The Temporal Key

by Adam Benson

  Thalia sat there fuming. She was angry at everything and everyone. “You know… when I signed up for this… I didn’t think this was going to be what my first mission was like! I probably would have told the TSC to forget it!”

  "Look. Thalia." Dayk said. She turned away and looked off into the distance. "I don’t think it’s that bad. I'll tell you what I know." She started to act like she was ignoring him. "And if we work together, then maybe we can figure out what is going on and fix this before it gets any worse." She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.

  Dayk didn't want to push her any further than she had already been pushed. Every time something went their way, two things went wrong to set them back. They were both tired, and both wanted nothing more than to get back home and forget about Roswell, New Mexico from two and a half million years back.

  "The fugitive part. Let's start there." He said. She cocked her head sideways to pay attention, but to keep ignoring him at the same time. "I swear to you that I've never committed a crime in my life, and I would do anything to maintain the purity of the natural flow of time. I have not now, nor have I ever been involved in any conspiracies to destroy the time line. I trust you, and I believe that you have never done anything criminal, nor have you been involved in any plots to destroy the time line as well. Am I right?" He asked.

  Her eyes got wide, but she kept huffing to herself.

  "Am I right?" He asked again.

  "Yes!" She huffed.

  "And do you believe me?" He asked.

  She sat there fuming, but she knew that he was about to prod again, and so she finally answered before he got the chance to say anything. "I don't know. Yes."

  "Alright. Then the first question is: Why has the Captain Nocta of the past come back here four days early referring to us as fugitives? That leads to another question: Why was the Nocta of the present... our present... acting like our friend, and then suddenly attempting to kill us all by purposefully crashing the ship, and then shooting at us with an unauthorized weapon?" He watched as Thalia's shoulders relaxed a little. It was a good sign. "That brings us to this." He pulled the Temporal Key from his pocket and activated it. The multi-dimensional shape floated above the device and there a short distance away from the surface floated a projection that emanated some thirty solarSines into the future. He pushed the device toward her so that he knew she could see it.

  Thalia turned her head just enough to see the device. She studied it with a frown. There was that little piece of future floating ominously off the side of an otherwise perfect time line. She sighed at it and then dropped her arms to her lap.

  "Someone in our future is manipulating the past, and my guess is they're trying to set themselves up with a brighter future of some sort. I'm starting to get the feeling that it might even be possible for Captain Nocta to the one behind all of this."

  "Nocta's dead." Thalia said flatly.

  "Yes. Nocta is dead... in this cycle. But it might be possible for him to have created this paradox in an attempt to save his own life. That could explain the future anomaly, and it could explain why he came here to... well... to collect his own body. And maybe that's what set it all off. Perhaps he came back on a rescue mission. Found his own body. Decided he didn't want to die. Traveled to.... well... wait..." He stopped mid thought. "How would that work exactly?" He asked rhetorically. "If he... managed to travel into the future... or perhaps he went back in time to..."

  "Dayk..." Thalia said.

  "Yes?"

  "You're rambling." She said. "It seems like the only way he could save himself is if his past self, went back further into future, but before we came back, and told himself to... well, but wait..."

  "Yeah. I know what you're thinking, but it's difficult to articulate, because logically if he didn't survive the crash, then killing us wouldn't make any difference in his future. The only way that would work is if he went back in time and convinced himself not to go on this mission in the first place."

  "But how would he make all these jumps back and forth. He'd need access to a team of Temporal Sciences people to assist him with this conundrum, and that's just not going to happen. That, or he'd have to break the power barrier." She said.

  “You're right... He would need access to a ship that he couldn’t have access to. And if all he did was to convince himself to not go on this trip, then why are we having this conversation about him. He wouldn't even be here."

  "Nope." She said.

  “So, then what is Captain Nocta doing in all this mess?”

  Thalia shrugged.

  "I am hoping that this might answer a few questions." Dayk said, pulling a second Temporal Key from his pocket.

  "Where did you get that!?" Thalia asked

  "I stole it off the Paentus before I left the ship."

  "You stole their key? Why?" She asked.

  Dayk activated the Paentus' Temporal Key and brought it next to one from the Chronis. "I'm hoping that it'll have a few clues as to when the younger Captain Nocta came from. It might shed some light on the nature of this paradox as well." He told her as he examined the two spheres. "Ours reads 4.698542793 gigaSines. Theirs reads 4.698542785 gigaSines. He's eight years previous to us."

  Controlling it telepathically, Dayk set their own Temporal Key back eight years and watched as the shape of the sphere shrunk back to what it had been in the past. The anomaly disappeared and the shape changed into something slightly different from what it was. He examined the shape carefully and then compared it to that of the Paentus. He pushed the two spheres together so that they overlapped and almost instantly he could see it. "They're exactly the same!" He said.

  "So, what does that mean?" Thalia asked.

  "It means that this happened in our own past as well. It means that Captain Nocta was sent here from our own timeline, eight years prior to now... and that it wasn't a change made from the future. Or if it was a change from the future, then it started after all of this." Confusion moved over his face as the words came out of his mouth. "But how is that possible?" He said.

  "You're saying that Nocta came back to kill us 'fugitives' in the natural order of time?" Thalia asked. Her anger was slipping away fast. Now, she was more interested in getting answers than she was in being mad at Dayk.

  "Yeah." He said. His brow was wrinkled in unsettling thought. "Why didn't I know about this?" He said aloud to himself.

  "How could you have?" Thalia asked.

  "No, you don't understand. We researched everyone thoroughly before we brought them onto our team. If someone comes from another division, especially Temporal Rescue, it's imperative that they've never had any temporal interactions with any past or future missions. That alone can trigger paradoxes." He said.

  "What?" Thalia said, not entirely following him.

  "Look. If someone from temporal rescue went back in time and rescued himself from a scientific expedition that he later took part in... Well, that's a paradox. It might be simple and benign, but it's still paradoxical. We don't allow that sort of thing on purpose. Everyone on our current mission was background checked for mission compatibility. Meaning they’ve never experienced this mission from any other perspective before. It's usually not an issue at all since temporal rescue teams are assembled at the same time as the scientific mission is, and then put on standby in case they're needed."

  "Which means that someone went back in time and sent an eight-year-old temporal rescue team onto a future mission. But how is that possible, since from their perspective the future isn't written?" Thalia asked.

  "Because this is one of those self-fulfilling-prophesies I told you about a few sols ago. It didn't take place in an unwritten future; it took place in the past. This past." Dayk said. "My bigger issue is, why didn't I know about it?"

  Thalia cocked her brow at him.

  "According to the archives there was no mission eight years ago that was sent to this time to rescue a ship that hadn't even been built yet. Plus, I've had a hand in almost every mission that
's gone back through time over the last one hundred years. There's not a single mission that I'm not aware of... at least, that's what I thought." Dayk said.

  Thalia's eyes got wide as she realized what he was talking about.

  "And furthermore, there's no reason that Temporal Sciences should ever hide anything from me. I'm one of their senior most members. I'm one of the people that keeps secrets from everyone else. If I go into research a particular mission or set of team members.... there's no such thing as restricted access for someone in my position. I have access to everything that the Temporal Sciences Center has ever done. See?" Dayk said with a worried expression.

  "Maybe that's what the anomaly is?" Thalia suggested.

  "What do you mean?" He asked.

  "Maybe someone went back in time and told them to hide it from you. Then they sent a secret mission back here to..." She stopped.

  "To what? Have me killed?" He said. "What's the point? I pose no temporal threat."

  "But you might in the future." She said.

  Suddenly, there was a clicking sound approaching from down the road. It was fast and regular like footsteps walking quickly down the road. Dayk activated his hologram and scanned down the road. He saw a glowing red avatar of Naomi walking toward her house. She seemed to be in a great hurry.

  It's Naomi. He thought to her.

  What do we do? Thalia asked.

  Let's go and meet her. It'll give us a better place to hide than this grass, and perhaps she'll have some information for us that will help us out until the actual rescue gets here. Dayk said.

  What makes you think they're coming? Thalia asked him.

  Because there’s still too much contamination here. Naomi’s biology lab alone is enough to destroy the timeline were it to be left here, he replied, then in a flash he disappeared behind his cloaking device. Come on, he said.

  Thalia engaged her own cloak and stood up as she watched the grass in front of her part ways as Dayk walked away. They pushed their way through the tall grass and walked toward Naomi who was quickly approaching her front door. They watched her as she started looking around as though she was expecting to see invisible aliens at any moment.

  When she got to her door, Naomi began digging around in her purse for her house keys. She stood by the door fumbling around in the bottomless pit of a bag that she carried with her. Finally, her fingers touched upon the metallic clink sound that was her key chain. She pulled the keys free and started flipping through them to the key that opened her apartment.

  "We're here." Dayk said invisibly as he approached.

  "Ahh!!!" Naomi screamed and jumped, dropping her keys to the ground. "Good god, you scared me!" She said. She was about to bend over and pick up her keys, when they suddenly appeared to be floating up to her hands. She stared wide eyed at the flying keys coming up to meet her.

  "Sorry about that." Dayk said. "Here you go." He said handing them to her.

  She took them from him awkwardly and fumbled through them again until she found her house key and unlocked the door. “Whatever you two did down at the hangar has the whole base up in a ruckus!” Naomi said as she opened her front door.

  “It wasn’t us,” Thalia defended.

  “Well, it was, and it wasn’t,” Dayk added as they walked inside. “There was an… unexpected development.”

  “Yeah? Well, we got thrown out of our lab and sent home while the MP’s conduct a search. It seems that everyone in the hangar suddenly lost your ship and their memories. The General’s throwing a fit, and he’s going to be tearing apart this base looking for it. Seems he doesn’t believe it could have just disappeared out from under them,” Naomi said as she closed the door and drew the shades.

  “They took the ship, and wiped everyone in the hangar,” Thalia said quickly.

  "Usually, they wipe memories for anything between one and ten sols, uh, days, depending on levels of contamination. We try to keep it on the shorter side, since the brain is a fragile organ, and wiping too much can cause serious trauma." Dayk told her.

  "You erased their memories?!" Naomi asked. She had a stricken look of concern on her face as she said it. "How is that possible?"

  "We didn't personally," he said, "but the rescue team did."

  "The rescue team already came?" She asked. "I thought you said it wasn't for another couple of days."

  "It's not supposed to be." Thalia chimed in.

  "Then...." Naomi paused. "Then, I don't understand. Why are you still here?" She asked.

  "It's a bit difficult to say." Dayk said.

  "We believe it was a… fake…rescue team." Thalia interjected.

  "What?" Naomi said with surprise. "Why? Why would anyone send a fake rescue?"

  "Naomi." Dayk said solemnly. "There's something going on here that has us at a bit of a loss. Without going into a whole lot of detail, we think there may be someone in the future trying to...." He paused while he tried to come up with a delicate way to express his thoughts.

  Thalia didn't wait for him to finish. "To kill us." She blurted out.

  "What?!" Naomi exclaimed.

  Thalia! Dayk scolded her telepathically. I was trying to minimize her level of alarm!

  Sorry. Thalia replied, giving him sheepish glance.

  "I'm not in any danger, am I?" Naomi asked.

  "I have no reason to believe you are." Dayk assured her. "We always go out of our way to protect the natural flow of history. You're a part of that history, and thus would be considered protected by anyone in our service."

  Then what about the ones who are obviously violating temporal law? Thalia asked him.

  Dayk shot her a quick glance but left his thoughts unspoken. She knew what he meant, and he was glad she chose not to say it aloud.

  "So, why do I still have my memories?" Naomi asked.

  "You weren’t in the hangar at the time." Dayk said.

  "The only reason I wasn't in there, was that we were prepping the biology lab to take the, uh, bodies.... for further study. Until today we didn’t have a way to store three bodies in the biology lab," She admitted weakly. "We were sending someone to retrieve them when the ruckus started."

  "It's fortunate that you weren't in there." Thalia said.

  "The memory loss isn't always permanent." Dayk added. "Sometimes subjects have been known to recall some details many years down the line, but most people never do. You'll be one of the few who remembers us."

  “Good thing too!” Naomi said. “You’re going to need a friend on the inside. I have very little doubt they’re going to be searching for you.”

  Lost Memories

  “And you don’t remember any of this?” General Ramey barked at Colonel Turner as he appropriated Turner’s desk for himself. “I’ve got five scientists and a doctor with evidence in their lab, that all swear up and down about this thing. I’ve seen this thing myself, Colonel, and now you’re telling me there never was an alien space ship out in that hangar?! What kind of fool do you think I am?”

  “Sir, all I’m saying is that I have no recollection of it, and I’m not even sure when you got here. I seem to have lost about a week, sir.”

  “I just don’t get it Colonel,” Ramey said. “How could a room full of scientist suddenly not remember spending the last couple of days with a flying saucer? And where in the hell did the damned thing go, anyway?”

  “I have no idea, sir. Something happened in that hangar. None of us can be sure what, but your man Cavitt was on about something.”

  “He and Major Marcel were the first to come in contact with this thing.”

  “From our perspective, you, Majors Moorhead and Marcel, and Captain Cavitt all basically appeared out of nowhere,” Turner said.

  “Nonsense.” Ramey turned and looked out the window toward the hangar. “Everyone in the biology lab seem to remember all of us, and everything that’s been going on the last couple of days. It’s just you all that were in the hangar who seem to have lost the days. Colonel, I want to get to the bottom
of this. I’m locking down the biology lab, and I want you, Marcel and Cavitt to all get briefed by Major Moorhead and your biology team.”

  “Yes sir. What about the research?” Colonel Turner asked.

  “It’s on hold until we find out what happened. Something that big doesn’t just disappear, Colonel.”

  “Yes sir.”

  General Ramey licked his teeth as he looked out the window to the rest of the base. He tapped his fingers on the desk thoughtfully and then turned back to Colonel Turner. “We need to do a complete search. I want every building, every house, and every goddamned woodshed from here to Roswell, torn apart and searched until we find that thing.”

  “Sir, I honestly don’t know what we’re looking for.”

  “Take Marcel and Cavitt. They still know what it looks like.”

  Fleeing Alamagordo

  Something was going on outside and the commotion prompted Naomi to rush to her window and look outside across the flat dusty desert. In the distance, she saw a line of Jeeps fanning out across the base. “They’re searching the base!” Naomi exclaimed. “And they’re headed this way. You two need to get your stuff and disappear. I’ll handle the boys.”

  “I’m on it!” Thalia said as she hopped of the couch and grabbed her archiver, taking a last look around for anything else that they might have left out.

  “Do you know if they’ll be using any instruments in their sweep, particle detectors, spectrum analyzers, anything like that?” Dayk asked as he came alongside Naomi and looked out the window for himself.

  “They might have snoops,” she replied. “Geiger counters, for detecting radioactive sources, but that will be about it.”

  “We should be clear,” Thalia said. “They won’t be able to detect us.”

  “Still, I want to stay out of their way. We’ll take the back door out of the kitchen and wait outside until they’re clear,” Dayk said.