The rest is scarier, though. Maybe a lot scarier, and on the scale of big things. I think we have real trouble here.
The system I’ve described is powerful, obviously. When you think about it, it’s basically sending information to itself, back in time. Ten and a half hours back.
But the information it sends back doesn’t have to just come from the Internet or police records. The information the system sends back can come from any source. Including the system itself.
The system can listen to its own information coming back from ten and a half hours ahead in time … then turn around and send that information to itself ten and a half hours in the past. Like a daisy chain. And there’s no real limit to how far the chain can stretch.
Did you ever plug a video camera into a TV, then point the camera at the screen? You get that tunnel of screens reaching away into infinity. This is like that, but the tunnel reaches through time instead.
It works, Claire. They really did this. The setup for it is there in their programming code, and their e-mails reference it over and over, behind all the careful language.
I know about at least two early trial runs. The first one was simple. They used the system to learn the closing value of the Dow Jones five days in the future. They ended up being dead-on.
The second trial had a longer reach: just shy of ten years. They told the system to give them the high temperature in Des Moines, Iowa, for July 1, 2025. Eighty-nine degrees, it said. I guess we’ll find out someday.
Far away across the parking lot, in the direction of the beach and the boardwalk, kids’ voices shouted and laughed. Something about a Frisbee. Dryden brushed his hair off his forehead. He felt his hand just perceptibly shake.
The trial runs ended almost three weeks ago. Since then, they’ve already begun using this long-term function for real. They have something planned, Claire. I don’t know what it is, but it has to be large-scale. It’s on a timeline of years. You’ll get a sense of it in their e-mails, if you read enough of them. These people, the Group … they have some kind of agenda, some ideology driving them. There are no specifics about it in their messages, but the general tone is hard to miss. They want something, and they’re going to use this technology to get it.
The parts of it that they’ve set in motion so far are small components, I think. Like they’re still testing the waters. But even with these little steps, they’ve demonstrated what an advantage their system gives them.
The way it works is, they can set a chain of events in motion (maybe paying certain people to do things, maybe writing up detailed strategies and committing resources to them), and then they search the future for news stories to see how it will turn out. And if it doesn’t turn out the way they want … they just change their plan in the present. Then they check the future again to see how that version would work. They can change it over and over, until they see a future they’re satisfied with. It’s like correcting artillery fire onto a target, based on watching where the shells are hitting … except their spotters are looking across years, not miles.
I know for a fact they’ve had people killed. (On top of killing everyone at Bayliss, and trying to kill us.) What I mean is they’re seeing future news reports about politicians or journalists who get in their way, even years from now … and they’re killing those people in the present time. We’re talking about people who don’t even necessarily work in those fields yet, or even realize that they someday will. They’re being murdered now over things they would have eventually done. This is really happening, Claire.
Movement at the edge of Dryden’s vision. He glanced up. A couple in their twenties walked to a minivan, five cars over. He stared at them without quite seeing them. His mind was far away, trying to grasp the scale of the situation Curtis had described.
After a few seconds he dropped his eyes to the letter again.
There was more to it. A lot more.
He turned the page and kept reading.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Marnie was on the freeway, passing Thousand Oaks, thirty minutes yet from El Sedero.
She had her phone in its dash mount, switched on. The map application was open, showing not her own location but that of Sam Dryden—the location of his Explorer, anyway: a little red thumbtack symbol currently positioned in what looked like a strip-mall parking lot.