A Twist in Time Read online

  A TWIST in Time

  A Novel on Time and What to Do About It

  US Air Force Photo

  Frank J. Derfler

  ISBN: 9781618421692

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Kent Kjellgren, Jim Walsh, and Alex May for their critical comments on the drafts of this book.

  A few of the people in this book are historic characters. I’ve used their names and portrayed their actions as accurately as possible. Some of the names of the characters, such as Ted Arthurs, belong to real people. Ted is a good friend of mine who was awarded two Silver Stars for Bravery during the Vietnam conflict. Ted is not a fighter pilot and he probably doesn’t know much about time travel, but he is a great guy and very deserving of our respect. As any of you who have played poker with him will know.

  Jose Valenzuela is the name of my son-in-law. He isn’t a fighter pilot, but he is the archetype of one. Craig Pulliam is a great pilot who patiently taught me to fly.

  Instructions and Forward

  Readers, welcome! This is a book about time, so your part of the reading process is to take note of the time. At the beginning of every chapter I give you time and place. It will help your enjoyment of the story if you note it. If you know some world history and current events you will see many tie-ins. Please Google any event you aren’t familiar with.

  I also give you some clues and orientation as an introduction at the start of each chapter. These are not the inspirational homilies you sometimes see at the top of a chapter in some books. Instead, they are meant to be real clues and signposts for your reading.

  There are no made up facts in here. Everything from Rubidium ice with no molecular momentum to the close passes by space rocks is real. With this book we took one and only one step forward into time: the ability to move an item with no molecular momentum back into time. But, that could happen at any time. Or, perhaps it has. How would you know if you changed the past? That’s always the question.

  Have some adventure along with our characters. I know they enjoy every moment you spend with them. They tell me so.

  Frank Derfler

  Islamorada, FL 2011

  Read this: It will make more sense later!

  The massless quantum vacuum state allows entanglement between separated regions of space-time. This entanglement, both on tiny and on massive scales, causes instant healing of truncated loops in time. An outcome can not exist without its time-paired stimulus. If the stimulus ceases to exist, then so does the outcome. If the stimulus significantly changes, then so does the outcome. The matter within the space-time loop -- be it energy, gas, mineral, or animal – has no natural way to sense or be aware of the change. The change leaves subtle markers, but within the loop the action of loop truncation and healing isn’t apparent.

  Chapter 1. Afterglow

  Monday August 31, 2009 0100 Pacific

  Boulder City, Nevada

  UNCLASSIFIED

  Excerpt from the Personal Narrative of Jose Henry Valenzuela

  “Getting that unit command in 2008 changed my life in so many ways. There was no way to ever have anticipated, trained for, or planned for the things that followed. I suppose a PhD in physics might have helped, but we had people to do that work.”

  He couldn’t see a thing, but it was a very pleasant feeling. A mane of blonde hair covered his eyes. The world truly had a golden glow. “Oh God, Jose, that was wonderful!” When she collapsed on top of him, her lips wound up an inch from his ear and his nose was on her shoulder. She smelled sweet and warm.

  “Better than wonderful,” he replied. “Spectacular!” Fighter pilots might lack some social skills, but they have good reflexes and situational awareness. Jose’s brain recognized the need and served up an immediate response. Besides, the third time was very good and overall it had been a spectacular evening.

  He ran his hands over her slim waist and down her firm bottom. They often rode horses in the Nevada desert and he knew how good she looked in a pair of jeans. She wasn't tall, but she had a strong and confident body and hands. She had grey eyes and a beautiful face. Unfortunately, her name was “Jelli.”

  Her parents had named her Jacqueline Lea Adams, but she wanted to be called Jelli. He had tried calling her Jacqueline, a name he thought was elegant and lovely, but that had earned him a hard look. She told him that her real estate clients called her Jacky, but her friends called her Jelli. So, when he had to use her name, he called her Jelli. He didn’t think the name fit her image, but so be it.

  Jose rolled them over and threw a protective leg over her hip to keep her from falling out of the bed. “Can you stay the night?” he asked.

  “If I do, I won’t be able to walk in the morning!” she replied. She hugged him. “I’ve got a couple that wants to start looking at houses early and I’ll have to be at work an hour before they show up to make sure all the appointments are ready. No, please take me home before you recover again. I have to make my escape while the giant is sleeping!”

  Jose laughed. The part about being a giant was hardly true, but he wasn’t going to argue. She was a clever girl. He admired the view as she put on her clothes. Then he slid out of the bed and picked up his clothes from the floor. As he was on one leg pulling up his jeans she come up from behind and pinched his belly. “Pretty good, flyboy,” she said appreciatively.

  He had gained five pounds since he graduated from the Air Force Academy, but at 183 pounds he still fit into any clothes he owned at graduation. His black hair, kept in a short military cut, didn’t need any attention although right now his heavy black eyebrows, part of his Hispanic heritage, were flying in different directions. At the Academy he usually had to shave twice a day and tonight he was, as Jelli had told him, “prickly”.

  After he drove Jelli home and saw her safely into her house, the clock on the dashboard of his Chevrolet Avalanche pickup told him it was 0200. He had been in bed, with a few languid naps, since about 2000 and he didn’t need to go back to bed yet.

  The streets of Boulder City, Nevada were deserted. The town only had about 14,000 residents, mostly white and employed. The town’s low crime rate and good schools made it a great place to live. Las Vegas, twenty miles away, provided all of the elegance, shopping, hi-tech medicine, airline connections, and other services that anyone could want. The primary advantages of Boulder City from Jose’s perspective were the great living conditions for his people and the nearby nexus of power feeders from Hoover Dam. Nellis Air Force Base, about twenty-two miles to the north, was close enough to provide support for his unit of Army and Air Force people and far enough away to stay out of his business.

  For Air Force Major Jose Valenzuela, being the commander of a military unit, even a unit as small as his fifteen-person detachment, meant that you had to be with your troops at all hours. The mid shift, from midnight to 0800, was the most difficult for his people. His crew worked a rotating schedule that gave them a block of three days off in a row, but the mid shift cycle was always physically the toughest. Basically, here in Boulder City they were the backup to the crew on duty at Homestead Air Reserve Base in south Florida. In a situation like that it was hard just to stay awake.

  Jose often thought that if he really had to explain his unit’s mission to a person of above average intelligence, like Jelli for example, he wasn’t sure they would believe him. One of the eggheads in Homestead had proposed a unit motto of “Custodia Aetas” in Latin or “guarding time” in English. They couldn’t use it, of course, because the motto revealed too much of the real mission. Guarding time is exactly what they did.

  He drove past the Boulder City airport to a metal warehouse surrounded by a chain link fence. When he got to the gate, he pushed a button on a normal garage door opener. Instead of op
ening the gate directly, the door opener’s signal sent a request to an operations console inside the building. After checking the vehicle on low light and infrared video, the two-person crew on duty could open the gate or could communicate through the squawk box mounted on a pole. Jose had his truck window down and was smiling into the camera as the gate opened.

  He parked outside the metal building, walked up the stairs to a loading dock, and entered through a pedestrian door that was unlocked electrically from the console inside. Any thieves who managed to sneak across the fence line, not a likely proposition since the physical fence was backed-up by strings of sensors and cameras, wouldn’t find the interior of a warehouse they had expected. Inside the metal building was a poured concrete rectangular building with a concrete dome set on top. A couple of modified pickup trucks -his US Army warrant officers insisted on calling them “technicals”- snuggled into the small space between the concrete building and the metal wall of the exterior shell.

  At the front door of the concrete building, Jose put his right forearm next to a metal plate set into the wall and entered a five-digit code into a keypad. Strong authentication is a security technique requiring a combination of several elements. In this case it combined what he had, the chip in his arm, with the code that he knew to authenticate his identity.

  It was cool inside the concrete building and the air carried the ozone smell of computers. Jose closed the first door and opened a second airlock that swung like out a bank vault door. Inside he met a US Army warrant officer wearing desert camouflage fatigues.

  “Mister Nelson, how are you this dark morning?” Jose asked. While the warrant officer was in uniform, Jose had on washed and ironed jeans, a white informal shirt, and Dan Post boots with a one and a half inch walking heel. Jose stood six feet tall in his bare feet and the boots brought him up even with the warrant officer.

  “Fine, Sir. Everything is quiet.” Nelson was one of a crew of Army warrant officers that “the Project,” as the overall operation was informally known, had scooped up when their jobs had become obsolete.

  Originally trained in the specialty career field of guarding and maintaining tactical nuclear weapons, these warrant officers mastered a variety of skills ranging from unarmed combat to the mechanics of nuclear physics. As the US Army reduced its inventory of tactical nuclear weapons, the warrant officers found themselves faced with either retraining or separation from the service. Since most of them were within a few years of retirement, as a group they were happy to move over to a joint command that could use some of their special skills. However, while the technology was fascinating, the job was 99.9% boredom. These very bright and hand-selected people needed to feel engaged and Jose’s biggest challenge was keeping up their spirits and motivation.

  The operations room consisted of a few comfortable swivel chairs, a console with multiple screens, keyboards, communications, and a video wall. The only other human spaces within the building included a few offices, a combination break room and training room, rooms for the security staff, a small armory, and closets. The other space was a large data center and a small sterile room crammed with lasers, magnets, cryogenic pumps, and sensors. A separate room for power transformers, rectifiers, and a large bank of capacitors ran along the back of the building behind three-foot thick poured concrete blast walls.

  Inside the operations room, the video wall could be configured to show anything from multiple Internet Websites to full screen secure videoconferences with the President of the United States. It was the job of the on-duty crew to monitor the world for significant activity and to monitor the status of the primary site in Florida. The crew accessed news feeds, reports from services such as the National Crime Information Center along with special connections to Homeland Security and NORAD-USNORTHCOM inside Cheyenne Mountain. The crews often joked privately that they were the best-informed people in America.

  A second warrant officer was at the console and he rose to greet Jose. Jose gave him a quick smile. “Good morning, Mister Ozer. What are you guys doing to keep yourselves busy this morning?”

  “I’ve been taking an online course on the National Incident-Based Reporting System.” Ozer replied. “Most of it is pretty basic, but there are some hints on how to get the most out of searches and reports on the system.”

  Jose nodded and turned to Warrant Officer Nelson who volunteered, “Grinding away on my law degree, Sir.”

  Jose grinned and shook his head. “Please, not another lawyer in the world. Couldn’t you find some legitimate line of work?”

  With a straight face, Nelson replied, “I tried to be a fighter pilot, Sir, but my parents are married.”

  Jose smiled at the old military joke. His rank as an Air Force major didn’t impress these US Army warrant officers. They were all about his age or older and a Chief Warrant Officer Five could make as much in military pay as a major. In this group, leadership meant a lot more than just issuing orders. Unit cohesion was key. They often socialized together. In fact, Jose met Jelli at a backyard pool party at Warrant Officer Nelson’s house. The meeting was a deliberate setup and their relationship was the talk of the unit.

  “How is the General doing?” Ozer asked. The General in this case was Major General Ted Arthurs. He was the commander of the Technical Defense Agency and Jose’s direct boss. Next up the chain from Arthurs was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The total personnel roster of the TDA was less than fifty people, so they felt close to their boss’s boss.

  “He’s still sore, but getting around fine.” Jose replied. “He’s worried about his flight status. Air Force flight surgeons hate it when you go unconscious. Although a blow on the head with a tire iron is a pretty good excuse. “

  Two weeks earlier, this room was the site of intense activity. In the face of a looming hurricane, the Homestead, Florida TDA facility was evacuated. During the evacuation, General Arthurs was knocked unconscious, beaten, and kidnapped by a crazed murderer. The attacker had been imprisoned under the Patriot Act to protect the secret of the time-tunneling capability of the TDA and wanted his revenge. From this room in Nevada, Jose and his crew, along with the General’s wife Sally Arthurs, put a quartz bead, white hot from its passage though time and space, into the killer’s head in the moment before he pulled the trigger.

  The fact that his action violated a standing order from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs against using the facility without his direct authorization hadn’t received a lot of attention so far. An Air Force JAG officer from Washington reviewed as much of the action as he was cleared to know and determined the death to be self-defense. Cleaning up the gore in the Homestead facility was the biggest practical problem that came out of the whole incident. The facility was shut down and classified as a biohazard site for a week. The cause of death, a white-hot glass bead exploding in the brain, was quick, but messy. During the hurricane and the subsequent stand down at Homestead, the Nevada facility picked up the primary mission, but now they were back to being the backup.

  “As our resident attorney Mr. Nelson, how are you doing with our concise mission explanation?” Jose asked.

  Nelson sat at the console, tapped a few keys, and brought a document up on the screen. Jose had asked him to simplify the unit’s mission for visitors with full need to know. The short mission statement, also known as the elevator briefing because it shouldn’t take longer to explain than an elevator ride, was also a great training tool for the crew.

  Nelson said, “The TDA mission has three major parts: strategic warning, image recovery, and offensive operations. Each part has its own codeword classification.”

  “We perform strategic warning by monitoring space and Earth-based sensors that record the background radiation and subatomic particles of space. We look for patterns indicating the use of time displacement technology.”

  “Image recovery allows us to collect small samples of light from the past. Through computer processing, we can create three hundred and sixty degree images with a li
mited view.”

  “Offensive operation involves sending material back in time to create change.” Nelson paused, picked up an innocuous looking clear quartz glass bead from his desk, waved it around, and then continued, “That’s just about twenty-five seconds.”

  Jose said, “That sounds clear to me. The quartz bead is a great effect. I’ll run the words past Sally Arthurs and we’ll put it in the training manual.” In addition to being the Commander’s wife, Sally was the Director of Administration for the TDA. In effect, that meant that she had her finger on the pulse of the organization.

  "But you know what, you'd better also cook up something on influencing the path of objects from space that threaten the Earth."

  "Yes sir, will do." Nelson replied.

  “Major,” Warrant Officer Ozer asked, “here’s something I don’t understand.”

  Jose nodded and gave Ozer his attention.

  “Okay, the sensor data sources we use for our strategic warning mission, the cosmic background sensors and the magnetosphere sensors, aren’t unique to us. The data comes from NASA, from laboratories doing research into sub-atomic particles, universities and who knows where else. So why don’t some of these other outfits see the same things we do?”