Project J Read Free

for reversing the measured property of the particle.   Do this for all the particles in an object and you’ve created an exact copy.”
     
    “That doesn’t seem right,” Tamara said.   “You can entangle two particles across a period of time?”
     
    “That’s right.   We can entangle a particle here and now with any particle from anywhere and from any time.   The original experiments were carried out ten years ago.   We’ve come a long ways since them.   This is mostly because larger, faster computers are available now.   You know what a FLOP is?”
     
    “Floating Point Instruction.   A measure of computer speed,” she said.
     
    Giving her a weary glance, he continued, “Right, a FLOP is a floating point operation per second.   Right now the officially fastest computer in the world is in China.   It’s called the Tianhe-2 and runs at 33.86 petaFLOPS.   That’s thirty-three quadrillion instructions per second.   Ten to the fifteenth power.
     
    He smiled.   “But Lightning, that’s the name for our main computer, runs at one hundred petaFLOPS!”   Turning to Dr. Stryker, he added, “It’s too bad we can’t tell the world about Lightning.”
     
    “You know it’s classified,” Stryker responded.
     
    “Yes.   Well, as I said, we have been developing this entanglement of particles between the past and present until now we can actually reproduce an object from the past in the here and now.   Since each particle of the object will be identical to the original, it will be the same object.   There is absolutely no way you could tell the two apart.   Assuming, that is, you had some way of bringing them together. Which would normally be impossible.
     
    “We’ve run a number of tests of this principle and believe me, it works!   Gobbles up computer power like you wouldn’t believe!   But then you have to understand that we have to be able to entangle each and every particle in the object, reproducing it here and now precisely as it was at an instant in prior time.
     
    He paused, and looked at Tamara for reaction.   But all he got was a frown.   She had seen plenty of top secret projects in her work, but never anything as weird sounding as this.
     
    “And what is the good of this?” she finally asked.   “Besides an interesting and expensive science experiment.”
     
    “Don’t you see?   The military potential alone is tremendous!   Let’s say you want to know some technical secret hidden deep within a foreign country.   You just scan back in time to when that secret was written down, locate it – which is another development we discovered almost by accident – and you copy that piece of paper right here into the lab.   Would work well for industrial secrets.   Of course,” he admitted almost shyly, “a hell of a lot of historians, anthropologists, paleontologists and such would beg to get their hands on this if they knew about it.”
     
    “Which explains why this project is classified at the highest level,” interjected Dr. Stryker.
     
    “Yes, well, someday...” Crane muttered.
     
    “Just how far along are you?” she asked.
     
    The two men glanced at each other.
     
    “Pretty far.   Marshal, why don’t you show her the museum?”
     
    “Yes.   Good.   Come along, Miss Graves, I’ve got some interesting things to show you.”
     
     
     

 
     
    Chapter 2:   Trinkets
     
     
     
    The “museum” was just an office on the main floor, not far from the conference room.   But, unlike most offices, it lacked a desk or even chairs.   In fact, the only furniture was two tables and a couple filing cabinets.   The only adornment was a single framed picture on one wall.   Tamara walked over to it.   On a plain white background was a single piece of paper, only a few square inches, brown with some black markings on it.
     
    “That was our first object retrieved from the past,” Dr. Stryker told her.   “Well, except for test items from the near