John Schettler - Nexus Point

She realized that moment would make an end of the world as she knew it—as she thought it to be all of her life. They had only just begun to meddle with eternity. The first breach of faith had been the harrowing mission to the Hejaz to reverse the Palma catastrophe. The equipment held together long enough for Paul and Robert to pull it off and make it safely home. She spent weeks debriefing the two travelers to try and ascertain just exactly what they did to alter the Meridian. After months of speculation and additional research, they still did not know. The Outcome was clear and unequivocal: Palma never happened, and Paradox had been averted by the narrowest margin—largely through the efforts of unseen counterparts in the future.

She tried to imagine them, wondering what year they had come back from and what the time travel project must be like there now after their success. Were they reveling in their time, jubilant with the new life they had created by preventing those towering wave sets from smashing the Eastern Seaboard? Every time she tried to join in that celebration the fear emerged in its place. Kelly nearly died, and there were hundreds of thousands of lives that were saved—probably millions. The future travelers had been desperate to reverse Palma and save those lives. What horror played itself out in that alternate thread of time—the thread in which her life first began?

Only a handful of people, those that were safe in the Deep Nexus during the mission, would ever know what that older world was like. She was one of the knowing few, along with Kelly, Robert, Paul and the technicians that had been with them at the Arch complex that night. It seemed that there was a definite sphere of influence around the Arch that had remained stable and protected when the transformation came about. Every thing had changed, even the lab equipment and furniture had been subtly altered. She looked at the desktop at this workstation and saw that the nick in the corner where she always set her teacup down, was no longer there. Things changed in a Nexus, said Paul, but not living beings —not living memories. The temporal consciousness and cell-based memories of those protected in a Nexus Point were the one thing that remained unaltered. And when we die, she thought, then no one will know what happened here.

The fear returned to her with that thought, pulsing up again from the pit of her stomach and setting off that anxiety ridden adrenaline reaction. Every day she had lived out since the mission ended had been a battle with that fear. She kept opening cupboards and peeking into the corners of her home, as if she was afraid she would find something missing, changed, altered, and gone forever. Yet everything seemed the same. The world she was living in now was virtually identical to the one she had been born into. That made sense, she reasoned, because the real changes would be caused by all those hundreds of thousands of lives that were not extinguished last May. They were all alive now, going about jobs, consuming food and energy, procreating, writing stories, discovering the daily business of their lives. With each and every act, even something as simple as the stirring of a spoon in a cup of tea, the Meridian was changing course and veering off in a direction it was never meant to reach. Now that she was being swept along in that gathering torrent of change, she would never recover the timeline of the world she had been born to. Everything would seem quite normal, quite the same here, just a few short months after Palma was prevented.

The changes were remarkably minor in these first days—and she looked with increasing diligence as the time ticked by. There were a few books that had been moved to different shelves in her library. The arrangement of items in a desk drawer was subtly altered. Yes, she had an uncanny visual memory for things in her own private world. Any odd little ripple from the stone they had dropped in the still waters of time would be noticed by her careful eye. One of her vases had a crack in the rim, and then there was this missing nick in the desktop here at her workstation. A little extra wear and tear in one place, a little mending in another—almost as if time was making sure to balance her books. This would be easy labor for her, she thought. Years from now, however, when one of the lives salvaged from the catastrophe of Palma did something truly significant, then Mother Time would have her real work cut out for her.

Yes, the differences would just be beginning now, but there, in that far-flung future she could only imagine, things would be drastically different—entirely new. Even as she had been scouring the corners of her world to root out the slightest hint of alteration, they would be overwhelmed to look out on the world they had brought about when the Nexus finally dissipated on their end of the operation. I’ll bet they’ve been spending the last few months just taking it all in, she thought.

How would it be? They could go to the nearest library and find hundreds of thousands of books—all entirely new—resting quietly on the dusty shelves! How could they possibly take that all in and own it as a world they could live in again? She realized that the elite few who found themselves in a Nexus Point of change would become lost, gypsy souls in a world of their own making, but one where they could never truly be at peace.

That thought replayed her reverie on Shakespeare, and all the arguments she made to Nordhausen when they had considered what to do with the project. “Don’t you realize how fragile this all is,” she remembered telling him. “Do you want to reach for Othello and find it gone, different, changed?”

“Ah,” he had countered, “But what if I find something new! Wouldn’t that be just as significant! What if I were to find another play!”

Maeve remembered how she had left the meeting that night and hastened over to the UC Berkeley library. She ran up to the literature section and went storming down the aisles with the anger of her argument still fresh in her eyes. The poor grad student who happened to be in the English Lit section saw her coming and seemed to skirt aside as if a freight train had been bearing down on him. Maeve tramped up to the stacks and snatched every last volume of Shakespeare’s work while the lad just gaped at her with a slack jawed expression on his face. She was going to check—every play, every line, every word.

Six hours later she had satisfied herself that everything was in order. Nordhausen wasn’t going to find another play. They were all there, all thirty-seven of them, and though she didn’t have quite the time required to read each one, she had gone to the heart and soul of them all, and found Shakespeare living happily in the verse. Nothing was missing; nothing seemed out of place; nothing jarred or lacked the luster, artistry and passion of his expression. Shakespeare was safe. His words had been written long before T.E. Lawrence ever had the chance to read them. The change made in the Meridian had occurred in 1917. Everything before that time was unaltered.

The argument with Nordhausen flared up from time to time. They went round and round, but Maeve persisted. The time project was too dangerous a thing to leave intact. The Arch should be shut down—dismantled—and the research locked away or destroyed. Even as she pressed her arguments home, however, she knew how futile they would be in the end. Mr. Graves’ knock on Nordhausen’s study door that stormy night in May had already made a mockery of them all—and Robert let her know that fact had not escaped him one evening over coffee.

“You know we can’t keep this covered up for long, Maeve,” he said. “Otherwise how could Graves drop by that night, eh?” Just like atomic power before it, they could not purge the knowledge of time travel now that it had been found to be a practical reality. The cat was out of the bag.