However, we were amazed by what we could now do. Travel in time. Our universe probably has 99% of its secrets still safe from us but now we had revealed such a primary secret that it brought us that little bit closer to the gods themselves. If the universe has a soul it must have quivered a little that day in 2139 when the secret of how intimately connected humans were to everything else. And only a few mystically-minded humans up to that day had ever even suspected it.
Well anyway, tomorrow’s the day. And I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. This spy is as prepared as he’ll ever be and as prepared as anyone will be until we manage the kind of tricks we’re planning for a few years from now. But more of that later. Right now I’d better get some sleep . . .
~
Teleportation is now relatively easy to do but not easy to comprehend. You see we conceive our physical selves to be located and so they are located. The trick involved in time travel is to reject that previous conception and to conceive another. This alone will not do the trick however. Through CERN-V we learned intimate details about the building blocks of our universe and how there is a primary element which underpins and links all else. This primary element is you and me and our conceptions. I did say this was difficult to understand and it is. Words cannot convey the meaning at these levels. Ineffability rules in these realms.
However, the machine aids man in disposing of all previous fixed conceptions of location in time and in space by providing another theater of reality which checkmates the present one. That it happens to be a future reality is irrelevant to the machine but wholly relevant to those of us who want to be there.
I’m sorry but that’s as close as I’m going to get to describing the indescribable. Forgive me? Please? I have truly done my best!
Now it’s time for me to go. Or, more accurately I should say, it’s now for me to change nows to another time.
~
The Teleport Centre in CERN-V is much as you’d expect it to be. Enormous and a little scary. But, we try to keep the atmosphere a little light with banter and so forth. There’s black humor too. Oh yes, there’s certainly lots of that.
But when it comes to the Porting itself it’s all business and I’m now almost ready for the ‘Change’. First off comes the trance state which allows me to be shifted from here and now to a willingness to be there and then. Once achieved at this point the latest circuits of the machine kick in to adjust the space and time of where I am to an alternate space and time. No one and nothing moves you understand because all of it (everything) in truth, is right here in the one place. The one place we call now.
~
I see a street and fight off the remnants of old streets I’ve seen that are clinging to it. My thought language word does the trick. It becomes sharper edged and much more colorfully defined. There are offices and what appear to be shops. I check my mental database for maps and bless Nikola Tesla one more time in a long succession. It’s all there. The statistics that tell me what’s certain here, the known parameters of this particular location. This naturally strengthens my sense of hereness. With that the edges of my perception begin to fill out. I see streets to my far left and to my near right. I intend to the street to the right and am there looking at a shop window. Now comes the difficult part, there must be items here outwith my knowledge. (Hardly surprising this, this is what we live for.) I do a fuzzy focus. It has to be fuzzy otherwise I’d simply plant something there from my memory. I fuzzy from the edges. It’s like looking out of the very corner of your eyes or that thing that can be done just after waking from an interesting dream and you tell yourself over and over “I remember” and slowly the dream content develops once more out of forgetfulness.
It’s only clothing. That’s the first cognition. Then come the various shapes and colors. Okay, move on. I think co-ordinates and arrive further down the street. Here’s a place looks very like an office block. I think myself in. There are figures, hazy at first and then more and more defined. Three in all. I conceive of sound and tune into their space. Naturally enough it’s not very revealing but that’s not important, Yet who knows what will be important and what not in the final analysis? Anyway, I’m just getting myself fully here and tuned in at the moment. This is a warm-up for hopefully the main event still to come. The words are approximations, received within my fuzzed-up memory store:
Female: “It won’t happen soon. The Electorals have defined that. The changes coincide with the weather and you know that doesn’t reach nexus until May.”
Male 1: “You’re right in theory _(name not stored)_ though (_?_) colleague says a different outcome can be made possible.”
Male 2: “You keep making assertions Nevin (?) I don’t (_?_) . . . Talk about the latest _(unintelligible)_ or tv hi-win race result, something else, anything (_?_) . . .”
Female: “Don’t be upset _(name not stored)_ there’s no need. It’s just (_?_) . . .”
Male 2 surprises me by turning to leave. Of these three he seems the most interesting, so I follow him out.
Now, as far as can be assessed we Porters cannot be seen in any other here and now except our own. At least none of the individuals we have encountered have given any indication that they have seen us. This may be due to the hair-raising issues inherent in the possibilities of a paradox event. If I was to travel backward and meet myself for instance, how could that possibly be resolved when I have no memory of such an event? Or, if I was to accidentally trip up the inventor of some future life-saving device, medicine or treatment and he was to fall to his death in a vat of mercury, what then? That breakthrough saving many lives might never be made. Or, heaven forbid, if I traveled back and was responsible for an event which eliminated the possibility of my mother being born, would I then be snuffed out in that very instant?
~
We knew several things about the white rooms we were seeking. They appeared to be in an underground complex and that complex appeared to be in the United States. The agent had seen a colorful poster close by the location and a great deal of sand. She had only had a few moments of outside view to take details in and that was all she had. The rest involved the interior which was composed of gun metal doors and these pristine white rooms which held the files containing details of the primary inventions of that future age.
Many thousands of missions had gone and come without success during the last ten years of searching and even though much vital mapping had taken place the location of the rooms stayed frustratingly out of view.
The reason why it was considered so vital to locate these rooms and the inventions, techniques and technologies within them was the discovery of one primary fact, the Earth was dying. Fast. Now, you may think it obvious that if the future existed then clearly the Earth survived. However it is not that simple. If you were reading the papers ten years ago you should know about one of the most startling discoveries of the scientists at CERN-V. It had long been speculated that there might not simply be one universe but rather an infinite number of universes. This concept, when it was first thought through had been given the name of ‘The Multiverse Theory’. It sprang from solid speculative roots and postulated that whatever could be imagined to be, probably was out there somewhere in one of an infinite number of universes. In this one you were working as a teacher, in another you were unemployed and homeless, in another a poet, a shopkeeper, a soldier and so on in any and every variety and to infinity. Happy, sad, healthy, sick, wise, stupid, strong, weak, bright, dull and everything possible in between. This theory was confirmed by CERN-V. And we discovered too that our Earth was dying. But . . . much later we discovered that this particular Earth I was now in, was not.
Perhaps they were Porting too. We didn’t know if they were or not. But the chances they would Port to our Earth and in our time when there were an infinite number of Earths in an infinite number of universes was almost absolute zero. But we at least had located them. Now per
haps many, many other Earths contained the same white rooms and contained the answers we sought. But that would have to remain pure speculation. We had no possible way of knowing this and it would take an almost infinite amount of time to find out. So, early on we chose to stick with the one Earth we had located first and to map it as thoroughly as we could. And it was through this process that we had discovered the existence of the white rooms. We knew then that this was our one primary hope to find a way to save our own, insignificant planet in the multiverse, from destruction.
Ironically, time was running out . . . . for us.
~
Nevin walked in confident fashion down the street and I followed behind as closely as I could manage. I noticed that the streets were becoming narrower and there were an increasing number of low-lying barricades to right and left. We progressed through a maze of narrow avenues until we came to an obstruction to our progress. This was a grey building with high trees standing before it and steps leading up to a wide glass door at the center of the upper terrace. The man showed some kind of pass at the door and gained entry. I quickly peered through the glass door and visualized myself inside. Marble cladding was everywhere and a mosaic mural was emblazoned across one wall. I followed Nevin to the first floor and into the office area there. What was he doing here? Was this in any way helping me or had I chosen a complete blind alley?
I followed him to a desk where he sat down facing a large computer screen. Using the fingers of one hand he manipulated various images on the screen as well as directing some almost whispered commands towards it. I saw galaxies flow by in swift progression and ultimately to a vast group of perhaps one thousand galaxies. Some of the more distant ones were warped into great arcs due to the space-distorting gravitational effect of the great lens of closer galaxies.
He made a motion with his hand above his head at this point and the light instantly dimmed in the room. Then, above him and slightly in front of his vision images began to form and move. The nebulous shapes began to gain definition and it became evident that they were figures and of humanoid form. They were certainly humanoid, but to my amazement they were certainly not human.
Text (in three dimensions) appeared and hung in space below the figures (three of them) and I was struck by how the words fluctuated with color as if the words being expressed were afforded additional emotional nuance in their shapes, shades and colors. None of it was intelligible to me but I knew, if we had any luck at all, it was all being recorded in my database memory and we could work on possible meanings later.
The next thing I knew I was watching the thin trail of Nevin’s own thought-text rippling before him. This seemed to excite the others into yet another display whereby the whole space of the room appeared to become a vast 360-degree screen. We appeared to be within a room which I can only describe as being machine-like. There was a body at its center, clearly held by some force or other. Around the body were streams of images like ribbons floating and it was clear these were emanating from whatever being lay there. As well as these ribbons I could see fluctuations like ripples in a disturbed pool in the air of the room, once again emanating from the body before us. Suddenly there was a blast of energy from the walls of the room and the body contorted and shrank into itself. The ribbons of images and the ripple-like flows shrank toward the body also. Then the image vanished. Nevin appeared calm and soon terminated the session after a brief acknowledgement to the others.
What was I to make of this? And was there something useful here? Certainly it was shockingly electrifying to know that at this time on this Earth there had been contact with an off-world civilization. Though they didn’t look friendly to me. They did not look friendly at all.
~
The best estimate scientists could give us was that we had between one hundred and two hundred years before our Earth began its accelerated descent toward oblivion. You’ll know all too well the dire situation in which we find ourselves, it’s hardly been out of the news since it was confirmed. We made the fatal mistake of almost never looking to the long-term but always and ever considering all the short-term benefits we could derive. Was it really too late to turn things around?
The soul-searching has been intense in some. Others of course have taken the attitude that they’ll be dead and gone by the time disaster hits so why should they worry or change their behavior in any way? Others welcome the looming disaster glorying in the thought that it heralds the Second Coming. Some see it as a good reason to party even harder now while they have the chance. In short, and as you’ll already know, there has been much more panic, praise and posturing lately than there has been the pursuit of logic and rationality. For those in the scientific community, especially those who have been predicting disaster for many decades now, this has been a long-sought opportunity to rally political will behind one last effort to find a way to avoid the seeming inevitable.
They postulated several possible beneficial factors to be derived from the exploration of the alternate Earth we had found. Could we discover if they had faced a similar looming disaster and had they managed to find a way to avert it? Were there technologies, techniques or social policies which they had developed that allowed them to do this? Could we discover these methodologies before it was too late? Only time would tell.
And only if there was time enough . . .
~
My time was up and I made the mental signal for return. Once back the debrief began. I was placed in an even deeper hypnotic trance state than before and hooked up to the CERN so that my database reports could be downloaded before they began to distort or decay.
When I came back to myself at home I could still recall most of what had gone on and had to take quite a number of very deep breaths to calm myself. I could hardly bring myself to believe what I’d seen in that office. Porting always involved a strange, altered mindstate and it was quite easy to begin to doubt the evidence of my ‘other’ eyes.
So I did some very normal things as I usually did after a trip. I flung on some fresh clothes and got out in the open air as fast as I possibly could. even though you could be in any possible environment when Porting it still felt quite claustrophobic somehow and that office and those images I saw had really spooked me.
Taking deep breaths while I strode rapidly down the sidewalk I took in the everyday sights around me. The fluttering of the leaves in the breeze of trees around me, the fresh smell of cut grass, the occasional scent of roses from a neighbor’s garden. This was important. Normality and Nature. The feel of the good earth and of the crackling of pine needles beneath my feet as I entered a small copse of woodland that I loved to frequent. I reached my favorite spot and then sat down on the soft moss and closed my eyes. I immediately felt the warm caressing rays of sunlight on my eyelids. I then lay down, feeling the strength of old pine roots beneath me. Slowly and wonderfully I felt my body relax and I let my limbs flop down on the comforting mosses and grasses around me. Steadily I reached a level of relaxation bordering on sleep. At these moments of near bliss it always struck me as odd, and of course painfully tragic, that our world was as it was and not how it should be. Like this, always.
Soon I was asleep and began to dream, First there was a voice. It seemed to be emanating from an old school friend of mine. But somehow that didn’t seem right. I couldn’t imagine him speaking that way. Then he was laughing. There was a wall I couldn’t get over and more and more people were gathering to poke fun at my efforts to climb it. Suddenly it flipped horizontal, then became a slope and I and everyone else slipped down it and off its end. Into a space full of stars. There was no up or down, east or west, there was no point of location, identity or recognition. Everyone without exception began to scream at the top of their lungs.
I woke up. I was no longer relaxed, but instead felt a creeping paranoia moving up from my lower neck to the back of my head. I tried to calm myself by looking round at the pine trees surro
unding me but what had previously been calming and comforting now seemed to hide secret malevolent purposes. I felt just like I did those times in my youth when I’d had a bad trip or took too much smoke. This I really did not need.
Bit by bit I calmed down. I wandered through the woods a while but it was beginning to grow dark and the lengthening shadows were not exactly helping my mood. I headed home. There I watched some tv but each program I tuned to seemed to be broadcasting some subliminal message and I began to get freaked again. What was the matter with me? I decided I’d better reach the comfort of my bed and shut all this out in the cozy warmth I might find there.
I threw off my clothes and climbed under the covers. I almost cowered there like a child as I watched the patterns of the lights crawl across my wall and cause the furniture and other objects in the room to create outlandish shadow shapes. I closed my eyes tight and buried my face in my pillow determined to sleep this off with the hope I’d wake the next day free of these crazy notions and sensitivities. It was then I heard the voice inside my head “You don’t really think that will help, do you?”
Somehow or other I must have fallen asleep because I woke the next morning without further incident. I presumed I hadn’t eaten enough or had eaten something bad. Or my experiences on the other Earth of the day before had freaked even my highly trained mind.
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