Paul Jones - Towards Yesterday

“And that would have been a bad thing because…?” said Adrianna with a sarcastic smile.

“Welcome,” began Lorentz, resting both of his hands flat against the surface of the conference table. “Thank you all for attending. I’m sure that our two newest members are wondering exactly what they are doing here, and why they were chosen to join our little team. And I’ll get to that in just a moment. But first, I must apologize to you both for the cloak-and—dagger tactics we employed to get you here. As you are about to find out, I was forced not to reveal any of the information you are going to hear before I was absolutely certain that you would attend this meeting.”

Lorentz remained still for a moment, gathering his thoughts and inhaling deeply before he resumed his oratory.

“I am responsible for the Slip ,” he admitted bluntly, a hint of unease in his voice. “I know Adrianna will tell you otherwise—that the team I assembled to work on the project that caused this calamity shared equally in the blame—but I was the instigator, and I must place the blame firmly and completely on my shoulders.”

There was a stunned silence from Jim and Rebecca.

“Approximately twenty-five years from now, in a government funded laboratory in Southern California, I will assemble a team of some of the most brilliant young scientists this country will have to offer. A team of whom Adrianna is the sole survivor, by virtue of the fact that she was my eldest recruit. We were— will be—contracted to work on a secret government project that would revolutionize communications between military Command and Control Centers and their units in the field.

“This project involved the sending and receiving of messages and signals using tachyons as opposed to regular radiotelegraphy. Project Tach-Comm as we called it, was supposed to eliminate the need for encryption of messages and make the use of radio networks and systems, as we knew them, obsolete. How? By virtue of the fact that, given the innate nature of tachyons to travel backward through time, any message sent from our transmitter would effectively be received by the message’s recipient before it was even sent. It would guarantee that only the unit in possession of the receiver would be able to receive the transmission—a guarantee which the military were more than eager to obtain at the earliest opportunity.”

“You built Dirac’s radio ?” said Jim incredulously.

“Essentially, yes. But we had no intention of communicating through time per se , although, theoretically speaking, we knew the message would actually be received only seconds before it was sent. The real goal was to utilize that effect to create an unbreakable, uninterruptable communication device; the likes of which the world had never known.”

In 1938, Paul Dirac, a Nobel laureate, had devised a theory that allowed for the possibility of backward transmission of radio waves through time without the possibility of creating a causal loop. If correct, his theory meant that a radio transmitter could be constructed that would allow the future to speak with the past.

“As you may have guessed our first major test of this new technology took place on New Year’s day of 2042. The unexpected consequence of that experiment was the Slip . Like everyone else I was left confused and stunned by the event, but over time, as I managed to analyze exactly what had happened, I became convinced that my experiment was to blame. I was lucky enough to have contacts within the government in this time, and I convinced them that my experiment—Project Tach-Comm—was the catalyst for the S lip . I also believed that I could reverse the effects and, thankfully, the government was willing to believe I could too.

“I say ‘thankfully’ because if we had not been given the opportunity to study the effect, we would not have learned that the consequences of the Slip were far greater than we first believed. Within three months of beginning my investigation into the event, I realized the Slip was not a unique occurrence. I have strong reason to believe that when that first experiment took place in the future, it initiated a cascade effect, one that will occur again on the exact date of the first experiment—January 1st 2042.”

Jim began to ask a question but Lorentz silenced him with a raised hand. Lorentz’s voice had gradually grown less substantial as he explained the depth of the misfortune he believed he had set loose on the world. To those gathered around the table, he appeared to slowly crumple into himself as he recounted his part in what was surely the greatest catastrophe ever to occur; an event Lorentz felt was entirely his fault.

“On that date,” he continued, “we will once more be thrown back in time twenty-five years. Everything we learn in the coming years, all life born during that time, every step forward we make will once again be wiped clean. We will all be thrust back into the chaos and destruction that accompanied the first Slip .” Lorentz paused before adding, “Although, I think the despair will be even greater the next time around. The devastation too great to even begin to imagine.”

Rebecca eased the miasmal air of doom hanging over the room with a question, “What evidence do you have to support your theory of a recurring effect?”

“A very good question,” said Lorentz. “Why don’t I let Adrianna answer that for you?”

Adrianna switched places with Lorentz. The scientist slumped in his chair, gray with the weight of responsibility he had placed on himself. The child scientist’s head was only just visible above the table, so a frustrated and embarrassed Adrianna climbed first up on to her chair, then stepped up onto the conference table and proceeded to sit cross-legged on the tabletop.

“That’s better,” she said, blushing. “When Doctor Lorentz and I first began working together again after the event, we decided that the only way to truly determine whether our experiment was the originator of the Slip would be to find a measurable effect…we found one. Our instruments detected residual tachyon… fallout is as good a word for it as any. This fallout consisted of traces of tachyons with the same entropic signature as those we created just before the Slip occurred. Although it isn’t exactly incontrovertible proof that our experiment was responsible, it does strongly suggest to us our first test was the initiator for the event. We named it T-fallout.

“A few months after we detected the first signs of T-fallout, we took another measurement. And that was when we discovered we had an even bigger problem. Instead of decaying as we would have expected it to, the signal was increasing in strength. We checked our instruments—triple checked them—they were calibrated perfectly. So we set up a regular regimen of T-fallout sample measurement and collation. The data we recovered reinforced our initial observation: over a period of six months, there was a discernable increase in the amount of T-fallout residue detected. Also, the level of power that we were witnessing was way off the scale, far in excess of what we believed we should be reading at this temporal distance from the incident.

“And we don’t understand why that is,” interjected Lorentz from his chair. He looked to Jim and then Rebecca. “That’s what we need you two to figure out for us.”

Jim was quick to respond. Leaning forward in his chair he said, “Look, Doctor Lorentz. I haven’t worked in physics in over twenty-five years. I don’t know how you expect me to be of any—”

“James,” Lorentz cut in before he could finish his sentence. “Your early theoretical work on superluminal particles is still the yardstick by which all new theories are tested. It is genius… absolute genius.”