CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Realization
After the dance, Eric made his way over to the punch bowl. A man with long hair and a Native American resemblance was also there grabbing some punch. “Hey,” Eric said, picking up a cup and filling it up. He spoke loud, trying to get his voice to carry over the music. “I think I recognize you. You were one of the scientists conducting that experiment, right? The one that made South Mapiya disappear?”
“That’s right,” he said, extending a hand. “Motega. And you’re the kid that brought us back.”
Eric accepted the handshake. “Yeah, I’m Eric.”
“Good to finally meet you,” Motega said. “I’ve been meaning to look you up and say thanks.” A couple more kids came over to the table to get their own punch. “Let’s talk over here.”
Eric followed Motega over to a spot on the wall, near the entrance, where it was quieter. “You know, I’m glad I ran into you,” Eric said, taking a sip of his punch. He looked out at the dance floor as the song changed. Heaven was dancing with a woman he also recognized from the experiment, dancing to some song written over a hundred years ago. “Is that one yours?”
Motega smiled. “I hope so, yeah. She’s Alina, my assistant.”
“You know, there’s one thing that’s been bothering me.”
“What’s that?”
Eric caught Motega’s eye, making sure he had his full attention. “Why the rubble and the nuclear wasteland?”
“Rubble?” Motega said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah, at the site of South Mapiya,” Eric said. “The whole city was scorched and wiped out like it had been hit by some explosion. I was picking through debris before I found the machine. It took South Mapiya’s place after The Event in 2012.”
“I had heard about that,” Motega said with a nod.
Eric sipped his punch. “So where did it come from?”
“I’m not sure where it could have come from,” Motega said. “The field on the ground encompassed South Mapiya, and it extends a bit into the fields and forest farther south. But the particles of the town were entangled with particles from, I don’t know, somewhere else.” He shrugged. “The size of the secondary field we recorded reached up to a hundred million miles. It could have come from anywhere between here and the sun or past Mars.”
“But it didn’t just come from anywhere,” Eric said. “They weren’t random particles.”
Motega looked down at his cup, then downed the last of the punch in one gulp. “No, they were not,” he agreed, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
“They were fairly consistent. Like they came from one location,” Eric said. “In fact, I remember seeing Mapiya’s South Campus still standing.”
“An alternate universe?” Motega suggested. “The many worlds theory? One interpretation of the way the math in Quantum Mechanics works out suggests that there could be many different universes interacting with each other in different ways. There’s even an interesting experiment that might prove it.”
Just then Eric realized what it was and it took his breath away. Feeling like he was moving in slow motion, he set his cup down on a nearby table. He felt sick to his stomach. “Or it could have come from—” He didn’t want to say it, but his mind was racing for some other explanation and coming up short. “From the future.”
“From the— From the what?”
Eric turned and focused on Motega, arms out in front of him gesturing and knees bent a little, like he was ready to jump into action. “Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? In science class we learned about Einstein’s Relativity.”
“Wait, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics don’t mix,” Motega objected. “Relativity breaks down when we start interacting at a very small size.”
“Maybe it is all connected,” Eric suggested. “The Sagona Principle was discovered about 30 years ago. That’s right, you wouldn’t know about that yet. It’s kind of a crossover between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. It’s not a theory of everything, but they are connected.’
Eric paused, but Motega spurred him on. “Go on. I’m listening.”
“Relativity teaches us that how fast time travels for any particular person is completely relative to his situation. For example, the faster a person travels through space, the slower time passes for him,” Eric explained.
“And gravity,” Motega put in. “The greater the gravity, the slower time passes, relative to a lesser gravity field, at least.”
“Yeah, but just think about the travel. Essentially, we are all traveling at the speed of light. Usually the bulk of that travel is forward momentum through time, but if we fly off in a space ship some of our travel through time is actually displaced by travel through space.”
Motega nodded. “Okay, I get it.” But he didn’t get it quite yet. He must not, or else he’d be as excited, or scared rather, as Eric was. Eric glanced at the door, itching to run through it, get as far away from this place as possible.
“It takes light about eight minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. So if the secondary field could have entangled with particles anywhere from here to the sun....” Eric trailed off, sure that the implication was clear.
“Then the other particles could have come from eight minutes in the future, as well,” Motega said, finishing his thought for him. “But that means that—”
“A nuclear bomb would have gone off just eight minutes after The Event,” Eric said. They stopped, letting the words hang in the air. Now that he said it, it sounded kind of crazy, but he could feel the adrenaline energizing his arms and legs. It was the best explanation he could come up with. It also meant the city could be wiped out at any time.
Out on the dance floor the song had finished and he noticed Heaven approaching them, but all his happy thoughts had vanished. “So what do we do about it?”
“Do about what?” Heaven said coming closer.
Motega snapped his fingers and stood up straight, a telltale sign that he had an idea. “The device made us all disappear and you brought us back, right? Maybe it could do it again.” Worry crossed his face. “But that would mean getting at it. Dravin came and had his government goons take it.”
“The device?” Heaven said, her eyes going wide. “Who’s Dravin?”
Eric ignored her. Motega’s plan wouldn’t work. “Wouldn’t turning it on again just make the space around it disappear?” he said. “What if the bomb has already been taken to the Twin Cities?”
“Guys, slow down, wait,” Heaven snapped, hands out. “Would someone please explain to me what’s going on?”
Motega pursed his lips and glanced at Eric; he looked like he still didn’t want to believe Eric, but he had to. “There may be a bomb in Mapiya. When South Mapiya disappeared 87 years ago it took on the appearance of the site of ground zero for a nuclear blast. Eric figured out that the most plausible explanation is that, when the town disappeared, it’s particles switched with particles from up to eight minutes in the future. Which means a bomb was about to explode before the device was activated.”
Heaven’s jaw dropped as he talked. “So, if the town hadn’t been suspended in time, that nuclear bomb would have gone off,” she said in disbelief, “destroying Mapiya?”
Motega nodded. “And taking out half of Minneapolis.”
“So it could happen again,” she said, coming to the same conclusion they had.
“At any time,” Eric added.
“Anyways, it’s okay, Eric. It’ll work,” Motega said, returning to their plans. “The Quantum Entanglement would only happen once. Everyone and everything that was in South Mapiya in 2012 already is wrapped up with the South Mapiya you know, ground zero. Turning the device off just switched our states, bringing us out of suspension. Turning it back on should simply reverse the process.”
“You guys think that will stop the bomb?” Heaven said.
“The bomb had to have been in the device’s field. Turning the device back on should suspend it again.”
“Then what do I do?” Eric asked. Run. Get on your bike and drive as far away as possible.
“Get help,” Motega said. “I’m hoping someone will turn the device back off and bring us back again. No doubt they will sooner or later, now that the government has their hands on it and knows how it works. But hopefully this will buy us some time. Eric, you’re from this time, so you’ll still be around to get help. Find out how the bomb is detonated so you can stop it when we come back.”
Motega walked off to get Alina and Heaven stepped in front of Eric, standing between him and the exit. “I’m coming with you.”
“Heaven, you can’t,” Eric insisted. “You have to get away from here. You have to be safe.” That just seemed to make her mad.
“I’m not going to go hide under a rock and be safe when I can help, Eric,” she said, now even more determined.
Eric glanced back at Motega. He and Alina were now making their way back to them, heading for the exit. Looking at Heaven he knew there was no way he could make her cede. She was too independent. He silently cursed as he muttered: “Fine, let’s go.”
***
Eric, Heaven, Motega, and Alina marched out of the school at a hurried pace, the muted music from inside now adding an eerie mood to the evening, now that they knew that at any moment Mapiya could explode. A police siren, quiet in the distance at first, became louder as they reached the parking lot until the blue and red lights shot through the dark as the squad car turned a corner and approached the school. The car had wheels, so it had to be Kevin, from 2012 Mapiya.
The siren shut off when the car pulled into the school parking lot. Kevin stepped out, visibly relieved to see them. “Motega, thank goodness,” he said. “So we’ve got the whole gang,” he added as he noticed everyone else.
“Hi, Sheriff,” Eric said.
“Motega, I’ve been trying to reach you. You haven’t been answering your phone.”
Motega looked at his hand, the metal bands from the new holophone not there. “I’m sorry, Sheriff. I must have left it back at the hotel room.”
“Well, we’re here now. Guys, we have a problem.”
“We know,” Heaven said.
“You do?”
Motega nodded to Kevin. “You go first.”
“I took your advice, Motega. This morning I called up a friend who works at the Armory. He went through the inventory. The place is old, unused, so it took some time. From the list they had, everything was there, but he found something not on the list. I checked it out for myself.” He paused, catching each of their eyes in turn to make sure they would all understand the gravity of what he was about to say. “There was a nuclear warhead stored at the armory.”
“How did it get there?” Alina asked, though that didn’t really matter at the moment.
Kevin shrugged. “They didn’t even know about it. Probably on its way to a military silo, but the paperwork got lost somewhere, maybe back during the Oil Wars. We could only tell because the crate was left behind. The warhead is gone.”
“Gone?” Heaven exclaimed.
Eric had stopped paying attention when he mentioned the warhead. “So that explains it,” he said with a nod.
Kevin wrinkled his nose in confusion. “Explains what?” The others looked at each other as if to find someone else to deliver the news. “What do you guys know?”
“We figured out what happened at The Event,” Motega said. “But I’ve got to go. Maybe you could fill him in, Eric.”
“Sure,” Eric said, Motega and Alina taking off for their car immediately.
“Please tell me this is not as bad as it sounds,” Kevin said, fearful eyes looking from Eric to Heaven and back again.
“The other particles that South Mapiya switched places with...” Eric started. “No one ever really knew what happened, but Sheriff, I was walking through the site of a nuclear ground zero. In 2012 there was no explosion, nothing, so it was always something of a mystery.” He knew he was avoiding saying it, so he glanced to Heaven.
“It was from the future,” Heaven said.
“Wait, you mean, like, from 2100?” Kevin said, raising an eyebrow.
Eric shook his head. “No, from future of The Event in 2012. Like, eight minutes in the future.”
“So, if the town hadn’t been suspended in time, that nuclear warhead would have detonated?” Kevin said in shocked disbelief.
“We think so, yeah.”
“So why didn’t it go off now? Why didn’t it explode a couple minutes after you came back? Wouldn’t the warhead have come back, too?”
They looked at each other for a second. Heaven finally came up with a suggestion. “What if it wasn’t an accident? What if it didn’t just go off?”
“You mean, like someone set it off?” Eric said. He wasn’t sure that sounded much better.
“Right. And after The Event, when night turned to day and winter into summer, whoever it was thought twice about setting it off.”
“So how do we find it?” Kevin said, now seeming to understand there was an even greater urgency than he thought.
They stood there, silent. To stop it they had to find it, but where? What was the first step? Eric checked his phone and did a quick search for Mapiya on the internet. Nothing was coming up. “Darn.”
“What is it?” Heaven asked, grabbing on to his arm.
“It’s like the internet has been shut down for anything to do with Mapiya,” Eric said. “The government has a pretty tight control over portions of the internet.” And he didn’t know how to access the pirate channels. He put away his phone. He had an idea, but he wasn’t sure. “The library?”