The Temporal Key

by Adam Benson

  Mack handed him his pocket knife. Floyd looked up over his glasses at what he was being handed. At first it didn't quite seem to register with him, but after a quick moment he acknowledged the suggestion and took the knife from Mack's hand. Holding the metal upright, Floyd started trying to whittle off a piece of the edge of the metal. It wouldn't cut, but instead seemed to avoid the blade of the knife, moving out of its way as he tried to shave off a section. "I think you need t' sharpen this thing” Floyd said jokingly. "I'll be damned!" He moved the blade perpendicular to the edge and started sawing away. The metal didn't budge at all, but no mark was left on it by the knife.

  With a little frustration, Floyd set the metal down on the coffee table and started trying to push the blade through the seemingly pliable material.

  "Now Floyd!" Loretta snapped, "Don't you mar up my coffee table! Why don't you do that outside?"

  But it didn't matter. The metal refused to let the knife go through it, no matter how hard Floyd pushed. In fact, no mark of any kind had been made anywhere, except that the tip of Mack's blade was now slightly bent. "Loretta!" He said back, somewhat frustrated. Not really by her, but by this strange material he'd been handed.

  In what seemed like a continuous huff, Floyd stood up and marched out the door with the metal in one hand and the pocket knife in another. The tenacious old man had suddenly become determined to make his mark on this inexplicable thing he’d been handed. Mack quickly got up and followed him out, and Loretta followed closely on his heels.

  Floyd set the metal down on the porch for a moment and then walked over to the woodpile. There he grabbed a couple pieces of relatively evenly cut lengths of wood and the ax that had been propped up alongside the woodpile. He came marching back with these things in hand. The two logs in one arm, and the ax and Mack's pocket knife in the other hand. He set them all down on the porch next to the metal. Then he handed Mack's knife back to him. "Sorry 'bout the blade, Mack."

  Mack looked at the bend tip of the knife. "Don’t sweat it, Floyd. Nothin' a good stone won't take out."

  Having propped the two logs up on their ends, Floyd put the metal sheet across their tops. “No way this ax won’t leave a mark.” He huffed, grabbing the ax and raising it high above his head. Mack and Loretta looked on eagerly. Floyd swung the ax blade straight down onto the metal. It hit hard and bounced off, leaving no marks on the strangely pliable object. The sudden halt of the blade traveled down the handle and straight up both of Floyd's arms. "I'll.... be.... DAMNED!!" He yelled in agony, dropping the ax to the ground. Mack quickly picked up the object and examined it. It was flawless.

  "What the hell is this thing?!" Mack said in amazement. "What the hell crashed on my land?!"

  "Ya' know!" Loretta started. "It might be one of them flying saucers!"

  "Loretta!" Floyd said with a grumble.

  "I'm serious!" She said. "I heard on the radio a couple of weeks back, that they're offering up to three thousand dollars to anyone who can find a real flying saucer."

  "What 'r you talkin' about? Flying saucers?" Mack asked

  "Well, I'm sure I don't know. Martians, or somethin’. Little green men and such." She replied. "But I heard that a couple of weeks ago. Seems like you found something you can't quite figure out. There's no harm in contactin' the authorities, ya' know."

  "She's got a point there, Mack." Floyd agreed. "If fer nothin' else than to get them to pick their rubbish up off yer land."

  "There's that Army base down by Roswell, ya know." Loretta added.

  "Yup, Sheriff Wilcox is out there." Mack said. Everyone looked around at each other in a moment of thought. "Three thousand bucks, huh?"

  "That's what I heard."

  "I could get me a new truck with that kinda money." Mack said. "Well... I suppose tomorrow I’ll head back out that way and gather up a little more, so's to take 'em somethin' substantial."

  The next morning Mack woke up and got started making himself a little bit of breakfast over the pot-bellied wood stove. The sun hadn't quite risen yet but had just started to glow over the horizon to the East. He warmed up a pot of beans, and made himself some coffee, and then finished getting dressed and ready for his day. Within about an hour of his rising he drove out over the land toward the crash site.

  He sighed deeply as he drove alone into the desert with a bad feeling about what was out there. Whatever it was he had come across was leaving a crawling sensation in his guts, and Loretta’s words had increased his feelings of dread, as things he hadn’t considered before now sat at the forefront of his mind. For all he knew it was Martians.

  Mack had never been all that privy to science fiction mumbo jumbo, but he wasn't completely ignorant of it either. There had been a growing notion of space men, and flying saucers drifting through society over the last number of years. Mack had always just attributed it to the movies, but what if it were true? What if he had found... Martians?

  It took him almost thirty minutes to make it out to the crash site. He was driving apprehensively in the July sun, terrified of what he was going to find out there. When he got close, he could see that his sheep were still standing on the hill facing off toward the crash. They hadn't moved at all and Mack instantly grew tense. His heart rate almost doubled as the trepidation he felt on finding the wreckage the day before suddenly flooded back to him.

  He pulled the truck over to the side of the road and got out with his rifle tightly gripped in his hand. He walked up the hill toward the herd of sheep trying to gauge what was wrong with them as he got closer. Most of them seemed fine, there didn’t appear to be anything physically wrong with them. The only thing was that they just stood there doing nothing, and even for sheep that was unusual.

  Trudging nervously up the hill, something caught his eye in the grass. Several of the sheep were dead. He stooped down to examine one of the fallen sheep, giving it as quick and thorough a going over as he could muster in his nervous state. He found nothing wrong with it beside that it was dead but was surprised that nothing had come to prey on it. No birds, no insects, no local predators; the sheep was completely untouched.

  Mack was puzzled by what he had found there in the desert. Remembering the strangeness from the day before, the static shocks and the strange debris, he couldn’t help but feel that something very bad had happened, and that he might not even know the half of it.

  He stood up and looked back to the large herd ahead of him. Scanning around, he could see at least five other corpses lying dead along the outer perimeter of the herd. He started walking further up the hill to get a closer look at the rest of the sheep, wondering why they just stood there doing nothing. He could see that their gaze was fixed, they were hypnotized by something that lay far off behind him. And so, he turned around and looked over his shoulder to match their gaze.

  From beyond a steep rock outcropping strewn with debris, something large and un-natural gleamed like a lake of sky from behind the hill. It became clear to him that the debris site he had stumbled upon yesterday was nothing more than a prelude to what lay beyond the rocks. Mack almost dropped his rifle. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing only a couple hundred yards away. Could it be a mirage of some kind?

  He stumbled over words as he slowly turned and walked back toward the debris site. With every step, his heart beat faster, and his hands gripped tighter and his muscles trembled faster than they had before. There was an otherworldly slowness as he made his way from one hill to the next in the desert. The static charge that permeated the grassland the day before had completely dissipated; no longer was he being shocked by objects that wouldn't normally even hold a charge. Now everything just seemed dead and broken. The bodies of grassland creatures still laid strewn about the field. There were no birds or insects alive within a few hundred yards of the crash site. Aside from the sheep it seemed like all animals were avoiding coming near this area. Mack understood why. He, himself, didn't want to be here. He felt nervous and apprehensive about being anywhere near this wrec
kage.

  His eyes were far more observant as he walked through the debris field a second time. Objects beyond his description lay strew all around him. Some were perfectly reflective; others were iridescent or utterly colorless; black holes of nothing. His eyes darted from here to there trying to make sense of what he was seeing as he slowly made his way through the debris. The rock outcropping was the only thing now between himself and whatever it was on the other side. As he made it to the top of the hill a new reality was revealed to him. There on the windward side of the rock out-cropping were the large, strewn out remains of something that he really couldn't explain. It was piled together purposefully, like some junk heap. This was no rocket, nor was it a balloon of any kind. This looked like a flying saucer. Broken apart and destroyed, it was still possible that this was some newfangled military secret, but it did not seem likely. Mack's heart was pounding loudly in his chest like some mad tribal drum. His eyes scoured the area, trying to take in and understand what he was seeing. He just stood there, staring.

  He gazed hard at the strange craft below him. He had never been so terrified in his life and he couldn’t move. Bit by bit he started piecing the scene before him together, and then suddenly something vaguely familiar caught his eye. Two small people! But they weren't human! Their skin was pale, almost grey. They looked like they weren't much taller than perhaps three or four feet. Their eyes were large and almond shaped. They wore strange clothes that all seemed to be one piece of fabric. The blood that he could see dried and streaming from their wounds was a dark red. Their skulls were large, almost bulbous, with small mouths that gaped open in their clearly dead state. One of them was impaled on a section of the craft, his head drooped forward, and his arms lay spread apart at his sides. The other lay almost straight, as though he'd been placed there on purpose. Mack's whole body started to tremble. Everything he had ever known or believed in had just been dealt an overwhelming blow.

  A flood of emotions came bursting out of him, fear, confusion, horror, sadness. His body jerked hard as he realized what it was he was looking at below. Those were not human beings, and they were nothing he knew on God’s green Earth. A terrible scream tore out of him, and suddenly Mack found himself dropping his gun and running as fast as he could from the crash site.

  A Brief History of Time Travel

  The universe is always moving and always expanding. Space and time are one, though not entirely the same. Time is the expansion of space and space is the distance between every particle in the universe as it expands. You cannot have space without time, and you cannot have time without the expansion of space. It is the expansion that defines both and makes the universe what it is. Stretching out of that infinite point that begat our universe is the outward flow that defines the universe and everything in it. All the laws of nature are wrapped up in the enigma of space-time.

  The perception of time, as we all experience it, is little more than the affect that the expansion has on bio-electro-chemical processes of our brains as they move through the universe. If the universe were to suddenly stop its expansion, we would stop experiencing time; everything would stand still, and our perceptions would stop dead in their tracks. Electrons would stop chasing each other around atomic nuclei, the wind would stop blowing, and all our thoughts would freeze mid-sentence. Without the moon’s tides, the ocean would become stagnate.

  As the universe expanded, it began to cool and coalesce into everything that we see around us, like the gradual condensation of water on cool glass; slowly creating stars, and galaxies, and eventually all the life whose motions and processes are a direct result of the ever-expanding universe. It does this using little more than the fundamental laws of physics, and those physical laws are determined by the most stable of all physical properties.

  The idea that one could travel through time had been a dream of humans for only a very short period in their history. They first had to recognize that they were passing through time in order to begin wishing that they could travel backward through it. Once the concept was imagined, however, it became nearly impossible to eradicate it. Like a virus, the idea spread to anyone who ever made a mistake, held a regret, or had an unquenchable hunger to experience things that had been permanently lost to history. It became the driving force behind an entire field of study within physics, and year after year people would come up with endless ideas on how it could be possible to travel through time.

  Humans never achieved it. They came close on several occasions, mastering some of the simple techniques that would end up being the foundations on which time travel was eventually achieved. Albeit, their time on Earth ended up being much shorter than many other species on the planet, only managing to survive for a little over three hundred and fifty thousand years; an incredibly short run on the geologic time-scale. However, it wasn't some sad catastrophe that led to the extinction of Homo sapiens. In fact, it was their own evolution that drove them to the archives of history. Like Homo habilis and Homo erectus before them, Homo sapiens moved beyond their own genetic code, and, like a butterfly from a cocoon, became something far more beautiful.

  Their evolution was driven by genetic modification and cybernetic enhancements that eventually formed two classes of Homo sapiens; naturally born humans, and the new creature that humans had turned themselves into. Almost all their enhancements had been for the best. Humans had gained the knowledge to make themselves far more fit than nature ever intended them.

  Nature, however, still played its part. Eons sitting in air conditioned, controlled environments and interbreeding across all the races eventually led to less pigmentation in the skin, making them more uniformed in color. Their eyes became ever more attuned to artificial light and adapted to the strains caused by monitors and computer interfaces. Their wrists and hands conformed to the new tools of the information age. Medical advancements, as well as genetic modifications, led to better immune systems, longer life and overall better health.

  After some several thousand years of manipulation, the scientific community, most of whom had descended from enhanced lineages themselves, decided that there had to be a new classification for what mankind had become. The name Homo Reformatur was given to this remade man. The term "human" stuck, although the words themselves also evolved over the centuries as languages morphed and became their own new creatures. Eventually, what was Homo sapiens simply died out. They had no place in a world where everyone was enhanced. Homo Reformatur had taken over the planet. For several eons, there were conservation attempts to "Save the Sapiens", but in the long run, like all other species, they too became extinct.

  Homo Reformatur wasn't immune to the effects of extinction either. Through the long march of time, from the continued advancements in science and technology, by war, and through the conquest of deeper space and the progress of further evolution, homo Reformatur fell to the same fate as Homo sapiens had. As history waxed and waned through the centuries Reformatur humans suffered periods of "dark ages" and "renaissance". Knowledge was lost and regained as time expanded ever further into the future. Eventually, they too evolved, both through changes they made to their own bodies, and through the process of natural selection. After over a million years on planet Earth, homo Reformatur, the newly modern humans, also became extinct.

  In their place came a new breed of man-kind. The fourth human hominid: Homo Sui factum. The self-made man. Homo Sui factum was a small, almost grey skinned man with an enlarged cranium, almond shaped eyes, diminished jaws, and long thin fingers and arms. They stood only about one meter tall and were almost magically brilliant. Their lineage had become so bio-technologically advanced that most of their cybernetic implants grew with them in the womb. They were endlessly integrated into their technology, having the telepathic abilities to not only interact with each other, but also with the computers and devices that made their lives possible. Through this vast technological entanglement, most children were born being able to read and write at a level that far surpasses anything that Homo
sapiens ever achieved.

  This last line of the human lineage was the first to truly develop time travel. Through their own turbulent history, they eventually developed the technology needed to manipulate time itself. But even for them it was no easy feat.

  If you think of time like a wave of expansion moving outward from a single point, it allows for the simple prediction that time has an outer limit, and an inner limit. You cannot travel further back than that initial point, and you cannot travel further forward than the outermost wave of the expansion. In a clear lake with a single ripple, the future is the part of the lake that remains flat beyond the radius of the ripple. Eventually, that ripple will cross whatever point you choose on that lake, but until it does you cannot ride a wave beyond where the wave exists. However, waves have peaks and valleys that oscillate behind their outermost ring; perfect copies of themselves that repeat over and over until they taper off at that initial point that started it all. This made travel to the future theoretically impossible, and travel to the past theoretically very possible. But simply understanding the nature of space-time did not give them a means of navigating through it. How do you jump backward to a wave that’s expanding outward at the same speed that you are, and how do you remain in the same relative position in space when space is constantly moving?

  The power requirements were literally astronomical. The sun itself generates enough power to warp space-time around itself only enough to bend light and slow down time just a little bit in its vicinity (time moves faster the further away from a star you are). They needed to find a way to expend more energy than the largest star, in a contained, laboratory environment, in a single milliChron. Fusion reactors were able to make small, artificial stars, but nothing on the scale that they needed. Matter-Anti-Matter reactors were far more efficient, generating many times the power of the fusion reactors, but they, too, fell far short of the mark. A new power source would be needed if they ever hoped to travel through time.