Майкл Салливан - Deep Magic. Fourth Collection

“Because the past is what it sees.” Dr. Marcus stood behind her. “When we point the imager at the wall, it shows us, not what’s behind it, but what was behind it a day ago, or a week ago.” He looked down at Laura. “Because terahertz waves are not light waves at all, but echoes of light.”

He smiled.

“Laura, our wonderful machine is detecting echoes of time.”

Another year later. Time operative Laura Ashcroft sat in the Project T operations room, her heart pounding with excitement as she rolled up her trouser leg to inject herself with the special steroid solution that kept her blood healthy. The painful prick of the needle barely registered through her euphoria. It was her turn next! In her mind she was already inside the now fully functioning imaging chamber, standing on top of Mount Everest, or watching the takeoff of the first manned mission to Mars from Cape Canaveral seven years ago.

Last week the operatives had gone back in time nine years.

Today they were trying ten.

The lights on the front of the chamber suddenly flashed in unison.

“What the hell!” Dr. Marcus stepped towards the chamber door. “What’s Ben doing? He’s stopped his trip early.”

The steel door whooshed open. Ben stood inside.

“They saw me,” he said. “The people in the time echo. They saw me.”

“What?” Marcus roared. “Ben, that’s not possible! The time echo is just a synthetic re-creation of a past moment . . .”

Ben held out his hand.

“I picked this up,” he said. “Look, Dr. Marcus. I picked this thing up . Inside the echo. I brought it back with me.”

Marcus stared. Clutched in Ben’s hand was a mini mainframe computer, twice the size of a human hand. Mainframes as large as this no longer existed.

They hadn’t existed for ten years.

“It’s not just an image,” said Ben. “Dr. Marcus, the chamber is warping the barrier of space-time. If we warp it enough, if we go back far enough, we don’t just see the echo, we can touch it.”

The Project T meeting room, one week later.

“The quasi-optic chamber is the most powerful espionage device possessed by anyone on earth,” Dr. Marcus said as he stood at the head of the table. “It must be used for the defence of the country, but only ever for that purpose. No trip must ever go back far enough in time to allow the slightest risk of time altering, except in the most urgent of circumstances. The missions must be performed only by time operatives who are so professional, so perfectly trained, that they will sacrifice their own lives rather than commit any act that might alter the past in any way.”

Dr. Marcus’s gaze finally fell on Laura.

“All time operatives must be in perfect health.”

“Penny for them.”

Ben’s black-suited form slowly materialised from the swirling fog of Laura’s memories.

“Just thinking,” she said.

“You do far too much of that,” he replied. “And we, Miss Ashcroft, are now both off duty. I could do with a drink. Want to go to the canteen?”

Laura gazed at him. “No,” she said. “I have stuff to finish in my office.”

She clicked the steel bolts on the operations room door, then walked along the corridor to the small partitioned room where she had spent most of her life over the past five years. A long desk stood in the corner, a large screen was mounted on the main wall. The office also contained a small but very comfortable fold-up bed. In the early days, when she was working on the design of the quasi-optic chamber, Laura had frequently spent the night here on the small bed, instead of wasting time making the trip across London to her apartment.

Laura sat at her desk and immediately tuned her digibracelet to the World Web. A picture of a large house appeared on the screen, a grand old country manor, surrounded by thick woodland. Laura had found the picture in the World Web archive. It was a photograph of Ashcroft House, taken in the late nineteen nineties. Laura’s family had lived in the house for generations, until just thirty years ago when the Ashcrofts had finally been forced to sell it to land developers. The beautiful house had been destroyed, and in just two decades, the whole section of Cornish countryside where it had once stood had disappeared, replaced by a complex of skyscrapers. Laura often liked to look at the house, fantasising about what it would have been like to have spent her childhood there. She would sometimes lose herself for hours, yearning for a past she had never known.

She pressed a button on her digibracelet, and the house was replaced by a series of photographs, men and women dressed in increasing degrees of antiquated clothing. The oldest picture was of a mustached, middle-aged man wearing the uniform of the British Army during the First World War. The most recent was of Laura’s father. Laura drank in the faces of her ancestors, watching the distinctive features, with their high cheekbones, repeating themselves backwards through time. Her family, her blood relatives, separated from her only by the thin glass of the screen, and by the impenetrable gulf of time.

I wish I could just reach out and touch you, she thought.

She stayed in her office until the sounds of voices and passing feet had ceased. Long after she should have gone home for the evening, Laura walked by herself to a corridor adjacent to the time chamber. At the end of the corridor was the door to a vault. Laura typed in the security code, and the door slid open. She stood for several minutes, staring at the mini mainframe that Ben had brought back with him during the last ever “official” time experiment. It was kept here in the vault, hidden from the eyes of the world. It was a space-time anomaly, a piece of unreality.

And has there ever been any consequence? thought Laura. Was an alternative timeline created? Did the entire space-time continuum crumble to pieces? Did a gigantic black hole open up and consume the whole of existence? No. And if the damn thing is really so dangerous, why didn’t the ministry destroy the chamber? Why is it okay for them to still use it, as long as they just hide this thing away and pretend it doesn’t exist?

One single object, brought forwards through time. A tiny, insignificant lump of matter that had no consequence on existence whatsoever.

Just like blood. A tiny amount of blood, taken from a human body. The body it was taken from wouldn’t even notice. How could there be any consequence to such a tiny act? The answer was that there could not. Not for the past. Not for the person she took it from. But a massive consequence for her, here, in the present. Because one single drop of blood is all that she would need to cure her of her illness for the rest of her life.

One tiny drop of blood. And then no more injections. No more pain. The ability to live a full and active life.

Laura resealed the vault. She went back to her office and pretended to debate with herself for the thousandth time whether she was really prepared to go through with it. But deep down she knew. Deep down she had decided a long time ago.

It was nearly midnight when Laura returned to the Project T operations room.

When the computer log records were checked tomorrow, they would know what she had done. The ministry would have no choice but to sack her. She didn’t care. She had made her choice. The blood would give her life. Real life.

Laura opened the door to the chamber.

She stripped out of her overalls and put on the smallest of the black suits hanging on the wall. The suits were just one of the many precautions the time operatives had to take. If their presence were ever detected by the occupants of a time echo, they would be observed as a formless black figure. In the dark they probably would not be seen at all. Whenever possible, every time experiment took place at night.