The Temporal Key

by Adam Benson

  Naomi stared awestruck at the holographic projection floating above Dayk's hand. In the image she could see her whole apartment, and the apartments of the people next door to her glowing a cold blue. She could see herself and the two time travelers standing in her living room, and she could see her neighbors moving around in their houses, going about their business. Everything that was alive appeared to glow with a red tint, except for Dayk and Thalia who glowed primarily red, but had many other colors dancing around their holographic avatars as well. Plants glowed slightly green and anything mechanical or technological glowed in a series of various other colors.

  "How can you do that?" She said, dumbfounded.

  "Like I said, our bodies are tuned to pick up all manners of radiation. Anything in the electromagnetic spectrum can be compiled to produce images." He put his other hand into the hologram and began moving the image around and zooming out, and in and all over the map. Then he zoomed way out, and showed her an image of a caravan of trucks all carrying cargo that glowed and flashed especially red. "That's our ship's resonance frequency. That's how we can locate it anywhere in the world, even if it's not within our immediate range. That frequency is embedded into every item on that ship. It's like a fingerprint for a mission. Helps us keep all the pieces together."

  "Even our bodies resonate that way when we're on a mission” Thalia added.

  "I know that road!" Naomi said, utterly stunned. "They've still got a ways to go through the canyons."

  Dayk closed his hand and the hologram disappeared.

  "If you are so much like us, then why do you look so different?" She asked. "Your head, and your eyes... your skin..."

  "Simple evolution." Dayk replied. "After a couple million years of sitting in front of computers people got paler, smaller, and our eyes got more attuned to watching monitors than anything else."

  "Computers?" Naomi asked. "Like… adding machines? And what's a monitor?"

  "No computers in this time?" Dayk asked, hoping that he hadn't made a mistake.

  "Well, I know of computers, but aren't they just adding machines that kind of do the math for you?" She said. “They have some IBMs up Los Alamos. I know they’ve done some calculations for our team here.”

  "That is where they got their start, but they are far more advanced than that." He replied. "In any case, we are what you will be after two and a half million years of evolution."

  "I feel like I had all these questions that I wanted to ask you, but now I just don't even know where to begin."

  "What can you tell us about the trucks and where they're taking our ship?" Dayk said, changing the subject a bit.

  "Well, I'm not entirely sure where they're going to take it, but there's really only a couple of places that they could. We've got two large hangars here, and then the main laboratory. One of the hangars is for experimental aircraft and such. I imagine they’ll take it there, since it’s already got some research equipment in it. It's a big complex, but other than housing and a few stores, there's not much here." Naomi rambled off.

  "So... Can you get us in?" Dayk asked.

  "Yeah, I think so. It's not going to be too hard for me to get you in, because I'm not going to get searched or turned away here." She clarified.

  "So then, all we have to do now is wait for it to get here!" Thalia said feeling elated.

  "It'll take them most of the night to get the trucks over the mountain. They probably won't be here until early in the morning." Naomi said.

  "That still leaves four days until the rescue." Said Dayk. "They're going to have to get the trucks settled in and unloaded, right?"

  "I guess so." Naomi said.

  “What about our comrades?” Thalia asked.

  “They’re going in to the biology lab as we speak,” Naomi replied. “Although with the technology in the bodies, they may put a make-shift biology lab in the hangar, to try and keep everything together.

  “Why would they keep moving things around like that?” Thalia asked.

  “Well, this is a military base. They’re not really known for their efficiency.”

  "So, then perhaps later in the day tomorrow we can sneak in to where ever they put the ship and have a look. If there's a good place to hide, then we may just stay there. Otherwise, we may come back here, and hide out until it's time." Dayk said.

  "Alright." Said Naomi. "You can stay here as long as you need to."

  "Thank you, Naomi” Dayk said. "You don't realize how much you've already helped us get home."

  "Can I get you anything? Something to drink, or eat? Y'all do eat, don't you?" She asked.

  "Actually, that would be really great. We've been living on rations for almost five days now."

  "And we haven't slept much in that time either." Thalia added.

  "Well, I know it's not much, but you're welcome to sleep on my couch." Naomi offered. "I can get you some pillows and blankets from my linen cupboard." Then she got up and went into the kitchen to make them all some food. She talked and asked questions the entire time.

  Alamogordo

  It was a long trip through the desert and over the mountains from Roswell to the White Sands. The trucks had driven all through the night, sometimes slowing to a crawl across rough and undeveloped terrain. The caravan of large vehicles finally arrived at their destination around three in the morning with an exhausted crew. The slow cautious trip had drained what little remaining energy any of them had. They were quickly escorted to a large hangar where the trucks were parked and held for the rest of the evening. Then each of the drivers and passengers were taken to temporary base housing to sleep for the rest of the night. Jesse Marcel and Sheridan Cavitt were among the weary travelers eagerly clamoring for sleep.

  By eight o'clock the next morning they were all dressed and present at the same hangar they had dropped their trucks off at only hours before. Running on fumes, Jesse and Sheridan pulled themselves together and went in to meet with General Ramey and Colonel Harold Turner who ran the lab at Alamogordo. They groggily went to the hangar together and made it only a few minutes late.

  As soon as Jesse and Sheridan walked into the secured hangar, they saw Ramey talking with Colonel Turner with a look of disgust that he was weakly trying to hide on his face. The White Sands proving grounds was a working lab with a large contingent of civilian scientists working alongside the military men. As a result, many of the officers there took a far more lax approach to their dress code than the General would have liked to see. The Colonel was wearing his uniform, but his tie was loosened, and his jacket was thrown over the back of a nearby chair. His sleeves were rolled up and he looked more like a civilian than the commanding officer of the base. It didn't bother Jesse, but he could tell that General Ramey felt differently.

  "Good morning sir. Sorry we're late." Major Marcel said as he and Sheridan approached the two commanding officers.

  "Major Marcel, Captain Cavitt. This is Colonel Turner. He's in charge here at Alamogordo. He'll be taking over the recovery effort here. You two will be briefing him on everything you know." General Ramey said very to the point.

  "Major, Captain." Colonel Turner said with an excited smile on his face, extending his hand in a very friendly manner. "We're all really looking forward to getting a good look at your find here. The General tells me you two are the men who found it."

  "Well..." Jesse started. "A rancher found it. We're just the first men to really examine it and get it back to the base." He said with a humbly proud air.

  "All the same. You men did good work here." The Colonel replied.

  "It's certainly an exciting find, sir!" Jesse said positively.

  "Well, I'm itching to get my hands on this stuff. Care to get started?" Colonel Turner said with an eager sigh.

  "Sure thing." Sheridan said.

  They went straight to the closest truck and started peeling a large green tarp from atop the mysterious alien cargo. The Colonel's eyes were wide like a child's as he touched the silvery hull for the first ti
me. When they had finally removed the entire tarp there before them sat the destroyed remains of the crew quarters and the cockpit.

  "We couldn't find any kind of controls anywhere on this thing." Jesse said at last. "There's not a button or knob anywhere in it."

  "Well, something's got to control it." Colonel Turner said.

  "Yes sir." Major Marcel replied. "Beats me as to what it is though."

  "It's advanced beyond anything that we have." Captain Cavitt added. "We only found one area that had anything remotely resembling machinery, and that seemed to have a toilet in it."

  "A toilet?!" The Colonel said. "Well, I guess everybody's got an asshole."

  They climbed up onto the truck and began crawling inside the spacecraft.

  "Gees! How big was the pilot?" The Colonel asked as he hunkered down inside.

  "They were all only about three feet tall." Jesse answered.

  "Any clues as to where they came from? Mars? Saturn?"

  "No sir. Perhaps your men could shed a little light on that," said Jesse.

  "We did find some kind of writing, but it's in another section of the ship." Sheridan said.

  "How do you know it was writing?" The Colonel asked as he looked around the small white bunk room.

  "It looked like labels for something."

  "Damn. This is some kind of crew quarters." The Colonel said excitedly, looking around.

  "Yes sir. That's what we figured." Said Jesse.

  "It's all one seamless piece." Sheridan added.

  "What the hell is it made of? I’ve never seen anything like this. The boys are going to love getting their hands on some of this." The Colonel moved his hands along the bunk bed feeling its strange surfaces as he eagerly looked around the room for other signs of something recognizable. “Some shelves and lockers. Not much else in here.”

  "Care to take a look at the upper deck?" Jesse asked. "It looks the most like a control room... without the controls."

  "Yeah, let's check it out." Colonel Turner said excitedly.

  They crawled out of the small cabin and hoisted themselves, one by one, into the equally small upper deck. The Colonel instantly caught sight of the fiber cables hanging ripped from the broken section of the hull. They looked like they should be wires, but they were certainly not made of metal, or anything else recognizable. They looked like glass hairs, but they were flexible and could bend without breaking.

  "Wire?" The Colonel asked rhetorically.

  "That's what we figured, but no idea what they're made of."

  "Did you try passing any kind of current through it?" The Colonel asked.

  "No sir. We knew the ship was coming here, so we left everything loaded on the trucks, except the bodies. They were already starting to decay, so we wanted to get a look at them before they deteriorated much more."

  "What did you find out about them?" He asked.

  "Well,” Jesse started. "If you want the specifics, you'll have to ask Major Moorhead. He did the autopsy. He and your gal Captain Saulf."

  "Captain Saulf is a damned good biologist." The Colonel interjected.

  "But the long and short of it was that they're a whole lot like us in many ways, and not like us at all in other ways." Jesse finished.

  "How so?" Colonel Turner said as he looked around the small white room, with two chairs mounted to the floor and what looked like a control panel with no controls.

  "Apparently they have basically the same blood as us; same basic organs and configuration. But they had some extra organs that we don't have, and they were...." He paused as he tried to come up with a good description.

  "They were what, Major?"

  "Well, sir, they were full of little metal bits. Small pieces of technology and whatnot."

  "Huh. Well, I see what you mean about this room. Two seats, facing a slanted panel like some sort of control, but no controls." Said the Colonel with some fascination lingering in his words. He began clicking his tongue as he looked around the small white room. Everything was as smooth as could be, with almost no sharp edges, except for one little cube shape cut into the slanted table before them. "Was something in this slot?" He asked, fingering the only sharp edge in the room.

  "Not when we found it." Jesse said.

  The Colonel looked hard for any sign of writing, or buttons, or knobs; anything that could give him a clue to how the thing worked at all. But nothing was there. It was stark white from the ceiling to the floor and that was it.

  "Alright men. Tell you what. I've got about thirty scientists all itching to get a look at this thing. Let's go get ‘em and I'll let you brief them on what you've found, get them up to speed, and then we'll all come back and hoist it off these trucks and start tearing it apart to see what we can find." Said Colonel Turner. "If you boys can stay for another day, I'd appreciate it."

  "Yes sir!" Jesse and Sheridan said in unison.

  In Naomi's Apartment

  For the second time in her life, a ray of sunshine crept through the crack in the curtains and hit Thalia right in the eyes while she slept. At first, she reacted by simply squeezing her eyelids tight, but soon she became consciously aware of it and began to stir. A pungent smell of something burned was filling the air, and she suddenly sensed an unfamiliar presence very near her.

  "Good morning!" Naomi said eagerly at the first sign of any motion from her.

  Her voice startled Thalia a bit and she jumped in her skin until she looked around and saw Naomi sitting in an armchair with a cup of coffee, staring bright faced and smiley across from her with a look of amazed wonderment in her eyes.

  "Good morning." Thalia said shyly.

  "Did you sleep alright?"

  "Um. Yes. I haven't slept that well in Sols." She replied, slowly sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

  "Do you drink coffee?" Naomi asked. "I made coffee. I can get you some coffee if you like."

  "What is it?" Thalia replied.

  "What is what? Coffee? You've never had it? Would you like a cup?" Naomi said, starting to rise from her chair.

  "I guess so." Said Thalia with a bit of trepidation.

  Naomi quickly walked into her kitchen and began clanking around with some dishes. "Cream and sugar?" She asked from beyond the wall.

  "What does that mean?" Thalia asked with some confusion. The sentence didn't make much sense to her. She knew what sugars were, but cream, at least in the context of a sugar, wasn't something she was familiar with. It sounded like such an odd statement to her.

  "Dairy cream and sugar. Would you like them in your coffee?"

  "Is that how you drink it?" Thalia asked.

  "Not me personally, I drink it black, but some people drink it with cream and sugar." Said Naomi, pouring coffee into a cup.

  "Uh, whatever you think is best." Said Thalia.

  A few moments later Naomi came back into the living room with a saucer and cup of coffee in her hands. She slowly and carefully handed it to Thalia. Thalia removed her oxygen mask and took the cup as graciously as she could. The cup was large in her small hands, but she pulled it up to her nose to take a smell.

  "It's hot!" Thalia said with some alarm at the pungent black liquid. It smelled like burnt organic matter of some kind. Whatever it was, she had never seen or smelled it before, and was unsure what to think. Being a gracious guest, she put the hot cup to her lips and sipped out some of the beverage. "It's really bitter!" She said as she took a drink, and her face contorted into an unintentional shape.

  "Some say that it's an acquired taste." Naomi said with a smile. "I hope it's alright."

  "I've just never even heard of it before." She replied, taking another sip. "What's in it?"

  "It's just coffee beans and water. No coffee where you're from, huh?"

  "No. Nothing like this." She replied.

  As she sipped her strange beverage, Thalia heard Dayk beginning to stir, and looked over to find him just barely sitting up. He looked only a little confused as he got his bearings, but otherwise he looked as we
ll rested as she, herself felt.

  "Good morning." Naomi said with a smile. "Did you sleep alright?"

  "Yes." Dayk said groggily.

  "Would you like some coffee?" Naomi asked him.

  "Do you have any water?" Dayk asked politely as he removed his mask.

  "Of course!" Naomi exclaimed, only too happy to oblige her unbelievable guests. She immediately returned to the kitchen to fetch some water for Dayk.

  "I'd like some too, please." Thalia said, as Naomi turned around.

  She was back in a flash with two glasses of water, both of which seemed too large for the small people sitting contently in her living room. They both drank the water greedily, as though it had been days since they'd had a drop. In truth, it had been quite a while since they had anything to drink, and as soon as the water hit their lips, they both realized how parched they had been.

  "If you’re from Earth, why do you have to wear the mask over your mouth? The lungs we examined yesterday were clearly similar to our own. Can't you breathe the air?" Naomi asked as she watched them guzzle the water.

  Dayk held up a patient hand while he finished his glass of water. "The air is a lot thicker in the future. It's a little hard to breath in such a thin atmosphere." He said with a gasp.

  "What's it like?" Naomi asked. "The future?"

  "There are a lot more trees." Thalia said matter-of-factly.

  "Yeah. Big trees." Dayk added. "It's changed a lot. You probably wouldn't recognize it at all. In our time, the Earth is a gigantic cultivated machine. Nature has evolved alongside of technology. Ideas become living things; they become technology. Thus, technology becomes part of nature, and so nature, in turn, adapted with the technology. So, our cities are forests and landscapes are self-sustaining ecosystems that have been altered and manipulated by human kind over millions of years, and simultaneously nature has evolved to both adapt alongside, and sometimes, to counteract many technologies. In some ways, you could say that plants and viruses have the same abilities to learn and use technologies as we do. Our houses are just as much grown as they are built."