that happened from that vantage point up to two weeks prior.
In layman’s terms, mankind now had a rewind button.
It altered how people behaved, and ultimately changed the world. Pretty much all crime could now be solved. The TEV could record the crime in progress. Even if the perpetrator cut out his chip, it was simply a question of following him backward in time, usually right to his house.
Within two years the jails-previously empty from back when all the drug-related offenders went free-were once again filled.
With the violent element removed, the USA became a much nicer place to live. Especially since the rest of society wised up. If, at any given moment, you knew your actions could be recorded, you tended to not break any laws. And legal drugs meant even crimes of passion were kept to a minimum.
Eighteen years ago, when I became a peace officer, there had been more than thirty timecasters in Chicago. We were now down to two on the payroll.
Virulence wasn’t good for diseases. A highly contagious, highly lethal virus was so efficient that it would rip through a population, killing all the hosts, and then dying itself. The same thing with timecasters. We were so effective, we put ourselves out of business.
“Can I watch?” Neil asked, peering over my shoulder.
“Only if you stay quiet.”
I pressed the emitter start switch, and the generator reels began to turn. As they gathered tachyons, they did a disconcerting thing. For brief flashes, lasting a few microseconds, the rotating wheels would disappear. This made them flicker, like jump cuts in an old movie.
“Whoa,” Neil said.
“Shh.”
I closed my eyes, listening to the room, to the hum of the TEV, and to spacetime itself.
That’s an embarrassing thing to admit-believing I could feel spacetime-and certainly not something I was taught by Michio Sata, my timecasting instructor. But I’d done a lot of research on the intranet to try to figure it out, and I thought I had a possible solution.
Years back, supernatural phenomena were proven to be bunk by science. Ghosts, ESP, monsters, God, magic, religion, and all of that other mumbo jumbo was abandoned by the majority of society. But a small fringe group hypothesized that belief in the supernatural was genetic. In certain situations, people were able to sense and sometimes control aspects of the eleven dimensions. Little things, like knowing the phone was going to ring two seconds before it did, and bigger things, like Indian swamis who could stop their heartbeats and balance on two fingers, were all related to the interaction among dimensions.
Certain people were more sensitive to this interaction than others. Throughout recorded history, these people were attributed with divine or supernatural powers. Magicians, prophets, mystics, miracle workers, clairvoyants, soothsayers; these folks could tune in and channel other dimensions. Some were treated like gods for having this ability. Others were burned at the stake.
This hypothesis never graduated to a theory, because only a few of the imploded dimensions could be proven mathematically, and the only one that could be seen was the eighth dimension, through tachyon emission visualization, and we weren’t even completely sure how it worked.
But, strange as it sounded, I believed when I was tuning the TEV into spacetime, I could sense if I was hitting the fabric or not, then adjust accordingly.
Nothing supernatural about it. Just a genetic ability, like being good at basketball, or having 20/20 eyesight. Still, I didn’t talk about it much, for fear of being laughed out of the Peace Department.
So I took a deep breath, let it out slow, then reached for the dial to see where this blood came from.
FOUR
When I’m tuning in to the spacetime fabric, my brain sort of splits in half. Not literally, or even figuratively. But I don’t really know how else to describe it. One part of my mind is intensely focused. The other part just spaces out, like I’m daydreaming.
Each click of the focus dial is one-hundredth of a millimeter, and most people can’t distinguish the movement. But to me, each click feels like a huge chasm that I’m traversing in slow motion. People watching me have commented that my fingers aren’t moving at all. But they are, on a very sensitive, very minuscule level.
First I needed to locate the eighth membrane. According to Michio Sata, the world’s first timecaster and the genius who helped invent the technology, there was no way to actually locate its physical presence. Either you could sense it, or you couldn’t. I could, and when I tuned in to the 8M I sensed that it looked and felt like a furry, bloated, red raisin. But the descriptors looked and felt aren’t appropriate, because I really couldn’t see or feel anything. It was all happening in my head.
Even though I hadn’t done a visualization in a long time, I focused in on the 8M pretty quickly. But it seemed strange. A little too small. A little too orange. I chalked that up to being out of practice, and then switched from the focus dial to the fine-tuning dial.
If one out of a thousand could locate the membrane, only a fraction of them could fine-tune. Unlike the raisin sensation, fine-tuning appeared in my imagination like a long, winding road. I had to follow its twists and turns, using the dial, maneuvering this way and that way until I reached the pinpoint of light at the very end. But it wasn’t actually light. It was more like a single point that pulled light in.
The point itself was weird as hell, and supposedly different for everyone who found it. But if you could sense the point, getting to it wasn’t any more difficult than driving a vehicle.
“Oh, my…”
I opened my eyes and looked at Neil, who appeared to be disappearing and reappearing, switching on and off like a flickering monitor. Actually, it was me and the TEV who were disappearing. Though I didn’t understand the science or the math, I was getting close to the octeract point; the center of the spacetime eighth-dimensional hypercube. While I didn’t understand what any of that meant, I knew what it felt like when I got there.
Strangely, it felt like petting a bunny between the ears.
As I got closer, the octeract point unfolded, and I sensed my mind being stretched, like it was made of chewing gum and someone was tugging on either end. One more delicate twist of the fine-tuning dial and the light enveloped everything, providing me with the very real but decidedly unmacho bunny sensation.
I locked the dials. The flickering had stopped. The world was tangible and real again. Neil’s jaw was hanging open.
“Close your mouth, Neil, or you’ll accidentally swallow the eighth dimension and your head will explode.”
His jaw clicked shut at my lie. Newbies were so much fun to mess with.
I directed my attention to the TEV monitor. It looked like a live video. The lens was pointed at the sink, and the monitor showed the sink. But when I waved my hand in front of the lens, it didn’t appear on the monitor.
That was because we weren’t looking at the sink in present time. We were looking at the sink from seventy- two hours ago. The liquid display was round and full-color, highly realistic, on par with the best real-definition displays. It had filters to compensate for the way light reflected off objects. Unfiltered, the center image was tinted blue, and around the edges was a deep red-blueshift and redshift due to the Doppler effect.
I checked the filters and tweaked them, because the current image was a bit too orange. Unable to lock it in, I played with the hue, trying to match the colors in the room. Eventually I got it looking pretty close.
“Incredible,” Neil said.
“Shh. Mouth closed.”
He obeyed, pursing his lips. I hit the fast-forward button, resuming play again when I saw a woman go to this sink. She was older, gray hair, comfortable shoes, wearing a combination of purple and green that only the elderly could get away with. I watched her place an empty plate in the sink, then drain the last drops of what looked like liquor from a rocks glass. Enjoying her alcohol still, apparently.
I looked away from the monitor, into the sink. The plate and glass were still there.
“Oh…”
At Neil’s gasp I glanced back at the monitor.
