Day 307 - Perfectly Executed. - Chapter 5 (1403 Words)

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PERFECTLY EXECUTED

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 5

It was time to move, time to execute his plan and to make things right again. There was only so much research and planning he could do before he had to act anyway, and now it had come to a head.

The attempted, aborted suicide meant that no more would be gleaned in the short term from the incarcerated Samuel Reid. At some point he had to move past the theoretical and get to the more practical elements of folding the fabric of reality.

The experiments he had conducted told him what he needed to know, put him on the path to verification of his hypotheses and validated the work he had done. There was only one thing left to actually do, and that was to activate the machine.

Edward Thompson knew as much as he could know about that day and the people involved in it. He had a target vector and a purpose and he had the ability and the freedom to take action. He did not have to worry about the funding for his project, paying his bills or taking care of the myriad and one items that were the burden on his modern life.

The one step he was about to take would put paid to all those things, he just needed to do it. And today was that day, the day when he would stop being Dr Edward Thompson, in effect, and become some one else and live another life, a life as yet unpiloted. He was the new variable, the one that breaks the pattern and the one the fixed the problems before life moved on again.

He went to the lab, he did not bother locking the house as he left it for the last time, at least in it’s current incarnation. There was a freedom that came with being unburdened by a modern life and that freeing feeling was the joy he felt in finally getting it right. Eighteen months down the track and it was finally the right time and the right place to take action.

The lab was empty when he got to work, no one was there and the parking lot was empty apart from the guards who never left, in shifts.

He checked his phone, returned to him unharmed and intact after losing it to the driver a month or three ago when forced to take a holiday. It was a Wednesday, he was sure that it had been but the empty parking lot and the silent halls of the labs made him wonder if he had missed a memo.

It did not matter in the slightest, he would proceed as he intended and he would make history before he was forgotten forever. Whatever it was that was going on here it did not change things. If anything it made it simpler, easier to set up and activate his project, the secret one that no one but him knew was lying underneath the funded overcoat.

The alarms were off, the doors unlocked, which were very unusual but mirrored the set up, that he had left at his own house that day, unprotected and open to whatever was going to happen next, regardless. That was an oddity he did not expect today and he was a little disturbed by it, but not put off from his purpose.

No one could know that he was going to act today, no one would know that he had anything to act on, not one person had he shared any details with. There would be none that could read what he planned to do into his work, his notes or the proprietary equipment he himself had engineered and made to his own specifications.

No one knew, no one could know. Something else had to be happening, something that he was not aware of about today, maybe it was a public holiday? There was some talk of a new one this year or next, maybe this was it?

Maybe.

He opened the door to his lab, where the equipment waited for him, in pieces innocuous and with no ulterior motive. Assembled in the way he needed them to be, aligned and configured they would soon be greater than the sum of their parts and provide an avenue for fixing, everything.

There was someone in his lab.

“Can I help you?” He asked politely, but there was an edge of ‘who the fuck are you?’ in the undertone of his voice.

“No, no I don’t think you can. You have plenty to do and I can help you, to be blunt about things.” The man’s voice betrayed how old he was, which was hard to tell from the angle that the man was sitting at, and he wore a fedora, like he belonged to another era, and was here on loan.

“Excuse me?” Dr Thompson reached for his phone, thinking to alert the guards, but the man waved a hand and then in it appeared a security pass for the building and made that a moot point.

Edward let go of the phone in his grip, letting it slide loosely back into his pants pocket.

“What are you doing in MY lab?” He framed it like a question, but it was a demand really.

“My lab actually. I’m the one paying for it, after all.” The older man laughed and in the laugh Edward heard something, some sense of irony or recognition.

“Do I know you?” He asked finally, accepting the situation had moved on from the shock of not knowing what was going on, now just trying to get the handle on things.

“Not yet, but you will get to know me, one way or another if you experiment works.” The man stood up and his age became more apparent as he brandished a walking stick with a flourish before placing it firmly on the ground. “It’s my money that has paid for all this nonsense, this experiment that is doomed to fail. I know that, I knew that all along but I had faith in the real purpose of what you were going to do.”

A chill went up Edward’s spine as he realized what it was the old man was saying and how it exposed his masterpiece. This was not the way he expected things to be going, not at all.

“I don’t know what you think you know, but…” Edward did not know how to finish the sentence, so the old man completed it for him.

“… but every word of what I think it is? Is true, don’t worry about that, I support your work and your intention. If it works, then this whole conversation is moot and the product of your work will… it will speak for itself. If that is the case then you will be in a somewhat unique position. I’d ask that if that is the case, and you get what you want? That you think about using that to your advantage, not just using the change to ‘fix’ things and then live on as if this never happened.”

“I don’t know what you mean?” Edward was listening intently, horrified that the context of the words the man was using suggested that he did in fact know exactly what he intended to do, but that was impossible of course.

“Nothing is impossible of course.” The older man echoed his thoughts with an eerie clarity and then he started picking up the disparate pieces of the machine and slotted three of the seven parts together before waving at the younger scientist, suggesting he would be better off competing that task, with his strength and vitality from comparative youth.

“I don’t know what you think you know, but how do you know how to do that?” Edward was turning the pieced together gadget in his hands and examining the expert assemblage of the device that he himself had hand tooled.

“I have been watching you for a while, I’ve been funding you for years, I know when you switched tracks, after the unfortunate incident with your family, how that changed your and shifted your focus. You moved quicker and with more purpose. There are a number of us on the board, we all have similar experiences or expertise, and we want you to succeed.”

The old man sat down heavily, the weariness of age and infirmity pressing hard on his bones.