History Shattered

“Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him.” -- Jeremy Aldana, author

Pat was pleasantly surprised at how well the efforts of the PD staff to keep the wormhole alive seemed to be proceeding. The repairs the engineering team had made to the lead hull of Station 28 appeared to be leak-free. The electronic feeds from the station’s interior had been re-established after the short black-out period immediately after the particle collision. There was no audio response coming from within 28. For now that was viewed as a positive. An audio response now would indicate Monica was still inside 28 rather than somewhere in the distant past. Eventually, the lack of audio communication would turn into a negative. It would become a stark announcement that neither of the time travelers had come home. So for now, the silence was embraced. It was impossible for any of them to be sure exactly when it should cease to be viewed in such a favorable light.

The data feeds were also working just as they should. Data to be analyzed was pouring from Station 28’s sensors. There was too much data to keep up with, so Pat directed his team to focus on the data which would help them best understand the relative energy levels inside 28. That would be the best indicator of changing conditions related to the wormhole itself. There would be time to analyze the more esoteric data somewhere in the future. Pat realized how tenuous that thought was in light of the current undertakings of the PD scientific team. The focus for now was almost tunnel-visioned. Do whatever was necessary, or at least possible, to keep the wormhole open.

The video feed coming from within 28 was inconclusive. It was the white-ish, grey-ish snow that had been present during the previous anomalies. Their eyes continued to tell them that the station’s cameras were not functioning properly. The electronic sensors told them that they were looking at the electronic signature of the mass of energy inside 28. Pat noted how different its appearance on their video monitors was when compared to the almost liquid characteristics noted in the videos Tyler had shot from outside the anomaly at the fourteenth century end in Crimea. His videos were from outside the anomaly, while these images were from its interior.

The final component, which had initially offered Pat the greatest concern, was his attempt to route high voltage lines into Station 28. The theory was simple. Feed additional power into 28 to prolong the life of the wormhole. Unfortunately, the theory was just that…, completely theoretical. They knew little about how the wormhole had been created, and it was impossible to predict with any certainty how it would react to the introduction of another power source. The first action Pat had ordered post-collision was to repair the conduit rupture which the collision had produced. That had taken almost two hours to accomplish. Once the repairs had been performed, he had the engineers begin feeding a small amount of power into 28. His scientists were monitoring the wormhole’s behavior immediately before and after the introduction of the new external power source. They were hoping to be able to identify any changes triggered by the added power. The initial readings were inconclusive. The amount of power being introduced was so miniscule in relation to the magnitude of the wormhole’s power output that it was impossible for the scientific team to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Pat made a brave decision and ordered a significant boost to the power being pumped into 28. If his instincts were wrong, he was jeopardizing any chance Monica and Tyler might have to return home. It was almost a half hour after he had given the order before they were able to positively identify that the wormhole’s power decay rate had slowed. The pace of the decline was almost imperceptible, but it was enough to cause Pat to order an additional boost to the power feed. After the second step-up in power, they were now sending eighty-five percent of the conduit’s maximum power capacity into Station 28. That was the maximum amount that could be sustained for a prolonged period. Pat’s hunch had been a correct one. The wormhole’s life was being extended by their actions. He just hoped it would buy enough time for his friends to find their way home.

~~~~o~~~~

Caffa had no jail or anything that even functioned as one. Justice was administered swiftly and involved physical punishment or death, usually in a most public forum. A jail was completely unnecessary. Therefore, they had no place to take Monica this night. Instead, they essentially turned the inn’s great room into a combination holding cell and courtroom. They had emptied all the contents of her backpack onto a large table. There were two video cameras, another flashlight, a multitude of syringes and additional medical supplies, six more vials of plague bacteria and two vials of antibiotics to combat its effect along with a week’s worth of MRE’s. There were four one-liter bottles of water. The bottles were clear plastic, another item yet to be invented. Even the materials her backpack, tent and sleeping bag were constructed of didn’t yet exist. She had tools and medical instruments, spare batteries and several incidental items which were clearly from another time and place. She had brought a treasure trove from the future with her, and it was now all on display on a table top in an inn in fourteenth century Crimea. Any nightmares Monica had dreamt about this mission now paled in comparison to the reality of her current dilemma.

She could only pick up a few words here and there as the chatter flew from every corner of the great room. She couldn’t be sure, but it sounded to her as though she was being accused of either being a witch or consorting with Satan or at the very least being guilty of behavior which the Greek Orthodox arm of Christianity would view as being in opposition to the beliefs of the church. To her, the message was clear even if the words were not. She was being painted as a heretic of some kind, or at the very least some kind of enemy of the church. Her attire, her inability to speak the language, and all of the futuristic toys on display on the tabletop did nothing but reinforce the sentiment mounting against her. This was not modern day America. There would be no presumption of innocence. Nothing approaching due process should be expected. The mob mentality would soon take over the crowd gathered together inside the great room, and an incorrect and unjust decision would be swiftly reached.

Would such a decision even be unjust? From one perspective it certainly was. But even Monica could understand where the crowd was coming from. She was, after all, there to kill, regardless of how altruistic the intentions or how mitigating the circumstances might be. The would-be mob didn’t even know that bit of information yet. The word bio-terrorist didn’t exist in the Latin language, but it didn’t really need to. Had her intent become clear to them, the debate over what to do with her would’ve already ended. She could catch only an occasional word amidst the cacophony of voices, but it was clear that they were growing louder and the crowd was becoming increasingly agitated. The implications were dire.

Tyler walked through the inn’s doorway. The crowd parted immediately for the man. He had a full beard, but was still wearing jeans, his nylon wind jacket and his stupid Converse All-Star basketball shoes. Apparently, he had opted to stop shaving since his return to Caffa. Monica suddenly recalled that he had not shaved while quarantined in Station 28 either. Despite the whirlwind of everything happening around and to her, her psyche somehow noted that Tyler looked good with a beard. She was overjoyed to see him, but rather than call to him, she began to cry.

Tyler spoke in fluent Latin to the two villagers who seemed to be in charge of the chaotic scene. They were speaking both too quietly and too rapidly for Monica to understand any of what was being said, but it was apparent that Tyler was doing far more listening than talking. At one point, she saw the men pointing animatedly at the table filled with the assortment of items she had brought from the future. The conversation lasted long enough that Monica was able to recompose herself before its conclusion. She wiped the tears from her cheeks as Tyler approached her. They shared a conversation in English.

“Are you alright?”

“Physically, I’m fine. Emotionally is another matter.”

“I’ll accept that you’re physically OK for now. How long have you been here?”

“You mean in the past, right…, not just in Caffa.”

“Well, both, I guess.”

“I left PD yesterday at noon and spent last night camping on the hillside above the anomaly. I made my way into Caffa today and have essentially been sitting at the table over there most of the day waiting for dinnertime.”

“You being here can’t be a good thing. What’s wrong now… in the future, I mean?”

“We don’t have time for that conversation, but to cut to the chase…, you overcorrected. Overnight we went from just over six billion people to just under nine billion. It was growth of something like forty-two percent.”

“What year is it now?”

“It’s 2031. We’re thirteen years after your first accidental trip back here and twelve years before your return. I’m now forty-six.”

“Yeah…, you look younger, although you looked great at fifty-nine.”

“It doesn’t look like I’ll need to worry about any of that anymore.”

“Let’s not go there just yet. Why are you here, Monica? I accepted that I was never leaving here. I picked out a great spot to build a cabin. It’s away from people with a great view of the sea. Don’t tell me this is some kind of rescue mission.”

“Rescue’s a secondary mission objective.”

“Geez…, you sound like Colonel James.”

“Yeah, well, in 2031 there are two of them. Both father and son are working at PD right now. The son’s a Lieutenant.”

“Wow…, that’s gotta be weird.”

“Not really…, see, every time history resets, it’s like we all get a memory wipe, and whatever has transpired in the latest version of time seems normal. So it seems completely normal to have both of them there.”

“So if that’s the case, how did you even know I’m here? I guess theoretically, I haven’t even come back here for another twelve years.”

“I don’t think we know how any of this works any better than when you left. It’s only been about another five or six days. But since you came back in 2043, we began to construct the alternate histories, and we had your videos and photos. Plus we learned how to track history as it moved forward.”

“I don’t know what that means…”

“History doesn’t reset all at once. It’s like a river, and the changes took a while to work from fourteenth century Crimea through the centuries to the present. It took a coupla days for the changes to make it all the way to 2031. One night we went to bed in 2043 and woke up the next morning in 2031. We knew it was coming…, sorta. We just didn’t know how long it would take to reach us.”

“That’s totally bizarre, but also totally cool. Anyway, let’s get back to why you’re here. If rescue is secondary, then what’s your primary mission?”

“You’re not gonna like it.”

“I already don’t like it since it brought you here in the first place. They want to kill you. They believe you must’ve sinned against God and the Church because of all the stuff you have with you.”

“Maybe I have…”

“Monica, stop being so fuckin’ cryptic! What are you doin’ here?”

“I’m trying to do the same thing you came back to do…, to restore history to some kind of equilibrium. I said you overcorrected. Your infectious disease control skills were so successfully employed that history doesn’t even refer to the plague pandemic as The Black Death anymore. There were only 30 to 50 million deaths. That’s why we’ve got the overpopulation crisis the world’s facing in 2031. History is effectively as different in some ways from your 2018 version because of your second trip back here as it was after your first one…, just in the opposite direction.”

“Holy Shit! So to grossly oversimplify, I’ve gone from a killer of four or five billion people over the generations to the Godfather of several billion new ones.”

“That’s a crude but fairly accurate statement.”

“And if you’re here to reset history once again, then that means you’ve gotta be trying to return the death toll from the plague back to something approaching its original level.”

“That’s right…” She let the simple two-word response hang in the air for a few moments as Tyler took in its larger implications.

“Monica, you’re a scientist. You’re not a killer or a bio-terrorist. Do you realize what you’re doing?”

“If you’re asking if I’ve recognized that there are moral and ethical implications to what I’m doing here, then the answer is ‘yes’. If you’re asking if I recognize that you would find the primary mission I’ve been tasked to carry out morally objectionable, then the answer is ‘yes’. If you’re asking if I’ve come to grips emotionally with what I’m doing here, then the answer’s an emphatic ‘NO’!”

“Then why are you here?”

“If I didn’t come back, someone else would have. The outcome from your second trip back was just as dire, if not more so in terms of its impact on the human condition, than your first trip was. But it also showed us that we could impact the course of history…, admittedly with a total lack of precision, but it seemed apparent that if we were to even attempt another fix, it needed to be right away…, before the opportunity was lost. The particle accelerator was damaged during your second trip and Station 28’s lead hull was damaged, too. It took a few days to make the necessary repairs. That was all happening while history was rewriting itself. It was a now or never kind of thing. We decided to try one more time to fix things we were responsible for having broken.”

“You mean things I broke.”

“Nobody’s blaming you for anything. It wasn’t your fault that any of this happened. It just happened. We don’t know that it’s fixable, but we felt like we needed to take the opportunity to make one more attempt before winter turns to spring here and the merchants sail away to Europe with the plague in their cargo holds.”

“But you’re gonna need to kill innocent people. Maybe most of the folks in this room…”

“Yes…, but they were supposed to die before we interfered. If you look at it like killing, then it sounds horrible…, monstrous…, which in many ways it is. But if you look at it as restoring history to the intended path, to the proper course, then there’s a humanity to it, or at least a small measure of justice in the grand scheme of things.”

“It sounds like semantics to me.”

“It is a little, but that’s not a totally fair assessment, either. You can have a moral objection to the actions needed, but you also understand the implications of both making the attempt and refusing to do so. Isn’t that a major reason you pushed for a second trip back for yourself. I’ve read the transcripts and watched your videos.”

“No fair. You can’t compare coming back to save lives to coming back to take them.”

“Even you have to admit they’re opposite sides of the same coin. Wouldn’t I have preferred to come back in a lifesaving mode? Of course I would’ve. But that wasn’t the hand I was dealt, and if it wasn’t me here, it would’ve been some young soldier who would have a complete lack of appreciation for the magnitude of every action and decision.”

“You’re right about that.”

“So they want to kill me. I guess I can understand how I seem strange enough that it would lead them to believe I’ve been consorting with the devil or something. Is there a way out of this?”

“I don’t know yet. They trust me, but I’ve never attempted to leverage that trust. This would seem like a really big ask. Before we go there, I need to know where you are in terms of accomplishing your mission objectives.”

“What are you going to do if I tell you?”

“I don’t honestly know the answer to that question, but based on your response, I guess I should assume you’ve already done something about your primary mission objective.”

“You should. I’m sorry.”

“What did you do, Mon?”

“I dumped three vials of plague bacteria solution in the open cask of mead.”

“Did anybody see you do it?”

“I don’t think so. I dumped it into my own mug of mead and pretended to drink some after I did it. The waitress woman dumped the contents of my mug back into the cask.”

“Well, I’ve gotta admit that was a pretty clever way to try and spread the disease.”

“It was the sneakiest thing I could come up with. I’m not very good at this cloak-and-dagger stuff. There are more vials of bacteria on the table over there along with syringes and vials of antibiotic.”

“So you’re telling me I can stop this whole mission by dumping out the cask of mead and administering antibiotics to everyone in this room?”

“Yeah…, I guess I am. Look, Tyler…, I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing here. I don’t know if history will judge me kindly or harshly or even record my existence at all. I am now officially dreading coming face-to-face with God at the end of my life and having to explain why I’ve done what I’ve done. If there’s a moral high ground here, I’m certainly not sure I’m occupying it. I’m doing what was agreed upon by our colleagues as the thing that we should attempt to do. There are moral and religious implications all over the map on this debate. You need to decide where you fall on all of it. There are no black and white answers here…, just an endless spectrum of gray to choose from.”

“Well, I’ve got a little time to mull over that ethical conundrum. Even after exposure to the bacteria, we’d have a day to administer antibiotics and still head off the plague. Right now, I need to figure out how deep a hole you’re in, and whether I have the stroke to get you out of trouble. Just sit there for now, and try to look innocent…, and pious…, try to look pious, too.”

“Easier said than done, but I’ll try.”

Tyler returned to his conversation with the village elders. The conversation seemed civil for a couple of minutes, but it became increasingly heated. Tyler was apparently unable to compete with the pressure the villagers felt from their religious beliefs. He persisted, and the conversation seemed to turn adversarial. Monica yelled at Tyler, and he turned.

“Don’t you dare do anything to jeopardize your status with these people. I knew the risks when I agreed to be sent back in time.”

Tyler didn’t respond to her. He just turned back around and continued to argue with the two men. The conversation finally de-escalated, but Tyler looked over his shoulder at Monica and shook his head. Whatever had been said was not resulting in a positive outcome for her. Tyler left the two men and spoke to the inn’s proprietor. From a distance that conversation seemed to go much more positively. Tyler returned to the pair of elders and resumed the dialogue with them. This time the conversation looked to be going much more favorably. Finally, Tyler turned away from the men and came over to speak once again with Monica.

“I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“OK…, I’ll bite. What’s the good news?”

“They’ve agreed to allow me to stay here with you tonight at the inn, since it’s too late for me to be heading back to my encampment and I’m the only one here who can actually carry on a decent conversation with you. Effectively, you’re in my custody overnight. That’s about all the clout I was able to exert in this scenario. I might be a decent doctor, but I can’t compete with God, and effectively, that’s who you’re batting against.”

“Alright…, if that’s the good news, I’m not sure I even want to hear the bad news? Oh well…, go ahead and tell me the bad. I’ve gotta hear it eventually.”

“They intend to burn you at the stake tomorrow….”