A Long Time Until Now

by Michael Z. Williamson

  They all looked at him. Who was this guy?

  “I’m Major Carnody. I’m here to check up on your well being.”

  Elliott said, “It would be better if we weren’t guarded and being extensively interrogated. I know they need intel, but it is a bit of a drain.”

  Carnody nodded. “I imagine so, and I’m sorry that’s happening. I’m told you’re all in excellent health.”

  He was a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist. Daniel had him figured out. He was here to see if they were conspiring on a story, delusional, or otherwise.

  Elliott asked, “How much background do you have and what can we talk about, sir?”

  “I’ve been told you say you were displaced in time, distant past and far future, and came home from there. The discrepancy in return is due to targeting problems.”

  Elliott raised his eyebrows and said, “I don’t think we should discuss it without written approval from Colonel Findlay, sir.”

  “I have it here,” he said, opening a folder and carefully withdrawing a letter. “If you prefer to talk to him directly, I understand.”

  Elliott glanced at it. He nodded to Felix and the others.

  “Okay, sir. Go ahead.”

  “So how did you stay fit? Exercise program?”

  This was a group debriefing, to go with the individual ones. Felix wasn’t looking forward to his, since he knew exactly what they’d ask and how.

  Elliott said, “We did. We also had a very active lifestyle. Chopping wood, building a palisade and lodges, hunting and later fencing and wrestling animals. Trying to grow a few edible plants. You’ll need to ask Sergeant Caswell, but part of the problem is that there’s very little in the way of edible plants back then. Almost everything we eat has been domesticated for thousands of years.

  “Anyway, I’m rambling. We had PT as well. We were basically in the field for two years, at our own COB. We even called it COB Bedrock.”

  “The Flintstones,” Carnody said. He took an empty chair and turned it around backward, then sat under the light in the middle front of the tent.

  “That’s what it felt like. Sergeant Spencer had a forge going to produce iron.”

  The psychiatrist turned to Spencer.

  Spencer said, “Direct reduction furnace for smelting. Forge for working. Though you can sometimes use the heat above the furnace for some quick and dirty forging, if you don’t care about impurities.”

  “What did you use as an anvil? A truck bumper?”

  Spencer shook his head. “No, sir, not massive enough. Granite works. It makes some of the detailed shaping harder, but it’s doable. It worked for the Vikings.”

  “And you kept in top shape.” The man was offering leading statements to get them to talk. He acted very cool, but it was an act. He was gauging everyone. He met Felix’s eyes for a moment, and smoothly looked away.

  Elliott said, “Well, the Cogi, the future people, gave us all medical treatment, including replacing our fillings with regrown teeth.”

  “Really? Can I see?”

  Elliott stepped under the light and leaned back. Carnody looked in and raised his eyebrows.

  “Do you all have restored teeth?”

  “And metabolisms,” Alexander said. “I haven’t taken Synthroid in months, but my mental acuities are with me. Mostly.”

  “What other food was there?” Carnody asked.

  “Lots of meat and fish. Berries seasonally. Apples, remarkably like modern apples. Lots of roots that were eh.”

  Jenny Caswell said, “Variations of carrot, Queen Anne’s Lace, cumin, fennel, dill. All part of the parsley family. The roots are marginally edible if you get them young, before they go woody. The seeds and greens can be used in salads. Very tasty.”

  Dalton said, “Matter of opinion. They add a bit to meat, but they aren’t really salad. Edible, but I never thought them tasty, just garnish.”

  Carnody was amazingly cool. “So tell me about the locals.”

  Oglesby said, “I can talk about language and stuff. How familiar are you with linguistics?”

  The major tilted his head. “Moderately.”

  “Okay, well their language is tonal, with lots of fricatives and dentals. Grammar is indistinct, relying on context and gestures to differentiate subject and object . . .”

  The Urushu were a subject of discussion for a half hour. At the end of it, Carnody said, “Fascinating. Well, if you’re all feeling good for now, I’m satisfied. I’m sorry you’re being sequestered.”

  Felix said, “I hope they can believe us. We can’t tell them what they want to hear, especially as we don’t even know what that is.”

  Carnody said, “I’ll be sending contact information to your families, letting them know you’re all still alive.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir!”

  Felix started tearing up, even though he didn’t have a lot of close family. His mother and aunt would be told, though.

  CHAPTER 49

  General McClare wondered what the hell he was going to report. Ten troops had disappeared, presumably captured, since it was unrealistic for ten to defect or flee at once. Now they showed up with some fucked-up story about time travel and some weird gadget.

  Findlay seemed convinced, as did this OSI investigator. They seemed embarrassed at being convinced.

  “What do you think, Carnody?” he asked the man across the desk. The office was very nice for a putative war zone. The desk was real mahogany.

  Carnody said, “Sir, I think they believe what they’re saying.”

  “But you don’t think it’s true.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He looked at Special Agent DiNote. “So what do you think?”

  “As the major said, they seem to believe what they’re saying. More importantly, the stories are consistent with each other and amongst themselves. It’s easy to agree on major details. It’s impossible to agree on minor ones. But when asked about small details or local people, they all have roughly the same information. It’s as if I asked you about your neighbors’ kids. If you tell me the same thing the parents do, I have to assume you’ve met the kids.”

  “So they’re all remembering the same things?”

  “With enough differences it’s not a memorized story, yes.”

  “Does that mean it’s real?”

  Carnody shrugged. “Now we get into metaphysical questions of what real is. I don’t know. They share a commonality of memory of events, but they are individuals with specific interpretations. For example, Devereaux, the medic, young black man from Queens.”

  “Yes, I saw him.”

  “He started crying when he told me how glad he was to see black Marines in the unit that recovered them. Because there were no black people in the distant past or future. He said he felt even more alone.”

  Findlay said, “I can see that. I’d never have thought of it.”

  Carnody said, “Exactly. No one would, unless they experienced it. Now, they’d experience that in most of A-stan, too. However, he’d know he was going home in A-stan, or was at least in this world. It really felt as if he was speaking as someone who’d gone to a world with no black people. But you put together a couple of hours of comments like that, and these people really believe the experiences they talk about. They’re not lying, not faking and really do remember what they say.”

  “So there was an explosion, they were in the past, like that.”

  Findlay said, “So they say. We have no evidence of them driving away. They have some space age gadget that’s a prototype at best, and a very sophisticated one. They have a story that does fit facts.”

  It was like something out of a blockbuster movie. “I don’t want to believe it.”

  “They said they didn’t, either. Took them days to come to terms with it, even while realizing there was no choice.”

  “So I ask again, are they telling the truth?” And how the fuck were they going to explain this if it was true?

  Carnody said, “Th
ey are not lying. There’s no indication of desertion, collaboration, anti-American sentiment, anything. They didn’t want to be where they were, they’re glad to be back, and they’re honest. I can tell you that. What actually happened will have to be asked of scientists. But there’s medical stuff, too.”

  “Yes?”

  “Spencer. He has a filling with four metal pins in it. Had. He now has a perfect tooth with four pins under the enamel, in the same location. He said they got medical treatment that healed their teeth. It apparently displaced the fillings, but not the pins. Here.”

  Carnody pulled out two X–rays. That was definitely the same tooth, but with less shadow. The filling was gone, the pins were there. The filling in front of it was also gone. That tooth was whole.

  “They all have perfect teeth, but their other teeth match records. Their DNA matches. We don’t know of anyone who can regrow enamel yet. So it was done somehow.”

  “Definitely not plastic or ceramic crowns?”

  “Nope, they’re real teeth.”

  McClare put his face in his hands and rubbed his forehead.

  “We need some kind of cover for the media. We can’t say ‘time travel.’ We’ll get accused of every conspiracy and war crime the internet has, and a few more.”

  DiNote, the investigator said, “Say little.”

  “That’s my position. Captured, escaped, still have critical information we need, NDA.”

  “Which is effectively true, if we accept their stories.”

  “The truth is the best way to lie. Do we believe them?”

  DiNote said, “You keep asking that, sir. They believe it. You tell me there were no signs of disappearance, and the impact area didn’t match anything we’ve seen before. Here they are. Their story does match, and they’re consistent, and they have that artifact that we’ve never seen before. If it’s some foreign prototype, whose? And why would they have it?”

  “Yeah, that’s hard to fake.”

  “Very convincing, yes.”

  “I showed their pictures to people who deployed with them. They IDed them. Their personal stories in their ISOPREP files match.”

  McClare said, “If I accept this story, the next thing is we have to start working on threat analyses against time travelers. Terminators? People wanting to fix things preemptively?”

  Carnody said, “I’m so glad that’s not my field.”

  “It’s ridiculous. But it appears to be true.”

  Findlay nodded. “It does.”

  “I’ve led men in combat, been in some of the worst hellholes in the world . . . this scares the fuck out of me.”

  Findlay said, “I’d be worried if it didn’t, sir. And yes, I’m scared, too. Terrified. It’s impossible, except I can’t find any holes in what I see.”

  “We’ll talk to them in person tomorrow. Or I will.”

  Gina woke early. She wasn’t sleeping as long as she had, but it seemed to be very productive sleep. That felt so good.

  After breakfast, Carnody was in the briefing room with Findlay, DiNote, and a general McClare. He was barrel-chested, shaven-headed, with gray eyebrows and big hands.

  McClare said, “Seats at ease. I’ve heard a bugfuck insane story, but I’ve been shown enough bits to make me think it might be real. Major Carnody says you appear to believe the stories you tell. So convince me.”

  Elliott asked, “Do you have our flexitool?”

  “This thing?” He held up the blob.

  “Yes. It’s good for about twenty more changes before it shuts down. They did that on purpose, but here. Shovel,” he took it and twisted it and it morphed. “Axe. Prybar.” It shifted into some other unobvious tool. “I have no idea what that is.”

  Gina chuckled, with some others.

  Devereaux said, “All our teeth are fixed without fillings. You can compare to dental records. We have regrown enamel.”

  McClare said, “We did. There’s no modern explanation for that.”

  Gina said, “Sir, can I borrow that projector?”

  “Go ahead.”

  She plugged her laptop in, fussed with it, and then inserted a memory stick.

  The images came up on the wall. She flipped through them.

  “This is a herd of woolly rhinos, now extinct. This is a wandering herd of mammoths. We think they were displaced. This . . . is a lion. This is the camp we built. This is a native camp. Look at their tent art. Here’s some Romans working on a charcoal burn.”

  She changed files.

  “In case you think I somehow photoshopped in the field, here’s video.”

  She rolled one. The strange sounds and movement were mesmerizing.

  McClare asked, “What the hell was that?”

  “Two Urushu women throat singing. I shot it in IR. Here’s another.”

  This video was the Neolith village, with a pan of people moving around the huts and racks.

  “What have you got from the future?” Carnody asked.

  “Nothing. They didn’t allow it.”

  “But they let you keep these files?”

  “I didn’t tell them about these files.” She smiled slightly.

  McClare said, “This is some truly fucked-up shit, but I’m forced to believe it. I have no fucking idea how you’d fake the video, the teeth, and that . . . thing.”

  He nodded, and Carnody grabbed a sealed electronics pouch.

  McClare looked stern as he said, “Your phones are here. You can have five minutes to check in with your families. Then we need to talk some more. You can tell them you’re alive and well. Don’t mention any goddamned time travel. Stay in public.” He indicated the room they were in.

  Gina was closest, at the projector. She snagged hers before the stampede arrived.

  She turned it on, menued and clicked. Then she waited, stared at it, waited, as the crappy Afghan cell net responded.

  Was he there? It rang once, twice—

  “Hello?”

  Blake sounded tired, sad, listless, but that voice sent a rush through her.

  “Love, it’s me. It’s Gina. I’m alive.”

  “God, it’s good to hear you,” he said, and she could hear the tears and twenty years of warmth. “They said you’d been recovered.”

  “I’m completely fine. We’re debriefing. It’s so good to hear you. I wish I could be home right now.”

  “Debriefing?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. Weeks maybe.”

  “Fuck, I hate the Army.” He didn’t. He’d done six years. But she knew what he meant.

  “It really must take that long. I’m sorry. Lots happened and I can’t talk about it yet.”

  “As long as you’re alive and well.”

  “I really am.” She started crying. “I’m very, very well. And so much better hearing you.” And the kids in the background. Her kids were still there, and still kids.

  He said, “The kids are here, jumping at me.”

  “Yes, put them on.”

  “Mom!” His voice was a lot deeper.

  “Dylan, is that you?”

  “Yes. You’re not shot?”

  “No, I was not shot, or blown up. We were lost, we’re back here now, and we’re all fine. We’ve got to take care of things here, but I’ll be home soon. Can you put your sister on?”

  “Here, Mom!” Aislinn sounded perfectly fine.

  “Hey, Sweetie!”

  “I’m glad you’re safe.”

  “So am I. I’m sorry you were so worried.”

  “We always knew you were alive, Mom. You’re too mean to die.”

  “I love you too, Sweetie. Put Dad back on. I can’t talk long.”

  “Here.”

  “I need to go. I have no idea when I can call again. I can’t talk about much.”

  “I understand. It can wait until you’re here.”

  “And then it can wait while we get reacquainted.”

  “I love you.”

&
nbsp; “I love you. I have to go.”

  There was an entire room full of teary-eyed people around her.

  Even if they were believed, they were still sequestered. They each spoke to an entire squad of intel, generating whole books of data.

  Rich Dalton felt a range of emotions. It was aggravating as fuck to be held like a prisoner, meals brought in boxes, no e-mails or other contact home. It was amusing to watch the head-scratching as the Army tried to figure out which box this problem fit into. It was unpleasant to discuss details of years of separation, anger, loneliness. It was boring in between to sit in the tent.

  They did PT every morning, talked all day, ate, watched TV at night. TV didn’t interest him anymore, and it wasn’t just AFN. They had new movies, which were good. Though X-Men was far less attention-grabbing now.

  The chaplain stopped by daily, and held service for them on Sunday. Even Spencer sat in the back and participated. Was it possible he’d ever accept Christ? He was a good man, a good friend, and Rich’s discussions with him had been very educational.

  Monday morning it was back to debriefing, in a room that looked like a box, somewhere in a building. He was taken in by a circuitous route and the van had no windows in back.

  “So you hunted fairly regularly?” His interrogator appeared to be a civilian, but might be military in civilian clothes. He was identified as Mr. Ahrends. He was about forty, with shaggy hair. He wondered how many people had been confided in this secret, how reliable they were, and when the story was going to leak.

  He’d been through this with two others. It was getting annoying.

  “Yes. Every day to once a week, depending on the game. Goats were easy, and well within the capabilities of an M Four. Larger animals were tastier but harder to shoot. The bows we made did the job fine. We got sick of goat pretty quickly.”

  “But do you have numbers? How many of each?”

  “Heck, I don’t know. Hundreds of goats, if you include the ones we started penning and raising. Dozens of aurochs, that’s the wild predecessor to the cow. Some antelope and deer and elklike things. A few pigs. Why?”

  Ahrends said, “We’ll have to have a tally for the EPA and the Department of the Interior.”

  That was bizarre. “Wait, you’re telling me that the Department of the Interior, in the U.S. twenty-first century, wants to know how many goats I shot in a chunk of desolate wasteland that predates Afghanistan by several thousand years, for . . . what, exactly?”