History Shattered

“When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the image 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It’s like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when is then?” Bill Nye, the Science Guy

The first task to accomplish was to disinfect the video camera and the SD card. Both, it had to be assumed, had been handled directly by Tyler, and even if he was in the midst of recovering from the plague, he was still carrying the bacteria and capable of transmitting the deadly, infectious disease. Even the fifteen minutes it took to perform that task seemed like an eternity to Monica. She almost wished time was moving as rapidly within PD as it apparently was at the far end of the wormhole.

The camera was plugged into the comm console and routed through the projector in the large meeting room onto the big screen. Virtually all of PD’s scientists were joined by Colonel James and his senior advisors to see what might be on the recordings. As the video came to life, there was the young version of Tyler they had adjusted to seeing over the past week. He began speaking.

“Hi, guys. It’s me…, Tyler…, and I have once again successfully time travelled out of Station 28. For the record, my surroundings look vaguely familiar, but the hillside is now brown instead of green, and the trees here appear to have lost their leaves. If I was forced to assess where I am, and I guess that’s what I’m doing, then I’d say I’m hoping that I’ve returned to just outside Caffa and that autumn has turned to winter. At this point, I’ve just regained consciousness, all my medical supplies appear to be intact, and all equipment seems functional. I am recording this video as a piece of evidence in the hopes that I can make it somehow return to Station 28 and serve as documentation of at least the partial success of our attempt to recreate the wormhole. What you are about to see is the exterior view of the wormhole from outside it. I don’t believe it would be possible for any of you to get a view like this back in Station 28. I’m walking over to the edge of the road and am now panning the camera down to show you the anomaly.

As you can see, it’s contained in a cavern-like depression next to the road. I’m sorry that I don’t know the dimensions of the hole or any other useful info like that. Notice how much the anomaly resembles a liquid in its behavior. It appears to roll from one end to the other, and it has waves and even releases splashes of what I assume are droplets of energy into the air before re-absorbing them. It’s my theory that when the waves roll to the end nearest the camera, the wormhole is permitting travel from Station 28 to here, and when the waves roll back in the opposite direction it allows for the return to the present. That would be your present, not mine. I need to keep reminding myself that time needs to be perceived from the perspective of the viewer, so your present and mine no longer align.

At any rate, I will be attempting to deliver this camera back to your present and to Station 28 as my first act here in wherever and whenever I am. I have a second video camera with me, so once I’m able to learn more, I’ll attempt to record and pass along additional data regarding my success or failure in terms of not only where and when I now am, but also whether or not my attempts to reverse the effects of my earlier visit to history are successful. Wish me luck. Oh, and one more thing…, Monica, I love you! Tyler out.”

Monica tried to focus on the entirety of Tyler’s message rather than his final comment. He believed he was in the right location geographically, so that was a noteworthy start. All of his supplies were intact and even his electronic gear appeared functional. Those were all positives in terms of his ability to carry out his mission to repair history. The images he transmitted of the anomaly itself would undoubtedly be helpful to the physicists gathered all around her. Understanding its shape and some of its behavioral characteristics would be helpful in guiding their efforts if they ever decided to intentionally develop the capability to create wormholes in the future. Monica turned and nodded to Colonel James who then instructed his soldiers back in the comm center to put the second SD card in the camera and play it. This time, Tyler was sporting the look of someone who had just awakened from a sound sleep, complete with mussed hair and morning stubble of facial hair.

“Hey guys, Tyler here again. It’s the next morning, and I’m afraid I’ve got a pretty large dose of bad news to share. Not the worst news like the mission was a complete failure, so don’t panic right off the top, but bad news nonetheless. I’m going to pan the camera over to the wormhole. This video is being taken from almost the exact spot I shot the one I sent back in the camera yesterday. As you can see, the wormhole has shrunk in size by roughly two-thirds to three-quarters. That’s in less than a day. In fact, I’ve been on the ground and conscious here for about thirteen hours, so I figure I’m recording this about an hour and a half after the particle collision in your time, not allowing for the time I might’ve been unconscious. The anomaly’s roughly half the size it was when I returned to PD from my last trip to the past, and that was after almost two days rather than less than one. I can only imagine that something went wrong at your end, and Pat and his team are all assholes and elbows trying to figure out what in the fuck went wrong. Good luck, Pat, but at least know I made it somewhere. That, unfortunately, is the best of any of the news I have to share with you guys.

The way I see it, I have two choices. Either I leave now, and in that case, this expedition would’ve accomplished a giant nothing beyond proving that we could recreate a time travel scenario…, I guess that’s not inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly is a minor aspect of what I intended to do, anyway…, I digress. Either I leave now, or I stay with the understanding that I won’t be coming back. Since all I’m sending back is an SD card, I guess my choice is pretty obvious to all of you. That brings up the other bit of bad news. I have no way of knowing whether or not I’m in 14th century Crimea. The countryside and the depression containing the anomaly look right, but it could be right place, wrong time and there’s no way for me to know that yet. By the time I find out, it looks like it’ll be too late for me to either let you know or for me to return to your now. It’s weird to think that I might be changing things here, and that will affect whether I’m ever there with all of you at all. Man, this time travel can really screw with your mind.

At any rate, my plan is to send this message back to you, pack up my gear and head out. With any luck, I’ll be in Caffa this afternoon, and I’ll be able to begin assessing the state of affairs here, and whether or not I can reverse the damage I did a week ago. So…, I guess this looks like it’ll be my final report. I’ll do my best. I’ll try to make you guys proud. Monica, I love you. I hope to see all of you again in about seven hundred years…, if that’s the way this whole notion of time travel really works. Man, oh man…, wouldn’t that be wild!”

Monica was now choked up. Her lover was telling her and all of his colleagues that he would not be returning. He had witnessed visually at his end of the wormhole what their instrumentation was telling them at this end. The anomaly was shrinking, collapsing, dissipating, or whatever the proper categorization of its behavior was exactly, at too rapid a rate to allow him to do what he had voyaged to the past to accomplish and still return to PD and his own time. He was saying goodbye. His outlook was brave and hopeful. And perhaps he was right, too. If his trip to the past was successful, there was nothing that any of them were currently aware of which would prevent him from being born again and live with them in the present. It was yet another of the imponderables that could overwhelm even the brightest of intellects if allowed to roam around unfettered in the mind.

Monica forced herself to focus on the larger implications rather than Tyler’s personal expression of affection. He was still unaware of whether or not he was in position to fix the broken history. It was just as possible that he was trapped in a different part of the past as it was that he had arrived at a moment in time where he could effect repairs, maybe even more likely. She shook her head to clear the negative thoughts.

Regardless of where he was, she needed to focus on what needed to be accomplished within PD. Perhaps part of that might need to be a third attempt to create the anomaly. Such an effort might be needed as part of a rescue mission or a second attempt to fix what had been changed. Neither of those strategies could be excluded at this point. But both would require PD’s particle accelerator to be functional, and clearly something had failed to allow it to perform at the same power production level as it had a week ago. Additionally, there was now structural damage to Station 28. Even if they were to create a third wormhole, the energy breach appeared to suggest that keeping the wormhole open for any significant length of time was currently problematic. Yes, there were plenty of issues to focus on here, just as she was sure that Tyler had his hands full wherever in the past he might currently be. He would be expecting her to do her job, just as she knew he would be doing his. She closed her mind to the far end of the wormhole temporarily and shifted back into operational mode.

Monica stood to address the assembly of scientists and military officers. “OK, we know Tyler made it out of 28, so congratulations on successfully recreating the wormhole. We also know that for now, we don’t need to be focusing on his return. We should all assume for now that Tyler’s in the right place in time and will be attempting to carry out his mission. Even if that assumption is incorrect, there’s not a damn thing we can be doing about whatever’s going on at the far end of the wormhole, so for now I want all of you to forget about that side of things. Instead, we need to focus on working on the multiple tasks waiting for us at this end. I’m just gonna start firing stuff off randomly, but it’s all important.

Pat, we need to find out why this particle collision produced significantly less energy than the one a week ago. We need to know if it was mechanical, if it had to do with your electromagnetic theory stuff or if there’s some kind of structural damage, or whatever…, the point being that I wanna know why it happened. The other end of that is trying to figure out why or what caused the rupture in the lead lining around Station 28. Was the energy field behaving differently? Was it related to the change in power? Was it a structural weakness or was the breach caused by the anomaly? We need to understand why it happened, how it happened, and what the likelihood is that it might happen again if there were to be a third attempt.”

She took a deep breath and then resumed.

“Speaking of 28, we need to get that place completely disinfected. Any trace of pathogens or contagious disease samples or cancer cells or H2N2 or bubonic plague or whatever else Tyler had in there…, I want it all gone. If and when he comes back, he’ll be pissed, but he’ll get over it. I want to be able to eat off every surface in that station. Colonel, you and your men did a great job of assessing the energy breach today, and in repairing it quickly, even if it didn’t allow us to get Tyler back. Now I’m gonna ask you to fix the breach so that it’s as strong as the rest of the hull. As far as that goes, I guess I want you to check out the entire lining around 28. If there are any other cracks or weak points or potential energy escape routes, I want ‘em plugged. I don’t want anything pertaining to 28’s capability to serve as a wormhole containment vessel to be compromised in any way. For that matter, if there’s anything that can be done so the comm links to 28 don’t go down every time we have one of these events, then that’d be great, too.

Jasmine, you and your team need to take everything that’s happened on this second collision and add it to your running historical commentary. Now that you will actually be able to gain access to the interior of 28…, once it’s been decontaminated, of course…, you need to document anything you can in there. I’m not sure how this whole altering history thing works, but I’m not convinced that we’ll know exactly when or if Tyler’s been successful in his efforts. Part of what you may need to be doing is monitoring our own historical record. I guess I’m saying I want you to compare our history to the two versions you’ve been playing with. If Tyler does something that changes history, I want us to know about it, even if it’s because we read about it in our own history books, where they are now reflecting something that either correlates with Tyler’s version of history or doesn’t match what’s in your current version of our history. I’m not even sure what I’m asking you to do. It must sound pretty nebulous…”

“I got it, Director. I know what you want us to do. It makes perfect sense even if it’s hard to articulate.”

“Thanks, Jasmine. I’m glad you get it even if I can’t say it right. Beyond that, we need to perform a post-mortem on this second particle collision. I want it analyzed, compared to the first one, etc. Let’s do our thing. Colonel, I’m sure you’ve got a laundry list of things for your folks to do as well.”

“You’re correct, Director. We’ve got a list of protocols of our own to attend to.”

“OK, then everyone…, let’s get busy. Dismissed!”

The room cleared fairly quickly. Most of the scientists were surprised that Monica had not only remained composed after watching Tyler’s video messages, but that she had then issued a most impressive series of tasks that engaged every member of her scientific team and gave their military friends plenty to focus on as well. They were all somber about Tyler, but Monica’s attitude allowed most of them to compartmentalize his status and to remain hopeful that he was still carrying out his part of the mission.

Almost all of the test swabs that the Hazmat suit-clad team had brought back from Station 28 tested positive for the plague. That either meant that Tyler was amazingly active or that the wormhole served as a conductor of sorts for the spread of the disease. Being able to determine which of those was actually the operative condition might be useful in the future, but for now it meant that the decontamination of 28 would need to be painfully thorough and would likely take at least the remainder of the day.

Colonel James ordered his engineering team to do a full structural assessment of 28. They were actually using X-ray equipment to look for fractures and cracks too small to detect with a visual inspection, in addition to a normal visual inspection of the station’s exterior. It was hoped that they could complete the exterior repairs rapidly, and then perform similar efforts on the station’s interior once the quarantine was lifted. Once the engineering team had marked the shielding, a repair team followed behind welding additional lead plates in place. The repairs needed to fix the rupture in the shielding caused by the energy surge’s breach would probably take a day or more to complete. The existing lead plates, each weighing up to two tons, would need to be removed and replaced before the breach could be effectively sealed.

One of the more significant moments occurred while the decontamination team was working its way through the station’s medical supplies. All of the bandages, drugs and other sterile supplies had expiration dates prior to the year 2021, over twenty-two years in the past. But none of them seemed aged or stale, at all. It wasn’t so much that they appeared preserved but that they appeared as new as anything else in PD. The intervening twenty-two years had not occurred for anything inside 28. That revelation not only further confirmed that Tyler had time travelled, but that Station 28 had apparently remained connected in some way to its own point of origin which was tied to the date of the initial particle collision in Tyler’s history. Just as Tyler hadn’t aged, neither had anything else in contact with the wormhole. This served as yet another example of how this time travel conundrum had so many unexplainable elements to how it functioned. It was as if at every turn and with every additional discovery, time itself was warning them that it was not to be trifled with. Monica was definitely picking up on that message. She hoped Colonel James and his military advisors were doing likewise.

Jasmine and her team had set to work immediately incorporating Tyler’s new videos and their own brief narrative about the second particle collision and the apparent creation of a second wormhole into their historical narrative. Once the word came from the decontamination unit that all of the supplies within 28 dated back to Tyler’s theoretical original departure date, they had even more material to process and weave into their documentation. She tasked one of her two pairs of married scientists, Chandler and Chris, to identify key historical elements to focus on and to establish a protocol of checking online reference sources every twelve hours to see if anything had somehow changed in any of those historical mile-markers without being otherwise detected. The entire process was surreal, but none of them doubted the necessity of the effort in light of what they knew to be occurring both within PD and somewhere in the distant past of a Crimean winter. It was becoming increasingly challenging to keep the storylines clear and distinct. Jasmine commented out loud to her team that it might be that an outsider reading their documentation would believe some form of mass delusion had occurred rather than actual time travel. She reiterated her earlier instructions to keep everything they were documenting as factual as possible. There would be opportunity for conjecture and theoretical wonderings elsewhere. That need not be a component of their efforts.

Monica finally called it a night just before two in the morning. She was frustrated by the lack of progress. The decontamination effort would likely go on until at least noon tomorrow, and the structural repairs to Station 28 would take even longer. Pat’s team was still trying to come up with an explanation for why the power of the second collision had been so much weaker than the first such effort. Although logically and intellectually she recognized that progress was being made and finding the answers to certain questions required time, she was emotionally spent, and that allowed her frustration to get the best of her. Fortunately, she recognized exactly what was occurring, and she was able to restrain herself from blowing up at any of her colleagues. As her head hit the pillow, she hoped tomorrow would bring more answers to all of their current questions while adding few new dilemmas to the pile. As she drifted off to sleep, the image of Tyler from his videos flashed through her subconscious mind.

“…Monica, I love you…”