The Temporal Key

by Adam Benson

  "This whole mission makes me nervous. Do you realize how close we just came to being stranded back here ourselves? Apparently, almost no one knew we were back there. Don't you find that a little unsettling?" Etos continued as Soomber moved through the archive.

  "Not as unsettling as this." He said and pointed to the image floating before him.

  Captain Nocta's run had slowed to a steady jog, and he had quit punching the bulkhead almost as soon as Lieutenant Soomber had disappeared behind the door. He let his mind go blank and tried to stop thinking about the consequences of their failed mission. It would be almost an entire solarSine before they would be faced with them anyway. It did him no good to let them fester so much now. He dripped with sweat and his muscles were beginning to tire.

  Sir... Came an uncomfortable telepathic voice in his head. Um... The archive. You asked me to look through it. It was Lieutenant Soomber.

  Yes. What is it, Lieutenant? He asked.

  Sir, you'd better join us in the cockpit. Etos interjected.

  Is this an emergency? Captain Nocta asked as he slowed his jog to a walk.

  Not exactly, sir... but it is... um... unsettling. Said Etos.

  I’m looking through the database to see who we collected, Soomber said. Sir, are you sure you want to see this? I think I know why we weren’t supposed to open this up.

  I'll be right there. Nocta replied. He got off the treadmill and started walking back through the infirmary toward the cockpit. As he came into the command center, he saw Etos and Soomber staring at a hologram, paler than their gray complexion normally was. They both looked at him as he entered with sheer horror on their faces. They stared at him as though he was the living dead, a ghost of the future. "What is it, Lieutenants?" He asked cautiously as he caught they're expressions.

  "Sir..." Soomber started, but all he could do was look away, back to the hologram before him.

  Captain Nocta followed his eyes to the image floating in place of the normal navigational projections. There was a dead body floating in the image. It had been cut up by the barbarians that existed in whatever age they had just come from, but then in a terrible chron he recognized who it was. It was his own dead body staring him in the face, mutilated by the ancient butchers they had just retrieved it from.

  His breathing got harder and his heart pounded in his chest like an explosion. Captain Nocta's eyes were fixated on the apparition hovering before him; an image of his own future death that he was now chauffeuring to a time well before he died. "What the hazmar is this?!" He said as he suddenly became nauseous. His head started to swim and whatever anger he had been feeling upon entering the room had been folded in upon itself one thousand times. He was going to be sick. He stumbled backward toward the hull of the ship and crumbled to the floor. "What the hazmar is this?!" He yelled at the top of his lungs!

  "Sir..." Soomber said, with a fearful terror swelling up inside him. "I.... I...."

  Nocta vomited onto the floor. He looked back up at the image with angry tears pouring from his beet red eyes. "What the hazmar is this!?" He said again.

  "Sir... you asked me to go through the archive and...." Soomber said nervously.

  "Is this some kind of joke?" He yelled angrily at Lieutenant Soomber.

  "No, sir!" Soomber pleaded. "We just..."

  "Rematerialize it!" He growled loudly. Soomber jumped in his seat.

  "Sir?" He said. "We're not even supposed to be...."

  "Rematerialize it! NOW!" Nocta screamed getting back to his feet and towering ominously over Lieutenant Soomber. "Put it in the infirmary!" He said, glaring hatred and fear through his bloodshot eyes.

  Soomber didn't say a word. He sighed heavily and began rematerializing Captain Nocta's corpse onto the table in the infirmary next door. With a huff, Nocta stormed through the portal into the infirmary, just as the archiver finished recompiling the autopsied remains of his own dead body. Soomber and Etos quickly got up and followed him into the infirmary.

  Nocta stood glaring wide eyed and without blinking at the horror laying before him. His breathing was a heavy mix of terrible self-foreshadowing and angst filled rage. His whole body shook as he stared into his own dead face. His body was riddled with lacerations and hastily done sutures. Some monster had slit him apart from head to toe and rummaged through his body like common garbage, leaving only this sad, decaying remains in its place. Nocta began to violently convulse and then he fell forward, catching himself on the bed and vomiting on the floor a second time.

  "Sir?" Etos said from behind him. "Are you alright?"

  Nocta turned and glared at him hard. "Nobody told you to leave your post. Go back and watch the ship!" He yelled at them. Both men turned and began heading back into the cockpit. "Not you!" Nocta growled as he pointed at Lieutenant Soomber.

  "Me sir?" The terrified Soomber asked.

  "I want my memories!" He said ominously.

  "Sir?" Soomber gasped.

  "I want my dhreghed memories! Get them out now!" He yelled at the Lieutenant.

  "From the b...b... body?" Soomber said with a horrified grimace on his face. "Sir, I don't think that's a good idea."

  "I don't care what you think, Lieutenant. I want my memories out of there now!"

  "But sir, I'm not a doctor, I've never pulled the memory enhancements out of another person before I wouldn't even know where to...."

  Captain Nocta flew at him like a bullet. He grabbed his throat and slammed him hard against the bulkhead behind him. Choking him tightly, Nocta watched as the blood was quickly being cut off from Soomber's head. "Get my memories out now, or I'll put you on that table myself!" He growled angrily. Then he released the petrified Soomber and stepped back up against the wall, his eyes locking back onto his body.

  Soomber stood there trembling for a chron before he finally moved closer to the table. "Yes... sir...” he said quietly as he approached Nocta's dead body.

  Soomber accessed the computer core and learned everything he could about posthumously removing a person's enhanced memory system. There were a series of tools in the infirmary that were design specifically to remove certain cybernetic enhancements so that they could be analyzed and accessed apart from the living tissue it was grown to work with. The whole procedure took almost two kiloChrons, but before long Soomber had removed his Captain's enhanced memory from the corpse and set it into a Petri dish on a table beside them.

  The entire time Nocta watched in mortal revulsion as his own dead body was once again being defiled. When the procedure was done, he was still turgidly staring into his own face. One of his eyes was almost unrecognizably mutilated and cut apart. The skin of his nose had been cut open, clearly folded back, and then crudely stitched back into place by some witch-doctor of the ancient world. His whole body was riddled with seams and stitches. Now, there before him lay the exact same memory enhancements that he had been born with, and which were paradoxically still in his own head at the same time.

  "Captain Nocta." Soomber said. "Sir, I have no idea why any of this has happened, but I'm afraid that if you access that chip, you're not going to like what you find, any more than this."

  "I have to know what happened. I have to know how I died!" He said monotonously. In the time that it had taken Soomber to remove the chip, Nocta had been become almost catatonic. He couldn't pull his eyes from himself, and his expression was saturated in a numbness that went beyond conscious control.

  "Sir, please. This isn't right." Soomber pleaded with him.

  Nocta finally let his eyes leave his corpse and float over to Lieutenant Soomber. As if suddenly realizing his life's calling, Nocta pulled himself from off the wall and stiffly walked over to the table and grabbed the chip. He set it under a scanner and accessed the controls with his mind. In a nanoChron a bluish hued image of his very last thought floated above the infirmary bed and filled the greater part of the room.

  Soomber looked on in morbid revulsion as the image attempted to clarify itself. Nocta turned and stepped up to
the holographic projection that showed the last thing that he had seen before his death.

  The image was still. It was a rocky terrain of some kind. From the center of the sight-line was a very bright glow that seemed to rip out toward him, warping everything in the image. The details were very fuzzy and hard to make out.

  "This isn't a crash." Nocta mumbled out. "What am I looking at?" He said numbly.

  "It looks like an explosion of some kind. An energy discharge. It could be a number of things." Soomber said.

  "Roll back the memory." Nocta said to the computer. "Half speed."

  The memory began to roll back in slow motion. It was a blast. The ripples and flash seemed to suck back in on itself until it became a landscape. Then a sound like a temporal core winding up in reverse seemed to fill the air. Within a moment the image rolled back until his head turned and he was looking back in another direction. It was a desert. Before him he could see two people running backwards toward him. His hand raised brandishing a gun, and then a series of energy blasts flew backwards toward him and disappeared into the gun. After a moment, he seemed to be running backwards himself. He was chasing someone. Why?

  "Roll back ten hectoChrons." He said solemnly. "Play forward."

  The memory jumped back ten hectoChrons and began playing forward in real time. There was smoke and fire everywhere. Bits of debris littered the rocky landscape, and electric arcs popped and burned all around him. The sound of alarms permeated the air, and the smell of chemicals and burnt grass filled the infirmary from the memory. He could hear himself coughing in the thick toxic atmosphere. The visibility was very limited as he appeared to be getting up from a prone position. There was a yelp in his own voice as he tried to lift himself with a wounded arm. Groans and cries of his own agony followed him all the way up until he was on his feet in the wreckage.

  He could see large sections of the Chronis obscured by smoke and tall, burning grasses as the memory moved forward. "Dr. Thalia!" Came a voice he didn't recognize. The voice sounded very concerned and seemed to be getting closer through the smoke. He watched as his own hand raised the pistol once again and fired several shots toward the unsuspecting person coming through the smoke. He seemed to be moving faster now, hobbling through the wreckage, nursing his wounded arm, and firing random shots into the wreckage. “Captain Nocta?” the voice yelled out through the smoke.

  "Get out here Dayk!" He heard himself yell loudly. He continued moving cautiously through the smoke and debris, looking this way and that through the wreckage. There wasn't any sign of the person he had been shooting at only moments before. "It’s time!" He yelled again.

  Nocta's face washed over with confusion as he watched the memory progress. He heard Dr. Dayk’s voice emanating from the holographic chaos, “what the hazmar are you doing, Captain? Where did you get that weapon? No destructive instruments! That’s the law, Captain! One shot from that could destroy a timeline!” His own voice replied, “or fix one. It doesn’t matter how I got it, Doctor. What matters is how I use it. Get out here! Dayk!” The search continued in the memory as he seemed to be looking frantically through the wreckage. “Come on Dayk. I’m going to find you.” There was no reply, and the holographic Dayk seemed to have completely disappear from the memory. “Where are you Dayk!? I'm getting sick of this chase! It's time to end it!"

  How long has this been going on? Nocta thought to himself. Suddenly he looked over at Lieutenant Soomber who was staring open jawed at the memory floating above them in the room. He suddenly felt a wash of embarrassment flood over him. This was not the kind of thing that any of them should be seeing but especially not his subordinate. He was growing self-conscious about what was going on.

  “We've gone through the crash, now let's get this over with. You’re not getting away, and I’m not going to die!" Memory Nocta said.

  “What?!” Nocta said aloud as he heard his future memory played back to him. “I knew? I knew it was…” he was cut off.

  "You ask me to wait until after the crash. I waited. Now it's time to finish this. You know what that means? It means that this mission has to end. It means you have to fail."

  Soomber glared at Nocta with a terrified and worried confusion, “Sir? What is going on here?”

  Nocta clinched his teeth as the memory played back, his holographic-self searching through the smoke, revealing things that they shouldn’t know about.

  "Oh, no! Dr. Amikes!?" A woman’s muffled voice permeated the din of the wreckage.

  "Dr. Thalia?” His voice said, "Where are you? Come on out here!"

  They watched his perspective as he snuck around one of the bulkheads with the pistol drawn and at the ready. "Dr. Thalia! You aren't with Dr. Dayk are you?" he called out as he continued around the back. There, impaled on the side of the ship, lay the unconscious, and field-treated Dr. Fossor. Both Nocta and Soomber froze as the image of the old man came into the hologram. "Ah, dhregh. Dr. Fossor," Nocta's voice said in the image. "Dayk, tying off his leg isn’t going to save him. It was good of you to try, but you know we can't leave him like this. Ten days to rescue, the infirmary is destroyed, we’ve got no way to treat him. Are you planning on just keeping him alive until he bleeds out? I’m afraid that’s not an option." They watched as Nocta raised his gun toward Fossor’s chest and fired three times. “He’s not going to suff…”

  Nocta quickly turned and grabbed the memory chip off the scanner, and the memory disappeared from in front of them. The only thing left in the infirmary was his own corpse and a horrified Lieutenant Soomber locking eyes with him. Soomber was shaking, and looked at his Captain as though he had suddenly come to realize that he was trapped on a small ship for the next year with a mad-man.

  "I am not a murderer!" Captain Nocta said defensively, stuffing the chip into his flight suit pocket. "This hasn't happened yet, and I'm not going to let it happen! This is just one possible future!" He tried to justify. Soomber just stared at him with a wave of confused emotions.

  "Sir..." he said nervously. Nocta watched as Soomber tried to collect his thoughts. His jaw was moving, but no words were coming out. Nocta's defensive statement did little to console Soomber, whose throat was still sore from Nocta's angry throttling.

  Suddenly, Nocta was more terrified of himself than he'd ever been in his life. What had he just witnessed? What was going on? Why was his own dead body laying before him, and why had he just murdered one of the oldest, and most revered members of the Temporal Sciences Center.

  "I... I..." Soomber continued to mumble.

  "I'm so sorry." Nocta said. He had never been so lost in all his life. There was no possible way that this day could get any worse. And there was no possible way that he would ever see a day this bad again.

  "Um... Captain..." Lieutenant Etos called from the cockpit. Nocta was still lost in his own horror. "Captain!" Etos said again.

  "What is it?" Nocta said with a tremor in his voice. Tears began running down his face.

  "Sir, we have another problem." Etos said from the cockpit.

  How could this day possibly get any worse?! Nocta thought to himself. "What is it, Etos?"

  "Sir... Somebody stole our Temporal Key." He replied.

  This day had gotten worse after all.

  Panic and Confusion

  "Alright, Dayk! What the hazmar is going on?" Thalia yelled as she stood invisibly just a short way from Naomi's apartment.

  "Keep your voice down!" He scolded. "I don't know what's going on yet."

  "Fugitives? Captain Nocta showing up to collect his own dead body, some seven to ten Sines before he died? Guns!? Dayk, they were chasing us with weapons. That's not a rescue!" Thalia was shaking with anger, feeling lost and confused by the bizarre and unprecedented betrayal by her own people.

  "Dr. Thalia... I know. I know." Dayk said. "Let's head over to that field across the street there. We need to get off this road." He walked to the other side of the street and pushed his way invisibly through the tall grass that faced Naomi's apart
ment. "I'm just as confused as you are right now,” he said as he walked away from Thalia, “None of this makes any sense."

  "No! That's not it, Dayk. You know more than you're letting on." She said accusing him as she followed him into the grass. "You're a dhreghed temporal mathematician. You're supposed to be able to predict the future!" She barked on angrily. "So why don't you tell me what's going on here."

  "Look Thalia, I can only predict temporal outcomes that follow the natural flow of space-time. This has become a paradox." He said, defending himself.

  "Oh, yeah! It's a paradox alright!" She said

  "Paradoxes are a different story! And this kind of paradox is cyclical. Predictions start to break down in cyclic paradoxes."

  "So, then... what? Your math doesn't work anymore?" She growled.

  "No, you don't understand. The problem with this paradox is that we're just now becoming aware of it.”

  “What about that anomaly in the temporal key? You said you knew about that already!” Thalia yelled.

  “Keep your voice down! We didn’t know what the anomaly was, which is part of the reason we were sent here to find out. Now that we’re in this loop, other people clearly know more than we do, which means that as we change things it causes them to change things, which causes us to change things.... you see... it's cyclical." He said.

  "So, what? We're stuck in an anomalous loop? How the hazmar did we get stuck in a loop, huh?" She snapped. "I'm done. I don't want anything to do with your paradox."

  "Thalia, this isn't my paradox! I don't know who created this conundrum! As far as I know this is Captain Nocta's paradox. That is the first anomalous thing I’ve seen and the more pieces of this puzzle I get, the more I think that this is something that he's done."

  They stepped through the tall grass pushed on a little further out of view of the houses. Dayk watched as a clump of grass collapsed itself under Thalia's invisible body as she sat down on it. He looked around to see if they were secure, and then he sat down next to her and disengaged his cloaking device. In a flash, she followed suit.