Out of Time

by E W Barnes

  But first there was a more important matter.

  “Ok, we’re in a safe place, where you need to be. It’s time for you to tell me what’s going on and why you brought me here.”

  Richard leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  “Yes, you’re right. I’ll tell you everything.”

  Sharon exhaled quietly. It was about time.

  “When the accident happened, when I was afflicted with temporal aberration disorder, I was trying to stop your grandmother’s murder. I planned to use a temporal amplifier to go back in time, in observation mode, to confirm it was the person I suspected was responsible. Instead, the temporal amplifier malfunctioned. They tried to help me, your grandmother, others, but I wasn’t in my right mind.” He chuckled at his own understatement again.

  “They put me in a medical facility, trying to find a cure but there isn’t one, you know. I didn’t trust anyone or anything I was seeing. I escaped, but I didn’t know where to go, or where to hide. Then they found me.”

  “The Chestnut Covin.”

  “Yes,” he nodded, his eyes still closed. “Though I didn’t know it at the time. They took me to a temporal amplifier and shifted me away, making it look as though I’d done it myself in an act of crazed paranoia.”

  “My grandmother said you shifted back in time, and they couldn’t track to what time frame you’d gone.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. There’s no way they could have found me,” he said, opening his eyes.

  “Why not?” Sharon asked, thinking of the director’s prerogative program which prevented the temporal mainframe from recording time travel shifts. Only a Temporal Protection Corps Director could authorize the program’s use. Could the TPC director of that time have been involved? Sharon wondered. But Richard’s answer was not what she was expecting.

  “I wasn’t lost in time,” he said. “They transported me to the parallel earth. The earth of the Alexander Event.”

  “What?” Sharon gasped. “I thought that wasn’t possible, that there were safeguards that would stop a rift from ever opening again, from either side.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Somehow they opened the rift and sent me through.”

  “What did you do?” she whispered in horror. The parallel earth of the Alexander Event was an aggressive, totalitarian society, a world in a state of constant war. She couldn’t imagine the terror of being dropped into that nightmare, let alone with temporal aberration disorder.

  “I stayed out of everyone’s way, at first,” he said, laughing his raspy laugh. “I found the dirtiest, smelliest, most disgusting hole I could, a place no one wanted to follow me, and stayed there for many years.”

  Sharon shook her head. It was not the first time she wondered how he’d survived.

  “It took some work,” he added. “In that world, let’s just say they don’t like people who don’t fit in. There, they make misfits, people who are different, go away.”

  “Go away…?” Sharon repeated, hoping he wasn’t saying what she thought he was implying.

  “Go away.” He nodded. “Here it was detention, mass shootings, crematoriums. There it was vaporization. It was still the same outcome. Gone away. Poof.”

  Sharon stared at him, eyes wide.

  “After a while the effects of the temporal aberration disorder began to wear off. I started remembering things. It took me a while to figure out what happened. At first, I thought I was on this earth, our earth, in the 20th century. But then I realized Rose hadn’t found me—if anyone could have found me in the 20th century it would be Rose. I started noticing that things differed from what I remembered from my 20th century studies. It was only a matter of time before I understood I was not on the earth I knew.”

  “What kinds of things were different?” Sharon asked.

  “For one thing, there was no United States as we knew it in the 20th century. In that world, the Nazis and Soviet Union joined forces during World War II, conquered and divided the world between them. It was an unholy alliance of fascism and communism, dissimilar philosophies with identical results: despotism, totalitarianism, and genocide.”

  “How did the United States fall?” Sharon asked in a whisper.

  “It fell to the Soviets,” Richard said as if he’d expected her question. “The Nazis got all of western Europe, Africa, including the Middle East, and South America. The Soviets took central and North America, and Asia, including India and Australia.”

  “I wonder how they came to that agreement, carving up the globe like a roast,” Sharon said in bitter horror.

  “Apparently, the Nazis demanded the Middle East, I’m guessing for the oil fields, and the Soviets used that as leverage to acquire the other areas. It’s like they knew…” he trailed off.

  “Knew what?” Sharon asked.

  “Well, not too long after the war, after they carved up the world as you put it, the Soviets developed a working cold fusion power system. Apparently, it was something the Nazis were working on during the war years, but the scientist leading the project defected to the Soviets and helped them complete the research. Within 20 years, the oil fields the Nazis demanded were obsolete.”

  “Cold fusion… that’s a safer kind of nuclear power, right? But couldn’t you make weapons from it, too? What stopped the Soviets from conquering the Nazis and taking over the entire world?”

  “You’re right,” he answered. “They could have used it as a weapon, but they didn’t. I’m not sure why. When I was there, they were selling power to Nazi countries at exorbitant prices and the Nazis were paying. They were draining the Nazis dry.”

  “How did you learn all of this?” Sharon couldn’t see Richard just strolling into a local library to research recent history.

  “Even in that world, there was an underground dissident movement, a community that shared resources so no one would starve, helped misfits escape execution, and waited for the day they could rise up and overthrow their conquerors.”

  “They saved you,” Sharon said. Richard nodded.

  “Yep. Eventually my luck ran out. My hiding place was discovered, and the authorities wanted nothing more than to remove my undesirable self from their perfect community. They’d scheduled me for expurgation when the dissidents found me and helped me escape. They cleaned me up, gave me clothes, food, a place to stay… and tolerated my, ahem, flights of fancy.”

  “How did you get back to this earth?” Sharon couldn’t imagine it.

  “Through an act of betrayal,” he responded softly.

  “Who betrayed you?” she asked.

  “Oh no, not me, I wasn’t betrayed,” he laughed his raspy laugh. “I did the betraying.”

  “Who did you betray?” Sharon whispered. She thought of her friend Jonas Fernley who had betrayed his friends and colleagues and joined with the Chestnut Covin. She shivered.

  “Myself,” he said almost inaudibly, looking down at his hands in his lap. “I betrayed my honor, my oaths.”

  “What happened?” Sharon asked gently.

  “Not long after the dissidents rescued me, an extraordinary thing happened. It shook the world, fascist and communist alike. A rift to a parallel earth opened.”

  “You mean…” Sharon breathed.

  “Exactly. The Alexander Event. Heh!” he barked a laugh. “I got to experience the Alexander Event from the other side!”

  “What did you do?”

  “I knew what was happening, of course. I demanded a meeting with a leader of the dissidents, someone who had contacts within the Soviet government. I explained what was happening and demanded they carry a message to Soviet leadership. At first, they dismissed what I was saying as delusions. But they finally passed on the message.”

  “What was the message?”

  “The Soviets and Nazis had come together again, for the first time in decades, to devise a strategy to invade our earth through the rift. But even with the cold fusion, they would need all the resources of their world
to pull it off, you see. The message I gave them was to hold off on the invasion, to negotiate with the other earth, our earth, to get time travel technology and goods and resources, so that when the time came the parallel earth could gain 10 times as much as they would have through invasion.”

  “You set up the debt the World Government agreed to?” Sharon gasped in shock.

  “It was to protect our earth,” he said wringing his hands. “I knew they would develop the safeguard, the one that would stop another rift from ever being opened. I just needed to delay the invasion long enough so it would never happen.”

  “You created a causation paradox,” Sharon said.

  He nodded, closing his eyes. “I violated the Law of Temporal Continuity and betrayed my oath as a TPC agent.”

  “You did it to save the world,” Sharon said.

  “And it was all for nothing,” he responded.

  “Is that what happened here? The parallel earth invaded?”

  He pressed his lips together and nodded.

  “But how? They developed the safeguard, just as you knew they would. There should have been no way for the parallel earth to open the rift again.”

  “There wasn’t a way to open the rift until the Chestnut Covin changed the timeline,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When they emailed back through time, pretending to be the parallel earth demanding the agreement be fulfilled, that the debt be paid, it changed the timeline.”

  “The debt is now due,” Sharon said, remembering the five-word email that caused chaos on her earth. “But we stopped that,” she said. “The email wasn’t sent, we stopped it. That timeline no longer exists.”

  “So you thought,” he said. “When the Chestnut Covin mole in the TPC fled to the future, the timeline in which they sent the email remained in existence in the future.”

  “Yorga Zintel,” Sharon muttered darkly.

  “Because of the email, they never developed the safeguard in that timeline. Eventually the parallel earth reopened the rift to collect payment. At the same time the Chestnut Covin infected the temporal mainframe with a virus. When the rift was opened, it merged all existing timelines into this one. And when the parallel earth learned our earth didn’t honor the agreement, they invaded and inflicted devastation as you have seen.”

  “Oh no,” Sharon whispered. “No, no, no.”

  She felt the world tilting. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the wall to steady herself. How could they not have realized the consequences of Yorga fleeing to the future? She wracked her brain trying to think of what they could have done when they had the chance to prevent the terrible outcome of that error.

  “So, you see why I need you…” Richard started.

  Sharon opened her eyes and looked around. She held up her hand as he started to speak again.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  A small sound in the hallway outside the door, almost imperceptible. She got on her hands and knees and then to her feet, slipping on the heels for what little protection they offered. Richard stood too, limping to her side as quietly as he could. She peered around the door to the right toward the elevator and saw nothing. Richard inhaled sharply, and she looked to her left.

  Five figures stood in the hallway, pointing weapons at them.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  2204 - Under Siege

  Temporal Protection Corps Agent Caelen Winters ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. He was standing in the office of TPC Director Ferhana Veta, along with the head of TPC security, Agent Chausiku MacGregor. He couldn’t believe no one knew what happened to Sharon.

  “What do you mean you don’t know where she is? You said you’d be monitoring her,” he growled at Agent MacGregor.

  “We were monitoring her,” Agent MacGregor responded, equally frustrated. “The temporal mainframe reported a shift in her vicinity, and we dispatched security agents to the micro-apartment assigned to her. When they arrived, no one was there.”

  “Do we know where the shift originated or its destination?” Director Veta asked in her calm voice.

  “No, Director,” Agent MacGregor answered. “The origin and destination were both encrypted, which suggests they might be the same.”

  “How does that help us?” Caelen asked exasperated.

  “It doesn’t immediately help, but it gives us a place to start.”

  A temporal security agent arrived with a small touch screen computer, sharing its contents with Agent MacGregor.

  “Interesting,” he said when he’d finished reviewing the screen.

  “What’s interesting?” Caelen demanded, desperate for answers.

  “Where were you an hour ago, Agent Winters?”

  “I was on my way to pick Sharon up from her apartment. We had a date.”

  “Did you arrive at her apartment?”

  “Yes, but when I got there she was gone.”

  “You didn’t see her?”

  “No. What’s this about?” Caelen’s eyes flicked between Agent MacGregor and Director Veta.

  “The security system registered Agent Winters arriving at Agent Gorse’s apartment. There’s video that shows her leaving with him, but then halting in the hallway. The video stopped recording at that point,” Agent MacGregor showed Director Veta the computer screen who watched it and then accessed the computer screen embedded in her desk.

  “Run a scan and report the whereabouts of Agent Caelen Winters for the last 60 minutes.”

  A mechanized computer voice responded:

  “60 minutes ago, Agent Caelen Winters was in the temporary quarters assigned to him. Forty-five minutes ago, Agent Winters arrived outside of the temporary apartment quarters to Agent Sharon Gorse. Thirty minutes ago, Agent Winters left the area outside the temporary quarters assigned to Agent Gorse. Thirty minutes ago, Agent Winters left the temporary quarters assigned to him and arrived outside the temporary quarters assigned to Agent Gorse. 20 minutes ago, Agent Winters requested the assistance of TPC security, and 10 minutes ago Agent Winters arrived in the office of Director Ferhana Veta.”

  Director Veta peered at Caelen. “It seems you were in two places at once.”

  “I don’t understand this,” Caelen said shaking his head.

  “Are you saying there are two Agent Winters?” Agent MacGregor scoffed.

  “Perhaps,” Director Veta said thoughtfully. “You said you detected a shift in Agent Gorse’s vicinity. It could have been an Agent Winters from a different time frame.”

  “Or it could have been an impostor, or the record was doctored so it looked like me,” Caelen said angrily. “We can argue about who was at Sharon’s apartment, but it doesn’t change the fact that she is missing, and we have to find her.”

  “Agreed,” Director Veta said. She turned to Agent MacGregor. “Let’s assume for now that this Agent Winters was not involved in Agent Gorse’s disappearance, and focus on other possibilities, including a second Agent Winters—and Chestnut Covin involvement.”

  Caelen opened his mouth to argue that he was blameless, when there was a knock on the door. Agent Nizhoni Diogo stuck her head in.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Director, but my most recent computer analysis has detected something… odd. I thought you should know about it.”

  “What do you mean by odd?”

  “Well, I was running the program on the temporal mainframe, you know, the project to figure out how to shift safely to the future? It came back with strange data, as if a shift to the future had actually taken place. But I was only running a simulation. It shouldn't have resulted in hard data.”

  “Let me see,” Agent MacGregor said as he took the computer screen Agent Diogo was holding.

  His lips thinned as he handed the screen to Director Veta.

  “I think we have our answer,” he said grimly.

  “What?” Caelen demanded.

  “It appears Agent Gorse has shifted to the future,” Director Veta said.
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  “How do we get her back?” Caelen asked.

  Agent Diogo scrunched her eyes. “I don’t know. If a shift to the future really has taken place, I would need to more closely examine the results of the simulation in my lab.”

  “Let’s go,” Caelen said heading out of Director Veta’s office before the director or Agent MacGregor could respond.

  ✽✽✽

  Agent Diogo’s lab looked like a temporal amplifier training room, except she had a view of the grounds through large windows. There were multiple workstations and many computer tablets left on the shining surfaces, several of which Agent Diogo picked up in succession as she described the program she had been running and what she was trying to accomplish.

  “As you know, we can’t safely shift to the future—the temporal mainframe cannot accurately determine time and place because of the locus flux.”

  “What’s locus flux?” Caelen asked.

  “You know how the future is constantly changing based on our actions and decisions, right? The temporal mainframe can’t safely estimate a single arrival point for time travel because the location is always changing. We call that constant change locus flux. Without an accurate arrival point, the traveler can end up in the wrong place or wrong time with consequences ranging from the inconvenient to the deadly.”

  “And that’s what you’re working on, a way to overcome that?” Agent MacGregor nodded.

  Agent Diogo smiled.

  “Exactly. I’m designing a program that will compensate for locus flux and allow us to time travel to the future.”

  “Tell us about the last simulation you ran,” Director Veta requested.

  “It was nothing out of the ordinary, one of a hundred simulations like it that I run every day,” Agent Diogo said, picking up another tablet and sharing it with the director. “I designed the simulations to calculate the most frequently occurring possible futures from the temporal mainframe and complete a simulated shift to determine accuracy. Because a shift doesn’t actually take place, the most we can expect is extrapolated data which gets fed back into the temporal mainframe for continued analysis.”