The Future Awaits
1 Synchronization
Distant Future
Emma was out celebrating her one hundred seventh birthday. In another three years she would officially cross into middle age. She was beginning to wonder if living longer was all that great. She was leading the extraction of people from some five hundred years ago so they could be processed and then sent back to an ancient time. The goal was to bolster the currently failing human DNA by strengthening the DNA early in the development of the human species.
She often joked about the ability of scientists being able to extend life but failing to learn how to maintain the health of the fundamental building blocks that made humans human.
Her team had learned how to manipulate time by folding space. She and a team had developed the mathematics that defined how space and time could be folded and manipulated. In essence they had learned to create the fold.
They could capture objects from the past if the objects were at the exact point of the fold.
Positioning the physical extraction unit to an exact fold position of the object to be extracted turned out to be a major extraction obstacle. They had not figured out how to move the target object to them, they had to physically be at the exact extraction site at the moment of capture.
Emma had lost count of the number of failures of positioning their equipment at exactly the right physical position.
She had become, anthropologist, cartographer, and an expert in dynamic topography in her attempts at accurately positioning her equipment.
Five hundred years of topographic and positional change needed to be exactly understood and compensating adjustments made.
Once she focused on the historic events that got detailed news reporting and coverage her extraction success rate went up dramatically. These were most often catastrophic events in large cities.
Getting her first extraction was dramatic for the extraction effort.
Her extractions were still crude. Their extracted subjects all suffered fresh bone fractures when they appeared in the extraction landing area
Once these subjects were healed, they were reinserted into the past.
The success of their six re-insertions were unconfirmed. They had no way knowing.
Their only check on their success was to monitor the condition of the Human DNA and determine if there was any improvement. So far, she and the team had not been able to see a single improvement.
Emma concluded that the cycle of extraction, reinsertion and then seeing if the DNA history improved was a million was a times worse than looking for a needle in a haystack.
She was looking for a breakthrough.
Emma walked through the extraction unit in historic downtown New York City. She and her team were on the ninety fifth floor of the Great American Tower. It was the location where American Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of The World Trade Center. Their goal was to extract the three people sitting in coach in the first row of the right-hand side exit windows.
The unit was as accurately placed as Emma could ascertain the exact location of the plane, and the seats. She hoped the details she had gleaned from months working with her team to determine the exact position of the three were accurate.
She had spent weeks negotiating the access and use of the space. The owner and renters were co-operative once they learned she had the right of eminent domain. She had spent extra time educating them and, in the end, they were very co-operative. They made a point of highlighting the cooperation to the press. Emma threw in a good word for them.
Current Time
Adam was the product of working hard for his father on their ranch, playing hard on the slopes of Grand Targhee Ski resort and of studying hard because he was hooked on learning.
His Dad used hard work as a way to instill what he called “character and excellence.” By character, his Dad meant honesty, integrity, and respect for all individuals and the will to achieve. By excellence, his Dad meant doing your best at what you set out to do and later looking back and figuring out how to do better.
His Dad and he had gone through scouting together. His Dad led the Cub Scout Pack. Later they both progressed together to a Troop his Dad led. Hiking the many trails through the Teton was a summer event for the Troop. Adam’s Eagle Scout project was to create a map of the hiking trails and to create connecting trails to create a new trail from Alta across the Tetons to Jackson Hole.
Adam and his team of about twenty scouts spent almost two years in connecting and mapping thirty-five miles between Alta and Jackson Hole Wyoming, through the Teton mountain range.
Adam’s mother simplified her teaching to a simple phrase “treat others the way you wish to be treated.” She was always there to support Adam.
Loving his parents, learning from them, growing up on the ranch. What more could he want?
He worked at school hard as or harder than he worked on the ranch. School was a treat for him. He did not care for sports and his Dad did not push him in this area. Adam fell in love with the history of the Greeks and Romans.
The details of Alexander the Great’s travels and battles were all played out when he rode his horse around the ranch or through the mountains. The fact that Alexander had accomplished this in the years before he died at the age of thirty-three made Adam feel like an underachiever.
He graduated from Teton High in Driggs, Idaho at the top of his class and was accepted into MIT where he studied Mechanical Engineering.
Adam was hooked on history, hooked on the evolution of technology, hooked on how equipment and machinery transitioned from early and almost useless innovation like the engine to sophisticated power plants that provided the world with electricity.
The best vacation he had ever taken was the tour of the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit with his Mom and Dad over an entire spring break. The transition of the technological transition from an early invention into the modern and useful tool was fascinating to him.
In the MIT laboratory he proved he could make the common slant six engine achieve fifty miles to the gallon. He wondered about the fact that if he could do it, why the big three had not done it.
Four years and graduation came much too fast. The job interviews were discouraging. The jobs seemed to go from just acceptable to really boring. He received three very good salary offers that would have been financially lucrative, but they all seemed boring.
His Dad rescued him when he asked him to help out on running the Horn family Ranch.
Working the ranch and not having any schoolwork was a refreshing experience. His skiing skills improved dramatically. Junior his horse and he traveled new trails and fished new streams for trout every weekend.
One day Junior faltered. Adam realized that Junior was now no longer junior. Adam put Junior out to pasture with the other horses. Junior would have a few more good years, but time had caught up.
Adam suddenly became acutely aware that time was passing, and he had not accomplished any of the things in his earlier dreams.
Involvement in the details of running the ranch had given him an appreciation for the financial and business acumen needed to be successful. He became more impressed with his parents capability.
He decided that he would get a master’s degree in either finance or business administration. He took a GMAT preparation class offered at Teton High.
He did fairly well. He was at the top end of the top tenth percentile.
He decided to aim as high as he could and applied at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Stanford, Brown, and Columbia.
He was surprised to get accepted at Stanford and Dartmouth.
Adam selected Stanford, during his jog of the wide-open campus with its buildings set purposely far apart, and the sunny pleasant seventy-degree weather, spiced by the roller blading long legged young women. He was sure he would get a good education as well.
The business courses seemed unusually simple to him. He often walked out of class with his homework done.
He spent more time in the Gym than on his class work.
He tried the beach scene, but the water was cold and laying on a towel in the sun did not attract him.
He realized one morning his time at the university was almost at an end. He needed to make a critical decision.
What was he going to do with his life? It was interview time.
The graduate support office posted the company interview schedule. The postings did not inspire him. Dull, Dull, Dull, Dull, seemed to follow his reading of each company description. Ranch life was beginning to look better all the time.
None the less he prepared a resume. He studied each company to understand their business. Several of the larger companies offered management development programs with six-month assignments to three or four parts of their business. These were the ones Adam applied to interview. He hoped he would find a home in some part of their business.
His lack of interest must have come through in his interviews. Only one company made him an offer.
He of course accepted but negotiated a start date six months in the future.
He decided to take his Dad up on the advice to see the world before starting to work.
The Horn Ranch trust fund, as his Dad called the family ranch, would pay the way.
Adam spent a month in Asia. He spent a week each in Japan, Korea, China, Thailand, and Cambodia.
In Cambodia he spent a week in the Angkor Watt region. This was a piece of history never covered in his history studies. He had accidently discovered the Angkor site when researching his round-the-world trip.
The region was huge and the number of temples, dating back before the Greek and Roman Empires, were so numerous he wondered how historians had overlooked such an immense and long-lived empire.
He then went to India to see the Taj Mahal. This was a tomb built to commemorate love. He stood for a long time looking at this tomb wondering about the details of a love affair that could lead to such a symbol.
His stops in Europe include Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and England. He spent two weeks in each country.
Each yielded yet more ammunition to a mounting sense of his under-achievement.
He now watched the Coast of New York come into view as he landed at La Guardia. He had gone around the world and was now going home before starting his working career.
He was slowly recalling the last few months as he watched the Coast of New York come into view. The plane was landing at La Guardia.
Adam had gone around the world and was now returning to the ranch before starting his working career.
Adam walked to the gate where his flight to Idaho Falls was scheduled to depart. He had been able to get an emergency exit seat but had to settle for a middle seat.
He was the first of the three and sat down but left his seat belt hanging loose.
He watched and tried to guess who would sit next to him.
Hanna had rushed back to LaGuardia to make her flight back to the west coast. She had stayed with a friend in Harford and together they had participated in the Harford Marathon. The two had finished in the main body of participants and were happy with their showing.
They then participated in the Monster Trail Marathon held in Virgil, New York.
Two Marathon in two weeks had been a challenge they had shared with each other in their senior year together at the University of Washington.
She had trained long and hard. She had run strong. She felt great about the results.
Hanna looked back at her academic experience and realized that it was the environment that provided her the transition, from being the daughter of a successful charter fisherman, as she fondly thought of her parents, to realizing her own success in the same field.
Hanna now managed an all-female run and staffed charter fishing boat she had purchased, reconditioned, and renamed, “Big Fish.”
Her best friend Cathy, now residing on the east coast, ran the financial and advertising side of the business. Cathy had developed an advertising campaign using a handsome muscular bare chested male model and some scantily clad female models. The advertising blurb was, we bait, we hook, we catch, “Big Fish”
The crew V cut T shirts had the words, “Big Fish” across the front and the picture of a big fish on the back.
Several roadside billboards with the same picture, a few local and selected TV ads, some local radio spots, and conversations on twitter and U-tube completed the advertising campaign.
Her fishing charter business was an immediate success.
Her boat was constantly full of young attractive men.
Her reservations were full through the entire summer into the fall.
Her crew members were very happy and split a significant tip jar after every cruise.
The fact her boat was twice as productive as her parents became the family joke.
“The guy’s come fishing but not for fish,” her father accused her.
Hanna laughed, agreed, and wondered about the gullibility of the other sex.
Cathy contacted her with the dual marathon challenge at Christmas. From January to June, Hannah entered three local Marathons.
When August came, she was ready for the double.
The summer fishing had been very lucrative. It was not the best time to leave but she got the previous owner of the Big Fish to act as captain for a month.
This allowed her to go for the month to get ready for the double marathon.
She had gotten the emergency row and felt lucky to have the extra room. None the less it was going to be a long trip back to the west coast.
She looked enviously at the first-class seats and wished she had paid to sit up front. She could afford it, but it seemed so excessive to her.
She found it hard to let go of the money she was at last earning.
When she located her seat, she realized she would be sitting next to a rather handsome guy. She hoped he was single and a good conversationalist. It would be great to meet someone she might want to date.
She smiled at him and said hello as he stood to let her get to her window seat.
His reply was a simple Howdy.
Her hopes sank. She was of the opinion that cowboys never talked very much because cows can’t talk.
Hanna rescinded herself to a long, quite flight.
Eva Wilkerson walked confidently on to the plane. She was on her way to Alaska for her first true vacation.
She was a Boston, Bean Town, subway rat.
She was in the seventy fifth percentile in her high school class. To her amazement she had received a scholarship to Brown University based on the articles she had written about her travel to every stop on every line of the Boston Subway system.
These articles were printed by the Boston Globe on a on a weekly basis.
Eva found her inner self at Brown. She took up Tae Kwon Do and it became a passion. The concentration and focus she learned in Tae Kwon Do carried over into her classroom work. She soon was recognized for achievements in both areas. She zoomed to the top of her class in both camps.
In her campaign for class president that was focused on individual responsibility, she sparred with individuals labeled with the election issues. She won each match, and she won the election as well.
She was elected by a landslide.
In four years, she earned her bachelor’s degree in business and achieved Black Belt status.
She surprised herself by accepting a job at Victoria Secrets as a purchasing agent.
Every time she thought about her career choice a smile would come to her. She was perfectly matched for the challenge of all the jerks who thought women were meant to be in skimpy bras and panties. She knew she could kick their butt.
She secretly liked these skimpy outfits but had never found the right guy to really make them useful.
She was geared for success and was moving successfully up in the Victoria Secrets organization.
The years were now beginning to take their emotional dues. She had not found Mr. Right and she was not sure she would find him anytime soon. She had just dropped her latest Mr. Right, as he went wrong.
None the less, she had a swagger and high energy to her walk. She had just competed in and taken first place in a Tae Kwon Do tournament. At five foot four, she was the smallest competitor and had overcome her much bigger and often stronger but slower rivals.
Her mantra that she repeated before every competition was, “I am tall, I am strong, I am fast. Tall, strong, fast. Tall, strong, fast.”
As a head buyer for her company, she had racked up enough miles to be in the Executive Platinum status.
She was disappointed that she had only been able to score an aisle seat in the emergency exit row.
She told herself to relax and begin enjoying her vacation.
She was only a few rows away from her seat before she was able to see the other two passengers in her row.
She immediately perked up when she saw the guy with sandy colored hair sitting in the center seat.
Eva immediately wondered if he was single.
She would find out.
Eva looked at the rather good-looking woman sitting by the window.
She offered to take the middle seat but was turned down by Mr. Sandy hair with deep blue eyes.
His cowboy drawl came softly through a strong solid voice and his smile pleased her.
He was definitely not her type. But then she had failed with the ones she that she thought were her type. It probably didn’t matter.
It would be a long flight to Salt Lake. She would learn what she could about Mr. Sandy hair.
Distant Future
Emma finished her inspection tour. She had nothing pressing to do and decided to catch a play on Broadway as a way to distract herself. She exited the building and walked through the park. The never cut grass was at the chosen height of four inches.
A circular display of Asters with their yellow trimmed red petals open like a broad flat beach umbrella with a deep red puff caused her to pause. They cheered her up and yet made her sad.
A small black hummingbird, just slightly larger than a large bumble bee, with a red chest trimmed in yellow guided her eyes to some horned like lavender flowers. Each stem had multiple horns. The small hummingbird briefly visited each blossom in bottom to top order.
The hummingbird and his precision in hovering, extracting the nectar made her think about the location precision and the 8:46:40 am time precision that needed to occur across five hundred years.
2 Extraction
The future
Emma had no trouble getting up. After the show she decided to take a cab back to the Marriot. She hoped she could get a couple of hours sleep before returning to the extraction site.
That hope did not materialize. She lay in the dark thinking through every detail leading up to and the rehabilitation of the three after the extraction.
Emma had spent years studying the horrific details of the terrorist destruction of the Twin Towers of the world trade center. She had the timing of events down to the hundredth of a second. She had the elevation down to one hundredth of an inch.
This was not the first extraction, but it would test the limits at how fast they could carry out an extraction. The targeted three would approach the extraction point at four hundred sixty-six mile per hour or 683.466667 feet per second.
The extraction would require the system to transfer the three subjects as they went past a transfer plane less than one hundredth of a second thick.
The power draw would be enormous. Most of the cost for this extraction had been to the electrical power company to run special cabling and deliver the power to the extraction unit. Emma had considered extracting only one but that proved to be technically more difficult, so she and the team had come to the agreement to extract all three.
Emma and her team had practiced this transfer speed with a glob of organic material that was as close to simulating a human as they could devise. They did it successfully seven times.
She was still not satisfied. She had a huge concern about retrieving live humans.
Current Time
Adam watched as, first one very attractive brunette sat down beside him on the window side and then a petite well, built blond took the aisle seat. He was sitting between two very good-looking ladies.
He decided it was his lucky day. The final leg of his trip might be the best part of the trip. How was he going to handle two good looking women sitting next to him?
He recalled his Dad’s saying, “Stopping stampeding cattle is an easier job then dealing with women.”
He was now looking forward to the Flight to LA.
The flight attendant verified their willingness to operate the safety door as the plane prepared to leave the gate.
He started with a self-introduction and that he was going home to Idaho when the take-off delay was announced.
Hanna surprised the cowboy was talking, so she shared her recent Marathon experience and that she was returning to Seattle.
Eva was surprised at herself when she admitted dumping her most recent boyfriend but still taking her planned vacation to Alaska on her own. Mr. Sandy hair, Adam, was having a disarming effect on her.
Emma, some five hundred years in the future, was anxiously watching the count-down clock. In spite of the grumbling of her team, she once again made them check out all the systems and every detail of the extraction process
Emma watched the big screen as it detailed the events happening to American Flight 11 on a second-by-second basis. The computer was in control of the extraction. It would trigger the extraction at the precise millisecond.
She was mentally living through the events experienced by Eva, Adam, and Hanna. She was the fourth passenger sitting with them. She saw the plane turn into a fireball before her eyes. Her emotions were raw as she hypnotically watched the computer count down the time in an excruciatingly slow pace.
The extraction flash startled her, and the team went into the extraction delay time.
Current to Future
The Statue of Liberty came into sight. Adam realized that the hijackers were not landing at Logan. They were not returning to the airport.
Both Hanna and Eva were holding his hand. He looked at each of them and saw tears in their eyes. He squeezed their hands.
Suddenly a terrific impact slammed him forward. He hit his head on his knees.
He saw the flames engulfing the plane.
There would be no escape.
They were dead.
He was still holding their hands. It was pitch black, but he could see that they were nude. He looked for burn marks, but they had none. Both Hanna and Eva were out.
Totally confused he saw a bright white light ahead. He pulled both of them to him and realized they felt cold.
He was embracing two naked young women. What a weird way to experience death.
The white light was rushing toward him at a high speed. At the last moment as he reached the light he instinctively spun around.
The last thing he remembered was the impact as they hit the white light.
He slowly opened his eyes. The room he was in was dark and empty. He didn’t feel dead but how would he know what death felt like. He realized that the mattress had shaped itself to his body. He felt comfortable and warm.
He tried to talk to the grey haired, grey bearded old man in a white lab coat that reminded him of a white bearded Abraham Lincoln.
Emma stepped around Lincoln and found herself looking directly into Adam’s deep blue eyes. None of the extraction subjects had ever awakened during their stay in this time period. Her partner immediately instructed the system to give the patient another shot of the sedative.
He tried to argue but he could not get his voice to activate. He was slowly drifting away. He heard the young slender woman with piercing green eyes and jet-black hair telling a Dr. Orenski that he should have consulted her before ordering additional sedatives.
Adam could hear the Dr. reply that their three subjects should not know anything about this time. They should remain unconscious until reinsertion.
His world was slowly going black, but he was still thinking, and he fought to stay awake.
The Dr. had mentioned three subjects.
Did he mean Hanna and Eva?
Was his trip down the tunnel to the light real?
Where was he and in what time?
For a moment, he saw the log framed gate to the Horn ranch. He and his father had made a trip to the lumber yard with their flatbed truck to select the six logs with which to make the gate. Each log was eighteen inches in diameter. The four vertical logs were each twenty-four feet long and the two horizontal logs were thirty-two feet long.
They had worked for almost a week to sink and anchor the vertical logs and put the crossing ones on top.
He spent two days sealing and varnishing the entire structure.
His mind locked on this memory and his body responded with a surge of new energy.
He got mad. He was not in bandages and did not feel mutilated or burned as he expected to be. He willed himself awake. He opened his eyes and looked around his dark empty room.
He was groggy and wobbly but otherwise he actually felt rested. He looked down at his naked body. He was in great shape and kept himself that way by doing a minimum of five hundred sit ups a day, doing his Tae Kwon Do exercises and getting in a three-to-five-mile jog three times a week. He sported a solid six pack on a one hundred-and-seventy-two-pound, six-foot two frame.
He wrapped the single sheet from the bed around his waist.
He and the bed were the only two objects in the room. He walked to the door and realized he did not know how to open it. It felt solid to the touch of his hand.
His instinct caused him to push the bed toward the door. Instead of the impact he had prepared for, the bed just passed through. He stopped the bed when it was half-of-the-way through and crawled out underneath it.
He then pulled the bed the rest of the way out into the hallway and parked it by the wall next to the door beneath a window that seemed to look into his room.
He walked to his right and peered into the window of the room next to his. The room was dark but slowly his eyes made out the figure of Hanna laying beneath a sheet. He walked to the next window and found Eva.
They were both out.
He decided to continue down the hallway.
Several windows later he looked into a room that looked like a scientific laboratory. The door blocked his entrance.
He returned and retrieved his bed and was pleasantly surprised when it passed through the doorway and he was able to crawl underneath into the lab.
By examining the door more carefully, Adam realized that it must be some sort of force field. The bed was in the program and, evidently, he was not.
Since he was able to use the bed in the manner that he was doing, he gave the programmer a D in programing. Adam took comfort that the human mind still had its blind spots.
The lab, as he thought about the room, was devoid of the lab equipment that he would have expected in his time. Adam had no idea how and what kinds of experiments would be done in this time period or what a lab equipment would look.
He walked over to the only counter that had anything physical on it.
He picked up the instrument and turned it over. The label date was twenty-five-sixty-seven.
He let the date sink in.
Now he knew that he was more than five hundred years into the future.
Adam walked across the room to a box sitting on a table. “Molecular Blades, Handle with Care” was stenciled in red across the top of the box.
He followed instructions and carefully opened the lid. He peered down at six thin long blades that reminded him of his prized hunting knife. These seemed to be ceramic with the sharp edge on both sides.
He had never seen anything look this sharp.
Adam took the edge of the bed sheet he was wearing and let it fall on one of the blades. He pulled the bed sheet along the blade and was amazed when the blade cut easily through. These blades were sharp beyond anything he had ever imagine.
He instinctively knew these blades were valuable in the situation he found himself. He took the box and placed it on the shelf beneath his bed. The box was not visible to a standing observer.
It was time to get back to his room.
He had just made it back and gotten into his bed when he heard someone talking.
He immediately closed his eyes and began a slow steady breathing rhythm.
The technician was claiming that there was something wrong with the vision system. Adam could hear Dr. Jekyll as Adam was now thinking of him, telling the technician to get things checked out.
Adam strained to hear the conversation between Ms. Green Eyes and Dr. Jekyll as they stood outside his door and discussed the upcoming reinsertion scheduled in two days.
Their three subjects would be reinserted in sequence as rapidly as the system could recharged to handle the transmissions. It was their hope that the three would arrive close together in the same time period.
Ms. Green Eyes closed by saying that Adam would be sent first in hopes that’s he would survive to help the other two.
Adam was now putting all the pieces together. He was sure he; Eva and Hanna were listed as dead in their time.
They had somehow been pulled from the burning plane wreck and brought into the future. The three were being conditioned to be sent back in time.
As he continued to listen, he became aware that the three of them were a part of an experiment in improving the human intelligence by improving the DNA strain far back into the past.
He learned that part of the conditioning they were currently receiving was to increase their life span and to make their bodies more tolerant to cold.
They had also been programed with survival skills.
Adam almost let out a chuckle when he realized he was just an experiment for a group of mad scientists.
Adam was sure he was now being watched. He almost let out a cheer when the room went totally dark.
He moved his hands around above him and was relieved when nothing happened.
He got out of his bed and pushed his bed through the door. He entered into Hanna’s room and tried to wake her. She stayed out cold. He had the same experience with Eva.
He immediately went to the lab where he found yet another box.
He opened this smaller box to find three knives made of the same material as the other blades he had already allocated. Adam thought allocated sounded so much better than stealing.
He looked at the set of blades and came to the realization that one set of blades seemed designed to become spearheads and the knives in the new box were meant to be hunting knives
He “allocated” the box with the knives and put them next to the box of spear heads.
He returned to the hallway and was about to go back to his room when he was attracted to the light coming from the room labeled Extraction-Reinsertion. He looked in through the window and was surprised to see several people sitting looking at what seemed to be a holographic control panel.
He immediately ducked down and hurriedly pushed his bed back to his room. He got back into his bed and immediately fell asleep.
He came immediately awake when he heard Dr. Jekyll’s voice. Who referred to Ms. Green Eyes as Emma and was still arguing about keeping the subjects asleep in their time period. He was arguing that being sent back thirty thousand years, after experiencing the wonders of this time period, would be demoralizing.
An almost electric shock went through him as Emma, with the penetrating green eyes and jet-black hair was asking why they were re-inserting the three into the Yellow Stone.
Dr. Jekyll explained that it was the only location that would lock in and hold. The other locations in Europe and Africa were for some reason intermittent.
I think the future is limiting our choices, Adam heard Dr. Jekyll speculate.
Emma and Dr. Jekyll walked away discussing how the future could influence what they did now that they had invented the ability to manipulate the space time continuum.
Adam was glad he was flat in his bed as he listened. He was actually wishing he hadn’t heard the discussion.
Going back to the Yellow Stone thirty thousand years in the past sounded more appealing. In this time period and the ever-onward reality would always be at the mercy of the upstream time period. History from this point on would always be changed based on the upstream need.
Adam’s Boy Scout experience gave him confidence in his ability to survive. He knew how; to make fire, to create an oven to bake in and how to make a fishhook with which to fish.
He began thinking through all of his outdoor survival skills. Living in the wild did not bother him as much as the future these people would have to live through.
He knew the mountains of the Yellow Stone Rockies.
Sometime on the following day was re-insertion. Adam relaxed. He wanted to get some asleep. He wanted to do another reconnaissance of the facility this evening.
Adam fell asleep thinking about what else he might be able to find to take back to give him an edge