by Dave Weaver
Jack felt a spasm of annoyance. “You don’t seem to know very much, do you? Your Chrono kidnapped me, nearly got me killed then dumped me here and you haven’t got a clue how or why it did it.”
“That’s a little ungrateful of you, considering the train.”
“I guess I got lucky there, but the rest I could have done without.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“But what happened to the Jumper who had the portal originally, I mean did you manage to get them back as well or…?”
The mask of good humour slipped and a shadow crossed the man’s face. Before he could reply, the invisible door opened again and two men in identical black suits entered. Both were roughly the same age; one slender with a beard, shoulder length fair hair and an expression of amused surprise. In contrast his companion was a squat red-faced man with a fuzz of grey hair around his bullet-like head. His features seemed to be naturally arranged in a scowl.
The first one threw a rolled up bunch of yellow material to Jack’s new friend. “He’d better put this on before we go any further; can’t have him scaring the staff.”
Jack put on a yellow version of a similar suit to the others including the little gold ‘T’ logo. It felt very light and cool.
His host was talking to him. “I’d like you to meet my two companions and fellow Directors, Doctors Atticus Flavius and Dario Constantine. We’ve got something we’d like to show you.”
“So what’s your name?” Jack asked.
“I’m Doctor Lucas Stewart. Let’s go shall we?” He slid off the anti-grav chair which remained hanging in the air, and went over to join his friends. The dangerous-looking Dario character suddenly flung a couple of objects at Jack who reacted quickly enough to catch one as the other sailed over his head.
“You’d better put those on first; things can get a bit slippery out there.”
“Thanks, kind of you.” Jack replied. The other shrugged.
“If you’re ready then?” Lucas Stewart urged with a hint of impatience as he struggled into the slip-on shoes. There was tension in the air between the three men. Why, when he’d returned their precious portal safe and sound? Jack sensed something else was going on that involved both him and matters far larger. Would they tell him what was going on or did he have to win their trust first?
He hurried to catch up as they left the glowing room.
Jack found them waiting in a wide corridor. Something odd was moving that shouldn’t have been. Looking down he found it was the floor or rather a section of it, like an airport walkway only this was an unbroken river of liquid metal.
“Nanobotic Streaming,” Lucas explained, noticing Jack’s confusion. “I’d thought they were developing it even in your time, but seeing your face…” He motioned for Jack to step on after them and they sped on though various rooms and interconnecting halls. Translucent walls, lit with phosphorescent liquids, threw soft hues over groups of people dressed in the same nondescript white suits grouped around desks. On each was set a small bright green box with glowing holographic figures hanging in the air above it.
It reminded Jack of a sales call centre. As they glided through the rooms, glass partitions slid apart to allow entry. He noticed columns of frosted white glass in each area giving an oddly classical feel. Still gazing around, he failed to notice the other three stepping off into a large conference room. Lucas grabbed his arm as he went past.
In the centre of the oval room a long white table held what looked like a child’s picture-book.
The three men motioned for him to join them. The hippy-ish Atticus slid the book across to him. “Have a look, we’d appreciate your honest reaction.”
“What is it?”
“A child’s history book.”
Holographic images of men and women moved through posed historical scenes: victorious generals, daring explorers, scientists and politicians, all caught at the moment of their triumphs. Despite obvious added technicalities it still looked the sort of basic history text book that might be available in a future junior school’s library. He didn’t recognise any of the supposedly famous figures though. Jack read the title out loud without realising he did so:
‘The Junior Historical Encyclopaedia of Briton – Events and Discoveries 400BC – 2142AD’
Perplexed, he looked up to find three faces staring intently at him as if expecting a reaction. He looked down at the book again as the pages obligingly faded in and out of vision.
The legend ‘Roots of the Empire’ hung over rural farms and coarsely-clothed peasants performing simple agricultural activities. It warped into ‘Rome Conquers the World!’ with scenes of vast armies battling on dusty plains, and crowds cheering as they marched triumphantly through the ancient capital. Caesars celebrated victorious battles with games in arenas far larger than the one Jack had been forced to attend. It showed heroic statues and the great marbled palaces of Rome and the other cities of the ancient Empire.
Entranced, Jack watched the various characters leap up to perform their vignettes of historical progress. The first section was full of the ancient names he knew so well, but these were quickly replaced by others he didn’t. Peoples he’d never heard of in places he never knew existed conquered new worlds, formed new civilisations, mastered navigation, medicine and human anatomy, discovered gravity and penicillin, founded new religions, fought wars, built cars and planes, televisions, computers, satellites and rocket ships. Although different countries were named, it was made clear these all came under the protection/ownership of Rome. They were all, to greater or lesser extent, citizens of the Empire.
There was no other alternative throughout the world. Everyone today was Roman.
And that meant that everything in Jack’s own orderly universe had somehow changed.
Chapter 9
He felt three pairs of eyes on him as he stared down at the surface of the table. The book had frozen its holographic display on the last page; ‘The Future’. Out of the corner of his eye he saw it close as the tiny figures disappeared. He looked up into the watching faces.
Lucas was the first to speak. “Do you understand now, Jack?”
“No!”
Dario Constantine sighed impatiently. “This is going to take ages!”
“I don’t think so,” Lucas replied calmly. “Our young friend will soon get the hang of things if we’re patient with him. Perhaps our method of explanation was a little too blunt.” Dario rolled his eyes. “The thing is,” Lucas continued, ignoring him, “that I left out one rather important detail in our earlier conversation. You see Jack, when you first used the time portal…”
“Our time portal!” Dario interrupted.
“Yes, anyway when you jumped the first time you travelled briefly backward in time then forward again as the programme crashed. You appeared visually in 49AD but didn’t physically materialise. The temporal link closed and you were snapped back to the moment you left your own time. Nothing else was changed because nothing happened to cause it to.”
“I was three hours late back.” Jack said in a peevish voice.
He couldn’t see the point of all these riddles and he didn’t understand the point of the book. History didn’t just change because three guys in jump suits had a weird book saying it did! They’d got the facts all wrong! Perhaps there had been a war or something and all the records had been destroyed. They’d had to start again from scratch and guess what had gone before. The funny thing was that the book seemed to be accurate right up to the time of the Romans. A small tingle of doubt began to form in his brain. He felt a leaden sensation in the pit of his stomach.
“It doesn’t matter!” Dario replied in an exasperated voice. “What does very much is this. That kid’s book we gave you is a simple yet accurate account of the most important things that have happened in the history of this planet; wars, discoveries, inventions, the rise and fall of Emperors and Empresses; things that virtually every child has known for the last two thousand years, at least up to their
own time period. Even the ones in the depths of the jungle or stuck on an island in the middle of the Ocean Maximus know about them. Yet you, a boy of what, Fifteen?”
“Sixteen!”
“Whatever. A young lad anyway with a decent IQ and a memory like a sponge; you take one look at that book and react like you’ve…” he searched around in frustration for a phrase, “…crash landed on another world!”
“What language did you speak in Fulchestorium, Jack?” Lucas was taking over from his exasperated colleague.
“Ancient Latin, you told me yourself. You said the portal translated everything into English.”
“I said translated into the language of the Jumper’s own time. I never mentioned the word ‘English’.”
“OK, French, or German, or Japanese…” He stopped and looked around at their faces. Instinctively he knew they’d never heard these words before in their lives.
“And what language do you think you’re speaking now?” Lucas asked.
“English of course, I’m speaking English!”
“Look at the shapes my mouth makes when I speak, Jack. Then listen to yourself.”
“I don’t know what you…”
He stopped and listened to his own voice. He was still speaking Latin! It was modern and colloquial, not formal and stiff like when he’d answered Drucillus or the Centurion, but it was still Latin. Then he realised he’d been speaking it since first opening his eyes on that ridiculous bed.
“How…what?”
“You’ll find that there’s a small scar on the back of your neck.” Lucas continued, as Jack felt hurriedly, “We’ve given you a translation implant that does the same job so you can communicate with us. Otherwise it’s going to be a very long day for both of us.”
“But this is England, isn’t it?’ Jack asked plaintively, “things can’t have changed that much in a hundred and thirty-two years!”
“Can’t they? None of us have ever heard of ‘England’, Jack. This is Romano Briton.”
Ignoring Jack’s stunned expression, he continued. “We downloaded your memory into Chrono while your wound was healing. We do the same when all our Jumpers return; it gives us an instant visual record. In your case we had to go a lot further of course, starting with the most recent images and peeling back the layers until we knew everything about you; your name, your family, your friends and school, your whole life in fact. We also found out everything you’ve remembered about the history of the world, and we were…amazed. Because your past is not our past, Jack.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” He stared across the marble table into the faces of the scientists. Were these guys really telling him the truth? He could just about accept that he’d travelled into the past, even that he was now in the future. But a different future with a completely different past to his own, one where Rome had not crumbled like every other empire since the world began? Where it had swollen until the entire planet was subjugated?
“If what you say is really true,” Jack continued, breaking the silence in the softly glowing room, “then explain exactly what’s happened to me. And this time I want the whole truth.”
Lucas took a deep breath. “Right…”
However before he could continue, the previously silent Atticus Flavius spoke up.
“Let me have a go, Lucas. Jack, I don’t know how far the science of physics has progressed in your world so please bear with me.” The mild voice had a soporific quality. With his long hair and general air of detachment, Atticus wouldn’t have been out of place at a late sixties rock festival. “Okay, you probably know already that we can technically travel forward in time if we move at incredible speeds, as near the speed of light as possible. Travel fast and time moves more slowly; time is bent in the same way other dimensions can be. Concertina-fold a flat piece of paper so that it’s a shorter length than the original size and pass a needle through the middle. That’s a model of a phenomenon we call ‘space-time’: speed plus energy decreases mass and warps time. That’s what Perugia’s Theorem of Relativity taught us many years ago, what every kid in Physics class has learnt ever since.”
“Who…? Don’t you mean Einstein?” Jack interrupted.
“No I don’t and that’s the problem.” Atticus replied with an affable smile. “‘Einstein’ eh? Sounds like a clever fellow. So, that’s time travel into the future. The past is a totally different matter of course. Perugia declared it to be impossible, and for many years that became the accepted fact until the discovery of universal black holes. That’s a phenomenon I know you already understand, from the scan of your memory. You have a grasp of physics, at least the physics of your own world and time.”
“I know about black holes,” Jack agreed, “but I wouldn’t say I understood them.”
“Well, in the WCTS we’ve managed to recreate a black hole, or at least replicate the dynamics of one.” Atticus saw Jack’s frown of incomprehension. “Sorry, that’s where you are right now, who we are in fact; the World Centre for Temporal Studies or the WCTS. You’re inside our main complex, about thirty miles north of Londinium and ten west of Verulamium.”
Jack did a quick geographical calculation; that put him somewhere in south Bedfordshire.
“Anyway, back to the black holes. In their normal state, if such a thing could ever be normal, they would be charge neutral and have a non-rotating point singularity. We, however, (he indicated his two colleagues) decided it might just be possible for a black hole to rotate, so that it re-orientates itself in a ring formation. This modified black hole would then be able to balance the immense gravitational force with the rotational inertia of the singularity. Plus, it wouldn’t need negative mass to stabilise it. Since the middle of the hole would be empty, the fabric of space-time there could be warped so that a Jumper could, in theory, pass through it to another point in space-time. Well, after countless dead ends and false dawns we did it. We managed to create a functional warping of space-time, a worm-hole into the past. We created Chrono to calculate and safely navigate the journey for us. And we created a linking device for our Jumpers to bring them back at the end of their research, or as in your case if anything went wrong; the time-coin portal that saved your life. Any questions?”
“About a million but none that I could put into words.” Jack told him.
“When our researchers time-travel into the past we make sure nothing is affected by their visit. The ‘cloaking’ signal that Chrono sends through the portal renders their presence unknown to the people of that era. That ensures they can’t accidentally break the golden rule of the Centre; ‘never interfere with the past’.”
“However,” Atticus continued, “your case was very different. It was a freak situation that you were Jumped at all. Because you came crashing in from outside the original projection on the second one you were uncloaked. That meant you were visible and had a physical presence. You interacted with the past.”
Jack gave Atticus a puzzled look.
“He means you did things,” Dario grunted impatiently, “talked to people, ate and drank. You were a fully functioning human being for a few days in a time and place that had already once existed without you.
“So?” Jack asked.
“Don’t be thick, you could have done something to change it.”
Of course, that’s what all this was all about! Not just some friendly lesson of explanation. It wasn’t even a debriefing. In the nicest possible way this was an interrogation. And the charge was that he’d blundered into the past and changed history, changed the future.
“I didn’t do anything!” he blurted out. “And even if I did in some tiny way, what harm would it do?”
“We can’t possibly know that, Jack.” Lucas replied. “But we do know in theory what might happen. If for example you decided that you hated your grandfather.”
“My grandfather’s dead and I never hated him; why would I do that?”
“But say, for arguments sake, he wasn’t and you did. You’re given t
he opportunity to time-travel back to when he was a boy your own age. You get into a fight and kill him. In theory, the moment he dies you cease to exist. You’ve just killed the man responsible for the birth of your father and ultimately you. But you must still exist or how else how could you go back and do the dirty deed? This is what we call a paradox, an impossible equation. We used to believe time travel to be impossible for this reason. Now we know we live not in a universe, a single-planed existence, but in a multiverse. If you really are not just from the past, but a different past, it might be possible you’re the key to that world’s creation. Or, I suppose, to ours.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Not necessarily. We believe the moment past events are radically altered by an intervention from the future a violent sub-atomic reaction occurs tearing the fabric of time. As the universe naturally repairs itself, a new membrane of time is formed. Now there are two, each sharing the same past but with divergent futures thanks to the intervention.”
“And you lot think I might have changed the past in some way to create this new membrane?” Jack sounded incredulous.
“In your world Rome ruled for less than a millennia then crumbled to dust as other empires took over. You come from a country that had an empire of your own. It conquered new lands and fought a number of massive wars, the last of which nearly destroyed it. Yet here these events never took place. Briton has always been a client kingdom of Rome as have the other countries on this planet.”
“Enough of the damn history lesson!” Dario broke in, twitching with impatience. “We’ve seen your memories of what happened in Fulchestorium when you used the AJP Fight or Flight app to save that girl from the lion. That programme’s prime directive is to protect the life of the Jumper not protect the indigenous inhabitants. It was an extremely stupid thing to do!”