SECOND CHANCES

SUN'S SUNSET

                                  It's 0600 and Chad's alarm goes off, he awakens reaching over to shut it off. He sits up thinking he wishes he had more time with Chandra last night and all of a sudden, his room feels so empty. He shakes it off, hops in the shower and gets dressed. He walks into the conference room at 0630 to find Sun and her staff going over her plans on an huge electronic whiteboard. She turns to Chad and asks, " Good you're early, I hope you are ready to make history this morning?" Chad replies, "Good morning, yes I am". He has figured out he must find a flaw in the nuclear power plants cooling system and disable it. Luckily the plant is completely automated so no casualties. The temperature should rise quickly without the coolant flowing properly, too quick to reverse and then "boom" within the hour. Sun's crew should become aware of the inevitable almost immediately so evacuations should begin ahead of the explosion.

                                   0700 Sun calls the planning phase to order. Since her goal is to take control of all the planetary government, she must determine how to replace each head of state whom she can't bribe. So she needs information that's either compromising or allows her some type of influence on everyone in every government. For instance, is anybody in crazy debt, a gambler, a married womanizer, greedy or power hungry. That is the mission she is giving Chad. He knows he has to stall until he has an opportunity to sabotage the power plant. He explains to Sun that gathering that much information and documenting it will take time since he has to rely on his memory of what he sees. He is unable to carry a recording device or any electronics into the 5th dimension. Sun asks if it is possible to read the electrical impulses directly from his mind while in the chair and Chad explains you could but translation into a useable report short order would be problematic if not impossible due to the time dilation factor.

                                    0900 The persons and approximate locations of Sun's targets are loaded into Chad's chair and he is ready to begin. As soon as he is launched, he immediately begins searching for the exact cause leading up to the explosion in that future he came across last night. He fails to find chain of events he is looking for so he decides to try another route. He travels further into future along that particular timeline looking for an after-action report investigation documenting the cause of the coolant system failure. He finds it, a Senator's aide is printing out a hard copy for presentation to the committee responsible for the investigation. It seems it was sabotage rather than an accident. Someone exploited a major software blunder of leaving the backdoor access the programming engineers used to get in off hours open when they should have deleted it.

                                         Armed with the information to cause the coolant failure and bring the desired timeline to fruition Chad concentrates on passing Sun false information about her political targets. He returns to the chair giving Sun what she wants to hear. It is 1300 hours and the explosion is documented to have occurred a couple minutes after 1700. He must get to the facilities main library to access a computer. He tells Sun he needs a break fo an hour and will then continue. Sun is not happy with the idea but reluctantly agrees only after he downloads the info he has received so far. Chad makes up enough info to keep her busy for a couple of hours, she is extremely satisfied.

                                        Chad goes straight to the main library and accesses the mainframe covertly and plants five lines of code that will automatically execute at 1650 hours and cause an unrecoverable catastrophic event in the coolant system to the plant. He wants to make sure Chandra is safe but finds she works in a restricted area for which he doesn't have clearance. He starts asking everyone he runs into in the corridors do they know her, but no one does, and he is due back at the chair. It is now 1400 hours and he has to go on another launch and be back in the chair by 1630 hours at the latest. He is worried about Chandra so when he is launched his only thought is to locate her in that future timeline. All he can do is look for her face among all the evacuees from the facility. He spends days in the 5th dimension searching for her with no luck. He eventually arrives back at his chair at 1630 hours their time.

                                          Sun is waiting for him for more information and Chad does not disappoint her, giving her more false information which he goes to download. Sun is reading over his shoulder and asks him "What's wrong?" "Nothing, just tired I guess" he says. At 1650 hours alarms began going off just as planned and Sun is informed of the coolant problem and orders the shutdown of the plant and to switch the facility to solar power. She's told the plant's meltdown is inevitable. "Nothing we can do" they tell her. She says, "Download all the facilities data to our Earth station and evacuate all non-essential personnel." At 1702 hours the reactor blows making a full evacuation her only option.

                                         Chad goes to the evac station trying to look at everyone getting on the ships, the last ship loads and he gets on looking behind him till the ramp closes.