The video screen began to show images of the wall being constructed. “Many reasons were given for the construction of the wall. Some said it was to protect the Amish from the war, and from the refugees who flooded the AZ after the destruction of the cities. Those were very real problems that needed to be addressed. Some said that the wall was designed to keep the Amish from openly trading with the rebels.” Amos had a sad look of chagrin on his face. “This was also a very real issue, I must admit.” He flipped his hand as if indicating some imaginary other group. “Still others—the more conspiracy-minded among us—believed that the plan all along had been to intentionally… How should I say this?” He made a flipping motion with his fingers, like he was turning on a light. “Transport… the AZ to New Pennsylvania.”
Jed was confused. “But there was already an AZ in New Pennsylvania before I even went through the emigration process,” Jed said. “I saw pictures.”
“That’s right,” Amos said.
“Which was before the war started.”
“That’s right. Think back on those pictures, Jed,” Amos said. “Did they look anything like the Amish Zone you found when you arrived here?”
Jed closed his eyes and tried to access that part of his memory. “Well, now that you mention it,” Jed said, “the brochures mentioned that the AZ in New Pennsylvania was still a tiny village. It never mentioned a wall at all.”
“Over thirty-five thousand miles of copper cable and wiring—debris from destroyed cities—was laid out in the construction of the wall. All the power lines, wire, and cable that existed in several major metropolises near the AZ. Not to mention all the steel rebar, re-mesh, and reinforcing materials that existed in the piles of rubble.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Jed asked.
“It has everything to do with everything,” Amos said. “Basically, the designers of the wall created the world’s largest portal—a huge Faraday cage that could take an unprecedented burst of pure energy and cycle it through the walls.”
Jed narrowed his eyes and chewed on his lip. He took a step closer and stared at the video screen. “You say ‘energy.’ By that do you mean electricity?”
“Everyone still uses the term ‘electricity’ to explain the energy that is produced by okcillium, but strictly speaking, it’s not electricity at all. It is a whole new thing altogether. It’s like the English using the term ‘horsepower’ to describe the locomotive force produced by their automobiles. It is something people understand because when the term was coined it hearkened back to what they used to know. But it is not strictly accurate.”
Jed nodded. “So okcillium produces an enormous amount of energy, right? Enough to fundamentally affect the physics around us?”
“It does,” Amos said.
“To bend time?” Jed asked.
“Yes,” Amos said. “To bend time.” He brought up the image of a large coil of cables suspended in the center of what looked to be a laboratory. “The first okcillium portals were very simple and small-scale. How the scientists figured out that there was a where—a real location, even if they didn’t know where the where was—where all of the stuff that disappeared through this portal was going, is a story in itself. Books could be written on the experiments that happened in a very short window of time.”
“‘Window of time,’” Jed said and smiled. “Very clever.”’
“Unintentionally so,” Amos said with a dismissive wave. “Through trial and error, and a whole lot of math, the people running the experiments were able to—in a general way—control the process, and even came up with a way to send a human through the portal and bring them back. They didn’t really go anywhere. It was time that moved, not them… but that’s a lecture for another day. Anyway, within a few years the phenomenon had been perfected, and Transport had the okcillium portal built into the Transport Station at Columbia. The emigration system—the whole process—was really an elaborate ruse designed to colonize New Pennsylvania while leaving the rebellion and all elements of TRACE behind.”
“Wow,” Jed said.
“Yes. Wow. They hoped to steal away with millions of potential slaves, and leave the rebellion behind on a planet they’d ruined.”
“So they… they… took the whole AZ?”
Amos nodded. “Of course, at the beginning they were just taking people, like you and hundreds of others. They’d built in the nine-year delay to explain away the distance traveled and so forth. But as the war heated up, they changed their plan. They took the whole AZ, and all at one time.”
“Unbelievable!” Jed said.
“All it required was a low-yield okcillium explosion, perfectly placed and timed, to send the whole Zone away… into the future. Or, if you prefer, into another dimension.”
“That sounds impossible,” Jed said.
“With all prior technologies, it was,” Amos said. “And frankly, they didn’t know it would work. A lot of good Amish folk died in the translation. Including…” He trailed off.
“Our parents.”
Amos couldn’t answer. He just nodded. Both men were silent, and the old man wiped away a tear. After a long period of quiet reflection, Amos continued. “There were a lot of fires… I… can’t even think about it without…”
Jed nodded. “I understand.”
Amos gathered himself and cleared his throat. “But okcillium changed everything. It allowed for a shocking amount of power to be transmitted down wires and through metals without it creating much heat or resistance. You know that when electricity flows through a coil of wires it produces electromagnetism, right?”
Jed shrugged. “I guess. But I never really thought about it.”
“In effect,” Amos said, “Transport did the same thing. Only with the astronomical amount of energy produced by okcillium, the process created enough gravitational disruption to transport the entire Amish Zone.”
“So… where did it go?” Jed asked.
“The Amish Zone? Well, in a way it went here, to New Pennsylvania. It became part of the reality of this new place.”
“In a way?”
“My scientist friends tell me it never went anywhere. Einstein, they say, talked of time as if it were a long, lazy, meandering river, and said that everything along that river of time always existed at that place. We perceive time as passing because we are traveling along with the river. But if we could go back up the river, we would find that everything that has ever happened is still happening back where we’d been. So, in this sense, the Amish Zone never went anywhere. The Zone stayed in place. The time around it changed. In essence, you could say that the zone just changed epochs or dimensions, but in reality it never moved.”
Jed’s mind spun. “And New Pennsylvania is the Earth in the future?”
Amos laughed. “Well, that’s the joke of the thing, brother. We don’t know for sure.” Amos threw his hands up as if his guess was as good as anyone’s. “No one does. We think so. Much of the old world was still present in the new one. Basements in Columbia were still intact when New Pennsylvania first began to be explored. You just recently saw the foundations and ‘tells’ of our old farm. In some ways it was as if the community was just transported forward in time. New Pennsylvania was very much like the Earth… but in the future.”
Jed had a pensive look on his face, and he narrowed his eyes at his brother. “Very much like?” He said. “But in some ways it was different?”
“In some ways it was remarkably different,” Amos said. “The Great Shelf, for example. The geography of the planet is fundamentally changed in a lot of ways. So it’s like I said… very much alike, but also changed. The Great Shelf looks as though the New Madrid fault, running through the Midwest, suffered a massive, world-changing earthquake that elevated the land to the west of it, and created the massive cliffs we call the Shelf. That event would have changed the makeup of the continent forever.” Amos looked at Jed, scanning him to see if the young man believed what he was being told. “The Mississippi River, for another example, isn’t there anymore.”