The Temporal Key
Page 36
They reached the gate in only a few moments and Naomi composed herself quickly and drove cautiously up to the guard tower. Artificial light flooded into the car as they approached the last obstacle between them and military, and she rolled down her window and smiled politely.
“Good evening ma’am” A young MP said as she handed him her credentials. He looked them over as though he understood anything that was going on around him, and then handed her ID card back to her. He shined his flashlight into her back seat and then into her front but saw nothing of interest in the car. “Have a good evening,” he said as he waved her on, and the wooden gate opened to let her pass. They heard the phone ringing as they drove away into the night.
Exile in the Desert
Three days passed since Naomi drove them nearly seventy kilometers out into the desert. After taking several treacherous old buggy paths deep into the wilderness, they came across a creek bed that Naomi seemed to recognize in the car’s headlights. With Naomi’s flashlight, and Dayk and Thalia’s enhanced vision, they trekked with some difficulty across the creek bed and up a hill to a rolling flatland that stretched on into the night for as far as they could see. Only a little way up from the creek stood a rock face about two meters high, like an extinct tributary, that ran nearly perpendicular out into the desert. Built up inside those ancient rock walls were the remains of stone shelters that had been used by silver miners at least sixty years earlier. There were bits of colored glass wedged into the spaces between the rocks, and rusted metal spikes protruding along the top on the inside. The shelters were barely large enough to allow an adult primitive to lay out to sleep and hang his clothes and lantern on the wall.
They found other traces of abandon human activity scattered all around the antique campsite. Most of it was bits of rusted metal, like the head of a pick-axe, or a leaf spring from a carriage. There were bits of long weathered bones of small animals littered around the ground near a dusted over fire pit, and a long-rotted tree trunk laying on its side, just a short distance away.
As the final day approached, anxious anticipations overwhelmed Dayk and Thalia both. Naomi had returned on the following day to bring them additional food and blankets, but otherwise they had been completely alone in the desert for the last three days.
Dayk looked out at the sunrise on his tenth day in 1947. Today would be the last day in this time period, and as much as he was ready for it to be over, he wanted to absorb as much of it as he could. A nervous sense of relief began tickling his mind as the sun crested the distant hills, and then something else grabbed his attention.
“There’s a vehicle approaching,” Thalia said as she stepped out of one of the shelters. “I think it’s Naomi.”
Dayk looked out over behind him and saw the dusty trail being kicked up by the approaching car. “Yeah, that’s her,” he said.
“You think she’s coming in to see us off?” Thalia asked.
“Probably,” Dayk replied.
“Do you feel it yet?” she asked.
“Feel what?”
“That sense that something’s approaching? Like last time,” said Thalia.
Dayk thought about it as Naomi’s car pulled to a halt just on the other side of the dry creek. “No, I guess not,” he said. “That doesn’t mean anything though. I don’t recall ever having felt that before anyhow.”
“Well, I’m not feeling anything, either,” Thalia said in a worried tone.
“Thalia, the feeling we had last time must have been from the anomaly. I think what we felt last time was some sort of temporal displacement; something that didn’t belong in the current timeline. Nothing more,” he said and then smiled and waved at Naomi who got out of Julia’s car and waved back.
“Hey, you two!” she yelled from across the creek. “I wasn’t sure if you’d still be here, but I brought us a picnic just in case!”
“Hello Naomi,” Dayk and Thalia said in unison. They watched her hop across the rocks, carrying a basket until she was making her way up the hill toward them.
“No sign of your ship yet then?” she asked as she approached.
“Nothing yet. It could be at any time today though,” Dayk said.
“Well, good. I was hoping to see you guys again before you returned,” Naomi said as she sat down beside Dayk. “I brought some chicken and some green beans. I hope you like them.”
Thalia came up to the group and joined in as they sat around and ate a mid-morning meal.
Overhead, the sun made its way across the sky, changing the shadows from dawn to dusk, and no sign of any rescue ship appeared. All day long they talked and watched patiently waiting for a vortex to open up or a ship to teleport them up, but the only thing that came and went was time. Eventually, the sun began to set, and the time travelers’ tension was growing very high.
“What makes you so sure it will come today?” Naomi asked.
“Because rescues are timed to coincide with the end of a mission. Our mission was supposed to end today. Ergo, if we don’t show back up from our trip, which we won’t, then they send a ship back to the last possible day of the mission. That way they don’t end up showing up before whatever kept us here in the past happens. It avoids paradoxes,” Dayk said matter-of-factly.
“But, I mean, couldn’t they show up tomorrow, or the next day?” she asked.
“I suppose it’s possible, but it’s not probable.”
“Well, what are we going to do, Dayk?” Thalia asked, clearly upset by the lack of a rescue. “This day only has another sixteen kiloChrons in it before it’s officially tomorrow! I thought you said there was no way they could leave us back here!”
“And they can’t. There’s no way they can leave this level of technological contamination this far back in the past. It would destroy the timeline!” Dayk told her. “Trust me, they’ll be here. They can’t not send a rescue.”
“They did send a rescue!” Thalia yelled. “And you stranded us here and sent them back to the future!”
“That wasn’t a rescue!” Dayk yelled back. “That ship was from the past! Our past! That was part of the paradoxical anomaly!”
“Guys!” Naomi interjected. “Don’t fight.”
“Yes! Exactly! We’re stuck in a paradoxical anomaly; a loop by your own admission!” Thalia added.
Dayk bit his lip in a huff and pulled out both temporal keys. The two orbs lit up, one in each hand, and he immediately began studying them as though he was going to find some last-minute piece of information that would change anything about their fate.
“What are you doing Dayk?” Thalia asked.
“Maybe we missed something.”
“There’s nothing in there!”
“Will you two stop it?” Naomi said over them. “Look. If no rescue comes, we’re going to have to do something. Is there any way to send your people a message?”
Dayk and Thalia looked at her, quietly still angry with each other.
“Not really,” Dayk said. “About the only thing we can do is to try and leave a message that they can read in the future. Unfortunately, we’re two and a half million years back right now, and very little of anything survives from this period. Our chances of actually getting a message home are almost nonexistent.”
“What about those things you’ve got. Didn’t you say that they kept track of the future?” Naomi asked about the temporal key. “Can’t you use those to send a message?”
“They don’t really work that way,” Thalia said. “The main shape is just a record of how the future looked when we left. Inside there are four quantum entangled particles that are connected through a micro-singularity, a nano-singularity really. The only thing they can do is compare the positions of the particles in the future with a record of the particles’ state when we left. They don’t actually send any signals back and forth. It’s a one-way process.”
“Ok, well…” Naomi started, but she didn’t have anything else to contribute.
“Dhregh!” Dayk said quietly.
“They’ll come!” he said.
“But what if they don’t?” she asked again. “What are we going to do then?”
Dayk looked at her and scoffed. “What do you think we’ll do then?” he said with a bite in his voice. “We’ll die here, that’s what will happen then. If they don’t send a ship… what? Are we going to construct our own hyper-fusion generator out of these rocks and minerals?”
Thalia looked down at the ground, averting her eyes from him.
“And, even if it was possible, which it’s not, what would we do then? Leave a hyper-fusion generator out in a primitive desert and hope they don’t find it? The periodic chart in this time period only has a hundred elements on it Thalia, where would we even get half of the materials we need to build anything from this time period?” Dayk barked.
“You know, we do have a few things, Dayk!” she snapped back. “It’s not like we’re completely helpless out here! What about the coils in those keys?”
“The coils in these keys are barely powerful enough to receive temporal-quantum data, one way!” Dayk told her.
“I know, but…” she started.
“And we don’t have anything on this side that can manipulate the quantum data to even send a signal. How are we supposed to manipulate those particles, huh? And what would we say? No one in the future is looking for hidden messages in a temporal keyhole device!”
“Calm down!” Naomi said to Dayk.
Dayk turned away from them and stared off toward the darkening creek bed. He didn’t even want to consider the possibility that they would be stranded in this time period. The technology that they still had on them was enough to destroy their own timeline, and so he couldn’t fathom why anyone in the future would ever allow that to happen. “They’ll come,” he finally said quietly. “They’ll come.”
Time continued to move forward as their hopes and expectations grew dire. Naomi stayed with them as they watched the dusk turn to starry skies and a crested moon slowly moved overhead. As it grew closer to zero-hour, it became a stark possibility that no help was coming for them.
“That’s it then,” Thalia said as the time reached zero kiloChrons. “The day’s over and they didn’t come.”
Dayk said nothing, mulling over all the possibilities in his head, but all he could see was temporal catastrophe in their being left in the past.
“We’re stranded here!” Thalia yelled at him. “Dhregh! We should have just gone with the Paentus! Even if they were hunting us like fugitives, it’s a lot better than being stranded here!”
Naomi stayed quiet. She was getting sleepy in the late night, and still had a long drive ahead of her if she hoped to make it home. She was feeling unsure and out of place with her strange friends, and now she was just trying to keep from falling asleep on the rocks while they panicked.
“What now, Dayk?” Thalia continued as he sat there quietly thinking. “Are you ignoring me?”
“No, I’m thinking.”
“Well, what now?” she said again.
“Do you mind if I grab one of my blankets?” Naomi mumbled from her seat on the rocks. “It’s getting cold out here.” Neither of them responded as she got up and grabbed a blanket from the first of the three shelters.
“I don’t know yet, Thalia,” Dayk replied. “I’m thinking.”
“About what?” she asked.
“None of this fits. There’s simply no way we can just be left here. Even the small amount of tech we have with us has components that don’t exist on Earth yet; a few by almost a million years. It’s major contamination,” Dayk said. “In every scenario I work out, our getting stuck here leads to some level of chaos in the future. I think this anomaly may be a technological contamination event. They have to get us out.”
Thalia suddenly had a terrible thought. “And it doesn’t mean they have to get us while we’re still alive.”
“What?”
“We’re in the middle of a primitive desert. Without enhancements and modern medicine, we won’t live forever. You’d probably live another thirty or forty years without any treatments. I might have a hundred years. Which is already assuming that we don’t get prematurely killed by something in this time period. All they have to do is come back after we die and collect the tech then,” she said morbidly. “Unless, someone wants us to contaminate the timeline.”
Dayk looked at her hard while the scenario played out in his head. He calculated variables and possibilities as quickly as he was able and tried to predict every outcome he could. Then a look of shock came over him as he suddenly realized, “you’re right. There’s a seventy percent likelihood that such a tactic could work. If they couldn’t catch us as ‘fugitives’ then they can get rid of us in another way. Which would also hold true for a purposeful contamination.”
“So, you think all of this is related then?” Thalia asked, almost rhetorically.
“The anomaly, the crash, the agents from our own past coming to take us as fugitives, abandoning us in the past… it all fits together, but I still don’t see how it makes any sense. Why would anyone do this? How could anyone do this?”
“Well, if they really are ditching us here, then I guess we’ll never find out,” Thalia said. “We’ve got to find another way, Dayk! I don’t want to die here in the desert!”
“I’m still holding out for a rescue,” he said. “Another, very likely, possibility is that the rescue trip was mistimed, and will be here by the morning.”
Suddenly, a startlingly loud sound growled out from the rocks. Dayk and Thalia both jumped around in the dark only to find Naomi wrapped up in a blanket and snoring away under the stars.
“I guess she’s not going to miss any sleep tonight,” Thalia said as she watched Naomi.
“I can’t say the same for myself,” Dayk replied, “I’m staying up to wait for the rescue.” He turned his eyes back to the sky and searched the darkness in vain for the tell-tale blue vortex announcing the arrival of a ship. “I still think they’re coming,” he said.
But he was wrong.