John Schettler - Devil's Garden

“Think of it this way. History became editable right about the same time photography and analog video footage went through the evolution to digital imagery.” That was the way she had tried to explain it to him.

“Remember the switch from analogue to digital? It was mandated right across the whole nation. All stations moved to the new digital signals, and from that moment anything broadcast was editable-not in the cutting room the old fashioned way, which could always be found out. No. Not like Richard Nixon blundering about to try and erase those Watergate tapes. Now they could edit pixel by pixel if they wanted to, and they often did, with no one ever knowing about it. We got the term WYSIWYG when computers revolutionized our society, but it seldom ever was. Nobody could ever trust what they saw or what they got in digital video again.”

And so they had put a watch on events, she told him, waiting for the ship to appear and planning to muster the necessary resources to deal with it when that happened. Kirov’s sudden appearance in the Pacific of 2021, and the ship’s return to Vladivostok, was a shock. It was a warning sign. It was something they had been told to expect and fear, and it had finally happened.

MacRae heard his own voice asking the impossible questions now: “Who? Who gave that warning? Are you saying men appeared from the future with information about this ship and its doings?”

“Men? No. Information…yes. That’s what appeared, Gordon. The Watch is a very select organization. There are only twelve active members at any given time. Should one die or be incapacitated, then another is briefed and appointed. We thought we were one of history’s greatest secrets. There have been many secret organizations through the centuries, but we thought we still had this one nicely under our hats-until we started receiving information.”

“From the future?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know that?

“Well… let me put it to you this way. We received a transmission containing video footage on a Friday morning. It was dated four days hence, supposedly coverage of an event the following Tuesday, and it was awful.”

“Awful in what way?”

“Well, Gordon, it was rather shocking to look at. Then we presumed it was just part of the editable world out there, and a damn good video editing prank…Until the following Tuesday when it actually happened.”

“What happened?”

“One of the most dramatic and memorable events of the early 21st century, the 9/11 attack in New York.”

“You’re telling me you received video footage of the event four days before it happened?”

“We did, and it was chapter and verse identical to footage shot for the first time that day by numerous news outlets covering the tragedy-pixel perfect.”

That statement hit MacRae like a rock. He felt staggered, as though he might have actually taken a physical blow. There were tons of conspiracy theories surrounding the World Trade Center attacks, but this one trumped them all. Video footage of the event four days before it happened?

“The transmissions continued,” she went on. “We saw things that were yet to happen, and soon the evidence was overwhelming. The only place it could be coming from was the future. No one could engineer data that would so exactly correspond to actual footage randomly shot at the events in question. It was truly chilling.”

“Lord above… How did you receive these transmissions?”

“The Watch was a creation of the Royal Navy, Gordon. Every one of the early members was a Royal Navy Admiral, save one or two, and I can’t disclose names. But it was an organization rooted in the Royal Navy over the years, very secret. The British government itself didn’t even know about it. Over time selected individuals were recruited as members-people from industry, the sciences, people that mattered and worked to make a difference in the world. What they ever saw in me is beyond my imagining, but I was recruited seven years ago, and I have had certain responsibilities to the Watch I was given ever since.”

MacRae thought back, remembered that time when she had suddenly seemed different, when that distant look appeared in her eyes, a low flame of fear.

“Why do you think it was so easy for me to procure a Daring class destroyer for the company flagship, the ship we’re sitting on right now? The Watch is a naval organization to this day. Its presiding members are always at sea, always minding a given watch, always on patrol. When these signals were received they always came the same way-at night, on a lonesome sea, and on a tightly controlled transmission beam to a ship of the Watch. We tried to trace it to a point in space but that led us nowhere. It was as if the signal just manifested right above the ship. I’ve never been privileged to receive one directly myself, but I’ve seen the footage of several striking events days before they actually happened. They sent us the closing price of every stock on the Dow three days before the big crash, and it was accurate to the decimal point. Someone in the future wanted to find a way to get our attention. Well they bloody well did.”

“Then this warning, Elena. This business about the 48 hours. It has something to do with these transmissions?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“And how does this Russian ship get under the umbrella?”

“We received footage of its re-appearance in the Pacific-actual surveillance video shot by one of our satellites. The thing was this-we got it weeks before it happened. Nobody knew what to make of it, though we knew it was Geronimo -it was Kirov . We went over that footage with a fine toothed comb. No one else in the Navy had it, or knew anything about it. So we took this to be a strong indication that this event was very significant, and we moved a few assets into the region. The Americans cooperated, though they didn’t know what we were really up to. They moved the submarine Key West into the sector we determined the footage came from. Now comes the interesting part…”

“I’m all ears!” He was more than that now. The Captain’s very soul was open and waiting, still trying to believe all that he was hearing.

“We got two transmissions. In the first one the submarine Key West was attacked and destroyed by the Russian battlecruiser, and that ended badly. In the other the Key West survived! The Russians even shipped them a couple boxes of Cuban cigars! We didn’t quite know what to make of that until it struck us that they were trying to tell us that the history was changing. That this was a point of divergence.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a single action that sets the course of events off on a new heading. Sometimes such an event can be dramatic, like 9/11, and other times it might be something truly insignificant, like the cow that kicked over the lantern that started the Chicago fire in 1871-Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, though that has been disputed. Yet it’s still a good example of how a small thing can have dramatic consequences. It doesn’t take anything really big to move things in another direction. Sometimes events have a momentum of their own and all it takes is the slightest nudge at the right place and time, and you get a whole new reality.”

“Astounding…Truly astounding.”

“You might think of it as if a big asteroid were hurtling towards the earth. Trying to stop it at the last minute is almost impossible, but if you can get to it years before it arrives, then all it would take is a gentle nudge to divert its course. Understand?”

“Well enough.”

“We thought the transmission was trying to tell us we were spared the holocaust of a great war that’s hanging over our heads this very minute. We thought that was the gentle nudge. The sinking of Key West was a trigger point in the first version of the files we received. The second version was our salvation, or so we believed at first, but it didn’t turn out that way.”