* * *
That one problem—not knowing where we’ll reappear—is why water and elevation are a time traveler’s enemies.
Seventy-five percent of the world’s surface is water. This means that if you sent a hundred people back in time to random locations, seventy-five of them would appear in an ocean, sea, or lake. These people would only live as long as they could tread water. Then they would drown.
Unless they fell from thousands of feet into that water. In that case, they would die on impact.
The water problem, as I’ve heard it mentioned, is the main factor for which departure sites are selected. Scientists try to choose places in the world with the highest chance of reappearing on land. The area around the latitude of 34 N has Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, and Atlanta, not to mention much of North Africa and the heart of China, making it one of the scientist’s favorite places to leave from. Departing from 34 N, a time traveler has a roughly 56.3% chance of arriving on land. 64 N has one of the best chances of success--a whopping 84.2% land-to-water ratio. Time travelers appearing there could arrive in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, or Russia. The only problem is that most of the land in Canada and Russia is too far away from civilization, and the climate too harsh, for a time traveler to be able to trek back to a more hospitable environment without being equipped with appropriate supplies.
There are some places where time travel will never take place. If someone travelled back in time from the equator, they would have only a 22.1% chance of appearing on land. With only a 1.5% chance of success, departing from Ushuaia, Argentina would be considered a suicide mission.
Elevation is the other factor that decides where scientists select their departure sites, and is likely the second leading cause of death among time travelers. Time travelers appear exactly where they departed from in relation to Earth’s center of gravity. This means that a man departing from Death Valley in California—far below sea level—and reappearing anywhere else in the world would either arrive three hundred feet under water and drown before he got to the surface, or else he would reappear hundreds of feet below ground and be melded into nonexistence with rock and earth.
But it’s not only appearing too low that’s risky. If a time traveler were to depart from Mount Everest’s summit, no matter where he reappeared in the world, he would fall to his death.
* * *
Why am I signing up for a mission in which I have a seventy percent chance of meeting this fate? As the light continues to expand from the boxes on either side of me, my shins are now also bathed in it, and I have to admit that’s a really good question.
Just as fast, I see the face of the scientist closest to the door go ghost white, and I know there is not only knocking and banging on the steel door, but also threats. The State is here. And just as quickly as I see the fear on his face, I know that the outcomes I might face at the hands of an imperfect technology are better than what the State will do to anyone still alive when they get through the steel door. Drowning or falling are also a better fate than staying here and allowing our entire civilization to be brutalized and abused.
* * *
My fear of heights is already kicking in. My palms are sweaty. My chest is tight.
The average person would be surprised by how much elevation varies from one location to the next. Even in regions without mountains, one town can be hundreds of feet higher or lower than the next town down the road. This means a time traveler might reappear over land, only to fall a hundred feet, shatter both ankles, or break his back, and never walk again. Newton, North Carolina is only two miles from its neighbor, Carrolton. However, Newton is five hundred feet higher in elevation.
I took a couple judo classes when I was a kid. In the very first class, we learned how to break-fall, which means we learned how to roll as we landed so we didn’t hurt ourselves. Not even a black belt in judo would survive disappearing from Newton and reappearing in Carrollton. The rest of us mere mortals have even less of a chance.
That doesn’t factor in the more extreme falls. Depart from Denver, Colorado, and you are almost guaranteed to plummet thousands of feet when you reappear in history.
* * *
“Why are you doing this?” Mrs. Ellis would surely ask if she could see me now.
The sad thing is, she can’t ask me that question now. The last I heard was that her husband had written an internet post that was critical of the State. A couple days after he disappeared, officers from the State visited Mrs. Ellis. Her neighbors saw two men in black suits escort her out of her home and into the backseat of a sedan with tinted windows. She was never seen again.
* * *
So if Mrs. Ellis could see me today and ask me that question, I’d remind her I’m a far cry from the kid she caught eating a stick of glue.
I’d tell her I’m lined up beside nine other men, the chances of my survival extremely thin, because I can’t live with the knowledge that everyone I love will live in fear for the rest of their lives. Because if I go back in time and prevent the State from forming, I can prevent a dozen different wars, and millions of deaths. I can prevent teachers and librarians from being arrested. I can prevent a world where people accept that everything they say and do is monitored. Most importantly, I can prevent a world where the majority of people are resigned to this fate.
* * *
I look up and down the row of potential time travelers. Some have their eyes closed. Others are staring, fixated, at one part of the room. One is staring at the thick cloud of light that has worked its way up from the floor and has now engulfed everything up to our hips. All of these people, I think, are repeating the same reason I’m offering to myself in their own heads as a way of not thinking about what will happen next.
* * *
The notion exists that time travel is some sort of adventure, that we are swashbucklers on a mission that will make one of us a hero. That’s what Hollywood has taught us.
It’s not like that at all.
Besides the fact that time travelers have a higher mortality rate than soldiers from any war in modern history, even if the time traveler does survive, there is no way they can ever return to their old life, see their family again, or even know whether their efforts to prevent the State will ultimately be successful. If they are accidentally sent back too far in time, they will simply live out their remaining years amongst pre-historic man.
Pre-historic man wouldn’t be my friend. He wouldn’t watch football games with me on Sunday as we drink beer and eat pizza. He’d take one look at me and determine that I’m either a threat he needs to run away from, or else that I’m something he should kill and eat.
Welcome to the Theta Project.
* * *
The scientists call it that because they propose the theory that every possible reality exists, but we are only aware of one. This one reality is like a single dot within an infinite sphere—the Theta Timeline—named after the Greek letter theta, which had a mark inside a circle.
* * *
The humming is loud enough that I can’t hear anything else. The light from the ceiling has descended enough that it begins to come down over my eyes. It doesn’t have far to go before it meets the cloud of light expanding upward from the floor, which is now above my navel.
The middle-aged scientist with brown hair and her younger male colleague are face to face with their hands cupping their ears so they can hear each other over the roar of the equipment. Both look terrified at something happening on the other side of the door.
Is the door vibrating, or is that just my imagination? I imagine troops from the State are hitting it with a battering ram. The oldest of the scientists doesn’t panic. He merely sits on a fold-out chair beside a laptop and hunches forward, his chin on his fists. There isn’t anything to do now except let the machinery finish its job. The remaining two scientists look back and forth between the old man and the pair of yelling scientists as if trying to decide if they should resign themselves
to their fate and accept it, or should their survival instinct kick in and make them fight to the last moment?
I hope they go quickly and painlessly. Part of me wishes they could survive just so they could tell my friends and family how I left, that I faced this with resolve and determination, knowing I was doing it for the right reasons.
* * *
All my life there have been people who said I couldn’t do things that I set my mind to.
I couldn’t get into a good college? Oh, but I did.
I wouldn’t dare join the military after graduating from that good college, would I? Yep, I would.
I faced the same doubters who voice objections to anyone with aspirations greater than their own. There will always be people who try to keep others from achieving greatness simply because they didn’t do much themselves. The people who win Academy Awards and Nobel Prizes and such are the people who ignored these naysayers. It’s true that most actors don’t make it big. It’s true that most scientists aren’t recognized by their peers around the world.
For me, the doubters would scoff with a different set of objections.
“You’d risk your life knowing there’s a seventy percent chance you’ll die right away?”
Yes
“Even if you survive, you could be sent too far back in time to be of any use, making the chance of success far smaller than thirty percent. It might be less than one percent.”
That’s true.
“Even if you appear in the right time, there’s no telling if you’ll actually be able to make a difference.”
That’s also true.
“You’d risk your life, you’d give up ever seeing your loved ones again, for a one percent chance of stopping the State?”
Of course.
Because what these people don’t understand is that there’s nothing greater than standing up for what you believe in. And if you can do that while also helping those who are suffering, then that is truly great.
* * *
Maybe that’s the difference between me and everyone I pass on the street. The city is full of people made miserable by the State, but they simply put their head down and hope, irrationally, that things will somehow get better. I’m sure they, too, would like to avoid being detained for no reason, would like to have a conversation on the phone where computers aren’t recording their every word. But they think the idea of risking their own life to stop such a world is foolish, whereas I think it’s my duty. They hope that maybe a miracle will be performed, and the State will decide one day that it doesn’t need to know what everyone is saying and doing, that it will stop its wars, indefinite detentions, and disappearances. Whereas I know miracles don’t exist.
If we’re going to be freed of the State, it’s going to take sacrifice.
It’s going to take the lives of at least seven of the people in the line in which I stand.
* * *
That’s not to say I blame everyone else for putting their heads down and hoping the State magically finds a conscience and changes course. I don’t.
Turn on any news station, and you find talking heads making excuses for the next war, and the next law, and the next infringement on our rights. The nicely dressed men and women on TV reassure us that each new law makes us safer. They say that it was an isolated incident when a man was gunned down by the State’s goons and that an investigation will take place. They say each new war is fought to keep us safe.
All of it, of course, is nonsense.
And yes, I would risk my life, would risk succumbing to a particularly grizzly fate, if it meant I could prevent all of these sufferings around me. If that’s crazy, if that’s not what everyone should want to do even if they can’t fathom the courage to actually do it, maybe I’m not meant for this reality anyway.
* * *
The humming is as loud as the rumors said it would be. It sounds like a jet fighter is getting ready to take off right beside me.
The light has come down over my face. I have to hunch over to see what’s going on outside the light. Two of the scientists have moved a table and chair in front of the steel door, as if that will stop the explosives that blow the door off its hinges.
I think I smell smoke. It might be coming from under the door, where the State let a canister of tear gas explode in hopes of flushing us out.
The oldest scientist is still sitting on the chair in the middle of the room. The others don’t know what to do with themselves and move nervously around the basement. The old man looks at the screen of his laptop, then at the machines on either side of the line of men, then waves at us.
I raise my hand to wave back, but the steel door blows sideways across the room. First, it hits the shoulder of the youngest scientist, who falls to the ground in agony. Then it hits the old man square in the chest and carries him across the room, against the far wall, where he is crushed.
* * *
I turn to look at the man beside me. Should we run?
But he’s not there.
* * *
Rather, it’s not him that’s gone, but everyone and everything. The light has overtaken everything in the room. I’m gone.
* * *
My stomach lurches toward my throat. I want to gag and throw up, but a different, simultaneous force is pushing up at my head and mouth.
It’s the wind rushing up at me as I plummet, head first, toward earth.
I’m falling.
The earth is racing up at me so fast, it’s hard to breathe.
Falling.
I’ll be one of the seven who don’t survive, but that’s okay. It’s better to die fighting for what you believe in than to live in misery. I might not be the one who goes back in time and prevents the State, but someone else will.
Someone will.
* * * * *
Chris Dietzel Bio
Chris graduated from Western Maryland College (McDaniel College). He currently lives in Florida. His dream is to write the same kind of stories that have inspired him over the years.
His novels have been required reading at the university level, become Amazon Science Fiction Best Sellers, and been produced as audiobooks by Podium Publishing and Aethon Books.
# # # # #
Gunship by Christine Gasbjerg
The sky above the port was the yellow-gray color of the lumpy blubber they ate at every meal. That was one of the few good things about being hired by E-Corp: at least they added protein chunks to the porridge. Even if it was of unknown origin.
Millie got a knot in her stomach from looking at the billowing mass of gray and nicotine-yellow clouds in the sky. Thick weather reduced the visibility, making her fear kick in.
“Are you sure today’s a good day for this?” she asked Holman.
“Absolutely,” her commander answered in his usual brisk manner. “You’ll have to be able to pilot a ship under any and all circumstances, so you might as well dive right in.”
“…jump in at the deep end…” She sighed.
“We’re short of available operational ships, so you’ll be taking that gunship over there.” He pointed.
“Gunship?” Millie turned to face the ship. It looked like a heap of spare parts from decommissioned ships patched together—nothing more than a rusty patchwork of flaking paint. It was hard to imagine a tin can like that offering any kind of protection during a space battle, or any other off-planet situation for that matter. “Our mission isn’t a military operation. Surely I’m never going into battle?”
“Usually we’d use a space bus or a cargo ship for your final pilot test. But it’s not a bad idea to be prepared for any scenario. We never know what’s waiting out there.”
“Well, at least there aren’t any aliens.” She coughed an awkward laugh.
He looked at her pensively.
She couldn’t help getting the feeling that Holman disagreed with her comment, which had to mean that he believed aliens existed—or perhaps he even knew it for a fact?
“Get ready for
takeoff. I’ll be in the coms tower.” He left her.
“Right now?” Fear clutched her belly. “Shit,” she said under her breath. She had been hired, not as a pilot, but as a scientist on the grounds of her expertise in habitable environments, including vitamins, minerals, soils, and sources of energy. And when she’d taken the job, she hadn’t imagined that she was going to have to fly a spaceship—let alone a gunship. But getting a pilot certificate was part of the fundamental training and requirements for going on an E-Corp space mission, so there was no way around it. “Fuck!” She climbed into the rugged patchwork ship for her first unaccompanied flight. She crossed her fingers that it wasn’t going to be her last. And since there was no way around this, she really wanted to get it over with and get her pilot certificate, ASAP.
Inside the gunship, it looked the same as on the outside—patched up spare parts from who knew where. At least it felt bigger inside than it seemed from the outside, which eased the knot of fear in her belly just a little. For as long as she could remember, confined spaces had filled her with dread and panic.
She sat down in the first pilot’s seat. It was surprisingly comfortable and seemed to fit her body just right.
“Put on the coms,” Holman’s voice scrambled over the intercom.
The Dogs of God Page 17
