History Shattered

H2N2 Virus: A strain of Influenza A, often referred to as ‘Bird Flu’, ‘Russian Flu’ or ‘Asian Flu’. A predecessor strain, H1N1, was believed to be responsible for a pandemic in the late 1880s. H2N2 first appeared in 1957 and is considered among the deadliest viral pandemics on record with a global death toll estimate ranging between one and four million, with almost 70,000 of those deaths occurring in the US. A more recent strain, H3N2, appeared in the late 1960s. Both the H2N2 and H3N2 strains contain avian influenza virus RNA segments. The H2N2 virus is airborne and can easily be transmitted through respiratory exposure. – excerpted from “The Origins of Influenza Pandemics” by Robert Belshe (New England Journal of Medicine, 2005)

The first image had shown just a handful of scientists including the image of a young Jasmine. Tyler sent a dozen images before he was through. Of the twelve scientists comprising the wormhole team, six weren’t in any of the photos. The remaining half dozen, including both Jasmine and Monica, appeared to be between twenty and thirty years younger than their current chronological age. What the group was staring at on the monitor was literally impossible to believe.

Jasmine got back on the headset. “Tyler, are you trying to make us believe that you took the images you just sent to us yesterday morning?”

“Only because that’s when they’re from. Monica asked me to document the morning of the test with some candid shots of everybody. Why? Is there something wrong with them?”

“And you didn’t do anything to alter the photos in any way?”

“Jasmine…, get real. When in the last day would I have had either the time or the energy to do something like that?”

“So that’s a no, right?”

“That’s an emphatic hell no. What in the fuck’s going on out there?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Tyler, I think we need to talk amongst ourselves again. Why don’t you try to take another nap and take in a few more fluids? We’ll try to talk with you again between 1:30 and 2. But before I let you go, let me ask you a simple question that we should’ve already asked you. What was yesterday’s date?”

“July 17th…”

“Sorry for being so picky, but can you give me the year?”

“Are you guys still trying to figure out if I’m delusional? It’s the year of our Lord 2018. Are ya happy now?”

“Ecstatic…, thanks! We’ll talk to you in a little while. Try to get some more rest. You’re sounding better.”

“Yeah? Try telling my colon that, and for the record, you guys are startin’ to give me a headache.”

“I suspect we’re gonna have a whole lot more to talk about than your colon and your head real soon. Bye for now.”

“Station 28 bathroom signing off…”

Jasmine pulled the headset off her head. She and the other team members looked to Monica for instructions.

“It’s time to bring in more brain power. Let’s get back to HQ.”

She glanced at Colonel James. “Would you have someone round up all my senior nerds and get them to the meeting room?”

“I’ll be happy to do that. But I’d also like somebody to explain to me how a photo that was supposedly taken yesterday morning has my Dad in it.”

~~~~o~~~~

The meeting room was buzzing. These scientists, trapped within the facility’s confines for two months at a time, had become quite adept at speculating about matters they knew nothing about. The rumors were ranging from Tyler already being freed from Station 28 to him dying a horrible death within its walls. None of them would’ve dared come up with such an outlandish supposition as the possible truth they were all suddenly being asked to face. Monica had requested that three chairs be placed at the front of the meeting room facing the gathering of scientists. Jasmine and Colonel James went with her to the front of the room.

“OK, everyone settle down and take your seats. We’ve got some important information to share with you, and it looks like today’s gonna be another long day.”

Jasmine spoke just loud enough for Monica and the Colonel to hear. “Yeah, like thirty years long.”

The group settled in their seats, and Monica started with reporting the less controversial facts. She intended to parse the information into bite size nuggets.

“First of all, Tyler is hanging in there. He’s got a fever and lots of other physical impairments that appear to be illness related, but he’s taking antibiotics and we’re monitoring his condition.”

“Antibiotics aren’t gonna help with the Bird Flu.”

“The antibiotics are precautionary. Tyler and Doctor Weisberg concurred on that point. But let’s not get hung up on that. I know all of you have been wondering about the anomaly. First, while it’s too early to be certain, and of course we haven’t been able to run any tests, it doesn’t appear as if the anomaly itself has had any negative impact on Tyler’s physical condition.”

“So you’ve seen him?”

“Well, no, actually all we’ve been able to do thus far is talk to him, but he seems lucid and while he’s complaining of various ailments, aside from a possible concussion the anomaly itself doesn’t seem to have contributed to the list.”

Pat finally spoke. “Monica, if our readings are correct, it looks like the anomaly will have completely dissipated within the next hour, if it hasn’t done so already. Why don’t we send a team in there to get him out?”

“We still have some concerns related to the potential threat of bio-hazards which may be present inside 28. Due to Tyler’s current physical frailty, we haven’t been able to verify that all the samples remain intact and that there aren’t any exposure risks.”

“Then send in a team wearing Hazmat suits.”

“We may end up doing that, but while Station 28 was built as a sort of containment unit if contagious materials or some kind of biological sample presented a threat, it isn’t like it has all the safeguards you’d find at the CDC or Fort Detrick or a full-scale lab facility. That was never the intent.”

“OK, well, we need to get Tyler outta there. He’s got information about that anomaly that we’re all just guessing about.”

“You’re right about that. Perhaps we can arrange for Tyler to have a dialogue with more of you as we move forward. In a way, that’s why I’ve asked all of you here. We’ve got an unexpected scenario staring at us…, unprecedented really. I’m going to turn the meeting over to Jasmine to give you a quick report on what the wormhole team has been doing for the past several hours. Jasmine…?”

“Before I go anywhere with this, I want to ask all of you to listen with an open mind. It’s OK to be skeptical, but at least be open to possibilities. I know many of you know next to nothing about wormholes beyond the fact that they are theoretical physics constructs, but almost like you were all going to a sci-fi movie, I’ll ask you to suspend disbelief for a little while as I explain a couple of competing theories to you. But first, let me give you a little more background. Tyler believes that the anomaly which manifested as a result of the twin energy waves coming out of the particle collision is, in fact, a wormhole. Theoretically, wormholes can produce the opportunity for travel through both time and space. In this case, Tyler believes that this particular wormhole permitted him to travel to fourteenth century Crimea. For those of us who aren’t history buffs, he believes he travelled to a place called Caffa specifically, and that’s noteworthy because it was essentially the departure point for what’s known as The Black Death, the pandemic that effectively wiped Europe off the map for about four hundred years.

Now I can already see the looks of doubt on some of your faces, and that’s why I asked you to suspend disbelief as I told you about this. The Black Death was an extremely lethal mixture of the bubonic plague and the H2N2 virus which wiped out approximately 95% of the entire population of Europe. At least, that’s what all of us have been taught. Maybe that’s not what happened. I’m going to now paint two alternative scenarios for you, and then we can open the meeting up for a larger discussion.

Tyler’s got the flu. Most of us knew that yesterday morning before the test started. Well, now it appears as if he’s also been exposed to the bubonic plague. Now before anyone jumps to another conclusion, no…, he didn’t have any plague samples in 28. He’s convinced that he got exposed to the plague bacteria while he was helping wounded soldiers and sick villagers in Caffa in the year 1346. Here’s where it gets weird, and yes, I agree it’s already weird enough sounding. Tyler passed the bird flu virus to the good folks of Caffa, which then combined with the bubonic plague to make The Black Death somewhere between 50 and 200 percent more lethal than it would’ve been on its own. The bullet point here is that Tyler changed history in about as dramatic a way as possible.

The alternative is that Tyler is delusional…, that some combination of the flu, a concussion and the anomaly has triggered a rich imaginary construct in his mind. It argues that he didn’t really time travel or contract the plague, and that the history he believes has occurred over the past almost seven hundred years is just a figment of his imagination. That alternative suggests that he doesn’t really have the plague, that it’s psychosomatic. It also leaves the anomaly largely unexplained. At any rate, those are the two scenarios we’re debating within our team, and we’ve now learned enough to feel like it was time to get this larger group involved in the conversation.”

Jasmine paused to catch her breath and to give the assembled genius time to digest what she had just shared and to begin consideration of the more far reaching implications suggested by her story. Pat again spoke.

“Jasmine, the second story is a whole lot easier to believe…, a WHOLE lot easier.”

“Well, given the limited amount of information you know right now, it makes total sense that you’d want to leap to that conclusion, but I’ll suggest that doing so might be a wee bit premature.”

Jasmine proceeded to give an abbreviated explanation regarding Tyler’s version of history. She included his recitations from the US Constitution and the Gettysburg Address and his stories about the Renaissance and World Wars I and II. Once the group heard those stories and coupled it with the symptoms of the plague that Tyler seemed to be exhibiting, their skepticism waned at least a little. Still, it was difficult to ask a group of scientists to accept not only that a wormhole and time travel had both been proven during the past thirty hours, but that those heretofore theoretical events were also now responsible for the dramatic altering of the history of the world as all of them had come to know it.

Pat had seemingly become a spokesperson for the group’s skeptical element. “Jasmine, that’s a really great story, but so far, that’s all it is…, a really great story. So far, aside from the possibility that Tyler might actually have the plague rather than just some vomiting that could be a byproduct of a concussion, you have no proof. We’d all like to think we had stumbled on something cool like a wormhole and time travel…, but come on…, it’s a little far-fetched. We’d need a lot more than what you’ve shown us so far to buy off on a notion like that. What else have you got?”

Jasmine turned to Colonel James. “Colonel, can you put the first of those images Tyler sent to us up on the screen, please?”

He hit buttons on a remote control he was holding which caused a screen to lower and the room’s built-in projector to come to life. A few more keystrokes on his laptop and the first image was now showing on the big screen at the front of the room.

“This photo and the other images we’re about to show you were all theoretically taken by Tyler yesterday morning as part of documenting the day of our particle collision test. And believe it or not, that woman on the right side of that picture up there is me.”

“No offense, Jasmine, but you haven’t looked like that for at least twenty years. We went to grad school together. I remember what a hottie you were back in the day. But let’s face it, that ship sailed a long time ago.”

“I wish I could argue with you on that point, Pat, but you’re right. In fact, to add a bit more precision to this discussion, I’ll tell you that it was about twenty-five and a half years ago…, July 17, 2018 to be precise. In Tyler’s altered time travel reality, that was the date of yesterday’s test.”

“But PD’s technology wasn’t even close to existing then. Only the Russians with their Tokamak reactor design were even in a position to contemplate something like this.”

“In our version of reality, that’s true. However, if Tyler’s inadvertent trip to the fourteenth century changed history, then that might not necessarily have been the case. Let’s look at all of the images. Colonel, will you run through the slide show for me, please?”

The room was largely silent as Mike flipped through the images one by one, allowing each image to stay on the screen for five seconds or so. Whenever one of the scientists would see the image of their younger self displayed on the screen, an inadvertent noise would come from somewhere in the room, with the silence making each such moment that much more jarring. Pat felt obligated to continue in his role as devil’s advocate.

“I don’t suppose you’ve had those images checked to see if they’ve been altered?”

Colonel James responded. “I’ve got a technical unit checking that out right now. For the sake of this discussion, though, I would think all of you should proceed under the assumption that the images have not been doctored.”

It was Monica’s turn to speak again. “Now you can see why we called all of you together. I don’t know if we’re looking at a scenario where we don’t really have much more than a sick colleague and an energy field of some kind that we need to categorize, or if we’re looking at the single biggest event in human history including the birth of Jesus Christ or any other singular moment you could come up with this side of the Big Bang.”

“Easy, Monica. There’s no media in this room. We don’t need to sensationalize this. We just need to work the problem. Let me start by asking a few questions right off the top, OK?”

“Please do, Pat. That’s why we’re opening the discussion up to include all of you.”

“Alright, then…, first, what do we need to do to determine definitively whether or not Tyler really has been exposed to the bubonic plague? A follow-up to that would need to be making sure beyond any doubt that there were no plague samples in the lab inside Station 28. Second, besides the younger versions of some of us in those pictures, who the hell are the rest of the people? Next, can we create and populate a historical timeline which overlays Tyler’s version of world events going forward from his alleged intrusion into the fabric of time side-by-side with our history? Can we then split that timeline into segments and assign teams of us to each of the different segments looking for similarities, differences and inconsistencies? Beyond that, can we begin to flesh out the greater impacts and more far reaching implications if this time travel actually occurred? In other words, are we better off? It sounds like we’re at least theoretically a quarter century behind in terms of scientific development, at least in terms of particle physics, but it also sounds like we may’ve dodged a couple of wars in the last century. There’s no sense in getting the cart before the horse here, but there have got to be thousands of different ways to look at something like this under the unlikely assumption that it actually occurred. All of that is a long-winded way of getting back to needing to answer a simple first question. Do we need to just call ‘Bullshit’?”

“Well, I know the answer to the first question. The only way to be positive that Tyler either does or doesn’t have the plague is to draw blood and examine it in a lab environment. Unfortunately, he’s been too sick to even attempt that. It’s also why he and Doc agreed to administer an antibiotic prophylactically. If and when Tyler is functional enough to draw a blood sample and test it, we’d know the answer to that question. Now, having said all that, I just exhausted my knowledge on the subject of testing for the plague. I have no idea how that process would work or how long it would take to get results or anything like that.”

“Well, it’s a place to start.”

“Everything else pretty much relies on Tyler giving us more information. If he took those pictures yesterday morning, then it should be a simple matter for him to identify everyone in them. I’d say it’s reasonable to assume they’re all part of the scientific team, but beyond that we’re just guessing.”

“What about the military officer in that one picture?”

Colonel James spoke. “That’s my father.”

Pat let out a low whistle before speaking. “No shit! Well, that’s not creepy at all, is it?”

One of the scientists who rarely spoke unless spoken to was waving her hand in an attempt to get Monica’s attention. She finally made eye contact with the woman.

“Yes, Elizabeth, you have something?”

“I do. First off, I wasn’t in any of the pictures, but I’m sure I was here yesterday when the test was conducted. I find it incredible to think, even hypothetically, that I wasn’t supposed to be here for the test, or that it actually occurred twenty-five years ago. I don’t know how I’m supposed to get my mind around something like that. We should be taking baby steps right now.”

“Whaddaya mean when you say baby steps?”

“Monica, didn’t you say earlier that you hadn’t actually seen Tyler since the test and the arrival of the anomaly?”

“That’s right. The video image has been blocked by the energy field so far, and Tyler’s been too sick to be anywhere other than the bathroom floor where we obviously don’t have a video feed.”

“Then aren’t we making this way more difficult than it needs to be?”

“Again, what do you mean, Elizabeth?”

“Well, if Tyler’s little adventure from yesterday really happened a quarter century ago, then he should be what…, in his early thirties? And even if he’s sick as a dog with flu or even a combination of flu and bubonic plague, he would still look like a sick young person rather than the much older versions of those people in the photos we all just saw. Rather than chasing our tails in this unwinnable argument, let’s just get a look at Tyler. Can’t we just do that?”

Monica turned to Colonel James. “Colonel, can you get your comm team to rig up a two-way video conference from here into the control room of Station 28? Pat just told us the anomaly should’ve just about finished dissipating. Maybe we can actually see the inside of 28 now.”

“I should be able to arrange that. Give me a couple of minutes to get it all set up.”

He left the room with Monica following close behind. She addressed the group before she exited.

“Everyone stay put. I’m gonna see if I can get Tyler into the control room in Station 28, so we can get a look at him.”

Three minutes later, Monica and Colonel James reentered the room and stared expectantly at the screen. Soon, they were looking at the back support of the empty chair at Station 28’s control room console. A few seconds later, Tyler’s voice came over the room’s speakers.

“I’m comin’…, I’m comin’…, just movin’ kinda slow.”

Another fifteen seconds passed before the image of Tyler’s t-shirt appeared incredibly close to the camera. Five seconds later he was sitting down, and the image of the top of his head gave way to reveal the image of a clearly sick, but equally as clearly, far younger version of Tyler than anyone in the room was prepared to see staring into the camera. There was a collective gasp from the gathering of scientists. At the other end of the video feed, Tyler was beginning to focus on the images coming from the meeting room into Station 28. The look of incredulity on his face immediately communicated his shock, even before he spoke.

“Holy shit! What the fuck happened to all of you?”