A story exploring time travel and societal issues in the wake of 9/11. This is chapter 4. See previous posts for chapters 1 and 2, and 3.
By the middle of winter, Thomas seemed to have come to terms with his situation. He and August were leaving soon to travel. August had taken a turn at winning the lottery and had come away with sixty million dollars after taxes, which was again split three ways. T2 was stressing out about their impending departure. "It's just, who am I supposed to talk to when you're gone?" he asked. "My business associates?"
"You'll have plenty to do," observed Thomas. "According to our plan, this is the time to amass a fortune. We'll be getting the accounts in Panama set up. Mossack Fonseca, right?"
"I for one can't wait to get out of here," said August. "I'll miss everyone, but where we're going will be incredible. All the places."
"I hope so," said T2. "You know, there's something I haven't told you about the future. Something I didn't think was very important until now. The world I come from is a dystopia, it's true. But my individual life was good. Things were fine. I didn't travel back in time to escape anything. I did it to run towards new possibilities."
On the day the couple left, T2 walked to the river and picked pebbles off the beach to skip across the water. Then he made his way to campus, to the computer science department, where he had a meeting with a computer science professor named Al Winslow. After asking around, T2 found Winslow in his office, on the phone. Entering the room and sitting down, T2 sat down and waited quietly until the call was finished.
"Dr Winslow, I'm Thomas Barabos, but everybody calls me T2," said T2.
"Call me Al," said Al, initiating a stiff handshake.
"Thanks," said T2. "As I told you on the phone, I have a new company called Network Insight Systems, or NIS. We're looking to hire a couple of grad students. Ideally, they'd have some familiarity with web standards, convolutional neural nets, crypto, and distributed computing. Is there anyone you can recommend?"
Al raised an eyebrow. "Trying to get a software engineer on the cheap, huh?" he said. "Afraid you might be barking up the wrong tree here."
"Well, thanks anyway for your time," said T2 blandly, not rising to leave.
They sat there for an increasingly awkward minute. "I'm sorry, was there something else?" asked Al.
T2 chuckled. "You're not going to get rid of me that easy," he said. "Listen, what we're doing at NIS is groundbreaking stuff. I can't say more unless you sign an NDA. The problem I'm bumping into is that there's just too much data. Too much work for our existing team. I was hoping we could maybe sponsor a hackathon or something. Something to find local talent instead of flying people up from California. If it helps, I'm sure some kind of finder's fee could be arranged."
"Finder's fee?" said Al.
T2 grinned, pulling a thick bundle of twenties from an inside coat pocket. "Two thousand," he said. "It's yours if you sign an NDA, review my confidential job descriptions, and recommend people. And I'll give you another thousand per position that I fill based on your recommendations."
"This is all highly irregular," said Al, reaching for the money. "What exactly is it that your company is working on?"
T2 handed him the money and pulled an NDA from the same pocket the money had been in. Al took the cash and set it on the desk, then took the NDA and reviewed the pages. "Aww what the hell," he said, signing the document. "Now, what's this really about?"
Taking a phone from the future from another pocket, T2 powered the device on, loaded a photo app, and handed it over. "Scroll through the images by swiping left on the touch screen," he said. "Take all the time you need."
"So you're a cell phone manufacturer or something?" asked Al, absently swiping through pictures of art.
"Each of the images you're looking at is 28 megapixels," said T2. "Make a reverse pinching movement on the screen to zoom in."
"What the hell?" said Al.
"Alright, I'll need that back," said T2, retrieving the device and putting it away. "You see, what we do is envision the future. The prototype you just saw won't hit the market for fifteen years. But we can start designing applications for similar devices now. Ideally, avoiding software development dead ends along the way."
"Where'd you say you went to school?" asked Al, who was trying mightily to keep his composure.
"Not your concern," said T2. "But you would of course be free to publish papers on any of our public research. Most of what we make will be open source, and I noticed that it's been a couple of years since you've published."
Despite his reservations, Al grinned. "Your positions would need to be paid," he said. "No unpaid internships. And I would need to be kept in the loop about everything. What's the equity situation?"
"Payments will be on a per-project basis," said T2. "If things work out, we can maybe discuss options."
"This is about 9/11 isn't it?" said Al after a long pause. "Has to be. Who do you really work for?"
"Let's just say I work for the forces of good," said T2. "Forces that feel 9/11 could have been prevented. Lapses at the State Department let hijackers into the country illegally. Cultural biases in the intelligence community kept us from getting key information from Sudan in time to stop it. The president was even briefed on the impending attack. But DC is a pit of vipers where information is traded for favors on a black market instead of being correctly applied to save lives. I greatly prefer the private sector to that world. Technology has no hidden agendas."
Al took a sip of a soda. "I see," he said. "So maybe you're not a spook. But that raises another question. What happens to my kids if you get in trouble with the spooks?"
"We're not working on security or defense matters," said T2. "But, like everyone else, we're subject to mass surveillance. The NSA's Echelon program has been monitoring all communications for years. This system will eventually be replaced by one called Prism. They've just abandoned a threat detection program called ThinThread in favor of one called Trailblazer, which is a more expensive, shittier version of ThinThread that ignores the Constitution. Trailblazer doesn't care what we're doing. I can assure you that we're not on anyone's radar."
"So you're an ex-spook, then," said Al. "I guess I can work with that. Just promise me you'll keep my students far far away from anything controversial."
"I can do that," said T2.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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