The Time Catalyst

Miracles, Inc. Tower, basement laboratory; early Saturday morning…

Tadosh and Dr. McClain were initially waiting until they caught all three of the neo-Anarchists before Tadosh chronoported them all with him back to 2287. But since it turned out that they were nabbing the trio one at a time, they had to slightly change their plan. Tadosh didn’t want to take any chances that Drogheda and Tage would detect a chronoportation activity if Tadosh went on to teleport Stefan back to 2287 when they first caught him. That would have alerted Drogheda and Tage, thereby, making the new Solar Converter Receiver a new target for Drogheda. As it turned out, when Patrick made his international calls for special parts for a new Solar Receiver, they came in the next day of his request, just as he told Thomas that they would.

Rebooting the Solar Unlimited network so Patrick and Tadosh could chronoport Stefan and Tage back to 2287 did, in fact, require a lab-full of scientists. But Patrick was not going to risk telling any more people about the story of time traveling and the three Anarchists. Once again, after all this business with Drogheda and Tadosh was done, Patrick still had a life and career to think about! So, Patrick utilized everyone that did know of the episode, including Samantha, a great lawyer and professor but with no formal scientific background.

The other people Patrick called on to help out with rebooting the Solar Unlimited were, of course, from various scientific backgrounds. Thomas, Cheri, and Sonya all showed up that Saturday dawn. With Patrick and Tadosh—who was not a scientist either, to their knowledge, but a military man with practical experience with chronoportation—obviously being there, that made a total number of six people working on the Solar Unlimited. Considering it took most of the fifty special lab assistants to run Patrick’s project, six people was a very small number of people for the task.

They had to do a lot of improvising. Samantha had taken several scientific courses between high school and when she went to New York University, but it was not the same as the hands on experience as working in an actual lab. Patrick and Thomas heaped up some procedure files and handed them to her. She didn’t have to read through them, per se, but she had to read certain sections of the manuals.

Patrick, Tadosh, Cheri, Thomas, and Sonya would periodically yell out instructions to her from across the lab, sometimes three at the same time! During one of the procedures, Samantha mistakenly punched in the command sequence into a terminal that would have activated the solar energy flow from the Sun much too early. The result would have been the new SCR exploding and sparking an electrical fire on the roof of the Miracles Tower. With the Miracles skyscraper being around one thousand feet high, it would have been a long day for the Seattle Fire Department! However, Patrick rushed over to the terminal Samantha was on and killed the command with plenty of time to spare.

As all of this commotion was going on, Tage and Stefan remained blindfolded, gagged and bound to a couple of chairs in a corner of the laboratory. And for good measure, Tadosh had placed earplugs into both of the young men’s ears. The Miracles team had done this in case the Anarchists would utilize any of what they saw in the lab to their own benefit. The Miracles team had previously confiscated the two young men’s portable teleporters, Tage’s communicator, and their pouch of advanced equipment.

After about thirty minutes, Patrick and his people were ready to chronoport Stefan and Tage. Tadosh had a pre-written note for his superiors back in 2287. Patrick had Charles, his AI avatar, write the note for Tadosh. The note, placed in an envelope and taped onto Tage’s forehead, was basically a summary of what Tadosh was doing in 2008 and gave some updates.

Finally, Patrick went down the list of check offs for each procedure. This, too, took a bit of extra time since Tadosh, Thomas, Sonya, or Cheri had to run around and punch in commands throughout the fairly large lab. Samantha decided to stay out of this portion of the chronoporting. She quietly sat next to Patrick at the command console.

Earlier, Stefan and Tage, both still taped up and bound, were placed strategically next to the Solar Converter Receiver on the Tower’s roof by the Miracles crew after they had fully programmed the Solar Unlimited. The chairs they were on had wheels, so Tadosh took Stefan while Patrick wheeled off Tage. After Tadosh and Patrick pushed the men off of the maintenance elevator and out onto the roof, that was when Patrick noticed the door that led to the roof had its door handle blasted off. Apparently, the late-23rd century time travelers materialized next to the original Receiver and broke into the Tower via the maintenance door on the roof.

After Patrick had rattled off the procedural checklist back in the lab, Tadosh had pushed the final commands that engaged the Solar Unlimited. Patrick thought within himself about Tadosh’s warning that he should destroy the Solar Unlimited after Tadosh went back to his time with the criminals. He’s right, Patrick contemplated during the procedure, all this power from the Sun at my hands is addictive!

Using a special security camera that was mounted on the roof that had its images piped only to the basement lab, the Miracles crew was able to see a large flash of blue vapor and a storm of tiny lightnings, all whirling around the two seated figures. And, in an instant, they were gone.