The Temporal Key

by Adam Benson

  We're going to have to destroy anything we find with a charge, said Dayk as he looked down at the debris under his feet. We can't leave anything functioning for someone to find. If even one thing with any power gets out it could destroy the timeline.

  When we're done in the infirmary, I'll go to engineering and see if the portable archiver is still intact. Thalia thought. If we archive the useful items, we can take them with us if we have to abandon the ship. She added.

  Does the portable archiver have enough storage to pick up the entire wreck? Dayk asked her.

  No, she replied. It only has about five thousand Yottabytes of usable storage. Not enough to hold even a quarter of the entire ship.

  Dayk hung on the torn floor of the infirmary, looking for a solid grip to hoist himself up to the top deck, when suddenly, a voice floated over the nearby rocky outcropping. “I’ll be damned!” it said. He let go of the ledge and turning in his tracks toward the sound.

  A hundred meters, over that hill! Thalia thought as she trained her sights on the rocks. Did you recognize the language?

  It's English! He thought frantically. Someone's discovered the crash site. Dhregh!

  That didn’t take long. Thalia said. What do we do?

  Come on. Dayk replied, and then he led her away from the ship. They ran quietly as possible to the windward side of the outcropping. Dayk peeked over the edge quickly and then ducked back down. There was a man standing in the grass with a primitive projectile weapon resting on his hip, and he was holding a small piece of debris.

  Dayk found his hand moving into his pocket toward Nocta’s gun. His heart rate was up, and his breathing got heavier. The excitement made him newly aware of the nausea that the radiation poisoning had given him.

  How do you know what he said? Thalia asked. The computer core is dead.

  I downloaded everything I could when I first woke up. He told her. He’s not saying much of anything. He just seems… bewildered.

  What do we do? Thalia seemed panicked in her inexperience. She started to peek over the rocks to see him for herself.

  Get down! Dayk almost said out loud. Thalia ducked back down. If he finds us this can only get worse. He has a weapon. There's no telling what he’ll do if he sees us. He opened his palm, letting his holographic orb float above his hand. With the radiation gone his body could easily sense the world around them, and instantly the strange man below showed up in the display like a glowing character in a false color world.

  He could see everything that the man was doing from behind his hiding place. The man on the other side of the rocks kept fiddling with the panel, bending it, crushing it, and stabbing at it, until something seemed to catch his attention and he started walking away.

  He’s headed toward his vehicle! Dayk breathed a heavy sigh of relief. As he watched his hologram, he saw the small flashing aura of the debris in the man’s hand. Dhregh! He’s still got a piece of ship.

  We've got to get it back! Thalia thought frantically.

  Nothing we can do about it now. He thought back. We'll have to find it when the rescue team arrives.

  They waited tensely for some sign that the man was leaving. Within a moment, they got their answer. The noisy engine of the old vehicle powered up and the tires ripped through the dirt as the vehicle spun around back the way it came.

  After a couple of chrons Dayk glanced back over the rocks. He could see the primitive vehicle moving quickly away from them leaving a trail of dust behind it. He breathed another sigh of relief and closed his hologram. I don't think we have long. He thought. We’d better get this cleaned up now!

  They jogged back to the ship, making a path to the infirmary. The nausea from the radiation had gotten so bad that Dayk started to tremble. See if you can find the archiver. Whoever gets done first, come and find the other. He handed her the rebreather mask and then hoisted himself up into a small crevice that led to the upper deck of the ship.

  Hopefully it’s still in its mount. I won’t be long. She replied. Thalia headed toward the other hole in the hull and crawled back into the engineering section looking for the portable archiver.

  The infirmary was still partially intact. The advanced medical equipment that was built into the small room was destroyed and disabled, but many of the small, independent devices were still in their wall mounts or were piled up as close to the Temporal Core as they could fall. Dayk pulled a small med-kit off the wall and quickly opened it up. Inside was a basic first aid kit, but no medicines. They needed a hypo-spray with the ability to make a radiation treatment compound. He set the first aid kit on the infirmary bed and then continued scouring the walls for what he needed. His trembles were getting worse and they nausea was beginning to take its toll. Dayk was starting to get frustrated looking for a working hypo-spray but there was nothing.

  His head started to spin, and severe dizziness began to set in. His eyes drifted over to the pile of junk that had collected on the floor near the Temporal Core. The idea of bending over in his current state made him feel worse than he already did. He started to take a step toward the pile, but as he went to bend over, he collapsed just a short reach away from the pile of debris on the floor. Dhregh! He thought as he hit the ground hard. His breathing was terribly labored, and the world started spinning around him. The thin air and radiation sickness were engulfing him, and he started to fear that he wouldn’t be able to come back out of it.

  “No.” He mumbled on the ground. He shook his head and started trying to right himself enough to crawl over to the pile of debris. There were a hundred little items piled up in front of his woozy eyes. He raked his hand sloppily through the mess hoping to catch a glimpse of the hypo-spray, but again there was nothing. He took a few shallow breaths and then ran his hand through the debris one more time.

  He couldn’t hold his head up any longer and he collapsed back down to the ground. His eyes still searching the pile, hoping to find the elusive hypo-spray and right as his vision began to blur, he saw it. Only the tip of the device stuck out beyond pile, but it was enough to give him a glimmer of hope. He reached over again and pulled the device out of the mess. “Just have to…” he mumbled through a grunt as he got the device in front of his eyes. He tapped a control and a holographic list appeared above the device. With a thought, he called up a cocktail of chemicals that would treat his radiation poisoning and the he injected it into the closest thing he could reach from his prone position, his cheek.

  The reagent worked quickly. Dayk felt it coursing through his veins like a cool burn that emanated from his face down into the rest of his body. I got the hypo-spray, he called out to Thalia. I got it. He lay there, unable to move as the nausea and faintness began to wear off.

  Despite the greater amount of radiation exposure, Thalia was fairing far better than Dayk as she rummaged around in the dark wreckage of the Chronis. Deep in engineering, the portable archiver was no longer in its mount and the large pile of debris clustered against the temporal core made navigating in the dim light more treacherous. The woozy feeling of nausea swelling over her made the heat and uneven footing harder to deal with, but she pushed through throwing piece after piece of the wreckage behind her as she searched for the archiver. Every tool or device she grabbed from the pile got a quick test to see if it was working, and then she hastily tossed each into separate piles.

  As she lifted a piece of bulkhead and started to throw it into the junk pile, she saw the portable archiver laying scuffed but unharmed in amongst the rest of the broken items sucked into the middle of the ship. A smile crawled across her face from beneath the mask as she tossed the bulkhead aside and picked up her archiver. I’ve got the archiver! She said excitedly. She tapped on the control and the holographic display lit up. And it’s functional.

  Great. Dayk replied. Come find me in the infirmary. I’d come to you, but I need a few hectos.

  I’ll be there in a chron. She replied. I’m going to collect what I’ve got now. As she thought it to him, she turned toward
her pile of working devices and started the process of dematerializing them into the portable archiver.

  The archivers came in two basic forms. The ship had a large and powerful archiver, capable of nearly limitless storage capacity, and the other was small hand-held device used in the field to collect samples and bring them back to the ship for storage. Like a teleporter, the archivers converted matter into energy and then saved that energy in a lattice that functioned as both data and energy. Once something was scanned it was quickly dematerialized and stored in the device where it would remain until it needed to be recompiled back into its material form. Archaeologists and researchers with this powerful tool could gather large amounts of artifacts and carry them with them without taking up any additional room on their persons, or in their ship. While useful for collecting most things in the field, the archivers couldn't be used on living material. The process killed anything biological, and thus couldn't be used on plants or animals.

  The inability of the archivers to store living things was the only reason that the small ship had any storage space at all. The ship only had two decks, one lower and one upper, it was relatively small for a crew of five. The Chronis had originally been disk-shaped, only six meters tall at its apex and had a diameter of ten meters. It was a very small craft, considering that many leaps through time would often take many years of travel time. It was divided into several sections, each of which served a vital purpose for both crew morale and mission necessity. Being a disc, it didn't have a traditional front and back, but it was often treated as though it did. The cockpit was at the front on the top deck. From there the pilot and navigator flew the ship and guided it through space and time. The cockpit faced in toward the Temporal Core with its slanted control panel protruding from the wall around the core itself, leaving the pilot and navigator with their backs to the outer edges of the ship. There were two seats molded into the floor that faced the control panel, and directly behind them was the down-hatch that lead to the crew quarters. To the left of the cockpit was the infirmary. It only had one bed available, and most of the instruments were built into the walls surrounding the bed. To the right of the cockpit sat the laboratory, and behind that was a small exercise and recreation area. The lower decks, moving clockwise around the ship, contained the crew quarters, a small two-person galley, the engineering section, environmental systems, and finally a small space for storing objects they could not otherwise archive.

  Dayk sat up and got a sense for how he was feeling now that the serum had begun to repair the damage done by the radiation. He looked around at the devastated remains of the infirmary. All the major systems that were powered by the hyper fusion coils were now completely useless, and so any major surgeries or advanced procedures would have been impossible. Even if Dr. Fossor hadn't been murdered, they had no way to save him. He would have suffered for days and succumb to his wounds before the rescue team could get there. It would have been an agonizing affair for the aging archaeologist, and so, for that reason Dayk was painfully copacetic with Nocta’s actions in killing him.

  Thalia popped her head through the opening into the infirmary. She tossed the portable archiver up onto the floor and then crawled up through the wreckage. Dayk leaned over and gave her a hand getting up.

  “Now help me up.” He said as she picked up the archiver. Thalia helped Dayk back up to his feet. He still had the hypo-spray in his hand and without a word he put it to Thalia’s neck and gave her a shot of it.

  “Ow! Thanks,” she said rolling her neck.

  “There’s not much left in here,” Dayk said looking around. He started sifting through the debris tossing useful, functional items onto the bed in the middle of the small infirmary. Thalia grabbed her archiver and started dematerializing the few objects that he set aside. There was the hypo-spray, the first aid kit, a small tissue regenerator, and a handful of other working items left in the infirmary.

  “Do you want to move through here, and just go section by section?” Thalia asked as the last item finally dematerialized.

  “Yeah,” Dayk said.

  They made their way through the infirmary and moved section by section working as quickly as possible to archive or destroy any technologies that could disrupt the timeline if they were ever discovered. It was a slow tedious process and by the time they got to the lab the sun was nearly set.

  The lab was full of equipment that they could use, but there was so much to sift through that the job was overwhelming. There were five poly-phasing cloaking devices that would make them nearly invisible to the eye, and to most technology, even from their own time. Small cylindrical devices that would self-adhere to almost any surface, the cloaking devices worked well at concealing people or objects, but they had a relatively short life span; only about fifty kiloChrons, half a day of continuous use before they would each be garbage.

  They also found a portable duplicator, a device that worked similarly to the archiver, but instead of converting existing matter to energy, it rearranged local matter to make perfect copies of artifacts that couldn’t be readily removed in the field. It was a noninvasive way to steal little things without stealing anything. It was a small device, that could only reproduce small items, and she couldn’t imagine what they would need it for in a survival capacity, but Thalia couldn’t bring herself to destroy it. She set it in the pile with the cloaking devices and put them into the archiver.

  “Dayk.”

  He stopped digging through debris and looked over at Thalia. She tossed him a rebreather mask.

  “There you go. Now we have two,” she said with a smile.

  “I was hoping we’d find the rest of those,” Dayk said as he put the mask to his face and took a deep breath.

  “Hey, there’s a set of proximity alarms over here!” Thalia said excitedly.

  “Are they alive?” Dayk asked.

  “Yes,” Thalia said. “Well, most of them are,” she said.

  The proximity alarms were a mostly biological technology. They were artificial creatures, designed to blend in with natural environments, like an insect, and then biodegrade when they were no longer needed, or if they could no longer sense a telepathic presence. They functioned telepathically, screaming in the mind, but silent in the world. They were perfect for creating a working perimeter and giving them ample time to disappear if anyone approached.

  “Give them to me. I’ll take them and set them up around us,” Dayk said, taking the case of alarms from Thalia. He stepped out into the dusky air of the desert and stared up into the sky. Billions of familiar stars were beginning to break their way through the twilight. Off in the distance around them he heard nocturnal life waking up and beginning to stir, but nothing was close. He began listening to the world on every frequency that he was capable of hearing. An ancient, and primitive radio signal started to coalesce in his mind. It was music! The primitives were broadcasting music using a modulated electro-magnetic wave. A smile crossed his face as he listened. The air was starting to cool, and a breeze washed across his skin, giving him a brief chill. Dayk walked up to the top of the rock and he looked out across the horizon. In the distance, he could make out a very faint glow that looked to him like a town or a city.

  He opened the package of proximity alarms and activated each one by brushing a finger across its back. As they woke up, he gave each one a telepathic command, and then they flew off and surrounded the crash site, landing on the branches of trees, tall grasses and rocks, and then blending into their surroundings. If anyone came within two kilometers of their position, they would know it instantly.

  As he watched the last of the proximity alarms fly off into the desert, Dayk walked back down the hill toward the ship. His thoughts were reeling around the crash and the attack. It wasn’t so much the crash itself, but the how and why of it that was causing him distress. Some things he had been expecting on this trip, but others had come to them as a disturbing surprise. As he approached the lab section, he paused and glanced over toward the cockpit.
He needed answers and some of them could be found there in the form of a device called the Temporal Key.

  Dayk climbed up into the broken cockpit and stepped over to the smooth, glossy white navigation panel. The lower right corner had embedded in it, a white cube only a few centimeters across. With a light push it came free and popped up from the rest of the console. He grabbed the tiny cube and then sat down at his station. With a thought, he activated the cube and it opened a micro-singularity to its quantum entangled clone in the distant future. After a few chrons the cube lit up and a holographic, multidimensional spheroid floated above it. The spheroid undulated as the ever-changing nature of the data increased its size and shifted the points that made up it’s strange surface. This spheroid was a representation of their collective knowledge compiled together into geometric shape, that could be matched against the current shape in the distant future.

  As the micro-singularity made its connection, the spheroid strobed green and then new data began to superimpose over top of the existing holographic sphere. Most of the shape matched almost perfectly, but then a tear-shaped bubble of future suddenly pulled off its surface and floated some distance away from the rest of the database. “It’s a future!” Dayk mumbled to himself. “It really happened.” He looked over the projection with worried wonderment, turning the sphere this way and that, as he looked for differences. “I can’t believe it,” he mumbled.

  “What is that!?”

  Dayk turned around with a start to find Thalia looking somewhat terrified at the Temporal Key. “Thalia!” he started to say, but she quickly cut him off.

  “Did we change the future?” Her face contorted into sheer dread as she pointed at the device. “Have we destroyed the timeline? Did I do that when I set off the blast?”

  Dayk just looked at her, unsure of what to say.

  “Did we alter the future, Dr. Dayk?” She asked again.

  “Yes,” he said with some hesitation.