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By George Steele
Roberto Marcos arrived in Manchester
approximately eight years before the Shift. On arrival, he saw a fierce-looking
dragon. Then he saw the clashing cymbals and decorative arch, and realised he
was in the city’s Chinatown district, and relaxed. Where he came from, dragons
were common.
The beauty of it all instantly took him
aback. He could taste diesel fumes, smell warm food cooking, he could see harsh
sunshine bounce off concrete and glass. There was a trickle of rain. As it
dripped onto his skin, warm and wet, he had to control himself not to shrink
away from it. Then he saw people. Hundreds, no, thousands of them. They were
walking to shops, to work, to home, to wherever they lived. Had lived. They
walked. They did not run or cower or try to mingle with their surroundings.
They had no fear of what was to come.
He stepped through the streets, wary,
feeling like a somnambulist, half-expecting the dream bubble to burst. The
mixture of feelings was quite overwhelming. He wanted to cry, laugh, burst into
song, grab hold of the nearest passer-by and shout some sense into them. But he
did none of these things. He told himself to focus on the task. He was
Lieutenant, first-class. He filled his mind with the mission he had to
accomplish. His own insignificant desires meant nothing.
He scoured the streets for a taxi. He
spoke with the driver, putting on a mask of shallow conversation to elicit
casual details of where he was, and when.
He remembered the last look Shakespeare
had given him. ‘All our hopes go with you,’ he had said. ‘If you
fail, we are forever drowned in this fog of uncertainties.’ Surprisingly
visual, for a man of words.
The taxi pulled up outside the house. It
was not at all what he had expected. Perhaps some Frankenstein’s laboratory.
Not anonymous, terraced, and grimly suburban. He gave the driver an outrageous
tip. “Don’t mention it,” he said and meant it.
His bracelet said two-thirty. He
imagined her sitting down at her computer, feverishly hooked into the Internet,
ploughing through theorems and treaties, a Pandora’s box of knowledge. He
wondered how she would react to him. He had seen pictures of her, and although
she was beautiful, to him she was also the most dangerous woman in the world.
He hesitated at the doorway. A sudden
doubt seized him. What was he doing? What did he think he could possibly
achieve? He looked down the street, at a woman passing over the road. A car
zoomed past. I could stay here, he thought, undetected, live as one
of them, until it happens again. It was so real. He felt the oppressive
weight of the ordinary stealing his will. Then he thought of Shakespeare. How
long was there? Eight years? Less? Not nearly long enough. This solidity, this
street - it was nothing. Just a lie. A shade of the past about to be stripped
away.
He knocked on the door.
“Helen Ekstrom?” he asked, producing his
badge. “Robert Marcos. I’m from the Ministry of Defence.”
She looked surprised more than anything.
She inspected his ID card. The holographic surface held her attention for a
moment. He doubted she had ever seen one before, but from the look of suspicion
on her features he could tell she needed further persuasion.
“It’s about your scientific work, Miss
Ekstrom,” he acted. “Your theories have raised extreme interest in certain
circles. We need to discuss it with you, as a matter of urgency.”
She stared for a moment longer, then recovered
herself with supreme grace. The lapse of self-doubt, of modesty, was hardly
discernible. “Well,” she said,” you’d better come inside.”
“I’ll be brief, and to the point. We
want to dissuade you from publishing your next Internet discussion article,” he
said when he was standing in her living room, ”In fact, we’d be prepared to
offer you a rather large sum of money to purchase the copyright.”
“We?” she asked.
“My employers at the Ministry,”
She examined his face, looked back to
the card, and said, “Can I get you a drink? Tea? Coffee?”
The offer had him spellbound. Real
coffee. Made with real coffee beans. He remembered how they had sold it in the
supermarkets once, in his youth. His stomach growled with anticipation.
“Yes, please,” he said, trying to mask
his excitement. “I would love some coffee.”
“Sugar?” she asked.
He paused to consider this. “Yes,
please. Four spoonfuls.”
She gave him a strange look, then went
into the kitchen.
His eyes followed her every move. Her
hips swung like a velvet clock under her flowing, flower-printed skirt. She
wore light perfume, and as she closed the door sunlight caught the fine hairs
of her arms and made a golden halo around her head. Not your typical mad
professor.
He surveyed the surprisingly bare room.
There was a two-dimensional picture of a dolphin leaping from a translucent sea
on the wall, a faded old graduation photo on the television, and an unpaid tax
demand behind the clock.
A clock with a pendulum that worked.
It was all too fascinating. It made him
want to run out of the building screaming. He was about to destroy all of this.
She came back in, looking slightly
flushed and placed the coffee at arms’ length on the small glass table in front
of him.
“Listen,” she said. “I want you to know
that I just called the number on your card. It doesn’t exist. I’ve also called
the police and they’ll be here in five minutes. So you can leave now if you
want to.”
He smiled, feeling a sudden, bottomless
pit open in his stomach. He would have to explain.
“You probably think I’m either a burglar
or an escaped lunatic,” he said.
“I have my opinions,” she replied
empirically. “Possibly both.”
He admired her. “My name is Roberto
Marcos. But I don’t work for the Ministry of Defence. I’m an astronaut.”
She flinched in her seat. Her eyes
roamed round the room, probably for a makeshift weapon in case he came at her.
Instead he sat down and placed his hands on his knees like King Canut holding
back an impossible tide.
“Believe me, I won’t harm you. I just
want to tell you a story. You’ve already called the police, so what difference
does it make?”
She didn’t reply. Perhaps she was trying
to conceal how frightened she was.
”By the way, I was telling the truth, “
he continued, “I do have a rather large sum of money. It’s in a bank account
that’s been set up for me. I still don’t want you to go public with that paper.
And I’m still willing to buy it. Anything, to stop you publishing it.”
“What paper do you mean?” she asked. “My
thesis on black holes? It’s already been published. You’re too late.”
“Not that one, “ he told her. “The other
one. Supporting Unified Field Theory.”
“I haven’t even finished that,“ she
whispered. Something like concern spread across her face, drawing lines across
her lovely forehead. “Have you hacked into my computer somehow? Have you been
spying on me?”
“No,” he replied. “I’ve read the
newspapers. Your complete diaries were published in serial format soon after
they built the first accelerator, eight years from now precisely. In six months
your paper is placed on your website, when you decide that your research should
be available to all members of the scientific community. A passing Professor of
Astrophysics surfing the ‘net picks up on it. He brings it to the attention of
NASA. It blows their mind. They write back to you. You’ll get the e-mail next
Thursday. Soon your work is published and read by the most respected scientific
minds in Britain and America. You’ll be received by the International Physics
Institute. In your paper, you theorize that an essential part of grand field
theory are tachyon particles. Previously hypothetical, you prove their
existence with a simple equation. You theorize these particles are interwoven
between physical matter and the fourth dimension. Time. You show them that, by
accessing the subdimensional strata of tachyon particles, instantaneous travel
to any place in the world is possible at a speed faster than light. In effect,
instant teleportation – through the physical plane, through time, or even
backwards through time.”
He took a deep breath and continued,
trying to ignore her incredulity.
“Next year, you’re hired to work with a team
of engineers and physicists to build the world’s first tachyon particle
accelerator. In spring of 2022, they finish their work. At 8:15 p.m. on
Saturday October 25th, they switch it on. The test goes well. Too
well.
“The machine generates a unified field,
which accelerates our physical plane to the same frequency of molecular
vibration as the theorised tachyons. Both our reality and the tachyon field are
in sync. In effect, it links the bioelectric field surrounded the Earth with
the time stream. What happens then is history, literally.”
“Why don’t you wait until you get to the
hospital?” she said. “You can tell me all about your theories then.”
He smiled, anger turning into
resignation. “We were right about the others,” he said. “Nobody believed them,
either.”
“What others?” she said.
“The others sent back down the time
stream to find you. They never got here. Now I understand why. They must have
lost control. As soon as they arrived they were treated as lunatics. Nobody
believed them.”
He took out a small device that looked
like a remote control to a TV set. “I was sent back to kill you, in case I
couldn’t convince you,” he said. He let the device fall onto the coffee table.
It looked more sinister now. The tip contained a fine red crystal. They exchanged
a long glance.
“But I think I can convince you,” he
said. “I think you’re too much of a scientist not to be curious about this.”
He removed the bracelet from his wrist.
It looked like a thick silver wristwatch, but the display was blank, and there
were only two buttons on its hard black plastic surface.
“It’s a smaller version of the field
generator you built. It projects a field approximately seven feet in diameter.
It’s for one use only, I’m afraid. But that won’t matter if I fail; I won’t be
going back.”
“So you’re from the future,” she said,
doing a grand job of entertaining what she undoubtedly thought what insanity.
”Okay, what year do you come from?”
“There are no years any more. Passing
time changed after the Shift. That was our name for what happened,” he leaned
forwards with an intent expression. “Helen, I want you to come back with me.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because you don’t want to be around
when it happens,” he explained, replacing the bracelet on his wrist.
“When the field was generated, it
created a chain reaction. A kind of China syndrome in time and space. The world
was plunged into a time vortex. People grew old in seconds, some turned into
babies, then blobs of slime. The past merged with the present. Dinosaurs
appeared in the streets. Things from the future too. Spiders, enormous ones,
more intelligent than people. Cavemen, Red Indians, the dead. We lost most of
our power. Nuclear power plants exploded or disappeared altogether. You see,
the world shifted that day. Atoms that were never meant to be here were shifted
from other parts of the time stream. Buildings grew out of nothing or became
transparent ghosts. People too. A lot got stuck in the new structures. The
lucky ones died soon. Matter became something that was no longer stable. It was
anarchy. A whole dimension of anarchy.”
She listened as he spoke. When he
stopped, he realised he was sweating. His hands were shaking. He didn’t know
whether it was with anticipation or fury.
“You see, what you and the scientists
failed to realise, what it took us many years of hard labour to understand, was
that time is not a motion, it is a state of existence. Time exists at all
levels. Every event that has occurred or will ever occur exists in some
potential form in the tachyon stream. And now it’s all happening at once. The
future, the present and the past.”
He thought of Shakespeare. The funny
little man had never had a chance when the spiders had descended on him. That
was just before he had stepped into the tachyon field himself. He saw them tear
the unlucky playwright limb form limb as a lilac-coloured aura surrounded him.
The Spiders had been massing their numbers, waiting, with that horrible insect
intelligence. Now they had broken into the compound, and no doubt destroyed
everything and everyone. That had been the last safehouse for humanity in the
state of Texas/Argentina (the two places having merged). Luckily, he had been
able to Shift away.
He wondered what there was left of his
own time to go back to. “Some things are never meant to exist together,” he
said. The bitterness of his tone was undeniable.
For a moment, a flicker of belief grew
in her eyes. He could see scientific curiosity swelling inside her. Then
cynicism crept in.
“How did you survive?” she asked.
“I wasn’t there. I was in space. On my
back from Mars, actually. Like I said, I’m an astronaut. When we lost contact
the crew I made an executive decision. We returned to Earth, let the rocket
guide itself in on automatic pilot. What we saw,” he felt his gorge rise,
“wasn’t worth coming back for.”
He looked up. The curiosity was gone.
Replaced by the kind of pitying look reserved for the sick or the elderly.
“It was the Mars bit, right?” he said.
“Too much science fiction?”
“It’s very hard to believe,” she
offered. “Without seeing it, I mean,”
“Fortunately, we weren’t the only ones
who survived the Shift. Between us and some of the other guys at NASA, we
figured out what had happened and discovered how to manipulate smaller tachyon
fields. It wasn’t easy. The building that housed your generator didn’t exist
any more. Heck, the whole city didn’t exist any more. But the more localized
the field, the easier it is to control. They hadn’t done their calculations
with the original field generator. They hadn’t allowed for the sheer scale of
the field that they produced. Now we can use devices like these,” he fingered
the bracelet, “to Shift ourselves back and forth. It’s risky. You can
easily embedd youself half in a brick
wall or a tree. But we’ve had time to improve, you might say.”
“So why come to me?” she asked. “What
can I do?”
“The trouble is, nobody can reverse the
effect. The generator is still there. But nobody can reach through to whatever
dimension it’s in now to turn it off. You can’t even get close. We’ve tried
digging up a few great minds to help us. We even grabbed a few artists along
the way. Shakespeare, Lennon, even Einstein, just in case they had any
perspective on matters. But so far they haven’t been much help. Shakespeare
wasn’t even much use in a fight.”
She stifled a laugh despite herself.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay. It doesn’t matter if you
don’t believe me, because it’ll happen anyway. But there is another reason I
came here. To meet you. In the flesh.”
“My God, a time traveller with a crush
on me!” She laughed out loud. Then she saw the look in his eyes and grew
silent.
The distant wail of police sirens was
growing closer by the second.
“I read everything word of your
diaries,” he said, spurred on by desperation. “I thought they might give us a
clue about the generator. Instead I found you. You put everything in them. Your
likes and dislikes. Your whole life. I know you had a cat called Jerry when you
were six and you washed him in the cold and he died of hypothermia. I know you
like James Stewart and you always cry at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life.”
He glanced around as the sirens
approached closer. The strangeness of his words was totally at odds with the
dull reality of life.
“Helen, I came because I wanted to meet
you. But if you don’t write the paper, the future might be beautiful again,
like it was. Like it is here, now. What’s left of my world isn’t worth living
in. The sky is black and filled with electromagnetic storms. There’s acid rain,
real acid rain. The cities crawl with screaming things that were once people
and the night is reserved for monsters. And it’s all because of you. Don’t you
owe it to us to undo all this?”
She sat listening. And when he had
finished, a funny little smile appeared on her face.
“Nobody knows about my cat,” she said.
“Nobody.” There was long pause before she added, “How many died?”
“I wouldn’t call it death,” he answered.
“But 65% of the population became - different.”
“Of our population?” she asked. “Here in
England?”
“No,” he said. “Of the world. The whole
world changed.”
She looked numb. “But I’m a nobody,” she
said.
He began to answer, but the sirens
suddenly stopped.
Moments later, there was a knock at the
door.
She stared at him for a few more
seconds, then stood. “You’re very convincing,” she said. “But what you’re
suggesting is impossible.”
“Improbable, but not impossible,” he
said. But he could see the battle was lost. And it had been fought in her
living room for the world.
The officers were wary and stiff. They
asked him if he would accompany them to the hospital, and he agreed. What was
the point of refusing? The energy he had come here with had dissipated in his
soul. He had been a fool to think he could change anything by words alone.
“It’s okay,” he smiled, seeing her
frown. “I already knew. You wrote about this in your diary too. I memorized the
entry for yesterday. It reads: ‘I’m so bored. Wonder what tomorrow will
bring?’” He felt the policeman nudge his arm. “But we had to try,” he said, “I
couldn’t kill you after all.”
With that he was bundled out of the door
and into the waiting van.
Again, recognition at his words flashed
across her face. He watched her shrink into the distance. The van doors closed
on him, and he was left with the darkness of his thoughts.
Suddenly, sunlight greeted him, and the
doors opened. To his surprise, Helen stood there with the police officers.
“Have you got her husband’s watch?” one
officer asked.
He looked at Helen, then nodded. He
slipped the bracelet off his wrist and handed it to the officer, who in turn
gave it to Helen. Her face was intense with emotion.
“Is this it?” the policeman asked.
She looked back to him with a kind of
mingled excitement and fear. “What do I press?” she asked. “Scientific
curiosity.”
Something inside him lifted. If he had
not been of a scientific mind he would have been tempted to call it his soul.
Instead, he reached across and pressed the RETURN button. The van would
accompany them but he didn’t mind.
The field flared out with the bright
lilac haze of tachyons. The world subsided into indecipherable shapes, then
into blackness. Where they would materalize was anyone’s guess.
When the blackness lifted, the air
smelled sweet. There were no cries of pain from outside, and the sun shone upon
them in a radiant smile. Another Shift? Was it possible, so quickly? He
expected to hear the howls of angry primates, the screams of the nearly dying
and the horrible chattering of the mandibles of man-hunting spiders. He braced
himself for the nightmare of shifting matter and swarms of flying flesh.
Instead, what greeted his ears was more like…birdsong.
He stared at his surroundings. They were
on a grassy hill. The world was warmer than he remembered.
What if there was no Shift, he thought to himself. What if we changed it all?
Helen was stood beside him. Two equally
confused police officers and a third of a police van lay nearby. And what if
we’ve gone beyond the world, he thought. What if this is the Paradise we
lost and were meant to rediscover? What if Heaven had been there all along,
hidden beneath our reality?
He turned towards her, searching for
words and finding none. She stared at the horizon. On her face, where he had
expected a look of terror, there was only the most beautiful, radiant, angelic
smile.
They stared out across the grass
together, and it seemed to him that those green meadows went on into the
distance forever.