What If? Ch. 01

The Final Chapter in the complex work surrounding Kitty, Charlene and Tad. This is a dramatic twist in the story, and is in the SF section because it has little in the way of BDSM, so it's cross-filed. For those who have not read it before, it is recommended to read the works 'Battlefield' and 'Measure Of A Man' before diving into this final chapter in the life. This final chapter basically wrote itself, it evolved from a simple closure of the story into a complex reality altering tale that continued to make sense as it splashed onto the pages. It's name even changed, going through five different titles before it finally felt comfortable being simply called 'What If?' I may never visit this universe again, but as with any work I put on the digital domain, there is always the possibility that the characters will wake me up and ask me that same question ... 'What If?' I must put a shoutout to @SmallTownGirl and to @EagleJet1 who helped me to review and work out many details of this story to make it more concise and make sense, especially with my high-speed pacing. Even if you don't feel like you did a lot, ladies, you helped a great deal, and this final work is dedicated to the both of you. As always, comments and critiques are welcomed, enjoy the ride, I know I enjoyed crafting this tale.

Kitty got up on unsteady legs and sat on the edge of the bed. Last night was a blur. JJ and her had celebrated her 21st birthday the way he celebrated most things, by getting stinking drunk, but this time she had joined him, as much to feel the same level of numbness as to be a part of his world. The house smelled of stale alcohol and vomit. JJ had been sick, throwing up all over the bathroom before heading off to work, a bottle of Bacardi in his pack. Leaving her to clean up the mess and get the kids off to school. She reached over and pulled on a thin cotton dress that was all that he wanted her to wear when she was at home. If he wanted to fuck her, she was easily accessible, but decently covered if somebody came over.

At least now that she had given him two children, he was not as violent with her any longer. The Chattel Act of 1978 gave him the right that he had exercised twelve years ago when he had bought her after her parents and Aunt Charlene had been killed in that car accident. As an orphan child, she was an available property, and JJ had bought her for his use. The same act meant she was untouchable sexually until she was sixteen. Then he had made her his, and she had given him two children in twenty-three months. Now she was 21, the kids were growing up, and JJ was slowly fading into a drunken mess on a regular basis.

Chevonne and Jason were both quiet and obedient for their mother as she got them up, dressed, fed them porridge, and then they were off to wait for the bus to take them to the integrated school at the edge of town. Chevonne was in kindergarten and Jason was in Grade 1. Both of them tried very hard to please their mother and their sullen father, when he cared to pay them any attention at all.

As children of chattel, they were free as long as their free parent survived until they were sixteen. If JJ was killed, they would go on the auction block and would be sold to any one who had the cash to buy their writ.

Once they were both on the bus, it did not take Kitty long to clean up the puke in the bathroom and then get the rest of the house cleaned up. JJ would be home around 2ish, and she made sure there was food ready to cook, then got dinner prepared so it would be ready to serve once her Master Husband was home.

She sat in the kitchen, watching the pot slowly begin to boil as it began to cook the roast which was what JJ liked on Wednesdays, then she turned and gasped, dropping the glass of water she was carrying. It smashed on the ground at the feet of a girl standing in her kitchen, dressed in some sort of purple bodysuit that left little to Kitty's imagination.

"Who are you? Get out!" Kitty said in a quavering voice.

"I'm you, and this ... this is totally wrong." Said the other girl with a frown and Kitty realized as she heard the voice that she was looking at a mirror image, this was her, but not the same her, this was somebody different.

...

Mariah Catherine 'Kitty' Douglas was sitting in the lab, watching the team make the final calibrations on the device they had been assembling for the past eight weeks. She had been working with them, her ideas and insights as to the physics having been instrumental in the baseline for this experiment.

She had gone back to school at Charlene's urging, and had delved right into high-energy physics, something that had been tickling at the back of her head for years, but which she had not pursued. With Charlene and Tad's support, she had enlisted with U of Wash's physics team and quickly rose to the top of the class. She had a unique way of looking at the world, and her professors were amazed at the odd insights she had shown which meant some of their established ideas were being turned on their heads.

It was her work with Cerenkov wavicles and radiation that had gotten her this far. She had gotten the idea back in the first days of the class, when the Professor had been explaining just how Cerenkov radiation impacted the material world as it was supposed to show the effects of faster than light energies impacting in our world. Kitty, or Mariah as she liked to be called at Uni, had asked some oddball questions which the Professor had been unable to answer to her satisfaction.

Two weeks later, Mariah had been sitting with him after class, showing him a formula she had devised that explained her theory, Professor Scott had been amazed that this Freshman had actually devised a physics formula that not only looked like something Einstein or Hawking would write, but it made sense.

She spent the rest of that evening explaining the formula and her wavicle theory to him, and he had taken her out to dinner so that they did not have to be interrupted. Mariah smiled at the memories. Professor Scott was in the middle of the group building the Cannon, every once in a while he would glance over to where she sat and she'd smile at him, which he would acknowledge with a small thin smile of his own, then go back to work aligning the 21 Cyclotron generators.

Mariah had no problem at all seducing the older man. Since Charlene and Tad had been married, she had learned there was no shame in using her body to help get her what she wanted, because as long as nobody got hurt, it was all green for go. Professor Ian Scott was unattached, but he was older, 46 years old, compared to Mariah's 20, at the time.

However, he was a means to an end. Mariah had to get this thing built so she could make the change that would right the wrong. She knew what the end game was already, and it was approaching. Professor Scott and all the undergrad students working on the Cannon had no idea what it was going to really be used for, and Mariah would not tell them until after the cycle had begun, which would then become fixed and not able to be changed.

21 Cyclotrons arranged in a ring, wired in series. Each one building on the energy generated by the one before it. Each cyclotron running in an atmosphere of pure nitrogen. Only one exit portal for the energy being generated by the cyclotrons, towards an inner ring that was a reinforced glass torus filled with distilled and hydrogen-ionized water. Wrapped around that torus was a fine mesh of silver wire, with the gaps being exactly 2.2 millimetres, to prevent certain microwaves from passing but allowing all other energies free reign. In the middle, a space of precisely 718 millimetres circular, the energies would interact in such a way as to generate a Cerenkov flash.

The actual device was a lot more complex than just that, Mariah had designed the entire thing, and with Professor Ian Scott's help, had begun to assemble the group of Grad, Undergrad and Sophomore students who would actually build it, and not draw attention to themselves in the process.

"Ready for a calibration run." Ian said as he and the other students stepped out of the generator ring and the torus lowered down to complete the conduit linkage. Mariah got off her stool, walked over and gave him a solid kiss that showed both her self-confidence, and lack of concern for what anybody else thought about their relationship.

He was a good man, he was her lover, and Mariah was in love with him. Just not in a position or at a stage to marry him. That didn't stop her from fucking his brains out every night she could though. Tonight would be no exception, Ian would be worn out by the 20 year old's energy and attention and sleep with a very satisfied smile on his face.

Ian handed Mariah the control panel, wired to the system by an inch-thick cable that was wrapped in layers of electrical tape, and as everybody stepped outside the red, then the yellow taped lines on the floor, she looked around for a final visual check.

"OK – final checks people." Mariah said into the quiet.

"Cyclotron visual check, good. Power feeds online, green. Water torus filled and sealed, nominal bubbles. Calibration sequence ready, computers are powered up and ready to start the sequence." Came the responses from Karen, Ramon, Shaun and Teg, four of the students who had helped put the device together.

Mariah tapped a series of commands on the console in her hands and lights began to flash in series as each cyclotron began to spin up, handing it's charged particle load off to the next one in series as they all built upon the stepped energy of the unit before.

"Ten Thousand Electron volts." Came the report from Ramon who was keeping an eye on the cyclotron power meters. Mariah knew they had to hit 100 MeV, or Million Electron volts, even as Ian had tried to tell her weeks ago, that the Cyclotrons she had acquired for this could only output a maximum of 5 million eV's each.

Her response to that had been to sit him in his chair, pull up her skirt so she could straddle him, and then she had educated her older lover in the finer points of french kissing, before slipping down to the floor where she knelt, unzipping his pants, and then proceeded to show him just what a tongue piercing could do to his long and thin member.

He had been quite happy to allow her to seduce him, despite what the conduct rules were at the University, there was actually nothing that prevented a student and Professor from being intimate. Just as long as they were discrete, and that there was clear separation between course and personal life. No matter how well she fucked him, it would not earn Mariah an A grade in class, even as she was Triple-A in his bed.

"We're approaching a hundred thousand eV." Ramon reported from the power monitors. This test would only bring the unit up to a million eV. Enough to allow them to visually see the result in the middle of the chamber as the Cerenkov Radiation interacted with the mesh and energies to begin to make something incredible manifest.

Mariah recalled when she had first gotten wind of this. A letter being delivered to her house days before she had begun enrolment. Hand-written, dated from 12 years ago. The FedEx delivery man had told her they had instructions to hold this letter until this specific date, then deliver it. There was no return address, but it was her own hand writing.

She had since received nineteen letters, and knew that there was one more left to arrive. 21 letters to change her life and the lives of those she cared about. 21 letters to make sure people could have a happily ever after. 21 letters to ensure that events happened the way they needed to happen, and not just by fate.

The letters had given her the formula, the plans, and the instructions to seduce the professor to seal the initial deal. The letters had given her the ability to talk to him on his level, because Mariah had the knowledge, but the letters gave her the insight to be able to talk through the difficult questions asked of her.

"Two hundred fifty thousand eV. We're approaching the beginning of the cascade." Mariah nodded at Karen and made an adjustment to the console so the waveguide gateways between the cyclotrons opened to allow energies to overflow as they reached peak and begin to ramp up other devices, so they could share the power build and not overload.

"Back to green." She said, and everybody stepped back until they were outside the green taped line that surrounded the entire experiment. She knew the safe zone in the middle of the torus was secure, but around it, the cyclotron energies were unshielded microwave and radio waves that could do damage at the levels they were approaching. Luckily, the energies were short-lived, so the green line was beyond the distance the particles would travel before subliming into muons and quarks.

"Cascade is beginning, we're up to half a million eV and rising steadily." Ramon reported from the power console.

"When we hit around a million, watch the middle – you'll see something you've never witnessed before. This is history in the making, people." Mariah said.

"Seven hundred fifty thousand. Cyclotron six is showing strain, but it's still within levels." Teg reported.

"Begin a cycle down, we want to peak at a million fifty, not go much higher." Ian said, and adjustments were made to stop pumping raw power into the cascade, but to begin to taper it off.

"We're almost at a million ... now. One Million eV through the cascade. Going higher, but it's slow-Oh My God!" Mariah, Ian and all the other students were stunned as the energy peak did what the letter had described. In the middle of the torus, on the space where the letters had told her to make a very specific gap in the power guides, a glow had appeared. This was a vertical column of bright blue radiation, just like Cerenkov had predicted, but this was in air, not water, glass or any other medium. This was not standard physics any longer.

"Begin ramp-down." Mariah said and tapped a command that cut external power to the cyclotrons so they began to spin down and reduce the inflow of power. The blue column quickly faded and the system dropped it's energy levels until it was finally quiet.

Later that evening, the entire group of twelve students, Mariah and Ian were at the local having a brew and talking about what had occurred. The students were all buzzing with energy and excitement, this was something none of them had ever seen or even considered before.

Ian, on the other hand, was watching his young lover with some concern. Mariah was very quiet, smiling and laughing, but not adding to the conversation.

Finally, in a lull, he asked the question everybody had been wondering but had been too nervous to ask.

"What are we building, Mariah? You seem to know a lot more than you are letting on."

She looked at him, her eyes suddenly bright with unshed tears. "A doorway, Ian. With no fixed endpoint. That is what we have been building for the last eight weeks. It's getting ready, and then it will work, at least once it will be successful."

"A doorway to where, Mariah?" One of the students asked her.

"A door that will allow us, me, to fix a wrong. To make it right again. Once I use it, you can run all the experiments you want, you will learn so much in a short time, Ian." She laughed through her tears. "You will get the Physics chair at Uwash for this, don't even think that you won't. This will change the understanding of high energy physics forever." She sniffed and wiped her wet cheeks with the back of her hand, then finished the beer in front of her and got to her feet.

"I need to go to the ladies' room to freshen up. I'll be right back."

She walked into the back of the pub, into the ladies' room and used the stall, then stood at the mirror, carefully drying her cheeks and touching up her eyeliner and lip gloss as she thought about what the letters had also said. An error would occur that would convince her that she had to do this, and which would prove to everybody who mattered that this had to happen. According to the letter, that would be tonight.

She turned, and gasped. Mariah was standing face to face with herself. But this was not the same her, this was an older version. She could see fine wrinkles around the eyes, laugh lines, and her skin was not as supple any longer. This one also did not have the collar that Tad had given her a year and a half ago.

"Who are you?" She asked.

"I'm you. From your timeline's future." Came the reply in her own voice. The older woman was definitely her, but at least ten years her senior. She was dressed in a purple catsuit with thin silver piping that was very skintight. Mariah was sure she was naked underneath it, which was unusual now that she was in Uni, her wild days had settled down. Why would she be so exposed again?

"Is this the mistake that you wrote about?"

"Yes, you described the mistake in letter 20, and you gave it a date, today is that date. This is the test that failed, and which proves everything works." Older her said, then walked past to look at herself in the mirror.

"Eh, I've aged, kind of dramatically. Temporal physics can do that. It'll go back to normal once the power drops." She turned to face herself again.

"Take note of what I am wearing, and the lack of jewellery or identifying items. You will get this clothing and be ready on test eight. That is the test that will prove everything so you can do what you know needs to be done."

"Why are we doing this? The letters talk about an Event, and the Moment, but they do not detail why?" Mariah asked her older self.

"You'll find out, very soon. Everything will become clear and you will then know why you began this path. I cannot disclose information to you that you do not already know, other than how to prepare for my event. I know what has to be done, but I'm not there yet, I'm just a few weeks ahead right now." Older her explained, then stepped back and with a wave, vanished with a flash of blue energy.

Mariah leaned against the counter, breathing quietly and steadily. Then gathered her wits and went back to join the party with her team.

Later that evening, with Ian snoring contentedly beside her, feeling the gentle body aches that come after a good lovemaking session, Mariah sat in bed thinking. She knew all about Causality, Novikov's work on self-consistency, and the Parallel Worlds concept that the letters detailed.

What she did not know yet, was what event would occur, except that it would effect both Charlene and Tad, and cause her to focus only on the Cannon until the Moment, at which time things would occur. She still had one letter to come, the final piece of the puzzle.

Mariah rolled onto her side and snuggled until her bottom was pressed against Ian's side while her mind whirled. Hundreds of ideas and concepts spinning wildly though her consciousness, until she finally slept.

Test 1 – they could detect an unknown energy radiating from the Cerenkov flash in the middle of the shaft of blue light. No idea if it was radioactive, dangerous or what, and even as Mariah explained that it was a new form of wavicle, Ian stopped everything until they could analyze the energy signature.

Test 2 – The wavicle was named a Douglas-Scott energy wave. It allowed for temporal energy to flow around whatever was in the Cerenkov shaft, so an object could move through time at a different rate than the rest of the physical universe.

Test 3 – The object had to be living, immaterial objects simply did not transit, or if they did, they did not appear to change.

Test 4 – A mouse put in the shaft de-aged until it was just a baby, and then after being dissected, they discovered that it truly was it's younger self. It had travelled back in time, but had not moved, so it just lost time and shifted backwards.