L Laura
With a high-vis vest and a clipboard, you can get almost anywhere...Almost.
L Laura
[Barbara leads The Protagonist into a secure room]
No small talk. Nothing that might reveal who we are or what we do.
I thought I was here to find out what we do.
L Laura
You're not here for "What", You're here for "How"..."What" is your department and not my business.
Well, to do what I do, I need some idea of the threat we face.
L Laura
As I understand it, we're trying to prevent World War III.
L Laura
No. Something worse.
L Laura
One of these bullets is like us, traveling forwards through time...The other one's going backwards...Can you tell which is which?
L Laura
How about Now? [Barbara holds out her hand out and bullet flies from table into her palm] It's Inverted. It's entropy runs backwards. So, to our eyes, its movement is reversed. We think it's a type of inverse radiation triggered by nuclear fission.
L Laura
No, we don't know how yet.
So, where'd it come from?
L Laura
Someone's manufacturing them in the future. They're streaming back at us...Try it.
[Holds out hand over Bullet that doesn't move]
L Laura
You have to have dropped it.
[Places hand over Bullet as if he just dropped it, Bullet flies up into his palm]
How can it move before I touch it?
L Laura
From your point of view, you caught it...But from the bullet's point of view, you dropped it.
But cause comes before effect.
L Laura
No, that's just the way we see time.
Well, What about free will?
L Laura
That bullet wouldn't have moved if you hadn't put your hand there. [Plays a recording of the interaction with the bullet both forward and backward] Either way we run the tape, you made it happen. Don't try to understand it. Feel It.
[Bullet begins to move backwards on table from Barbara's fingertips to The Protagonist hands]
Instinct. Got it.
[Points gun at wall and multiple bullets fly into the gun]
Why does it feel so strange?
L Laura
You're not shooting the bullet, you're catching it.
Whoa. [Walks up closer to the wall] I've seen this type of ammunition before.
L Laura
Then you were exceedingly lucky. An inverted bullet passing through your body would be devastating. Not Pretty.
L Laura
They may have been made today and inverted years from now.
L Laura
Came with the wall. I was assigned it, like all the material I'm studying here.
Do you have an analysis on the metals?
The mixture of the alloys can tell me where they might have been made. Look...I'm not seeing Armageddon here.
L Laura
The bullet may not seem like much, but it's a simple machine...Lead bullet, brass casing, gunpowder. If they can invert that, I see no reason they couldn't invert pretty much anything. Even a nuclear weapon can only affect our future...An inverted weapon might be able to affect our past as well. [Opens a drawer of random items that have been inverted] Now that we know what to look for, we're finding more and more inverted material. Remnants of complex objects.
[Holds hand over one of the items that flies into his palm]
What do you think we're seeing?
L Laura
The detritus of a coming war.
