Everyone knows what happens next.
After the initial pyrotechnics, the Engine stabilizes. With a flourish, Goettreider plugs in a light bulb to prove it’s generating power. The light bulb glows brightly, too brightly, surges, and bursts. Wiry fingers of electricity spew out, singeing the concrete ceiling. The power to the whole building goes out, then the block, then the neighborhood, then the city, then the continent. But in the darkness and confusion, the Engine keeps spinning, sucking up unfathomable watts, quickly filling up the high-yield battery Goettreider had set up in the unlikely event his invention actually worked. Once the furor over the blackout dies down, the device is evaluated by multiple teams with overlapping jurisdictions, and when the vetting process is completed, first the United States, then Canada, then Mexico and Central America, then most of the world is patched into the prototype, running off its ceaseless turn until a network of dedicated Engines is constructed in relay centers around the planet. A few countries insist on maintaining their own power generation, but on his deathbed, chalky and emaciated from radiation poisoning, his teeth and hair and fingernails gone, his eyes pulpy and blind, his organs a black and murky soup, Goettreider releases any legal claim on his design, allowing anyone to build their own Engine. He died without wife or heir, his parents and brothers and most of his relatives were murdered in the Holocaust, he had nobody to give the money to, and so he gave the world the gift of limitless power and the world gave him the gift of immortal stature. The future began.
Here’s what isn’t supposed to happen.
Goettreider isn’t supposed to panic after seeing a translucent stranger in a sleek bodysuit standing in his laboratory.
He isn’t supposed to yank the activation lever and shut down the Goettreider Engine midstream.
The Engine isn’t supposed to shudder and spark because the outrageous amounts of energy it’s generating have nowhere to go.
The harmless pulses of silvery light aren’t supposed to glint into a fiery blue.
A blue pulse isn’t supposed to rip into the control console, melting the metal and glass, burning right through the concrete and licking flames up the wall.
Ursula isn’t supposed to scream at Lionel to get away from the machine.
The next blue pulse isn’t supposed to shoot right at her, like it’s been aimed that way on purpose.
Jerome isn’t supposed to shout something incoherent, lunge forward, and push Ursula out of the way.
The blue pulse isn’t supposed to shear the skin and muscle right off his arm, just below his elbow, and punch through the far wall as Jerome clutches his skeletal limb, the blood cauterized on impact, squealing in terror and agony while the exposed bones disintegrate into a powdery ash.
Ursula isn’t supposed to open her mouth to make a sound that never comes as her husband sinks to his knees, flailing his smoking stump.
The other fourteen observers, all sharp and cogent scientific minds, aren’t supposed to snap into a seizing mob of weeping, scrambling, chittering fear, knocking over chairs and thrusting toward the only door, tumbling over each other, fingers breaking, hard teeth crunched into soft lips, as another blue pulse whirls into the ceiling, slicing up to the floor above, a steel joist melting on contact, flames swooping up along the jagged cracks that spider across the ceiling as the heavy concrete slabs sag ominously.
Lionel isn’t supposed to raise his hands in futile self-defense, heat sluicing off the Engine’s intake core as it convulses into meltdown, blisters bubbling and popping on his palms, the downy hair of his eyelashes and eyebrows catching fire, but too mesmerized by the calamity before him to blink.
But mostly I’m not supposed to be here. So everything that isn’t supposed to happen is happening.
The truth is, everyone in this room is destined to die. But after they make history, bronzed into the future as martyred visionaries. Not like this, crying and shoving and skittering for cover on their hands and knees, Ursula cradling a mutilated cuckold and the world’s greatest mind staring at the wreckage of his genius while the tip of his nose burns away to raw cartilage.
In this moment of chaos and horror, I discover something kind of nice about myself—I’m reasonably calm under pressure. Instead of devolving into a blubbering amoeba of terror, I charge across the lab, invisible, and shove Lionel away from the Engine with as much force as I can muster, sending him slamming into the far wall, at least a couple of feet closer to safety.
Another fiery blue plume bursts from the Engine, washing over me. I should be incinerated, but my skin suit was designed to be remarkably resilient to physical damage. What it does do is send a catastrophic surge through its organic circuitry, causing a cascading system failure. Fortunately, my father and his engineers built in a fail-safe—in the event of a total and comprehensive malfunction, the emergency boomerang protocol automatically triggers.
In one second, I’ll be going home.
Against all odds and for possibly the only time in my life, my brain is operating at peak efficiency. One second is just enough time for my nervous system to convey a simple message to the muscles in my shoulder, arm, hand, and fingers. The message is this: Switch the Engine back on so it doesn’t destroy half the continent.
I pull up the activation lever with my invisible hand.
And then I’m gone.
55
SUMMARY—Chapters 44 to 54
Fueled by shock, grief, anger, and idiocy, Tom Barren uses his father’s prototype time machine to travel from 2016 to 1965, just a few minutes before Lionel Goettreider first activates his world-changing invention—the Goettreider Engine.
Invisible to both eye and camera, in his agitated state Tom neglected to render himself immaterial as well, so he’s able to physically interact with his environment. Which he soon does, accidentally, drawing the confused attention of Lionel Goettreider.
Lionel’s curiosity is interrupted by Ursula Francoeur, one of the celebrated sixteen observers who witnessed Goettreider’s experiment. They think they’re alone and so Tom learns something no one has ever discovered—that Lionel and Ursula are having an affair.
The other fifteen observers arrive, including Ursula’s husband, Jerome Francoeur, the government bureaucrat who approved Lionel’s research and oversees his funding. Nobody in the room expects anything amazing to happen.
Lionel runs some final calculations and notices something odd—a trace of a previously unidentified type of radiation. Tom realizes the radiation is coming from him. Because he’s not immaterial, the energies he brought back in time with him are showing up on Lionel’s instruments.
Fortunately, the social pressure of the moment overrules Lionel’s concerns. The future of his research rests on the experiment he’s about to conduct, and any show of hesitation could fuel an already suspicious and resentful Jerome.
He pulls up the lever to activate the Engine.
At first, all goes as it should. The device gets up to speed and starts pulling in massive amounts of energy. Swirling plumes of glittering silvery light arc wildly through the room, dazzling but harmless.