History Shattered

“Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technologies. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and have Brain 2.0, our consciousness on a disc which will survive even after we die.” Michio Kaku

None of her scientists had called or left her a voicemail overnight. Colonel James had also failed to make Monica aware of any of his soldiers who might have an interest in making a trip to the past. She couldn’t blame any of them for not wanting to undertake such a journey. Beyond the risks involved in the creation of the wormhole and being in the direct path of two massive waves of energy, it was effectively a suicide mission. The probability of a successful mission completion and return to the present was quite low. The quality of life in fourteenth century Crimea would be bleak and the life expectancy would be quite short. The mission itself would require this time astronaut to infect innocent victims with deadly bacteria. These victims’ only crime was being in the wrong place at exactly the wrong moment in history. It wasn’t exactly a glamourous assignment.

The notion struck her almost casually while she was showering. At first, she discounted it, but then it began to percolate in her mind. If there were no volunteers more qualified who might step forward this morning, then why not her? She knew a smattering of Latin…, probably at least enough to communicate in a rudimentary fashion. She understood exactly what was at stake. The ramifications of any actions would not be lost on her. The same probably couldn’t be said for one of the young soldiers who might volunteer. Not only was she single, but in one of the strangest but most compelling twists, her significant other was now apparently trapped at her intended destination. Tyler would have the ability to assist her in aspects of the mission’s execution. If she ended up trapped in the past, then at least they might be trapped there together. If the mission was wildly successful, she would be able to bring Tyler back to the present…, a present they had successfully repaired and brought back to a proper balance. There was a nice symmetry to the concept…, or was she just romanticizing it? Well…, she had until the meeting with her senior staff at noon to mull it over. The morning passed uneventfully, at least by PD’s outrageous standards of the past week.

The room slowly filled with all her team leaders. Colonel James was also in attendance. The facial expressions were a mixture of apprehension and anticipation. Monica started the meeting by asking Colonel James if any of his soldiers had stepped forward.

“I had two, but both of them are family men…, five young kids between the two families. I’ll be honest. I discouraged both of them…., but they are options.”

“OK…, for the record, I’m opposed to the volunteer being a family person, too. We’ve got to be candid in our assessment of the likelihood of this time travel attempt resulting in a successful return to now. About the only thing we seem to be able to predict with any certainty is that even if our volunteer makes it back from the past, the present they would return to would be markedly different from the one they’re leaving. I don’t even want to think about coming back to a present where your spouse and kids either aren’t there or are completely different from how you remember them. That would seem like the worst kind of emotional pain.”

“And you, Director? Do you have any volunteers among the ranks of your scientists?”

“One…, single, no kids or emotional attachments at present, good health, speaks a little Latin, pretty broad understanding of the risks and potential repercussions…”

“That sounds ideal. Which of the guys stepped up?”

Jasmine climbed on her feminist soapbox for a moment. “Pat…, why do you immediately think it has to be a guy?”

“I’m sorry…, Jasmine I didn’t mean to offend your feminine sensibilities. I guess that’s just how my brain works.”

“Maybe our volunteer can figure out how to get rid of male chauvinism while they’re fixing history.”

Monica stepped in. “OK, you two…, put your swords away. We’re all on the same team. But you are onto something, Jasmine. Our volunteer is female.”

“See, Pat…, OK, I couldn’t help but gloat a little. Who is it, and why isn’t she attending the meeting?”

“Actually, she is…, I’m the volunteer.”

The words landed with a thud on the table. Mouths dropped open, and words could not be found for several seconds. The silence was followed by the reaction she had expected.

“No way…, there’s no way you should go.”

“Out of the question…, you’re the facility director for God’s sake.”

These were followed by another several rapid fire comments, all sharing the same theme of denial. Monica absorbed them all, and sat silently, riding out the wave of reactionary sentiment.

“OK, stop for a moment. When I was pinging off qualifications and before you knew it was me, you thought the candidate was ideal. Don’t personalize it. That’s what you’re doing right now.”

“Yeah, but…”

“No buts…, I’m uniquely qualified, and I’ve got more of both a personal and professional stake in trying to achieve a positive outcome to this thing than anybody else you can come up with. Mike, what do you think?”

“Thanks for throwing me under the bus. I’ll make a couple of observations. First, I don’t like the individual in command performing the task, but I’ve also been accused on countless occasions of doing things I probably shouldn’t just so my men can’t say they’re being asked to do something I haven’t done. This might be an extreme case of leading by example, but that’s what it is. Second, I’m old school. I’d rather have a male volunteer. Even if there might be reasons a female could perform the task just as ably, I’d prefer that. It goes back to that whole ‘no women in combat’ mindset that I grew up with in the military. That’s a personal bias, though, so I’m willing to acknowledge and discount it. Third, you do meet the criteria. It would be difficult to come up with a candidate that could check off more of the right boxes than you can. If I take the emotional component away and look at it rationally, then I’d say you’re qualified. But I’d also like to hear from your mouth why you’re volunteering.”

“I think I alluded to it a little already. First, I’m qualified. Second, I have a pretty thorough understanding of the totality of the issues at play. Third, I’ve worked with Tyler in some pretty desolate third world locations fighting disease outbreaks. That’s not on my official resume, but it’s still a major life experience. Fourth is Tyler. He’s more likely to help me than he would anyone else. Plus, if there’s a chance we could repair history and return to a present day that’s much like it was in the 2018 of the first wormhole’s creation, then that has both a professional and personal significance that would be difficult to overestimate. Fifth, this is something I feel needs to be done, and over the last twenty-four hours it has slowly turned into something I want to do, as well.”

“Could you actually kill somebody, Director?”

“I understand what’s required of this mission. I know that lives must be spilled to correct what we’ve broken in history. I’ll be leaning heavily on thinking about the balance I’ll be restoring to the world’s population and not about the billions of lives that might be extinguished as I do what’s necessary. But to be completely open about it, I’ve never killed anyone, either passively or overtly. I’m not one hundred percent sure how I’ll react.”

“It’s actually a good sign you have doubts. I’d be more worried if you didn’t.”

“Then I guess you can stop worrying.”

“Monica, if you do this, then who would do your job?”

“All of you know your jobs. Jasmine will keep documenting everything we’re doing. Pat’s effectively in charge of the actual particle collision already. Mike’s guys maintain security and will keep everything running, and we get replaced by the other scientific team in less than two weeks. That’ll allow for another two-month window to figure out who and how I’ll be replaced. Besides, that assumes I won’t make it back from the past.”

“Monica, you just can’t…”

“Don’t make me remind you who’s in charge…”

“And don’t just pull rank like that. I’ll say this, though. It does sound like you’ve given it some thought.”

“You all know me well enough to know I have.”

“So are you telling us the decision’s been made?”

“Yeah, I guess I am. So…, I guess we need to move on to what’s next. Let’s begin prepping for the next particle collision. Pat, it sounds like you’ve got some additional wiring you have in mind for Station 28…”

“Already working with Colonel James’ boys on that one, Boss.”

“Listen to Pat with the ‘Boss’ shit. Relax with the sucking up, Pat. We all know you’re gonna be the next director.”

“Hey, I’m just showing proper respect. There’s a lesson there.”

“OK, stop it. I’m still here for now. Let’s worry about office politics later. We have jobs to do.”

The meeting vibe shifted immediately. There was an undertone of melancholy which pervaded the dialogue. Monica spent much of her focus in working with Pat and Colonel James regarding the work that must be done. Pat had his team working on the removal of the broken part in the accelerator, replacing it with the new replacement part. The installation and testing processes would take very nearly until the proposed commencement of the countdown’s final stage to complete. Any tardiness in making the repair would force a delay in creating the particle collision. Since a delay in the present resulted in a delay eight times as long at the business end of the wormhole, any delay was to be avoided if at all possible.

Pat was hyper, but he was also focused. He was supervising the particle accelerator repair effort and was also overseeing the rerouting of several power conduits into Station 28. He was more aware than he had shared with anyone that the power he was attempting to feed into 28 was a drop in the ocean compared to the massive energy waves required to produce the wormhole in the first place. It was both his hope and a completely unproven theory that far less energy was required to sustain the wormhole once created than was necessary to form the anomaly in the first place. The power he was rerouting was substantial and should be sustainable over a multi-day time horizon, but it was nothing like the massive momentary burst triggered by the accelerator’s collision.

Jasmine didn’t show her nervous energy in the same way Pat did, but she immediately launched once again into full speed mode. Her challenges were just as complex, and perhaps even more so, as they had been in the countdown to the second collision, not that she could remember exactly what she had done twelve years from now. She could see the product of the efforts of her History Team’s documentation, and now that she had been forced to present it to a group of doubting scientists, she had identified some changes she wanted made in how they collected and presented the historical data. Her team would not be sleeping tonight, and maybe not tomorrow night either. There was nothing like recognizing the pressure of historical changes rolling forward through the centuries with no way to stop them or even slow them down, and knowing that at the same time the history you have always known is bleeding away forever. A failure by her team to properly document some critical aspect of what had happened, was happening or was about to happen would create a hole in history that no one would be able to fill.

Colonel James was supervising all of the military’s countdown processes. He was also working personally with Monica and Doctor Kelsall. The elderly physician was Doctor Weisberg’s predecessor at PD. They would be forced to formulate and implement a plan to expose additional settlers in fourteenth century Caffa to the bubonic plague bacteria. Monica’s background was not medical, but she could handle a needle and injections. She had done so during her summer trips with Tyler when they were younger. They intended to arm her with syringes if the opportunity to utilize injections presented itself, but they also were making plans for administering the bacteria orally. Monica tried to focus on the procedural aspects of what she was being required to do. She kept her mind away from thoughts of the death sentences she would be handing out to seemingly innocent victims.

Monica also had to focus on handing out additional responsibilities to her senior scientific staffers. She recognized there was a probability she would not ever be returning to PD, and there were a large number of administrative responsibilities which must be delegated to keep the scientific efforts on track after her departure. She approached it as if she had resigned. Anything that should be handed off in such a scenario should be handled that way now. It was just that she had only hours to accomplish such a transition rather than weeks or months. She was bound to miss something important. It was almost a guarantee that she would. It couldn’t be helped. There was no sense in either beating herself up over it or worrying about what she might miss. She was glad she had slept well for a couple of nights. Sleep would not be an option tonight.

Jasmine assigned Chandler to follow Pat and his team around. She was burned out on searching the internet for historical changes, so Jasmine offered her the change of scenery. She was following Pat so closely that a couple of times he stopped somewhat abruptly while moving about the facility and Chandler stumbled into him. Her documentation could be the basis for improving any future attempts at recreating a wormhole or preventing one from dissipating too rapidly. Monica and Jasmine discussed the very real possibility that the documentation they were creating could someday become part of the blueprint for the militarization of time travel, but they also recognized there was little they could do about such a seemingly distant decision now.

Her conversations with Jasmine did force Monica to begin confronting some of the darker thoughts she had fastidiously attempted to avoid regarding the mission. The first set of thoughts was related to confronting her own fears regarding the mission itself. Those fears began with a mild claustrophobia about being trapped with the twin energy waves inside what she was now viewing as a lead-lined tomb rather than a portal to another place and time. She was fearful of the energy waves themselves. It was impossible to know what kind of long-term damage might result from exposure to such massive, concentrated energy. That it was created from a nuclear reaction just made the fear more intense. She was worried about her ability to speak Latin, in spite of her insistence that it was strong enough to allow her to be conversational. Would the villagers in Caffa allow a woman to ostensibly offer medical treatment? What might they do if or when they found she was spreading plague bacteria?

Those fears would only present themselves if the wormhole was successfully created and actually took her to the proper destination. What would she do if she was transported to another place or time? She believed she might be able to get word of such failure back through the wormhole to Station 28, but there were no guarantees. What if she swung the pandemic back too far in the other direction? How could she possibly expect to understand how broadly she should attempt to spread the plague bacteria? Would she be able to find Tyler? Would he approve of this second mission to repair history, or because she was carrying death with her, rather than life, would she find him to be an opponent? Even if he sided with her, what would happen if they were trapped in the past? With the age difference now at about a dozen years, how would that affect their relationship? Tyler had professed his love in the 2043 videos, but that was when he thought he would be trapped in the past alone. He had no way of knowing that his most recent changes to history had moved the calendar back a dozen years, or that another rescue and repair mission was in the works. So many questions…, far too few answers.

She had never considered herself to be a religious person, but she was now contemplating not just the existence of a higher power, but what that Supreme Being’s attitude about what they were undertaking might be. Their initial misstep had been completely unintentional and horrifically unfortunate. The second trip back had been an attempt to save lives and restore a broken history. This time, the mission was much darker. Even looking at it in the positive light of trying to restore some kind of equilibrium to history, it would, if successful, take two billion people who were currently occupying the planet away…, forever. Monica tried to put herself in God’s place and attempted to react as he might to what she was about to do. The images spewing forth gave her the distinct impression that her imagination wasn’t really on board with the current undertaking. It implied that God apparently wasn’t, either. Monica tried to close the book on her internal spiritual dialogue by concluding that the night before a particle collision probably wasn’t the best moment to go through a spiritual self-examination.

Her mind next wandered to the subject of the eventual politicization and militarization of time travel. It was troubling enough to think about it in some futuristic fantasy environment. To be thinking that she was essentially laying the foundation for that fantasy to become a reality was particularly disturbing, especially when laid next to the spiritual self-critiquing she had just performed. Was she literally creating the framework that could lead to the destruction of mankind? Was this the moment that some future generation might point to as the crucial instant and action that marked the beginning of the end? Colonel James seemed certain to run with the concept of time travel to its worst possible conclusion. Monica was certain that his old school military approach would allow for no other course. His son, on the other hand, had seemed to have a strong awareness regarding the potential for politicians and military leaders to abuse the awesome power that time travel represented…, at least Jasmine’s notes from the meeting which would had taken place twelve years hence suggested such. If only there was a way to insure that the son’s influence might carry the day. Unless she returned from the past, she would now be eliminated from that battle. It would be left to Pat and Jasmine and other successors to make those arguments. She was suddenly aware of how small and insignificant she was. Her role seemed destined to be either one of little consequence or one of historic tragedy.

Monica needed to be alone. She went to her room and grabbed the clothes she intended to take with her to Crimea. While there, she stripped off all her clothes and climbed into the shower, allowing the hot water to pelt down on her. Gradually, she allowed her back to slide down the shower’s tiled back wall until she was in a seated position. She hugged her knees with her arms and wept, as she rocked back and forth on the wet tile floor of the shower.