History Shattered

“Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel.” Michio Kaku

Jasmine had ordered Chandler to get some sleep just as she was doing for the next four hours. Chandler was then tasked with once again updating her comparative histories. Jasmine theorized that the pace of the historical changes would progress rapidly enough that they would be able to at least loosely follow them and identify when they would reach present day. If the world’s population had changed by a billion people overnight, and then grown twice more to expand by an additional six hundred million people in less than three hours, then she had to believe that history’s new changes would become visible rapidly, and that Chandler’s concern that it might take years or decades for them to show up couldn’t possibly be right.

Chandler’s first research stop did nothing beyond confirming that the changes she had first seen in the darkness of the early morning regarding the debacle of The Black Death remained intact. She next checked the population numbers. She spent a little additional time reviewing them, looking at the continental totals in addition to the global numbers. The global total had increased only an additional two hundred million, but that put it at nearly nine billion. She shook her head in amazement. The number of human beings currently alive on the planet had theoretically grown by almost 42 percent overnight. If all of these time travel-related variances were to be believed, there were almost three billion people walking the planet today that weren’t doing so at this time yesterday. Every logical bone in her body wanted to object. She knew Jasmine and Monica would feel the same. Chris’s snoring brought her back to focus.

She quickly noted the dramatic population increases in both western hemisphere continents and the huge jump in European numbers, all of which made perfect sense if the effects of The Black Death on Europe had been minimized by whatever actions Tyler had taken in what was still just less than a day according to Chandler’s watch. She returned to the World Health Organization site to look for additional details about The Black Death, although it was no longer called that. After fifteen minutes, she decided to move on. The beginnings of the epidemic were still being attributed to the Mongol army’s 1346 A.D. attack on Caffa. There was no mention of Tyler. There was no mention of H2N2. All history recalled was that the plague was less ferocious in its attack upon the European continent. Would Tyler be upset that his footnote to history had gone unreported? Would Tyler even be able to tell from his vantage point inside Caffa’s walls that he had made any kind of difference at all? The questions these events were forcing all of them to ask were quite literally mind boggling.

It was now time to try to look for other signs of changes advancing across the centuries. Her first indication of changes had been at three in the morning, which was seven hours after her final data check yesterday. It was now just after eleven, and other than the moving targets which were the population numbers, she hadn’t detected any other changes in her last glance just before six in the morning. The next historical markers available for her to check were quite different depending on which history she looked at. She should be able to read about changes in the enslavement of European serfs fleeing the plague into Africa if its impact had been minimized in current history. Tyler’s next marker was the beginning of an era he referred to as the Renaissance in Europe…, an Age of Enlightenment and Rebirth is how he had described it. The word was beautiful. She decided it would be far more interesting to search for it than it would be to research the ugly topic of human slavery. She began keying the letters into her computer’s search engine. PD was a restricted government facility doing top secret classified research. Chandler’s computer was connected to the facility’s internal network. It was quite restrictive in terms of the searches it would permit. She would need to remember to get Jasmine or Monica to grant her temporary unrestricted access to the internet while she was assigned to perform these broad searches for information.

She keyed in almost half of the word before references to ‘Renaissance’ began populating her screen. She spent the next ten minutes reading about the period Tyler had told all of them about a few days ago. Based on his references versus what she was currently reading, it appeared as though one of two scenarios was now in place. Either this Renaissance wasn’t as robust or prolonged as Tyler recalled that it had been or time had still only partially processed it. She scrambled to find Tyler’s notes. She went to her handwritten notes rather than the sanitized edited version on her computer. She had reviewed her notes so many times over the past few days that she went to almost the exact page immediately. There were Tyler’s words in her own handwriting.

Even a bunch of science nerds should know all about the Renaissance. It was an age of renewed enlightenment in Europe post-plague. It was an intellectual and economic rebirth. Some of the greatest advances in philosophy, science, art and industry are byproducts of the Renaissance.

There was nothing date specific there. She would be forced to allow the history string to play out a bit farther. Dammit! Wait…, didn’t he make specific references to scientific milestones and weren’t there dates associated with many of those? …or at least to the scientists they were attributed to? She grabbed her notes and began flipping through pages about as violently as she dared without risking tearing the pages out of her notebook. The first scientist he mentioned was someone named Galileo, an Italian astronomer and physicist who Tyler described as the father of modern science. Although Tyler had been uncertain about the exact dates of the man’s life, he had indicated that he believed he had lived in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s. Chandler decided that seemed an excellent place to begin digging.

She keyed his name in and waited expectantly. Suddenly her search screen was populated with over ten million entries related to Galileo. Although she had not searched for any entries related to him last evening, she had done so while they were documenting Tyler’s version of history. At that time, no entries related to a scientist from the sixteenth or seventeenth century could be found. She pulled up the top entry. There the man was, almost as Tyler had described. He was an early proponent of the sun being the center of the solar system, or the universe back then, and was persecuted by the Catholic Church because of that and other beliefs. So Tyler’s version of history was coming to life bit by bit. She was literally witnessing the rewriting of history.

Her next target was the late 17th century British scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, a mathematician who also happened to discover gravity, and to her chagrin also invented calculus. Chandler had hated calculus almost as much as Jasmine apparently had. She was almost hoping she wouldn’t find an entry for the man in hopes that she could avoid the despised subject forever. Alas, there he was. She had been at it for twenty minutes when she heard Chris stirring and became aware that the snoring had stopped. She called into the bedroom.

“You’re not gonna believe this but I’ve found the Renaissance, Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton. They all really exist now, and they pretty much align with Tyler’s descriptions. I don’t think anyone could possibly categorize him as delusional anymore.”

Chris popped his head around the doorjamb. He looked like he could use a few more hours of sleep, and his level of enthusiasm didn’t come up to Chandler’s expectations.

“Cool…, I’m gonna take a shower.”

“That’s it? That’s all you’re gonna say? Cool…? Really? History’s changing right before our eyes, Chris.”

“Sorry, Chan…, I just woke up. How about really cool? Will that help?”

“No…, not really. Just shut up, and go take a shower. I’ll talk to you when you’re awake. Jesus…”

He called back from the bathroom. “Don’t tell me something happened to Jesus…”

“You can be a real asshole sometimes!”

She returned her focus to her computer screen and her notes. Who was next? She decided to pass on the invention of the steam engine after a brief search, because it was too nebulous to pinpoint and because Tyler had been unable to supply an inventor’s name. His next scientist had been the first American on his list, Ben Franklin. She keyed in his name, eager to see what results awaited her.

For the first time, she was greeted with disappointment. Ben Franklin’s name was not triggering the avalanche of internet hits that her previous search targets of the morning had produced. That seemed to suggest two alternatives. Either Ben Franklin didn’t exist in this newest version of history which was being written, or the river of time had not reached that far forward in updating its course after Tyler’s latest handiwork. Both scenarios sounded plausible to her. She couldn’t wait to bounce the notions off her team and hear what they thought. She glanced at the time in the bottom corner of her computer screen. She had ten more minutes before the team meeting scheduled for noon. It was time to stop searching and prepare for the meeting. This was bound to be an entertaining discussion for sure.

~~~~o~~~~

Rather than the excited conversation Chandler had expected, the History Team was largely silent for a few moments after she broke the news to them that Tyler’s version of history was now apparently blending into, or perhaps more correctly, replacing the history all of them thought they knew. That seemed to be the reaction each time one of their suppositions morphed into reality. It was as if each scientist wanted to take a few thoughtful moments to digest the new data before commenting. Finally, Jasmine broke the silence.

“So…, no Ben Franklin…, too bad. He sounded like quite the character.”

“Well, no Ben Franklin, yet…”

“That’s right. I guess we can’t officially write him off until it looks like history has completely passed him by. Chandler, you said you have a new couple of ideas in that regard?”

“Yeah, well one’s the obvious one. It just assumes Ben Franklin was never born. The second one is almost as obvious. It just assumes that Tyler’s latest revisions to history haven’t reached Ben Franklin yet. If we just do some simple math, and I hate math, by the way…, then we can see that it looks like the historical record had changed now from 1346 A.D. when The Black Death morphed into the lesser bubonic plague pandemic up through somewhere between Sir Isaac Newton’s time and possibly Ben Franklin’s time. The next scientist on Tyler’s list after him was another Brit named Charles Darwin and he was a 19th century guy. I haven’t had time to look for him yet.

But if I assume that history has been changing since around three in the morning, which may not be right…, I mean it could’ve been 8:01 last night. We’ve got no way of knowing that, but anyway…, if I assume the history rewrite began at around three in the morning, then it appears to have covered somewhere between three hundred and four hundred years since it started, which means the history reset would be current by late this evening. If it started as early as eight-ish last night, then we’d be looking at history being completely rewritten by sometime late tomorrow morning.”

“That assumes that the reset occurs in a straight line fashion.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Well, it’s at least theoretically possible that time speeds up and slows down. Maybe it swirls and creates eddies and potentially even branches off.”

“Oh…, I see what you’re saying…, the pace of change doesn’t necessarily need to be a constant. I hadn’t thought about that. I told you I hated math.”

“Don’t sweat it, Chandler. It was what you said that triggered that thought in my mind.”

Monica, who had been mostly silent at any of the History Team meetings she had attended, spoke. “We may also want to consider that as the new history advances, with each additional step, the rewriting gets more complex. More seemingly random events creep in. There are obviously more people involved. The very act of rewriting history would get exponentially more complex. It’s very possible that the pace at which time could absorb or process the changes would slow down. Maybe that at least partially explains why time seems to be moving so much more rapidly at the past end of the wormhole than it does at our end.”

“Wow…, that’s heavy…, but it also makes a lot of sense, or maybe I should say it seems quite plausible. But even if Monica’s theory is just partially true, it means it would be almost impossible to measure when or how long it would take for our entire history to reset.”

“Or I could just be wrong, and the simplest answer is the right one.”

“Yeah, that’s possible. So we’re back to square one.”

“Well, yes, in terms of our predictive capabilities. As far as history goes, I’d say we’re currently somewhere around square seventeen or eighteen hundred.”

“OK, let’s just keep monitoring for now.”

“But I haven’t shared the latest population growth number with you yet.”

“Let me guess. They’re getting bigger…, especially in Europe and the western hemisphere. At least that’s what I’d expect to be happening. Am I right?”

“Chris, you’re such a smartass! Why did I marry you?”

“Am I right…?”

“Yes, smartass…, you’re right.”

“And now you know why you married me…, because I’m right for you. Right…, get it.”

Jasmine interrupted the married couple’s conversation. “We all get it, Chris, although I’m sure I speak for just about everyone in saying I wish we didn’t. I think that’s a good place to stop for now. Chandler, can we have another quick update at 4:30? Monica and I have another meeting at five.”

“Absolutely.”

“Great! Thank you, and nice work! Dismissed, everyone.”

~~~~o~~~~

The 4:30 update featured Charles Darwin, but there was still no sign of Ben Franklin. That prompted a brand new set of theories suggesting that perhaps there were different branches of time, and that they moved at different speeds affecting the updating process. The exploration process which produced the European colonization of the Americas had appeared and seemed fairly robust. Chandler had no real hard data from Tyler to compare to regarding what she was now learning, so she was unable to do much beyond speculating regarding how similar or different it was to Tyler’s version of the pre-time travel history. It was assuredly quite different from the history all of the team’s scientists had grown up knowing. Everything they were being presented with was still incredibly uncertain and fluid. About the only concrete notion they could latch onto was that everything they had come to believe about the past was changing. The fragility of their very existence was apparent to every team member.

After the briefing, Monica and Jasmine stopped by the room Pat’s team was meeting in and collected him. The trio walked together into the military wing of the facility, very uncertain of what they were about to face in the meeting with the military officers. They were equally uncertain of what they could even talk about in terms of what the time travel which had already occurred would reveal about any of their futures. The military men would be expecting answers, when the scientists were entering the meeting with mostly questions.

Colonel James made the unnecessary gesture of introducing his scientific guests at the start of the meeting. He also made a simple statement regarding his belief that input from the resident scientific community was critical to a broader understanding of what they were all dealing with in terms of both the wormhole phenomenon and the broader concept of time travel. Monica appreciated the gesture, although she also perceived that it would do little to diminish the somewhat adversarial nature of the inevitable debate that would surely surface at some point. After his opening remarks, he gave Monica and her colleagues the floor to provide an update to his advisors. Monica opted to let her male colleague go first. She reasoned that Pat had worked on weapons systems and military satellites in the past, and he was a man. Both of those facts might smooth the digestive process regarding the scientific information they were about to share.

“Well, we’ve determined that we have a broken part on the collider which will take at least six weeks to manufacture and ship here, and probably a few days to install and test. That’s the latest on the particle accelerator itself. We have also determined that the hull ruptures in 28 produced a dissipation rate in the energy field or anomaly or wormhole…, whatever you guys are referring to it as, over three times as rapid as the dissipation rate during the first anomaly. That’s why the wormhole wasn’t sustainable for the time needed for Tyler to do his thing and make it back. There’s a lot of hard data behind what I just said, but I know you guys are all about the bottom line so there it is.”

A few of the officers were jotting down notes, and there were several head nods after Pat’s comments. Evidently he knew what his audience wanted to hear. Jasmine went next, and took her cue from Pat’s remarks.

“Tyler has begun reshaping history. By this time tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day, the history you’ve grown up knowing will no longer exist. From a behavioral standpoint, it looks like time is, for lack of a better way to describe it, updating itself chronologically. The impact of The Black Death has been reduced dramatically, and we’re beginning to see changes in terms of global exploration and a historical period known as the Renaissance taking place in Europe. We don’t have that many details from Tyler, but these events seem to suggest that history is at a minimum moving away from what we all know and toward the version Tyler shared with us. We don’t have sufficient detail from him to be able to tell whether this new history is more or less… aggressive, but that shift is definitely underway. As of about a half hour ago, it looks like history has reset roughly through somewhere in the nineteenth century, but it’s very fluid at this point. If I had to reach out and grab the major points we can latch onto so far, it would be that the impact of The Black Death has been minimized, possibly to the point of being labelled as an overcorrection, and it looks like the world’s population has expanded dramatically.”

“How dramatically?”

“I can’t give you an exact answer. Remember I mentioned the fluidity of the shifts we’re seeing. As of now, it looks like the world population is sitting at about nine billion people. To properly frame that, the population yesterday evening was just over six billion.”

“You’re telling us there’s been a fifty percent increase in the global population…, overnight?”

“Well…, forty-two percent actually…, but yeah…, that’s what I’m telling you.”

Major Hailey reacted. “Holy shit! It sounds like a containment exercise might be required.”

Monica interjected. “Excuse me, I don’t have a military background. What’s a containment exercise?”

Before the Major could offer an explanation, Colonel James stepped in. “Clearly, we’re still in a fact finding mode here. Let’s focus on what we know, what we’re learning, and what our immediate objectives need to be. We can save the more esoteric discussions for another time.”

Monica responded. “I agree that we’ve got plenty on our plates here and now, but if a containment exercise is what it sounds like, it doesn’t sound as esoteric as it does pragmatic and tangible.”

“Perhaps esoteric was a poor word choice. Let’s at least consider it premature for now, and let’s focus on the more immediate issues facing us all.”

Pat, Jasmine and Monica all exchanged concerned glances with one another. Colonel James noted the looks but chose to attempt to push forward in keeping the meeting on track.

“Bob, why don’t you update us on the repair efforts to 28, and then Frank can update us on the decontamination progress. Let’s stay focused on what’s in front of us, people.”

Monica and her scientific colleagues found themselves struggling to comply with that request, as she tried to imagine the possible differing definitions of a containment exercise.