Time Frame

  TIME

  FRAME

  Douglas E. Richards

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Douglas E. Richards

  Published by Paragon Press, 2017

  E-mail the author at doug@san.rr.com

  Friend him on Facebook at Douglas E. Richards Author

  Visit the author’s website at www.douglaserichards.com

  All rights reserved. With the exception of excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system.

  First Edition

  PART 1

  “Does anybody really know what time it is?

  Does anybody really care—about time?

  If so, I can’t imagine why

  We’ve all got time enough to cry.”

  —Chicago, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

  “For those who think the world is obsessed with ‘time,’ the Oxford dictionary added support to the theory Thursday when they announced that the word time is the most often used noun in the English language.”

  —NBCNEWS.com (6/22/2016)—based on an analysis of almost three billion words culled from the Internet.

  With respect to knowing what time it is, or caring, the currently accepted worldwide definition of one second is: “The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.” This is measured by atomic clocks that are accurate to within one second over a period of fifteen billion years—roughly the age of the universe.

  1

  The two naked women who were sprawled out at provocative angles on the huge bed were spectacular. Flawless. Both in their early twenties, with curves in all the right places, beautiful faces, and soft, silky hair. And the positions they assumed left nothing to the imagination.

  The lone man who completed the threesome took them with a frenzied abandon, allowing himself to operate on lust and instinct alone. His passion was so fierce and unbridled, he was so consumed by pure, mindless animal need, that he was able to achieve his goal: temporarily forgetting he was a prisoner, condemned to death.

  A prisoner whose sentence would be carried out with chilling efficiency in less than three weeks.

  True, he was imprisoned in a veritable palace, a luxury resort that the richest men alive would envy, but knowing that his execution date was imminent, and set in stone, did tend to put a rain-cloud over the sunniest day.

  But at least for now he would be fully occupied satisfying a primal need as old as time, responding to the softness of the women, their warmth, their writhing bodies, and their groaning and other squeals of ecstasy. Not to mention their exhortations for him to take them, along with explicit instructions for how they wanted him to accomplish this task.

  He had become the star of his own porn movie, and he allowed himself to believe that their performances were real—not letting his intellect spoil the perfect fantasy.

  Finally, unable to hold out any longer, he achieved the release his body so desperately demanded. He closed his eyes and tried to maintain a state of pure relaxation, basking in the recent memories of the fierce ecstasy he had experienced.

  Even so, his rational mind couldn’t help but return from its exile. He gazed at the women, who made no effort to cover up. They had done their job well, but of course it had all been an act. For twelve thousand dollars a day, one could get prostitutes who looked like centerfolds and who would pretend to be in lust with the man to whom they were assigned. And these pros had been worth every penny.

  Death row inmates were traditionally given a last meal. His warden had given him a month’s worth of last meals, with an expanded menu that included the hottest call girls in existence.

  He dressed, told the two girls he’d be back in a few hours for another round, and made his way to the pool, just outside the luxurious main residence. He took a seat inside an egg-shaped wicker lounge chair, and stared off at the nearby Rocky Mountains, still capped with white despite the warmer weather at lower elevations. The late afternoon Wyoming sun glistened off the snow and hit the incoming storm clouds at various angles, creating a bruised purple mosaic in the sky.

  It was magnificent.

  But all he could think about was death.

  The endless mansion, the size of a small hotel, faced the mountains that he loved while being stocked with everything else that he loved, not just the world’s priciest and best call girls, but even his favorite mattress and pillows on the bed. The temperature and agitation level of the Jacuzzi’s jets had been finely tuned to his preferred settings. Gourmet meals were brought in fresh by drone every day, each one a favorite. He had his own movie theater and the best automated massage chairs money could buy.

  Everything precisely tailored to his tastes.

  And why not? The callous bastard who had trapped him, who had written his death sentence, knew everything there was to know about him.

  His executioner wanted him to be as happy and comfortable as possible for his last weeks among the living, not fully understanding how staring into the abyss, knowing Death was rapidly approaching, made every luxury a double-edged sword, reminding him of how great life truly was just before it was snatched away forever. No luxury could make him forget that eternal night was coming.

  The man holding a knife at his neck had made attempts to soften the blow, but this didn’t change the fact that his executioner was cold and pitiless, a man of blind ambition. A man certain he could utterly transform human civilization. A man who thrived on control, selfishly guarding his command and unwilling to share a single iota of his authority.

  “God damn you, Edgar Knight!” the condemned man whispered to the mountains, but this was spoken more in resignation than in hatred. Hatred wouldn’t help.

  He could hate Edgar Knight all he wanted. But this didn’t change the fact that he was Edgar Knight.

  And that the decision to imprison him in this gilded cage, awaiting a swift and imminent execution, was one that he, himself, had made.

  2

  Edgar Knight shifted his gaze from the mountaintops and lowered his eyes to the sand-colored limestone tiles surrounding the pool. He remembered the thinking behind his death sentence, every step of the decision-making process, as if it had been his own.

  Because it had been.

  Although Knight had reached his fateful conclusion seven months earlier, it seemed like yesterday. It was simple, really. He was a great man, one who would be pivotal in determining the future course of humanity. In fact, the most pivotal to ever live. Which meant the most irreplaceable. If he was ever stricken down, the only man great enough to take his place was . . . himself.

  So he had made plans to give himself repeated one-month death sentences. Death sentences that had now been carried out six times over six months. The version of Knight now recalling this reasoning had come into existence in this frame of time just over a week earlier, the seventh repetition of this exercise. Like the others, there would be no escape.

  Almost three years earlier, Edgar Knight had discovered a way to tap into the mysterious dark energy that physicists had found made up more than half of all energy in the universe. Well hidden, but all-pervasive, it was a power source that existed even in the vacuum of space. As nearly infinite as a human mind could comprehend.

  By finding a way to tap it, Knight had cemented his status as the most brilliant, intuitive experimen
tal physicist and inventor to ever live. He knew it was considered bad form to think of oneself in these glowing terms, but he had to recognize reality, and no one familiar with his work would ever deny the truth of this assertion.

  Knight was born to parents who reproduced like rabbits, the seventh child of ten, in a backwater town in the heart of Kentucky. He didn’t believe in tales of gods impregnating women, either in Greek mythology or in the case of the Virgin Mary. But if someone were trying to prove this was possible, Edgar Knight would have been offered up as exhibit A. His parents and many siblings had the combined IQ of a lump of clay, and far less talent, while he had a genius for invention the likes of which the world had never seen.

  By the time little Edgar was thirteen he had come up with inventions that had netted him millions, allowing him to buy a mansion for his family with a guesthouse all his own. He left as soon as the law would allow, emancipating himself from an environment that taught him nothing but to despise both overpopulation and ignorance, which was all his home life had to offer.

  His high school was worthless, so he taught himself, absorbing the equivalent of a PhD level education in several scientific and technical disciplines. He was admitted to MIT, where he completed a degree in electrical engineering in two years despite attending classes only when this was mandatory.

  His genius for invention became so obvious, so early, that he was snapped up by the head of Black Ops R&D just after graduation, who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Year after year, Knight proved the wisdom of this choice, coming up with one breakthrough invention after another.

  Then, four years earlier, he had joined up with a man named Lee Cargill, who had earned a sterling reputation for managing interdisciplinary teams in pursuit of impossible goals. Whatever the latest Moon-shot or Manhattan project, Cargill would be put in charge. This time he was tasked with finding a way to tap into dark energy, and Q5 Enterprises was born, a Black Ops initiative under cover of a tech company.

  It was believed in the highest towers of academia that this enigmatic dark energy could never be tapped. Knight had been determined to prove this wrong. Just because you didn’t know where or what a force was, didn’t mean you couldn’t find a way to use it. An electromagnet would still pick up a car, even if the magnet’s maker knew nothing about magnetic fields and lines of force.

  Using nothing but instinct, Knight had forged ahead, a blind man attempting to tap into an invisible energy source, which often seemed more mythical than real. And he had succeeded, although it had taken a while for him to realize that he had, and longer still to understand the nature of the effect—an effect that no one could have ever predicted.

  Metaphorically, he had placed an energy collector in the center of an exploding nuclear bomb without managing to collect any energy. It was like standing on the surface of the sun and not even getting a tan.

  Eventually he came to realize that the energy was doing work, just not on the spatial axis of space-time.

  Instead, he was releasing mind-boggling amounts of energy, enough to meet the power requirements of the entire planet for months, but this energy was accomplishing one thing only: pushing matter within a contained space just over forty-five millionths of a second into the past.

  Edgar Knight had done nothing less than invent a time machine, albeit one that could only send matter back precisely 45.15 microseconds.

  Still, it was astonishing. Miraculous. And while its limitations meant there would be no trips to witness the birth of Jesus or to watch dinosaurs frolicking about, it was inarguably the most stunning, breathtaking discovery in all of history.

  3

  Knight continued to reflect on these vivid memories, which belonged as much to him as to the Edgar Knight who would survive him.

  Lee Cargill, the head of Q5, had raced to understand the potential of this new capability, and had taken great pains to secure this earth-shattering secret. Only after Cargill had transformed his organization into the most isolated black program in the history of black programs did he turn his full attention to finding ways to exploit and advance Knight’s discovery.

  Knight had continued to perfect the technology, building it into the trailers of eighteen-wheelers to give the system mobility, and had immediately seen far beyond the obvious possibilities. He knew just how to use these newfound capabilities to utterly transform the world, lift the species to new heights.

  But try as he might, he could not persuade Lee Cargill to subscribe to his views.

  Cargill was pathetic, worthless. The man could not have been more short-sighted if he were blind, and his sense of caution bordered on paralysis. He was also bound by an antiquated sense of morality, not relevant in this day and age and given the possibilities that time travel created.

  Knight, on the other hand, was supernaturally talented, daring, and visionary. It had driven him mad that Cargill had been too squeamish to make the best use of what he had created. Unwilling to push the technology to its limits, especially when it came to sending a human being back in time to create a universe with two copies of him or her.

  The term creative differences didn’t begin to cover it.

  So Knight had taken his technology, and a number of members of Cargill’s team, and had left. Not that this had been easy to do. When you’re part of the most secretive project on Earth, housed within the blackest of Black Ops groups, and you’ve come up with a technology capable of altering the structure of the universe itself, the very fabric of reality, separating from the pack and freelancing isn’t exactly an available option.

  But Knight didn’t let that deter him. After careful planning, and considerable bloodshed, he managed to extricate himself from the womb Cargill refused to leave, and eventually set up shop on an island in Lake Las Vegas, a man-made lake that was seventeen miles from the fabled Strip.

  No one knew that he controlled this facility, and his headquarters couldn’t have been more impregnable.

  Even so, Knight was a cautious man. Human beings were frail, easily killed. He could fall and hit his head on the edge of a table, killing himself instantly. He could electrocute himself during an experiment, despite careful precautions.

  So why not make a backup—just in case? Why not send himself back in time so there were now two of him?

  Not that he would ever let a second Edgar Knight roam free to interfere with his efforts. He would not allow any meddling, even by a version of himself a fraction of a second younger. Two of him would lead to confusion. Who would be in charge?

  The second him, the duplicate, wouldn’t just share his DNA, but his bank accounts and legal rights, his every memory—his very mind. The duplicate would be him just as surely as he was, simply one frame—or forty-five millionths of a second—behind him in the film reel of his life.

  There was no way he would ever consider sharing power, especially not with someone as brilliant, ambitious, and formidable as he was.

  So he decided to make duplicates of himself and imprison them. Let each lead a life of luxury while trapped, one month at a time. At the end of each month, the current duplicate would be dispensed with and he would create another, who would be fully up to date on all of the thoughts and experiences he had had during the preceding month. A fresher backup, so to speak.

  Once a month he had his helo pilot fly him from Nevada to his backup headquarters compound in Wyoming, chosen for its spectacular mountains and sparse population.

  Once he arrived he would step into the back of a big-rig, which housed a time machine, and send himself back forty-five millionths of a second.

  And the computer would dutifully carry out this order. Knight would be pinned on the spatial axis of space-time, but would slide a single frame backward on the time axis. He would remain on the spatial coordinates at which he had begun, but when he arrived in the near past the Earth would be in an entirely different location.

  The Earth never stood still. In fact, it hurtled through space at far greater speeds than any human
plane or rocket had ever achieved. It spun on its own axis and revolved around the sun, while the entire Solar System raced around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at breakneck speed.

  All in all, the Earth was traveling through the cosmos at two hundred forty-two miles per second. Even in forty-five microseconds the Earth traveled a distance of fifty-eight feet, meaning Knight would arrive in the past fifty-eight feet ahead of where he had begun. Gravity played a role that wasn’t fully understood, such that objects sent into the past ended up fifty-eight feet away, but always landed on the ground rather than above it.

  If fifty-eight feet would put an object inside a tree, matter’s strong repulsive force would deflect the object a short distance away, so that it would end up beside the tree instead. If the destination was dense with matter, like the middle of a mountain, with no open space near enough for a slight deflection, time travel wouldn’t work at all.

  Remarkably, the directionality of the effect could be changed by adjusting the polarity of the time travel field. The jumps were always fifty-eight feet, the exact distance Knight’s fledgling theory suggested would be the case based on the movement of the Earth over forty-five millionths of a second, but the direction of the jump could be dialed in as desired. This wasn’t something either predicted or predictable, but an effect discovered by trial and error alone.

  How this was possible was currently unknown, with the going theory being that time travel didn’t cut across the space-time axis, per se, which would be through the four common dimensions, but rather through a fifth dimension. Movement through this dimension translated into unexpected and counterintuitive results, which none of their scientists could yet adequately explain.