Nexus of Time

by Mark Riverstone

  Dr. Black is no longer a person of life and ponders, of ideals and ideas. She is now only possibilities and solutions. She could punch a hole in the universe the size of the one in her soul, or breed a monster if it stopped the Greys. Her dark broken heart no longer differentiates right from wrong. It only sees solutions. She knows the sophisticated biological sciences trump the technological inorganic sciences. It is biology, organic beings, that create technology, use it, and destroy it.

  Burt returns with a case and a metallic cylinder. "If you follow me into the bio lab, I'll show what we got."

  In the back of the specimen room is a smaller unlit dark lab behind a windowed wall and a heavy security door with a bio hazard symbol on it. As they walk into the room, an automatic sensor turns on the lights and equipment. Burt sets the case on a long narrow surgical table and opens it. He then gets a pair of heavy protective gloves, puts them on, reaches into the case, and lifts out a square of metal with Grey species palms and wrists coming out the top. Fingers stick out the bottom.

  "Don't touch this. We keep it stored at -150 degrees Celsius."

  He sets the specimen sample on the table.

  "How am I supposed to analyze it?"

  "This is for you to see. In here," Burt unscrews the cylinder and pulls out a long thin clear vial, "is a core sample I took from a wrist through to the base of the metal plate, or palm. You can use the Transmission Electron Microscope right there, but keep the sample in this vial. It prevents contamination and decomposition, if it decomposes. I never tested the mixed composition part for that, but the upper section of the sample containing a hundred percent flesh will decompose. You can touch this tube. I keep it in cold refrigeration. It is safe to handle."

  Burt hands her the vile, then picks up the frozen wrist metal sample with the gloves. "You can see this tiny extraction hole here at the top of the wrist cross section is from the core sample."

  "All the way though?"

  "Correct." Burt flips the metal plate over to the finger side, "The base of the core sample is right around here...I can't seem to see it. It was there, I took the sample myself."

  "Don't worry, I'll check this out."

  Burt puts the wrist section back in the case and closes it. Dr. Black puts the cylindrical vial in place under the electron microscope then types on the computer keyboard. On the many monitors, live magnified images appear.

  For a half an hour, Burt watches Dr. Black scan the sample and store digital images with a big smile on his face. She glances at Burt and sees he is smiling. She turns back to the microscope and asks him, "What's with the smile, Burt?"

  "Sorry, it's just so nice to watch you working. It's not often other scientists visit. And even less often a female, not that that matters...and over a decade since anyone worked on this sample. Re-exploring this item with you instead of doing paperwork is invigorating."

  Dr. Black smirks, "You males are all alike. A girl flashes a little science, and a man turns into a giggling boy."

  They both laugh. Dr. Black brings up images she took with the microscope onto the different computer monitors. They are extreme close ups on the edges of the core sample at different points.

  Studying the images, she asks, "Burt, what is going on here with the sample?"

  "Each one of those images is at a different location along the core, correct?"

  "Correct," concurs Dr. Black.

  "The last ones here are of the sample where it combines with the metal. I can tell by the color shading, and if you zoom in, you will see a mix of organic cells that has metal throughout it."

  Dr. Black points and clarifies, "I can do that but I'm referring to the edging. If you look closely at the flesh section, you can see the extraction's lacerated edge. Typical definitive edge. But here in this section where the flesh and metal combine, the sample has moved right up against the transparent tube material, losing any edging, acting as a liquid. It adjusted to the space, pressing up against the tube wall perfectly, removing the minutest gap that exists elsewhere."

  She types into the computer again and zooms in on the sample where she sees the change.

  "Can this TEM zoom in to the molecular level?"

  "Yes. To the atomic level if needed. We examine organics and materials that may be interstellar or unknown to man, so it is necessary to possess the tools capable of seeing items at their lowest level. Let me..."

  Burt types in commands and makes adjustments. The image zooms in to the molecules at the section.

  "I performed numerous observations of this sample at the cellular level but not the molecular," explains Burt.

  "Why not?"

  "At the cellular level you could see how the metal meshed with the cells, and that the cells were still living and maintaining structure post transformation. The organic cells were functioning with the inorganic as if present but not problematic. I kept waiting for the cells to collapse, and the material to become a mix of organic and inorganic material without a specific structure, but it never happened. The cells continued to maintain their structure while holding the metal's structure that ran through it. Then I set it aside, getting sidetracked with the Zeus Box, which was a more significant scientific and practical discovery."

  "Zeus Box?"

  "I'll tell you all about it later. It was a perpetual motion energy amplifier made of a supersolid encasing a supersolid surrounded by a superfluid which exists at normal temperatures."

  "I possess little knowledge on superfluids, but if I am correct, doesn't a superfluid only exist at absolute zero Kelvin?"

  "This one didn't. That made it special and science altering. Needless to say, the Zeus Box became more of a research priority than this sample here."

  After pulling up a molecular view of the core sample on the screen, Dr. Black and Burt scrutinize it.

  "Am I seeing what I think?" says Burt.

  "I see it, too. Exact proportions and distribution of organic and inorganic molecules, one to one, but see how they align in the same direction? Explains the seamless melding of flesh with the metal panel. It might also explain..." She stops talking.

  "What?" asks Burt.

  "Burt, is there a structural scanner or even an old school x-ray in here we can use on this frozen hand sample?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  "I want to get an internal view of the hand where the core sample was removed."

  "Sure, it'll be a minute."

  Burt removes the sample and puts it into a machine case, closing it. He turns the device on. Lines of white, green and blue lights scan up and down the hand in the case. On the display screen, a translucent 3D rendering of the image appears showing the unseen internal structures of the hand: the bones, skin epidermal layer, and circulatory systems. A thin circular gap is visible inside the wrist, showing the core sample extraction hole, but the extraction hole ends where metal and flesh combine.

  Burt rubs his brow, "I don't understand. You see in the core sample it includes that section."

  "It's what I was expecting to see. Why you couldn't find the hole in the bottom where the core was. Those molecules are aligned and unified, so once you removed the core sample, the molecules in the palm pulled together as if the hole was never there."

  "But I kept the sample at -150 Celsius. The flesh should be solid."

  "If it was typical flesh. But these molecules are inline and working as one molecule, even though the molecules are different types. Similar to a super material, except these are not atoms of the same element nor molecules of the same type. Maybe fusing materials together with that dimensional phasing you were telling me about allows the Greys to create super materials at normal temperatures, like that box you mentioned."

  "The Zeus Box."

  "Yes. Can I try a test? But I need to remove the sample from this micro vial, damaging the sample."

  "Before we do that, we should present to Walter what we found, make him aware of what you want to do, so he can give us approval to continue," says Burt in a scholarly tone.


  "Well, can we ask him now?"

  "Let me put the wrist back into the case before I go to ask him."

  Burt opens the scanning case, and with the gloves on removes the hand sample and returns it to its storage case. After latching the case closed, he takes off the gloves.

  "Wait here. I'll talk to Walter."

  "That'd be great. I'll keep looking over these images until you get back."

  Burt leaves. Dr. Black inspects the image of the molecules arranged inline.

  The History Of The Present

  Chapter 2

  Grey Valley Bunker conference room, Remote California.

  Mr. Nix, a tall white-haired bony-faced man in his sixties, sits at one end of a large round table next to Walter, a short bald man in his late eighties with cherub cheeks. The table is circled by a dozen wheeled chairs. Toward the middle of the table are three monitors embedded in the surface in a triangle formation. Two white boards and a chalkboard are behind them filled with drawings and math equations.

  Mr. Nix rubs his head while replaying a video on the monitors embedded in the table. It's a zoomed-in satellite recording of an explosion that causes a huge crescent-shaped Grey spacecraft to appear, the cloaking shield failing. Then, sections of the ship transition from visible to transparent until the ship goes critical, causing a massive explosion. The large ship disappears in the burst. At the same moment, the cloaks of four smaller ships flanking the larger ship fail, causing them to appear with fluctuating cloaking shields.

  Mr. Nix stops the recording, "There is no report of any wreckage from the larger ship. The four smaller ships we recovered in the past, including the one once stored in this bunker. The Committee has been searching the last twelve hours, but nothing. With the size of that explosion, there is no possibility the ship re-cloaked and got away. Even if it underwent complete fragmentation, we should have found a piece."

  "Set playback at one frame a second," requests Walter.

  "Are you thinking it traversed time like the other four?"

  "Maybe."

  "If that happened, why wasn't it found like other four ships we recovered in the past?"

  "Well, let me verify before I speculate," expresses Walter in a stale tone.

  Mr. Nix runs the recording again. As they watch the recording frame by frame, it appears the explosion overwhelms the ship.

  "Play those last few frames, one frame every five seconds," interrupts Walter.

  As they play the recording frame by frame, Walter notices the frame where the explosion peaks, the ship is no longer there.

  Walter points, "See, right there. If the ship fractured or pulverized, we should see expansion at the explosion, or contraction if it imploded at the apex. Instead, it disappears. I believe the ship dropped into a rift like the others. It disappears before the explosion peaked, which means the crux of the ship was intact when it slipped out of our spacetime dimension."

  "Where did it go? Into the future instead of the past?"

  "There are other possibilities. Traveling to a distant point in the universe differs from traveling to the same point in space in a different time, though they share one similar necessity: folding a dimension. One requires folding space, the other requires folding time. When the smaller ships were recovered in the past, time folded. It is possible the larger ship folded space, not time, or both. If that larger ship reentered our dimension on the other side of the universe with a hole in the hull, life on the ship died."

  "Wait, I understand wormholes folding space, but not folding time. When we've discussed the Philadelphia experiment destroyer or the possibility of Roswell from the future, you mentioned it crossing dimensions but not folding time."

  "We never went into details, and for good reason. I worked on different theories for the last three decades of how the ships could traverse time. Until yesterday, we didn't know this was an absolute fact. All I had to work with before was old forties footage and a theory. Now, we have satellite footage of four Grey terrestrial crafts disappearing, including the one which the Committee and the Army Air Force recovered from Roswell in the past and stored here. This video also shows multiple ships had electromagnetic cloaks active and malfunctioning. Because of this, I can say for certain the unification of gravity and electromagnetism is the key to folding space and time.

  "Einstein, Schrodinger and others speculated that gravity and electromagnetism unifying may in fact be the next dimension allowing four-dimensional objects to exist in the fifth dimension. That unification causing tesseract objects to exist. Separate, gravity and electromagnetism affect matter within time and space. Unified, they affect time and space, so powerful it folds time and space."

  Mr. Nix rubs his face and ponders, "Walter, I consider myself smart, but how does gravity and electromagnetism become a dimension? A dimension is quantifiable and measurable, right? I'm three dimensional in a three-dimensional world, time is relative, and gravity is a force, isn't it?"

  Walter chuckles, "Most people take a Newtonian view of time and gravity. People think of time as a unit of measure. We talk about time as past, present or future. Hours of the day are our measurements for time. However, time is not a measurement. Time is a dimension. What we call time is a measure of that dimension."

  "How is time a dimension?"

  "Let me lay it out. One dimension is a point. But a point is not the first dimension. Two dimensions is width and height with no depth, but that is not the second dimension. The true first dimension is time. Nothing but time. Time is the only dimension that can move with nothing else. Time existed before anything else in the universe, or in any dimensions. Nothing could come into existence without time. Because for something to exist, it must first not exist, a before and after, time. The universe could not become our universe, become multiverses, multiple dimensions, without time. Reactions, evolution, creation, destruction, are all dependent on time. Without time, a dimension is static, as is, always was, always will be, never changing, and unaffected by the laws of science and nature. No reactions, no evolution, because there is no dimension upon which change can occur. Time is the only dimension that exists in every dimension, in every universe. Even mathematical equations are time based; an equation operation implies time, for nothing is multiplied or subtracted without time to occur. Now I'm not saying that time is linear in all dimensions. It could be circular, folded, omni-directional, or in a structure I cannot perceive, but it is there.

  "So, the second dimension is one-dimensional objects and time. The third dimension is two-dimensional objects and time. You said you are a three-dimensional object in a three-dimensional world. But we do not exist in the third dimension, we exist in the fourth dimension. A dimensional object must exist in a dimension with at least one more dimension than that object so motion can occur. We exist in the fourth dimension as a three-dimensional object plus the dimension of time."

  "I'm with you so far," says Mr. Nix, concentrating on Walter's words.

  "Good. Once motion exists, change can occur. Affected by forces like gravity. Time allows you to move your arm, digest your food, or the universe to explode and expand. A before and an after. Nothing is faster than time. Even if something moves instantly from point A to point B, there is still a moment it is at point A, then a moment it is at point B."

  "If you can't go faster than time, how can you go backwards in time?"

  "Time is a dimension. Going backwards in time is not going faster than time, it is going negative units of time. When traveling time, there is still a moment you are in the present, then in the past, you are just moving negative units instead of positive. What you need to think is that time is being folded, so going back in time is not traveling backwards a hundred years, it is skipping from the present to the past because a hundred years ago is folded to connect with the present. The same ways scientists speculate that folding space is how a ship can travel light years away in seconds."

  "In a wormhole."

  "Sort of. I believe a lot of
conceptions on wormholes, or Einstein-Rosen Bridges, are mistaken. You cannot fold space in our dimension to the point of connecting two different locations, you can only contour or warp space in the fourth dimension. A two-dimensional object cannot be folded to move to the other end of a 2D object faster. Once you fold a two-dimensional object, it becomes a three-dimensional object. Therefore, folding space in our dimension requires a fourth dimension only available in fifth-dimensional space."

  "Are you saying wormholes go into fifth-dimensional space?"

  "Yes, or they create a pocket of fifth-dimensional space. An Einstein-Rosen Bridge crosses through another dimension and exits back into ours."

  "How do you open a portal to another dimension?"

  "You are not opening a portal. You need to create the additional dimension at a location, causing a rift to occur. Einstein thought gravity and electromagnetism unifying is the additional dimension needed to create four-dimensional objects and fifth-dimensional space. The Grey's cloaking device uses an electromagnetic field. At the peak moment of the malfunction on this recording, the electromagnetic field and Earth's gravity unified, creating a temporary fifth-dimensional rift. Since time and space are both folded in the fifth dimension, they can be traversed. The Roswell craft lacked the ability to traverse fifth-dimensional space, so it did not move any distance, but the ship was in the rift for a period, so it traversed time in that dimension. Not linear time, but folded time. That explains why Tomas Seventeen's craft reappeared in Roswell 1947, but the other three appeared in different years up to 1968, each being in the rift a different length of time."

  Mr. Nix expresses skepticism, "Wait, you said the crafts lacked the ability to move across folded space in the fifth dimension, but a minute ago you said is it possible that the larger ship crossed folded space and ended up across the universe?"

  "I believe the small ships lack the ability to move in fifth-dimensional space, however, the large ship was going through a nuclear explosion at the time it entered the rift. If the ship's explosion continued or completed while in the fifth dimension, that could supply the force necessary to propel the ship across folded space. The smaller crafts use hydrogen combustion for propulsion, which isn't ample force to move in fifth-dimensional space. It is also possible the larger ship went into the distant future, or so far back in time it was unrecoverable. All we can say for sure is we can't locate it or its remains."