John Schettler: Golem 7

The admiral himself considered resignation, certain he would suffer consequences for failing to pursue the Strasbourg . And afterwards, every ship that took part in the battle seemed beset with a bad luck that came to be called “the curse of Mers-el-Kebir.”

The French would have their revenge on battleship Resolution when the submarine Bevezier torpedoed her off Dakar later that year. Battleship Valiant would be struck by two bombs in May of 1941 off Crete, and then suffer further damage when she was mined and torpedoed by the Italians some months later. And the very next time the mighty Hood would fire her guns in anger, the pride of the fleet would see a cataclysmic end on the surging grey swells of the cold Atlantic. Oddly, another man named Holland would command her at that time, unrelated to the French speaking officer that had come in on Foxhound to try and prevent, quite unknowingly, a disaster that no man of that generation could ever imagine or foresee.

Paul spedup Hearst Avenue to Cyclotron Road, accelerating up the hill until he reached the hairpin turn at the lower visitor parking area. He cornered sharply around the turn, and continued up the hill to the squat blue security booth, stopping briefly to flash his facility ID. The guard recognized his white Honda and waved him through with a smile. He checked his rear view mirror as he entered, but there was no sign of the vehicle that had been following him, so he bore right onto Chu Road at the fork ahead, and within minutes he had keyed his security code and was through the last facility gate, taking the driveway down to the underground garage beneath the Arch Complex.

The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories were just beyond the campus, up a winding way called Cyclotron Road. Born on the Berkeley campus, the facilities had grown considerably over the years, and eventually moved to the rolling green hills that overlooked the university. A host of scientific disciplines were rooted in the lab, which was a major center of research and a place where some of the most profound questions imaginable were asked, and sometimes answered, with the secret arts of Quantum Science. Things that were once thought to be impossible, even unimaginable, suddenly became odd realities. Travel in Time, long debated by physicists, was one of those unimaginable things.

The project team held forth on the old site of the venerable Bevatron complex. Built in 1953, it was once one of the world’s leading particle accelerators but was deemed seismically unsafe and completed demolition in October of 2011. As no other facility was immediately scheduled for construction there, Paul and his project team members had formed a joint private company to purchase the site and build their independent Physics Center.

The public knew it as a basic physics research lab, with a primary focus on magnetic resonance and quantum theory. A segment of the facility served those general scientific studies, with a small lecture center, a section of labs for graduate student research, extensive computer facilities and a library. But the hidden heart of the complex was deep underground, where Paul had guided the slow development of the Arch Matrix for experiments that had remained confidential and closely guarded secrets. At any given time the lab could be used for general experiments in quantum physics, and conveniently passed inspection every year in spite of the fact that its real hidden purpose dappled in the nascent art of singularity generation studies, the scientific effort to create a tiny quantum singularity. This would be called a “Black Hole” in layman’s terms, though the principles involved were much different from the massive natural phenomenon astrologers had seen in distant space.

To create the Arch it was necessary to complete the last leg of a physics problem that had never been solved—how to relate all the fundamental forces in some unified theory? Paul had begun with Loop Quantum Gravity theory, working with the Schrodinger equation and testing a number of new analogues built from Ashtekar variables and simple spin networks. Spin was in for a good many years, and Paul had a major breakthrough that eventually allowed him to create a controlled quantum singularity within a low gravity environment.

It was an arcane science bridging electro magnetism, special relativity, quantum field theory and finally quantum gravity was demonstrated to exist—and more than this—Paul discovered it could be controlled. These breakthroughs led him to experiments in space-time applications, and the Arch was quietly built to begin testing. The first object that had been successfully moved in space-time was an apple, but Paul soon found that technology had enormous new potentials where Time theory was involved.

His unique view of Time was that any given moment was simply a specific arrangement of every quantum particle that made up the universe. The particles, always in motion, created the perception of a forward progression in the flow of Time, which was really nothing more than the constant variation of those particles, morphing from one state and position to another. To be in any place, or any moment, all one had to do was find a way to tell all the particles of the universe to assume a given state or position in relationship to one another. Any reality that was ever possible could become this moment; this reality. The realization of the theory seemed impossible, however, for one could never know how to arrange each particle of the universe just as they were at a given event in history. It was challenge enough to understand even one particle of the universe—but science held that the whole of the universe had sprung from one single point. If that were true, then any possible universe might arise in the same way.

While it was impossible for humans to physically re-arrange the particles of the universe into a new pattern, a quantum singularity achieved this result effortlessly. Humans only had to tell the universe what they wanted—what shape and time to assume on the other side of the singularity. Mathematics was their voice, and the universe, being about nothing of any particular importance at any given moment, was kind enough to heed them and comply.

Yet from the first moment they eagerly spun up the Arch in Lawrence Berkeley labs the project team had been locked in a life and death struggle, engaged with two opposing forces in the future who were now using the same theory to wage war. Paul’s team had first thought they could remain stubbornly neutral, taking some moral middle ground between the two sides and striving only to preserve the history they had stored and preserved in their RAM Bank data library. But when they discovered the true scope of what the enemy was planning, and beheld the merciless nature of their designs, they decided that they had to take sides after all.

Yet their sole ally, a future group they had come to call the “Order,” had suffered a severe blow when their enemies, the Assassin cult, had managed to reverse the intervention Paul’s team made to prevent the collapse of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of Palma—the very first intervention run by the Berkley Arch facility. Now Paul and his small project team found themselves manning a front line outpost, a temporal fortress from which they, and they alone, could act to defeat the enemy plan. Recent missions to the past had achieved much, but the disaster of Palma still stood as one last obstacle to be removed. They had all spent the last three days desperately trying to gather the resources they would need to continue the struggle—food and fuel becoming really urgent needs now as the nation reeled from the shock of a devastated eastern seaboard.