"Now Niko...we're not spying on you. That's totally unfounded. Of course we still trust you...yes. We set up monitoring you as an added effort to ensure your well being...after all, you're a century and a half old Niko...what 160 years or better by now. We're just concerned about your health. You are probably the most important man alive...no kidding. Maybe we should have mentioned it to you, but we didn't want you to get the wrong idea. You understand, right?"

 

He tried to be convincing but Niko could see right through it. But at least now he had gotten his answer. Indeed, something strange was afoot at the old timeless prison chamber. and he knew now he was well founded in questioning DARPA's motives. He wasn't paranoid after all. His mind was working just fine. It was time to advance to Plan B, something he had hoped he would never have to resort to, but down deep he always felt it could come to this. It was time to quietly pack his bags.

 

After Sorenson and Heinstadt left him to simmer in his chamber, Niko began to consider how his keepers were monitoring his every move. It became obvious quickly. A few months back they had installed a new program on his laptop, an instant message software so he could reach them quickly if he needed them. With the advancement and widespread use of computers as the preferred media for communications, the program was also designed to spy on him, and not just by way of an ingenious web cam installed as part of the display, but by sending regularly activity logs, so all his work on the computer, which was a great deal, was being monitored. On top of that, he didn't doubt there may be a camera hidden somewhere in the chamber to monitor him when he was away from his work station.

 

Just as well. he thought. They had either forgot who they were dealing with or had banked on him not discovering they were spying on him. Already he was running solutions in his mind of how he could not only disrupt their signals, but a way to make them think they were still monitoring him when they actually were being tricked; fed a false feed. It was child's play. It only took him an hour to figure it all out. The real challenge was creating the software in such a way that they would think he was still working on other projects, and then to install or insert his software in a way to override their monitoring without them realizing what had happened.

 

By late that night he had accomplished the task. They continued to believe they were monitoring a live feed from his chamber both through his computer and a pair of cameras that captured varying angles of him at work and at leisure in his chamber, but they were actually pre-programmed images; a loop of monitoring he had carefully devised. He had to only make certain he wore the same shirt and trousers for the next couple of days so they would not suspect what they were watching was not real time monitoring. After that it wouldn't matter for he would be long gone.

 

His plan was simple, and it provided the added benefit of fulfilling a long time dream of his, a great adventure through the multiverse; a walk through time. Finally he was going to be able to visit parallel worlds, to seek times and places of both his past and his future. By creating a miniature replica of his large cell block chamber, one just large enough for him to fit inside of, he would be able to phase in and out time and space by slowing down or speeding up, indeed even reversing the hands of time with his light refraction technology and phasing in and out of alternative worlds at will.

 

With him, stored safely in his brain, he would take his forbidden science. Would DARPA be able to follow him? Certainly with his chamber left behind they would inevitably be able to crack enough of the phasing code to be able to follow him, and follow him they would. For now that he had called them out for what they had become, for what they were trying to do, they would fear him even more than they already did. They would consider him to their greatest threat, for he possessed all the science needed to help others to possess enough power and technology rival or surpass their own.

 

That he would never do, of course. He recognized the danger of any government or zealous individual to hold such power at their calling, including the leaders of his long time ally, his beloved United States.

 

Too bad, he considered, that the world had lost so much of its innocence. While there had always been powerful men that aspired to even greater power, the principles and freedoms and liberty promoted by a young American nation gave hope to the ideology that mankind could rise above greed power.

 

The only way to protect the world now was to venture forth on his own, evade those that no doubt would surely follow. It was time to walk back in time and to change, if he could, what he had already accomplished, to make certain the secret to his science would never be discovered in the future, to erase the threat he had accidentally created.

 

Now it was Nikola Tesla versus the world. He could only hope that he could find a lasting peace for all the multiverse he had opened to the world.