Empty Planet

by Lynette Sloane

  As was my habit, I’d slept naked so was now feeling really cold. I climbed back on the part of my mattress unaffected the time transition, pulled my duvet around me and frantically searched for my survival pack. I found my boxers and put them on—that was a start—but the rest of my things were missing, probably buried in the rubble somewhere.

  I made a mental note that I should move to a ground floor flat in case this ever happened again.

  Suddenly the thought struck me: how was I going to get back to my flat? All that remained of it was a gaping hole and crumbling walls, and if I ventured out of the building I would eventually find myself back in natural time wandering around in my underwear.

  While I was still considering this unusual problem I felt the familiar ache in the back of my neck signalling my return to natural time. I leaned back, rubbing my neck with my hand and looked up through the hole into the cloudless sky. Creepers had grown through the upstairs window spaces and across the walls. I watched the bird take off from its ledge and fly across the space, then suddenly my view became blocked by a white, wallpapered ceiling. My vision blurred; this was the beginning of a temporal migraine. The flat around me had returned to what must have been its original state, and my bed and duvet were once again upstairs in my flat.

  I realised I was back in natural time sitting on a bed next to a young woman. I’d seen her in the corridor outside the flat a couple of times, but I don’t think we’d ever spoken. I remembered someone saying her name was Steph, or something similar. She was probably in her mid-twenties, and was wearing a cropped T-shirt and panties. The weight of my body suddenly appearing on the bed next to her woke her up. She opened her eyes and gasped when she saw me.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I pleaded, “Please don’t scream. I was drunk and don’t know how I got here. I think my mates played a trick on me.”

  “Get out. I’m ringing the police,” she yelled.

  I leapt off the bed and ran to the door, tripping over the pile of clothing.

  “The door’s locked,” I said, frantically trying to open it, not knowing if my panic was greater than my embarrassment.

  Steph grabbed a sheet to cover herself and called out, “The key’s in the dish on the side table.” I grabbed the key, opened the door, apologised again and left.

  I was so glad she didn’t ring the police. She knew I lived in the same building as her, and the next time we met said something cheesy like, “Oh hello, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on,” then laughed and walked away.

  __________

  My most memorable university jump took place in the early June of my second year. My friends and I were laughing as we made our way through the university corridors. They were bragging about the girls they’d got off with and were fed up of me telling them I would never be unfaithful to Anna. Without warning the laughter stopped as everyone disappeared.

  “Oh terrific, not again,” I said, sarcastically. Living through several hours of future jumping, and then returning to around the same point in natural time, added hours to the day, and I was already tired. I’d been up all night with my mates and didn’t have the energy for an adventure right now.

  I looked around at the dilapidated Wills Memorial Building, interested to see and derelict state of the lecture theatre I had been heading too before the jump intervened. The walls had collapsed and most of the roof lay on the ground in pieces, hidden in the undergrowth that had pushed up through the flooring. Visible though a large gap in the wall, I could see the remains of the Gothic style Wills Tower covered with creeping ivy.

  I was glad it wasn’t raining, and that I hadn’t jumped into a snow blizzard as Emily, one of my online Jumper friends, had reported doing a few weeks before.

  She had been sunbathing on Brighton beach, in a ninety-degree heat wave, when she suddenly jumped into a blizzard wearing only a bikini and nearly froze to death. Fortunately the jump lasted less than ten minutes, but it was long enough for her to suffer frostbite and have to be admitted to hospital. The doctors were baffled and could offer no explanation.

  I looked around the derelict building. The inevitable ivy had invaded the building through large gaps in the walls, and, except for a small area where I was standing, the tiled flooring had completely disappeared under topsoil, mosses and tall weeds.

  The state of the building reminded me of the time I’d visited Tintern Abbey near Chepstow. Although a small boy, I had marvelled at the twelfth century remains of that magnificent testament to English architecture, and I immediately started exploring the derelict university with the same boyish enthusiasm.

  I picked my way down the abandoned corridor and looked around the ruins. Although I knew most the university building quite well, at times it was hard to work out whereabouts I was. After a while I reached a part of the building I didn’t recognise at all and stepped inside a small room. Again, there was no roof and weeds and stinging nettles covered the floor. I heard the crunch of broken tiles underfoot, and I looked up to see, rusty pipes protruding out of the wall in front of me. So that’s where the tiles came from, I thought.

  The dull ache in the back of my neck gave me a few seconds notice of my imminent return to the natural time frame. Suddenly the room around me became very steamy and within seconds I was soaked to the skin. I became aware of several girls in close proximity to myself: naked screaming girls.

  “Sorry ladies,” I said, realising I was in the girls shower room. “I’m afraid I got a little lost.” I ran out of the door trying not to laugh and sprinted back to the corridor where I’d last seen my friends. I found them looking confused.

  Toby, my friend from Wales, was the first to speak, “Where’d you disappear to and why are you dripping wet?”

  “I nipped into the girl’s shower room to have a shower,” I replied.

  “In your clothes?” a couple of the others remarked.

  By the next morning news of the shower incident had spread throughout the university. Some of the girls were saying a peeping Tom had somehow managed to get in the showers with them, while others were saying it was a student on a dare.

  Chapter 9

  The following summer, having recently passed my driving test, I drove up to Walton to visit Nan for a few days whilst awaiting my final examination results. If I’d passed my Bachelor of Law, I’d soon be able to add LLB after my name. Anna was away on a weeks training course in prosthetics, so the timing was perfect.

  Nan was very pleased to see me driving my own car. It was a fifteen-year-old banger but at least it ran well and gave me the freedom to travel wherever I wanted to go.

  When I first started Law School my parents bought me a laptop to help with my studies. I soon found it an essential tool for keeping in regular contact with Anna, Carla and the other leadership members, and so always took it with me when I travelled. Anna and I had grown very close, and when we couldn’t be together we spoke face-to-face over the Internet every day.

  Every few weeks she travelled to Bristol on the train so we could spend the whole weekend together. I dreaded any future without her and valued these stolen weekends. I reasoned that some people never find love so I shouldn’t throw any happiness away, no matter how fleeting.

  I stayed the night at Nan’s and drove up the road to Gemma’s bungalow the following morning. We’d arranged to visit to the Elan Valley Dams.

  Gemma hadn’t changed a lot in the couple of years since I’d last seen her, although her hair was a little shorter and her body more toned. We drove through Rhayader, stopped off to buy sandwiches and coffee at the Visitor Centre at the bottom of the first dam, then drove up to the Careg-Ddu Dam and ate our picnic sitting on a rough stonewall.

  After our snack we walked along the road crossing the top of the sunken dam, all the while eagerly chatting about the various jumps we’d been on since we last met.

  Soon we spotted a little church built into in the hillside. Constructed from local stone, it was a typical of churches built around th
e time of the 1906 Welsh Revival; there were hundreds of them to be found dotted around the Welsh countryside and borderlands. So many people had come to faith in God at that time that the prisons were nearly empty and the police had very little to do.

  The door was unlocked so we ventured inside and had a look around. It was much cooler in the little church and it smelt of old books. Rows of pews extended from the front of the church to the vestry at the back, running parallel to the wooden alter and ancient pipe organ. I walked up the centre aisle. Sunlight streamed through old stained glass windows featuring long dead saints and made corresponding patterns on the tiled floor. I climbed the stone steps up into the pulpit pretending to preach, “Thus sayeth the Lord …” but Gemma was already bored.

  “Lets go up to the next dam. Dare you to walk out on top of it,” she said with a mischievous look in her eye. Why not? I thought. Gemma was still the same cheeky young madam I’d met ten years earlier when she called to me from inside the hollow tree.

  We ran back to the car and drove down the road, parking next to the Pen-y-Garreg Dam. Then, not needing to lock the car doors because the spot was so remote, we climbed over the fence ignoring the warning sign telling us to keep away. Our next obstacle was a heavy metal guard with protruding steel spikes that had been set in concrete next to the dam to prevent anyone climbing onto it. I carefully climbed around the spikes then held Gemma’s half empty polystyrene coffee cup so she could join me.

  “Why don’t you throw this away?” I asked, as she carefully negotiated her way around the obstruction. “It’s cold.”

  “I like it cold,” she replied, now standing safely on my side of the barrier. She took the cup from me and drank a mouthful of the foul coffee.

  The top of this dam was much narrower than one we had driven over before lunch, but it was wide enough to walk over, although there were no safety barriers.

  I remembered coming here with Mum and Charlie when I was a child, although we didn’t climb on any of the dams. Mum would never have allowed that; she wasn’t one to break rules and allow her children to get into danger. That autumn it had rained for weeks and weeks with little respite, consequently the reservoir behind the dam had been so full that water had cascaded over the whole width of the dam, including the spot where we were now standing. It would have been impossible for anyone to walk across it that day. This year, because of the recent dry spell, there was only a small amount of water flowing over the middle section of the dam, so in theory it was possible to walk out to the tower in the centre.

  We carefully edged out across the dam, disregarding a portly man with a bushy beard who shouted after us from the roadside informing us we were risk-taking idiots. The scene was breathtaking; to our left the water gently lapped against the strong stone dam wall, sparkling as it caught the sun. The dam had to be over three hundred metres across. I had studied the area in Geography lessons at school and remembered the reservoir behind this dam was an impressive three miles long.

  The lower slopes of the surrounding hills were covered with woodland, whilst the exposed hilltops were sparsely dotted with a few trees and home to the hundreds of sheep spread over miles and miles of hillside.

  To our right the view was even more striking. The side of the dam fell away abruptly to the valley floor some sixty metres below us. A slip of my foot could have been fatal. I tried not to imagine myself, or Gemma falling down and smashing on the rocks below. On either side of the dam were escape channels where overflow water was channelled when the reservoir became too full.

  Gemma asked, “Want to hear some useless information?”

  “What else is new?” I teased.

  Choosing to ignore my friendly jibe, she put on a more serious expression and said, “This reservoir contains six thousand and fifty-five mega-litres of water. Do you know how many litres that is?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Well, a mega-litre is one million litres.”

  We carefully edged further along the top of the dam. Gemma was still holding her polystyrene coffee cup and chose this moment to empty the remaining contents into the reservoir.

  She said, “This is the water supply for a huge area. The water goes to homes as far away as Birmingham,” then, considering the absurdity of her next statement she laughed, adding, “they can have my coffee too.”

  By now we were nearing the tower in the centre of the dam. This was when I first noticed water escaping further down the dam wall. That definitely doesn’t seem right I thought, glancing behind me to where Gemma was standing, her face pale with fear.

  “The road’s gone; it’s happening again,” she cried, her voice trembling. We were on a temporal jump and I couldn’t think of a worse place to be standing at that moment. I didn’t know how far into the future we had travelled, but I felt a strong vibration beneath my feet. The dam was unstable, very unstable. Water gushed through a fracture in the far side of the dam wall with incredible force, enlarging the fracture and sending huge chunks of concrete crashing down from the wall.

  “Go back the way we came,” I shouted over the deafening sound. We quickly and very carefully tried to make our way back to safety, but the dam was weakening by the second. Four metres in front of us our makeshift path was crumbling. Water burst through a new opening taking with it more concrete. Large stones and trees were being swept from the sides of the dam as the escaping water thundered down into the valley below. A huge torrent of water escaped in front of us taking with it our only path to safety. I knew our situation was hopeless, and death only seconds away.

  I grabbed hold of Gemma, and as I held her tight a shimmering light appeared directly in front of me hovering in mid air over the side of the dam. A hole materialised in the centre of the light, small at first, then, within a moment, growing to the size and shape of a large front door. A man’s arm reached out from the hole and grasped hold of my arm, the bright light around him preventing me from seeing him clearly. I heard him shout something, but his words were lost in the deafening noise.

  I knew I only had a terra-second to choose between death and the unknown, aware that whatever choice I made I would be making for Gemma too. Her life was literally in my hands. I chose the unknown. Still holding Gemma I stepped forward pushing both of us over the edge of the dam into what a few seconds ago would have been thin air. Gemma’s face was turned away from the opening so she hadn’t seen it. I felt the vibration of her scream against my chest, and prayed we would live.

  Instead of falling to our deaths, we landed on the solid, tiled floor of a large, sterile room, Gemma stumbling and landing on her backside with me sprawled on top of her. As I looked back through the sparkling doorway the image of the dam faded, and I saw the reservoir emptying, taking with it trees, topsoil, and anything standing in its path. The picture disappeared, a contrastingly quiet room now surrounding us.

  Gemma and I were speechless; I helped her to her feet and checked she wasn’t hurt. She held on to me very tightly, still terrified and barely able to open her eyes to look around.

  As the fear and shock subsided I realised our rescuer was my father!

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” he said, gently leading us past a desk covered in computer touch screen interfaces. “I’ll try to explain.” Gemma held on to my hand as if her life depended on it. “You’ve been taken out of a temporal jump.”

  I’d guessed that much. My mind was racing with so many questions, but I couldn’t string the words together to express myself. I swore, and in such extreme circumstances Dad excused my bad language.

  “How did? … What the? … Where are we? What’s happening and how did you know about this?” Not only was I still in shock from facing certain death, but there was the added surprise of being pulled through the sparkling doorway by my father.

  Could he have played a part in all the temporal excursions? Was he watching over me during my formative years when I felt so very alone and fearful? My mind raced with a thousand thoughts. I felt relie
ved and angry at the same time. It would have been so much easier if I’d have known about this and had had him to confide in. Surely he could have trusted me to know of his possible involvement.

  “Have you rescued us from temporal jumping in general or just this one? And are you a part of this and why is this happening?” I demanded.

  Dad calmed us down and led us into a small side room, giving us time to recover from the shock.

  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to a sofa and sitting on a chair opposite us. Gemma and I sat down.

  She spoke, directing her words to my father, “Thank you for saving us back there. Where are we, and when? Are we back in natural time?”

  “I can’t give you our exact location, but yes, you are back in natural time,” he answered her, then addressing us both continued, “I work for a government department known as Section, and have done for many years. Steve, I’m sorry I wasn’t around when you were very small; I was trapped in a temporal jump. I can’t tell you about it yet as any information I give might alter the timeline, but one day everything will be clear to you.

  “I met your friend Carla on a previous jump and she invited me to join your Leadership Team.” This was too much to take in.

  “Give me a minute Dad?” I said, my mind reeling. I took a few deep breaths then said, “Ok, tell us more.”

  “Section have been accessing your website and are aware that you and the other Jumpers suspect they’ve been genetically modified. This much is correct; Jumpers are resistant to all harmful viruses and germs naturally found on the earth, they have exceptionally high intelligence quotients and they’ve been adapted to withstand the effects of temporal stress, meaning that they can jump through time and return alive. They also have no appendix. This was all my work.”