On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 162, of 240 so far.

Teletype

“You’re not the usual kind we get in here, Mr. Blaine,” the detective said, and the scientist glanced up at him for a moment. The detective’s name was Kidd, and he’d already heard all the jokes about it a million times over. These days, when people looked at him, they didn’t make the jokes anymore.

“I imagine not,” Blaine replied. “And it’s doctor, by the way.”

Kidd nodded. “My apologies; doctor it is. Can you tell me why you tried to burn down your former employer’s building earlier this morning?”

Blaine looked down at the table. The interrogation room was surprisingly small, but only compared to what he’d seen on television. He supposed that it made sense. They had to fit cameras and crew into the rooms for the cop shows, after all — if they were even real rooms at all.

“I should probably be talking to a lawyer at this point,” he said, and Kidd folded his arms and nodded.

“Probably,” the detective replied, and Blaine somehow found the energy to smile. He’d expected to be discouraged from seeking legal representation, but a moment later he realised that he was almost certainly being recorded at this very moment, and the police couldn’t afford to ever be seen to be pushing people to waive their rights.

A long moment passed, then Kidd spoke again. “Would you like to contact your lawyer, Dr. Blaine? Or we can get one for you. It’s no problem, and it’s your legal entitlement. It’s also generally a good move.”

Blaine wondered if the respect that he now felt for the shabbily-dressed detective was all part of a plan to gain his trust, but he immediately decided that he was too tired to think through it. He was also too tired to care. The physical evidence was incontrovertible, and he was most certainly up on an attempted arson charge — or worse.

“Was anyone hurt?” he asked suddenly, appalled that this was the first time he’d truly considered it, and after several endless seconds, Kidd shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Fire suppression system, a janitor who’d had his coffee and was luckily in the room adjacent to the exterior wall where you started the blaze, and a slow night at the fire station a few streets away. You were fortunate. This would be a different conversation if any of the forty-eight people in there had lost their lives.”

Blaine studied the detective’s face, and he saw something that he could read as easily as an equation, or an emissions spectrum.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Blaine said, and Kidd raised a weary eyebrow, inviting him to continue. He did so immediately. “You’re thinking that the lab isn’t that big a place, and that most of the evacuated people were scientific staff, and that it’s pretty unusual to have so many of them working during the night.”

Kidd looked at him for a few seconds, then he shrugged. “You’re right,” the detective replied. “Did you arrange for them to be there? More people to get caught in the fire?”

Blaine laughed without much amusement, and shook his head. “And here I was thinking you were an intelligent man, detective. I had no intention of harming anyone at all. They would just be… collateral damage. The lab is staffed around the clock now. They don’t want to miss a single thing.”

Kidd took a seat across from Blaine, and clasped his hands on the table top. “Then what was the intended outcome? Just revenge against the company that let you go recently? That’s a pretty blue-collar story.”

“I was trying to do the right thing,” Blaine replied. “I don’t care about my job. I was glad to leave. I tried to shut the project down, but they forced me out instead.”

Kidd didn’t say anything, knowing that the man sitting before him would continue on his own. He didn’t have to wait long.

“And it wasn’t luck,” Blaine continued. “That the janitor was right there, I mean. I have no way to prove it to you, but I guarantee that he was told to keep an eye on that room at that time, for an undisclosed reason, by someone high up in the company. It’s already started.”

“Care to expand on that?” Kidd asked, finally taking out a notebook and flipping to a blank page, even though the audio and video equipment in the room had been recording since he brought Blaine in.

Blaine looked down at his own hands, which weren’t cuffed or otherwise secured. His seat was comfortable enough, too. None of the clichés of an interrogation.

“I suppose there’s no point in lying to you,” he said, “even though you’ll assume that I’m doing that very thing. So let me ask you something, detective: do you know what a teletype is?”

Kidd frowned, considering the question. “I think it’s a kind of very old technology,” he replied. “Like a telegraph. But more like a typewriter that’s split in two. You type on the keys at one end, and the words get printed at the other end. It’s pre-World War One stuff. No use today.”

Blaine nodded, impressed with the piece of trivia. “That’s more or less accurate, yes,” he said. “Now here’s another question: do you know much about quantum mechanics?”

Kidd sighed, and shook his head. “Not a thing. And if you don’t mind, doctor, I’m not really looking for a physics lesson tonight.”

“Bear with me,” Blaine said. “It’s my area of expertise, and you don’t need to know much — especially since you won’t believe a word of it. But it’s true. It’s all true, and I hope that at some point you might actually consider that possibility.”

Kidd set his pen down beside the notebook and sat back, folding his arms. He was willing to listen, at least. Blaine nodded and began to speak.

“You can look up something on your phone later: quantum entanglement. It’s a bit like the machine you just described, but for subatomic particles. Two particles, produced in an accelerator in such a way that they’re linked together. Whatever happens to one of them also happens to the other, instantaneously, and regardless of distance.”

Kidd was frowning again. “That doesn’t seem possible to me,” he replied. “Sounds like nonsense.”

Blaine nodded. “I know. It sounds that way to everyone at first. But it’s an everyday reality in physics, and in the universe. Whether you can accept it or imagine it or not, it seems to be true. But my employer — my former employer — has taken it a step further.”

Blaine leaned forward now, his gaze falling to the table top as he put his thoughts in order.

“We created an array of entangled particles in our accelerator, set up so that they can be read or modified by… well, by something that’s not too dissimilar to a laser, I suppose you’d say. A pair of arrays, entangled with each other. Eight particles per array, so sixteen in total.”

“So what?” Kidd asked, not unkindly, and Blaine nodded twice in quick succession.

“You can represent letters of the alphabet using eight bits of information — binary digits, ones or zeroes. There’s a particular pattern for A, and another for B, and so on. It’s how computers work, essentially. So you can use one entangled array as the keyboard, and the other as the printer.”

“Amazing,” the detective replied, his tone making it clear that he didn’t find it the least bit interesting at all.

“Again, bear with me,” Blaine said. “The major innovation was in maintaining the velocity of one of the arrays of particles, in a continuous loop around a linear accelerator, but retaining the ability to read their state while in flight. We kept them at point-nine-five-C.”

“Doctor, I’m sure this is very exciting if you’re a physicist, but I’m not,” Kidd replied. “I don’t know where or what Point 9-5-C is, or why you’re telling me all this.”

“It’s a speed. It’s ninety-five percent of the speed of light,” Blaine said, a note of frustration entering his tone. “Faster than you can imagine. And here’s the next thing you can look up on your phone: things travelling at speeds close to that of light experience time differently than things moving more slowly. Time doesn’t pass at the same rate for them. Do you see the consequence?”

Kidd reviewed what he’d been told. He was a trained and experienced investigator, and correlating or summarising information was easy for him, even if he didn’t actually grasp the finer details.

“I suppose it means that you type a letter on your keyboard particles,” Kidd replied, “and then they show up on your printer particles, but there’s a delay because of how fast one set of particles is flying around your accelerator machine.”

“Very good,” Blaine said. “I’d give you a solid B+ for comprehension, especially since it’s your first class. But to get an A, you’d need to add that the delay is significant in magnitude, and negative in sign.”

Kidd summoned as much patience as he could dredge up. “Blue-collar version, please, Doctor,” he said.

Blaine spread his palms flat on the table, and looked at the other man with an unblinking gaze. “The particles were created about two weeks ago. That was the final straw for me, when they went ahead with it despite my protests. Did you hear on the news about the big lottery jackpot winner last weekend? He happens to be the chief executive of the company. You can verify that yourself.”

The detective leaned forward and made a note to do just that, then looked at Blaine again. “Still waiting for that working-man’s explanation,” he said.

“Then here it is,” Blaine said. “The printer particles, as you put it, began displaying information as soon as they’d been created — information that had been typed on the keyboard particles. But the information didn’t have to be typed at the same time, because of the speed difference: it comes from any point later. That’s how it works.”

Kidd had the definite beginnings of a headache. He scratched his brow. “So what you’re telling me, doctor,” he replied, “is that you tried to burn down a building with almost fifty people inside because you wanted to destroy a fancy kind of text messaging system—”

“Which sends its messages back in time,” Blaine said. “All they have to do is wait and see what happens, then send the information back to the origin point via entanglement. Warn themselves, tip themselves off, sell information about the future, and do whatever they like. And the longer it exists, the further they’ll be sending the messages back — always to our present era, about two weeks ago. All of future history is now in flux.”

He looked frightened now, and Kidd felt a chill in the room as the scientist spoke again.

“They knew I was coming, you see, and even if you choose to believe me, they’ll know you’re coming too. I’ve been thinking about it all night, and I can’t come up with a damned thing we can do about it.”

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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