John Schettler - Nexus Point

Maeve was delighted. “Kelly, you’re a genius! Is it only history and political events, or can I query things like religion, literature, art, music and the sciences?”

“It’s the whole damn Internet—or at least the essence of what’s out there as we speak. Ask anything you like.”

“Sounds like this colorized chronology is a good place to start.” Maeve settled into the swivel chair, adjusting the armrests and stretching before she stared at the keyboard. “But how does it work?”

“Just hit the F1 for a general display and enter your dates. Use the TAB key to start a specific query on any given year or year grouping. A menu will come up and you can search for key events in any of the disciplines you mentioned a moment ago.”

“History first,” she rubbed her palms together, her mind beginning to feel its way through the situation, assessing what she needed to do. “I’ll have a look at the last two thousand years or so. Do I enter negative numbers for dates before the Birth of Christ?” A nod from Kelly confirmed that and she thought for a moment. “Let’s see… we had better check in on the Prime Movers first. I’ll go from –1 BC to the present. That will cover Christ, Muhammad, Luther’s Boys and most of the key history that would effect us here.”

“You’ll miss the Buddha,” Kelly noted.

“I’ll get back to him later. For now I want to see if anyone’s fooling around with Western Civ. I’d hate to see the look on old Professor Porter’s face if he has to re-write all his course notes at the University. Those dates will give me a good chunk of Rome, the Byzantines, Barbarian invasions, the rise of the Islamic Caliphates, the Medieval period and everything after.” She had the numbers in and was pleased to see the screen display as it began to trace out a green color bar starting with the first year BC and working forward. She sighed with immediate relief. “Looks like Christ was born in Bethlehem, right on schedule.”

“Halleluiah!” Kelly mimicked a typical television preacher, a bit of a Southern twang in his tone of voice. The chronology made its way slowly forward as the CPUs in the research systems ran comparison checks on the two data banks at the speed of light. The progress still seemed agonizingly slow to Maeve. After about five minutes she had worked her way through the first century AD, her mind ticking off events by recollection. “The Romans look solid,” she said. “Nero, Titus, Hadrian… all looking good.”

The time line continued forward, solid green, to Maeve’s great satisfaction. “Here come the Goths,” she said as the line swept through the second century into the third. “They’ll sack Athens and Sparta any second now.”

“Don’t forget the Persians,” Kelly put in.

“Oh, I won’t. Right now Rome has its hands full with the Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Picts, Scots, Germans and the Huns will show up soon enough. You say all is well as long as I get green here, right?” She pointed at the timeline. “You don’t have any surprises for me, do you, like shades of emerald to lime and so on?”

“Nope. Any variation will go to yellow at once. See that meter in the upper left hand of the screen? It will tick off calendar years, and you can toggle it down to months if you need to take a closer look at something. Any discrepancy will be flagged and put into this box here. Think of it like a penalty box denoting the bad years. You’ll be able to go right to that specific year and initiate a deep pattern search to vector in on the data.”

“God, I just love this Kelly! How did you dream this up?” Maeve was beaming as Alaric the Goth and Attila began to devour the fringes of the Roman Empire. Italy was invaded while she was warming up her coffee and barbarians clotted the Appian Way as she stirred in the cream. Rome fell while she struggled to get the cellophane off a bag of Fig Newtons. By the time she had returned to her seat the Western Roman Empire had come to an end, the Vandals moved in, and the value of real estate dropped considerably in Italy and Sicily. Her line looked perfectly normal, green and solid as the Byzantine Empire began to spar with Persia in the Sixth Century. The Persians soon moved into Syria and overran Egypt as the line moved into the Seventh Century.

“Looks like Muhammad has started things rolling in his neck of the woods,” she said. “The Arabs will be militarizing by now and pushing north into Palestine and the butt of Asia Minor.”

“No problems yet?” Kelly came to look over her shoulder.

“Not if this thing works as advertised,” said Maeve. “Look. While Europe languishes the Islamic Caliphs are spreading their credo like wildfire. The call of the muezzin will be sounding in India to the East and echoing from the cobblestones of Lisbon in the West soon.”

Kelly squinted at the line as it traced through the eighth century. “Looks like Charles Martel stopped them at Tours and Portiers, “he said. “No variations at all, and those were some pretty significant years.” The line was still solid green as it reached 900 on the chronology.

“Expecting trouble?” Maeve gave him a quick glance, wondering what was on his mind.

“Well,” he explained, “given the fact that we set back the greatest blow ever conceived and executed against the West by the Muslim world, I was wondering about other crisis points in that conflict.”

“You mean Palma?”

“Sure,” said Kelly. “Just consider what the world would have been like in the future if we hadn’t stopped those wave sets from smashing the Eastern Seaboard.”

Maeve gave him a nod of agreement. “It’s conceivable that the United States would have been finally eclipsed on the world stage—assuming Europe got off with relatively little damage.”

“Europe would have survived, but with the US literally swept out of its position as the world’s imperial watchdog, the Islamic states may have consolidated in opposition to the European Union.”

“They would have lost their biggest customer,” Maeve put in.

“Hell, California and the entire West Coast would not have been affected by Palma. But they’d have their hands full rebuilding the East for decades to come. I suppose Graves could have told us all about it.”

“Did he?” Maeve raised an eyebrow, realizing that she had violated her own credo in asking Kelly about his brief sojourn with Mr. Graves in the future.

“Nope. He was very tight lipped about the history. In fact, I think they were totally amazed with what happened after the Palma mission. I mean, they were desperate, right? So we have to assume the world was spinning down into something really bad by then. Who knows what was going on. Maybe there was a nuclear war, or some bio-terror plague once these radicals got the bit between their teeth.”

“History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes, said Voltaire.” Maeve raised a finger, gratified that all the ill deeds and foul play were still in order on her screen.

“I like Henry Ford better,” Kelly offered. “History is bunk. He gets right to the point, and I suppose they must have had quite a shock when we ran our little mission. Imagine what it must have been like for them when everything suddenly changed! They would have had an entire new world to walk into, and hundreds of years of history to re-learn.”

“Were they that far ahead in time?” Maeve took one more step out onto the ice, and then promised herself she would stick with the past.

“They wouldn’t tell me,” Kelly finished. “I suppose you would be the first to understand why, Miss Outcomes and Consequences.”