Paul Jones - Towards Yesterday

At sight of Jim and Becky walking toward him, he tossed the cigarette to the ground and crushed it into the gravel with a quick twist of his booted foot. DeWitt walked around to the rear of the Lincoln and opened the passenger door, spoke to the occupant, and the stepped aside.

“Hello you two,” squeaked Adrianna Drake as she stepped from the car, looking somber in a black dress, a white rose pinned to her breast. Not waiting for a reply from either of her friends, she positioned herself between them and took a hand from both in her own. “Come with me,” she said. “We have lots to talk about.” Turning her head to speak to the Colonel, she said with a smile, “If I’m not back in half an hour send out the search party.”

A smile and a nod in return from the soldier acknowledged the remark. “Will do, Doctor Drake.”

“He’s cute, don’t you think?” said Adrianna with a knowing wink to Rebecca as they strolled across the parking lot, gravel crunching beneath their feet.

“A little old for you,” said Jim, summoning his most fatherly tone of voice.

“I’ll grow into him,” replied Adrianna, with a mischievous glint in her eye.

Annexed between the parking lot and the entrance to the cemetery was a garden of remembrance; a two-acre field of green, cordoned off by English yew trees that stretched like sentinels into the sky, standing eternal watch over the dead.

A concrete path meandered through flowerless rose beds and pools of Koi, past poetry inscribed copper plaques and the occasional park-bench strategically placed to overlook the most peaceful scenery the location offered.

The three friends strolled slowly down the path until Adrianna stopped them at a pond. With a cacophony of quacks, a flurry of ducks swam lazily toward them from their island sanctuary at the pools center.

“Wish I had some bread,” said Adrianna, as she watched the fearless birds gliding their way.

“I don’t think you brought us here to feed the fowl,” Jim said.

“No. No, I didn’t,” she smiled back. “I didn’t get a chance to sit and talk with you both with all the commotion after the attack and you being in hospital and all. I thought I needed to explain what happened.”

Becky interrupted her. “It’s okay,” she said laying a reassuring hand on her small shoulder. “I understand why you—”

“No, you don’t understand,” insisted Adrianna, “I’m not talking about what happened at the lab. I’m talking about what happened after you left me to go check the explosion.”

“What do you mean, after I left?”

Adrianna raised her hands out in front and spun slowly around. “All this: the ducks, the park, you, me, everything… it’s still here. And it shouldn’t be.”

“We made a mistake in the calculations or we misinterpreted the signal, that’s the only possible answer. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here having this conversation,” Jim said.

Adrianna shook her head. “No.”

“No?”

“I mean that’s not the explanation. There’s another explanation. There’s a reason we are all still here.”

Adrianna led her two friends over to a wrought iron bench overlooking the pond. She motioned for Rebecca and Jim to join her.

“After you left to go check out the explosion I was waiting next to the receiver,” she said, as the three of them sat. “And at exactly midnight, I heard a voice coming over the receiver: it was Lorentz’s.” Jim started to object but Adrianna stopped him dead. “I know what I heard Jim. It was definitely Lorentz’s voice.”

Jim looked askance at her. “But he was already dead. The transmitter was destroyed in the explosion as well as the generator. There was no way he could have broadcast any kind of a signal even if he had survived the explosion.”

“It was him, Jim,” she instead. The soul and memories contained in this child’s body were those of a much older woman, Jim remembered, but right now the emotional response to Jim’s disbelief was that of a little girl. Adrianna stared down at her feet as though chastised.

Jim placed a reassuring arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said and then after a moment before they both felt too awkward, he added, “So what did he say?”

“Who?… Oh! Lorentz.”

For a little while, she turned her attention back to the ducks as they swam away, back to their island nest, tired of waiting for food from the human interlopers to their world.

Finally, she said “One. Two. Three. He said, one, two, three.’”

The cold of the metal park bench began to seep through Jim’s clothes, chilling the skin of his back and legs, but he didn’t really notice. He was too intent on listening to Adrianna as she explained her theory of why the second Slip had failed to occur, even though the team had also failed to send the preventative tachyon signal. Even stranger, was the fact she had heard the voice of the project’s lead scientist emanating from the project receiver. The owner of that voice had already been dead for close to ten minutes by his estimation, destroyed along with the transmitting equipment in the fiery explosion of the bomb.

“You remember, a few days before the experiment was due to commence I showed you the data I had pulled from the harmonic? Do you remember the graphic I used to display the data?”

“Of course,” said Rebecca, “it looked like a DNA helix.”

“Exactly! And the more I worked on it, the more frequencies I extracted from the harmonic, the more it looked like DNA.”

Jim gave a little chuckle, “You mean you’ve detected the DNA of the universe?”

Adrianna didn’t laugh. “Well I wouldn’t go so far as to jump to any conclusions… yet. But I would say there seems to be a strong similarity between the genetic makeup of life and the equivalent genetic structure of the universe.”

Jim and Rebecca glanced at each other.

“But that’s ridiculous,” said Jim. “There must be a thousand reasons why the information could be interpreted that way.”

“Of course there are. And I’ve gone over them all and none of them work. None… of… them …” Adrianna paused as if considering whether she felt them worthy of sharing some secret knowledge. Apparently satisfied that they were, she added dramatically, “… except for one.”

“Well, come on then,” said Rebecca. “What’s the answer?”

Again, there was a long pause before the girl-scientist spoke, this time her voice was filled with a reverent awe at her own discoveries. “You both remember what a DNA helix looks like? It’s a strand of carbon and nitrogen molecules with a helix of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon phosphate-ester chains running around it.”

Adrianna took a deep breath before she continued. “Now imagine each of those molecules is an alternate reality or alternate universe, clustered together in groups with similar but unique alternate-universes, all of them swirling around the main strand of a shared timeline.”

She let the idea sink in for a moment, and just as Jim seemed about to object she continued with her explanation.

“Now, each of those clusters of alternate universes—similar in most respects to its neighbors—is touching others within its cluster, overlapping if you like, and it’s through these overlaps that the other tachyon signals we were picking up at the lab managed to escape. They filtered through into our universe through the overlaps, but they don’t belong in our universe. I called them vagrant - particles because they wander from one universe to another. Remember how they were so similar to the signals that we sent? Except there were some minor distinctions in variance and frequency?”