Good god, how do you start something like this? “Dear diary, today something extraordinary happened to me”?
You don’t say! Extraordinary stuff has been happening to me non-stop for a while now.
Bob’s job offer? I accepted it, yeah, of course I did. What else could I do?
I have my own place, my cabin, in the “habitation module” part of this mega International Space Station in the future. Damn, I still have trouble believing it! Maybe that’s why I’m writing all this down. Seeing these things in black and white makes them seem more tangible and real. I often have the feeling that I’m going wake up and find myself back at Fatelmeyer’s, my arms strapped in a straitjacket… But the days go by and I still haven’t woken up. Or else I died when the car fell in the river, and all of this is my brain hallucinating just before I drown. They say that when you’re on the brink of death, the mind opens the floodgates and releases all the neurotransmitters in your synapses, causing you to go on a super-trip. Maybe all this stuff is my twisted nerdish version of purgatory, with a big black dude playing the role of the archangel Gabriel. Yeah, I might be capable of dreaming up something like that.
Another possibility (definitely the scariest): I’m not crazy and all of this is completely real.
And since I’m uncertain, I act as though it’s true…
So, I have my own cabin.
Although to be honest, it’s not much better than being at the institute. There’s a bed and a closet with half a dozen identical Star Trek-style pyjamas. My own bathroom with a sonic shower. Plus there’s a view of space, not something to be sneered at… No, actually, with all those stars and the big red planet down there, whose name I can never remember, it’s awesome! I can’t pretend to be blasé about that!
You want to know what the twenty-fifth century looks like, in terms of interior decorating? Steve Jobs won out, apparently: everything here might have been designed by Apple. The entire space station is just like the first room I saw when I opened my eyes: white, minimalist and streamlined. Sort of sci-fi meets Zen. More like the USS Enterprise than the grimy corridors and rusting pipes you see in Star Wars or Alien.
The computer I’m using to write this only has access to a kind of intranet, a local cloud that provides service messages, my training schedule, things like that. For example:
Chrono archive #TZ-7553-MC-164//SAM has been declassified without undergoing the standard control phase. You do not have the authorization required to access its contents. If you have read it, contact your liaison officer immediately.
Security message – Video data was released on 09/07/2469. These recordings were not vetted by the Directorate and are strictly confidential. Please delete all copies. The Neuro-Psy service will provide a corrective hypno-patch for your personal comfort – The Directorate.
They’re big on secrets around here. How was I transferred to the future? It’s still a mystery! Teleportation? Hibernation? An H.G. Wells-style time machine? Bob dodges the issue whenever I bring it up. And I’m forbidden from browsing the Infosphere, a kind of quantum, intergalactic Web that replaced our good old Internet. I’m only being drip-fed info about the TIME Agency, the situation on Earth, and my future missions. And the system of authorizations allowing people to circulate between sectors of the station is super strict. It works by colours, going through the rainbow from red to violet. Obviously, being a rookie, I only rate a basic red. I learn bits and pieces by talking to people at the Red Light, the club where station personnel go to relax.
How has the world changed since my time? I’ve missed seasons 22 thru 25 of the history of humanity; that’s a lot of episodes I need to catch up on.
Apparently, things started to seriously deteriorate twenty years after my… disappearance. The alarm signals accumulated, but world’s leaders went on governing in the short term, as usual. Managing immediate problems while the big catastrophe loomed. It was like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
And finally, the shit hit the fan.
Personally, I would have bet on the climate, or a mega-financial crash, but it turned out that the first domino to tip over all the others, the thing that caused everything to come tumbling down, was a pandemic. A dreadful illness that made the Spanish flu of 1918 look like the common cold. It was followed by wars, famines, every man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost. So things got really hairy for about a century, and everyone suffered losses, even the elites who thought they were safe in their secure, gated residences, their high-rise towers, and their floating cities. And, oh yes, the icing on the cake was climate change. The waters rose further than anyone predicted. The future Earth looked more like Waterworld than Blade Runner, to put it bluntly. It turns out the best films aren’t necessarily the most prophetic…
The survivors rebuilt from zero or at least not very much, but this time they were careful and tried not to make the same mistakes as before. It’s a shame that it took such a massive purge to teach them a lesson.
Humanity got its second wind toward the middle of the twenty-third century. They called this period the “New Renaissance”. A confederation emerged, which acted to preserve planetary stability. Apparently, this system worked and is still working today: nobody has gone to war for a long while. This new golden age has, and I quote: “resulted in real economic prosperity and encouraged a giant leap in scientific knowledge”.
How did I learn all this, if my access to the Infosphere is limited? Well, firstly, by taking history classes, but secondly, and above all, from evenings talking with my fellow recruits at the Red Light. The agents who already know stuff soon bring newbies like me up to speed. They told me all about the Twenty-First Century Pandemic and the New Renaissance while I downed shots (too many, according to Bob) in the club’s comfy atmosphere. The Red Light is quite nice, actually: retro music (meaning turbolift tunes from the twenty-fourth century), OK drinks. It’s practically the only distraction, the only entertainment, in this giant tin can of a space station. There are no cinemas, no concerts… In any case, in the evenings, I generally just want to crawl into bed and fall asleep.
With classes and all, they’re keeping me busy.
In the mornings (they maintain an artificial day-night cycle to keep us in sync with our circadian rhythm), wake-up is at 5am, and then we go to a miniature lecture hall where our instructors teach us non-stop. Going back to school at the age of twenty isn’t my idea of fun, but, yet again, I’m not given a choice. There are about thirty of us in our class. Humans AND ETs. Oh, I forgot to mention that? About a quarter of us are extraterrestrials, or even extradimensionals. It makes things a little strange at the beginning, to say the least, when you find yourself sitting beside a kissing cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I haven’t seen any pointy-eared Vulcans or Klingons yet, but there is a broad variety: species with scales or fur, skinny or fat, short as Yoda or as tall as a Wookie… Only humanoids, as far as I know. No blobs or giant slugs… I try to take this in my stride, but frankly, I was freaked out at first. When we’re faced with anything new and different, our instinctive reaction wavers between fear and disgust. Then curiosity kicks in and you get beyond that. And how do we communicate with all these good people? We’re implanted with a chip at the beginning of training. A universal translator, in the form of a bio-integrated app. Surprisingly, as far as robots go, there aren’t many to be found. I was expecting to meet a whole bunch of C-3POs and WALL-Es in the corridors, but so far – except for the robot cleaners, which are not very different from the ones in my time – all I’ve seen is a sort of ovoid drone with stubby fins and a blue “eye”, which flies a few feet above the ground making a buzzing sound, like a big metal insect. Disappointing.
The course I pay most attention to is History of Time Travel, which is fascinating. The research on tachyonic technology was developed at the Meyrin University complex in Switzerland (one of the few places to escape from rising sea levels).
At first, they “sent” discreet observers. And they learned one or two interesting things. For example, Jesus really existed. He was the leader of a small sect, sort of an anarchist rebel. I’ve seen pictures of him. Crazy, right? Photos of Christ himself! Well, let me tell you that he looks nothing like the guy in the drawing on the wall of my adoptive parents’ living room. You know, the blond, blue-eyed hippie surfer dude. Jesus was a little guy with dark skin and a big nose. It seems he stirred up a lot of trouble before the Romans caught him. I’ve also seen a video of Julius Caesar’s assassination. Gory! And the dinosaurs are awesome! Even better than the ones in Jurassic Park!
So, at the beginning of temporal exploration, everything was going fine. People took notes, they recorded all the big events, wrote theses and reports…
But then things started to unravel.
They have a place here in the station called the Command Post. And it has a monitor screen showing a timeline, that of our universe. I can’t tell you much about the other universes, because I confess that I have trouble following the course on parallel, or alternative realities. These dimensions might be (please note that I cautiously use the word “might”) displaced reflections of our primary reality. The theory of quantum echoes and linked timelines was first formulated by Brän Ronn in 2455 but all that is still in its infancy. It’s impossible to keep track of the infinite number of realities that co-exist in parallel with our own. But returning to the “prime timeline”, meaning the one associated with OUR reality, some small “bugs” have cropped up in the past few years. At the beginning, this didn’t amount to much. A few minor details. Somebody who died sooner than they should have. Events that happened in reverse order chronologically… You really needed to zoom in on the timeline in order to perceive the alterations. Then things became more serious. After a while, the agency’s directors had to face the facts: we weren’t the only ones around who were capable of travelling in time.
Panic time! Especially since the others – the competitors, or the “bad guys” as Bob called them during our first conversation – were not the most careful types. They came hurtling into the past, like bulls in a china shop, without worrying about the consequences of their actions. These strange adversaries had been nicknamed the Syaans. That was their code name. I have no idea where that came from, although we’re taking a course about them. It’s a short course, mind, given that we don’t know much about our enemies. They’ve been presented to us as a kind of cult, a terrorist group with members of all origins, Terran (from Earth) or otherwise. How long have they existed? How are they organized? More mysteries! Do they use tachyonic insertion for their spacetime jumps? Presumably not, since the agency’s tech is top secret. In our case, funding comes from a consortium of private companies with billions at their disposal. Capitalism is alive and well in the twenty-fifth century, thank you very much!
So, what do these Syaans want? Again, we don’t know. They may be deliberately playing with fire (I like the analogy with pyromaniacs) or just reckless. In the end, the result is the same: a big mess.
And that’s where we come into play, the spacetime agents (ta-dah, cue the theme music, with drum rolls). We’re like the UN peacekeepers of time travel. The blue helmets of the future.
In the beginning, I thought they were going to place us in a box and – boom! – project us in flesh and blood to a specific period of history. But no, it doesn’t work quite like that. In fact, only our minds travel in time. Our bodies remain in the future, or rather the present. Well, you know what I mean: the bodies remain here in the station. It seems to be, and I quote again here: “the most economical and respectful” (respectful of what, the ozone layer?) method they’ve found to transport intervention units into the “field”. So, we’re teleported into the body of some guy or girl who hasn’t signed up for anything and, for the duration of the run, these “receptacles” (that’s what we call the poor dopes in question) serve as our avatars or puppets. And what happens if one or more of these avatars is killed during the operation? No worries: 1) we wake up, unharmed, in our individual capsule; and 2) the computer having selected people who are nobodies, their death won’t threaten to create major havoc in the timeline. I may sound callous when I speak of “nobodies”, but I include myself in the same category. My disappearance in 2014 didn’t change things. The world continued to turn on its axis and water kept on flowing beneath the bridge. We don’t count for much in the bigger picture. That’s hard to swallow, but from time to time a small lesson in humility doesn’t hurt.
Tomorrow we’ll be doing our first practical training exercises. At last I’m going to know how it feels to take possession of another body. I’m thrilled, I have to admit! I’m getting tired of theory. What’s more, Bob himself will be our instructor. I like Bob. He’s come into the lecture hall two or three times to give us a speech or to chew us out when the class average has slipped. He may yell loud, but you can tell that the guy has a heart.
And tomorrow we will also form into teams of four (yeah, it works in fours, our thing, don’t ask me why…) with future missions in mind. Until now, everyone has been keeping their distance. Watching one another out of the corner of their eyes. Sizing one another up. I’ve spotted two or three people who seem cool, but there are also a bunch of dickheads I don’t want to have anything to do with: pretentious rich people; hyper-focused nerds; and even one dude who looks like a psychopath, the type you definitely wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. And that’s just the humans, of course. As for my extraterrestrial colleagues (and again, I find it difficult to believe I’m writing this), it’s not so easy to form an opinion. They all look so freaking strange!
“Tomorrow will be a make-or-break day” (I’m quoting Bob here). A new team… people that I will be working with for months on end. Maybe years. I don’t even know if this job is temporary or permanent. There wasn’t any contract to sign. Joining the agency is like joining a religious order, it seems.
So, this evening, I’m going to bed with a nervous knot in my stomach.
What a crazy-ass story.
Well, “stay tuned, little diary”… (Oh, what bullshit, LOL!)