Three months later.
The Ghost Ranch had transformed. It wasn't a school anymore. It was a factory of the impossible.
The main adobe hall had been gutted. In its center stood The Pile.
It looked like a giant, ugly beehive made of graphite bricks. Wires snaked out of it like ivy, connecting to a wall of erratic gauges.
In the corner, Robert Oppenheimer sat cross-legged on a crate, smoking a chain of cigarettes. He looked gaunt, his eyes burning with a feverish intensity.
"Criticality in ten seconds," Oppenheimer announced. His voice was calm, almost bored.
Jason stood behind a lead-lined barrier with Einstein. He wore dark welding goggles. The air in the room tasted metallic—ozone and ionization.
"The cadmium control rods are fully inserted," Einstein whispered, checking his clipboard. "We pull them out slowly. Inch by inch."
"Do it," Jason ordered.
Oppenheimer turned a hand-crank. Ratchet. Ratchet.
The central rod rose from the pile.
Click. Click-click.
The Geiger counter on the table began to chatter. A slow, rhythmic static.
" Neutron flux rising," Einstein murmured. "Keep going."
Ratchet. Ratchet.
Click-click-click-click.
The sound accelerated. It sounded like rain on a tin roof. Then like a roaring waterfall.
A soft blue glow began to emanate from the gaps in the graphite bricks. It wasn't reflected light. It was Cherenkov radiation—the air itself ionizing from the sheer speed of the particles.
"Self-sustaining reaction achieved," Oppenheimer said. He took a drag of his cigarette. "We have fire."
Suddenly, the needle on the temperature gauge spiked. Red zone.
"Heat anomaly in Sector 4!" Einstein shouted. "The graphite is cracking!"
A hiss of steam erupted from the pile. A coolant line had ruptured.
"Scram it!" Jason yelled. "Drop the rods!"
Oppenheimer yanked the emergency lever.
Nothing happened.
"Jam!" Oppenheimer shouted, losing his cool for the first time. "The mechanism is jammed!"
The blue glow brightened. It was blinding now. The Geiger counter was screaming a continuous, high-pitched wail.
If the pile melted down, they were all dead. The radiation would cook them in seconds.
Jason didn't think. He vaulted over the lead barrier.
"Jason, no!" Sarah screamed from the doorway.
Jason grabbed a heavy wrench from the workbench. He ran toward the glowing, hissing monster.
The heat hit him like a physical wall. He could feel his skin prickling—the atoms in his own body vibrating.
He jammed the wrench into the stuck gear of the control rod mechanism.
He heaved.
"Go down, you bastard!" Jason grunted.
SNAP.
The gear broke free. The cadmium rod slammed back down into the core with a heavy THUD.
The blue glow vanished instantly.
The Geiger counter slowed. Click... click... click.
Silence returned to the room, broken only by Jason's heavy breathing.
Einstein rushed over with a radiation detector. He waved it over Jason.
"High," Einstein muttered. "But not lethal. You were lucky, Herr Prentice."
Jason dropped the wrench. His hands were shaking.
"It works," Jason said, staring at the black pile. "We split the atom. And it tried to kill us."
"Prometheus got his liver eaten," Oppenheimer said from the corner, lighting a fresh cigarette. "We just got a sunburn."
That night, the desert was silent.
Sarah sat in the radio shack—a small shed filled with stolen military surplus receivers. She was scanning the frequencies, looking for government chatter.
Jason walked in, holding a bottle of tepid whiskey.
"Celebrate?" Jason offered.
Sarah ignored the bottle. She was wearing headphones, pressing them tight to her ears. Her face was pale.
"Jason, listen to this."
She unplugged the headphones and flipped a switch. The speaker crackled.
It wasn't a voice. It wasn't Morse code.
Screech-bloop-ksshhhh-ding.
It was a rhythmic, digital screeching.
Jason froze. He knew that sound. He hadn't heard it since 2024.
It was the sound of a dial-up modem. A digital handshake.
"That's impossible," Jason whispered. "This is 1920. Digital data transmission doesn't exist."
"It's on a loop," Sarah said. "Broadcasting every hour on the hour. It's encrypted, but the structure... it's binary. Zeros and ones."
Jason leaned over the console.
"Can you triangulate it?"
Sarah turned a dial. "I've been trying. It's weak. But it's coming from the West Coast."
She pointed to a map pinned to the wall. A red pin was stuck in California.
"The Santa Clara Valley," Sarah said. "Just south of San Francisco."
"Silicon Valley," Jason murmured. "But right now, it's just fruit orchards."
"Someone is growing something else there," Sarah said. "Jason, is there another Traveler? Someone else from the future?"
Jason stared at the radio. The screeching continued. Ksshhhh-ding.
"Or maybe," Jason said slowly, "we broke history so badly that the timeline is leaking. We accelerated nuclear physics by twenty years. Maybe computing is accelerating too."
"Who could build a computer in 1920?"
"I don't know," Jason said. "But we need to find out. Before they download us."
The next morning, the sound of an engine woke them.
Not a truck engine. An airplane engine.
A silver monoplane circled the mesa. It was sleek, aerodynamic—far more advanced than the biplanes of the Great War.
It banked sharply and came in for a landing on the dirt strip Jason's men had cleared.
Dust billowed as the plane taxied to a halt near the lab.
Ricardo and his bandits surrounded it, rifles raised.
The cockpit canopy slid back.
A tall, lanky man climbed out. He wore a perfectly tailored suit, a fedora, and dark aviator sunglasses. He carried a leather briefcase.
He didn't look at the guns. He looked at his shoes. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dusted off a speck of dirt from his loafer.
Then he looked up at Jason.
"Mr. Prentice!" the man shouted over the dying propeller. "I hear you have a battery that never runs out!"
Jason walked forward. He recognized the face from history books and movies. The obsessive genius. The billionaire aviator.
"Mr. Hughes," Jason said. "You're a long way from Hollywood."
Howard Hughes smiled. It was a dazzling, manic smile.
"Hollywood is boring," Hughes said, stepping down. He kept his hands in his pockets—he didn't shake hands. Germs. "I'm interested in the future."
He looked at the adobe building where the pile sat.
"My engineers tell me you're emitting enough radiation to sterilize a goat from five miles away. Impressive."
"What do you want, Howard?"
"I want to fly faster," Hughes said. "Gasoline is heavy. Engines are loud. I want electric flight. Silent. Endless range."
He pointed to the lab.
"I want your Blue Battery."
"It's not for sale," Jason said. "And it's not safe."
"Safety is for pedestrians," Hughes scoffed. "Look, Prentice. I know you're stuck. The Feds are north, the Reds are south. You need logistics. You need supplies. You need a friend with an air force."
Hughes gestured to his plane.
"I have twenty of these. I can fly in uranium. I can fly in food. I can be your Amazon Prime."
Jason raised an eyebrow. "My what?"
"Never mind," Hughes said quickly. "The point is, I have resources. You have the tech. Let's make a deal."
Jason considered it. Hughes was crazy. Unstable. But he was powerful. And he was the only capitalist left who wasn't afraid of the government.
"I need information first," Jason said.
"Shoot."
"There's a signal coming from California. Silicon Valley. Digital encryption. Do you know who's operating there?"
Hughes's smile faded. He looked nervous. He glanced around the empty desert.
He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a file. He tossed it onto the dirt in front of Jason. He wouldn't hand it over directly.
"I tracked that signal too," Hughes said quietly. "It spooked my radio guys."
Jason picked up the file.
"It's a shell company," Hughes said. "Apex Industries. They bought a thousand acres of orchards last month. They're building a campus. High security. No windows."
"Who runs it?"
"A ghost," Hughes whispered. "The CEO is listed as 'John Doe.' But my private investigator got a photo."
Jason opened the file.
There was a grainy black-and-white photo of a man stepping out of a car in San Francisco.
He wore a suit. He looked older. A scar ran down his cheek.
But Jason knew him.
It was Gates.
The fixer. The man Jason had "killed" in New York two years ago to cover up his past.
Gates hadn't died in the raid. He had survived. And he remembered.
And now, he was building computers in California.
"He's not just a fixer anymore," Jason realized, staring at the photo. "He's a competitor."
Jason looked up at Hughes.
"Deal," Jason said. "You get the battery. I get the air force. We have a war to fight on two fronts now."