John Schettler - 1943

This business about the keys is very intriguing. Clearly they were made in the future. Where else? That would be the only place where they would have had the time to discover the location of all these time rifts and then secure them. Well, Mister Fedorov, I have the means of solving that little riddle for you, and perhaps one day it will dawn on you—my Omega Plan.

Ilanskiy… Yes, that stairway goes both directions. I’ve already gone up once, and was so shocked by what I saw with that nuke over Kansk that I beat a hasty retreat and never went back. Suppose I tried that again, and then found some way to get to the main stairway once I got there. The second floor was damaged, probably from the shock wave when that nuke went off at Kansk, but I might be able to get over to the main stairway.

If I do, I just go down and then the real fun starts. I go right back into the dining room to the base of the back stairway. From there, it’s only seventeen steps up to that dark future everyone is so worried about. Yes… I could go see what has silenced the lips of those men from the future—the key makers, as Fedorov believes.

How very interesting….

They were gathered around the ‘Thread Module,’ as Kelly was calling it now, and to all of them it seemed like the ‘Threat’ module would be a better name. It used to be called the Meridian Track, a large ultrawide flat panel display where the line of the continuum through history was displayed in a long horizontal bar that could be scrolled left or right. Colors indicated the integrity of that track to the history recorded and permanently stored in the Touchstone RAM Database. That was data that had been recorded and securely stored before the team ever attempted their first move in time, a record of the world as it was before anyone ever had the chance to tamper with the past.

The Golem module constantly monitored the Internet, sifting through millions of records, like a hundred thousand Google search bots. What they were looking for were changes and variations, anything that might indicate that something was amiss. If something was wrong, a change in the past significant enough to affect the history as it moved forward, those changes would ripple out, and the tiny outliers of that tsunami would be easily detected.

It might be something as simple as a birth or death record. Mrs. Smith was supposed to have given birth to three children, and now she had four. The Meridian Team called those uninvited guests ‘Zombies,’ the real walking dead, people who were recorded as being alive when they shouldn’t be; when they were never even born. Or John Doe’s record of birth goes missing, and no other evidence of his existence could be found—no driver’s license, social security, credit files, job, marriage or medical records. In that instance, the team called those missing souls “Wraiths.”

It wasn’t just people, though their individual fate lines could be very potent Pushpoints on the course of events. It was also the recorded history, as reported in every newspaper article, news item, or book stored in the data base, and it had damn near everything that had even been published, even scans of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian tablets dating back millennia. If something were found that contradicted an existing record in the Touchstone Database, sometimes simply called the RAM Bank, it would be flagged by the system and the historical point on the continuum would change color.

Yellow would indicate a minor variation that invited investigation to verify the find before being accepted. Amber was a more significant change that had turned up multiple references in discord with the RAM Bank, and that color deepened to burnt orange and then eventually went red as the violations and variations increased. When that line went black, the contradiction was so severe that it heralded chaos, a radical transformation of the meridian capable of altering all the history beyond that point.

But they had never seen this before.

There, as Nordhausen swiped at the touch screen to scroll the line left or right, they could clearly see what had happened. The first event recorded in this alert had occurred in 1908, and zooming in to that year, on June 30th, the most significant event in the recorded history was the fall over the Stony Tunguska River, where something mysterious exploded in a massive fireball that shook seismographs thousands of miles away, and lit the night skies with an eerie glow for days after.

There, in a long vertical column below that date, were links to every other event of any significance in the database. One could scroll down and down for hours on end, reading headlines of major news stories of the day, or finding something as trivial as the recorded news in the Salida Mail, Volume XXIX, Number 8, one of Colorado’s oldest news journals. You could learn that Miss Cornelia Gregg and Miss Isla Harris drove down from Buena Vista last Sunday morning and spent the day visiting with their friends. Alas, Mr. Ned Paquette, while riding his horse to Poncha Springs to attend the ball game received injuries from his horse falling through a bridge, though he escaped death.

Such seemingly insignificant bits of trivia were not always found at the focus point of major changes on the continuum. The fate of Ned Paquette might not matter one wit to the world, then again, it might have mattered a very great deal, had he died in that little mishap when he was supposed to have survived it. Had that variation been found, Ned would have become a Wraith, and his name entered in to a special list that immediately triggered a genealogical search to determine who else was now missing on the branching tree of his offspring. Imagine Adolf Hitler’s mother having such an accident before she gave birth to the man, and the point of this analysis becomes clear.

So it started at Tunguska, something as simple as a change in the arrival time of one of the teams participating in the Great Race; something as simple as a strange name in the guest register that wasn’t there before. Fedorov and others had surmised this was the origin of the disaster without the use of this elaborate tracking and reporting system. It started right there in Siberia, the mysterious impact striking the history like a stone hitting a mirror, and that very instant, a small crack appeared, aligned right along the back stairway at Ilanskiy.

Anton Fedorov heard the crack, for he was right there when it happened, albeit in 1942, some 34 years in the future. But he should not have been there at all. No. That sound should not have turned his head, a deep, ominous rumble that led him towards the upper landing of that staircase. No one should have heard it, or seen the odd glow emanating from the shadows of that stairwell. No one should have been curious enough to walk down those stairs that day.

The rest was history—an altered history of the world that never should have been written. But now the Meridian Team realized what had happened. The man who was there to hear that crack had come off a ship— Kirov —and that ship had slipped through another hole in time because of an arcane conspiracy between a nuclear reactor, a nuclear detonation, and a control rod containing exotic particles that had been mined from sites along the Stony Tunguska River. It was as if the event itself, the thing that came from the depths of space that day, was now trying to call home all the disparate particles it had shed with that terrible impact.

There at Ilanskiy, in that tumultuous hour, a man walked down those stairs to meet the man that christened his ship, and everything changed—everything.

Now the Meridian Team members hunched over the graphic display of those changes, awed by what they were seeing. It was something Dorland had predicted and provided for in the code that ran the display, but not something he ever thought he would see. The Meridian had split, not once, but twice, branching off to create new possible courses in the flow of time. The events caused by the coming of Kirov had been so catastrophic that time itself could not yet choose which of the three lines of fate it might rely on to become the Prime Meridian again, for there could only be one continuum in the end. Zooming and scrolling through the display, the team members found the ship, the officers and crewmen who sailed in it, and witnessed their exploits with utter dismay.