Extra Life (16 page)

In his driver’s seat Dad was still himself—scruffy, pot-bellied. Not some alternate-reality avatar of Kasper Vale with a massive cerebral cortex swelling his head to twice its size.

He explained as he drove, how the spark for his invention happened fifteen years ago, back when I was still learning how not to crap myself. He was working on probability algorithms meant to render player choices in video role-playing games more naturalistic and intuitive. Like, thirty options for how to use your shrapnel bomb instead of just three, and level bosses that adjusted their attacks to your personal playing style—innovative stuff at the time. But the US government saw military uses, so Rush Fiberoptics chased the money, moved out of gaming and into artificial intelligence for drone warfare. Real-life remote control missiles that could think for themselves so you don’t have to.

Then, more research and development with MIT, involving theoretical non-silicone computing at the atomic level, stuff that was poised to make binary coding as obsolete as horse carts. Like, your whole computer could be a dollop of jelly, and similar weirdness. But Rush kept it under wraps until the ideas could be applied in real life. All the theory in the world meant squat if the bulb stayed dark when you flicked on the switch.

In the meantime, Dad retooled his breakthroughs for a computer program that simulated quantum computing. In a virtual sense, he could vibrate subatomic strings at precise frequencies without collapsing the wave functions of electrons.
Virtual
negative energy could be harnessed from those vibrations, enough to fuel a
virtual
wormhole. But all it did in actual practice was
look
kinda cool, like a fractal screen saver that dances to the music.

All the specifics were lost on me, but not the gist. Dad’s computer program could make a virtual black hole that stayed stable for almost a whole second (a seriously long time in quantum terms, apparently). Rush had almost all the ingredients for folding up time. All they needed, he said, was the mixer: a Tipler Cylinder that could spin fast enough to drag the fabric of space-time into a vortex. A time machine.

They don’t sell Tipler Cylinders at Target. In fact, the device didn’t even
exist
until serious advances in nanotechnology (another division of Rush) put the tech within Dad’s microscopic reach. A Tipler Cylinder the size of a rice grain, and suddenly, the possibility of time travel wasn’t sci-fi anymore, it wasn’t just theoretical math, and Dad freaked out. He refused to take the project any further.

“Never a good idea to steal fire from the gods,” he said.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Why did they fire you?”

“I resigned, actually,” he said. “For ethical reasons.”

I didn’t need to ask about the ethical dilemma. I was experiencing it first hand. But what I didn’t get was why Dad let everybody think he was fired, especially Mom. Fewer questions he didn’t want to answer, I supposed. Better to look like a loser than expose a dangerous company secret.

Dad told me how he didn’t lose much sleep worrying that the eggheads at Rush would crack their code without him. They’d have to actually harness enough negative energy to keep the vortex stable, for one. Stability is what keeps a guy intact when he warps through. Stability is what drops him at the right space-point coordinates instead of, say, into dead space on the far side of Pluto. I was a big fan of this stability thing.

At red lights, Dad uncapped his green erasable marker and plotted equations on the windshield. New variables based on my account of the last eleven hours. How he converted my nightmare into numbers, I had no clue. It was all
The Social Network
to my eyes, but I was desperate to know the outcome.

“Wait,” he said. “Your consciousness is singular, correct?”

“Huh?”

“Do you experience the other’s Russ’s perceptions, like double-vision?”

“No, he’s separate. Another person. So was the one who sent me the video.”

Dad slapped himself in the forehead and thumb-erased a few numbers. “I forgot about that one,” he said. “But he could be you in the future, yes?”

“He didn’t have a black eye.”

Dad did a double take. Apparently he hadn’t noticed my shiner until I mentioned it.

“Fight at school,” I explained. “Well, not this time. The other me never got into the fight, so he doesn’t have any battle scars.”

I still hadn’t told him about Paige. I couldn’t find the words—and
suicide
wasn’t one of them. I refused to believe it. Plus, that level of problem would’ve been too much added pressure for Dad, so I kept it filed away, a draft I could open later and revise. Her fate didn’t have to be permanent or real anymore.

“Temporal paradoxes resolving themselves,” he said. “Strange. In fact, impossible—except…”

“Except what?” I said.

He studied the numbers cluttering the windshield glass, but the marker just ticked in his hand.

“Everything keeps dissolving into irrationals,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

The light turned green and Dad moved forward with the traffic, peering through his own chicken scratch.

“Maybe erase it so you can see the road?” I suggested.

“Right. We don’t want anyone to spot these formulas. In the wrong hands—”

“I don’t think we need to worry about that, Dad.”

“Of course. Duh, me. It’s backwards from their point of view!”

Rush Fiberoptics was in a sterile compound of plate-glass office buildings with manicured lawns and precisely spaced trees. Product development divisions for dozens of tech and medical companies.

Deep in the corporate zone, we were surrounded by reflective glass walls. Mirror images of our car and its riders kept flitting in and out of our view. Dad swerved into a nearly empty lot, one of the few that wasn’t gated and manned with a booth, probably because its matching building was still under construction.

Rush was across the street. Ten stories, evening sunlight shimmering orange on the glass. The grounds were fortified with a tall fence and concertina wire. For a company supposedly hiding the biggest tech secret in human history, it probably should’ve sported military choppers, searchlights and turret guns mounted on towers.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Don’t know. They won’t be happy to see me.” Dad glared at the edifice of his former employer’s headquarters. I’d never seen him look so fierce, so determined, and all for my sake.

We got out and crossed the street. An hour past the workday commute, the whole compound felt evacuated. The only noise was the slow echoing clang of metal on metal somewhere high above. Like a bird in flight mode, I wanted to soar up to a safe and surrounding view of the threats down below.

The guard who manned Rush’s security booth was retirement age, more like a Wal-Mart greeter than a first line of defense.
Chip
, his nametag read. “Mr. Vale,” he said to Dad. “Long time, no see. Who’s the young fella?”

Dad slung his arm across my back and grasped my shoulder. “This is my son, Russ. I know it’s late in the day, but I was hoping the two of us might see Ed Corrigan in R&D. Or even Mr. Proust if he’s available.”

“Sorry, Mr. Vale. Both of them’s gone for the night.”

Dad grinned at me as if to apologize. It seemed that the sum total of his plan was simply to pretend he was way late for a board meeting on bring-your-son-to-work day.

Chip was assessing Dad’s unemployment outfit. “Anything else I can do for you?”

“Actually, yes,” Dad said. “I stopped by because I realized I left some important personal effects…”

“Sorry again,” Chip said, dropping the customer-service charade. “Building’s shut up for the night. Not to mention, y’all been put on the no-fly list, if you catch my drift. Can’t let you in under no circumstances.” Chip raised a clipboard and tapped his gnarled finger on a blacklist of names. Quite a few names, in fact.

“I see,” Dad said.

“Happy to pass along a message Monday morning if you like.”

“That’s okay, Chip. Thanks.” Dad put his hands in his pockets, slumped his shoulders, and headed back toward the car.

I couldn’t bring myself to follow him. I just stood there by the guard post, huge imaginary question mark over my head. My resistance gave Chip the jitters. He reached under a shelf. Alarm or gun, I didn’t know.

“Russ,” Dad said. “Let’s go fix that clock.”

Back across the street, I leaned against the car while Dad ducked into the driver’s side and rummaged through the opened center console. After a second he popped out and held the prize between his thumb and index finger.

“Jackpot,” he said.

“Flash drive?”

“Working prototype. This baby’s got five petabytes of storage.”

“I guess that’s a lot?”

“
Yeah,
”
Dad said, with a snort-laugh
. “
More than any lone consumer could need. Unless he’s uploading and running a time travel program. The plan is, I’ll get in there, download the program from their servers. If it exists, of course.”

“What do you mean
if it exists
? I told you I used it.”

“Yes, but
when
was it sent from? That’s the question.”

He had a point, and it poked a hole in all my inflated hope. We were a couple of burglars on the biggest heist in human history, but there was a damn good chance we’d find the vault completely empty. If the app was sent to me from the future, a working version might not even have been developed yet, here in the present.

“Could somebody else in there have finished your work?” I asked.

Dad sat down sideways in the driver’s seat, shoes still on the pavement. “Nobody I worked with had the brains, frankly. I would’ve bet we were decades, maybe even
centuries
away from harnessing the exotic energy we’d need to make time travel work. I would’ve said it was impossible, ever. Still, the computer simulations assured us it was all right there for the picking, inside our electrons. And to think, whoever finally developed a working application for this thing even figured out how to
transmit
the wormhole by satellite to your phone.”

He sprang up, an instant mood shift, and grabbed both of my shoulders.

“Russ, what you’re telling me, the means of time travel is spinning inside our every atom.”

“I know. If you’ll recall,
it already happened to me
.”

“Yes! You’re a pioneer, son, a freaking chrononaut.”

“Uh, couldn’t have done it without you?”

Dad frowned at my sarcasm. I could understand his thrill, but the clock was ticking, and he didn’t know the horrors I unleashed with my ridiculous
pioneering
.

“What was it like, going through?” he asked me.

“Kind of like getting shocked, punched in the stomach, the giant whirlpool at Six Flags, all at once, compressed into less than a second.”

“Right, all right, excellent,” he muttered. “I’m going in.”

“What are we doing?”

He pressed the car keys into my hand. “Keep the car running.”

“So I’m the wheelman?”

A slight grin sneaked back onto his face. “That you are. Wish me luck.”

I kept the driver’s seat warm, started the ignition. Watching Dad head back toward Chip at the security gate, not knowing what he planned to do, frayed every last one of my nerves.

I begged Paige, wherever she was, to wait just a little longer. Reel the film in reverse, the train goes backward and the damsel is in one piece again, sprawled across the tracks, desperate to be untied from the ropes. I scanned the radio, looking for something calm, but none of the available music kept rhythm with my heartbeat. I tapped the radio off, resumed my surveillance.

Dad was nowhere to be seen, and Chip’s security booth was also empty.

Time sticks when you’re in a panic. I don’t know how long I waited for some sign of life, but what I got instead was the wail of far-off sirens ricocheting off the echo chamber of glass buildings around me.

Then, over at Rush headquarters, about six floors up, an office window burst outward from the force of a human-sized projectile. My body jolted at the sight of it. Both my hands pressed the horn. No idea why.

When the object bounced onto the courtyard lawn in a rain of glass, I saw that it was just an empty office chair and not, say, my father falling to his death. Six stories above, nobody appeared in the jagged opening formerly known as the office window. No movement at all.

Still, this didn’t look like part of a plan.

I could’ve imploded from helplessness. No matter what Dad said, I should’ve gone in there with him. I should’ve insisted he take me home instead of here. He was a desk jockey, not a Navy SEAL. For the extent of his physical prowess and stealth, he might as well have been a brain floating in a jar.

Another few seconds, and police cruisers blared down the road in both directions. They screeched to a halt in formation outside the gate, as if this siege was all choreographed ahead of time. Cops deployed from their vehicles and breached the “security checkpoint” no problem. All they did was duck under the lowered toll bar, or hurdle it, in the case of one showoff.