The prototype cargo plane rattled like a tin can full of marbles.
Jason gripped the freezing metal bench in the cargo hold. There were no seats, no insulation, and definitely no stewardess. Just crates of uranium ore, Sarah, and the deafening roar of two experimental engines.
"We're dropping altitude!" Sarah shouted over the noise. Her breath puffed out in a white cloud.
"Hughes is hugging the mountains!" Jason yelled back. "Radar evasion!"
"Radar doesn't exist yet!"
"It does if Hughes invented it last Tuesday!"
The plane banked sharply, the wingtip missing a granite peak of the Sierra Nevada by fifty feet. Jason's stomach did a barrel roll.
Up in the cockpit, Howard Hughes was laughing. Jason could hear him cackling over the intercom system.
"Turbulence is just the air saying hello, Mr. Prentice! Or maybe they're shooting at us. Hard to tell!"
Jason looked down at the file in his lap. It was shaking so hard the text was blurry.
Subject: Apex Industries.
Location: San Jose, California.
CEO: [REDACTED]
But Jason knew the name under the black ink.
Gates.
The fixer. The thug Jason had hired in 1907 to break knees and bribe judges. The man Jason had "killed" in a police raid to bury his secrets.
"He survived," Jason muttered. "How?"
Sarah leaned in, shivering in her leather jacket.
"He didn't just survive, Jason. Look at the purchase orders."
She tapped a page.
Order #409: Vacuum Tubes (10,000 units).
Order #410: Copper Wiring (50 miles).
Order #411: Babbage Loom Components.
"He's building a computer," Sarah said. "In 1920."
"He's a thug, Sarah. He can barely read. How does he know how to build a logic gate?"
Then, it hit him. The memory hit him harder than the turbulence.
The raid on Jason's apartment. Gates had been there before the police. He had ransacked the safe.
"My phone," Jason whispered.
Sarah froze. "What?"
"I brought my phone back with me," Jason said. "From 2025. It was dead. Brick. I kept it in the wall safe. A souvenir."
"Gates found it?"
"If he found it... he has the blueprint," Jason said, feeling sick. "Even if he couldn't turn it on. Just looking at the chips. The architecture. The concept of a circuit board. He isn't inventing, Sarah. He's reverse-engineering the 21st century."
The plane lurched again.
"Prepare for landing!" Hughes shouted. "Or crashing! It's a fifty-fifty shot!"
The landing was less of an arrival and more of a controlled disaster.
The plane bounced three times on a dirt field outside San Jose before skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust.
"Perfect!" Hughes announced, jumping out of the cockpit. He was wearing a tuxedo. "I didn't even spill my milk."
He handed Jason a bottle of milk. Jason ignored it.
"Stay with the plane, Howard," Jason ordered. "Keep the engines warm. If we aren't back in two hours, leave."
"I don't leave assets behind," Hughes said, checking his watch. "I'll give you three hours. Then I charge you for the parking."
Jason and Sarah moved out into the darkness.
The Santa Clara Valley was beautiful. Endless rows of apricot and cherry trees stretched out under the moonlight. The air smelled sweet, like blossoms and rain.
It was hard to believe this would one day be paved over with Googleplexes and Apple Parks.
"There," Sarah whispered.
In the center of the orchard, a mile away, stood an anomaly.
It was a massive concrete cube. No windows. Surrounded by a twelve-foot fence topped with barbed wire.
Floodlights swept the perimeter.
"That's not a fruit canning factory," Jason said.
They belly-crawled through the tall grass until they reached the fence line.
Jason raised his binoculars.
"Guards," he whispered. "North gate."
Two men stood by the entrance. They wore gray uniforms with no insignia. They held Thompson submachine guns.
But it wasn't the guns that made Jason's blood run cold.
It was their heads.
They were wearing bulky, metal headsets with long antennas jutting out like insect feelers.
"Walkie-talkies," Sarah realized. "Portable two-way radios."
"Motorola won't invent those for another twenty years," Jason said. "Gates is already equipping his infantry with comms."
"How do we get in?"
Sarah pointed to a junction box on the outside of the concrete wall. Thick cables ran from it into the ground.
"Power," Sarah said. "Or data. If I cut it, maybe it triggers a reboot."
"Or an alarm."
"Let's find out."
Sarah crawled forward. She took out a pair of wire cutters.
Snip.
Sparks flew.
The floodlights didn't go out. But a heavy mechanical CLUNK echoed from inside the bunker. Like a giant gear slipping.
"We bought a few seconds," Sarah said. "Move."
They scrambled over the fence. Jason dropped into the compound, pistol drawn.
They reached a service door. It was unlocked—probably due to the power fluctuation Sarah caused.
They slipped inside.
The noise hit them first.
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.
It sounded like a thousand typewriters firing at once. The air was hot and humid, smelling of oil and steam.
They were on a catwalk overlooking the main floor.
Jason looked down. His jaw dropped.
It wasn't a server farm. It was a loom factory.
Rows of massive, brass machines churned away, driven by pistons and steam pipes. Punch cards fed into them like ammunition belts.
"Mechanical computers," Jason whispered. "Babbage Engines. But electrified."
"He's running binary code on gears," Sarah said, amazed. "It's slow. But it works."
"Welcome to the future, Mr. Prentice."
The voice boomed from a loudspeaker.
Suddenly, a net dropped from the ceiling. A heavy, steel-mesh cargo net.
It fell on Jason and Sarah before they could move, pinning them to the catwalk grating.
"Dammit!" Jason struggled, but the net was weighted.
A door opened on the far side of the catwalk.
A man rolled out.
He was in a wheelchair. A polished, mahogany wheelchair with rubber tires.
He wore a pristine white suit. His face was older, lined with deep scars.
But the most striking thing was his leg.
His left trouser leg was cut short. Below the knee, there was no flesh. Just a complex framework of steel rods, pistons, and springs.
A mechanical prosthetic. Steam-punk cybernetics.
"Gates," Jason spat.
Gates rolled closer. The gears in his leg whirred softly.
"Please," Gates smiled. "Call me CEO."
He reached into his jacket pocket.
He pulled out a black rectangle. Cracked glass. An Apple logo on the back.
Jason's iPhone 15.
"It never turned on," Gates said, turning the dead phone over in his hands. "I charged it. I prayed to it. Nothing."
He looked at Jason.
"But I took it apart. I looked at the green cities inside. The chips. The logic."
Gates gestured to the room of thundering machines below.
"I didn't understand the magic, Prentice. But I understood the structure. On, off. Zero, one. Current, no current."
"You built a calculator," Jason said. "Congratulations."
"I built a network," Gates corrected. "We are processing targeting data for the British Navy. We are calculating artillery trajectories for the Red Army. We are optimizing supply chains for Standard Oil."
Jason froze. "You're selling to everyone?"
"Data is neutral," Gates said. "I am the arms dealer of the mind."
He rolled closer to the net.
"You split the atom in the desert. Very loud. Very messy."
Gates tapped his temple.
"But I am going to connect the world. And then... I'm going to sell the user data to the highest bidder."
He leaned in, his mechanical leg hissing.
"Who needs a bomb when you know what everyone is thinking?"