Multiverse a technothril.., p.19
Multiverse: A Technothriller, page 19
She angrily wiped an unbidden tear from the corner of her eye and her father shook his head.
“Honey, don’t get mad when your humanity peeks out from behind the curtain. It’s a good thing to know it’s still there. I think you’ll be surprised by what I have planned.”
“What are you planning?” Mason asked.
Her father harrumphed as he stared at his boss. “It’s a surprise.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Alicia sat on the edge of the bed as she listened to her father talking on his cell phone.
“The Air Force Memorial in Arlington at three in the afternoon? Brice, are you sure?”
Alicia heard a muffled “Yes” and the rest of the response was too faint for her to hear as her father paced back and forth in the small apartment the Outfit provided him, which was just outside of the DC area.
“Have you been there? That place is wide open. There’s no sneaking up to the memorial nor is anyone going to sneak away. We’ll be two steps from the Pentagon and Arlington Cemetery. If anything goes sideways, that place will be swarming with Feds in no time.” He nodded to something Brice must have said. “Okay, that works. Hey, have you heard from Mason at all today? No, he’s ghosting me as well. Don’t worry about it, I have what I need. You know how to get me if anything changes.” Her father tossed his phone onto his bed and shifted his gaze to her. “Are you sure you still want to do a ride-along with me?”
“Absolutely.” Alicia nodded. “What are we doing? How can I help?”
He pointed to the bathroom. “Go shower, and scrub whatever makeup or anything else you’ve got on you. We’ll go from there.”
“Dad!” She frowned. “I just spent thirty minutes putting my makeup on, why—”
“You’ll see.” He raised an eyebrow and shook his head. “Go get all that stuff off.”
“Fine.” Alicia huffed and pointed at the clothes she was wearing. “What about my clothes, is this okay?”
“Don’t worry about the clothes, I’ll come up with something more appropriate. Hey, did my mother ever show you how to make those figures out of sheets of paper?”
“You mean origami, Dad?”
“Yes, origami.”
“She did. In fact, she said that you learned how to do it in Japan and taught her how to make all those different animals and shapes.” Alicia said with some hesitation. “Why do you ask?”
“You’ll see in a bit.” He grabbed a large duffle bag from his closet and tossed it on the bed. “Go get yourself cleaned up, you’ll see why I’m asking.”
Alicia held a perplexed expression as her father began pulling out vacuum-sealed bags of clothes, a set of what looked like cases of makeup, and other things she’d never have expected to find in his apartment.
He gave her a sidelong glance. “Alicia, get washed up now or you’re not going with me. I’m serious. Do it now.”
Alicia grabbed a fresh towel and practically tripped over her own feet as she rushed to the bathroom to get washed up. She absolutely wanted to understand why her father had makeup kits, wigs, and hair extensions in that duffle bag.
What in the world were they going to be doing?
Mason peered through a set of high-powered binoculars at the building on Randolph Street. The target had men on all four sides of him as he was transferred out of a vehicle and walked the fifty feet to the nearest building entrance. It would have been a difficult shot, but not one that couldn’t be made.
Very few people in the Outfit were still around from when he’d first been recruited to join. One of the things he’d brought to the table wasn’t just his managerial skills, but his background as a military sniper. Buried somewhere up in his head, he replayed a memory of pulling out his trusty old M40 sniper rifle and making that very shot.
Through his scope, he could almost see the beginning of the bald spot the professor was developing as he walked from the parking lot toward the building.
He’d loaded his rifle with 200-grain rounds for a subsonic flight downrange. That coupled with the suppressor and the noise from the mid-day traffic would give him a modicum of anonymity regarding the origin of his shot.
He glanced at the flags near the target, they were hanging limply against their flagpoles.
Go time.
Peering through the scope from his elevated position, he placed the buttstock firmly against his shoulder and rested his finger on the trigger.
The professor was a wide-open target as he walked along the sidewalk, the crown of his head lined up perfectly for a clean head shot.
He placed the crosshairs on the back of the man’s head, adjusting slightly for the distance and pace of movement. It almost felt like time had slowed.
Each beat of his heart pushed blood through his body, imparting the slightest wobble to his aim. To compensate, he waited. Waited for the pause between heartbeats, and when his aim recovered from the almost imperceptible wobble, the crosshairs settled on the target.
He squeezed the trigger. The rifle bucked back against his shoulder.
It took less than two seconds for the bullet to travel through the barrel, over the city streets and rush hour traffic, and slam into the back of the professor’s head.
He dropped as if he were a marionette and someone had cut his strings.
That memory was from another time. Things were different this time. There were forces at play in the future who were adjusting strategies and sending back different tactics.
The multiverse he was in had shifted.
The memories he carried of having killed the professor were only a hint of what had been in one instance of an alternate reality. And a future reality was still trying to compensate. Trying to keep the status quo, while Mason and others in the future were trying to remedy the sins of the past.
The professor was no longer a sitting duck.
Today’s elements of the FBI knew of the future, they must, otherwise things would still be as he remembered.
Someone from the future had reached out to the past and warned them.
Either way, him killing the professor hadn’t done the world any good last time… the man’s death was clearly insufficient to stop what was going to happen.
What were they missing? What else needed to be done to prevent the hellscape that the future would turn into?
There was only one person who actually had the answer to that question… and he had just walked into that building.
Sitting in the DARPA headquarters building in Arlington, Virginia, Michael watched with some level of amusement as Dr. Sundenbach, good ole Red Eye, showed a short video clip from a projector. It was giving a visual representation of a future stage of Project Morpheus. Even though the voice broadcasting from a hidden speaker on the projector had a metallic quality to it, it was obviously Carl’s voice narrating the film.
“Today, lasers can be used to carry digital information from one point to another at the speed of light, but what if we could use our newly harnessed tachyon beams to transmit data from one time to another?”
A cartoon showed a modern scientist sending an e-mail, and the words on the e-mail were digitized and beamed from a satellite dish up into the sky, and suddenly the contents of the e-mail appeared on a scroll, in the hands of someone in Ancient Egypt.
It was a silly nonsensical thing, but it clearly showed a concept, not the reality of how it would work. A papyrus scroll obviously wouldn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere with the e-mail’s content, like shown on the cartoon.
Michael kept his sense of annoyance to himself, but the video was obviously a sign of what would happen to real science if you let the marketing people try to spin it for management’s sake. The idea of dumbing things down for easy consumption was fine, but he hated the idea of giving inaccurate messages. Clearly others didn’t have the same sensibilities.
Several graphics appeared on the screen with launch dates and coordinates peppering the illustration.
“For this reality to be achieved, we need to verify what has already been seen in a controlled lab environment. The relationship between the speed of the tachyon beam and its ability to traverse time is understood, but not verified. To truly verify and fine tune our ability to control not only where the beam goes, but to -when- it goes, we need to launch a space probe to receive the beam. If we predict that the beam can travel back one year, the probe will need to be located where we were one year ago to receive it.
“Since our world is traveling through space at well over 300 kilometers per second, experiments with time great than tiny fractions of a second could never be done on Earth. And that’s why we must include these probe launches in our capital expense forecasts.
“Project Morpheus has an aggressive plan of five probe launches in the next four years. With each progressive test refining the calculations and enabling a way forward for us to possibly have the ability to reach back into our own time. Our own history.
“There are parallel efforts underway to explore how such a thing can be leveraged, both for national security purposes as well as humanitarian causes such as the eradication of modern diseases in the past.
“The possibilities are endless.”
The film ended and Michael stared at the logo of the Defense Department. His mind drifted back to that college student and what she had said.
“I’m the one responsible for the memory externalization process, you’re the one with the ability to send things across time and space. Together we ruin this world. We have to stop this before it goes any further.”
How could she have known? The only thing that made sense was that she was some kind of foreign spy. Someone who maybe was associated with his family’s kidnappers. Or maybe just a student who’d heard one of the engineers talking and she had a wild imagination.
A while back, during a moment of weakness, he’d tried calling that number she’d shared with him. Nobody had answered, though the voice on the voice mail was the same girl’s voice.
“Together we ruin this world.”
Michael shook his head. It didn’t matter. At this stage, whatever was happening was going to happen. There were enough people on the team and he’d documented enough of this so that even if he stopped work today, it would only slow things down. There was nothing he could do to stop the motion of progress.
The best thing he could do was to be involved and do the right thing. And the right thing was to pursue the science, and by earning everyone’s trust, help influence how things got used.
It was the only way.
One of the men in the conference room said, “Now that we’ve seen the sales pitch for the higher-ups, how about we break for lunch?”
An FBI agent standing near the door to the conference room looked over at Michael and asked, “Professor, I think the schedule has you in Quantico this afternoon. You still want to visit the Air Force Memorial before we head out there? It’s only a few minutes away from here.”
Michael nodded. “I do. I long ago promised my grandfather I’d pay respects to his friend and fellow pilot if I was ever in the area.”
“Roger that.” The agent pulled out his phone and put it to his ear as everyone else got up from their seats.
Percy sat up and yawned as Michael pushed back from the table.
He gave the puppy a scratch on the top of his head and whispered, “Are you hungry, big boy?”
The dog thumped his tail loudly against the conference room furniture and let out a huff, as if to say, “Of course.”
Grabbing his leash, Michael followed the other engineers out of the conference room, and looked forward to getting some fresh air.
He and Percy both needed it.
With a large array of makeup and costume paraphernalia on the bathroom counter, Alicia stood in front of the bathroom mirror, her hair still damp from the shower, wearing just her bra and pajama bottoms. She looked over at her father who’d stripped naked to his waist and was also in front of the mirror. She grinned, “Dad, you’re the last person on Earth I was expecting to get a makeup lesson from, ever.”
He chuckled and shifted the angle of an illuminated magnifying mirror he had on a gooseneck attachment. “Baby girl, a person in my field sometimes has to mask his Hollywood good looks and charm and be something he’s not.”
Alicia snorted and rolled her eyes.
“You’ll see what it’s like to take on a new persona, and it starts with the easy part—how you look.
“That’s the easy part?”
“Sure,” he responded. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to take on someone else’s identity. Imagine trying to act and talk like someone in their seventies. Including holding a conversation and using language that’s appropriate for a different age. It’s not as easy as you might imagine. But for now, we’ll just focus on how you look. That’s the only thing the FBI has to go on at this moment, and since we have to assume they might know you and I are related, then we’re both going to end up looking and sounding a bit different when we’re done.”
Alicia stared at all the unfamiliar things on the double-sink counter and she felt a bit nervous. This wasn’t as simple as a little eyeliner, blush, and lipstick. “Okay, where do we start?”
“As a girl, you probably wouldn’t do this, but watch what I’m about to do.”
Alicia stared wide-eyed as her father wet his hair in the bathroom sink, and then smoothed it back so that it lay tight against his scalp. Even though he was in his forties, he had the physique of someone in their prime, well-chiseled and a bit annoying how symmetric his musculature was. With her having one breast a cup larger than the other, symmetry, or lack thereof was a thing that she’d become a bit sensitive to. She stared at him and noticed something for the first time: unlike most white guys his age, he didn’t have a single gray hair that she could see. “Dad, do you dye your hair?”
“No, and I won’t for this disguise, you’ll see.”
“I mean, normally. You don’t have any gray hair at all.”
“I guess I’m just lucky. My mother has plenty for the both of us.” He ripped open a package and pulled out a floppy flesh-colored piece of latex. “This is an untrimmed latex skullcap.” Her father gazed into the bathroom mirror and carefully laid the thin, flesh-colored cap on his head. He took a small sharp pair of scissors and began explaining things as he did them. “Now I trim the edges, leaving just enough overlap with my skin to apply spirit gum and glue the edges down.”
He tilted his head back and forth and side to side, examining his work in the mirror. “I’m looking to make sure the cap fits well and doesn’t bunch up unnaturally anywhere. So far, so good. As soon as I’m done with my hair, you and I will both do our faces at the same time.”
Alicia stared at her father, fascinated by the transformation happening in front of her. “So we are both aging up for this mission?”
Her father looked over at her and grinned. “Listen to my baby girl talking about missions. Yes, we’re going to age quite a bit. Just watch. This stuff is called crepe wool.” He opened another package and began teasing apart a braid of some sort of hair. “Actors tend to use the cheap stuff that’s made of vegetable fibers, but I always look for a more realistic look, so this is actually plaited wool. As in from a sheep.” He applied adhesive along the crown of his bald cap, cut a four-inch segment of the teased wool, and carefully placed the cut end against the tacky glue. “Now I wait a moment for this stuff to dry.” He repeated the process until he had a semicircle of hair on the crown of his head.
With a makeup applicator he began patting himself with some powder. “This is translucent powder that I’m putting on any of the exposed glue. It’ll help hide the edges of the cap. Now for a bit of styling.”
Alicia watched as her father carefully combed the horseshoe of hair sticking up from the cap and, using an electric shaver, contoured it a bit so it lay correctly.
He turned to her and smiled. “So, what do you think?”
With her mouth hanging open, Alicia shook her head. “You look like a young Farmer Jenkins. It looks weird that you’re bald but with a relatively young face.”
“It can happen. I remember Mr. Jenkins began losing his hair when he was twenty. But you have a point. Now is time for both of us to start aging.” He opened a jar and said, “We start with some foundation.”
Alicia picked up the same jar next to her sink, opened it and looked over at what her father was doing.
“Take a wedge-shaped sponge and place a thin coat across your forehead, cheeks, and along your throat.”
Alicia watched what her father did with practiced motions and she tried her best to follow along.
He looked over at her and said, “Hold your chin up.” Her father began dabbing foundation onto her skin. “This changes the opacity of your skin and acts as a base layer to apply our changes.” He looked at her from various angles and nodded his approval.
Alicia continued to watch and follow along as she grabbed a makeup brush and a plum-colored shader. With light taps, she tapped the brush against the powder-based makeup, and applied shadow to her temples, the hollows of her cheeks, her forehead wrinkles, under her eyes, and along some lines on her neck.
Her father glanced at her and evidently not seeing an issue continued applying makeup, without even looking at the mirror anymore.
“Dad, slow down, you’ve I guess done this a million times. I can’t keep up.”
“Sorry, honey. Now onto the highlights…”
Alicia applied highlights to her cheekbones, nasal folds, and forehead wrinkles.
“Now you softly blend the wrinkles to ease the contrast between the highlights and the shadows.” He dabbed on a maroon effect and said, “This gives the illusion of broken capillaries on the nose, upper cheeks, and forehead.”
She continued mimicking him and to her shock, saw herself slowly transforming into an older Asian woman.
“Now for some aging spots. Alicia, turn to me.”
