Who Made Who?
Who made who, who made you?
Who made who, ain't nobody told you?
Who made who, who made you?
AC/DC
On October 29, 1962, the President’s cabinet members, all 535 United States Congressmen, and the Pentagon’s top echelon (plus those who bribed them enough), took refuge from World War III inside a top-secret government relocation facility underneath the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia.
JFK’s negotiations with Nikita Khrushchev to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba had failed; the Soviet Union had just launched a full-scale preemptive strike on North America; the US had just retaliated with a strike of nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles on eastern Europe. In twenty minutes or so, the planet would become a mushroom-clouded, melting ball of radioactive smoke and ash; the ensuing nuclear winter would kill the rest of life on Earth. The Kennedy family, feeling the weight of failure, opted to observe the end of the world from the White House’s South Lawn.
Inside the bowels of salvation burrowed out just a few years earlier for this very occasion and protected by 25-ton blast doors, Military Aide to the President, General Chester V. Clifton; Deputy Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatric; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer; Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, and other former high-ranking officials of the former government gathered in the conference room. Covering one wall was a large pull-down map of Washington DC; on another, a mural of the US Capitol building posted behind a desk and television camera–relics, because in just a few long minutes, the building, the city and everybody in it, whether tv viewers or not, will be instantly evaporated.
The bunker was quiet, each Brass contemplating his own Doomsday regrets, until General Lemnitzer sighed and broke the silence.
“Well, this was a most unexpected conclusion of our work gone wrong,” he said in a meek, most un-commanding way.
“Are you referencing . . . ruing . . . the Manhattan Project, Sir?” McNamara asked without his own usual military-type bravado.
“No, Mr. Secretary. I’m ruing the more complex work during the war that Mr. Einstein and his colleagues had simultaneously accomplished at Princeton University.
The warmongers around the table wore that look of suddenly discovering that they had been left in the dark, absolutely.
Lemnitzer read their faces. “You have no idea. Not a clue, do you, gentlemen? Our splitting of the atom and the development of the bomb was merely the tip of the spear–simply the horrific reaping of the more top-secret, more nefarious, Operation Whirlwind, although most of us involved in the tightly-controlled loop just called it the Touch of God–TOG in it’s mandatory military acronym.” He chuckled, but not really.
“TOG was formulated on an aspect of unified field theory, a term coined by Einstein to describe–mathematically and physically–the interrelated nature of the forces of electromagnetism and gravity; this combined with his Theory of Relativity that proved that space and time are, indeed, linked together.” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stalled, not quite sure how to get his deep, dark confession off his medal-and-ribbon-infested chest.
Another precious minute crawled by before he could admit: “Officers . . . Secretary McNamara . . . the Philadelphia Experiment actually took place.”
Another long pause when life was quickly running out of long pauses.
“At zero five hundred hours on October 28, 1943, the USS Eldridge, netted in Tesla coils and 1-inch thick electrical cables, not only became invisible, but, yes, disappeared from the area and was teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, over 200 miles away. The escort destroyer sat for some time in view of men aboard the ship SS Andrew Furuseth, whereupon Eldridge vanished in a greenish fog and then reappeared in Philadelphia at the site it had originally occupied. And yes, the rumors that some crew members were physically fused to bulkheads while others suffered from mental disorders, some re-materialized inside out, and still others who simply vanished are likewise affirmative. Afterwards, the survivors were subjected to CIA brainwashing to maintain the secrecy of the experiment.” The general looked like a kid who got caught sneaking the last cookie.
“It is also affirmative that while the project in Los Alamos was an overwhelming success—as we can obviously attest to—and decommissioned, the Philadelphia Experiment continued on after the success with Japan, funded by dark money buried deep in the defense budget. Expanded upon. Perfected. Given the code name Whirlwind.”
He cleared his throat so he could choke out his big confession. “The United States of America has mastered time travel, gentlemen. These Frankensteins of physics, by creating and harnessing massive amounts of quantum energy, opened up a tunnel through time and space. A wormhole, as it were, to the past.”
A strong shockwave roiled the bunker, a preview of the one that would roil the entire continent in about thirteen minutes.
“After initial tests proved promising, we sent chimpanzees through this wormhole, sustained by tremendous amounts of cyclonic gravitational and electromagnetic energy. They were trained to find and bring back a coin from each of their time of travel we reconnaissance them to, for proof. They complied admiralty: a ten-dollar gold doubloon dated 1888 from Spain; a well-won Italian lira from the Renaissance, dated 1543; a drachma from classical Greece; a Lydian stater, dating from 600 BCE.”
Lemnitzer looked flummoxed, like he had just lost a battle.
“Next, we recruited human subjects–experts in mathematics, science, engineering, and warfare–to nudge along the human race when it needed nudging along. Our wormhole was busy–an optics specialist taught Galileo how to ground glass lenses, arrange them in a tube, and debunk the common belief at the time that Earth was the center of the universe. Another, good with numbers, sat with Euclid and gave him geometry lessons. The architect of the Empire State building led the construction of the pyramids at Giza. How far back in time could we go? The theoretical, philosophical, and ethical implications of TOG as we probed deeper into humankind’s past became less important than was producing more ‘butterfly effects’ for the benefit of future generations.”
Now Lemnitzer looked like he had just lost the war.
“On March 6, 1952, the TOG team took a Luckies break outside the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Their conversation mocked the theories of how our race developed intelligence: was Darwin correct? Or did a divine touch from God, as the religious believe, suddenly spark our collective cerebral cortexes? They laughed because they knew it was neither. The Frankensteins that day had just sent military strategists through the wormhole to create a rational creature from hominids.”
He took a drink of his cached bottled water and continued with his absolution.
“Operation Whirlwind generated longer time tunnels as we produced stronger wormholes. By God, gentlemen, we went back 2.5 million years to the East African Great Rift Valley. In our arrogance to play God, the team taught a tribe of Australopithecus africanus a more efficient, much more brutal and bloody, way of killing other than with sticks and stones–by using antelope femurs as clubs. A book was published just last year called African Genesis about the origins of man. The writer was a TOG team member sent there to document this overarching achievement. It’s a first-hand account.
“This, gentleman, is the true history of how mankind gained knowledge and his violent sense of self. What had we done? This requisition of budding intelligence that we gave them grew exponentially–the human race learned faster, more impactful ways to kill each other, which spread to every ancient culture to every ancient people. Had we not enlightened this band of monkeys in Whirlwind, we would not be here ticking down Earth’s annihilation in just a matter of minutes now. It’s truly the ultimate Grandfather Paradox.”
Military aide Clifton broke into the interlude of silence that followed. “We’ve just received a communique from the Air Force. Radar confirms Red missiles over Alaskan airspace.”
The collective fear was disarming.
“I will cut this short, so we might make our peace. Our time-traveling team members became gods to be worshiped; we laughed at their idolization. The ancient petroglyphs depicting interstellar beings wearing “spacesuits and helmets”? They were not gods or aliens who came down from the sky, but our team of chrononauts training the race and early civilizations to rely on their brains for battle, rather than brawn. Let their rock art be our chiseled tombstone—a deathly requiem—for meddling in Nature’s affairs For giving knowledge to a non-sentient being unprepared for the consequences of invention, of invention out of control. We went too far.”
Clifton made a second announcement: “The West Coast is gone. Chicago was Ground Zero in the Midwest. We have less than fifteen seconds.”
“You want to debate who had the touch of God? We gave a dumb creature thinking ability—a very dangerous attribute. He became our worst threat to his fellow creatures, to his fellow humans, and to the entire planet. Gentlemen, we have met the enemy and he is us. Dismis
By CraigE
From: United States
Website: https://spillwords.com/author/craigeharms/
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