Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel

by Michael Bunker

  “Hereafter” is partially set in a future I think of as the Labyrinth, a world where corporations have expanded beyond governments, where people live in the shadow of surveillance by telepaths, where robots are second-class members of society on the verge of becoming self-aware.

  If that world sounds almost familiar, you’d be right. Ever since I fell in love with science and speculative fiction—both the classic writers, including Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, and the more contemporary, including Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro—I’ve realized that what such fiction does so well is to illuminate not the future, but everyday life: life as we know it today.

  At the moment my speculative fiction is less well known than my poetry, which includes several collections that range in subject from vampires, in Sonata Vampirica, to love poetry, in How More Beautiful You Are, to horror and hope, in War and Ablution.

  Even in poetry, what I found was that, as Hugh Howey says, “I could write about my deepest thoughts, fears, and desires while disguising them as plot.” Exploring the bond between a vampire and its victim was really an exploration of abusive relationships. Genetically tweaking avian embryos to recreate dinosaurs became a metaphor for resurrecting a lost love. Fragments from a girl’s war diary were a symbol of hope.

  We live in a present in fear of the future—of something unknown, dystopian, apocalyptic. I believe that, despite all this, there is promise, there is hope. I plan to write about that, and I hope you’ll come along for the journey.

  (Oh, and if I do decide I have more to say about “Hereafter,” or other stories, a small circle will hear about it first on http://bit.ly/SamPeraltaNews.)

  Many thanks to Michael Bunker and David Gatewood for inviting me to be a part of this amazing collection of stories, and to Jason Gurley for the inspiration to raise my hand and say “Choose me!” It’s a tremendous honor to share these pages with such talented authors.

  REENTRY WINDOW

  by Eric Tozzi

  “I can’t believe what I’m about to say—can’t believe this is really happening. Something’s landed here on Mars. Just a half mile from my current position. I watched it decelerate, so I’m certain it’s not a meteor. It looked like a parachute deployed, and a piece of it fell away—maybe a heat shield. I don’t know what to make of this. There were no other flights scheduled but ours. No way it’s from Earth. No way.”

  Brett Lockwood angled his gloved hand toward the glass of his helmet to read the touch screen on his wrist. His suit had three hours of life support left. Enough time to investigate the strange object. Enough time to make it back to his lander. But after that? He’d have to engage the Mars Ascent Engine, leave the surface, and rendezvous in orbit with his crew in Epoch 1. Once systems checked out, they could start recalculating a trip back to Earth. They’d have to leave now, ahead of schedule. It was too dangerous out here. But based on the orbits of Earth and Mars, getting back home at this point might be impossible.

  It was in that moment that Brett felt it sink in, an injection of resignation bleeding into his stomach, possessing his whole body, staking out a stronghold in his mind. The window’s closed, Brett. There’s no going home. The thought came loudly. But he muscled past it. No. No, there’s still a chance! With a carefully planned gravity assist, they could build enough velocity and make it back to Earth safely.

  Brett swept his display to make sure that audio was live, still recording his every word. It was. A tiny waveform at the bottom right of the screen pulsed in time with the sound of his voice.

  “Still recording,” he said, as if to remind himself to keep talking. He found it to be a comfort—the sound of his voice in that helmet. He’d been waiting for a response from his friend Martin Locke, flight navigator on Epoch 1, or from any of the rest of his crew: Debra Stone, William Chu, Howard Black, Kate Wallace. He could imagine hearing them as clearly as he had on any one of the two hundred days they’d spent together on the flight to Mars, each with their own distinct voice, like instruments in an orchestra. Singing now in his memory. But that’s all they were. A memory. They weren’t responding to his calls. As if… as if the anomaly had done something to them. Yes, the anomaly—it’s why they came here to Mars in the first place.

  * * *

  Fifteen years earlier, the planetary exploration program had been pronounced dead. Prior to that, there had been plans for a robotic sample return mission, and even a manned mission to set up a permanent habitat on the surface of Mars. But over time, economies tanked, political will failed, people lost interest—and space exploration, whether manned or robotic, was buried and forgotten. One by one, deep-space missions were truncated and spacecraft abandoned, left to die in the uncharitable coldness of the solar system.

  It was the Mars atmospheric anomaly that resurrected the planetary and deep-space exploration programs from the ashes of oblivion.

  Initially described as merely a strange opening, or window, in the top of the Martian atmosphere, the anomaly soon became the primary target of investigation of the MAVEN Orbiting Spacecraft. MAVEN, or Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, had been sent to Mars for a routine study of the upper atmosphere; scientists were hoping to learn why the red planet had lost most of its atmosphere over the last several billion years. But MAVEN discovered much more. On a routine orbit, it detected a strong inflow of solar particles moving toward a focal point in the atmosphere—a point that was generating a massive quantum gravity field spike. The phenomenon, as a whole, resembled some sort of vortex.

  Readings from the throat of the anomaly were off the charts—a flood of data that no one could interpret. No one knew for sure what it was they were seeing. No one could explain how it got there.

  And then, on a subsequent orbital pass, MAVEN vanished.

  This wasn’t a situation in which a spacecraft encounters a malfunction and drops into safe mode. MAVEN simply ceased to occupy its space in Mars orbit. The phone call from JPL to Washington, DC was brief.

  “What’s happened to MAVEN?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Sounds like a software issue. It’s probably in safe mode, and just needs an update—”

  “No, sir, it’s not a software issue or a hardware issue or a malfunction of any kind. The spacecraft is gone.”

  Within a few hours, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Global Surveyor were redirected into new orbits that would keep them at a theoretical safe distance from the anomaly.

  Finally, after much debate, the plans for a manned mission to the Red Planet were given the green light, and the ship Epoch 1 was quickly developed and built. The mission was multi-purpose, which made it appealing to those in Congress who finally agreed to pay for it. The flight would satisfy three primary objectives: from a safe orbital distance, it would study the anomaly and catalogue its findings; it would send a lander to the surface of Mars to achieve the first human steps on the Red Planet; and, finally, it would collect soil and rock samples for return to Earth. Three missions wrapped up in one flight. Everyone agreed it was a bargain. Everyone was happy.

  A week before launch, Brett and his crew spent an evening at the beach house at Cape Canaveral, just a half mile from the Apollo launch pad. Brett and Martin stood at the edge of the water, looking out over the causeway, watching a full moon rise above the horizon like a looming eye of God. William and the others were taking a short walk along the sandy shore, leaving the two friends alone.

  “Crazy, isn’t it? Armstrong, Aldrin, stood here eighty years ago and saw that same moon,” Martin said.

  Brett chuckled. “Is that what we are? Modern day Armstrongs?”

  “We’re going to be the first people to set foot on Mars,” Martin answered. “Well, you at least. Dream come true, huh?”

  Brett’s gaze floated away from the shore, toward the treeline that rimmed the waterfront. Beyond it stood the Vertical Integration Facility, a fifteen-story steel edifice built to house the new Atlas Heavy launch vehicle that would carry them into space, emancipa
ting them from the bond of Earth’s gravity.

  “I haven’t dreamed in years.”

  Without looking at his friend, Martin said, “She’d be proud of you, Brett. She would.”

  “Maybe,” Brett replied. “Anyway,” he added, quickly brushing the moisture from the rims of his eyes, “I guess it takes something like this.”

  “Huh?”

  “The Mars anomaly… I guess it takes something this bizarre to drive us back out into space. As if our solar system doesn’t have enough wonders we could be exploring. Still can’t believe we haven’t touched the surface of Europa, or Enceladus for that matter. Can you imagine how far we’d be if this anomaly had occurred when we landed Vikings 1 and 2 back in the seventies? If the cameras had turned on and they’d seen fossils or footprints?”

  Martin said, “Guess that’s why we only made six lunar landings, and Apollo 17 was the end of it. People began to see the moon as something unremarkable.”

  “And Mars… Curiosity worked for twenty-three years,” Brett quipped, “and then—nothing. Like it never happened. Just more rocks and dirt to look at. A dead-end road.” He grew somber as the others, bathed now in soft, magnesium moonlight, drifted back toward them.

  “Maybe we’re the ones that’ll reignite this whole thing, Martin. Maybe we’ll give the world a chance to believe again.”

  * * *

  A week later, with the strength of nine million pounds of sheer thrust, the five of them were moving at a speed of twenty-five thousand miles an hour, leaving Earth orbit on a sure trajectory that would take them to an intercept with the planet Mars—and the atmospheric anomaly that, as far as remote sensing was able to determine, was still present. Still mystifying.

  A voyage to the Red Planet meant two hundred days in space, one way. Two hundred days without seeing blue skies, white clouds, green grass. Two hundred days confined in a space not much larger than a small, one-bedroom apartment. And each day, time dilated. There were no sunrises, sunsets, or any other occurrences that might promise a person that their existence was moving along in an ordinary world. Real-time communications with Earth began to stretch into halting exchanges punctuated by several-second delays. Then fifteen seconds. Then thirty. Then it would take minutes. By the time they reached orbital insertion at Mars, a round-trip message would take almost twenty minutes.

  Brett remembered Day 100—the halfway point. It was the day he realized he was adrift on a sea a hundred trillion times wider and more open than the largest ocean back home. Looking out the viewport, he could see nothing behind them, nothing in front of them—only star-dusted infinities on each side. It was the day he felt small, lost between worlds, bound to neither one. Long past a mission abort point, still tens of millions of miles from his destination, he wondered, My God, what the hell am I doing out here? What have I done? It was not unlike how he’d felt when she left him.

  Carrie had long, platinum-blond hair that framed a kind, youthful face. She was cute. Adorable, in fact. The love of his life. And then, one day, she left. With no explanation. Brett had no idea where she was or what had become of her. Until, many years later, a mutual friend told him about the cancer—and that she was gone. In that instant, Brett slipped through a window that exists between moments—a window into the surreal. He was a man between worlds. Lost.

  After Day 100, he busied himself, so as not to dwell on the alarming truth about his celestial position. He went over his previous analysis of the anomaly, and he carefully rehearsed his entry, descent, and landing procedures. These would mostly be executed by software, but still, he ran the drill. Over and over. There could be no errors. No second chances, especially out here. No vehicle, manned or unmanned, had made it to the Red Planet and back again to Earth. A million things could go wrong. A million things had to go right.

  * * *

  Day 200 came, and Epoch 1, using an aero-braking technique, achieved a successful orbital insertion around Mars.

  “My God,” Martin said, a shiver in his voice. “It’s Mars. Look at it!”

  Brett pressed himself to the viewport, and felt a tide of awe rush in. They were drifting over the Tharsis region of the Red Planet, and centered beneath them was Olympus Mons, an extinct shield volcano that soared eighty-nine thousand feet above the surface of the planet. They’d all studied the pictures of it taken from Mars orbiters over the decades. But as they saw it now, gliding past them, its sheer mass was astonishing—three times the height of Mount Everest back home.

  For the next twelve hours the team of scientists settled in: they secured an orbit that would keep them at a distance of twenty kilometers from the anomaly, ran thorough checks of all systems, and unpackaged and assembled equipment that had been stowed since launch.

  Finally, they began a comprehensive analysis of the anomaly.

  And then, an hour later, it all changed.

  “This is crazy,” Martin said.

  Debra floated past him to her instrument bay, passing a computer tablet to Kate. Kate swiveled away toward another panel, where she performed a data upload that would be sent back to Earth via their high-gain antenna. Howard and William studied their own findings, murmuring between each other.

  “It is. But it’s accurate,” Debra said.

  “So what you’re saying is… it’s gone now.” Brett said.

  The question hung beneath an unbearable stillness in the ship.

  “It looks that way,” Martin finally said. “No signature, no traces that it was ever there.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem. It was never there to begin with. The anomaly was a malfunction in our sensors,” Howard said.

  Martin shook his head firmly. “No. No way that’s possible.”

  “I’d say just about anything’s possible, Martin,” Howard replied evenly.

  Kate added, “It doesn’t explain what happened to MAVEN. We’re still missing a spacecraft that we know did not deorbit and burn up in the Martian atmosphere.”

  Brett said, “So the anomaly was here an hour ago, and now it’s… gone.”

  “Shut like a window,” Debra said. It was the word window that gave them all a moment of pause. Martin locked eyes with Brett, and there was complete understanding between them.

  “Maybe it’s not gone. Maybe it’s just… closed,” Brett said.

  “So. What now?” Martin asked. The mission prep had been a rigorous exercise in contingency planning, yet the possibility that the anomaly would simply vanish… That was one possibility that hadn’t been considered.

  Brett floated gently to the viewport, stopping himself there, gazing down at the curve of the Red Planet. Mars. They were orbiting Mars—the very first people ever to do so. No one else had ever seen it. Not this close.

  “Guys, we’re at Mars. The only ones. We’ve still got surface and sample operations to conduct. I suggest we proceed. We can still make history out here. Our window is still open.”

  And so they all fell into agreement, and began preparing for surface operations. Brett would pilot the Mars Lander down to the surface and make the first footprints in the soil. He’d do a short-range survey and collect rock and soil samples, each no bigger than an aspirin, and place them in a cache. Then, using the newly developed Mars Ascent Engine, he’d leave the planet and rendezvous with Epoch 1. They were scheduled to spend another several months in orbit. If the anomaly didn’t reappear, they’d spend that time doing further atmospheric analysis. And then they’d begin the journey back home.

  The surface op began just as expected. Brett safely undocked the lander from Epoch 1 and began a descent toward the upper atmosphere of Mars. All systems were stable, all lights were green. He could hear Martin in the voice-operated switch, or VOX unit, of his helmet.

  “Okay Lander, you’re in the approach corridor, looking good. No trajectory correction required. You’ll be making first contact with the upper atmosphere in just a few seconds.”

  “Copy that,” Brett replied, now feeling an unmistakable tremor in the frame
of the lander. Soon, he knew, it would become a far stronger vibration as the enormous force of atmospheric friction began to slow his vehicle. He would feel g forces on the magnitude of seven during peak deceleration, and the heat shield beneath him would reach temperatures as hot as the surface of the sun. For about ninety seconds Brett would become a meteor.

  “Okay, picking up strong vibrations here in the lander,” he said out loud. Hearing the sound of his voice brought immediate comfort. “Everything’s still looking good on the panels.”

  He felt the pressure on his body as the forces of hypersonic speed crossed swords with friction.

  “Ninety seconds of this, twenty seconds of peak deceleration followed by—”

  BANG. Brett snapped his gaze toward the sound at the side of the lander. What the hell was that? Did something burst? Helium tank? He checked his panels. All green. He closed his eyes and spoke softly to himself.

  “Twenty seconds of peak deceleration followed by parachute deploy at mach two point one. Heat shield separation ten seconds after that followed by—”

  Brett heard a voice on the radio.

  “You’ve drifted, Lander. Brett, your position is…target landing ellipse…recomp…”

  Martin’s voice was cutting in and out, his words reduced to mere syllables. Brett fumbled with the VOX icon on the wrist display attached to his suit. It still showed a healthy signal strength.

  “Wait. Epoch One, say again?”

  There was nothing.

  “Martin? Martin? Epoch One, I can’t hear you—”

  “…an…ly…it’s back…an…en…”

  Brett shouted, “I can’t hear you, Martin! Did you say something about the anomaly? Epoch One, do you copy me?”

  All at once, the spacecraft went dark. Every display, every indicator light failed, plunging Brett into iron cold darkness. Then, alarmingly, the forces of deceleration ceased, replaced by a plunging sensation through sheer emptiness. As if… as if the atmosphere itself had opened beneath him and he was falling down a very deep hole. Absolute vertical descent. An express elevator with the cables cut.