The Temporal Key

by Adam Benson

  “But wait, how can you have a written future?” Amikes asked. “We can’t move beyond the expansion of the universe; we can only travel to the past. So, how does a known future suddenly appear in our database?”

  “If we were actually in the past now.” Fossor said.

  “Doctors, we have no reason to doubt that we are on the leading edge of time.” Ca’aury tried to reassure them.

  “But we don’t really have any way to know, do we?” Amikes said. “For all we know we’re not on the leading edge of time, and we’ve stumbled upon a contamination that’s intersecting with now, which would mean….”

  “Well, you can see why this is troubling, and why I asked you all to keep this thing a secret.” Ca’aury said, cutting him off.

  “There must be some mistake. I’m sorry Dayk, but this seems to violate a couple of base principals. There must be a mistake somewhere.” Dr. Amikes said.

  “It’s not a mistake,” Ca’aury said firmly.

  “Then why is this only appearing now?” Amikes demanded.

  “Because we were looking at it from the wrong perspective.” Dayk said.

  “It’s a historical event, what other perspective are we supposed to look at it from?” Fathal asked.

  “The crash is a historical event, but the mission to the past hasn’t happened yet, which makes it a future event.” Dayk told him.

  “Wait, are you suggesting a temporal duality?” Amikes asked. “We have to start predicting our own futures now, to accurately know the past? If the future is truly unknowable…”

  “Which it is.” Ca’aury interjected.

  “…All right. Then what are you saying, we have to start factoring everything that we may or may not do thirty years from now in order to see the effects in the past?” Amikes finished.

  “No…”

  “You’re suggesting that all of our missions have a temporal duality to them? This kind of anomaly could show up on any of our missions, calculated in this way.” Dr. Fossor said.

  “No, I’ve calculated over five hundred missions in this experiment. None of them produce results of this kind. This is the first I’ve come across.” Dayk said. “Which is why I felt it necessary to confer with Director Ca’aury and bring you all in on this.”

  All six scientists turned back to the orb and focused their attention on the small bubble of future, looping back into the distant past. It seemed to have a separation of almost thirty-five years beyond what the database represented as the present, and what the bubble represented as the future.

  “Cosmological expansion means that we can predict the future, but we can’t know it, and we can’t accurately travel to a place that we don’t know,” Fossor said solemnly. “If this database is accurate then we could travel to this point in space-time.” He said, pointing to the anomaly. “Knowledge of the future breeds corruption and is by its very nature a sort of tampering with the timeline.”

  “Perhaps so,” Director Ca’aury said. “But what we have here is also a potential Paleo-Causal event, and in any case that event has been locked in written history for over two million years. We have little reason to believe that this was really an ‘alien’ crash, and the images found in the database, though none of them actually taken at the event, do have a strong resemblance to us. Gentlemen, we are already bound by history to investigate this crash. After all, the database’s information is incomplete, and spotty at best, and it is our job as temporal historians to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. That is what we do here.”

  “But if that crash is us, then we are dooming ourselves to crash one of our own ships, and thereby contaminate the past,” Dr. Amikes said.

  “Yes Doctor, that’s why this is such a conundrum. If that crash was one of our own, and we decide here and now not to go back and investigate it, then we will also be changing the past, and if this is a Paleo-Causal event, we might very well be destroying our own future, and maybe even our own existence. The problem with a loop of this size is that the event has been a part of natural history for the last two million years, even though now if we go through with it, it will no longer be a part of natural history.”

  “The Center has never had a paradox of this scale before,” Dr. Fathal said with gloom in his voice. “Are we doomed to make this mistake?”

  “We don’t know what it is yet, Dr. Fathal,” Ca’aury said coolly.

  “And therein lies the problem. Why does it project thirty-five sines into negative time,” Fossor asked?

  “If it is negative time,” Dr. Amikes said. “We could simply be thirty-five years in the past now.”

  “We’re not.” Director Ca’aury said confidently.

  “How can you know that,” Amikes asked.

  “Because we are on the leading edge of time now.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes,” Ca’aury said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dayk spoke up. “That’s not why we’re here anyways.”

  “How can it not matter, Dayk?” Amikes said.

  “Because in this case whether we’re on the leading edge of time or not is moot. The only thing we have to decide here is, who is going back to investigate this?” Dayk said, raising his voice a notch.

  “Investigate!?” Fathal said. “Dhregh, Dayk, we’re not talking about an investigation, we’re talking about volunteering for a catastrophe!”

  “How bad is it?” Amikes asked.

  “The data we’ve recovered is conflicting and broken at best, all we know is that some people claimed there was a crash of some kind. Most of the rest of the information is exaggerated conjecture from the time period,” Ca’aury said. He was holding something back and Dayk knew it.

  “A few of the pieces I found suggest that two or three alien bodies were recovered. Others suggest that no bodies were recovered, and most of it suggested that the whole thing was a hoax anyways,” Dayk said over Ca’aury. “Mistaken identity on a broken piece of scientific equipment from the military of the time.”

  “Two or three dead.” Fathal said glaring at Ca’aury. “What are you asking us for here?”

  Ca’aury kept his gentle cool and waited a moment for Dr. Fathal to calm down. “Dr. Fathal. Since the creation of the Temporal Sciences Center we’ve lost fifty-eight researchers to history…”

  “Those were volunteers!” Dr. Fathal barked.

  Ca’aury paused again as the tension in the room built. “Yes, most of those were volunteers, but this is a dangerous business. We violate the space-time continuum every time we rip open a vortex and occasionally something is going to go wrong. You’ve known that for a long time, Fathal.”

  Dr. Fathal continued to glare hard at Director Ca’aury. “This isn’t risk. You’re asking us to take on a suicide mission!”

  “Dr. Fathal.” Ca’aury locked eyes with him. “Someone must investigate this. We don’t have a choice in that, the event is locked in history. Dr. Dayk is a member of your team, and it was he that brought this to my attention. I am asking your team to make a recommendation on who to send back in time.”

  “It has to be us.” Dr. Amikes said. “We can’t ask another team to do this. What would that make us?”

  Fathal turned and glared at Amikes as though he had completely betrayed him. “Are you trying to get us all killed?”

  “He’s right, Fathal,” Dayk said. “I found this; we can’t subject anyone else to it.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Fathal said. “You two are the youngest scientists here. You have the most to lose! I’m over six hundred years old and I certainly am not ready to die just yet, but you two are pups!”

  “I’m a hundred and fifty-nine, Fathal, I hardly think that qualifies me as a pup!” Dayk said. “And no, I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die at all, but I can’t send someone else to their death just to protect my own skin.”

  Fathal seethed at his two colleagues. He looked over at Dr. Fossor for support, since both he and Fossor were of equivalent age and had been
working together for most of their careers. Dr. Fossor bit his lip and lowered his gaze. “You too?” he said at last.

  “Fathal…” Fossor started. He looked around the room in distress and his eyes caught the anomaly once again, floating there like some foretold doom. “They’re right. Whether we were all involved in the discovery or not, it’s still our team that found it. We can’t ask anyone else to die here.”

  “Doctors,” Ca’aury interjected. “I think your pessimism has seen enough light for the day. There’s no guarantee that anyone is going to die. We’re dealing with broken historical information and conjecture. No one is sentencing anyone to die here, but we do have to decide about which team investigates this. As it is Dr. Dayk’s discovery…”

  “At your request!” Fathal said to Ca’aury.

  Ca’aury looked up at them all and smiled a sheepish smile. “Doctors. As I said before, this is strictly confidential. We need to have this mission fully calculated and prepared as soon as possible. Dr. Dayk can share all the current information that he has with you, but I want to launch this within three solarSines. Which means I need your collective decision within two megaChrons. I will leave this decision in your hands.” With that, he and Dr. Harbr’oon teleported out of the Navigational Probabilities lab.

  “What were you thinking?” Fathal said, seething at Dayk.

  “Fathal, I had no idea that anything like this was going to happen. All the pictures of ‘alien’ faces in the Malaysian Database was raising questions in the Center about the ‘Self-Fulfilling Prophesies’ that Ca’aury’s been on about for the last nine hundred years. If those images are of us, then those moments are locked in history and must be investigated in order to maintain that history. All I was doing was calculating trips to each of those references.”

  “Well, now you’ve killed us all.” Fathal said irrationally.

  Dr. Fossor stood up for his colleague, “Fathal! This isn’t Dayk’s fault. He was doing his job. What’s wrong with you?”

  All eyes were now centered on Dr. Fathal. He was suddenly feeling cornered and betrayed by his friends and colleagues, and he realized that his anger and arguments were falling on deaf ears. “You all decide what you want to do. I’m getting too old for this.” With that he teleported away from the Navigational Probabilities lab.

  What is it?

  Mack drove straight to the Proctor's ranch a further eight or so miles away from the crash site. It had taken him almost a half an hour to make the trip down the bumpy farm route roads. He pulled up just a short way away from the front porch and ground to a stop. The dust he had been kicking up behind him caught up with the truck and quickly blew past it as Mack leaped out and started marching up toward the house.

  Loretta Proctor heard an engine approaching and had gone to the door just as a figure she recognized came walking toward her from behind the cloud of dust that blew by. “Howdy Mack!" She called from inside, opening the screen door to greet him. "Weren't expecting you this evening."

  "Howdy Loretta." Mack returned. "Floyd around?"

  "Well, uh, Floyd's still out in the barn." Loretta said. "Give me a sec, and I'll go fetch him."

  "If it's all the same, I'll go 'round and find him myself, ma'am." Mack said hurriedly, making his way to the barn as he passed.

  "Alright,” she said, “Y'all come back up to the house when you're ready for some supper!" She called behind him as he walked quickly down to the barn.

  Mack found Floyd working in the dark under his Case Hay Baler, spouting an endless stream of vociferous frustrations. "Howdy Floyd." Mack called from the barn door.

  "Is that you, Mack?" Floyd called back from under the hay baler. He pulled himself out from under the machine and grabbed a rag to wipe off his greasy hands. "What's goin' on?"

  "Y'all hear that explosion a while ago?" Mack asked.

  "Yeah, I recon I did. Didn't pay it no mind though. I've been stuck under this baler fer most of the day." Floyd said, getting to his feet to properly greet Mack.

  "What's wrong with yer baler?" Mack asked.

  "Threw a belt on one o'the pickups. Ain't been able to get it back on there. Damned wheel won't budge on it." Floyd went on. "Been down the better part of a week now."

  "Well, that ain't no good." Mack sympathized.

  "Nah, it ain't," Floyd agreed. "So, what about that explosion’s got you worked up? Army test o' some kind, wasn’t it?"

  "Yeah, that's what I figured too," Mack said. "Thing of it is, the damned thing crashed out there on my ranch, an' I ain't got the foggiest notion of what it is. It's big too. Bigger'n any o' the normal stuff they shoot off our way."

  "Well, that ain't too out of the usual," Floyd said.

  "Normally, I'd agree with ya'," said Mack, "but this one's diff'rent. I ain't come across anything like what I found today."

  "What's diff'rent about it?" Floyd asked with some curiosity. Mack wasn't the kind of man to get frazzled easily, and the fact that he seemed frazzled now was enough to get Floyd's attention.

  "Floyd." Mack started. But he hesitated, trying to find the words “Some of the broken pieces layin' around, I ain't got no explanation for. The metal, er whatever it is, ain't like no other metal I ever seen. It kinda looks like metal, but it kinda don't too. And everythin' about it was just... strange." Floyd listened as Mack went on. "The ground was all charged up with static. Ever' step I took it was like gitting shocked by... Like when you rub yer shoes on carpet and then touch a door knob. But it was comin' from the grass. You ever seen that?"

  "You was gittin' shocked by the grass?" Floyd asked, almost not believing it.

  "Not just the grass. Ever'thin'. The ground, the grass. Anythin' I touched. An' it was jumping through my pants and my boots, too. Not just my bare skin." Mack said. The more he said, the greater the look of worry that crept across his face. "The whole thing smelled kinda funny too. Like a whole bunch of chemicals. I couldn't pinpoint any one kinda smell. Just... somethin' ain't right about it."

  "This is out on your land right now?" Floyd tried to clarify.

  "Yup," said Mack. "I brung back a piece of the metal I was tellin' you about. Floyd, I tried to bend it, and fold it, an' it would give way, but then no matter what I did it springs right back into whatever shape it was in to begin with. And it’s light too. Like nothin' you ever felt".

  "You think it's some top-secret military contraption?" Floyd asked.

  "I don't rightly know." Mack replied. "I kinda figured I'd come git yer opinion of it. If'n you got the time."

  "Yeah, I'll come take a look-see." Floyd said. “I ain’t gettin’ nowhere with this confounded thing anyhow.” They started to make their way out of the barn to head back up to the house. "You want a glass o' tea?" Floyd asked Mack.

  "I wouldn't say no to that." Mack said graciously. “My supper done flew outta my hands when that thing went off.”

  “Yer supper?” Floyd asked a little confused.

  “Somethin’ ain’t right about all this,” Mack said.

  "I'll git Loretta to make us up some tea, and we'll have a look at what'choo brung over"

  The two men meandered back up to the house, saying very little as they went. The Proctor's farm was only moderately nicer than the ranch house that Mack lived in. It was larger, but it was also a family homestead. Both Floyd and Loretta lived there with their eight children. They owned the land they lived on and had been original homesteaders from a generation before. They had more amenities than Mack had, which included a gasoline powered washing machine that Loretta had bought for herself about five years earlier. They raised most of their own food, including hogs and a few cows, beans and sugarcane. They were also primarily sheep herders but diversified their agricultural activities far more than Mack did. In fact, apart from selling wool and cow's milk, they also caught and sold rattlesnakes at a dollar a pound. Compared to Mack, they were running a super-market.

  Floyd walked straight into the house to clean up while Mack went around front to grab the str
ange object from his truck. He let himself into the house and plopped the metallic thing on the coffee table in front of Floyd. "So, what do you make of this?" Mack said as he settled into a chair perpendicular to the couch.

  "It's lighter than it seemed." Floyd said, somewhat astonished as he picked it up. "An' look at them colors. It seems t' change as ya turn it in the light."

  "Try bendin' it." Mack said. Floyd folded the metal easily. It felt like he was bending a piece of tin. The rigidity and tension was about the same, and as he bent it, it felt as though it would easily hold that shape. But only a second or two after he released it, it reformed itself back into the shape it had been in; perfectly smooth and polished.

  "Well, I'll be damned,” Floyd said in amazement over the strange metal.

  "Crumple it up!" Mack advised him.

  Just then Loretta walked in with a couple glasses of tea and handed them to the two men. "So, what did y'all find?" She asked as she passed off the tea. Floyd had begun crumpling the metal up in his hand, and once again it was easily pliable.

  "Some strange metal Mack found out on his ranch." Floyd told her. He released his grip on the metal and a moment later it moved back into place. "Well, I'll be damned!"

  "Where’d you find that Mack?" She asked as she watched the metal unfold itself back into its original shape.

  "Crashed out on m’ land,” Mack said. “’bout eight miles out from here.”

  “What is it?” She asked.

  “Don’t rightly know.” Mack paused, watching Floyd fidget with the object.

  "I'll be damned!" Floyd said again, still fiddling with the plastic-like metal in his hands. "That is pretty strange."

  "Well, strange or not," Mack started, "I've got a big ol' mess out there that's gonna need to be cleaned up. There's a whole lot more'n I can pick up by myself." Mack's voice picked up an air of frustration as he spoke. "I feel like the Army needs to be the one t' come clean it up. It's their mess, anyhow. Don't know why I always have to be the one to clean up their rubbish!"

  "I know what'cha mean." Floyd said. "I had one of them rubber things fall down ‘cross yonder last year alone.” He nodded behind where Mack was sitting. “I don't even know what they're doin' with 'em, but it does seem like they should be takin' some responsibility fer their actions." Floyd had set his glass of tea on the edge of the folded metal, to see if the weight of the glass could hold it in place. After a few seconds, the glass started to tip as the metal tried to straighten itself back out. Floyd caught the glass before the metal could cause a spill. "Well, I'll be damned! This is the strangest thing I ever seen!"