Based on their extensive testing, they built the machine they called a phase shield in the middle of the city and calculated that the field of impact would reach right to the city limits. In a ceremony of some importance with several important people including the leader of Pilkrand, the lead scientist threw the switch to activate the phase shield. Observers from outside the city saw a wave of energy emanate from the center before everyone inside the city limits disappeared, though the city itself remained intact. A cheer rang out in the belief that the experiment was a complete success.
Then hours passed with no change in the city. A man who had watched the demonstration from outside the city wanted to return to his home inside Carburast, and everyone watched as he crossed the border on foot. Moments later, he disappeared. Worry changed to fear and concern as everyone slowly realized that something had gone wrong, but they were not sure what.
A group of scientists who were familiar with the project crossed the city limits in a vehicle, and after a few minutes, that vehicle disappeared only to reappear stopped a minute later, but empty. As people marveled over the vehicle, the scientists appeared at the city limits, standing perfectly still, their faces expressionless. Behind them, other residents of the city appeared also still and expressionless, none of them offering any explanation for what had happened.
They finally went to Doctor Royker Velata, who had been involved with the phase shield at one point during its development before other matters called him away. He was the one to shed some light on what had gone wrong in Carburast for he had been present at the initial testing. Because the people were phase shifted into the future, when they move, they do not exist in the present moment. However, when they stand still, their form can be seen by those of us who exist slightly in their past as a sort of a shadow. The one thing he guessed that they never tested was activating and deactivating the shield from within the shield itself, although they should have known it would be problematic. Once in that phase-shifted form, a person cannot interact with his surroundings because he exists in a different time than they do. Therefore, once phased, it would be impossible to deactivate the phasing device. He suspected this was what happened to those inside the phase shield, and until it could be shut down, those within its boundaries would remain in their half existence, neither dead nor alive. They would experience the passage of time, but their bodies would never age nor change while in that state since they did not truly exist in the real world.
They knew from the beginning that no one could enter the town without phasing out, so sending anyone further into the town to try to deactivate the machine manually was out of the question. They could not bomb the city because the people were still alive and a bomb could still kill them. Officially, it was also said that they also could not cut the power since the machine was powered from within the building it was constructed. All they were left with was the prospect of waiting for the machine to fail eventually, and that was ten years ago.
Since then, the vice-leader of Pilkrand moved into the leadership position and ordered that Carburast be sealed off completely, placing the military base at its primary entry point. Since Doctor Velata had expressed no hope at fixing the problem externally, all efforts to rescue those inside had been abandoned, a fence constructed around its perimeter, and the closest town voluntarily evacuated to prevent any accidents. Carburast is safe from any invaders, as the creators of the shield promised, since anyone who dares to cross its borders disappear, so it remains in pristine condition.
Blake considered all of this for some time, wondering what to make of it, and more importantly, what they were going to do with it.
“So no one on the inside can fix the problem because you have to move in order to fix it,” Blake said, clarifying his thoughts out loud more than anything else.
“Yes,” Gerard said. “Everyone is there, but only visible when stationary. They can move around as far as we know, but no interaction. Some believed that they might have died over the years, but I knew they’d be fine. Just like Velata had said. It was just that no one had seen anyone in a long time.”
“And no one can enter to fix it because they disappear too,” Blake mused. “How long does that take?”
“Usually less than five minutes,” Gerard said. “Most people start to phase out as soon as they cross the boundary, which is invisible. They have just enough time to back out before they’re trapped.”
“And once you’re in, you’re stuck there,” Blake confirmed.
“No one has ever come out,” Gerard said. “That we’ve seen anyway.”
“We came out,” Perry said. “And we were in there a lot longer than five minutes.”
“Oh, I have a theory on that at least,” Blake said. “The inter-dimensional travel vortex the Maze sends us through probably gave us a bit more time than the locals because that sort of travel does mix you up a bit. Michelle phased first because she’s only traveled twice. Perry, you and I will go eventually, but it will just take longer.”
“Once,” Michelle said.
“Once what?” Blake asked.
“I’ve only traveled once,” Michelle said. “Just to here.”
“Twice,” Blake repeated. “You did crawl into the elevator to get to us. It was still a movement from one time to another. Our arrival in Carburast was just your first time traveling consciously, shall we say?” Blake turned to Gerard. “What has been done to try and shut it down?”
“Not much,” Gerard replied. “That’s why some of us who knew people in there think that the Pilkrand government engineered it so certain people were in there. They made a show of it in the first couple years sending a few people in only to disappear, but that only served to strengthen their resolve to do nothing.”
“And the power for the machine is inside the zone,” Blake said.
“But it isn’t,” Gerard said. Blake looked at him surprised.
“But you said,” Blake began, but Gerard interrupted him.
“I told you the official version, but in fact, there is a power station on the edge of town outside the phasing zone.” Gerard sounded excited at this point, and Blake knew he was building up to this for some reason. “The one thing that never made sense was that the shield would be able to maintain its power for so long without any interaction, so I figured it had to be receiving power from somewhere outside the zone.”
“There are forms of power that can run almost perpetually without any personal interaction,” Blake said, but Gerard ignored him.
“This power station is more heavily guarded than the town’s front door, but instead of a base, they have it covered in troops,” Gerard continued. “It only makes sense.”
“Why would they do that?” Michelle asked.
“Does that station deliver power to places other than Carburast?” Blake asked.
“All of the towns close enough to benefit from it have redundancies,” Gerard said. “We’ve checked. The primary place that station can be delivering power to is Carburast. If Carburast is stuck, why keep the power going? The only explanation I’ve been able to come up with is that it stays on so Halloway doesn’t lose his sweet position along with everyone else that benefited from the disaster.”
“So no one has tried to turn it off?” Blake asked.
“It’s too heavily guarded,” Gerard said. “No one can get in.”
“No, I mean no one who would have been in charge when the phase shield went off to begin with,” Blake clarified. “That Doctor Royker Velata, for example. Surely, turning off the power would have been the first thing your scientists would have tried.”
“You would have thought so, wouldn’t you?” Gerard said with a smile. Blake looked at Gerard doubtfully. Something did not add up.
“With all the research you’ve done, you’ve not managed to find a hole in their defenses?” Blake asked.
“We are not soldiers,” Gerard said.
“Could have fooled me,” Perry said. “What do you call what you’re doing he
re? Selling cookies?”
“What I mean to say is that from what little we’ve uncovered, we haven’t found anything,” Gerard said. “I’d be happy to show you to its location, though. Maybe you can find something.”
“We can certainly look, but I still have my doubts as to what this will do,” Blake said. “It isn’t that I doubt the power station might deliver power to somewhere in Carburast, but it seems unlikely that they would create a shield only to place its generator outside its protection. Doesn’t make sense.”
“No?” Gerard asked. “They knew that being inside the shield would not allow them to turn it off. They had to. If that were you, would you not then place the off switch in a location that someone could get to it and turn it off for you? Just in case something went wrong just like something went wrong. Doctor Velata wasn’t surprised by what happened, and it seems likely that those closest to the project would anticipate it. Why not place a failsafe outside the zone just in case?”
“So why didn’t they turn it off then?” Blake asked. “I mean ten years ago when it first happened?”
“I told you,” Gerard said. “Because they planned to leave it on. That war with Hetralu’s Allied Forces ended very soon after the accident, if you want to call it that, and Pilkrand’s vice-president was a known Hetralu sympathizer. It isn’t that we’ve had peace since then. We just haven’t been fighting the same war.”
Blake sat back and scratched his chin in thought as he looked at Gerard. The man’s excitement grew the more he talked, so he was clearly very interested in shutting down that shield. Blake doubted it was for purely humanitarian reasons, however.
“So what is your interest in all of this?” Blake asked. “Who are you and your little band of troublemakers? Who do you represent?”
“The people trapped on the inside,” Gerard said without hesitation. “We are their families. Everyone here has a brother, sister, mother, father, spouse, aunt, uncle, cousin, or someone inside that shield. We want our people back. And we’ll do whatever it takes to get them back.”
Blake could not argue with the man’s conviction, and perhaps having a look at this power station would get them closer to their goal here. It was even possible that this station held the answer they needed. He had little choice but to agree. After all, what was the worst that could happen? Nothing? Then the town, which was not going anywhere, would be where it was before they started. The only concern Blake had at this point was how long they had before they would be acclimated to the world and phase as quickly as everyone else.
* * * * * * *
Blake, Perry, and Michelle sat together in what would have been a break room or lounge in the abandoned municipal building they had been brought to a few hours earlier. Following their discussion with Gerard Keppler, he had allowed them a moment’s repose before they would have everything together that they needed to approach the power station. Blake was certain this would involve a large number of guns and nothing else, but these were decisions the people of this world would make without his input.
“We’re going to have to go back into that town, aren’t we?” Perry said.
“Probably,” Blake nodded. “I doubt this power station is the answer. Seems a bit too easy. I could be wrong, of course. Still, it might get us closer to our answer.”
“So this is what we do then?” Michelle asked. Blake looked at her, confused.
“What is what we do when?” he asked.
“We just go around to various places and fix stuff?” she confirmed.
“In a manner of speaking, I guess,” Blake said. “The Maze has records of most of time and space within it, and it generally knows where we’ve been, so it places us where we need to be.”
“Wait,” Michelle looked confused this time. “What?”
“As you know,” Blake said, “the Maze is capable of opening those elevator doors on any planet in the known universe at any point in time prior to its own present.”
“And when is its present?” Michelle asked.
“I don’t know,” Blake admitted.
“How can you not know?” Michelle asked. “I thought you were in charge.”
“As The Guide, I keep a running record of the actual missions,” Blake said unapologetically, “but since there are races out there who would desire the technology of the Maze for themselves, those of us who travel within it know neither its time nor place of origin. I know it is a long time into any of our futures, though. Thousands of years.”
“So this Maze is a machine that goes into its past and picks up random people to send somewhere in the universe to do something?” Michelle asked incredulously. “Why?”
“I know this will sound a bit weird,” Blake said. “but the reason is because it is what we are meant to do.”
“The Maze knows our futures?” Michelle asked.
“Well, it knows its own past, and we’re all a part of that,” Blake explained. “And since its past is in our future, the answer would be yes.”
“So if it knows what we’re going to do before we do it, why not just tell us what to do before we go?” Michelle asked, and it was a perfectly logical question. It was one he had wondered about before, but over time, he had figured out the reason.
“If it told us what to do before we left,” Blake said, “then how would it know what we need to know? Information has to have a source. The Maze may have information on this crisis and our parts in it, but it may not have the specifics on how we accomplished it. There are also times when the Maze does not know what we did, and so one of our missions is to find out what happened. When we arrive somewhere, it’s up to us to decide what we need to do.”
“But it knows we’ve already done it before we leave?” Michelle asked.
“It knows the outcome, yes,” Blake said.
“How is that possible?”
“Let’s say that I’m a time traveler who can control where I go. I meet you one day and ask about your day yesterday, and you tell me all about it. If I travel to the day before yesterday and meet you again, I already know what you will do tomorrow because to me, you already did it. You haven’t lived through tomorrow, so from your perspective, you haven’t made those choices yet, but they are still yours to make. From the Maze’s perspective, it has all of this in its history already, so it knew that we were here, even though from our perspective, we hadn’t arrived yet. It knows who was here, so it knows whom to send here. It also knows when and where to drop us and when and where to pick us up because it can detect the changes in the time stream that it created and matches those to the ones that it must create to respond. More simply put, it can read the space-time tunnel it created in the past, and it creates a corresponding one in its present to receive whatever comes through it.”
“Isn’t that changing history?” Michelle asked. Blake shook his head.
“You can’t change history, because history has already happened,” Blake continued. “Most people live their lives in a straight line, never deviating from it. A few of us will jump around on that timeline, but like the person who has already seen tomorrow, if you know where to look in historical texts across the universe, you’ll find yourself before you arrive because you’ve already been there even though you haven’t lived it yet.”
Michelle’s blank look said it all. A glance to Perry showed that he was not following either.
“Think back to my example of me visiting you tomorrow and then going back to yesterday knowing what happened. While there, I tell you to spend some time with your friend who is going to die the following day at 10am in an accident with a bus. Rather than focusing on your friend, you decide you’re going to change this event by interfering with that accident by going to that time and place to ensure your friend isn’t killed. You show up at the appointed time and place and find your friend crossing the street. You tell her to get out of the way, but instead of continuing her walk, she pauses to look at you. At that point, she is hit by the bus that killed her. According to history, I was
always going to know this fact before meeting you. I was always going to tell you, and you were always going to be the cause of her death. You can consider that if you had not showed up, she would not have died, but it was never going to happen that way. It was never going to happen any other way. That’s how time works. You have your free will to do whatever it is you want to do in your lifetime, but everyone living tomorrow knows what you already did. And once you arrive at a point in any history, you become a part of it. Every time.”
“If you let him talk long enough, he’ll tell you about Novikov and Blinovitch, stressing that one is reality and the other is fiction,” Perry said. “Point is that what we do is weird. Really, really weird. Somehow, we’ve already done everything we’re going to do, and to be honest, it’s easier to just keep moving forward and do it rather than try to make sense of it. If you want to go home, you figure out the reason we’re here and deal with it.”
“Simple as that,” Michelle said.
“Simple as that,” Blake agreed. “Once we arrive somewhere and when, we are part of that history. We can’t screw anything up, because we were always going to be here. All we can do is the best we can while we’re here, or just take every day as it comes regardless of where and when we are, like I do. Sometimes, it is best not to think about it too hard.”
Michelle looked toward the floor as she considered this, but then she spotted the logo on her shirt again. “How does this work?” She pointed to the logo on her shirt.
Blake looked at where she pointed and nodded. “Oh, right, we forgot about that.”
“She asked earlier about being separated, but I couldn’t say much because of the guards,” Perry explained.
“Good idea,” Blake nodded before he turned back to her. “This is how the Maze keeps track of what goes on with us out here. It does this is a variety of ways, but what is relevant to you for now is that it serves as a communication device between us. To protect us from local peoples, we keep its use to a minimum. It would take awhile to explain everything it does, but it’s largely a passive device to help us while we’re away from the Maze.”
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