Paul Jones - Towards Yesterday

“Lorentz, if this new event is going to occur twenty odd years earlier than we estimated how is that going to affect where we get deposited back down the time stream?” Jim asked.

Adrianna pulled the printout back from Lorentz and quickly jotted down more figures. A minute later, she stopped writing and stared impassively at the paper. A single tear appeared in the girl’s eye, flowed over her reddened cheek and across her quivering lip before falling silently to the table. “Oh no,” she whispered. “Someone tell me this isn’t right.”

Rebecca stood and walked around to the back of Adrianna’s chair. She placed an encouraging hand on the girl’s shoulder and stared at the calculations on the printout. Among the jumble of calculations, she saw a single figure in the Professor’s childlike hand, underlined with three thick slashing strokes from her pen.

The figure read, 1989 .

Rebecca felt the room begin to spin. She threw her hand out and grabbed the back of Adrianna’s chair for support until her vision stopped swimming.

“Christ Rebbeca, you look like someone just walked over your grave,” Horatio Mabry was halfway out of his chair, a look of concern carved across his face, quickly followed by embarrassment as he caught his poor choice of words to the resurrected woman.

“I’m… okay,” Rebecca responded, making her way back to her chair on leaden feet.

“So, are you going to give the rest of us the good news?” Mabry asked solemnly.

Rebecca took a deep breath before answering. “According to Adrianna’s preliminary calculations, the second slip is going push us back the same amount of time as the first one.”

“Back to 2017,” said Mabry. “Right?”

Rebecca’s eyes met Jim’s as she regarded him deeply for a moment before answering in a barely audible voice. “No. Because the second slip is going to occur so much earlier than we expected it’s going to drop us somewhere in 1989 and that means most of us will either be infants or… un—born. Either way there won’t be anyone left to figure out how to stop this thing.”

…you see, the Catholic Church is faulty. It is so entrenched in the doctrine of ‘ faith above all else’ that should God himself come to us, and tell us that a certain belief or practice the Church had mandated was incorrect, he would be unable to persuade those who govern the faithful of his veracity. If he sat across from you in this very chair and said ‘I am the one and only true God’, the average Catholic would reply ‘Get thee behind me Satan’. Everyone seems so very sure God has no desire to talk directly to them . The very tenet binding us to the Church, denies us true contact and understanding of God. People had forgotten, myself included, that God speaks through the Church, and that the Church is not God—that is a distinction which must be remembered at all cost.

There is a modern parable I am particularly fond of that illustrates my point: A man is caught in a flood and as the water begins to rise, he climbs up onto the roof of his house and awaits rescue. As the hours pass and the water rises, no help comes, so he begins to pray : Dear Lord, in your divine mercy please save me from the rising floodwater .

Suddenly a helicopter appears and lowers a rope down to the stranded man—‘take the rope’ says the pilot. ‘No thanks’ replies the stranded man, ‘I’m waiting for God to rescue me.’ Three more times the pilot of the helicopter tries to convince the stranded man to climb up the rope and three more times he is refused: ‘I’m waiting for God.’

All the while, the water is rising and rising, until finally, the house is swept away, the man with it. His last words being ‘God, why have you forsaken me?’

So you see, when God announces his presence he always makes it obvious to humanity. How much more obvious than the events of the last few years does he need to make it before you will believe?

“Look at this,” said Adrianna, gesturing to figures on her computer screen. “I’ve been working on this for the last few days. Check this out.” She punched a key on the computer keyboard and row upon row of numbers began to scroll down the screen.

The team, gathered around her computer, regarded the rapidly scrolling figures with confusion.

“What are they?” asked Jim.

“Those,” said Adrianna, as the numbers continued to scroll, “are the frequencies of the tachyons contained within the harmonic.”

“My God! How many are there?” asked Lorentz.

“I managed to isolate over seven hundred.” Adrianna swung around in her chair to face the others. “Most are close to being immeasurable, they barely registered on the scanner—it was a bastard to have to go in and extrapolate them individually—but that’s not the best of it. Take a look at this.” She pressed another key and an animated graphic replaced the figures.

“See?” she exhaled, her voice a hushed tone of awe.

“Very pretty,” said Jim, “but what the hell is it.”

“It looks like a string of DNA,” Mitchell guessed, but as he leaned closer to the screen he reappraised his observation, “Or, more precisely, it looks very much like a DNA double-helix.”

On the computer screen, slowly rotating around its axis, a blue strand wove its way helically up the screen. Attached at varying points along the strand were small glowing spheres of phosphorescent light, most bunched in groups of three but the further away from the center of the strand; the less the spheres were bunched.

“So what does DNA have to do with the harmonic?” asked Mabry, his bushy eyebrows arched questioningly.

“It’s not a DNA strand,” replied Adrianna. “It’s a graphical representation of the frequencies I pulled out of the harmonic.”

“What’s that?” asked Rebecca pointing at the center of the strand where a single red globe, bordered on either side by two green spheres of glowing light, pulsed gently.

“That represents the frequency of our original signal, the one that initiated the Slip . I’ve isolated it and confirmed its characteristics; it is definitely the original signal. It’s also the strongest.

“The two spheres on either side of it—” Adrianna used the index and middle finger of her right hand to point at the screen, “—are frequencies that were just below and above it. There’s barely a difference of just a few megahertz really.” She moved her tiny fingers to the top and bottom of the strand.

“You see here and here, the clustering of frequencies drops off. The further away you get from our central frequency, the weaker the signals become. I have a feeling that if we could amplify the signal significantly enough, and maybe clean out some more of the noise, we would find the missing frequencies to these clusters. Hell! For all I know the stuff my equipment is reading as noise could be more frequencies, too faint for me to extract. Without more sensitive equipment I will never be able to tell.”

“Amazing,” Lorentz said quietly.

“Yes, definitely amazing,” said Jim, “But what does it mean ?”

Adrianna swung slowly around in her chair until she faced the group of scientists standing behind her. “I have absolutely no idea,” she said candidly. “We really don’t know enough about it to be able to speculate with any degree of accuracy. It could be echoes, a naturally occurring event that we have never been able to monitor before, maybe even similar experiments in other countries.”