Tempus: The Phoenix Man

by Matt Hilton

  ‘It’s fucked up is what it is,’ Walker said, to a murmur of affirmation which, to his surprise, Rembrandt found himself joining in with.

  ‘And we can never go back, Chief?’ Benny Oxford had posed the question on everyone’s minds.

  ‘Why would you want to, Ox? There’s nothing there for us. You all became cops because you’d no family left, no one to worry about while you were upholding the law. The only real friends you have are right here, right now. What’s to go back to? Hell? What could we expect back there…a few more years of violence, starvation, and quite possibly a lingering death under a scavenger’s knife or to disease or radiation sickness?’ Rembrandt had paused. ‘But if that’s what you want, I’m sure I can arrange it. I got you out, but I’ll give you the opportunity to decide if you wish to stay. I’ve no right to force any of you, not anymore.’

  Rembrandt had waited, allowing his words to sink in.

  ‘Well? Anyone want to go back?’

  ‘I don’t want to go back, it’s much nicer here,’ Oxford said, colour creeping into his bluff features. He blinked around; waiting for the inevitable pulling of his leg he’d grown accustomed to. None of the others even gave him as much as a frown. He wasn’t in the minority.

  ‘It will take some adjusting to, I grant you that, but you will come to terms with what happened,’ Rembrandt had promised. ‘But here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to let you sleep on it. If anyone changes their mind overnight, then all they have to do is tell me so, and I’ll arrange for you to be returned safely to where you came from. We’ll reconvene at twelve hundred hours at the central mess – you know where that is right?’ The team had already visited the large canteen room once Doctor Heller’s medics had cleared them, where they’d eaten and drank enough to satisfy twice their number. ‘Good. Then there’s nothing else to be said now. Go get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Now, sitting at the table waiting, Rembrandt wasn’t sure that his team would return to him with good news. He checked his watch and saw that it was a minute until midday. They weren’t late yet, but he had a bad feeling about their tardiness: perhaps they were dragging their heels for fear he would be maddened by their decision to flee back to normality. He’d be saddened, but not angered. He had accepted the terms, but it was different for him. He had been born to this world – even if he’d no memory of it – and that perhaps helped him adjust in a way his team couldn’t. To them they’d feel alien and out of kilter with this time and place. He hoped he could win them over. Despite his heritage, his words yesterday evening had held powerful meaning when he’d said “The only real friends you have are right here, right now” because he understood that it was his own truth he was uttering. If he were to allow them to go, then he’d be the alien, alone in this world with no one to turn to that he could trust to even begin to understand him.

  Yesterday Rembrandt had learned the details of the mission Terrence Semple had in mind for him. When first he’d heard what was expected of him, Rembrandt had felt the room tilt, and he was close to falling flat on his back from the rush of blood to his brain. It was an incredible feat Semple had set him. One that Rembrandt wasn’t totally confident he could complete without assistance. Semple had at first denied him a trip back to Old City, instead offering a crack Spec Ops team at his disposal, while Major Coombs fumed silently at having to rubber stamp the deal. But Rembrandt had refused: he’d wanted his own team, not a bunch of strangers. He’d worked with Dhand, Bowlam, Walker, Kwolek and Oxford, for so long, in so many dangerous situations that he knew without pause that they could be relied upon. A group of highly trained Special Forces soldiers might find Rembrandt’s unconventional methods impossible to work with. Plus, he had not bonded with Coombs’s men, and couldn’t spare the time necessary to do so. It was ironic that time had become an issue, particularly when it could be manipulated by the Tempus Project, but the issue wasn’t about jumping back in time for this mission, but halting something that was gaining speed in the here and now. The longer it took to get his team onboard, the more the damage.

  Governor Semple and Professor Doherty had led Rembrandt to a wood-paneled room, dominated by a large conference-sized table and chairs to accommodate a dozen or more. A gallery of oil paintings hung around the wall: portraits of famous scientists, and Terrence Semple. On the table was a projector, and Semple had hit buttons and from the ceiling at the far end of the room had slid a blank canvas of sorts, and vivid three-dimensional images had come alive on its surface. It was all very high-tech to Rembrandt but he contained his desire to go and check out the technology and sat where he was instructed, at Semple’s left elbow, opposite the professor.

  Rembrandt was no stranger to reconnaissance photography. He’d seen many pictures taken from high-altitude aircraft and even satellites, but they were generally black and white, grainy and slightly out of focus. The images his attention was drawn to on the screen were as sharp and colourful as if he himself bore wings on his back and swooped over the terrain.

  ‘Impressive technology,’ Rembrandt muttered. ‘Where I came from we were scrabbling around for what we could find left over from the late eighties. There wasn’t much of use. If it weren’t for the visible wreckage, and what little equipment we were able to scavenge, it’d be fair to say that it was like living in the Stone Age.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Semple said.

  ‘I’m sure you can’t,’ Rembrandt had responded without sarcasm.

  ‘Perhaps you will be surprised,’ Professor Doherty chipped in, waving a hand at the screen and taking Rembrandt’s attention back to it. ‘Watch.’

  The high-resolution image went from the verdant greens and blues of rolling hills to a blighted wasteland of grey ash. Rembrandt leaned back in his seat. The picture swooped on, and a demarcation line appeared and once more the terrain was colourful with life and vibrancy.

  ‘Forest fire?’ Rembrandt asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘No. Doesn’t it look familiar to you?’

  ‘Yes, it’s like the world I came from.’

  Semple manipulated the device in his hand, as though unfamiliar with its use, before leaning back with a satisfied nod. The picture retracted and the curve of the earth could be seen. Rembrandt recognised the coastline of the Far East and understood that the scene he’d just witnessed had been somewhere in China or Indonesia. The satellite camera shifted, swinging to the upper left of the image and then zoomed in at speed. ‘The first scene you saw was in the Kachin State of Myanmar, on the Indochinese peninsula. You might know of the country as Burma. This one,’ he said, bringing the zoom to a halt over an equally devastated landscape in northern Europe, ‘is in Belarus, little more than fifty miles north of Minsk.’ He took the imagery out, zoomed in again – this time on Scotland. ‘This is much closer to home. Do you know the area of Ross and Cromarty?’

  ‘If I do, I’ve no memory of it.’

  ‘Thankfully it’s one of the least populated areas of Scotland, nevertheless there was a loss of life when the singularity formed and the anomaly hit.’

  ‘The anomaly, that’s what you’re calling it?’

  ‘The phrase suits our purposes.’ Semple looked to Professor Doherty to take up the reins.

  The professor laced his fingers together, leaning his elbows on the table. ‘I will attempt to make this explanation as simple as possible, but if I lose you please stop me and I’ll clarify. The Tempus chamber works on a subatomic level, where quantum physics show that two of the very same proton can appear in two different places at once. Somehow – we’re not fully sure how yet – but by manipulating one of those doppelgänger protons it can have an affect on its twin. It was through this discovery that the string theory concerning parallel dimensions came into being.’

  ‘You’re starting to lose me, Prof,’ Rembrandt warned.

  ‘OK, try this instead.’ He picked up a notebook and tore off two sheets of paper, scrawling a stick man image on both, and marked them A and B. H
e laid them side by side in front of Rembrandt. ‘People have always thought that time runs like this -’ he moved a finger from A to B ‘- when actually, we’ve come to discover it is more like this.’ He picked up the papers and held them vertically back-to-back. He then took the nib of his pen and drove it through the stick figure A. ‘This is you now, Rembrandt.’ He then separated the two sheets and moved them apart an inch. Indicating stick figure B, he said, ‘and this is your past self. Working on the quantum level, both A and B are made of the same ‘twin’ subatomic particles and are inextricably linked. The way the chamber works is that it can be calibrated to pick up the vibration of B wherever and whenever we choose.’ With a little juggling of the pages, he then drove his pen through stick figure A, across the space and through stick figure B. ‘Tuning in to the vibration, the Tempus chamber then aligns the two and shifts A to dimension B via a wormhole.’

  Rembrandt quizzed over the conjoined pictures. ‘But doesn’t that mean you’d need my other self to come here in my place?’

  ‘I’ve made my explanation too simple,’ Doherty said. ‘We don’t necessarily need your opposite, just something – the atmosphere for example – where your opposite exists or existed to tune into. When we sent Sergeant David Johnston across to your world, his twin existed, and we were able to pull on this twin’s vibration.’

  ‘There’s another version of me back there?’ Rembrandt said, the revelation setting off a tic in his throat.

  ‘There was at that time and place, I can’t say that he’s still around now,’ Doherty said. ‘In fact there are versions of you across all the time dimensions, as there are of us, and every man, woman and child on this planet.’

  An image of the younger Sergeant Johnston flashed through Rembrandt’s mind, a face he was only familiar with from the file given him to study by Coombs. It was as if he looked in a mirror, and he wondered where the stray thought came from, perhaps a reflection in a mirror or a puddle or such, but the face fled as quickly as it had come, and he brushed off the sense of unease creeping through him.

  Doherty indicated the screen, drawing Rembrandt’s attention to the scene of devastation in northwest Scotland. ‘It appears that our experiments with the Tempus Project have consequences we did not foresee. A straight jump back in time isn’t the problem, but cross-dimensional travel brings with it perils we had not taken account of. You see, by manipulating the boundaries between dimensions, we cause tears in the fabric of space and time and it appears that these rifts are slow to close again.’ He again used his stick figure diagrams to emphasise his point, withdrawing the pen and leaving open the holes punched through the sheets of paper. ‘For the duration of a ‘transvection’ – that is the split-seconds in which the Tempus Project is active – we are forming a singularity or black hole, therefore opening a wormhole and effectively ripping the fabric that separates our dimension from the one into which we jump back or forth. Sadly the results are not contained to those same split seconds: for some reason the breaches remain open indefinitely. With any rupture there is of course a leakage of sorts, a spilling of one dimension into the other. It is highly likely that, if we’d a window to your dimension, we would see our atmosphere spilling over into it, whereas here, we’ve been unlucky.’

  ‘Those areas, they’re pockets of nuclear devastated land? Spillages from Old City?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Doherty said. ‘Thankfully of the three breaches we’ve discovered so far, all have settled in remote places, but who knows where the next might pop up. It could be over a major city and the loss of life could be counted in millions.’

  ‘How are these spillages occurring in such remote places? Why not here?’

  ‘When first they opened they were more or less here above the facility.’ Doherty indicated overhead with a wave of his hand. ‘But they have been affected by the rotation of the earth on its axis, by atmospheric pressure, weather fronts and numerous other factors. It’s why we were unaware of the consequences at first.’ He flicked an uncertain glance at Semple, whose features remained flat. ‘We vented the Tempus chamber following each of your subsequent transvections without realising that we were loosing the dimensional breaches into the Earth’s atmosphere. At the time the breaches themselves were infinitely tiny, microscopic, but they have proven to be self-generating, and as you see with weaknesses in any fabric they enlarge at an alarming rate. At first they were free floating, at the whim of nature, and it’s only as they develop that they have enough force to anchor in certain regions, and from there begin to grow. As this one did this evening in Ross-shire.’

  The blight was small in comparison to the two previous ones he’d witnessed, but the danger posed by it wasn’t lost on Rembrandt.

  ‘It’s continuing to grow?’

  ‘Yes. And causing untold damage to our environment, as I said.’

  ‘So basically, you’re saying that you’re planning on scrapping any further jumps to that dimension?’ Rembrandt prepared to argue his case. He’d made his request known to Major Coombs that he wanted to go and fetch his team safely from the ambush at the British Museum, and thought this was Semple’s way of putting him off.

  It was Semple who answered. ‘No, I’ve changed my mind and now want you to go back. We have to fix this problem and between us, having studied and learned from your debriefing notes, Professor Doherty and I have a vague idea of how we can do so.’ He pointed at the image on the screen. ‘I hear that you want to bring your team here. To do so will mean opening another wormhole and with it a tear in the dimension walls, and God knows what that will do to another part of our planet. But I think the risk is justified, if – and I mean a very large if – we can then undo what damage we cause. Assisted by your team you stand a greater chance of success, and I’m all for raising the odds in our favour. Those rifts are not sealing, the overspills continue as we speak: each area of blighted land grows inexorably by the second, gaining their own momentum as the two timelines converge and meld. But here’s the worst of it: there’s more than the radioactive dust to contend with. It appears our two worlds are converging and matching in features. The land the ash clouds touch is being transformed into a replica of that other world. So, where the bombs struck, or fires raged or cities collapsed under the bombardment, we see the same results here. If those breaches are left unchecked, we can expect colossal devastation. Perhaps even on a worldwide scale.’

  ‘While this is happening here, does that mean that the opposite is true in my dimension…the world there is being healed?’

  Doherty chuckled drily. ‘Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. Although our healthier terrain and atmosphere is spilling into that time and place, the world there is already poisoned and will simply overwhelm the good stuff that gets through. If we don’t check those breaches in space, all we’ll end up with is two uninhabitable dimensions instead of one.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about time travel and all the connotations involved in it. Can I pose a theory?’ Rembrandt asked.

  ‘Go for it,’ Semple said, ‘I’m sure that Professor Doherty will be happy to consider it.’

  ‘OK. So, somehow, I get sent back and halt these breaches from happening. If that were in the past, wouldn’t we already know if I’d been successful? I mean, if I’d stopped the problem prior to this moment, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation now, would we?’

  Semple laughed to himself. ‘The grandfather paradox,’ he said under his breath, alluding to what Rembrandt and Major Coombs had already considered.

  ‘I don’t mind admitting that all this is well beyond my understanding,’ Rembrandt said.

  Doherty smiled at Rembrandt’s confusion. ‘Thinking logically, then you’re correct. However logic is a contradiction in itself where a paradox is concerned. You see, you haven’t yet travelled back to a past time or place to halt the anomalies happening, so in this reality your theory holds no reason. Only after you make a jump will the effects of your mission cause resonance on the here and now, but we will
already be beyond the here and now and this moment in our past, but quite probably this conversation will still have happened for our future selves. Truthfully, we’ll never know until it happens, but I firmly believe that our memory will not be aversely affected, those of us with knowledge of what we do now will always be aware of it, but to the world at large, they will only know what history has told them happened. Does that make sense?’

  Rembrandt shrugged, no clearer.

  ‘Basically, we won’t know until we try,’ Doherty added. ‘In fact, I imagine that sending you back to bring out your team will be an ideal test of my theory.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Semple. ‘If you do so and return here with your memory of those events, plus what went before intact, then we will know that we can manipulate the past to our advantage.’

  ‘And the plan then?’

  ‘Once we know that my theory is correct, then we send you back to halt the nuclear war that you told us devastated your world.’

  Rembrandt’s mouth fell open.

  ‘I know it’s a big ask,’ Semple said. ‘But it’s the only way we can ensure that the effect of that dimension doesn’t continue to destroy ours.’

  ‘How do you expect me to stop a bloody nuclear war?’ Rembrandt asked. ‘Warn the world leaders of what’s coming? I can see where that will end: they’ll throw me in a lunatic asylum, or torture me to death to get the technology to build their own bloody time machine.’

  ‘Which is why you must travel back in secret and stop it by clandestine means.’

  Rembrandt placed his head in his hands, rubbing at his face.

  ‘Until a certain event occurred, it appears that our two dimensions were contemporaneous,’ Doherty continued. ‘From what you learned living among the survivors of the war, and subsequently told us, we’ve been able to identify the tipping point that threw the world you knew into chaos, and caused the divergence between our realities. As you said, in the late nineteen eighties the Cold War came to a head in your world, by way of the super powers raining missiles on each other. But here we experienced a different reality. We had Glasnost and the dissolution of the USSR. We experienced an unexpected peace and the threat of nuclear war subsided. It appears that it was down to the fate of one man. You see, here, an assassination attempt was made on Ronald Reagan, the President of the USA…’