Unlikely: What If You Could Go Back

By J.M. Cullen

Cameron’s high-speed communications experiment explodes, allowing him to interact with A.D. 375 Yucatan Peninsula. At City of Dawn, he follows a Warrior-Leader and his father creating the Dzinuhu Amoxtli - A Precious Yellow-Metal Book. 

Watch an aspiring priest who believes they also have the Mahan Codex—secrets to

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.M. Cullen
• Release date: Jan 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087862811

J.M. Cullen

An avid adventurist, John enjoys traveling to new places to learn about this wonderful world we all live in. For over thirty years he works as a Software Engineer and grew up with technology without losing his sense of adventure. He earned a business degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and writes damn good code. He is a self-proclaimed a nerd, attends Comic Conventions (yes, I dress the part), and gives in to his creative side in order to balance his analytical world of rearranging one's and zero's all day. He is a Certified Life Coach and has mastered the art of reading body language. Observing technological breakthroughs over the years, he began wondering how some of the predictions would come about, and what life would be like. And how they could go wrong. He writes about the things that keep him up at night. When he is not writing software or novels, John travels all over the world. So far, he has visited many parts of CA, CO, DC, FL, IA, ID, IL, MO, MT, ND, NV, NY, OH, OR, PN, SC, SD, TX, UT, VA, WA and WY, Brittish Columbia, Tokyo, Japan, Taipei, Taiwan, Mexico, Bahamas, and Grand Cayman. He has fly-fished, skydived and loves to SCUBA dive. John currently lives and works in Idaho and Utah.

Book preview

Unlikely

J.M. Cullen

Copyright © 2020 J.M. Cullen

All rights reserved

ISBN-13: 9781654236649

For DeNise.

Thank you for believing in me

Prologue

21 Sep 1827, 43° 0' 22.32 N, 77° 13' 26.4 W

The cool autumn air began to change the color of the oak and spruce leaves in the trees, but the young man running through them took little notice. The burlap sack slung over his right shoulder bore a heavy burden, causing him to breathe harder, sweat trickling down his face, neck and back. His eyes, strained with worry, darted over his left shoulder, then his right.

A rustle of leaves brought his eyes left, and he darted to the right, altering his course yet again. It could have been a squirrel. But then again, maybe not. Men from the nearby town followed him to the hill earlier that night. How many, he did not know. He identified at least five. He'd heard one of the men calling out names, shouting orders.

Josiah, the Johnston place! Lyman, you take Sig and head to the river, keep him from going that way! While the young man received no formal military training, he knew they flanked him, driving him like a wild stallion, corralling him. To where? He knew not. Certainly towards an ambush, but he felt no fear. He devised a plan, and it was going to succeed.

Just then, the young man stepped too close to a tree stump, years ago brought down by a lightning bolt, with jagged, burnt remains jutting out. One of them seemingly reached out, snagged the burlap sack, and ripped a hole in it. With heaving chest, he stopped running, knelt down by the stump, and examined the rip. It would not bear the burden they contained much longer. It came in an instant, a thought, an image in his mind, and the confidence that it would work. He needed to work quickly, because the men closed the distance quickly, and they might see. He wrapped the contents tightly, and placed it inside the hollowed out tree trunk. Scooping handfuls of the wood chips, leaves, and other detritus, he completely covered the burlap sack and its precious cargo. Then he waited.

Only moments later, footsteps crushing leaves within a stone’s throw told him it was time for his ruse. Making as much noise as possible, he turned and headed west, shuffling his feet, churning up the fallen leaves, ankles finding dried twigs, snapping them.

John, he's headed back for the hill! Quickly now! He lead them away from the tree, and from the cargo.

* * *

4 Sep 0420, 39° 15′ 53″ N 111° 38′ 20″ W

His hair hung past his shoulders. In his later years, as it grayed more, he tried to braid it to pull it back away from his face and out of his eyes. But his hands, once strong and nimble, now aching at the joints, stiff and trembling, no longer obeyed his will. God had been good to him, and though he traveled alone, he wanted for nothing.

He ate the last of his rabbit for dinner the previous day. He'd spotted the large ears of a black-tailed jackrabbit twitching above the sage a dozen feet away from him several days before. Silently drawing his bow and notching an arrow, he shifted his weight to his front foot, sighted down the shaft toward the ears. Anticipating that the noise from his release would frighten the rabbit, he aimed slightly in front of the ears and away between the two junipers and loosed the arrow. The rabbit indeed jumped, but his aim remained true.

He worked quickly and soon he built a fire, stripped the hide, and hung the meat over the smoke and flames. He spent the next day tanning the hide and fashioned a headband, wrapped around the crown from forehead, behind the ears, to the nape of the neck. It wasn't his best work, but it kept his hair out of his eyes.

He'd sleep under the stars tonight with a sky clear to the horizon. The high desert air , filled with aroma of sage and juniper mixed with the musk of wildlife inhabiting the area. At dawn, he'd break camp and head north. A month ago, he met some hunters. They called themselves the People From the Land of the Sun. They said that to the north lay a large body of water called Niicóo'ówu'. From there, he'd head east. He counted the distance to his destination not in hours, or days, but in months, but he knew he'd reach his final destination. He had a deposit to make; the final act of his great life.

* * *

4 Sep 2019, 41° 45′ 3″ N 111° 48′ 939″ W

I stood at the side of the large flat screen. The most austere group of men and women I had ever faced sat around the conference table looking at me. Technical presentations like this one were not new to me, but this was the most nerve-wracking. Introductions only moments before included General George McIntyre, Special attache to General. Martin E. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Ray Maberman, Secretary of the Navy, Laurie B. Gravier, Deputy Administrator National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Francis Georing, Director of Planetary Sciences, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and others. Now they all looked at me silently.

Behind me the presentation I stayed up nearly all the previous night revising, displayed the title screen, awaiting my signal. I wore special adaptation headgear on my brow, ears and nose: miniature video camera lenses embedded into the corners of Brow-line glass frames, microphones on each ear piece received verbal commands, the frame itself made of flexible memory contained dual processors, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antennas, earphones dropped from the ear pieces and rested ergonomically inside the ear.

To calm my nerves, I looked up at the ceiling. Steve, I thought, lips trembling to form words. If you’re out there somewhere, I could use a little help here. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, stuttering.

I thought of how painful it must have been for him to lie in that foreign place, with the sun burning the air around him, and his leg shredded into pieces and his blood seeping into the hot sand below him. I felt the terror he must have felt as his life slipped away into the unknown.

I yearned to hear him laugh at my stupid jokes and see him admire the body of the waitress and watch him flirt with her with that dimpled, boyish grin of his. I missed the long talks we used to have, where we shared our hopes for the future and pondered the reasons for life.

I longed to see him again, having successfully saved lives, to tell him that I did it all for him—in honor of his sacrifice; that he did not suffer pain, misery, and fright in vain; that he did good in the world and could reap the rewards reserved for the valiant.

I could do so much good with technology, but the computing power simply does not exist. But I could do something with what does exist, and this was my opportunity to make it happen. With Steve’s memory drilling a hole in my chest, I pranced for my peanut like a third-world monkey before the civilized crowd.

Presentation, begin, I whispered. As images transitioned on the screen, flying in from every angle, I began my monologue. Ladies and Gentlemen, as heads of the strategic outreach of American innovation and ingenuity, you are at the forefront of every conceivable life threatening situation and circumstance of the modern world. The need for robotics and intelligent commutation to replace human intervention in dangerous circumstances is well-known to each and every one present today. And while all other efforts have focused on Artificial Intelligence and micro robotics, we present to you today an alternative to the 82% achievement rate attained only last week by Sygnus Artificial Laboratories. On the screen, images of mobile robots defusing Improvised Explosive Devices in Iraq and Afghanistan villages, outposts, and roadsides, followed other images of mobile cameras scanning the undersides of vehicles at military and police checkpoints faded in and out in a four dimensional collage.

We offer a different paradigm: Micro- and Macro-robotics, remotely guided using the latest in Micro-burst, encrypted High Frequency communications with Predictive Intelligent Assistance. Behind me the images faded to a single desert scene. In the distance, an interminable mountain range. In the foreground, the image appeared of a vehicle resembling Curiosity, the Mars rover that landed in August beginning its 98-week primary mission .

What you see before you is a remote unit similar to Curiosity, the hugely successful Mars explorer. Did we land it on the moon, or Mars, perhaps? It could be on the Sonoran desert, or a deep sea diver specially built to handle the pressures at the lowest levels of the Mariana Trench nearly 11 kilometers below sea level. With our communicative capabilities, patented transmitters and receivers, we can send and receive any form of signal, relayed through booster transmitters synchronously or asynchronously to any distance. I began slowly walking toward the head of the conference table.

Our visual adapters can take any image, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, and process them through any of our specialized recognition modules. For example, I paused, whispered another command, and focused my attention on General McIntyre.

On screen, the image switched to the cameras on my headgear. As I focused on the General, facial recognition grid lines drew around the image of his face on the screen, identifying the distinguishable peaks and valleys, the nodal points of human faces, and began measuring the distance between the eyes, the width and length of the nose and jaw lines , the depth of eye sockets. In seconds, the measurements displayed on the screen, a portrait of the General appeared, and below it scrolled publicly known information about his career. Murmurs of appreciation involuntarily escaped around the table.

An Unlikely Guardian

1

21 Sep 2020 41° 45′ 45.5539″ N 111° 48′ 57.8221″ W

Receiving telemetry, with a signal strength of ninety-seven point two percent. Better than we expected.

Her name is Crystal O’Leary, and she had been a considerable part of the development of the transmitter system. The two of us worked side by side for the last three years to reach this point in the project. It took nearly two weeks after the rover landed to check out communication towers and antennas, mobility motors, memory registers, and the like. Following this test of communication burst compression, decompression, encryption, and decryption modules, the primary mission could commence. Associates took the lander to an undisclosed location for this phase of testing.

Temperature: eleven degrees Centigrade, she continued, humidity: seventeen percent, wind: SE at sixteen km/h, Pressure: thirty point two-two and rising, visibility: sixteen point zero nine kilometers.

I stood at the focal point of the large parabolic display wall on a circular platform 2.5 meters in diameter, .3 meters tall. Stepping onto the platform signaled the image processor to begin relaying images from the cameras on the landing unit onto the parabolic display. This provided a one hundred degrees forward view from the unit. A pair of eyeglasses, wirelessly connected to the processors, displayed objects in a three-dimensional environment, giving the user a kind of heads up display. Lasers, connected to the top of the wall, continuously scanned the occupant of the platform. A series of processors received the input from the sensors, associated algorithms determined motion down to millimeter movements of each finger, enabling the user to interact with the virtual environment displayed by the headgear.

I rewrote old computer touch interfaces into a new, truly ergonomic three-dimensional interactive environment. Touching the screen or sliding your fingers across to perform a wide variety of operations like scrolling lists, enlarging and reducing images, and other screen elements are now done with hand gestures measured by the lasers.

Icons appeared in this user environment that controlled various operations on the landing unit: movement of the unit and retractable arms, cameras, and all the visual services we programmed into the system, and other actions. We needed to test all of the icons and their associated applications to ensure they operated as expected. So began the laborious process of unit testing each operation.

Initiating forward camera number one, said Crystal. Image stream verified, compression rate forty-eight point seven, encryption cycle point two seven, and decryption rate three point six. There was no degradation to the data points once the system decrypted and uncompressed each burst.

We needed to complete specific tests associated with each camera. One trial included tilting the forward camera up and examining the sky. During the day, we examined the location of the sun along its azimuth and declination against the visible horizon. At night, we studied the stars, if visible, locating the major constellations, measuring individual stars along each outline, and measuring its declination from the horizon and distances to other constellations. Knowing these points of data, together with the current date and time, the Geo-positional algorithms could locate the landing unit without the need for satellites.

When I first discussed this requirement with the robotics team, I naively asked why not use the already familiar Global Positioning System built into millions of mobile devices. The answer surprised me because up to that point, I thought the system would operate somewhere on earth. The research team at N.A.S.A. wanted to use these systems in extra-terrestrial operations, like the moon, Mars, and perhaps even other planets in the solar system. Thus, my need to frantically revise my presentation to the funding committee last year.

Tilting the camera up to its maximum of +50°, and panning -27°, the sun and moon both appeared on the wall. I put my finger through the Sextant icon, and a new window squared up in the display. Swiping the left corner of this window immediately relocated it to the far left upper edge of the display.

Against its semi-transparent black background, data points began displaying in different colors. Smokey white numbers appeared next to an icon of the sun: RA: 9h 40m 30s for the Right Ascension, D: -1° 12’ 01 for the Declination, Az: 291° 46’ 01 for the Azimuth, Alt: 24° 40’ 41" for the Altitude, and C: 189px for the circumference of the sun, sea green numbers identifying similar data for the moon, cyan numbers for the distance between the sun, moon, and horizon respectively.

Bold white numbers appeared across the bottom of the window: 36° 26’ 21.01 N 105° 32’ 44.12 W on the left, and 291° W-NW on the right indicating the orientation of the unit.

Displayed in the distance, the multi-dimensional, terraced, and interconnected, the oddly squarish and uneven design of an adobe residence appeared. I tilted the camera down, tapped another icon, causing yet another window to open in the display. A snapshot of the screen appeared in this window. The operating system drew lines around and through the outlines of the discernible structures of the dwelling. After 364 milliseconds, the window enlarged again, this time labeling the identified image as Taos Pueblo, and below that information about the pueblo scrolled upwards. Nearly 1,000 years old, probably built between 1000 AD and 1450 AD, 1.6 km north of Taos, NM, designated National Historic Landmark 9 Oct 1960, and so on.

Field team reporting in, said Crystal, one hand holding the earpiece to her headset in place. They say we’re within one-centimeter variance! The broadest smile of relief I saw on her face, with one hand pumping the air, told me she finally began to relax.

Cameron, Crystal said, alarm rising in her voice. Something’s not…

Suddenly the entire visual display flashed flaming white, followed by sharp pain from my eyes to the back of my head and circling atop and around my skull back to my frontal lobes. Hot flaming pain filled my head and wrung its sharp whine in my ears. Then everything went black, starting at the edges and quickly encapsulating the center, and a shock wave of even more intense pain finally resulted in blissful tranquility.

* * *

21 Sep 2020 41° 45′ 45.5539″ N 111° 48′ 57.8221″ W

Wh... The voice came out harsh, throaty, and dry. It felt raw and sore, abrasive deep in my throat. I tried to open my eyes but saw only blackness, red pulsing with the drumming in my ears. I tried to lift my hands to touch my face, find out why I could not see.

Shhhh, she said. Don't move. Help is on the way. Just lay still, and everything will be alright.

I felt her hand on my forehead, caressing my cheek. I felt her touching my neck, feeling my pulse, exploring the nape, then up both sides behind the ears to the crown. Her hands felt cold even though they trembled slightly. I felt her shaky breathing on my skin, her face close to mine. A tear fell on my cheek. Listening more closely, I heard faint sobbing while her hands continued to search for wounds. I still could not see anything, awareness of my surroundings came to me slowly. The floor of the lab felt cool. Crystal had propped my feet up on the platform. Sounds echoed in the silence, unusual because the fans and machines created noise that became white noise the more we worked there. For the first time, I heard the trembling and labored breath of Crystal. Or was she crying?

* * *

22 Sep 2020 41° 45′ 45.5539″ N 111° 48′ 57.8221″ W

Don’t ever scare me like that again! Crystal laughed her nervous laugh, but I saw genuine concern in her eyes. As much as I appreciated it, I really wanted to get back to the lab and find out how our equipment held up to whatever spiked yesterday.

I am fine, I insisted, Really. I wish they’d let me out of here. I saw her shoulders relax a little, so I quickly added, Where are my clothes? I can check myself out. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, looking around the room for my clothes. Crystal placed a hand on my shoulder.

Please take it easy, the doctor will be here shortly to sign the release papers. Then I’m driving you home! She said it with such emotion that I hardly dared to argue. Within a half-hour, we left the hospital, heading toward her car in the parking lot.

Crystal, please, I pleaded. I am fine, and I need to know that the equipment is fine as well. I won’t be able to sleep, not knowing. We’ve spent so much time and effort to get the project to this point, and I can’t quit now. She stood there, staring at me across the roof of the car. 

Why is this so important to you? she asked. I don’t understand.

Have I ever told you the story about my friend, Steve?

No, not yet, she said as she climbed into the car. 

He was in the Army, I said as I gingerly slid into the passenger seat. They stationed him at Sperwan Ghar, a forward operating base in Panjwayi District. One afternoon, on a routine patrol, there was an I.E.D. He wasn’t even at the front of the column. Apparently, an insurgent, hiding out in a nearby abandoned building, set off the explosive remotely. He was the closest soldier. My chest heaved, and I stared at my feet, barely breathing. Crystal started the engine, put the car in reverse and backed out of the parking stall. The motion helped me gather my composure.

He was close, wasn’t he? She asked.

What? I asked, looking up at her as she put the car in drive.

The two of you, she said. You were close, weren’t you?

Yes, I said, looking down at my hands folded tightly in my lap. I tried to relax. Ever since grade school. I sat in silence until we exited the parking lot heading east, toward the lab. Then I continued.

He bled out before the air rescue arrived. There was nothing anyone could do.

That’s when you left L3? She asked.

Yes, I said, staring out the window at the passing buildings. Six months later, I made my proposal to the committee at DARPA.

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency? Crystal asked almost aghast.

Yes, I replied simply. She didn’t ask any further questions, and I didn’t volunteer anything more. We rode in silence until we arrived at the lab.

* * *

22 Sep 2020 41° 45′ 45.5539″ N 111° 48′ 57.8221″ W

Darkness filled the lab. Monitors, usually on, received no power. Sensors, communication, and monitoring equipment, operational twenty-four hours a day, were not running. Even the air conditioners and dehumidifiers, keeping the atmosphere controlled, remained silent. It took an hour to power everything back up. The sequence started with the bank of computers monitoring everything inside the lab. Next, we brought online the server rack housing the processors, server cluster, routers, and backup power supplies. Finally, the platform controller received power. Donning the headgear, I stepped onto the platform and watched the display while the glasses connected to the wireless sensor processors. Looking through the User Interface, I couldn’t believe what I saw on the wall.

It was dark. Not the kind of dark when the power to a monitor is off. It was night, and Infrared and Night Vision adapters remained disabled. Rather than the outline of the adobe structure, we saw trees and above that, stars.

Crystal, confirm telemetry, I said. Had someone replaced the live stream with a recording of a previous session or an altered virtual recording we developed for testing purposes? I knew that Crystal monitored the system and observed the output. She wrote most of the routines. Yet she remained silent, and I wanted confirmation that she witnessed the same things as I.

Um... she began, Yeah... Something’s not right here. I glanced over at her and, she was, as I expected, hunched over a keyboard, typing furiously, eyes scanning several monitors.

Tell me what you see, I suggested calmly.

Signal strength is ninety percent, low but still within expected limits. All frequencies are reporting expected data: temperature, humidity, wind speed, moisture levels. Her eyes moved from monitor to monitor as she continued, Compression rate 65.3, encryption cycle .32, decryption rate 5.3. Cameron, everything looks good, but it’s wrong. The humidity is too high, moisture levels exceeding expectations over 200%. The ambient audio processors are reporting all the wrong things. What the... her voice trailed off, so I glanced over at her again. She turned and stared at the parabolic wall, mouth open mid-sentence, her astonishment blocking her ability to complete the thought.

And she had a right to be astonished. Instead of illuminating the New Mexican desert with the forward lights, which we both expected to see, we saw lush vegetation. A colossal tree centered the display, dominating the understory layer of a jungle, its trunk nearly three meters in diameter and crowded with huge thorns. Bunches of leaves grouped together with fist-sized pods hung from many branches. Some pods were green and closed, others gray and opened with large white fluffs of a cotton-like fiber with black seeds. Other types of trees commingled with this tree. Some having gray-brown bark with irregular grain, its fifteen to fifty centimeter leaves grouped together toward the end of the branches. Below, in the forest floor surrounding the trunks, giant ferns branched in every direction from a central trunk, long knife-like leaves along each side.

Tilting my head, I examined the stars overhead. They were bright, crisp in a night sky that lacked the diffusion of nearby civilization. Hearing shallow waves lapping against the shore, I turned around, realizing that I stood on a sandy beach.

Looking upward, I tapped the Sextant icon, and the image processors began analyzing the sky. Measuring brightness, it began building a list of x, y coordinates along with the luminosity factor for each star, which scrolled on the right of the interface. Next, a second list of constellation matrices appeared. The system eliminated those without at least one star matching relative luminosity. Then the processor began adding neighboring stars with distances measured and angles calculated, removing each unmatched constellation matrix until one remained, Aquila with its brightest star Altair. Within milliseconds, the processor calculated the locations of the constellation Cygnus with its brightest star Deneb and the constellation Lyra with its principal star Vega.

A new window appeared in the lower-left corner of the display. A 500-pixel diameter circle dominated the window. Eight major ordinals appeared, N for north at the top, NW to the right, then W, and so on. First, the constellation Aquila appeared. The red text next to it listed the triangulated Right Ascension, declination, Azimuth, and Altitude, indicating errors in the calculations. Next, Lyra appeared with red data and Cygnus also with red data. Below the circle, along the bottom of the window the system displayed these coordinates. 23° 33’ 50.3532 N 86° 42’ 14.7672 W

Cameron, that doesn’t make any sense, Crystal said, turning to one of the monitors. Those coordinates put you in the Gulf of Mexico, west-northwest of Havana, Cuba.

How can that be? I asked. There has to be something wrong with the equipment, I said after a short pause. Crystal contemplated the data on her monitors, saying nothing. Suddenly she sat upright in her chair.

Cameron, what about the date? Crystal asked. She obviously saw the confusion on my face because she grinned her lopsided half-smile at me. "On the sextant, if you keep the azimuth and right ascension figures the same, change the date, and the coordinates will change. The way the three constellations line up, they appear in the correct positions relative to each other, just rotated counter-clockwise.

Okay, I said slow and drawn out. Not that I