The Dealey Project

Speculative fiction: Part I of IV of the Detem Cycle: The future of history begins in the past

I always thought it would be higher. I’d thought of it as a sniper’s nest or something like that. Plus I didn’t really know what a knoll was. It seemed like such an old-fashioned word, and I wondered if maybe it hadn’t been 70 years ago. Maybe it had been a normal word, but once it became grassy, nobody used it the old way anymore. We quit calling them knolls, and started calling them hills, or rises, or mounds. Because calling it a knoll would bring us back here. This had become the knoll. I wondered if the others had even put up a fight. Or was it knoll-o contendere?

“What are you smiling at?” Mina asked. She’d been pointing her phone at the ugly brick building across the way, running an app that would tell her distances and angles from various places in the so-called plaza to others on the street or on the building. The building was misleading as well. Maybe because I just hadn’t thought about it. It was seven floors tall, but I’d heard about the sixth floor so much that it stuck in my head. I might have been surprised to find out there were five floors below the historic one.

But all those thing I didn’t really know were no impediment to the job I’d been hired for. I’d been hired to write about the testing and decision-making processes for the LPD. More specifically, I was hired as a counterpoint to the campus PR guy who wanted to call LPD our window into the past.

“More like a window into last Tuesday,” one of the physicists had said.

“I was just thinking about all the phrases that are stuck in our heads,” I said, answering Mina’s question. “The sixth floor, the grassy knoll, the three tramps. I wonder how many people use those expressions without really knowing what they mean.”

“That’s why you’re the word man, I guess,” she said. “What ever happened to tramp anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not even used anymore to refer to a slutty girl. Hobos are called homeless now.”

“I think you meant to say unhoused. Anyway, what’s a knoll?”

“The Steelers coach who won four Super Bowls,” she said.

“You’re from Pennsylvania then?” I asked her.

“Erie,” she said. “That means I could root for the Bills or the Steelers, depending on who was having the better season.”

“Giants fan myself. But I know not to mention that in Dallas. Same might go for your Steelers.”

I went back to whispering into my phone. Mina didn’t say anything. She’d told the app on her phone what she needed to know before we left Midland. She pointed the phone, and it would tell her where an acre was. More accurately, it would give her several possible acres to choose from. I had to work harder because I didn’t know what I’d need to write about later.

The LPD, technically the Lingering Population of Dispersals Collector and Interpreter, was going to be tested in about six weeks. There was a countdown clock on the wall of the main lab at Scrubtown, and I imagine half of the physics team had one on their phones. Dr. Peters probably had one in his head. The amount of detail he could carry there, along with his ability to conceptualize the entire project, made him the perfect director of the LPD. His personality made him the worst possible choice. He’d wanted to fire two members of his hand-picked lab team because one of them called the project the Linger-Pop. The other one’s crime was hearing the first one say it. Peters thought the reference indicated a lack of seriousness. God knows what he’d have thought of the team privately, very privately, calling themselves the Ling Ring.

“Who started calling it the Ling Ring?” I asked Mina that night. We were having a serviceable but generic meal at the hotel restaurant. We’d been over most of the details of the day and agreed we had enough information and could head for San Antonio the next day.

“That was Jason, I think,” she said.

“Numbers boy?” I asked.

“That one. He was making fun of how fast Dr. Peters talks. He called us the LingRing Brothers circus. Before you ask, Linger Pop was Carl, the optics and sonics guy.”

“Got it,” I said. “Why are you just Mina? I mean, why don’t you have a designation connected to your job?”

“First, I’m the chief of staff, more or less. I bring everything else together. I’m a generalist and not a specialist. Second, I’m Dr. Peters’ alter ego. The lab gang are a little uncertain about testing my sense of humor.”

Of course, she was more than just a chief of staff. She was the pragmatic representative of Peters on Earth while he lived in the ether of his science. He knew every detail and he knew the full scope of the project, but real life stymied him, to put it mildly. Mina didn’t pick up his laundry, bring him coffee, or change his passwords periodically, but she managed the admin who did those things. She kept Peters from talking to the legislators who supplied the money and the administrators who took a cut for doling it out. When the guy who was supposed to do the measurements checked up with a mild case of Covid-237, she was the best one to make the trip instead, and the only one who could keep Scrubtown running by phone.

“How did you wind up getting that job? His alter ego and/or chief of staff?”

“We bonded over loss,” she said, with the tone of voice she might use to say they liked the same teams. I almost asked, “Bills or Steelers?” but decided to wait.

“His wife, Justine, died in a car wreck the year before I joined the project. My older brother, Justin, was killed in a 7-Eleven robbery when I was in high school. We started the job interview talking about the coincidence of names, moved on to talking about pretending to move on, agreed it was a pretense, and talked for two hours without mentioning the job. He hired me the same day.”

“I didn’t know about your brother. I’m sorry.” She nodded to acknowledge the condolence. “You seemed to describe a side of Peters we don’t see a lot. I’m used to the excitement, the . . .”

“The ranting and raving? I don’t have any illusions about him. That’s one reason I’m good at my job.”

The conversation somehow moved on to the quality of the food, which we both agreed was better than the Scrubtown cafeteria. The complex was Los Alamos without the charm, and a lot harder to explain to politicians who wrote the checks. But an obscure West Texas real estate tycoon had wound up chairing a Congressional subcommittee on science funding, and someone, probably Mina, knew what to tell him.

“So, does Chairman Whitaker really think we can find out what happened at the Alamo?” I asked her when the conversation seemed at an opportune point.

She paused for what seemed like a long time, perhaps thinking about my job description – describe the project without jeopardizing it – before she carefully answered.

“We’re not sure what he thinks about the possibility of San Antonio,” she said. “We’ve told him the numbers, but they’re dense to the point of impenetrable. Relative distance backwards is cubed, more or less, and interpreting space is squared.”

“Slow that down for me,” I said.

“Dallas was 70 years ago,” she said. “San Antonio was 197. That’s 2.8 times the distance, cubed is 22.3 times. So we’d need 22.3 times the power that next month’s test will take. San Antonio would be ten hours of space as opposed to ten minutes for Dallas. That’s 60 times as long, squared is 3,600.”

“Ten hours?”

“It’s a guess,” she said. “An educated estimate of the time from the beginning of the Mexican assault to when David Crockett died.”

“So you’d need 3,600 times the power? Is that possible?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s 3,600 for ten hours of space times 22.3 for the distance. It’s closer to 80,000 times the power. We don’t have the technology to handle that power load. The sensors, the drives, the CPUs – they all max out at some point.”

“And you want me to write this?” I was starting to realize that maybe Mina had arranged this trip for this time. So that over a mediocre chicken dish in a chain hotel she could tell me the limits of the project. And then she could tell me why she told me, if she wanted to.

“We need an honest history of this project,” she said. “The chairman is backing us because of the Crockett angle. He brought it up; we just never refuted it.”

I was thinking the plan was to tell the world, and the Congressional committee, after the Dallas test that we’d discovered the limits. But there was something else hidden in the reasoning that I hadn’t figure out yet.

“So, science and history aside, the chairman is sponsoring the LPD because he wants to know how Davy Crockett died? That’s weird even for Washington.”

Mina was shaking her head. There was still something I wasn’t getting.

“He’s not after how Crockett died,” she said. “He wants us to prove that everyone in the fort died heroically.”

“But if you can’t go back to . . . How far back can you go?”

“Dallas will be near the limit, but we know the exact time and place. Maximum for more than a few minutes is probably 80 years, maybe 90.”

“So, the end of World War II? Hitler’s suicide, maybe.”

She gave an eye shrug. Maybe, she agreed. That still wasn’t what she wanted me to figure out. Somewhere in the near future, the project’s sponsor, its rabbi, would find out its limits. So that future was . . . My brain skipped the track a little bit.

“The Future of History instead of window into history,” I said. “A different kind of research. The most primary of sources. All the great mysteries are modern ones anyway. We could find Hoffa’s body. We could re-create the 18 and a half minute gap. But who’s going to tell the chairman?”

Mina started to say something but I held a hand up to stop her. The waiter came over to take out plates. Mina rejected dessert for both of us, which I found presumptuous, but I was on the verge of understanding a critical point.

“So, we need the chairman for this stage of the funding. But by the time we need more, we’ll have solved Dallas and that will be the selling point. We’ll go public with what we find in Dealey Plaza, and the Alamo idea will be . . .”

“Go ahead and say it,” Mina said.

“The Alamo idea will be history. We’ll be talking to a bigger committee, on a bigger stage.”

Mina’s face seemed to have relaxed. I took that to mean I understood the politics of the situation.

“Did you hire me to lie about this project?” I asked. I made my tone as non-accusatory as I could.

“I don’t want you to lie. But your skill set is writing fiction. I want you to help me create plausible scenarios for some of the actions we’ll have to take. I’ll do the lying.”

“Telling me that,” I said. “That’s why we’re on this trip.”

“More or less,” she said. “That and to measure a contiguous acre of Dealey Plaza.”

The sentence sounded like it ended with something other than a period. A semicolon. Maybe an ellipsis. I waited for the rest.

“We also have to compartmentalize information at Scrubtown for the next six weeks. We think there may be someone in the project trying to sabotage it. “

—

Consider this. With the Sino-Putinist project to colonize the moon underway, someone would have to create the videos to make it look like it had succeeded. Disney had, as everyone knew, created the original movies of Neil Armstrong and his giant leap, but they were no longer reliable for that kind of work. In 1969, they were willing to create moon-landing movies that gave us a propaganda victory over the Soviets, but in 2033, looking for their first trillion-dollar year, they weren’t interested in a pro bono sideline. So the government had built Scrubtown, a research colony in the scrub desert outside Odessa, Texas, to produce the videos. The cover story was that Scrubtown was doing some kind of radiation research.

“Consider this” was the giveaway. If I used any form of consider in an email, it went into Mina’s alternate history file. How she distributed them from there was above my pay grade. My job was to come up with what we called the Considerations, while sticking with my day job of writing down what was actually happening, with some limitations.

Another major Consideration was a social media meme that pandemicked. I could almost hear the whispery voice of the gossip saying she could tell people that Scrubtown was going to be closed in five months but she wasn’t authorized to say why. Like a good Swiss cheese, it was the holes that gave it its character. Why would someone leak the imminent closing but not the reason? Well, obviously, because she was brave enough to share the truth, but there’s no telling what they might do to her if she told why. Something about the closing being five months away – not a year, not two weeks, but five months – gave it a veracity that many MetaFace memes lacked.

I tried to imagine the calls to the Congressman’s office. We brought a lot of money to that dry patch of Texas.

Inside the LPD, the two stories enhanced Mina’s decision to silo information. The first suspicion among the lab team was which staff members were leaking that nonsense. Cleaners, cooks, drivers, electricians, and plumbers had to be able to come and go, and one or more of them had to be the leak(s). And somebody had to be leaking to them the inside info that allowed them to create their misconceptions. Members of the lab team became careful about what they shared inside the team, knowing that it was blasting through a wax seal somewhere.

The first two Considerations worked so well, I didn’t have to concentrate on that part of the job. Much as I enjoyed it – I did, after all, like writing fiction – it was still the guiltiest of pleasures. I worried sometimes what I was actually guilty of. Was I misleading those providing the funding? If so, did it rise to the level of a criminal offense? I couldn’t find an affirmative to either question, but a strong negative was no easier. Worrying became mere fretting, and gave me more time to concentrate on the science behind the project or, more accurately, the taxonomy and nomenclature.

The LPD was the Lingering Population of Dispersals Collector and Interpreter. Lingering population was clear enough. There was a coherent group of things, and those things hadn’t gone anywhere. Those things would be collected, and they could be interpreted. But calling these things dispersals was telling what they did, not what they were. So what were they?

I didn’t ask the wrong person, but I may have asked it the wrong way. I had already told Mina I needed to get a little more of the science directly from Peters, to add color and accuracy to what I wrote. She set it up after a disk test in the morning. Normally, a one-hour task in the morning might see the professor still chasing tangents at dinner time. But the disk tests were limited. Each sensor array held six sensors, and each sensor provided data to eight hard drives. Those eight drives dumped their data to a larger drive every second, then erased themselves. More accurately, the firmware on the PROM attached to the drive sucked the data off and spat it onto a larger drive. The PROM, the programmable chip, had to be hand-programmed by Madison, the data woman, then attached to the drive itself. Then pre-packaged data was dumped to the drive by a mock sensor to test it, and 80 percent of the drives survived. With about 2,300 drives needed for the acre of Dealey, that meant almost 600 failed drives, boxed up and fed through a grinder by some of the staff. It was useful in two ways. On the one hand, the data and the configuration, proprietary, top secret, and valuable, could not be simply dumped in a landfill. On the other, crushing those drives gave me another activity to attach an outrageous story to, all things considered.

The hour limit on the test Peters was overseeing was the limit of the processors in the VLPU, the Very Large Processing Unit, also custom built by Madison. After an hour, she said, the VLPU got tired. What that meant was that it began to heat at 90 minutes, so the testing had to be limited. The balance for everything, for every chip, drive, sensor, and cable, was how much to test it without wearing it out versus how much reliability we would need for the Dealey test.

I caught Peters in a good mood. Ninety-two percent of the drives had passed that day, and he and Madison had found something – a variant sector anomaly, whatever that was – that explained why the other eight percent didn’t make it. That meant they’d know what to test for before hooking the drives to the PROMs or to the mock sensors. It would be a major time-saver going forward. Peters didn’t smile, but he was scowling less when I asked about what the dispersals were.

“Think of it this way,” he said, snapping his fingers. “If I did that beside your ear, it would be loud and instant. If I did it across the room, it would be quieter and take a fraction of a second to reach your ear. If I did it in the courtyard, you could not hear it at all, but the disturbance from it would still be visible to the sensors in this room.”

“So the sound waves could be picked up by the sensors even when the ear can’t hear them?”

Peters shook his head so vigorously, I worried he’d hurt himself.

“No, no, no. There is nothing remaining that is coherent enough to be called a wave. If it were loud enough to hurt,” he said, snapping his fingers a couple of inches from my face and continuing to talk as I flinched. “Then the pain you feel lingering on your eardrum might be the disturbance. Think of the dispersals as measuring that pain to re-create the sound.”

In the language Peters used, he was measuring dispersed disturbances. The phrase was not musical, but that didn’t excuse the wordplay I displayed before I had time to think about it.

“So that’s how finger pops become linger pops?” I said.

“Mr. Kingston,” he bellowed, turning away from me and throwing his hands in the air. I glanced around the lab. Madison had glanced at her watch. So had her lab assistant, Larry. As he spun back to face me, the tirade began. “I hired you for your ability to use words, not so that you could help create and use new ones that combine sophomoric humor with scientific inaccuracy as if the lingering fabric of human history and existence could be reduced to a punch line that tells the story in the same way that a wet mop describes a clean floor.” There were more sentences like that, building into paragraphs, punctuated with waving arms and frenzied pacing. When the pacing was away from me, I could take deep breaths and blink. I wondered what it would do to my standing in the project, and whether I’d still have any, if I walked away. His pitch and speed of his voice grew until his words and phrases were on the verge of unintelligible, delivered more rapidly than a human brain could absorb them. Finally, overtaken by exhaustion or by the futility of chiding me, he stormed out of the drive lab, slamming the door as he went.

“I got six minutes and 43 seconds,” Madison said.

“6:47,” Larry said.

“You counted until the door slam?” she asked him.

“It seemed to be part of the exposition,” Larry said.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Madison said. “It’s nowhere near the record anyway.”

That was what it was like working with a bunch of geniuses. Madness was just a phenomenon, like wind or rain. I remembered what I could of what Peters had said before his tirade. A fossilized fern, I remembered from a freshman earth science course, was not actually the fern, but the deposits that filled in the space where the fern had been and hardened. That was the closest metaphor I could find for measuring the disturbances and not the original events. The LPD collection didn’t capture events, but rather interpreted them. We were after the fossils of sounds and images.

“Madison,” I said, drawing her attention away from typing drive statuses into her tablet. “Is it safe to say that what you’re building in this lab can eventually be mass-produced instead of handmade?”

“Theoretically, and if it’s valuable to somebody to do it. But I don’t know the sociology or economics of it. That’s not my field.”

“But it could reach a point where the efficiency of the technology can give us a better look at things further back?”

“It could,” she said. “But our only test that reached two minutes only went back two weeks. We don’t know what kind of numbers we’re working with yet.”

“But at the same time,” I said, letting the words come out almost as the thought occurred. “The power consumption grows the further back we go. So if the dissipation of the dispersed disturbances is faster than the improved capacity of the LPD, we’re losing history every day, every second?”

“I guess so,” she said, but she was looking past me. I turned around and saw Mina standing hear the door. I hadn’t heard her come in. But for some reason, the look on her face was perhaps shock, perhaps anger. Surely she had thought of the widening gap herself, or discussed it with Peters. I didn’t fully understand why, but the look on her face seemed to say that I shouldn’t have thought of it.

—

Scrubtown has a bar of sorts, not so much so that the lab team didn’t have to drive to Odessa or Midland, but so that they didn’t have to drive back after drinking. I found good and bad news when I joined them. They’d all been there longer than me and so there was a lot of conversational catching up to do. The good news was that I got a good sense of what I needed to know. The bad news was that I was halfway working while they were unwinding.

One of the things I found out was that Peters either helped young people to recover from losses, or that he was a vulture preying on the damaged. Madison was getting over a miscarriage when she was hired. Larry was recently divorced. Jason had been with a software startup that went bust. It was at the same time ghoulish and uplifting. They all had a chance to throw themselves into work that bordered on mission. It helped them get over hard times, but took advantage of them as well. It was hard to picture Peters having the compassion to want to help them, but easy to ascribe morbid opportunism. I filed it away as none of my business, but perhaps part of the story.

That was one of the things I tried to catch up on at the bar one night. Just a small exchange when Larry was counting how many beers to order and noticed Carl was missing. Not a big deal, except he asked Madison where he was. Her attempt to make her shrug look nonchalant told me why she’d be expected to know.

“You know to be careful around him?” Larry said.

Madison glanced at me, then at the other lab guys around the table. “Is he the one Mina’s worried about?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Jason said. “You think he might be?”

“I don’t know either,” she said. “I’ve just overheard a couple of quick phone calls, like somebody checking details. He’s mentioned four minutes twice. I go back and forth. I don’t want to know what it means and I’m worried about what it means.”

“Isn’t that the Dealey goal?” Larry asked. “Four minutes?”

“It’s ten minutes for the project,” Jason said.

“I know what he means,” Madison said. “Margie, the historian, said it was ten minutes of science to get four minutes of history.”

“Yeah, but ten is as accurate as we can get at that distance to still capture the target area of four minutes,” Larry said. “That’s what Peters thinks anyway. But I think we’ve nailed it. Those six extra minutes will be at the end.”

Jason raised his beer. “And we’ll all be working somewhere there’s grass next year,” he toasted.

Margie had joined us after hearing her name from two tables away. She joined the toast, but then asked about the subject.

“Why here anyway? I understand doing it in Texas because that’s where the targets are, but why not get closer to the targets? Maybe somewhere there’s a Starbucks?”

“Texas is a coincidence,” Jason said.

“I’ve heard it called a lot of things,” Margie said.

“I mean the site has nothing to do with where the targets are. There’s a site in the Gobi Desert that would work just as well if we could do it without electricity, and one in the South Pacific if you could anchor a boat. The site being in Chairman Whitaker’s district was just pure luck, and being close to the targets was pure coincidence.”

“You’ve lost me,” Margie said.

“My dad told me once that growing up in West Virginia, he could pick up radio stations from all over the country at night,” Jason said. “Fifty thousand watt stations from Chicago, New York, and Atlanta, AM stations when that was still good for something besides talk radio. It’s kind of like that for transient dispersals. There are places where we can gather and interpret them in the middle of the night and when there’s no solar activity.”

“And when we hold our mouths right,” Larry said.

I would often hear them talk as if the success of the test was unlikely. Phrases like “a window into last Tuesday” and “ten minutes to capture four.”

“What are the chances, realistically, that the test will work?” I asked. “That it will tell us what happened?”

Nobody said anything for a few seconds, then Larry said, “It’s big casino.”

I wondered what would happen if he used that expression in front of Peters.

—

“If it’s the right four minutes, then the test failed,” Mina said. I didn’t answer. I hadn’t caught up with all the possibilities from what I remembered of the discussion in the bar. I understand that in a perfect world, or one where the test went perfectly, there would be three minutes before the motorcade entered the plaza, the four minutes everyone wanted to see, and three minutes after. But the metaphors. It would be like catching a thousand insects in a net and sorting out the flies. The mental gymnastics to figure out the timing would make my head hurt for a week, but for the lab team it was just a warmup.

“But if that wasn’t what Carl was talking about,” Mina went on. “Then there’s no real danger. The reference to four minutes could be just a coincidence.”

“Do you think it is?” I asked.

“No.”

“Could you watch the call? Collect the dispersals on it?”

“No, it would be a waste of power. We don’t have enough info and too many people would know,” she said. Her casual tone told me she’d already thought of it.

I understood what she meant. The only full test since I’d been on board only lasted thirty seconds and included about a dozen of the lab team. The rest were overseeing the software. Eventually, tested and refined, the process would be fully programmed and run by AI, but there were still a lot of variables. That’s what Jason said anyway, and I assumed he’d recognize a variable if he saw one. “Imagine that you have to give a hotel guest a wake-up call,” he’d explained it once. “And the only information you have is a range of room numbers, four out of five digits to the phone number, and the guest’s hair color.”

That was sort of where Mina and I were. Carl had spoken to someone concerning four minutes. Four minutes was how much area we wanted to cover in Dealey. Carl had not joined everyone at the bar one evening. He might be in a relationship with Madison. Someone might be trying to sabotage the project. Someone had told Mina of the possibility of sabotage. I wondered if we knew that person’s hair color.

I had asked Jason at the time what relevance the hair color had. His answer was, “None unless it tells you the missing digit of the phone number. Then you don’t need the range of room numbers.”

The thirty-second test I’d been part of gave me a better idea of the collection and interpretation process, although it took some confusion to get there.

“Why do you call it seeing-eye?” I’d asked.

“We don’t,” Madison said, but at the same time Larry was saying, “We should call it that. We’re blind until we do it.”

“C and I,” Madison said, ignoring him. “Collection and interpretation, although there are really three aspects to it. We collect it, we synchronize it, and we interpret it. But CSI was already taken.”

“There’s evidence of that,” Larry said, before explaining the test further. Half of us stood on each side of the patch of dust outside the labs that we called a courtyard. Then we crossed to the other side, each of us repeating the same phrase, “Dad made me bet if I’d go for gum too.”

Some of us stumbled on the phrase and it was hard to not laugh. But that was part of the test. “Bad bade be met” looked the same as “Dad made me bet” on Phase I of the C&I, or CIP-1. That phase showed us walking and caught the colors of our clothing. CIP-2 added fingers and facial features. CIP-3 synchronized the sounds. CIP-4 isolated one subject, Larry. He said the phrase slowly three times as he walked across the courtyard. But he and Madison had started saying it at the same time as they walked past each other. Twice it came out in his voice, and once in hers.

We had to do the test in the courtyard because LPD only worked outside. I’d asked Carl once why that was and his explanation was, “If it’s inside, we don’t know where the dispersals go.”

Peters overheard him. “We know exactly where the dispersals go but what we don’t know is exactly what disturbances they create in a closed environment. We don’t care where the dispersals go, we care what the disturbances do, which is the level of precision we need in the language we use if it’s to match the precision on the molecular level that makes this process possible, which is why we should no more indulge in word play than we should in number play. Jesus Christ and Isaac Newton, is this scientific research or Saturday Night Fever?”

In the second it took me to understand he’d meant Saturday Night Live, I realized he was glaring at me. I wasn’t sure whether to answer his question or hide, so I blurted out, “It should be ‘Mom and Dad made me bet.’ It adds the major vowel sound that’s missing from the original phrase.”

He glared at me harder for several seconds.

“Exactly,” he bellowed eventually. “That’s the kind of precision and completion that will make LPD a scientific breakthrough instead of a parlor game about solving a 70-year-old murder for the people who probably did it in the first place and before anyone tells me it’s not the same people I’ll remind them that the difference between the self-serving imbeciles we depend on for money and the bastards who put Galileo on trial is the difference between horseshit and muleshit.”

There were times Peters made me feel inadequate as the word guy. I’d given him a vowel, but he’d added muleshit to my vocabulary. It didn’t seem like a fair trade.

The thirty-second test crashed just two of the drives, which cost us about a second of Carl’s voice. That was considered a win. It also burned out two inverters and damaged one of the big batteries, but we had spares for those. And since it was thunderstorm season, recharging the batteries was no problem. The electro-static capture and storage component, the ESCSC, was one of the more reliable parts of the process, although God help you if Peters heard you calling it the Frankenstein Rig. Larry didn’t get caught calling it that, but he did refer to it a couple of times as the ESCSCSC to see if Peters was counting.

The batteries and the inverters were easy to replace because everything at that point was off the shelf. There was a storeroom full of 2-gigabyte drives, although I didn’t realize anyone still made them. The plan was to use the funding spike after Dealey to convert to solid-state drives with multiple inputs and dump them to redundant, custom-made bio-quantum cores. I asked Carl exactly what those were. “They haven’t been invented yet,” he said.

Oddly enough, all that had been invented were the software and the arrays for the collection sensor, which Peters begrudgingly allowed them to refer to as a Coll-Sen. Everything else was existing technology and in some cases old technology. The process would be refined using what seemed like surplus tech, and then the tech would be refined to make the process automatic. At some point, someone would input geographic coordinates and a time, and the system would produce a three-dimensional video viewable from any angle, if they were willing to spend a couple billion dollars a minute.

I arrived at that synopsis slowly and gradually, slicing through everything from sophomoric wordplay to multisyllabic scientific jargon, putting it back together and then asking Mina if I had it right. She was the only one besides Peters who seemed to have a global grasp of the system.

“Does that make you the only irreplaceable parts?” I asked her once.

“Not really,” she said. “There are enough Coll-Sen arrays built that any doctoral physics student could re-create the system if they knew what it was supposed to do. It’s not trivial, but it’s possible.”

I had to think about that one for a moment.

“So, what if somebody in one of the funding agencies, or on Whitaker’s committee, figures out that Peters is theoretically replaceable?” I asked. “Could they take over the project that way?”

She was shaking her head before I finished asking.

“No, there are human limits,” Mina said. “There might be somebody in Congress who can change a muffler in ten minutes or steal a catalytic converter in five, but they don’t have anybody who understands how an exhaust system works.”

It would have to do for an answer.

Peters brought in a sleep doctor two weeks before the Dealey Test. The lab team members were all Type A-Plus, and they slept using a combination of Ambien, Unisom, and melatonin, and knew the chemical names for each one. The sleep doc worked with them to even out their sleep schedules and sleep a little later each morning. That way, two o’clock in the morning, when conditions were right for the test, would not be the middle of their night but more early in their evening as far as their bodies were concerned. Peters believed that would make them sharper during the critical time of the test. It was the kind of thing that made it look like he’d thought of every possible detail.

Of course he hadn’t.

And so we gathered for breakfast at one in the afternoon on April 19, 2033. And finally, everyone showed the tension that had been missing so far. Up until then, we’d been getting the equipment ready and learning how to use it. Soon, we’d be going into combat. Although it didn’t feel that way when we gathered in the main lab later that afternoon for a run-through. Peters stood behind a desk at one end of the room while Mina ran through the checklist.

“Distance,” she called out.

“Counting back 25,352 days from April 20,2033,” Jason replied.

“Area,” she said.

“Ten hours forward for ten minutes,” Madison answered.

“Power 1.”

“Batteries six through 32 to sensor arrays four through seven.”

There were a little more than two dozen checks for Mina to read off and the lab team members to answer. She read them off her table and checked them. Peters had them in his head.

An hour later everyone switched stations and Mina ran them through the list again. The idea was to create errors by putting people in unfamiliar jobs. An hour later everyone was back at their main stations for a final run-through. The second and third run-throughs weren’t necessary. But they gave everyone something to do.

We had dinner together around midnight. Some of us played cards. Peters paced the courtyard.

When the test launched at 2:30, everything went smoothly for the first minute. Carl had two monitors, one of them keyed to a single drive. He only had to collect and interpret a little less than a hundredth of a second of video and no sound. A little less than a screen capture, he’d called it. If that capture of the advertising clock on the roof of the school book depository confirmed the time, everything continued. If not, we would shut it down before we wasted any more power or burned out any more drives.

Carl’s face was inches from the monitor. He wore a huge headset, and we could hear him breathing, almost panting, through his microphone. The data collection and the monitoring went on for the thirty-three seconds it took him to interpret the dispersals and build an image. At thirty-four seconds, he pulled the headset off too quickly, sending his glasses skittering across two other workstations.

“Confirmed,” he yelled, as Larry handed him his glasses back. I know that everyone in the room breathed a sigh of relief and felt a sense of wonder at what we were doing, but I couldn’t hear either one.

Twenty-five second later, Larry said, “Power dip detected.”

“Isolate it,” Mina and Peters both said simultaneously. Mina gave him a sharp look. He held up his hands as if surrendering control and sat down behind the desk.

“A sensor array’s not drawing power,” Carl said. “No, three of them.”

Larry began reading numbers to the two people around the sensor arrays in the courtyard. He used a walkie-talkie. Cell phones were banned during the test.

“Do we abort?” Madison asked.

“Keep going,” Mina said. “We’ll abort at five minutes if we can’t find the dip.”

Everyone was isolating and expanding sections of the feeds on their monitors. There was no visible sign that anybody was finding anything.

“Do we want to burn half our power?” someone asked.

“Less than a tenth in four minutes with this dip going on,” Mina said. “Right, Jason?”

“Affirmative,” replied the numbers guy. I glanced at Peters. He gave a nod and a small smile. There was a smugness to it, either because he’d done the math a second earlier or because he’d been smart enough to hire Mina. The big clock on the lab wall that had been counting down the time to the test had lost its minus sign and showed two minutes, one minute into the four until abort.

Nobody had panicked yet. When anybody spoke, it was in numbers. The rhythm was the click of keyboards, the melody was the crackle of the walkie-talkies.

“The VLPU thinks those sensors are redundant,” Larry said at three minutes. “It doesn’t think it needs them to collect all the dispersals.”

“We thought we wouldn’t have enough,” Madison said.

The big clock hit four minutes, Mina held up a finger. One minute to abort. Larry read some temperature numbers into his walkie-talkie. The answer came on Carl’s. “Safe heat range,” he said.

“Power rising,” Larry said. “All sensors activated.” We had more than thirty seconds to spare until abort. All the time in the world.

With everything running as it should, the big clock was the only thing to watch. I wondered how many millions or billions of dollars each second represented. I knew there were minds in the room who could have told me, probably down to the cent. But they were busy.

People began to relax a little in the final couple of minutes. By then, we’d either capture what we were after or we hadn’t.

“Do you think we lost anything?” Larry asked.

“It was an unmanned mission,” Madison said, because it would have been wrong to say, “Nobody died.” Somebody would if Peters heard her.

Carl and Larry had the video ready by the next afternoon. Nobody ate or slept much until then. Naps maybe. Snacks. Post-mortems and recriminations began before the video was over. The video opened with cheering crowds. The relevant part began when the limo turned into the plaza, half a minute into the video. That was the edge of the dispersals collected, so we could only see it from the front. Thirty seconds after that, as the limo turned toward the underpass, the grassy knoll, and the fatal moments, the video became gibberish, random colors and incomprehensible sounds. Carl skipped through the three minutes of that. The pictures and sound came back with Jackie crawling across the trunk of the car toward the Secret Service agent. A minute later, the car had disappeared into the underpass, headed for Parkland Hospital. I don’t know how long the room was silent. Maybe a minute. Maybe the rest of the afternoon.

“Did the power dip cause that?” Peters finally asked.

“No,” Carl said. “That caused the power dips.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t?” Peters hissed.

“Yes,” Carl said. “I’m sure.”

I watched Mina take a slow breath and let it out. Carl got up and left the room.

Mina looked at Madison. Madison took a breath of her own. “The power dip came because the coll-sens weren’t drawing it,” she said. “The VLPU powered them down because they were redundant. If the input distance switched to a different time, maybe within five or ten years ago, then fewer collection sensors would have to be on-line.”

“Can we recover what we collected when the power dipped?” Peters asked.

“We don’t know yet, but it’s unlikely. There’s a 128-bit code on each packet that feeds into the collection subroutine.”

“Is there now?” Peters snarled. He’d designed the system. He knew how it worked. He wanted to know why it had failed. But Madison had had as little sleep as anyone else and was just as disappointed. Peters was brilliant, but I don’t think he was smart enough to understand her mood.

“The code was corrupted during the power dip,” she said. “We don’t know how much or which bits.”

“Do we know anything?” he said, glaring at Madison.

He said it wrong. Madison stood up and pushed her chair under the table.

“Thank you for the opportunity to work on this project, Dr. Peters,” she said. “I’m sorry your experiment failed.” The word “your” hung in the air as she walked out.

“We can reverse-engineer the packet code,” Jason said. “A brute-force walk through the possibilities might give us the right code in a few seconds if we’re lucky.”

“And if we’re not lucky?” Peters said.

“Eighty or ninety years,” Jason said.

I waited for Peters to say, “Get started,” but he had stalked out of the room by then.

—

I left the project about the time Homeland Security took over. Their idea, not mine. They didn’t necessarily want things documented.

It’s kind of funny in retrospect. The dynamics of electromagnetic fields had landed us in Chairman Whitaker’s district. The vagaries of politics kept the money coming. His misunderstanding of history gave him something to prove. The LPD was just another obscure boondoggle until the glitch on the Dealey Test. The glitch. The event. The disaster.

Peters didn’t know how nasty he’d been to everyone after that. It wasn’t in his personality to know it. The lab team members left one at a time. Mina wrote their reference letters, after they’d signed non-disclosure agreements longer than their dissertations. Madison stayed the longest, after Mina coaxed her back and promised to keep her away from Peters. Carl just left. It was a year or more later before I figured out just how much Peters had offended him.

Homeland Security people figured out fairly quickly how valuable the LPD process could be in crime and terrorism cases. Some cases were probably easier because the perps went outside to avoid possible bugs. Some were harder unless Peters or Mina figured out a way to see through walls. I’d have said that was impossible before I worked at Scrubtown. All I know is I was expendable. Before I left, I signed their NDA. I’m fairly sure the two people in the room with me were carrying guns.

I had saved a lot of money while Scrubtown was giving me room and board. I didn’t have to work, so I had time to think. I tried not to speculate too much. But after watching the Dealey video, recorded 70 years after the event, I didn’t have a good grasp of what was possible and what wasn’t. The science of the project had ripped the edge off what could be real.

Speculate was all I could do. Mina either didn’t answer my emails or had me blocked. Both looked the same to me.

Her bio on-line said she’d graduated high school in Charlotte. It didn’t take long to get a public information officer from there on the phone. I had just enough information about a murdered store clerk named Justin to give him something to go on. He muttered for fifteen seconds or so while he waited for the computer.

“You said it was a cold case?” he said.

“That’s the best information I have,” I said.

“And you said you’re writing a magazine story about it?” he asked.

“Planning to, depending on how much information I get.”

“Well, it’s not a cold case. It was solved sometime after the fact. The perpetrator died a few years later from a drug overdose.”

I kind of got it, but figured I’d poke the bear to be sure.

“Did an anonymous three-minute video have anything to do with finding the perp?” I asked.

After a long pause, he said, “You must know somebody’s going to want to talk further to you about this?”

“I must,” I said. “You know where to find me.”

On a lark, on a whim, and with my Scrubtown savings, I flew to Los Angeles to see Carl. I knew he was doing something in movies, but wasn’t sure what. With his audiovisual technical skills, probably whatever he wanted to. I hadn’t been any closer to him than the others, but he was the one who hadn’t signed an NDA. We met for lunch at a place near the studio where he worked. He was carrying a briefcase, but all I had was my phone. We discussed the menu and how my trip had been before he opened the briefcase. He set a black disk the size of a silver dollar on the table.

“Did you take that with you from Scrubtown?” I said.

“It’s not a collection sensor,” he said with a smirk. “It just looks like one. Slightly different color, little bit smaller.”

“I’m all ears,” I said.

“So are our old bosses,” he said. He tapped on his phone a few times until the disk gave a slight hum and changed color from black to a dark blue. Whatever it was, he had an app for it.

“You know, everything at Scrubtown was off the shelf,” he said. “You could buy these at just about any place that sells security hardware.”

“But not for what we used it for?”

He shook his head. “It can pick up anything from motion to sound to light changes,” he said. “Or dispersals, if it knows where to look. And it can be programmed to give a signal to others like it. Security guys call it a Detem, a detector-emitter.”

“It talks to other . . . Detems?”

“Yeah. The idea is that it sees a burglar, or a coyote, or whatever, and tells the other Detems to look out for the same thing. I don’t know what Peters did to it to make it pick up dispersals. That may have been mostly in the software anyway.”

“So am I guessing right about what it’s doing right now?”

“I think you are.” His smile was radiant.

“This device is dispersing disturbances that will make it impossible for other sensors to collect and interpret audio or video from a location within some diameter of the device?”

“About ten feet,” Carl said. “Ain’t it great to be able to eat outside?”

“I didn’t know you were that good with the hardware side. I knew you were supposed to be the best A/V guy around.”

“I guess everybody knew Madison and I had a little bit of a thing at Scrubtown,” he said. I nodded because we did. “We had the windows open one night when the heat wasn’t so oppressive, and we started wondering if anybody could use an LPD to spy on us. So we reverse-engineered the software and figured out how to use it as kind of a jammer.”

“That night?”

“No. It took a few days, even with her skill set. You could still point a sensor at that window, so to speak, and catch us in bed that night.”

“Just as soon not,” I said. “How’s Madison doing?”

He shook his head. “We haven’t been in touch very much. Leaving Scrubtown for her was . . . well, she didn’t want to be reminded of it and I was a souvenir of the place. I can’t blame her, I guess. She’d been through some trauma even before that.”

“A lot of folks there did,” I said. “Peters seemed to prey on it. Larry was freshly divorced. Mina’s brother had been murdered.”

“I didn’t know that,” he said. He held up a hand to tell me to wait while he processed it.

Our conversation bounced around while we ate. We talked about where the Scrubtown lab team members were now, what we’d learned.

“Do you have any idea what happened there at the end?” I asked him after a while.

“Mina thinks I do, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said.

“I am now,” I said. “Asking, I mean.”

“A team at UCLA wanted my help on a project,” he said. “There was some federal money involved so the director made some background checks. Word got back to me, kind of friend of a friend, rumor of a rumor, that Mina was bad-mouthing me. She said I had sabotaged a historic project, possibly while working for the CIA.”

I didn’t mean to laugh, but that was when everything came together.

“I know you’re going to tell me eventually what’s funny,” he said.

I told him about the call to the Charlotte cops. He leaned back and stared up at the clear skies above us, then glanced at the Detem, maybe thinking nobody up there could see us, even if they wanted to.

“What are you going to tell the Charlotte people if they get back to you?” he said, but it was sort of an idle question, making conversation while he thought about all I’d told him. We were like two people putting together a jigsaw puzzle in the dark, but we were almost finished.

“I’ll tell them I signed an NDA with Homeland Security,” I said.

“That works,” he said. “You know I didn’t? Do you want to write a screenplay about this? It pays well, and we have some hellacious lawyers.”

“A Rumor of a Rumor. A screenplay by Pat Kingston?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Give me the elevator pitch.”

I had no idea if we were serious, but I went ahead anyway.

“A woman highjacks and wrecks a top secret government project to find out who murdered her brother twenty years ago, and manages to place the blame on a member of the lab team. She knows there’s a saboteur on the project, because she’s the saboteur. ”

“It does kind of humanize her decision to slander me and destroy my academic career,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about reality or the movie, and I still didn’t know if we were serious. It’s that kind of place.

“But in the end, the hero offers to make a movie about it, and she starts retracting her story,” I said. “Best A/V guy in America, she says. The project couldn’t have worked without him. No, she says, I can’t tell you which project.”

“That’s worth thinking about,” he said.

We both sipped our drinks. Every few seconds one of us would chuckle as another piece of the puzzle came together. There was only one piece I still wondered about.

“Madison heard you talking to someone on the phone about the four minutes,” I said.

His laughter caught the attention of people at nearby tables. It was the kind of laughter people enjoy, so nobody seemed to mind.

“I was talking to somebody out here,” he said. “I was going to sell them the four minutes. I was going to capture it on my phone when we reviewed it.”

“We might have noticed you holding a cell phone up in the air,” I said. It was sort of a question.

“One of the Detems was going to pick it up and send it to my phone,” he said. “Peters and Mina didn’t think of everything. I still wonder what happened during those four minutes. Do you think she hijacked the LPD during that exact time on purpose?”

“You think she was that good?”

“Hard to say,” Carl said. “Wonder if they’ll ever try to look at Dealey again?”

“I doubt it. They’re more interested in cops and robbers stuff.”

“But with Dealey? Did her new bosses just not care?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Either that or they already knew.”