Chapter sixty-eight.
Time machine
A big fucking time machine.
That was EVE's thought, as she watched the screens in the main control center of the superaccelerator.
Since the last hour she had been trapped down there with the others with no way out. She had been sitting on a bench and watching the scientists working on the keyboards, screens and holographic projections. They didn't seem to mind being down there, but at least they were there of their own free will.
EVE didn't understand much of what they were doing, but she had finally figured out part of why she was there. She was not amused, but the Director had explained some of the data to her.
She had found out something else, the so called Director had the name, Lukas Peaslee, although he had asked to be called Director only. Names don't matter here, he had told EVE. If it was about names she couldn't say anything. After all EVE was an acronym for Extraterrestrial Violent Entity.
I don't believe it, EVE whispered as she scratched her back. It had been itching for a few minutes and she had retracted her symbiont armor to scratch it discreetly. It wasn't that she was being watched, but she didn't want to show her bare back to a bunch of strangers either.
When she retracted her armor it was possible to see what looked like scar marks on her shoulder blades. Although they had a design almost as if they had been drawn with a certain tribal, yet curvilinear and symmetrical artistic pattern. Those milky white marks contrasted slightly against EVE's skin. Still, she did not know what the itching could be due to. There was nothing on her back, but it was bothering her now.
She sighed and the armor covered the bare part as she leaned back against the bench.
The Director at the time was talking to two other technicians or scientists, on a main screen that took up an entire wall and displayed data from the facility, as well as a full projection of the supercollider facility.
On the screen was represented not only superaccelerator, but all the others, there were other accelerators and systems around that were smaller, but they were just as important because they complemented everything as a single system. It was certainly huge. There were four control points and she was at the main one. Where it would all end.
What she had brought was vital for the final part.
The Director had explained to her that this was part of an experiment and that Benjamin Bloodworth had been asked to participate with someone from his company. It would be a joint effort of many involved, but nothing illegal. That was good to hear.
It was a test by the Council to test a theory about observation and time travel. Everyone involved had to participate as if it were real. It was a simulation but where everything had to be carried out as if almost everyone was unaware of what it was really all about. Except for Janus, who was the one who had originally planned everything.
Was that the reason why Benjamin had been suspicious? Because it was really a lie and it was all planned?
It wouldn't be the first time EVE had been part of an experiment. After all, in order to determine that she was a Keelian, an entity from another universe that for some reason had come to this universe, she herself had gone through several secret tests conducted by Benjamin. The Council was aware of her existence but to the rest of the world it was a secret, thanks to the influence of the Bloodworth company.
The Director could not give her all the details, but he assured her that it was a massive experiment that had been carried out over time and pieces had been added and taken out over the years.
EVE asked him about who was aboard the plane, but he shrugged it off. It was a piece he didn't know. In fact, he asked her not to tell him any more. Each of us knows what part we have to play, but ignorance is a vital part of all this as well.
But he did tell her some details of the final part and the other part was shown on the screens.
The experiment was to send two people back in time.
What she had obtained from the plane, which was also supposed to be part of the experiment, was a fractus nucleus split in two. One of the halves, the one obtained by Stan and Rum in the robbery, had been used to obtain the other half in the plane that was in the past. Would those two be real thieves to begin with?
I don't believe it…
EVE knew as much about physics as anyone. Although she did not like to study, Benjamin had forced her to take some courses. It was known that time travel was a delicate subject because of an experiment that had happened some time ago and because some Dark Events could create distortions. Bubbles where time could go faster or slower than a second for a second. But it was the first time EVE had heard of an experiment involving the past. But well, the Council was involved, so that must have been a special exception.
It was common for such tests to be done sometimes and she knew it, although it was the first time she had been involved in one. Many companies tested fractus cores in strange ways to observe that their production could not cause side effects, mostly the appearance of Dark Events, not to mention the probability of other mishaps.
From what the Director suggested, it had been an attempt to load those two core pieces of experiences. Something similar to the creation of a collective egregore to manipulate time and thus see if it would be possible to send two people back in time.
But could it all be possible? She worried a little. If she could, she would have to send an apology to those two she had almost killed during the attack on Pyrene. Or were they already prepared to be shaken like that? Simulations were common, but at this level?
EVE wondered if it made any sense. An egregore was possible. EVE knew of some Dark Events that had endowed inanimate objects with what could be called a spirit, or consciousness, such objects in fact had names hundreds of years ago, for example they were called tsukumogami in Japanese culture. But one that had to do with time manipulation? Maybe? She herself had some of that after all in her martial art.
She remembered nothing of her past before she came to Earth, but her body remembered those special fighting moves as if it were a kind of muscle memory. Her special blows had the ability to give the impression to the receiver that they were detached from their bodies and that time slowed down. That was simply an effect of unbalancing the body in the right places, there was no magic or anything like that involved, just force applied in the right place. The little magic she could use was to neutralize the magic of someone else in her range.
Whatever it was, even with the Director's explanation it seemed like a miracle. A Dark Event, but she had the feeling it was an intentional one.
EVE sighed and stared at the screens with the projections and diagrams. The final experiment had begun hours before she arrived, where they had been running collision simulations and tests by sending out test particle packets to check that everything was going as it should.
First there was the complex of small accelerators that had to work first. That part EVE understood from what little physics she had studied.
Hydrogen atoms were fired first, stripped of their electrons and left with protons that were sent to a radio-frequency chamber. From there the proton packets were sent to rings called Boosters, where they would gain speed by applying a charge and electromagnets to bend the direction. Then came another point called Proton-Synchrotron where the protons were sent and accelerated to even higher velocities, making them gain mass. From there EVE was lost in what she understood, but they were sent to a new accelerator called a Super Proton Synchrotron and from there to the two rings of the giant Super Accelerator where it was a little more complex to understand what was going on.
As far as EVE could make out from the schematics and projections it appeared that around the super rings some fractium material had been placed in forty-eight parts which, with successive accelerations around the ring, the proton packets somehow dragged along in successive revolutions as they accelerated. She wasn't sure why but they were marked on the schematics as harmonic needles.
EVE did not know that at those forty-eight points, in a separate chamber, those forty-eight fragments of the fractium nucleus had first been destabilized by applying a large electric field to them. After all, the destabilization of the electron orbit was the most important thing as well. It was the reason why plasma and electric arc weapons were the most effective against fractus. The problem was that even when destabilized, the final particles needed for the experiment could not be extracted. For this were the successive collisions that had been going on for several hours to accelerate the protons. But the important part depended on the Sun to activate the particles that mattered.
The problem with these fragments was that the fractium cores usually remained as a whole fragment when the fractus died. What was called the three-dimensional shadow of a higher dimensional entity. But that fragment was broken into forty-eight parts. For this it was necessary to first destabilize the fragments and then expose them to the proton beam so that with the successive turns around the ring they could simulate a union of the fragments as one. This was enough time to allow the ghostly particles that could only be activated by the Sun: the so-called tokions.
The places where these fragments had been placed were the old radiation test areas, where different types of materials were usually tested to evaluate their resistance to the accelerator's radiation. These areas had been modified to be a part of the ring through which the proton packets passed. Something that would have been impossible in the past.
EVE zoomed in on the screen and tried to understand the final part. That was easy to understand in a way. Or so she thought.
Once the proton packets collected the particles of those forty-eight fragments they were sent to another room at the end point and collected by two devices that were in charge of capturing particles by cooling them and then re-accelerating them in a short range similar to the first step in the booster. From there they were sent to the final point of collision, the nuclei she had brought. It all happened in less time than the blink of an eye.
From there, the particles collected from the collision would finally go directly to two special chambers called Lilith's Cradles, ten meters wide by ten meters high and another ten meters deep. EVE did not know what it had to do with the name of Lilith, an entity that appeared in several religions and myths of antiquity, but that was its name.
Those two chambers were structures that, in another time, had been used as observatories to study neutrinos. They had been dismantled when they closed, but the structure that had housed everything was still there and had been replaced by something else.
What now occupied the two chambers was a type of OOPArt called a Mirror Box. Each mirror box had been assembled inside the structure and somehow EVE didn't know they had been deployed making them occupy the entire structure.
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What EVE did not know was that those mirror boxes were named Lilith's Mirrors or Lilith's Cradles after a legend in a certain grimoire called the Munich Codex. In itself the mirror did not have much to do with the character of Lilith. It was a variant of a legend, but the name had remained in the annals of magic and necromancy with that name. The artifact had the ability to keep inside whoever got into it and supposedly keep him young, but the stories also attributed other stranger powers that could well be extrapolated to the dilation of time.
But they were two chambers, each of those who would travel had been placed in each of those chambers. Those two men on a kind of stretcher were sound asleep at that moment. Two men and two fragments.
EVE narrowed her eyes as she thought. The fragment she had carried in the ship was separate from the one in the plane, but in the image on the screen it was projected as one. Was the synchronization with the Sun at the exact moment to unite the two fragments? Where had the plane come from to begin with? Wasn't it easier to do it another way?https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/42dd80f9-5ac6-42d5-8ccc-bcea020b6152/dhrgl64-08719598-b159-4a86-92ac-8614da1cbd74.jpg/v1/fit/w_828,h_1170,q_70,strp/nevermore_enygma_vol_5_chapter_68_by_hasegawakein_dhrgl64-414w-2x.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9MTY4NCIsInBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzQyZGQ4MGY5LTVhYzYtNDJkNS04Y2NjLWJjZWEwMjBiNjE1MlwvZGhyZ2w2NC0wODcxOTU5OC1iMTU5LTRhODYtOTJhYy04NjE0ZGExY2JkNzQuanBnIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTExOTEifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6aW1hZ2Uub3BlcmF0aW9ucyJdfQ._oh7K7tS7KWA4zpqJov2p9gq1m9z33MinEdkYZkYENM [https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/42dd80f9-5ac6-42d5-8ccc-bcea020b6152/dhrgl64-08719598-b159-4a86-92ac-8614da1cbd74.jpg/v1/fit/w_828,h_1170,q_70,strp/nevermore_enygma_vol_5_chapter_68_by_hasegawakein_dhrgl64-414w-2x.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9MTY4NCIsInBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzQyZGQ4MGY5LTVhYzYtNDJkNS04Y2NjLWJjZWEwMjBiNjE1MlwvZGhyZ2w2NC0wODcxOTU5OC1iMTU5LTRhODYtOTJhYy04NjE0ZGExY2JkNzQuanBnIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTExOTEifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6aW1hZ2Uub3BlcmF0aW9ucyJdfQ._oh7K7tS7KWA4zpqJov2p9gq1m9z33MinEdkYZkYENM]
***
The Director, Lukas Peaslee, swallowed hard and glanced sideways at EVE who was very interested in looking at the screen.
The lie, half-heartedly, seemed to have worked, and even if reluctantly, she had stood still and watched everything. She didn't say anything about the missing plane or anything like that. Even the others were oblivious to that. Everyone there was offering their services to the Council, although that was also a lie from Janus.
But the case of EVE and that other girl from whom they had obtained the data for the traps was different from that of him and the others.
Janus had told him what he should tell EVE to reassure her. It had worked and thank goodness it was so. He had enough to do with the other scientists controlling the final experiment.
He looked at the results of the core and through the transmission from the containment chamber as the surface of the fractus core was slowly rotating in the collision chamber. It had become one again, according to Janus that was because the core itself had been purged of something although he did not know what it could be. The movement of the crystalline surface had begun even before they opened the box EVE had given them. That certainly indicated that the Sun was sending the savitronic particles to the core.
No sooner had they checked that, than they had moved the core to its designated area near the Pening traps. And at the same time they had finally integrated the sections containing the forty-eight fragments of the core around the collision ring.
During the last hour, proton packets had been accelerating and the extraction of the tokion particles from the fragments was in its final phase. Even though they were extracted, they were still spinning at almost the speed of light.
The reality was that the tokions were particles that did not exist to begin with, they were virtual particles. For some reason they only reacted to the sun to acquire a quasi-real state and be extracted from the quantum foam. The savitronic particles could be superluminal, as Nobuyama had supposedly said, but that meant that somehow the tokions reacted only to the weak force, although neutrino and muon tests had not turned up any results on that.
Who knew what enigmas the fractium nuclei still held. To begin with, according to Janus, there had only been three fractus with that type of nucleus. The one in the Kuriles, the one in Krasnoyark, and the one in Lake Lemac, all three called Chronophages. From the information Janus had given him, it was possible that all three were originally one organism and had split. After all they were different in how they looked.
Well, he could be sure that Janus had given him the right data after all? Not that he hated him, but his being there was a crime according to the code of the rights of sentient beings and the same went for everyone else.
Still, what a unique opportunity to live. If only for a few weeks since he had awakened.
The experiment of sending something into the past would have been impossible had it not been for those creatures that had invaded the earth. For that iteration of Lukas Peaslee living for a short time and then reintegrating into the original consciousness was a small burden to pay for being there.
Over the centuries theoretical models had been made of what a time machine could be like and the idea of using accelerators had also been proposed, although with very different approaches. For example, that it would not be possible to go back beyond the time in which the time machine had been put into operation or that the time machine itself should have a size of several tens of astronomical units. No further time travel would be possible unless naked singularities were formed, such as wormholes appearing naturally in the fabric of spacetime. Something like that could be incredibly dangerous but, it was exactly what had been happening for some time. Through naked singularities OOPArts could also appear, but it was not possible to determine where and how that would happen. It was as if nature itself had said: fuck you and your theories, calculations and laws.
That with that nucleus was different. It could cause naked singularities, but could it through a controlled singularity send something into the past? That for the Director was a doubt while for Janus it was a certainty.
The data also told him that it was possible not only because of the events but because of the physics.
The curvature was equal to the material energy of the traveler, which created a closed time line. For the traveler moving in time he did not have the impression that he was violating any causality, but for an external observer he was. Everything was choreographed so that events occurred that for the future were already in the past. The problem was the transfer of information, but they had already taken care of that by giving new memories to travelers while erasing and blocking others.
Whatever it was, he was there to make it happen and nothing else. Luckily everything had gone as planned. The accelerator was working perfectly.
The truth was that Janus had been sending droids from time to time, to some of the more damaged sections and to repair parts that had fallen apart. But it was basic maintenance work. That was why the job had been relatively easy at all four points. Other parts along the 118 kilometers had been repaired over the decades, although that was only accounted for by the industrial engineers who had been working on it.
Parts had been modified, but one of the main parts had been modified decades ago. That part was the one that would be most important for the final part of the whole experiment.
After acceleration and collection came the part for which that accelerator had not been built. It was the phase of transforming it into a time machine.
According to Janus and his own calculations there was a serious problem with the core. And that was that most of the information had traveled in a linear fashion into the future. To send something to a past more than two centuries away, it was necessary to transform those tokions into a time machine that could hold the mass of two adult bodies.
To do this, after the phase of colliding the proton packet together with the tokions of the forty-eight fragments in plasma form, against the final nucleus, came a part over which they would have half control. One of the uncontrolled variables, as Janus called it.
First the high temperature plasma would have to be compressed at a point of high density by performing a pincer and directing it precisely to the final core.
That would create an implosion first destroying the nucleus and destabilizing the electron orbital but, at the same time, allowing all the tokions to come together as a cloud of particles. At that point, they had conditions in which the tokions only by fluctuations could create wormholes, but of such a useless size that it was impossible to use them as a time machine.
At that point it was directed for an infinite amount of time to the traps and from there to the Lilith's Cradles. There remained a third trap that would contain the particles for a few minutes before they evaporated and nothing remained of them.
In the two main traps that plasma needed to be fed with exotic matter, such as that used in the fractus nuclei that could be used to create antigravity. At that point high energy lasers were employed in the plasma as a process of inflating the plasma cloud and finally creating a barely momentary balance between positive and negative energy at the mouth the wormhole. In the process of inflating the plasma cloud only one particle of tokion per box would be transformed into the mouth of the wormhole that would connect with their past time.
The bodies of the two travelers at that time would pass through the wormhole but... well that was another matter. Since it was an uncontrollable variable they could do nothing about the way they had to pass through. It was like teleportation on steroids. It could kill a human, an aeon or a fey after all, but those two were different.
That was it, two wormholes that could be used once to send the traveler into the past before it collapsed.
Two were all that was necessary and no more.
But there was the last part and that worried him.
The Director looked at his watch and checked the itinerary once more.
Everyone was surprised to hear an alarm and the emergency lights that had been turned on in the corners.
"Keep working!" the Director shouted.
The Director looked in the direction of EVE who, hearing the alarms, had stood up. Ten minutes and it would all be over.
Just then the alerts to the droids on the inside came in.
Just as Janus had said, the battle had begun on the surface and they had seven minutes left, no more than that now that the speed of the rotation of the surface of that core was increasing. The mice should have entered just a few seconds ago.
He counted the seconds and through the Neurowire sent an alert to the system hacking through the security systems.
[Attention, there has been a hostile entry into the facility, you are cleared to stop them]. All the droids subway had just received the order, then the Director walked towards EVE.
"What's going on?" she asked.
"Do you think you can help us?"
EVE pursed her lips. She didn't really want to, now that she knew it was all a game, but well if Benjamin had been asked to help she couldn't make him look bad, especially if he had chosen her to represent the company. Even if it was a stupid game or experiment, he had entrusted it to her and only her.
"What do I have to do?"
"We have some unwanted guests on the premises," the Director said with a wink. "Will you take care of helping the droids while we finish up here?"
"All right." EVE snorted and with that her bangs fluttered messily.
***
"Holy shit!" Granger shouted, as he had hidden behind a wall while he had just dodged several magnetic needle shots. The hits had just made a few holes in the concrete wall, but the projectiles disappeared the next second as they were called back to the weapons that had fired them.
A group of five tactical droids was coming down the corridor towards them.
"What happened? Jim asked from the rear.
"Are they on to us yet? How?" asked Lizbeth. "We didn't get past any security devices."
"It doesn't matter, we can't go back now. With Jade's message, the attack on the surface must have already begun," Shin said.
Granger nodded. "All that's left is to move on."
"Yes. Up the attack has just begun," Jade affirmed.
Lizbeth glanced sideways at everyone. "I guess it's my turn…"
"Yep..." they all nodded.
"Yeah, I expected that."