Time Tunnel: The Towers Read online

  Behind the glare was an attractive woman. Her hazel eyes were framed with a subtle Asian flare—her mother’s influence.

  Annika’s entire life had orbited the US government. Her parents worked for the State Department. At age seven, she moved to Hong Kong when her father was appointed deputy consulate to Hong Kong and Macau. Her Chinese American mother worked as a translator at the Consulate. When her family landed in Hong Kong in early 1972, Bruce Lee was a sensation. Annika begged her parents to allow her to see his movies. Eventually surrendering to their daughter’s ceaseless pestering, they took her to see “Fist of Fury.” Annika was instantly hooked. She covered the walls of her room with Bruce Lee posters and began studying the Wing Chun style of martial arts that was the bedrock of Lee’s Jeet Kun Do mixed Kung Fu style. She even met Bruce Lee’s teacher, the legendary Yip Man, before his death in 1972.

  According to legend, Wing Chun was created by a woman, Ng Mui, who was a nun at the Henan Shaolin Monastery. Qing soldiers burned her monastery and killed the monks, though Ng Mui escaped, fleeing to the White Crane Temple in the Daliang Mountains. At the temple, she created a new style of martial art, inspired by watching a crane and a fox in combat. Ng Mui taught the new style of fighting to a young woman named Yim Wing-Chun, whom a bandit was forcing into marriage. The core principles of Ng Mui’s brand of Kung Fu promoted elegance and speed over brute strength. Ng Mui named her fighting style after her first student.

  As a child, Annika dreamt of becoming a shadow warrior, like the characters in Chinese films, whose martial arts skills were so evolved that they could even defy gravity. By the time Annika applied to West Point, though she had not yet mastered gravity, she was capable of defeating most human opponents in hand-to-hand combat. In the time that had passed since age seven, Annika had not wavered from her shadow warrior goal. She channeled her dream into the military with the objective of becoming a Special Forces commando.

  Like Kyle, she graduated top of class at West Point. Unlike Kyle, her first assignment as second lieutenant was spent at a desk, little more than a secretary with a rank.

  Undaunted by the military’s discrimination, Annika continued to chase her dream. She applied to Ranger school. She was denied—women not allowed. She applied to become a Delta commando. Again, she was denied. In order to get closer to the action, she entered aviation school, learning how to fly Black Hawk and Apache Longbow helicopters. She was barely tall enough to meet the Army’s minimum height requirements to fly helos. After graduation, Annika spent most of her time in Operation Desert Storm ferrying troops to and from the action in her Black Hawk.

  Once, when picking up a squad of Rangers in an Iraqi firefight, the Rangers’ master sergeant balked at the idea of getting into a helicopter piloted by a woman.

  Annika fired back, “Sergeant, this helo’s leaving in in 10 seconds, with or without you. You can get in the fucking helo or you can die. I don’t give a cold shit which.”

  Annika revved up the engines and the stunned sergeant and his men scrambled aboard.

  Discrimination was not the only problem Annika faced in the man’s Army. Her exotic looks often drew unwanted attention from her male colleagues. One essential difference between her and most of her female comrades in arms is that, when Annika was groped, the perp would usually end up with a broken wrist, nose, or at least one black eye. She was never reported, as none of the male soldiers wanted to admit they were beat up by a girl—and a little girl at that. Though she was as much as 100 pounds lighter than her beefy male opponents, she could move like lightning. Eventually, everyone got the message that if you messed with Annika, you were going to get hurt—badly.

  The Army’s misogynist atmosphere began to grind Annika down. Though she eventually earned a grudging respect from her fellow soldiers, no one liked her. She held her bitter feelings behind an increasingly cold exterior. Because Annika’s performance record was textbook perfect, her superiors had little choice but to promote the “Ice Princess,” as she was quietly known.

  With each promotion, her shadow warrior dream slipped further away. Despite the fact that she was arguably the best helo pilot in the Army, she was denied a place in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, aka the “Night Stalkers,” the cadre of pilots that transported Special Forces commandos to and from covert missions. Women pilots were not permitted to become Night Stalkers.

  Annika met her future husband one day when she found him snooping around her helicopter before a mission. He was a contractor, an employee of Sikorsky, sent into the field to collect feedback on the performance of their Black Hawk helicopters. When Annika found him checking out her helo without first clearing with her, she reamed him in multiple dimensions. From his wounded expression, she realized that she had overstepped, and that the man, “Bob,” was only trying to do his job. She apologized and offered to make it up to him by buying him a beer at the end of the day. They dated into a comfortable relationship. Though she wasn’t in love with Bob, he was a good man, devoted to Annika, and someone with whom she could talk with and vent. They married in 2000. She was widowed in 2001 when Bob was called to the Pentagon for a meeting on 9/11.

  When Annika was promoted Lieutenant Colonel, she became an instructor at aviation school. She was a demanding coach, especially hard on women students. While most of the female students resented Colonel Wise bitterly at the time they were learning to fly, most eventually realized that she had given them an edge to compete with the guys on the Army’s lopsided gender playing field.

  Now, in 2008, once again, Annika was face-to-face with Army double standards. Though her qualifications were superior to Kyle’s, Kyle had become the shadow warrior she dreamt of being—simply because he had a penis and she didn’t. Here, at the Time Tunnel, Kyle was a mess, completely unfit for duty of any kind. The fact that he had been given a courtesy promotion to the same rank for which she had worked so hard ground rock salt deep in her psyche’s wound. Annika’s resentment spilled into rage. As commanding officer of their mission, she fully intended to make Kyle’s life a flaming hell.

  • • •

  General Craig turned to the historian, “Roger, start us off. Can you please give us an overview of the early history of this project?”

  “Certainly,” Roger began. “In 1947, a flying disc crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico. There were two debris fields. The best known is that on the Foster Ranch near Corona, where pieces of a craft made of an unusual material were recovered. The fragments were extremely strong and lightweight—nothing that existed on this planet at the time.”

  The old 1947 map of the crash sites appeared on the big screen.

  “A second, much larger debris field was found some 70 miles to the east. Though there had clearly been some kind of catastrophic event that caused extensive damage, it was evident from the debris that the remains were from some kind of craft. The fragments at site two were very unusual, not only because they were very strong and light like site one, but also because they were featureless. There was no discernable machinery in the conventional sense, no instruments, no power source—nothing.”

  Roger paused, taking a breath.

  He continued, “There’s more. Four bodies were recovered at site two. They were not human in appearance. They were short in stature, less than five feet in height, with abnormally large heads, atrophied limbs, very large, almond-shaped black eyes, and gray skin. They did not appear to be from this world.”

  General Craig turned to Kyle, “You ok so far?”

  Kyle felt his pulse quickening, “Yes sir—it’s a lot to take in.”

  “Please continue Roger,” said the general.

  “The Army issued a cover story that the debris was really from a weather balloon. The press was misdirected to a briefing at Fort Worth Army Air Field. The distraction enabled the Army to collect and relocate the debris and bodies to secure locations. The debris was moved to an abandoned World War II Army airfield on Groom Lake, Nevada. The bodies were initially re
located to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and put on ice until an adequate refrigeration capability could be installed at Groom Lake.”

  “A temporary facility to store and analyze the craft wreckage was erected, though it was decided that a more secure facility was needed. So they went underground. The initial Dreamland Research Facility was modest compared to this one—a couple hundred thousand square feet. Over time, obviously, the facility has expanded considerably. Its primary mission has also changed from analysis of the remains to something very different as a result of some remarkable findings by Doctors Meredith and Appel. Gunther, perhaps this is a good place for you to pick up the story?”

  Gunther Appel, aka “Strangelove,” now 86, began, “The analysis of the craft wreckage began very slowly and, quite frankly, was very frustrating. As Roger said, the craft fragments revealed no discernable mechanisms—no propulsion, power source, instrumentation, etc. The objects appeared to be solid. We tried cutting into the fragments to see if they contained anything on the inside. Again, they were solid matter—there was nothing inside.”

  Gunther clicked a remote and pointed to the giant screen. An image of the curved charcoal-colored fragment Gunther had shown to the generals over 20 years earlier displayed on the screen.

  “This is one of the fragments,” Gunther said. It appears to be an ordinary piece of some graphite-type material. Using spectroscopy, we were able to quickly determine that the craft fragments were comprised of carbon. When we take a closer look, we find something very interesting.”

  Gunther clicked a remote. The image of the graphite fragment zoomed thousands of times, revealing an intricate lattice network, resembling a crystalline spider’s web.

  “This is a small portion of the object, magnified 2,000 times,” said Gunther. “It reveals an artificial network of some kind. When we took an even closer look at the network, using an electron microscope, this is what we found…”

  Gunther clicked the remote displaying a series of images on the screen. The images were of geometric shapes, some connected by tiny tubes. The geometric shapes glowed eerily.

  “These are carbon nanomechanisms, comprised primarily of carbon nanotubes,” Gunther said. “Some are as small as one nanometer in diameter. To give you an idea of the size of one nanometer, it is 2,500 times smaller than the width of a red blood cell. These nanotubes have been configured into circuitry, and even machinery with moving parts. There are trillions of them throughout the hull of the craft. This infrastructure provides all of the craft’s functionality.”

  “Once we made this breakthrough, we could begin the painstaking process of reverse engineering the nano-infrastructure to determine its purpose. This was very difficult, in part because of the practical difficulty of scanning the fragments without damaging the nanotubes. A compounding challenge was the fact that we could not observe the nanostructure in action. We were forced to theorize its functionality and test—sometimes using replicas of the nanotechnology built from current generation materials. In some cases, once we were able to determine a mechanism’s function, we were able to reactivate it.”

  “It was an exceedingly difficult process, though, over decades, we were able to determine many of the craft’s basic functions. We were able to determine that antimatter reactions powered the craft, and we have speculated that an accident with their antimatter reactor may have been the cause of the catastrophic event that destroyed the craft. An antimatter explosion could easily have destroyed the entire planet, so we are fortunate that this craft had the capacity to shield the reaction.”

  “Though we made significant progress in reverse engineering the craft’s functions, we could not identify any obvious means of propulsion. We could not determine how the craft could possibly be capable of interstellar travel. One clue we found was in the craft’s ability to manipulate gravity. We theorized that the Grays were warping space-time, which could conceivably be used as a means to rapidly cross vast distances. It was at this time that Dr. Meredith had the final breakthrough that solved the puzzle. Lara, would you like to continue?”

  Lara clicked a remote. A ghastly image of one of the Gray cadavers appeared on the big screen, with its oversized cranium, almond eyes, and gaping mouth. It looked as though it was terrified at the moment it died. Kyle squelched a gasp at the sight of the dead creature.

  “Necroscopy performed on the Grays found them to be remarkably human-like anatomically,” said Lara. “Though their heads and craniums are larger than ours, their eyes appear to be different, and their limbs are atrophied compared with humans, the Grays are otherwise identical to humans. Mass spectrometric analysis on Gray tissue confirmed the presence of DNA. Gray cells were karyotyped, revealing that they contained 23 pairs of chromosomes—the same as humans.”

  Lara clicked the remote to display the Karyotype test she had shown the Army generals over two decades earlier.

  Lara continued, “In the early ’70s, the possibility of sequencing DNA began to evolve from science fiction into something that might be plausible. Sequencing is the process of determining the precise order of nucleotides within a DNA molecule. I was hired to run the DNA sequencing project here at the complex. At the time, the objective of sequencing Gray DNA was to identify weaknesses in their biology that could be exploited for the purpose of developing bioweapon defenses. We began sequencing Gray DNA in the 1970s, though with the limited computing bandwidth of the time, we projected that it would take twenty years to complete an index of Gray DNA.”

  “In 1985, we had a breakthrough. A new process became available to profile and compare DNA from different subjects. It was called restriction fragment length polymorphism, or RFLP analysis. RFLP was originally developed as a tool for crime investigation and to resolve paternity cases. Since the ’80s more sophisticated tools for DNA profiling have become available. RFLP was not a DNA sequencing method. It was a way to isolate and compare areas of DNA that exhibit polymorphism—these are the areas of DNA that make individuals unique.”

  “In 1985, for the hell of it, I decided to run a RFLP test on Gray tissue and compare it against human DNA sampled from various human ethnic groups. Ostensibly, the goal was to note the high-level similarities and differences between Gray and human DNA, though, in reality, the reason I ran the test was because we were running out of things to do on the Grays. They had been dissected, spectra-analyzed, karyotyped, and our DNA sequencing was a rote routine that was going to take years to complete. I had to get creative to keep the research moving forward.”

  Lara clicked the remote to display the results of the 1985 RFLP test.

  Lara continued, “I didn’t really expect to find much of anything of interest when I ran the RFLP test. So imagine my surprise when the results came back with an exact match against the Han ethnic group. As it turned out, our Grays were Chinese—two males and two females. The Grays are not from another world—they’re from this one. Their craft is not a spacecraft, it’s a time machine.”

  The room was silent. All eyes were on Kyle as his mind overloaded.

  “Holy shit!” said Kyle.

  “That’s what the other Army guys said twenty-something years ago when I dropped this on them,” said Lara.

  The others laughed.

  “We went ahead and completed the DNA sequencing in the ’90s, though the goal of the exercise had changed, obviously. It didn’t make much sense to concoct bioweapons to kill the Grays, as there is no shortage of such weapons that will kill humans. Now we’re mostly just curious to find the Gray’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents—who presumably live somewhere in China.”

  “But what about their physical appearance? They don’t appear to be human,” asked Kyle.

  “We can explain much of it through studies conducted on astronauts after prolonged periods in outer space,” answered Lara, “Head swelling and atrophied limbs are common side-effects of space travel. A distinct possibility is that the appearance of our great decedents changes over many generati
ons living in space. Perhaps they are explorers. Perhaps the Earth is no longer inhabitable in the future. Whatever their reason for living in space, it is unlikely that their bodies could withstand Earth’s gravity for long periods of time. It would be like a modern day human trying to swim several thousand feet below sea level.”

  “As far as the Gray’s black eyes were concerned, their eyes were covered by an artificial material—kind of like a permanent contact lens, though these lenses were embedded with more nanotechnology. It gives the Grays superpower vision—optical enhancements like zoom and night vision, along with various sensors to analyze things they see. They also have an enhanced pattern recognition capability. They can match up patterns in a database—useful for instantly identifying objects or life forms. It could also come in handy if you forget someone’s name at a party.”

  “The last item of interest is the Gray’s brains. We found several specks of artificial material embedded in their brains. They were tiny—as small as grains of sand. In the early necrospcopies performed on the Grays in the ’40s, the specks were lost—they probably went unnoticed, or were dismissed as terrestrial contamination. Fortunately, only two of the four Grays were dissected back then. When we took another look in the 70s, we found the same specks in both remaining subjects. When we turned them over to Gunther’s team for examination, the specks turned out to be more nanotechnology. The Grays integrate artificial technology into their brains. The tech enhances brain functions, as well as integrating knowledge bases. Gunther’s group is working on downloading and decoding those knowledge sets. It will be very exciting to know what these people knew.”