Groom Lake, Nevada, 2022
"Elsa! You're okay!" shouted Kristoff, running into the quantum oscillator before skidding to a halt and putting his hands up over his eyes. "Ahhh nope, sorry, I didn't expect you coming back without clothes." He looked around fruitlessly for something - anything - to help cover the missing scientist's naked body.
Elsa knelt on the floor of the oscillation chamber, skin flickering with small blue sparks, her head bowed and eyes closed. "What… where am I?" She opened her eyes and her shoulders sagged in relief, recognizing the laboratory and her own time.
Doctor Beeks ran into the chamber with a laboratory coat, draping it over Elsa to give her a little decency. "Doctor Beckett, thank god you've returned unharmed! We were all so worried about you."
"How- how long was I gone, Gerda? Kai?" She turned her head towards Kai, standing in the observation room, staring intently at the instrument panels and pushing buttons in a frenzy.
Gushman's voice echoed over the loudspeakers. "Approximately 5 minutes, Doctor Beckett! This is astounding, simply ama-"
Kristoff sharply waved his hand at the operator window, shushing Kai.
"Five… five minutes? It can't be… it was hours…" Elsa gasped, thoroughly confused. She knew what she'd experienced, where she had been. It had all been so real… hadn't it?
Gerda finished checking over Elsa with her own instruments and gave a silent nod of approval to Kristoff. Whatever had happened to her, it hadn't caused any overt harm.
Kristoff put a hand gently on Elsa's shoulder. "Come on, let's get you out of here and get a cup of coffee, and you can tell me what happened."
"It felt so real," Elsa sighed, staring down into the inky darkness of her paper coffee cup, the sterile white military base cafeteria empty. "I swear, I was back in Indiana, right at the moment Anna was going to be born. I saw my mother and father - I saw my mother in labor!"
Kristoff shook his head, aimlessly nudging his own cup in small circles on the metal table. "Elsa, that's impossible. You were only gone for a few minutes at most. Maybe… I don't know, maybe you were in some kind of dream state, or a trance, or something. Gooshie says the tests are still inconclusive about where you went, but the past…?"
Kristoff ran a hand through his thinning sandy blond hair. In the past two years, he and Elsa Beckett had gone from total strangers to close friends. Initially, they'd butted heads fiercely, the scientist insisting on doing everything her way and providing minimal information about what exactly she was building beyond the specifications agreed in her contract.
After one particularly difficult day early on, Kristoff had brought her a mug of hot chocolate as a peace offering. She'd been immediately suspicious and even hinted at impropriety before he reassured her that he had no interest in her - or any woman, for that matter.
After that personal revelation, they went from colleagues to as close to besties as one could be in a top-secret military project over the last two years. Kristoff admired her tenacity and focus; she reciprocated in admiration of his no-nonsense, get-shit-done attitude and eagerness to clear red tape out of her way.
Elsa sighed again, more heavily. Frustration and glee warred with each other in her heart and on her lips. "I know what I saw, Kristoff. There has to be some way to prove that it was real, some kind of test we can do at the quantum level to show that the superposition-"
He held up his hands in front of him. "Elsa! I'm the dumb army grunt, remember? Tell me what that means in small words that I can understand, please," Kristoff urged.
"All right…" she smiled. "Everything we can see in the universe vibrates, for a lack of a better term, at a specific frequency."
"Like a radio station?"
Elsa nodded vigorously. "Yes, exactly. We are tuned to a specific frequency and see and hear everything on it. What we just did in the laboratory - what we've been trying to do for years now - is change the station. That was the whole point of Weaseltown-"
"You know he hates that name," Kristoff chuckled.
"Fine, Weselton - that was the whole point of his project. To make a system that can move matter so that we can make it reappear somewhere else, the perfect bomb delivery system. Like this cup of coffee-" she held up the paper cup, "could reappear anywhere by tuning it to a different station, moving it, and then tuning it back to our station, our reality. Remember when we started this project, what I told you it should behave like?"
Kristoff furrowed his brow, confused. "Yeah, like a transporter from Star Trek. That's how we sold the DoD on this project at all. I get that, Elsa. But what does that have to do with time and your dream that you went back in time?"
Elsa pinched the bridge of her nose. Boiling down complex theories into terms the average person could understand was never her strong suit. A memory bubbled up from her past, sitting in her bedroom, trying to explain a math problem to Anna and listening to Anna get frustrated, unable to help her understand. Guilt washed over her as it always did, reflecting on all the things she could have done better, done differently, for her sister before she was gone.
Elsa shook her head to clear away the ghosts of the past. "When I… snuck into the lab earlier today, it was because something hit me in the shower. What if we used the oscillator to move an object into superposition not only in location, but also in time? Imagine time as a fourth dimension - length, width, depth, and time. We already know, from the tests we've been doing, that we could theoreteically move something to a specified set of coordinates in space. I decided to try sending something to a set of coordinates in time. That's what I programmed into the oscillator."
Kristoff ran a hand down his face. "But… how did you know it would work? How did you know it wouldn't kill you?"
"I didn't."
Kristoff spit his coffee across the table. "Elsa! That's- you're insane! What possessed you to do that?"
Elsa let out a long breath, her shoulders sagging. "It's been twenty years to the day, Kristoff."
"The day of… oh." Kristoff's eyes widened with the realization. Elsa had always seemed distant and cool, but after one particularly late night and a beer or two, she'd confessed to Kristoff that she'd lost her sister to a drunk driver when she was just 22 years old, a pivotal moment in her life that drove her to a lifetime of study and professional excellence.
"Okay. So what made you pick your old hometown, then?"
Elsa looked down at her hands. "It wasn't a conscious choice. I was trying to work out the complexity of the equation in my head as I programmed the coordinates into the oscillator and…" she gestured to the sky, "I just ended up where I did."
"So… you just decided to roll the dice? You could have ended up in the middle of the ocean or in a volcano or something!"
Elsa shook her head. "It sounds absolutely crazy, and totally irrational coming from me, but… Anna told me it would be all right." Her eyes softened at the thought, the memory, a few tears gathering. "I dreamed that she was at my side in the lab, watching me, and she told me it would work. That's where I got the inspiration for using time in my calculations for the oscillator. Anna told me to."
Kristoff let his head fall into his hands, almost knocking over his coffee cup. "Elsa… please, please do not ever say anything like that aloud again. Weselton will have my head if he thinks you've gone off the deep end. Frankly, I'm not convinced you haven't gone off the deep end. I mean, I know you're brilliant and everything but that just sounds… crazy."
"I know how it sounds, Kristoff. But it worked, didn't it?"
"The jury's still out on that. In fact-" he turned to see Kai hustling into the lab as quickly as his portly stature would permit. "What have you got, Gooshie?"
Kai cleared his throat. "According to the sensors in the observation room, Doctor Beckett did indeed achieve superposition. What's more, according to the electromagnetic sensors, she returned with her subcortical metabolic activities substantially diminished, approximately 24% off the baseline from when the experiment started."
Kristoff rolled his eyes. "English, guys! Please. Help the dumb soldier out. What does any of that mean?"
Elsa raised her hand, grinning. "It's a part of the brain that changes over time between sleep cycles. The longer you're awake, the more that part of the brain changes. When you sleep, you refresh that part of the brain. Kai's saying that I've been awake for longer than the 7 minutes I was gone in this time. How long, Kai?"
"You show metabolic levels associated with being gone for approximately 4-6 hours, Doctor Beckett."
Elsa jumped up from her chair with a cheer, knocking over her coffee cup and startling Kristoff into dropping his. "Yes! I knew it! I knew it worked! I really did see Anna! We did it!" She grabbed Kai and hugged him awkwardly for a moment.
Realization slowly dawned on Kristoff, and a smile crept upon his lips. "We… we did it? We succeeded? Holy shit! I mean… you guys, this… we've really done it! This whole project worked out!" Fireworks exploded in Kristoff's mind. Weselton would get his superweapon, the project would be perpetually funded, and he might even get a promotion out of it. "I… I'll be right back. I need to go call Weselton and tell him the news!" Kristoff charged out of the room.
"Doctor Beckett-" Kai lowered his voice, looking at the door Kristoff had just exited, "There's something else. When you returned, I detected continuous elevated levels of bosons in your quantum signature."
"Elevated how?"
"As though you hadn't left the oscillator," he whispered, concern furrowing his brow. "Your atoms and molecules are still in a state of quantum flux, as though they're not quite settled back into our place and time."
Elsa looked down at her hands. Though no one else had said anything, to her eyes, her skin was still sparkling. Tiny flecks of blue light like the smallest snowflakes cascaded off her, like a gentle breeze in a winter's flurry. She shoved her hands in the pockets of the lab coat and breathed deeply.
"All right. Let's… let's get a test set up to see what we can learn." Elsa walked with Kai back to the laboratory after refilling her cup of coffee.
The two scientists stepped into the observation room and began resetting all the sensors when Elsa braced herself against the desk, breathing heavily and feeling unwell. Kai turned his head from his screen to look at Elsa, only to lose whatever words he was about to say, his mouth hanging open.
Elsa's coffee was levitating out of its cup as though they were in outer space.
"Kai… what- what's going on?"
Gushman grabbed his portable sensory unit and began measuring. "It would appear… Doctor Beckett, this is quite remarkable. It would appear there is a local tachyonic field here somehow. That should be impossible - the oscillator isn't powered up yet."
He took a step closer to the coffee cup and watched one of the gauges brighten on the instrument. "Fascinating, Doctor. Look at these readings!"
Gushman moved to show Elsa the tablet computer, only to see the indicator brighten and turn red when he stood next to her. "It's- it's you, Doctor Beckett! You appear to be the source of this field!"
Elsa nodded sharply, feeling the tingling sensation quickly cover her whole body, the flecks of light brightening into tiny lightning bolts. The electricity stiffened her muscles; reaching out an arm became a monumental effort. Her eyes turned to look at Kai, desperation flashing in them…
… and she vanished in a bright flash of white light, the lab coat drifting to the floor, as Kai's instruments sounded every manner of alarm.
Author's NotesThank you so much for all the feedback - comments, kudos, reviews, likes, etc. I appreciate it. This chapter now sets the pattern for the rest of the story - past, present, past, present, in alternating formats.
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