by Adam Benson
"You grow houses?" Naomi interrupted with a cautious disbelief in her face and tone.
"Yeah." Thalia said. "All of our cities are grown into surrounding native terrain."
"Are you saying you live in tree houses?" She asked.
"Kind of." Dayk said. "We have some trees that evolved from primitive engineered projects. They were originally designed to turn tree sap into an organic meta-material polymer; a plastic of sorts."
"But over a million years the trees evolved on their own and started turning out a whole plethora of various meta-materials with a whole host of various capabilities." Thalia added excitedly. Materials engineering was one of her passions. She had devoted a lot of time studying neonatural-polymametic metamaterials while she was studying to be an engineer. Her understanding of material dynamics and how they interacted with hyper-fusion physics had given her a leg up in the field of temporal engineering. "For instance,” she went on, “we have a vine that grows into a lattice which can be guided by a magnetic field, and if you permeate it with Haagleon poly-spatial waves at the right time in its development, it will begin excreting a thick white gelatinous foam. The foam is electromagnetically attracted to itself, so it comes together to form a smooth flat surface around the lattice. In a few days, the whole thing hardens into a basic structure that's both rigid, and resilient against the elements. And since it's naturally grown it has only a minimal imprint on the overall environment."
Naomi stared in confused wonder. "You have a plastic, gelatinous tree that grows into a house, and that's natural?"
"Well, yes. Those vines evolved that way over a couple million years, but they were designed by humans originally, so we know how to take advantage of it." Thalia added.
"Where did the plastic tree come from to begin with?" Naomi asked defensively. "There's no plastic trees on my Earth."
"Like I said. They were manipulated a long time ago... well, for us it was a long time ago. Humans...." he paused and looked directly at Naomi, hoping not to offend her with the fact that he wasn't referring to homo Sapiens. "...after you humans.... and before us humans.... " he gestured with his hands, "genetically and technologically engineered certain trees to produce plastic like materials instead of sap. And it wasn't just trees. All sorts of plants have been engineered over the millennia to do all manner of various tasks. Drug manufacturing, building materials, fuels... the list goes on. Eventually, all those plants continued to evolve on their own. That's where plastic trees came from.
"A lot has changed since your time." Said Dayk, "Your cities are dead structures. They're not made of living matter, their made from dead matter. Ours are simply made from living matter. You have roads and solid buildings, and everything is laid out very efficiently in neat rows with streets running between. We don't have anything like that anymore. Our whole society is very organic. We don't use many vehicles. We travel mostly through a teleportation network. We think of a place and we're there almost instantly." He said, snapping his fingers. "So, there's no need for roads or organized cities.
"But don't make the mistake of thinking that because we live in trees, it's somehow primitive. Our cities are highly advanced. Well beyond anything you could probably even imagine." Dayk went on. "Anything we want, or need can be materialized instantaneously from simple matter-energy conversions. We don't get ill or suffer diseases. Our bodies are capable of detecting anything that might be going wrong and begin the process of healing itself. Any additional medical attention needed can almost always be corrected in a matter of hectoChrons."
“How long do you live?” She asked, wishing that a better question had come from her lips.
"I'm a hundred and sixty-three years old." Dayk continued. "Unless I meet some misfortune, I can live indefinitely. All of this is a combination of human creation and natural evolution. We are not outside of nature; we are part of it. In our time, we've just gotten a lot better at synchronizing ourselves to all of nature. Plants, animals, radio waves, light waves, physics, chemistry, biology, time and space.... "
"It's actually really nice!" Thalia added with a smile. It was the first time Naomi had seen Thalia smile, and it was the first time Dayk had seen it in a while too. "I miss it right now." She said.
"You guys can just think of a place and 'poof' you're there?" Naomi asked. "Can you do it now?"
"I wish we could." Dayk said. "Were our ship intact we could do it across a limited range, but back in our time the whole world is in the network, including all the cities on various planets within the solar system."
"You have cities on other planets!?" Naomi asked excitedly. "Which ones? Do you have a city on Mars?" She asked.
"There are a lot of cities on Mars. It's not called Mars anymore, but all the same." Said Dayk proudly.
"We have cities on Luna, Titan, Europa, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and several on various planetoids. I don't think you have a name for any of them yet." Thalia said, trying to remember the ancient names for everything.
"Nothing on Pluto?" Naomi asked.
"It's mostly mining colonies near the asteroid belts, but yes, there's civilizations out there." Said Dayk.
"Do you think we'll ever get to travel in space?" She asked. "I mean, us old humans"
"Actually, you'll be going to space in about ten years." Dayk told her.
"Ten years?" Said Naomi with some surprise. "We'll be able to go to Pluto in ten years?"
"Oh, no. If memory serves me correctly, the Russians will break the gravitational barrier first, followed closely by the Americans. The Americans will land on the moon first about ten years later, and then after that it's mostly probes being sent out into space for about eighty years." Dayk said. "I didn't get the entire database memorized before the computer failed, so I don't have all of the information."
"Ten years." Said Naomi to herself. "The Russians beat us into space? Are the Russians going to take over the world?" She asked with some worry in her voice.
"I don't think so." Dayk consoled.
"I can't believe we're going to make it to space so soon." She went on. "I mean, we only started flying about thirty years ago. My momma remembers when the Wright Brothers flew that first plane."
"Technology moves fast." Dayk said.
Naomi sat in contemplation for a moment, trying to absorb all the tidbits the two time travelers had rambled on about. It was all so hard for her to imagine. "You said that the little gold bits, the..."
"Micro holographic projectors?" Dayk interjected.
"Yeah... You said they grew in your fingers. Is that the same kind of thing that you did to the trees? Stuff just grows in people now? I mean, how do you control the genes to just... make gold devices?" She asked.
"Yes." He replied. "I was born with the projectors, enhanced memory and vision, telepathic abilities, the teleportation technology I need to travel through the network, and also my skin can do this." He said holding up his arm and pulling up his sleeve. He thought hard for a moment and then all his vital signs appeared like a tattoo on the back of his arm. Naomi's jaw dropped, and then as quickly as the markings appeared, they disappeared and his skin turned back to its usual pale, nearly opalescent color.
Dayk! Radiation! Suddenly came Thalia's thoughts. She had caught the glimpse of Dayk's arm as he exposed his vitals. He hadn't seen them, since his arm was facing toward Naomi. Almost immediately she glanced at her own arm and saw the same thing.
Dayk suddenly turned his arm and looked at his own vitals. They were being exposed to various radiations from across the spectrum.
"You were born that way?!" She asked. "How did you do that?"
"It was originally adapted from octopus and cuttlefish skin and nerve cells to create a camouflage for soldiers. Later it was adapted to allow us to directly interact with our internal organs." Said Thalia. "So, we can check ourselves without needing medical equipment. After a while it began developing naturally in children." Speaking of checking ourselves, she thought, Dayk, what about the radiation?
&
nbsp; "I can't believe it. You two are just absolutely amazing!" She looked at them longingly for a few moments before another question popped into her mind. "Do y'all just pop around through time the same way you do going from place to place? I mean, how do you travel through time? Will we ever be able to do anything like that?"
The radiation levels are negligible. Our inoculations will hold for now, he thought to Thalia before responding to Naomi. "No. It's incredibly difficult. Real time travel has only been around for about two thousand years in my time, and we're two and a half million years more advanced than you." Dayk said. "It still takes us a couple of years to plan a mission back through time, and once we start, there's only two jumps: Once back, and once forward. That's all our ships can achieve."
"Is that why it takes so long for a time traveler to get rescued?" Naomi asked.
"There’s no two-way communication with our native time period. They come get us when we don’t return at the end of our scheduled mission." He replied.
"You can't just go place to place in your time machine?" Naomi asked.
"Unfortunately, no. We have to return to our own time after every mission,” said Dayk.
"In your terms, it's like saying, that's all the fuel it can hold." Thalia added.
"Oh..." Naomi said, and then she suddenly wondered, "How did you crash?"
"I'm not really sure..." Dayk answered. "We were coming to the end of our trip, we were re-entering normal space-time and then almost instantly we slammed into the ground. It's like we came out of the wormhole too close to the planet."
Thalia heard his words and her mind recoiled. There was something that she remembered, and it came back to her in a flash. Suddenly the pictures were as clear as if it were happening.
She was in the ship again. The memory was painfully vivid.
“Dr. Thalia, what’s our status?” Dr. Amikes asked her as they approached the event horizon.
“Field strength is good,” she replied. “I’m initiating the gravity coils for normal space time.” She tapped in commands on one of the engineering panels as Amikes monitored another station.
“I see it. Gravity coils initialized. Reentry into normal space time in twenty chrons,” Amikes said as the Chronis began humming with an energy that they hadn’t felt in nearly a year.
“Um, Dr. Amikes,” Thalia said with a confused look on her face.
“What is it?”
“Sir, a pulse delay just caused the reentry trigger to jump from thirteen chrons to fourteen chrons,” she said.
“What?!” Amikes flew over to her station and looked at the minor fluctuation in their synchronization. “That’s no coincident,” he mumbled to himself. “See if you can reset it.”
“It’s locked out, sir,” she replied as she frantically tried to adjust the control.
Captain Nocta, Amikes thought up to the cockpit. Release the lock-out on the reentry controls! Do it now!
There was no reply.
Captain Nocta! He yelled again. Still no reply came.
“I can’t release it!” Thalia said.
“There’s no time! Brace for impact!” Dr. Amikes said.
Before either of them could grab onto anything the ship suddenly slammed into the Earth. They were thrown back and across the room, and then suddenly, blackness.
"It was Captain Nocta!" Thalia blurted out.
"What?!" Said Dayk, suddenly very thrown off. "How do you know that?"
"Who's Captain Knock-tuh?" Naomi asked.
"He's the man you autopsied." Thalia told her. "Right before we re-entered, someone manually delivered a pulse delay to the temporal core. It happened right before we re-entered, and then we immediately crashed. After that all I heard were alarms. I forgot all about it until just now."
"A pulse delay? Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” Thalia said. “The reentry time jumped by a chron just a few chrons before we crashed.”
“That has to be manually initialized by the pilot.”
“Exactly,” Thalia said.
“What’s going on here?” Dayk asked. “If what you’re saying is true, then…”
“Captain Nocta crashed the ship on purpose,” Thalia interjected.
“And then he started shooting at us,” Dayk added. “Why would he actively try to kill us all?”
"Well, I'm feeling less bad about him getting autopsied." Thalia said. "There had to be someone else, didn't there? He didn't know any of us before this assignment, why would he have wanted us all dead?"
"No idea. But why would anyone have wanted us dead?"
"So, the one that we autopsied crashed your ship on purpose to kill all of you?" Naomi said, suddenly feeling like she probably wasn't supposed to know any of this.
"That's what it looks like." Dayk said. "The whole situation is looking very suspicious."
"Well, if you think he was sent to kill you, then what makes you think that they're going to come rescue you at all?" Naomi asked.
"Because they can't leave all this technology here. Even the bodies are technological contamination." Dayk informed her. "If we left any trace of ourselves back in this time it would irrevocably damage the timeline. That's why I know they're coming for us."
"They're going to take the ship from the base?" Said Naomi.
"They have to. Can you imagine what would happen if we left two million years’ worth of advanced technology in the lab of a primitive people? No offense. It would completely contaminate the timeline. Inventions would be invented without the supporting science to make them work. It would create temporal paradoxes, conundrums and many other unintended causality problems. We simply can't leave a trace behind." He said surely.
"Well, but they have left people behind before." Thalia said. "I mean, even the first time-traveler was lost to time, and we've never been able to find him."
"Well, but we haven't spent a whole lot of time looking for him. We know where Irugy went... we just... you're right. We've never found a trace of him. And yes, I guess there have been others that have been 'lost to time'." Dayk admitted. "But this ship, in our case. No. They're definitely coming for us."
"Are you guys in some sort of war, or something?" Naomi asked, feeling like a third wheel.
"No." Thalia said.
"That's what's so troubling." Dayk added. "We've got no explanation for Captain Nocta's actions, nor do we have any information on why anyone else would want us to suffer this fate. It doesn't make any sense. We're a peaceful people. Explorers and scientists only."
"Then what's going to happen when you go back? Are they going to kill you if they catch you?" Naomi asked solemnly.
"In our future, things like this generally don't happen. I think... I hope we'll be safe in the future." He replied. "Naomi. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?"
"I can't imagine what I could tell you. Ya'll are so far advanced..." She replied.
"Well, you could tell us a lot, actually. We are historians, after all. We are here to study and learn what we can about our own history. Which includes you." He said with a smile.
"Well, alright." Naomi was felling suddenly put on the spot, like an ill prepared audience member getting heckled by the comedian. "What can I tell you?" She asked.
“What do you know about the radiation around this place?” He asked.
“Only that they’re within the safety guidelines established at Los Alamos. There are a lot of radioactive materials on this base. Some of them we test with in our lab, in the Biology wing. For instance, and I probably shouldn’t be telling y’all this, but frankly I think you probably know more about it that I do. In the biology labs, we test almost all of the radioactive materials, radium, uranium, actinium. We’ve done lots of experiments with cell cultures, rats, we even tested bromeliads...”
“Your ‘safe’ levels of exposure, aren’t as safe as you think they are.” Thalia interrupted.
“What?” Naomi stopped. She already knew deep down that Thalia was right, but hadn’t been expec
ting to hear it. “Well… I mean, I know that there’s a risk involved, but…”
“Risk! These levels are dangerously high! You people are exposing yourselves to….”
“Thalia,” Dayk said smoothly. We’re here to observe history, not change it.
Thalia was taken beside herself for a moment before she realized what Dayk was telling her. “Sorry,” she said to Naomi. “Maybe don’t make a career out of this place.”
Naomi looked from Thalia to Dayk and then back. “Should I be worried?” She asked.
Dayk smiled, trying to think of a way to alleviate the fears that Thalia had inadvertently set into Naomi’s mind. “You’ll be fine, but she’s right. Don’t stay here for too long. Eventually, even this level of exposure can be dangerous.” He could see the concern still lingering on Naomi’s face. “Look. We can give you an inoculation that will clear up the damage, and protect you for a while yet before the effects wear off. Think of it as an exchange for your help in getting us here and giving us a place to hide. Now, what do we need to do to get in to see our ship? There's already people working on it. What can you tell me about places to hide, ways in and out, that sort of thing?" He asked.
His question threw her off. "Oh, um. Well.... Let's see." She thought aloud. "I'm supposed to report to Dr. Moorhead and Dr. Hamburg in a couple of hours. I've got to get ready. Ugh! I wish I could call in sick. But I don't want them thinking that I somehow got sick from the autopsy yesterday and come exploring, only to find you two here. I'm supposed to help Dr. Moorhead brief Dr. Hamburg, but that'll be taking place in the lab. To be honest, I haven't really been into any of the hangars. Especially the experimental ones. I can get in; I just haven't had a lot of reason to. Fortunately, the crash will be bringing the biology lab and the engineering labs together on this project, because it’s not just the saucer, it’s the aliens too. So, it won’t be too strange if I stop by there today, though I'm not really sure where to tell you to hide,” she said to the point.
