kill millions of people?”
“Biological weapons targeted very specifically at humans.”
Dani sat silently regarding the faces of these people, trying to figure out what their game was. So far, none of this made sense. Clearly they wanted her to believe them. But how could she? Still, she was curious to find out what they were really up to, so she decided to play along, at least for a little while.
“You said I could go back. What do I have to do?”
Swenson tapped her fingertips together. “Have you ever killed anyone, Daniella?”
“No.”
“Could you?”
Dani considered the question. It wasn’t the first time she’d thought about it, of course. In her job, it was a real, daily possibility. She hoped she would never have to kill anyone. That was probably the one aspect of her job she most dreaded, the need to use deadly force. But if her life, the life of her fellow officers or the lives of innocent people were in danger, she knew she was capable of it. She was trained for it. “Yes, I could do it,” she answered. “If people were in danger.”
“A lot of people are in danger from Darius. Could you kill him?”
Dani nodded. “Yes, if I couldn’t take him into custody. If it was necessary.”
Mr. Moon rolled his eyes. “What did I tell you?”
Swenson smiled gently at Dani. “You don’t understand. He has to be stopped. He has to be killed. Custody is not enough. You witnessed his first murder. There will be so many more. I can’t begin to describe the horrors that will result from his actions. His ultimate goal is no less than to annihilate the human race.”
“Why would he do that? Bryan said he was an environmentalist, that he wanted to stop the polluters, stop the destruction of the rain forests and all that. He wanted to make sure there was clean air and water and natural, healthy crops…for people. It doesn’t make sense that he would attack Genepac if he wants to destroy the human race.”
“Did you miss the part about him being a maniac?” asked Moon sarcastically.
“Exactly,” Swenson agreed. “Darius started out like any other planet-friendly protestor. But he evolved. His ideas became dangerously twisted. He began to believe that reformation wasn’t possible, that any progress would be too little, too late. So he turned to destruction as the means of achieving his ends, to return the planet to its natural state. He wanted to remove what he saw as the most destructive poison threatening the Earth. Humans. He believed that the only way to save the planet was to eradicate humanity.”
Dani stared.
“In a way, he’s right,” said Hale with a half-hearted shrug. “I mean, obviously, humans have raped and pillaged the planet for centuries. Species have gone extinct, ecosystems have been destroyed.”
“We are all aware of that,” Swenson said. “As a species, we’ve made huge mistakes and we’ve been selfish, but we have turned it around. We’re on the right track now. We’re doing much better as shepherds of this planet. And we will continue to improve. Even Darius realized that humanity will get it right eventually.”
