She turned to the creature, which was now lowering itself to the ground. Four legs appeared from its belly, and within a breath’s time it was standing among the rocks. A ring of tiny red lights around the blood-smeared orb flashed on and off a few times as it stared back at Skyra.
“You did not stay hidden by the river, Ripple,” Skyra said, using the creature’s own language. “I told you to stay there.”
Ripple continued staring at her for a few more throbs of its circle of red lights. “Perhaps we will learn another new word today,” it said. “The word is gratitude. You would be showing gratitude if you were to say, ‘Thank you for saving my life, Ripple.’”
Skyra stepped over to Ripple and kneeled. She wiped some of the bolup blood off its orb, which became dim upon her touch. She then ran her finger along a damaged corner at the top of Ripple’s shell. “You have hurt yourself! You should have stayed by the river.”
After a moment of silence, the creature said, “You are welcome.”
Skyra picked up a handful of dirt and rubbed it onto the blood covering the angular ridges to one side of Ripple’s orb. “Veenah is still with the bolups—the humans. She will soon die. She will die because I have failed.”
“You may have failed this time, but you can try again. Veenah is important, as you are, and we will come up with another plan to save her from the humans.” Ripple shifted slightly, turning toward the hill. “Skyra, you must now set aside your concerns for your birthmate. Your life is in immediate peril.”
Skyra rose to her feet. The bolup men had apparently recovered from their fear. They were coming back down the hill. One of them raised his khul and shouted fiercely.
Ripple rose from the ground, pulling its legs up into its belly. “You must flee, Skyra.”
2
Lincoln
47,659 years later - Northwest of Tucson, Arizona, USA
Lincoln Woodhouse glanced over his shoulder at his pursuers as he ran up the rugged slope of Heartache Hill. There were now at least six of them—white arctic wolves—and they were closer than the last time he’d looked back. He could hear their panting breaths and occasional growls. He poured on the speed, making it to the hilltop in less than two minutes, a damned decent pace. Regardless, the wolves were now almost nipping at his heels.
Lincoln gained more of a lead on his way down the slope, but he decided he just wasn’t feeling it. Arctic wolves seemed out of place in the Arizona desert. He stopped and put a finger to the frame of his sunglasses. The wolves caught up, snarling and tearing at the flesh of his legs. He ignored them and pressed the mode button on his glasses. The wolves vanished. Fifty meters back up the slope, three staggering, tattered people appeared. Strips of rotting skin hung loosely from their bodies, exposing blackened meat and jagged bone. The three stopped staggering and began picking up speed, running straight for Lincoln.
Lincoln grunted and pressed the mode button again. The zombies vanished. A split second later, an adult allosaurus came lumbering down the slope. The creature was at least eight meters long and stood three meters tall, but it was picking up speed at a downright frightening rate, and Lincoln could hear its thick feet pounding the sand through the earbuds attached to his glasses. A prickly thrill spread over his skin, accelerating his heart rate.
“That’s the one,” he muttered, and he began running again.
Lincoln threaded his way through six more kilometers of towering saguaro cactuses and red-tipped ocotillo shrubs. The dinosaur was behind him every time he looked back, sometimes at a safe distance, other times so close that he was forced to pick up his pace. This last iteration was it—the sunglasses were ready for prime time. Runners and cyclists were going to love them, and the glasses would earn him a buttload of money.
Lincoln had every intention of running a second twelve-kilometer loop. The desert was relatively cool this morning, and yesterday he’d been too busy with final programming tweaks to squeeze in a run. As he rounded the last bend of the dry stream bed of Scrub Creek, however, he saw Maddy standing beside the trail in front of the main lab of his research campus. Maddy rarely set foot outside the lab, so this peculiar sight brought Lincoln to an abrupt stop.
“What’s going on, Maddy?”
The drone’s ring of red lights blinked rapidly, an expression of consternation. A calm female voice came from the two speakers on either side of the twelve-centimeter, illuminated camera lens. “If you would take your phone with you when you run, Lincoln, you would already know what’s going on. Then I would not have had to come out to this unsanitary, sand-ridden environment to intercept you.”
Lincoln heard fast-approaching footsteps and a low growl. He turned just as the allosaurus caught up to him. The creature lunged forward to take his head in its jaws. He instinctively threw his arms up and ducked away but then quickly regained composure and pressed the power button on his sunglasses.
Maddy said, “Are you having a seizure, Lincoln? Do you need assistance?”
“Very funny. You want to tell me why you’re interrupting my one opportunity of the day to find some peace of mind?”
“You have visitors, and your visitors have made it clear that they are not patient men. Their general demeanor suggested that you, Lincoln, may be in some hot water.”
Lincoln glanced at the two vehicles parked by the lab’s front door, a van and an SUV, both of them shiny and black. “Oh, great. Are they old?”
“By your standards, quite old. I told them that you did not trust any human being who is older than forty, but that did not seem to pacify them.”
Lincoln shot Maddy a look. “You did not.”
The drone gazed back at him for a few seconds. “No, I did not.”
Lincoln used his shirt to wipe sweat from his face. “Alright, let’s see what kind of hot water I’m in now.” He headed to the lab. Maddy followed him, her mechanical legs skittering in the gravel. As they passed the van and SUV, Lincoln saw that both vehicles were turned on, and a driver was waiting patiently behind the wheel of each.
Lincoln and Maddy passed through the lobby and entered the Congeniality Room, a meeting space where Lincoln often addressed visiting scientists and dignitaries, albeit reluctantly. Four men, all of them sporting gray hair, stood beside the long table made from Madagascan ebony. They were talking to Jazzlyn and Virgil, two of Lincoln’s most valued science techs. Lincoln recognized three of the men from the endless series of hearings he’d been forced to attend. They were bigwigs in the needlessly-complex government science policy structure. Their presence here couldn’t possibly be a good thing. He strode to within a few meters of them and stopped. Maddy stopped beside him.
When Lincoln didn’t speak, Jazzlyn raised her brows at him and mouthed the words, “Say something!”
He didn’t.
“Mr. Woodhouse, you may remember me. Robert Chandler, Director, National Science Foundation. I’m pretty sure you’ve met Drs. Bud Reed and Daniel Gibbons, both of them on the National Science Board.” Chandler then motioned toward the fourth man. “And this is Stephen Fuchs, Deputy National Security Advisor and regular attendee of the White House National Security Council.”
Lincoln still remained silent. No, this couldn’t possibly be good.
Chandler said, “We’d shake your hand, Lincoln, but we’ve heard you have some kind of phobia regarding contact.”
Lincoln broke his silence. “It’s not so much a phobia as it is distrust.”
The men exchanged glances.
Chandler shrugged. “Well, fortunately we’re not here to exchange pleasantries. We have something quite important to discuss with you.” The man glanced down at a tablet in his hand.
Lincoln stepped back and held up both hands, sensing that Chandler was about to hand him the tablet. He’d always had the ability to detect what people were about to do or say—a skill that at times had made his life miserable but at other times had given him the edge he needed. “I’d rather you share that screen to my projector, if you don’t m
ind.”
Chandler shot him a puzzled frown. “I didn’t offer to show you anything yet.”
Lincoln stepped over to the projector’s control panel and pressed the power button. A virtual screen appeared and hovered several centimeters in front of the room’s white wall. “You were about to. Just connect to the network called Bugger Off.”
Again the men exchanged glances.
“Do you find yourself to be funny, Mr. Woodhouse?” asked Fuchs, the national security guy.
“It really is the network’s name,” Lincoln said. “My staff and I thought it was funny, but we’re—you know—young.” He nodded at Chandler’s tablet. “There’s no password.”
Chandler sighed and tapped his tablet a few times. An image of a rocky, hilly landscape filled the virtual screen. “Mr. Woodhouse, does this scene look familiar to you at all?”
Lincoln studied the image. There were no man-made structures, only rugged hills. “Can’t say I’ve been there.”
“This is the site of the Pomer paleontological site in Spain. It’s a very recent dig. In a matter of only a few days, a rather striking discovery was made. Do you have any idea what discovery that might be?”
Lincoln’s wariness went into overdrive, but so did his curiosity. “How would I know? Maybe you could dispense with the cryptic questions and get to the point?”
Chandler tapped his tablet again, switching to a photo of a hillside of jumbled boulders. To one side was a dig site, surrounded by a temporary orange mesh fence. “The skeletal remains that were found here are 47,659 years old. Does that number mean anything to you?”
“It means you’re lying.”
Jazzlyn spoke up. “What Lincoln’s trying to say is that the number is far too precise. There’s no way to date fossils with that degree of precision.” Jazzlyn was Lincoln’s head paleontologist. She was also better at diplomacy than Lincoln.
“Let’s say we’re pretty sure of the date,” Chandler said. “Does the number mean anything to you?”
Lincoln considered this. “First, I’ve never sent a drone back 47,659 years. Second, what difference would it make if I had? It would have no effect whatsoever on this world. You know that.”
Again with the damn exchange of glances.
Chandler tapped the tablet, displaying an image of a fossilized human skull as well as what appeared to be most of the other bones, including vertebrae, arms, legs, and pelvis. From what Lincoln could see, the only bones missing were the feet and lower legs below the knees. The disjointed skeleton was arranged neatly on a white lab table, probably to facilitate 3D imaging. “Homo neanderthalensis. Female. Remarkably well preserved, although a few bones of the right shoulder were broken, and for some reason the lower legs and feet haven’t been found.”
Lincoln waited, but the four men were simply watching him. Finally, he couldn’t resist. “She’s quite attractive. Was she your girlfriend?”
Chandler actually cracked a smile, but only for a split second. “Here’s the thing, Woodhouse. You came up with the Temporal Bridge Theorem. Using an impressive chain of reasoning, you successfully convinced almost every physicist in the world that your theorem is beyond refute.”
“It is beyond refute.”
“Is it? Would you like to know what was discovered alongside this Neanderthal specimen?”
“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.” Actually, at this point Lincoln was starting to doubt his ability to predict anything Chandler was going to say. He had no idea where this conversation was going.
The NSF Director tapped his tablet again.
Lincoln stared at the image. “If this is a joke, it’s not funny.”
“That comment does not warrant a response,” Chandler said.
A wave of nausea passed through Lincoln’s gut, forcing him to swallow several times to get it under control. He was staring at a drone. Not just any drone—one of his drones. The device was stained and darkened with age, but it was recognizable. “That’s… not possible,” he stammered.
“Yet, there it is. The drone was actually on top of the Neanderthal’s remains, with its mechanical limbs positioned on either side of her body. Considering the astounding preservation of the skeletal arrangement, we have no reason to assume the close proximity of the machine is due to postmortem disturbances.”
Lincoln barely heard Chandler’s words over the pounding of his own heart. “It’s just not possible.”
“It seems your Temporal Bridge Theorem is now obsolete, and the implications of that are immeasurable,” said one of the other men, although Lincoln didn’t bother to tear his eyes from the image to see which one.
He made an effort to step back emotionally and look at the entire drone in a more analytical way. Yes, it was recognizable. It was definitely a drone, and it was similar to his drones, including Maddy, but it wasn’t exactly the same. There were subtle differences—slight deviations in the angles of the shell and structure of the limbs, for example. Finally, he turned to the men. “What makes you think this is my drone?”
Chandler sighed and pointed at Maddy. “One of your drones is standing right there. Hell, that might be the same one that hosted Saturday Night Live last year. Everyone on this planet knows what your drones look like, Lincoln. There are slight differences, but there can be no doubt this is one of your drones. It’s probably the design you’ll make a year from now, or maybe ten years from now.”
Chandler was right, of course. The design was too similar to even consider that the drone wasn’t one of his. At the very least it was constructed based upon his design. This was all beside the point. The real point was, the drone’s existence in this universe was impossible. Jumping back or forward in time created an alternate time-line—a parallel universe. His theorem had proven this, and no mathematician or physicist had succeeded in disproving it. He had sent fourteen drones back in time, and there was no possible way one of those drones could exist on this version of Earth. Everyone knew that. In fact, it was the reason he’d been granted permission to do it in the first place. His program had been a great success so far—data the drones had transmitted back had already multiplied humanity’s understanding of biological and meteorological conditions of the past.
Bud Reed spoke up. “Now that we know your theorem is flawed, we’re quite fortunate that your drones have not drastically and tragically impacted the present. It’s not an exaggeration to state that we’re lucky the human species even exists at all.”
Lincoln let out an exasperated breath between his teeth. “That’s absurd. If my theorem is flawed and this really is one of my drones, then the current state of the world and of the human species is actually because of the fourteen connections I’ve made to the past. If my theorem is flawed, then you exist and are talking to me right now because of my drones. You’re welcome!”
Reed started to say something, but Chandler cut him off. “Let’s dispense with the confrontational fuss, shall we?” He turned to Lincoln. “Clearly, the implications are staggering. We’re trying to understand it, just as you are.”
Lincoln’s thoughts were already running wild. There were aspects of this discovery that defied all logic. “How?” he asked. “How in the hell could this have been discovered at this specific time? The drone could have been found long before I was even born, or a hundred years from now. Or never. The coincidence is….” He couldn’t even come up with a suitable word.
Another round of exchanged glances, this time followed by nods.
Chandler said, “It’s not as much of a coincidence as you might think. Six weeks ago, scientists in Spain were alerted to a strange radio signal being broadcast from a point near the small village of Pomer, in the Zaragoza Province. Fortunately, they were able to pinpoint the source just before the signal faded away. Obviously curious, they initiated an excavation. Only two unusual things were found, the Neanderthal specimen and the drone.”
Lincoln rubbed his temples. He felt like his head was going to explode. He wasn’t terribly surpr
ised that the drone could have preserved a small portion of its reserve power for 47,000 years. After all, he had challenged himself to design his drones so that they would not corrode or disintegrate over vast periods of time. Still, he couldn’t get over the timing. The drone had to have maintained the functioning of its internal clock, and for some reason it had chosen this specific year to expend the last of its power to draw attention to itself. Why now? And how in the hell could it even exist on this world to begin with?
The men were watching him, perhaps giving him time to absorb the news.
“There’s more,” Chandler said. “Not surprisingly, we weren’t able to procure the actual fossils or the drone itself, but we were given high-def 3D models of each of the Neanderthal’s bones, as well as a model of the entire dig site with the specimen and drone in situ.” He tapped his tablet a few times and held it out for Lincoln to take. “I’d like you to examine the Neanderthal’s right femur. You can manipulate it on the screen.”
Instead of taking the tablet, Lincoln stepped to the virtual screen at the wall. Before him was a leg bone the color of breakfast blend coffee. It looked to be pretty much the same size and shape as a human femur, although slightly thicker. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. “You want to tell me what I’m looking for?”
“Turn the bone over,” Chandler said.
Lincoln inserted two fingers into the screen and turned the femur. He saw it almost immediately—some kind of etchings in the bone’s surface. “Are those tooth marks?”
“Look more closely.”
He spread his fingers apart, enlarging the bone. The scratches weren’t tooth marks at all. One of them looked like an upside down letter E. He rotated the femur 180 degrees and zoomed in even more. Next to the letter E was a letter N. Several other marks followed, but they were difficult to make out.
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