Negative Man

by William Riling

Professor Carlton Evers, lost in numb thought, stared at the faded photograph pinched tight between his thumb and forefinger, asking himself in a near silent whisper over and over again, “What if?” “What if?” Two simple words repeating like the scratch of a record needle playing at the end of an LP. The photo in his hand was an old Polaroid, washed by sunlight, dried by the years, leaving behind contrasts one mostly finds in old-world watercolors.

The picture was of a young girl, tan and lithe, her sandy brown hair hung to her browned shoulders. Head tilted, she presented a smile that lit up her freckle kissed face while sparking a light in her electric blue eyes. Clad in a cream white bikini, as if she was posing for a postcard, she sat knees up, arms back, on a large beach towel bearing the imprint of a Union Jack flag. The towel’s design shouldn’t serve as a misdirection, the young girl was by no means British. She was from New Jersey. Had the photo also been able to capture her accent, you’d recognize it as very “South” Jersey. Carlton had won the towel for her from a boardwalk attraction on their very first date.

The photograph was of seventeen-year-old Lori Saunders, also known as Miss Ocean City ’83 and the focal point of Carlton’s summertime romance that same year.

In ’83, Carlton was eighteen years old and a summer season away from attending MIT that same year on a full scholarship. With all his obvious intelligence, it still puzzled the future physicist how he could end up in a summer romance with a girl as beautiful as Lori. What could she see in him? He was after all, a Star Wars geek, an Atari nerd who still lived with his parents, possessing the social skills of a leper in a nudist camp, and as he knew all too well, still a virgin. He was by no means competition for the bronzed surfers and college jocks trolling the beaches, bars and boardwalk scamming for summer tail.

Yet it was his boyish shyness combined with his razor-sharp intellect that attracted the young beauty to him. Plus, when Carlton looked at her, he didn’t leer, he didn’t salivate, he didn’t show off or put on airs. He was a good listener. She liked that about him.

They had met at the Borden Soft Ice Cream kiosk along the 6th avenue boardwalk. She was a server. His job was to sweep that section of the boardwalk, keeping the area free from trash. Each day while working he would spend his break time by ordering a cone from Lori. It was always vanilla, like his personality.

His breaks could barely be considered brief interludes within the number of working hours in a day. They were more like eye blinks, or snatches of seconds, just fleeting moments. Lori was usually busy tending to customers. Yet over time, their small conversations about the weather, trivial things and all things vanilla, somehow managed to morph into something more.

Soon their dialog grew into a past time they like to play together they called, “Local or Loco?” It was a game they invented where they’d guess where people were originally from by their appearance and dress. The fashions of the eighties didn’t make the guessing as easy as it may sound. Disco was dying and Goth/Punk growing.

Eventually, Lori began to take her break at the same time as Carlton. Like two game show contestants they would sit on a boardwalk bench looking and secretly pointing at the tourists. Each would give a theory on where that person was from and why they thought so. Usually, the outfits were a dead giveaway. Tight bathing suits, jewelry and platform shoes on legs with zero tan pointed to the Italian guys from New York. Beer guts, baseball hats, and double entendre T-shirts, meant a Philly native. Speedos were either Canadians or Europeans. Both Carlton and Lori got a lot of enjoyment when they would find out they were right after hearing the vacationers speaking with an accent or in a foreign language.

The fourth week of June in ’83 in Ocean City there was a triple feature on a Saturday playing at the Moorlyn theatre. It had been scheduled and sold out as early as May First. It was the first two Star Wars Movies followed by the premiere of Return of the Jedi. Carlton had purchased two tickets the day they went on sale. At first, he was going to take his younger sister Sam, but call it the Force, or what have you, Carlton drew the nerve to ask Lori to join him. She agreed.

It would be their first date and followed by their first kiss under the boardwalk later that evening. For all practical purposes, other than it being Carlton’s first true love, it would also be his first broken heart. That's the side of memory lane Carlton doesn’t drive on. Suffice it to say Carlton went to MIT that fall. He became a physicist, and later a tenured professor at the school, no less. Now middle aged, with glasses and a thinning hairline, the remaining tenacious strands of hair cling squid-like to the skull that contains one of the most incredible brains to ever grace the MIT campus. Professor Carlton Evers ended his reverie with a sigh.

“What if?” He finally said aloud, setting the photograph back beneath the push pin that held it to the partition by his office desk. Once a rhetorical question borne from regret, ennui and lost love, they became two words that triggered a longing that was soon to become a desire magically leading to an incredible idea. Those two minuscule words would inspire fifty-five-year-old physicist Carlton Evers to conceive and construct what he believed to be the world’s first working time machine.

He had gazed at the photo more than once over the years. So often the ink inscription left on it was barely legible. He wished with an aching heart that he could go back to that moment in time that, at least in his fading memory, were the happiest days of his life. He held before him an image frozen in time. A place and a moment never seen before or since, never to be repeated. It was a time capsule recorded by a light sensitive negative. That’s when the aging physicist began to daydream and question “What if?”

What if all the information of that day back in 1983 was encoded into that photograph the moment the picture was snapped? What if there was a way, perhaps with the aid of a supercomputer and laser, to break down and map all that information, down to the very atomic structure of every molecule, light particle and electron recorded?

Then, what if all that atomic data could be fused or compressed into one particle, perhaps by use of a Haldon Collider, accelerated to the speed of light opening a wormhole and then, like bouncing back a radio signal, return that molecular information to its original space and time then reverse the process to send it back?

Carlton knew he would need more than a faded Polaroid to extract that kind of imprinted data. Even though the photo’s zinc paper is treated with a glossy, protective overcoat of polycarbonate compounds, the actual image taken was recorded onto a light sensitive negative that is generally tossed away when the photo develops. Besides, he understood Polaroid’s film base is coated with layers of silver halide grades, image dyes and interlayers under a transparent cover sheet. In layman’s terms it would be like trying to extract data from a comic page image that had been transferred onto silly putty.

Carlton further reasoned that a film stock made of a cellulose acetate would be much more robust. Unlike nitrate which produces its own oxygen when immersed in water, thus making it unstable, even more flammable. Whereas, in a better stock of film, the silver salts are on the emulsion layer; the light sensitive materials are suspended in gelatin and coated onto the acetate. They have a Modulation Transfer Function absorption rate of 160 lines per millimeter. That MTF reads coarse and fine details much more naturally and organically than digital images which treat everything encompassed with the same unflinching eye, so light is not recorded as much as it is interpreted by digital camera software.

The end result from his nostalgic trip down memory lane; Professor Carlton Evers was on the threshold of discovering if a negative from a photograph might be the on-ramp to the expressway for time travel. That was the informal concept he took to DARPA, concluding it would take government funding to build such a device. He was surprised he received an answer within a month.

Now almost a year and a half and quarter of a billion dollars later, two men in dark suits and dark glasses, each with similar tightly cropped haircuts, entered MIT’s basement lab several steps ahead of a third man, also dressed for business, only in a lighter suit minus the sunglasses and carrying a steel attaché. In lockstep cadence, the group descended the spiral staircase down to the level where a brand-new ballroom sized Hadron collider stood behind a glass enclosed sterile chamber.

Standing upright within the enclosure was a large, circular, gold and silver coil-filled contraption, riddled with rivets, surrounded by tubes, conduits and brackets holding brackets, with cables and tubing snaking out from its base, looking like the maw of some mechanized beast from an AI generated image of alien machinery sucking down metallic spaghetti.

It had been eighteen months from when the original concept on a drawing board went to the finishing touches now being fine-tuned on Carlton’s… make that the United States Government’s, experimental time machine. However, no one was actually calling it that. Carlton took it upon himself and christened the device L.O.R.I., after his lost love or the Lightwave Origin Recapturing Interferometer. The anagram was a stretch for sure, but it wasn’t just an homage, it also served for secrecy, for nowhere in any schematic did they use the words, “Time Machine.”

Originally the experiment was to be simple. Take a photograph of your time traveler Tuesday morning in a room containing an object in a box. Take the negative of that photo on Wednesday and send the subject back in time. When they return, if they can tell you what was in the box, we’ll know time travel is possible. But after the expense laid out up until now, the government had much more ambitious goals in mind.

The two accompanying men took up posts on either side of the room as the man in gray set the briefcase down on a table. Carlton, dressed in PPE gear, stepped out from the collider compartment and over to his computer to input the initiating code. He opened a file, “Operation Lancer.” A code appeared. His fingers danced on the keyboard typing in a numeric prompt. The source code 20/63/327767/96.7970/^/1200 appeared skipping across the display screen. A red light began to blink on a nearby digital clock. A count down from 12 hours ticked away like a heartbeat.

Carlton then stepped over to his work bench where the mystery man known to him only as “Mr. X” had set the briefcase. The mysterious stranger then dialed in the combination. The man’s thumbs were scanned by a blue light on the edge of the latches that open the case. The light turned green, the case snapped open. The man in the gray suit turned the case to face Carlton. In the center of the case, a small white envelop lay in a postage stamp sized recessed space etched into a protective gun metal gray foam lining the case. With a pair of forceps, Carlton removed the envelope handling it it as if it were nitro glycerin. He turned, making for the sterile glass enclosure protecting the Hadron collider from foreign material and contamination. A motion sensor activated the door.

The second he stepped inside the glass door whooshed closed behind him He continued through the next to the gangway leading to the center of the coil. Arriving at the coil, there was a tray of tools on a table stand off to a side. Taking another forceps, he pried open the envelope and gingerly removed a small piece of brownish acetate. With a surgeon’s touch, he placed it on a clear glass plate about an inch by an inch and a half and slid the plate beneath his microscope. Carlton squinted one eye as he peered through the aperture, he brought the item into focus.

What first caught his attention was the white glare from two sprocket holes on the left side of an image. It was immediately apparent to Carlton that he was looking at a small piece of film. Framed by black, the color image was of a group of people lining a gray street corner surrounded by brown and cream-colored sandstone buildings. The crowd appeared to be awaiting a parade. The whites and reds of people’s shirts popped off of black silhouettes. An old-style streetlamp painted green stood sentry to the left. Located near dead-center of the still image, a motorcycle cop was negotiating a corner turn with another cycle cop out of focus behind him.

Professor Carlton Evers was looking at frame z007 of the Zapruder Film, one small piece from the 8 mm capture of the assassination of JFK. A much as he wanted to, Carlton’s time machine wasn’t sending anyone back to Ocean City 1983. This pioneering trip was sending someone to Dallas, Texas and the year 1963. What they hoped to accomplish was anyone’s guess, they insisted they were going back just to observe. The consensus was that every step short of not going was to be taken to avoid changing history. They wanted to know what they could do inhistory before they ever attempted to do anything to history. Carlton was beginning to think he knew how Oppenheimer must have felt.

Using forceps, Carlton removed the piece of film from the glass plating and lay it in a thumb drive sized compartment. He slid the component into a slot on a motherboard attached to the coil’s console and pushed it in. The room was configured as a smaller version of NASA’s mission control. Multiple computers activated at once and began processing at lightning speed. Lights in the basement laboratory dimmed, flickered and then returned as the computing task automatically drew its power from another outside source.

With its ethernet linked to the Frontier supercomputer in Oak Ridge Tennessee, the fastest, most powerful computer in the world, delineation of the data that was locked in the film negative would take a minimum of three hours to process. The image itself would be destroyed in the process by laser light atomizing the acetate causing a radioactive like decay. Carlton’s calculations left open the possibility this could affect the duration of the chronological expedition. There was no turning back. The countdown was set.

Carlton Evers wasn’t going to be making this trip back in time and he wasn’t happy about his role but understood someone had to steer the ship. DARPA insisted on providing their person to make the trip. The mysterious man who delivered the single frame of the Zapruder film was to be the first experimental “Nanonaut.” It was a term DARPA coined, combining the term “nanotechnology” to the word “astronaut.” Clever people, those government spooks.

Carlton Evers had many questions but was so wrapped up in the complexity of the launch he hadn’t had time to sort through them. Now with the film frame in place, the computations processing and the power stabilized, he took a moment to think.

Why choose the Kennedy assassination for “Operation Lancer?” Lancer, he learned, was the code name the secret service detail had given Kennedy all those years ago. But why choose that moment in history? They could, if there was 8mm color film of Nazi Germany available, and there was, go back and try to stop Hitler before he painted his first watercolor. Before he sent six million people to their deaths. Or they could choose to go back to 9/11 and save thousands from a horrific ending. Then there were the existential questions that arose automatically.

Carlton continued to posit. Say you did stop Hitler; who is to say a more effective fascist wouldn’t rise to power? Someone more tactical, more hateful, more efficient than him? Or what if you stopped 9/11 in 2001 only to have a dirty bomb placed there in 2002 and kill three times as many people? There it was, that nagging “What if” question again. A billion possible outcomes and a billion possible mistakes.

Add to it all the possibility that maybe all you’re doing is creating an offshoot reality. A parallel universe, existing in its own space/time continuum. Would you no longer exist in the former? Does it just become another bubble in the multiverse? What if you crossed paths with your younger self? Unknowingly brought Covid back in time with you? Stepped on a butterfly? It was enough to think oneself into a headache. It didn’t matter, the clock was ticking. As the saying goes, time waits for no man. It was almost time to prepare the traveler.

The decontamination chamber was an anti-room off the back of the basement. The stark white sterile environment contained a hospital bed, side tables, medical monitors, clean towels and sheets, a shower and a flat screen TV for the Nanonaut to watch while waiting for final countdown.

In an open closet hung a gray, Beau Brummell men’s suit and matching tie from the 60’s, like something straight from the wardrobe department of the TV show Mad Men. They found it in a vintage clothing store in Kansas. A Trilby hat from the same era, purchased in a Seattle flea market, hung on a hook. A pair of black sued lace up Oxfords were discovered in Vermont, polished sat on a shelf along with an Omega Speedmaster watch purchased on eBay. Every item was manufactured in the sixties. Carlton felt this would help make a smoother transference having atomic similarities to the destination year while helping the time traveler visually fit into the era.

The Nanonaut, Mr. X, was currently in the MIT cafeteria having a final meal with the launch crew before his journey. The fare was bullion, tofu with a little chicken meat added out of sympathy. Carlton was doing last minute tests on the heart monitor and ekg machines, syncing them to the main system. They record the body’s reactions up until the last second.

Carlton reached to calibrate the monitor; he bumped a side table. The attaché popped open an inch. Why something so secure was left unlocked aroused Carlton’s curiosity. With furtive glances to make sure no one was watching; he opened the case. He found the reason it wasn’t closed properly. The gray foam that protected the frame of film was pried up and askew. Carlton peeked under the material.

Laying beneath that foam on a thinner layer was a High Standard HD 22., the CIA’s weapon of choice. A silencer, shoulder holster and portable aluminum stock sat alongside it. He reset the foam the way he found it. Carlton realized this was no DARPA scientist they were sending back in time. This man was CIA through and through.

Carlton began to rifle through rest of the suitcase’s sleeves. He found a Manila envelope. He hesitated a beat and opened it. In it was a three-page dossier with the title “Operation Lancer” stamped across it the words, “TOP SECRET.” The first page had a picture of a young man in jacket and tie and hair cropped like Mr. X’s. The info stated the man’s name was Jack Kyleford.

Carlton wondered if the man was any relation to Presidential candidate John Kyleford, the Republican front runner for President. But it couldn’t be. This man’s age was listed as 24. Height, 6 foot, 0 inches, weight 202. Vice President John Kyleford was thin, barely six feet tall and 82 years old. There was a serial number followed by the words “Operation Mongoose.”At the end of this man Kyleford’s bio, the words, “INTERCEPT/TERMINATE.”

On the second page a photo was pixelated, the bio was redacted with swaths of black ink covering most of the copy. Still, Carlton recognized the silhouetted form as Lee Harvey Oswald. The three names were blacked out as well as his serial number. It was also followed by “Operation Mongoose.” There was no instruction after his name. It read: D.O.A.

The final page and photo took Carlton’s breath away. It was from his MIT I.D. It had a few lines of biographical information containing his name and social security number followed by the words, “Operation Lancer” and the instruction, TERMINATE. He had to read it several times as he stared at the word then back to his photo.

Carlton shoved the pages back into the envelope with an unsteady hand but forgetting the sleeve he took them from, he jammed them into the first one and closed the attaché. His heart moved like a thumping rabbit’s foot. Adrenaline raced through his nervous system.

“Holy fuck. The CIA want me dead.” A thousand thoughts crowded for attention. Why kill me? Was the assassination a CIA plot? Was Mr. X on the grassy knoll? Did they kill Oswald? Kennedy? Who is Kyleford? Perhaps he’s the second shooter? What is “Operation Mongoose”? He couldn’t let the test continue, could he?

Carlton turned to the gray suit hanging on the rack, then out through the window of the decontamination room door. He saw the collider still counting down. One did not have to be a physics professor to add together what he was thinking at that moment.

Carlton changed clothes as if he was late for his own wedding. The arms of the Beau Brummell suit coat rode up above his wrists revealing the white sleeves of the pressed dressed shirt he just buttoned. It was a tight fit. He surprised himself when he remembered how to tie a Windsor knot, which he was now doing at breakneck speed; Cross wide end over narrow, loop, cross again, loop, pass wide end through loop and pull.

“Close enough” he thought as he shorted the front part. The pant legs revealed a little too much ankle, but the argyle socks were doing their job, so it wasn’t too noticeable. He strapped on the wristwatch laying on the table and checked the time. It was synched up with the computer in the other room. Carlton stepped to the mirror and put on the charcoal Trilby with a red and gray hat band. Looking like he stepped out of a 1960’s cigarette ad, he started for the door and paused. He had one more accessory to consider. He stepped back to the suitcase. Lifting the foam he considered the gun in its suppressor-ready shoulder holster. Carlton removed his jacket one last time.

A minute later, Carlton stepped out of the decon chamber and crossed toward the main computer bank. He removed his hat, sat and took up pen and pencil. He began writing a few calculations on a clipboard. He was going to have to help the Frontier computer speed up its processing time. There were still a good three hours before operational initiation. He needed to go in the next three minutes. It was almost time for Mr. X and his team to begin preparation. They could arrive any moment. Carlton typed in the new source code instructing the power surge protectors that controlled energy flow to seek more of it.

Several crypto mining warehouses in the mid-Eastern United States suddenly went offline. The computers in the control room lit up like tilting pin ball machines. Carlton put on his hat. He kissed the photo of Lori taped to the control console. “Wish me luck.” He made for the Haydon Collider. “I’m going to need it.” He had no plan other than making sure no CIA Nanonaut would have a chance to fuck with history.

Stepping into the center of the Hadron ring, Carlton stood in place watching the sequence wind down from twenty seconds. Large coils behind him began to rotate in opposite directions speeding up with a growing electronic whine like a propeller to a large B-17 spinning to life. Had he spread his limbs, He would have looked just like DaVinci’s Vitruvian man.

Beneath the noise Carlton could hear muffled shouting. He saw Mr. X and his CIA compatriots scrambling down the spiral staircase, this time in a more herky-jerky stumbling manner. The inside chamber began to spark and flash like a Tesla Coil gone crazy. Blue electrical charged lighting flayed out in all directions. The concentric coils of the collider now all seemed to be spinning in the same direction. The noise reached the level of a jet engine. Carlton began to feel a G-force unlike anything he could imagine. Like his whole body was being squeezed in a vice made from broken glass. The pain felt like a dental drill digging into a raw nerve and that nerve happened to be his whole body. He tried to scream but that was sucked back into him like a vacuum. There was a blinding flash, he was gone.

What no one could tell Carlton about his time travel theory was, not if it is possible but, what if his theory works? What happens when the very matter that makes up each atom in the body, where the corporeal casing that keeps your consciousness bottled up, is instantaneously disassembled, squeezed through a space time continuum at the speed of light, transported by worm hole or a tear in space/time itself and reassembled to different time and place. Would anyone survive such a journey? How is such travel possible if the earth, a ball spinning through space, was in a completely different location in its orbit back in 1963? Would he end up floating somewhere along the orbital path marooned in the cold void of space? Carlton was about to find out.

The next thing he remembered was a feeling of nauseousness. An upset stomach was the least of the results of this trip. The pain he initially felt disappeared as quickly as it began, replaced by tinnitus, but this ringing in the ears produced more of a high-pitched whine, leaving Carlton virtually incapacitated and unable to move for the first thirty-seconds of his arrival in 1963. Add vertigo and an uncontrollable need to projectile vomit into the mix and they’re side effects no amount of Dramamine can diffuse. But where was he?

Carlton leaned against a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air warm to the touch from the mid-day sun. Judging by the make and model years of the other cars in the lot, He knew he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. After losing the contents of his stomach behind the car, Carlton steadied himself and stood to get his bearings. The day was warm, the sun shined bright, but something was off. He was standing in a parking lot behind the Texas School Book Depository. He could see the back of the Hertz Rent a Car billboard atop the building. The tinnitus was dissipating but there was a strange sound in the air, like a humming or a dull droning, like background noise at a ballgame mixed with something like white noise from a TV receiving no signal. Nothing was moving. Nothing.

He looked up to see a small flock of blackbirds frozen in place in the air. There was a large freight train on the railroad track behind him looking normal save for the static plume of steam perched still and stationary above the engine. Several people stood statue like in mid-step heading in his direction. Carlton had traveled back in time only to arrive at a place where time was frozen as well as everything else. This made no sense to Carlton’s knowledge of physics or quantum mechanics. It was as if he arrived in an actual still frame from history. “Unless…” he thought, “…We truly are living in a simulation.” If that were the case, Carlton Evers may have stumbled upon one of the greatest revelations to human existence. Before he continued with that realization, something caught his eye.

There were a few people alongside a fence to the right of the building, one man stood out. Dressed similarly to the ill fitted suit he now wore; a man was lighting a cigarette with a match cupped in his hands. Carlton moved in for a closer look.

The ground was a little unsteady for him, Carlton appeared to choose a path to the man a wino might take, swerving side to side until he gained his equilibrium. The tinnitus let up and was now at a level the same as the background noise filling the air. He approached the stranger, whose head was tilted, ready to light the smoke. Carlton recognized him instantly. It was Jack Kyleford, the man from the dossier. Carlton wasn’t sure if Kyleford could see him. It was a bizarre feeling getting no reaction not even an eyeblink at a finger snap. It was as if Kyleford was hypnotized, or Carlton was invisible.

Carlton needed to confirm the man’s identity. He noticed the man’s raised arms created a slight hitch on the suit jacket exposing his waist. Carlton could make out a badge clipped to the agent’s belt. On it, an eagle cresting the department of justice insignia of the special operations division indicated the origin of the badge. Confirming Carlton’s guess were the embossed letters F.B.I. all in caps. Opening the agent’s lapel, Carlton could see he was packing a gun. He set the lapel back in place. What was an FBI agent doing behind a fence near the School Book Depository? Carlton wasn’t sure what to do next.

He turned his attention to the wooden fence before him. A small tree on the other side had released a few leaves that hung midair, motionless above the ground. He stepped up to the fence and a familiar sight unfolded before him. It was Dealey Plaza lit bright by the afternoon sun. He saw the backs of the crowd lining the causeway. He could see Abraham Zapruder standing on the white concrete pedestal by the memorial holding his PD Bell& Howell Zoomatic Director Series Camera. It didn’t go unnoticed by Carlton that frame z007 was at this very second being shot.

Carlton saw the motorcycle cops leaning into the turn from Elm Street and the background noise was a bit louder. He saw the smiles and looks of anticipation on the people’s faces, and he saw the red brick corner of the School Book Depository. He looked behind him at the human statue, Agent Kyleford, and he shook his head in disbelief. “Oliver Stone was right. It was all a conspiracy. There was a second gunman, and that man was now sixty some years in the future and running for President.” Carlton was a scientist, he paused. He needed facts and proof before concluding. He headed for the School Book Depository Building and a rendezvous with an ex-marine and sociopath.

Carlton crossed the back fence and headed down the grassy knoll towards the building’s front entrance. He passed Zapruder on the pedestal and his secretary who was helping him steady his legs as he shot the infamous film. He proceeded up the sidewalk lined with onlookers focused on the street corner. A hungering curiosity caused Carlton to increase his speed. He arrived at the front steps of the building where he froze in place, foot on stair and just as immoveable as the rest of this world he inhabited.

He drew in a breath of surprise. At the top of the stair, he could swear he was staring right into the face of Lee Harvey Oswald. He glanced back at the motorcade still frozen in place. Down Elm Street he could see Jackie’s pink pill box hat, outfit and black hair. Kennedy was obscured behind a motorcycle cop.

Carlton began to reason. If that’s Oswald, there’s no way he could have made it to the sixth floor to fire those shots. For the second time that day Carlton felt a loss of equilibrium.

He replanted his foot on the ground and took another look. Carlton recalled something about eyewitness confusion that had come up during the Warren Report. He noticed the man had the name “Billy” in script sewn onto his work jacket by his left pectoral. Carlton would later learn the man was an employee of the School Book Depository. His name was Billy Nolan Lovelady, a twenty-six-year-old stockman. From a distance the man could have been Oswald’s doppelganger. Carlton climbed the steps and slid past the group of employees sitting and standing on the stairs awaiting the President’s motorcade. He entered the dark entrance of the Depository.

The small lobby was empty save for a cigarette machine and radiator rising from the linoleum floor. Despite the stark white foyer, there was a musty smell that filled his nostrils, like wet paper that had dried out in a tobacco barn. It permeated the whole warehouse. He saw a sign that listed the publishing companies renting space in the building. A set of stairs against a tiled glass wall curved upwards braced by a wood-white railing. Carlton began to make the climb.

The second-floor Southwest corner of the building was a secretarial pool. Visible was a half dozen empty desks with signs of work being suddenly halted and recently abandoned. Paper jammed in the Selectric and Underwood typewriters, file drawers partially opened. Coffee cups left on desks with wisps of steam on hold above them. He saw a sign that read, STAIRS in all caps and a jagged stair shaped line pointing the way. He continued on.

The third floor he could see an empty lunchroom with tables, chairs, and candy and soda machines. Half-eaten lunches and near empty bottles of coke were on the tables. The candy machine had the antiquated clear plastic pull levers. In the machine were Dots, Good and Plenty, Tootsie Roll, NECCO Wafers, Chuckles and even Candy Cigarettes. All but the later he remembered from childhood.

The machine also had a mirror and Carlton couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was his own reflection of course, he knew that. It was what his image was doing that rattled him to his core. It would go from his normal reflection, then changing to what can only be described as glitch, into a film negative version of himself. A white man with dark eyes in a dark trebly hat flashed into a dark man with white eyes and a bright white trebly hat. A negative man, so to speak.

He tried to calm himself to figure out what was happening. It dawned on him after a fifth glitch “The Zapruder Film! It’s got to be.” Carlton understood the shelf life, unless adequately preserved, of good acetate film was 70 years at a maximum. The Zapruder film was 60 years old and may have already begun a process of decay. It’s possible he was beginning to fade from this plane of existence and return to the collider or disappear altogether. He looked at his watch. The second hand was sweeping around the face. This was not the ’63 Omega watch. It was a Movado watch from the twenty-first century. Mr. X must’ve started to prepare early and switched them. Whatever the reason, it was acting like a small magnet causing this time distortion. Carlton had no idea when he might be pulled back to his timeline. He had to get to the sixth floor. He had to know, did Oswald act alone?

Carlton arrived at the six floor. Here the musky smell was more pronounced. Dust particles glinted in the sunlight pouring through the far end windows. Stacks upon stacks of books rose to the thick wooden cross beams dividing the large space into thirds. He stifled a sneeze and walked towards the Southeast windows heading for the corner. The glitch effect was happening at seven second intervals as he got closer to a stack of books piled high on an angle blocking the whole corner window from view. The background noise began to return which indicated an open window. Carlton stepped around the boxes to find himself standing diagonally to a crouched Lee Harvey Oswald.

The first thing that struck Carlton was how puny the man was. Bent on one knee, Oswald held the Mannlicher-Carcano Model 38 carbine with scope to his side at a 60° angle with both hands. There were a set of boxes stacked two to three feet high in front of him creating the sniper’s nest. He was wearing a long sleeved, brownish, pattern woven shirt with a small hole in the right sleeve. Beneath it, a white crew neck tee shirt and dark khaki or chino pants, all that and his wiry frame balanced on pair of black Oxford work shoes.

By leaning a little to his right Carlton could only make out a profile view of Oswald’s face, but he could see a hawkish stare beneath a pinched eyebrow. Though almost chinless and an early receding hairline, Oswald reminded Carlton of a bird of prey’s hatchling, his tongue tucked between his lips as if he were just about to line up his shot.

Carlton could see the Kennedy motorcade heading directly for the building. The President’s limousine frozen about fifty yards back. He wondered why didn’t Oswald shoot with this viewpoint. It seemed to be a much easier shot. Then he noticed an object to his right near a column of stacked books. It was a brown three-foot piece of wrapping paper, long enough to contain curtain rods or a rifle, depending on if you were a DIY enthusiast or a warped little nobody who longed to be somebody, anybody… big. The paper wrapper was in mid fall as if it had just dropped off the nearby book stack. Carlton deduced that Oswald had just gotten into place only seconds before, indicating he was rushed and a possible explanation for the first shot missing.

Carlton had an idea. All he had to do was adjust the elevation knob on the scope and turn the power ring by the eyepiece setting it out of focus. This could disrupt Oswald more than enough to miss the shot. He could also just smack him over the head with a thick Scholastic Math book from one of the boxes.

The whole changing history conundrum was interrupted. The negative glitching increased, and Carlton began to flicker like a broken florescent light bulb. He felt the nausea returning, the vertigo, tinnitus and seering pain return. Oswald stayed unmolested in 1963. Carlton left 1963 in an eyeblink.

Inside the laboratory basement Mr. X and the launch crew were scrambling about, attempting to stop the collider. Carlton zapped into existence surrounded by the dancing blue electrical charge. To everyone else, Carlton had never left. They lost visual contact only for a lightning flash moment. The machine wound down, the power levels stabilized, and the spinning Hadron Collider slowed to a stop. Carlton fell to his knees dry heaving for there was nothing left to come up except for internal organs.

The medical staff entered with a gurney and lifted Carlton from the device and wheeled him to the decontamination room. No one knew that Carlton had travelled through time. They only saw a man scream in pain and drop to his knees to wretch. They had no idea they were looking at the first Nanonaut in history, and from history.

Mr. X was livid. Cheeks flushed and ears red as he pushed passed the medical team. “What the fuck was that, Evers?”

“I couldn’t in good conscience experiment with another human being’s life. It’s my theory, it’s my invention, the risks should be mine. For all I know you could have materialized in the Earth’s core or on the moon.” Carlton glanced over at the briefcase on the other side of the room. Mr. X caught the eyeline. He crossed over to the attaché and lifted the foam. His pistol, and silencer were in the holster and stock were just where he left them. Before travelling through time, Carlton changed his mind at the last second and never took the protection along with him. He was a scientist for Christ’s sake, not James Bond.

Then X opened the center sleeve in the attaché, empty. He followed with the front. He removed the manila envelope. He peeked at its contents. Satisfied he tossed it into the briefcase, locking it. He turned slowly to Carlton. “Reset the launch, we’re going to try this again. Get undressed.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” Carlton said. “The experiment didn’t work because of the brittle state of the Zapruder film itself.” He scootched up in the bed and continued, “New film can be very fragile let alone sixty-year-old acetate. The scanning process created a molecular decay chain reaction. It would’ve been safer if we started with something relatively recent. You didn’t perhaps film your wedding day, did you?”

Mr. X was in no mood. He took up his attaché and signaled for his men to follow him. He held up the omega watch and signaled to Carlton’s wrist. They traded watches. X spoke without eye contact as he put on his watch. “Professor Evers, seeing as Uncle Sam footed the bill for your device, the government will be taking possession of L.O.R.I. immediately. Your services are no longer required. We’ll be bringing in a new team.” With that, the men in black turned and left. Professor Carlton Evers wasn’t about to let that happen.

President John Kyleford was elected that November. His first action had all files on the JFK assassination released through the Freedom of Information Act. The new President specifically requested the release of an FBI file that, up until this day, contained information the CIA considered too sensitive and a threat to National Security.

It was a two-page report his younger self wrote as a twenty-four-year-old FBI agent stationed in Dallas on another November day sixty plus years ago. It described his attempts to get to Oswald on the day of the shooting. He discovered a copy of the Presidents route in an envelope addressed to Alek Hidell’s post office box. Alek Hidell was Oswald’s alias. The same name he purchased the gun under. There was no return address.

Kyleford attained the letter with a warrant based on Oswald’s possible participation in the Bay of Pigs and “Operation Mongoose.” That day Special Agent Jack Kyleford was on his way to detain Oswald. Before he could, he was intercepted by two CIA agents who were not conspiring to kill the President but bent on covering up any entanglements related to “Operation Mongoose.”

The President’s second executive order was to begin a complete overhaul of the Central Intelligence Agency by rooting out the agency within the agency. The divisions that created clandestine operations without oversight like Mongoose. He also added a firewall to the NSA. Checks and balances was the order of the day.

“Operation Lancer” was exposed within the Department of Homeland Security but remained classified within the very top echelons of the government. It was revealed to be an attempted hit on the younger Kyleford to get him from writing the report that implicated the CIA in the first place. The agency knew Kyleford had written one but had no idea where it was these past decades. It was a ticking time bomb as far as they were concerned, and the best solution was if it was never reported. They were willing to sacrifice John Kyleford’s contribution to history to diffuse that bomb. The entire plan, like the conspiracy, was a coverup.

It would never be known who sent Alek Hidell the map, despite the Mexican postage, but it was certain he never received it. Lee Harvey Oswald at least on that day, acted alone. Was he influenced by outside entities? Quite possibly.

What was a certainty is none of this would have come to light had not Professor Carlton Evers upon his return from the past contacted then Presidential candidate John Kyleford and blew the whistle on “Operation Lancer.” At first Kyleford was dismissive of the Professor, but Carlton knew he could convince him when he personally handed the President-to-be the FBI Special Agent badge Kyleford wore many, many years ago. Carlton had pilfered it as evidence, bringing it back with him from 1963, the year Kyleford mysteriously lost it.

Today is Tuesday. Professor Carlton Evers is staring again at Polaroid of Lori Sanders on the beach towel. He knows there isn’t enough data in that picture to risk another trip back in time. He also learned he had developed acute Leukemia from his first time-travelling excursion. The radiation exposure was never considered in the calculations. Its rapid progression meant he had months maybe weeks before he succumbed to the cancer. Carlton turned the photo over.

On the back of every Polaroid from that era there’s a ten-digit number representing the month of production, year of production, machine used, film type and day the film was produced. There’s a whole market on eBay for old Polaroid stock. Carlton ordered a box of the 600 film with that exact production number and found it. For a little less than 35 bucks he now possessed the same negative composite material needed. Added to Lori’s photo, it might provide enough data for the Haldon collider to send him back to Ocean City and 1983 and that beautiful beach day. If not, he had nothing to lose. Cancer and or Mr. X were waiting in the shadows.

This would be a one-way trip. But first a quick hack. By inputting a time code virus that could wipe clean all the data and software that controlled the Time Machine, Evers made sure no one could ever follow. There were too many unpredictable outcomes for his liking. It was better no one else have the power.

Carlton stepped into the chamber wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts, tank top under a blue Hawaiian shirt, knee socks, sandals and sunglasses from ’83. He wondered if he could be seen would his younger self and Lori figure out where he was from. He was going back not to engage but to observe one of the happiest days of his life. He would see himself as he wished to be remembered and Lori would be eternally young and not have died in a car accident the year following their meeting. He set the new composite photo of Lori Saunders into the slot revealing the faded inscription under the laser light. “2 Evers, 4 Ever. Love, Lori.”

Tentacles of blue lightning arced throughout the chamber followed by a blinding flash of blue light. Professor Carlton Evers was gone. History.