Just Don't Die

For Worse

"By sheer luck, the shift went flawlessly. With the help of a math genius at our company, our careful calculations were close enough that we all woke up in the middle of the night during one of the few staff duty nights we all had at the same time. We knew it had worked as soon as we sat up from our cots and looked at each other. We discovered the shift headache, but due to the excitement and the fact that we had been drunk during our shift, it never had a chance to slow us down.

"Without needing so much as a word between us, we got up and started towards our task. We each filled out requests for leave from September 1st, 2001 to September 25th, 2001. We had agreed before the shift that not only would we prevent the technology we created from existing, but we would also prevent the terrorist attacks on September 11th from ever happening. We even gave the shift experiment the mission nickname of 'Two Birds.'

"Our plan consisted of each of us taking one of the flights we had committed to memory before the shift and stopping the attack. Before our assigned flight, we would each make an anonymous call from the airport to the fourth plane we couldn't be on. We assumed that three different calls from three different people reporting suspicious activity on that plane would ground it long enough for the authorities to find the other terrorists. We also knew that no one was expecting this attack, and if we had jumped up and tried to fight the hijackers, we would have likely been subdued by other passengers, not realizing the true danger. That meant the goal was to take out the hijackers without anyone knowing.

"I took the subtle route and simply held a knife to one of the terrorist's throats before they had a chance to take over and kept them from even attempting to take over the plane. I told them I was an air marshal and would take them to jail as soon as the plane landed. When they landed, they tried to make a break for it, just as I had assumed they would, and went back to their hideout. Unfortunately for them, the hideout had been public record in the original future, and I had already set up a reasonably innocuous gas leak that suffocated them before the morning.

"Kalvin took the less covert route and caught them in the airport bathroom before the flight. He had a syringe of Propofol, Fentanyl, and Rocuronium and injected three of the terrorists as they walked in. By the time they felt the pinch of the needle and turned to see what had happened, Kalvin would carefully catch them and lead them to a stall. He sat them on the toilet in the stall and walked out, knowing they would lose their airway within a matter of seconds. He walked back out and waited for the last two to come in to check on their friend, and repeated it twice more.

"It was you that made the big mistake. You walked up to them and told them in perfect Arabic that the plan was off. Then you sat on the plane to make sure they didn't do anything. It worked as much as they didn't try to hijack the plane, but they also didn't go to the hideout you previously booby-trapped. The terrorists all bought different plane tickets and dispersed.

"Overall, the plan was effective. No planes were hijacked, and no innocent lives were lost. The three of us went on our way and quickly worked on getting out of the military while investing everything we had in stocks that we knew would quickly make us millions. We all agreed to invest in all Graphene technologies and patent anything that could possibly lead to transfer technology. That would prevent anyone else from getting a hold of it." Adam again paused, this time with a grimace on his face.

"On May 17th of 2014, the second time through, Al-Qaeda's plan was allowed to come to full fruition in a coordinated attack across North America, Europe, and Asia. Since 9/11 never happened, the heightened airport security never happened, and over 70 flights took off, each with a suicide bomber with a wireless detonator that triggered a small amount of explosives surrounded by cesium-137. The immediate fatalities and injuries from the radiation poisonings numbered close to 900 million worldwide.