Short Story: Cause and Effect

Chapter 1: Current timeline

Location: Room 09, secret location.

Date: undisclosed

Time: 09:03 AM.

Ellen was nervous and restless. She knew it was all because of the meeting she was about to have. She had not slept well, in fact it felt like she had been lying awake all night. She had been having all sorts of wild dreams during the five or six times her consciousness shut down for a few minutes. Some had been related to her recent discoveries, which made sense, but some had been very different, almost random, about her time at school, her first jobs. Then there had been dreams that she didn’t remember at all, but which had left her sad and exhausted, like having run somewhere to discover that you were too late, that the damage had already been done.

She had set her alarm for 0600, planning ahead as usual. She got gotten up half an hour before the alarm was supposed to go off, having lost all appetite for lying in bed, feeling both tired and restless. She had gone for a run to try and shake off the feeling of gloom that had stayed with her after she had woken, hoping that the cold morning air would lift the veil that she imagined still clung to her skin. Although the morning had been beautiful, the clear, crisp mountain air creating a crimson dawn on a navy blue canvas, the eventual daybreak had lifted the fog in the valley further down the trail, but not in her head.

She had cut her run short, feeling disappointment, and had returned to her cabin for breakfast, putting her money on food instead of exercise. A few bites in, she had realized that food wasn’t the answer either, and that the feeling probably wouldn’t go away soon anyway. She had made some coffee, poured it into a thermos flask which she carried to her car and had started to drive, ending up here, fourty minutes later, at a government complex in the middle of nowhere, about to go into a meeting with the deputy head of Homeland Security.

“Sit down”, Frank had said immediately after she had come in to the office that had been reserved for the meeting.

Ellen was reminded of the previous encounter she had had with Frank. She had been in press briefing with Frank’s boss, the head of Homeland Security, as well as Frank himself, several other officials she didn’t remember, some press and she herself, being an aide to the President’s science adviser at the time, long before she got the top job herself. She remembered Frank as brusque, impatient, tough, and with little time nor respect for the ways of science and scientists. Apparently, he hadn’t changed much since then.

The office was in the back of the building, looking out across a field through floor-to-ceiling windows, providing a view that was surprisingly luxurious for a government building. It was decorated sparsely, with the usual accoutrements of offices anywhere, a large boardroom table in the center with four leather-upholstered reclining and very comfortable office chairs on each side, a projector hidden away in the paneled ceiling, a desk with office supplies and several connectors and buttons on a panel in the wall near a coffee and drinks table which stood next to the door through which they had come in. It had the mix of quality and sparsity that reminded her more of a rented office space than of a government building. Obviously, even the government had to rent additional office space sometimes. Not surprising after the closing of many office buildings during the last administration, she thought.

“Thanks for seeing me Frank. I need to ask – who else knows about this meeting?” Ellen had been worried about this since the meeting had been set up. It was too soon for others to be involved, and she didn’t want to risk making a fool of herself, or worse, of Frank.

“Just you and me” Frank replied, with a hint of surprise at the directness of her question.

“The fewer people that know about it, the better!” Ellen continued. “What about Joyce?”

Frank’s secretary had to have been involved in planning the meeting, she knew, but hoped that she hadn’t been made aware of who Frank was meeting with.

“Just that I have an offsite appointment. Joyce has no idea with who I am meeting nor where.”

Ellen relaxed a little at this piece of information. She had made an assumption that this meeting was not something Frank wanted people to know about, and it seemed her guess had been the correct one.

“The guard at the gate has of course seen you” Frank continued, “but he doesn’t know what you’re coming for, and I’m also sure that he doesn’t know who you are.”

Ellen couldn’t help detecting a hint of mockery in Frank’s voice. She decided to not let it bother her and pressed on with her agenda.

“Thanks. I will try not to take that as an insult. Anyway, I get what you mean. But it’s important. What I’m here to tell you is extremely sensitive. I want guarantees that this will remain between us.”

Frank raised his eyebrows. “What exactly are you afraid of?”

“That you’ll turn it into a weapon right away. It won’t be the first time that a discovery with potential to benefit mankind is transformed into a military project or is shut down and silenced.”

Frank was silent for a few seconds, unsure whether he’d heard her correctly.

“OK”, he said slowly, after giving it some thought, “I guess you’re referring to the atom bomb or something? But what do you mean by shutting down or silencing? Do you think that Roswell really happened? That we’re all conspiring to keep the truth about the aliens from you?”

Frank was clearly not enjoying this meeting so far, and she regretted the ferocity in her voice. She had to be careful she didn’t upset him in the first five minutes already. But she also wasn’t going to let him brush aside her concerns either, dammit! She took a moment to settle her frustration, forced a patient smile to her lips, and replied with as calm and serious a voice as she could muster.

“No Frank, I am thinking of the obvious fact that for at least the past fifty years, nuclear fusion has almost been working and just needed ten more years. If it is not actively being discouraged, then at the very least, it is not being actively advanced. With enough government support, there would no longer be an energy problem!”

Frank looked at her for a second, undecided whether to laugh or get mad and chose not to respond at all.

“Here, have some coffee, take some milk. Let’s try to talk about what you came for. At least I assume you didn’t come here only to accuse me of a conspiracy.”

He poured her a cup and put it in front of her, looking up at her with eyebrows raised, inviting her to speak.  Again she felt the merest hint of mockery in his voice.

Ellen searched for words, ignoring the coffee. She felt agitated and it annoyed her. She was desperately trying to find a voice of strength and reason that this man would listen too, and noticed herself failing again and again. She looked at her fingernails, as if looking for the answer there.

“No, it’s not, ” she said finally, breaking the spell and looking up from her hands. “All right, then. Yes, there is something important I’m here for, and I need your help.” She sighed. She looked Frank straight in the eyes, having found her conviction once again. “But first, I want your promise that we will determine together what happens to this information before I tell you more. Do you promise me that?”

“Come on, Ellen, why so dramatic, we’re not the enemy. At least give me a little something. What the hell are we talking about here, aliens?”

“Almost. Do you promise?” Her tone was flat, and Frank’s face changed, ever so slightly.

“Okay, you got my attention. Tell me.”

“Do you promise?” Ellen pressed.

“Yes, goddamn it, I promise, spill it out!”

Ellen leaned back in the leather office chair. She folded her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling for a moment. “Do you know Michael Rose?”

“From Caltech?”

Ellen nodded and hummed in agreement.

“Yes, I know him, but he’s a physicist, not an astronomer. What about him?”

“No, indeed, he’s a physicist. Quite an accomplished one. In recent years, he’s been working mostly on quantum tunneling.”

Ellen saw Frank’s eyebrows go up. She leaned in a little and looked him straight in eyes again, feeling more confident now that she was finally telling her story the way she had prepared it.

“Quantum tunneling is one of the more bizarre consequences of the laws of the quantum mechanics. It’s full of weird stuff, anyway. For starters, according to Planck, a particle is at the same time a wave and made of matter, and according to Heisenberg you can only know where or how fast a particle moves but never both.

“It gets worse. It follows from the laws of quantum mechanics that a gas that is enclosed in a sealed space, has a probability that some of its particles are actually outside of that space. Not that they really are, but that there’s a chance, a probability that they’re there. Experiments have shown that particles have indeed been measured in places where they should not be. This is called ‘quantum tunneling’.

“OK, I can still follow that. And what has Michael Rose discovered?”, Frank asked.

“As you may know, in addition to quantum mechanics, there is also another fundamental basis for contemporary physics.”

“Einstein?” Frank replied. He took a sip of his coffee, finding it too hot to drink and set it back down on the table.

“Very good”, Ellen said, “Einstein’s general and special theory of relativity. We’ve just never been able to connect the two. As soon as you make distances extremely small, quantum reality takes over and Einstein is nowhere, and vice versa. But there is one angle that hasn’t been explored deep enough, at least until now. As you may remember, Einstein imagined our universe with four dimensions, length, width, height and time.

“Time?”

“Yes, time. For example you could pinpoint our conversation today with a longitude, a latitude, some altimeters and a timestamp. The same place, but one day later, is a completely different place in Einstein’s universe.”

“OK, that makes sense too. Time as the fourth dimension.”

“That’s it. So, what we had not yet investigated properly is whether quantum tunneling can also take place in the fourth dimension.”

“Ah, so whether a particle can appear at a different timestamp than where it should be. That means…” Frank’s face  instantly lit up with understanding. “… time travel?”

“That’s right.”

“Ellen, you wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t something for you to tell me and that probably means something bad. What the hell did he find out?”

“You have to understand that these are probabilities. Quantum mechanics is not about particles with a precise location but particles with a probability curve, a mathematical description of all possible places, with an associated probability. Think of it as a cloud filled with places where a particle could be. Only when you try to observe the particle does the cloud disappear and do you see the particle in a certain place. Until then, it will be in every place in that probability cloud at the same time.”

Frank sat with his hands in his hair and looked through pinched eyelids at a spot above Ellen’s left eye. He was very aware that he was at the edge of his understanding and Ellen was threating to go beyond. He did not want to look stupid, but he also knew that he really had to try to understand it, if he was going to play a role in this development and have a say about what happened next. It all sounded too fantastic – but also very dangerous.

Ellen pressed on. “The first time he actively tried to accelerate a particle to the right energy level for it to be able to tunnel, nothing special happened. The same thing happened the next few hundred attempts. You should know that this is an endless puzzle with dozens of variables and infinite ways in which it doesn’t work.”

“OK, can we cut to the chase please?” asked Frank impatiently. “What did he find?” He was getting a headache. He picked up his coffee again.

“At the hundred-seventieth time, Michael did exactly what he had done before, but ended up getting double the energy back from what he put in. His first idea was that he had found a way to tap the point-energy of quantum space, which would have a been a revolution too, but later he realized he had found something very different and much more terrifying. Because, after trial three-hundred-eighty-two, he received nothing in return. No energy. Nothing at all.”

Ellen made Frank think about this for a second. The sound of birds in the forest outside and mumbling voices in the hallway behind the office door could be heard over the utter silence that now descended on the office that Ellen and Frank sat in.

Frank frowned, testing his conceptual limits, mulling over what she had said. No energy came out… when double the energy out earlier…. Finally it dawned and he looked at her in disbelief.

“Holy crap… So… The extra energy that he had found at the first trial, was actually the lost energy of the later test? How on earth is that possible?”

“Quantum tunneling, Frank. Apparently, in the later trial, a particle was made that had a probability could that stretched, through the fourth dimension, up to the time of the earlier test, where he caught it.”

“Before it even existed?”

“Before it existed, yes.”

Frank stared at her in disbelief. Ellen moved on. “Of course, he immediately changed his research direction and dropped everything else. After a few months, they managed to repeat this with some level of predictability. And this is where it gets really groundbreaking.”

She finally took a sip of her coffee without noticing it was cold and continued her story.

“So, by now, they had developed very sensitive instruments that could detect these extremely rare particles. When the team discussed if they could maybe entangle, or modulate some information onto a particle, so it could be wrapped up with the particle as it were, someone suggested that they could try to calibrate the machine to detect only a certain type of particles. Like, for example, photons.”

“Photons?”

“Yes, photons, particles of light.”

“Do you mean to say they built a fucking camera?” Frank stared at her open-mouthed.

“Yes, actually, I do. By making the detector sensitive to photons with these special properties, from this specific probability cloud, they would in theory be able to catch information from the future, in the form of light. And if you collect enough individual little dots of light, you automatically get…”

“An image…” Frank’s was now leaning forward on his elbows, with his palms raised off table, his coffee cup tilting slightly, almost spilling his coffee on the board-room table.

“It worked”, Ellen continued, leaving Frank frozen in his pose. “His team has indeed managed to capture images from the future in this way.”

“How far ahead? Minutes, hours?” Frank’s mind was racing now, seeing all the possibilities, good and bad, that this could realize.

“At first it was minutes, but now, since about a month, it’s years. A lot of years.”

Frank continued to stare at Ellen. He’d never liked scientists, always found them condescending, intent on making him feel insecure and dumb. He hated that. Still, he was usually able to feign interest in their stories when he needed to, while in reality his thoughts wandered off after the first few minutes. Instead, he noticed how deeply attentive he now was, listening to Ellen’s crazy story. For the first time he realized that he’d been listening for minutes without moving a muscle. He could feel his stiff arms and legs, noticed the cup in his hand and quickly set it back on the table. What she had said sounded outrageous. Could it be a joke? To get back at him for his known disdain of scientists?

He decided to break the tension and let himself lean back for a moment in his chair. To test his theory, he let a small smile play around his lips for a few seconds, but immediately saw in her motionless and dead-pan expression that it had not been a joke, that this was very serious indeed. God almighty, he thought, this is insane, and very, very dangerous… And the timing! Now that it looked as if humanity had finally figured out how to live peacefully together. Everything seemed to indicate that they were entering a period of prosperity, peace, cooperation and economic stability, all as a result of ever-increasing confidence. Scientists working together on the climate problem had ensured more and more connection and exchange between countries that had previously been suspicious of each other, there were even more and more voices to abolish the army… Ridiculous, of course, but what was their role in this world that was almost no longer at war…?

He awoke from his reverie with a sudden thought. He leant forward, looking at her intently, like a kid about to get a toy. “You brought something with you to show me, didn’t you? ”

Silently, Ellen reached with her right hand in her briefcase, grabbed her tablet and in one move opened it with her thumbprint, letting the tablet display a grayish photo, and turned it towards Frank.

 

 

Chapter 2: Sometime in the year 2130

A conversation between David Ortiz, Head of Strategic Research and general Ali Mansour, Head of Armed Forces.

Discussion room 531, secret location.

9:03 in the morning.

 

David had been sitting in the cold and bare office for the past twenty minutes, wondering how anyone could work in such a dreary place, imagining them sitting behind that desk on the other side of the room armed with woolen mittens and earmuffs to stay warm. The desk itself had something antagonistic about its design, something that cnoveyed toughness and indestructibility, just like the only person that was allowed to sit there. He’d expected the office of general Mansour to be more opulent, or at least somewhat comfortable, but realized quickly that someone who had the top rank in the military would want to demonstrate their toughness and indestructibility to everyone else by not having a comfortable office.

For the fourth time he gazed at the little bits of decoration around the room. Or was it the fifth time? He saw a day calendar with no markings on it, a framed photo of general Mansour with some serious-looking people in uniform beside her and a pole with a US flag in the far corner opposite the desk, behind his chair.

While he was looking over his left shoulder, the door behind him opened and the general entered.

“What am I doing here?” she said, as she marched towards her desk, not pausing to greet David.

David’s legs had started to lift him out of the chair in deference and greeting but quickly sat down again, seeing that the general had no interest in formalities.

“Thank you for coming, General, I know you’re very busy, but we considered this very important.”

“Nine o’clock and-no-coffee-yet-important?” The general had reached her chair and was sitting upright and unmovable as she spoke, like a mountain in her chair, arms crossed, eyes sharp and focused on David. he could see her forehead creasing in an intense frown, radiating annoyance and impatience.

“I’m told coffee has been ordered and will be here soon” David said, using his most business-like tone. “But yes, that important. I didn’t want to waste any time, this deserves your full attention and mine and we will probably be working on this for the rest of the day. Your assistant tells me she is already looking at clearing your schedule.”

General Major Ali Mansour was unpleasantly surprised by all this. She wasn’t used to people speaking to her like that. Certainly not someone who was clearly ten years younger that she was and who apparently had just left the academy. Incomprehensible, these young people who had no idea of the seriousness of the situation in the world.

“Ok” she sighed, “then tell me what we’re going to be doing all day, and I hope for your time the coffee will be there soon!” She relinquished her mountain-like pose somewhat and leaned forward on her arms.

“Yes, of course, so am I. All right, then.” David took a manila folder out of his briefcase on laid it, closed, in front of him on the general’s desk. This caused the general’s frown to increase a little. Undeterred, David continued. “You know what kind of research we do at our institute, that we are always looking into new ways to send information so that none of our enemies can intercept it. We believe that we are still way ahead of Russia and China. However, they are also making some progress. As we anticipate that the they are doing the same as us, we’ve been trying to catch them in the act.”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, I have to give you some introduction first, but this won’t take long. So – we’re trying to figure out all of the ways that they could be trying to send data so that we don’t pick up on . Encryption, entanglement, negative-light modulation, etc.”

The general growled.

“Our latest idea was that they might use the quantum-tunneling effect to scatter information, so that only someone who knows exactly along which axes and to what extent the information is scattered can read the message.”

“So, what’s the deal? Any Russian messages? Chinese?”

“No, we didn’t find any, but we did find something else. We noticed that someone had indeed been busy sending data in this way. Or actually receiving data in this way.”

“What data? Who?”

“We don’t know – but we do know with quite some certainty that some information has in effect been transferred from our lab to another lab.”

“Don’t talk in riddles man, what exactly do you mean?”

Despite his good preparation and the importance of his discovery, David noticed that he started to lose his calm, getting unnerved by the General’s gaze.

“I mean, we have, um, the data,…”

At that moment, a service bot came in with a cup of coffee and sweets. Rescued by a bot, David thought relieved.

With the coffee on the table and poured, David continued, now with renewed confidence. “What we have ascertained so far is that someone is doing experiments with quantum tunneling. We have done the same in our own research and somehow a connection has appeared between our two labs and information has gone from us to them. At the moment, no more than single particles, but we see that the signal is getting stronger. It won’t be long before they can capture images from the inside of our lab.”

“Can’t you disconnect? Stop your own experiment?”

“Unfortunately not, we immediately tried that of course. But when we  pull the plug, we also kill our only way of seeing what they see and then we’re blind – while they continue looking at our labs.”

“I get it. As long as we’re connected, we can see what they’re seeing, but we can’t stop them. Any idea who’s behind it?”

“No, we can’t deduce that from anything. We don’t know where it’s coming from.”

“So it could be anyone! China, Russia, Mercosur, Korea, and they can just take a goddamn peek in our pants! Do you have any idea what an advantage over us that gives them? Things have been relatively peaceful for more than a century because everything’s perfectly balanced – only the fact that everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing has ensured that no new world war has broken out! Do you have any idea what it takes to plunge us into the next hundred years of misery? Absolutely nothing! We have been living in the middle of a new cold war for over a hundred years, and this one is ten times worse than the last one!”

“Yes, General. But scientists have also…”

She didn’t let him finish. “Jesus… Our latest technology, our latest experiments…. In the hands of I don’t know which enemy. This is an enormous goddamn shit-pile you and your scientists have created David!”

“General, we have an idea.” David continued, ignoring the slight to him and his team.

It took a while for the general to break away from her indignation. “Huh, what?”

David poured her some more coffee. He saw that he still hadn’t touched his own cup. “The connection only exists in one place, specifically one of the lab rooms in complex B. Nowhere else. And we can’t stop them from looking, but we can stop them seeing certain things.”

He took the time to let this sink in with the general. Strangely enough, he now seemed the calmer of the two, to be the one in charge of the conversation, rather than the mountain facing him. He continued confidently. “We can determine what they see. Do you see? We can decorate the space in any way we want. We could turn it into a kitchen, a church, whatever, and they’ll never suspect anything as they didn’t know we knew they were looking!”

The general was sitting with the cup of coffee in her hands, looking intently at David. He couldn’t read if it was outrage, fear or relief in her eyes, but something was brewing. He finally raised his cup to take a sip of coffee but before he could, she slammed her coffee on the table so hard that David was afraid the cup would break. “A kitchen, you say? A church? For Christ’s sake, you are bunch of idiots!”

General Mansour was back in her familiar role and David’s newly found confidence disappeared like snow melting in the sun. “This is the opportunity to throw sand in the eyes of a hostile nation! Let me tell you what you and your pencil-head staff are going to do – you’re going to take all of the modern junk out of that lab right now, and replace it with the oldest, dustiest, outdated and failed experiments and devices you still have somewhere on the shelf. You’re going back 150 years today, do you understand? If they want to peek inside our pants, they will be treated to a beautiful historic scene! And it better look believable, David! Got it?!”

With her hands flat on the table and leaning forward over, she had issued her commands. To David’s surprise, her rage hadn’t been directed at his team’s idea at all. It seemed she actually liked the idea – they just hadn’t come up with the solution that the general now proposed. But she couldn’t blame them for not thinking like a general, right? They were scientists!

He nodded his consent and started collecting his things, convinced that he better get away from her as soon as possible. But before he could even start to get up out of his seat, the general had already marched out of the room,  just as she decidedly as she had come in earlier. In the now empty room, David collapsed back into his chair. He breathed heavily and stared at a point of the table in front of him. His heart rate was slowing a little now. He looked at the rest of the table. There was still coffee and baklava. He poured himself a fresh cup and blew on the hot coffee. He took a piece of baklava, he felt he deserved it. He wiped the sticky crumbs off his mouth with his wrist, grabbed his intercom and dialed a number.

“Esai? It’s David. Well, it went as expected. Yes, I’m still shaking, but she agrees with our plan to change the room. But she has a different idea. She wants us to fill it up with old devices. … What? Wes, actually, I do. This is better. You’re going to start disassembling? I’ll be right there. Uh-uh? I’m sure you do! We still have a lot of things in the basement. yes, set that up, too. Fine, see you soon.”

He disconnected, sighed, and finally took his first sip of coffee of the day.

 

Chapter 3: Current timelin3

Location: Room 09, secret location.

Date: undisclosed

Time: 11:07 AM.

 

Frank was watching the tablet. It wasn’t the most detailed photo, but he hadn’t expect it to be. With his background in the security service he had learned to extract clear data from the vaguest images. This was not so bad. It looked most like a French painting with these dots. Frank was annoyed for a moment that he did not know the name of that style, but he could visualise the painting in his mind. Something with flowers and a pond…

He squeezed his eyes and surmised that he was looking at a lab, with racks, tables, appliances, and people busying around between them.

“What do you make of it?” Ellen asked.

“Well, it looks like a lab, and it doesn’t look spectacular, I have to say. What are these people doing?”

“Our idea is that they are assembling or disassembling something. They look rushed. Like something just happened. But that’s not the most important thing. Take a look at this.”

Ellen wiped her index finger across the tablet to bring out another photo. Frank looked intently. This was a close-up of a device. It looked familiar to him…

“What is this?” he asked.

“That,” Ellen said, “is a GE 2000 Electron spin analyzer. In fact, that’s our GE 2000 Electron spin analyzer. I can see it by a dent at the top right. I personally dropped a laptop on that. Not my best day, by the way.”

“What do you think that means?”

“Little progress in any case. When you consider how fast progress is going now, it’s hard to understand. Why not much will change in 100 years’ time. But there’s something else that’s worrying me. Look at the people.”

“Huh? What about the people?” Frank couldn’t see what she meant. They loooked normal, like typical lab rats. White coats, glasses, smug looks like they knew something he didn’t. He was familiar with the type.

“Don’t you see?” Ellen pressed him.

Frank stared some more at the image in front of him. Ellen zoomed out so that the whole image became visible. The picture now showed five lab technicians in grey coats, wearing some kind of badge…  Soldiers? Frank was still lost. “What are you talking about, Ellen? I just see five guys in a lab. What am I missing?”

“Five guys – indeed. Five white guys, probably Russians, and by the look of it probably military Russians.”

Frank silently absorbed what Ellen was saying. Today, labs like that were a public forum, where nations worked together for the benefit of all. He should see at least one Chinese or Arab scientist in this picture. Also, given the technology that he was seeing in this lab from the future, it looked like no signficant technological progress would be made in the next fifty years or more. What had happened? And why were they wearing uniforms? To Frank, the answer was obvious. It could mean only one thing. Today’s era of peace and collaboration is very soon making way for something else… He felt himself getting worked up, excited even, at the thought of something finally changing in this world that had gotten tired of war, that no longer thought it needed it’s military. An opportunity for them to be relevant again.

“So?” Ellen asked, looking at him with questioning eyes while she turned her tablet back towards her and started to switch it off.

He quickly regained control and looked up. He needed to keep his cool and play this well. He sighed and looked at her with an earnest expression. “I don’t know, Ellen,” he started. “I love what you’re doing, but I can’t do anything with this. Even if it’s all real, I find it hard to believe there’s something there to worry about. Also, I don’t think you should go public with this. People will call you crazy. But I do want you to tell Michael to continue his investigation until there’s more clarity.”

“What’s the matter with you? Why? Continue? What are you talking about?”

“I mean, we’re done with this conversation. I’ve got more to do.”

“You can’t mean that. It was superimportant just a moment ago!”

Frank got up, looked at Ellen but didn’t say anything. Sputtering, Ellen started packing her belongings. She gave Frank a look she hoped reflected both anger and contempt.

“I can’t believe you’re sending me away now, Frank!”

“Have a nice day, Ellen,” Frank said, pointing to the door. Ellen turned around and left the room.

Frank sat down with a deep sigh, waited for the door to close and grabbed the phone. He called the Minister of Defence. “Jeffrey? Convene a staff meeting. I just saw something that changes everything. We’re back in business.”

He hung up the phone, disconnecting his call. Frank leaned back in his chair, and for the first time in days, felt himself smile.