Day 273 - Repeat Offenders - Chapter 15.3 (1390 Words)

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REPEAT OFFENDERS

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 15.3

“I don't understand, why can't we just lock him up?” George Samuels was still being held in the Black Site and had not seen friends or family for over two weeks, there was no sign he was ever going to be let go from the secure facility which made the quandary over Brian Prime all the more galling.

“There is no legal way to take him to court, and based on the way the legal system operates the trial would be a matter of public record. We can't have any details of the machine or what it does getting made public. The chaos it would cause is immense.” Kyle Stone had been given a promotion of sorts, he was no longer an NSA divisional manager, he was the Director on site of the Special Access Program built around the device. His job was to find a way to deal with the mess around the machine and the people involved in the dimensional jumping, and maybe find a way to resolve the chaos created. So far it had not been an easy job.

“You do kill people, I mean it's not exactly a huge stretch to call him a threat to national security is it? The man is a fucking threat to Global Security.”

Kyle Stone blushed a deep and angry red. “I understand your frustration, and I understand your anger. Please keep your profanity to yourself.” His tone was clipped and forced, what he really wanted to say was buried deep beneath whatever principles he was striving to uphold.

“Look Stone, it's not like we can just let this guy get away with it.”

“No, but neither are we condoning an execution of an American Citizen.” Kyle tapped the portfolio on the desk in front of him impatiently. He wanted George to get on board and start the program asap. This back and forth over someone they had no control over was pointless.

“But he's not is he. Not legally, not this America.”

Kyle pinched the bridge of his nose, and took a deep breath. Execution was an option for George Samuels, and considering how much trouble he was turning out to be the option had been discussed more than once at levels above Kyle's pay grade. Things were not all they were cracked up to be at the Project Banzai, the designated code word for the new Special Access they created around the dimensional Prime problem.

Ultimately they elected to keep the participants on side and use them to travel the dimensional rifts and they were a dwindling resource at that. The biggest problem that they had was Brian himself. There were more than twenty five copies of the scientific mind that created the machine and knew how to manipulate the dimensional shifting and creation process. They were unable to reverse engineer the process completely, he had recorded the steps necessary for universe sharding, and the hopping between existing ones too, but there were a few things that were as yet undiscovered. For example the process whereby he marked the duplicated Ivans and Mikes for deletion was a black box. He had shown the process in camera, the button pressing and the step by step procedure on what he did, but some of the detail in 'how' it was done was missing.

He would enter a long string of numbers in some kind of alpha numeric code that the best minds were unable to decipher. He had been given a few weeks to live by the oncologist they brought in to examine the survivors, and he had begged to be frozen in time, placed in the glass case and have the stasis field applied. That had been his plan all along, to collect a significant sum of money and eventually ditch the others, either leaving them to their cut or if they became a problem cutting them adrift in another reality. It was possible that he planned to eliminate them entirely from existence, given the way he freely admitted 'deleting' the copies before they propagated into each dimension.

The name he gave it was rationalising, but internally it had already been nicknamed the 'Abortion' process and the questionable ethics and motivations for it meant that anyone but Brian himself agreed the term fit. There was no longer a Mike to deal with, he was absent from every dimension.

The same was almost true of Ivan, there were two copies of him but that was all there was. Brian had not brought the men into the plan until he had taken seven trips of his own, and put the earlier versions of himself into the machines. There were many machines and there was twenty four copies of the world, and each one had a copy of Brian in a stasis machine, each at varying degrees of interactivity with the machine. He had travelled to each of the six realities created backwards through the logs and convinced each previous version of himself to take a sabbatical in the stasis chamber while he undertook the search for the cure.

Every trip in time caused a stress on the body, if you were travelling through the dimensions. Each time he criss crossed back and forth the problem was exacerbated. By placing the other versions of himself into the stasis chambers, they did not gain any exposure to whatever forces were mutating his DNA and giving him the tumours. For him though, each time he created a universe, the tumours would grow a little more. Where the cancer that would have taken two to three years to progress on it's own, he was accelerating the process and making it worse.

The idea was that he would get enough money to fund research into two branches of technology, and he would gather a team of minds to work on each one. He would collect and collate the varying versions of himself and make a virtual 'mind farm' using his own brain twenty times over. The expense it would take to house, store and facilitate such a project was in the millions. He knew very early on that the cancer was caused by the machine, knew within three jumps that it was going to come along unless he did something about it. In trying to reverse the process he discovered he could jump back along the dimensions one at a time, and in moving forward he discovered how to prevent unauthorised copies of his accomplices from over balancing the team in their favour.

He had met himself on more than one occasion, and hence when he pushed back into his previous selves he could easily convince them of the cancer risk and get them on board to freeze themselves to be defrosted later and work on the cure, or the solution.

The two streams of work were a cure for cancer or a way to upload the human brain into another body. Ultimately that would mean that they would all have to transfer bodies at some stage, be it into a clean copy of Brian Prime or into a new body that had never travelled dimensionally. If he could put his mind, twenty or more versions of it, into twenty or more clean healthy bodies then he would have the immortal engine and ultimate think tank at his, at their disposal.

So he started robbing the dimensions, he needed the assistance of the criminal element, but he did not want them sticking around, and he did not want to create an army based on the necessary evil with which he had to align himself.

Kyle Stone hated the man, but they could not prosecute him and they could not kill him, because they had too many potential problems to clean up and they needed the original version who had the most amount of knowledge and experience. So they put in the in the stasis machine and froze him indefinitely. When they needed something they would unfreeze, and he would be back and answering the question as quickly as possible.

The three questions he would always ask were:

What's the date?

Do you have the Solution?

And What do you want?