Time Trawling
Time Trawling is just one part of the Totalitarian Concept, known as project Chrono's. The government scientists in the late nineties experimented with time travel, bringing people in from the past. The only successful target to have been brought in from the past was Doctor Theophilus Tanner. The others resembled nothing so much as ground beef. These failed experiments were sent into oblivion.
There are two known Facilities that could handle time trawling. The first one is located in the Ile Au Haut Acadia national forest in New England. The second in Chicago. The facility in Chicago had been set up to trawl forward three people when the war occurred. Thus they never were until Ryan Cawdor and the others stumbled upon the facility.
There were three targets, or Dolphins, as the Whitecoats named them. The first was a 42 year old single man named Graham Oswald Vair. The thing they trawled into the future was somehow still alive, but wouldn't be for long. They hit the abort button and it's molecules were dispersed throughout time and space.
The second target was a woman named Dolores Mae Melville, a 39 year old mass murderer who as kept in the Tehachapi prison in California. She arrived intact, but was shortly killed afterwards by Ryan when they learn she killed over fifty young boys.
The third target was a 19 year old boy named Michael Brother, a monk in the Nil Vanity monastery in California. He was successfully brought to the future by the Time Trawling equipment.
The process of trawling is almost like viewing decomposition in reverse. The target is reassembled molecule by molecule until either whole, such as Tanner, Brother, or Melville, or a ruined mess of organic tissue like several of the first targets, and Vair. The entire process takes only ninety seconds. As mentioned above, there is an override, or abort switch that can be hit, dispersing the failures across time and space, so no one except the scientists would ever know what really did happen.
The equipment can be used to send targets into different times, like with Doc Tanner who was sent from the nineties to nearly one hundred years into the future. There was a built in delay of two and a half hours. This is the only thing that saved Doc Tanner's life when he tried to return to his family in the past. The machinery was malfunctioning and would have killed him for sure if he would have been able to use it right away.
One other experiment was that of 'viewing' targets in the past, as if watching them on a grainy, soundless video. The only successful video was that of Doc Tanner and his family, shortly before he was taken away from them and brought to the future. There were no other successful videos.