If you’re reading this, I want you to know in advance that this is not a warning. That would imply that there was a chance, however small, of changing things. There isn’t. The flow of time cannot be altered. What’s going to happen is meant to happen and there’s nothing that can be done about it. I’m sorry for that, honestly I am. Think of this as more of a heads-up than anything else.
I can’t get into too many specific details, partly because the nature of my work is extremely confidential, but also because the project is so under-wraps, with so many layers of classification, even I don’t know exactly how it works.
I’ve give you the short version. I work as a researcher on an extremely top-secret government-funded project concerning the nature of time travel. Thirty years ago, scientists discovered a rather crude but effective way to open a portal in the temporal flow of the time-space continuum. Before you get too excited, there’s catch…well, actually, several. First, physical time travel, i.e. transportation, is not possible; at least in any practical way we have yet to discover. In other words, you can’t go back in time and stop the Kennedy assassination or travel back to Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary on April 20, 1889 and kill baby Adolf Hitler, thus preventing WWII and the Holocaust from ever happening. It doesn’t work that way, folks.
(I guess, technically, calling it time travel would be a misnomer. It’s more like a window you can look into. We can observe, but not interfere.)
Another cold, hard fact you have to face is we can only look into the future, not the past. Turns out time travel is a one-way street after all. The flow of time only goes in one direction: the future. If there’s a way to reverse it, again, we have yet to discover it.
Thirdly, you can’t pick a specific date and time in the future to observe. The exact coordinates cannot be pinpointed. The time-flow cannot be directed. Essentially, anytime we open the portal, it’s a craps shot on what year we’re going to be looking into.
Fourth and lastly, remember what I said at the beginning about how the flow of time can’t be altered? You ever hear of the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle? Basically, it states that past events can’t be changed because any actions taken by a time traveler were part of history all along. In other words, by trying to prevent something from happening, you would just indirectly cause it to happen. Well, we learned the hard way that similar rules apply to the future as well. We learned that when we tried to stop 9/11 from happening after we witnessed the Twin Towers collapse in ‘97…but I’m not going to get into that. Again, don’t ask me to explain exactly how the physics of this all works; I don’t fully understand it myself, and even if I did, trying to describe it to you in layman’s terms would probably take weeks and just leave you even more confused than before.
Observing the future is just a way to gain insights; a useful guide. Like looking out the window in the morning to check the sky and see if you need to take an umbrella with you to work.
Last month, we opened the time portal to do some standard research and we learned something horrible.
The portal is essentially a window that gives one a view of what a specific location in the world will look like in the future. Like the exact date, we cannot choose a location; it’s different each time, the luck of the draw.
Based on what we could see, and the language the passersby were speaking, we guessed we were on a busy street in a city somewhere in India; maybe Mumbai.
We studied the portal for any clues to narrow down the location and the date. This basically amounts to surveying our limited point of view for something to set a concrete time frame for reference. Sometimes we hit a dry hole; something extremely vague and unhelpful like a scenic perspective of the mountains of Nepal or the barren wastes of what might have been the Nabid Desert or even something as bland and prosaic as a view of an anonymous residential street in Anytown, U.S.A.
But sometimes we get lucky, and this was one of those times.
As it happened, by an extremely lucky coincidence, the time portal happened to open facing the display window of an electronics store with a number of flatscreen TVs facing the street, all of them on. Most of them were tuned to various channels that offered nothing useful to us - Hindi soap operas, sports programs, game shows - but the largest screen in the center of the display was turned to WION, an English-language international news network.
We couldn’t hear what was being said; sound doesn’t travel very well through the time portal, but we were close enough to see the lips of the newscasters speaking and that was enough. Several of our researchers were trained to read lips specifically for this purpose and we got them to study the broadcast and transcribe what was being said for analysis. From what they could determine, the date we were looking at was sometime in June of 2033; merely eleven years from our current present. There wasn’t much of importance to note; the usual world turmoil and strife, political scandals, accidents, natural disasters, environmental concerns. The only thing really worth noting was the name of the (then) U.S. President which we dutifully jotted down for our records. Nothing too out of the ordinary. We were about to shut down the portal for the day…when things changed.
The newscaster was suddenly replaced with a breaking news bulletin. An official from NASA was speaking at a press conference. A large, unknown object had been detected moving in our solar system three weeks before, just beyond the orbit of Neptune. At first scientists had presumed it was an asteroid or a large meteor. There had been interest, but no great concern because it had not seemed to be in a trajectory that would have aligned with Earth. But then the object had changed its course. And it had begun moving at a much greater speed than before. Both the velocity of the object and the manner in which it was maneuvering were strange; it didn’t seem to be hurling through space randomly. Its movements and speed were controlled and precise; seemingly deliberate. As if it were sentient and moving of its own accord. Scientists had watched with disbelief as it sped through our solar system at a phenomenal rate, crossing millions of miles of distance in an unfathomably short amount of time, passing the outer planets one by one: Neptune…Uranus…Saturn…Jupiter. It was now just about ten million miles beyond Mars…and still coming.
And after Mars…there was Earth.
Scientists estimated it would reach our planet in another week. They didn’t know what it was or where it had come from…but it was coming our way.
Our lip readers turned away from the portal, looking at me and my colleagues, bewildered and frightened.
I quickly summoned the Head Researcher to the lab and told him what was going on. At first he couldn’t believe what I told him. When I finally convinced him, his normally stoic demeanor faltered and he looked deeply disturbed for a few seconds. I believe it was only with an extreme force of will that he was able to retrieve his emotionally detached attitude and maintain a clinical facade. He was silent for a moment, considering what to do. Finally he made a decision and got on his phone to our government benefactors. One thing you should know is that it takes a great deal of energy - and money - to generate the time portal. As a result, our cost-effective SOP was to only use it for short periods of time, usually just an hour or so, once or twice and week, make our observations about the future, record any useful data, and then shut it down. But this was an extremely unique and serious circumstance. If we closed the portal, we would never be able to return to this exact moment. We had to see how this played out, follow the ongoing situation to its conclusion, however long it took, funding be damned.
And once the money-handling brass were briefed on what was happening, they agreed. It was decided that the portal would remain open indefinitely. We monitored it in teams, around the clock, staying on top of the situation on the other side (time in the portal passes in the same linear fashion as the present so when we see events transpire in the future they pass in real time).
It went pretty much as you would expect when a thing like that happens. There was the prerequisite world-wide shock and panic, people rioting in fear, the religious types and doomsayers screaming about the end of the world and Judgement Day, the “tinfoil hat” conspiracy theorists and their half-baked notions that it was all fake and the government was just trying to control the masses using fear and psychological warfare, the UFO nuts claiming an alien invasion was eminent, the crazy redneck survivalists stockpiling weapons and food, people buying bomb shelters, talk of terrorism, mass suicides, the military declaring martial law, the government futilely pleading for calm and trying to maintain a sense of order in a world that had gone insane overnight.
A week passed. The object got closer to Earth. The world waited and watched.
Finally it got close enough for our satellites to get a clear image and we - them in the future and us in the present - got a close enough look at it.
It wasn’t an interstellar spacecraft or a flying saucer or an alien satellite. If it had been any of those things we might have been prepared to accept it because it would have been something we had been expecting. No, it was much worse than any of those. We didn’t know what it was, but whatever it was, it was awful beyond description.
It appeared to be an entirely organic structure. Large, irregularly shaped, roughly spherical in form, and black as Obsidian. The surface of the…the thing…was covered in fissures, and protruding from these gaping cracks were what looked like masses of…tentacles. Long, grotesque tentacles that writhed and squirmed all around it, thousands, perhaps millions of them.
Horrified, the governments of the world sprung into action. As it entered our atmosphere, defensive measures were taken. Missiles were fired at the creature, or whatever it was, to no avail. For unknown reasons the missiles detonated prematurely, exploding well before they reached their target. More missiles were fired in desperation, with the same result.
The world watched, helpless and fearful, as it continued to approach…then abruptly stopped. It hovered in our higher atmosphere, above Antarctica, directly above the hole in Earth’s ozone layer, not moving, its journey seemingly at its end.
We waited with bated breath for what was going to happen next, what it was going to do.
It didn’t take long to find out.
The increasingly frantic and terrified newscasters began to report attacks being committed all over the world by strange creatures that were seemingly appearing out of nowhere. People were being killed in the thousands, their bodies torn apart as if by wild animals.
Days passed, then weeks. The reports increased, the killings numbering in the millions. More and more of the creatures were appearing, multiplying rapidly. Then, another horror came to light. Scientists revealed that the creatures…were…or had been...human beings. People were changing, their bodies mutating, becoming monstrous. They lost their higher brain functions, all semblances of human logic and reason. They began to attack anyone within close proximity, including family and friends. The governments of the world were at a loss for an explanation, they could only speculate that the phenomenon was somehow related to the strange, alien orb still floating above the planet. More attempts were made to destroy it, including the use of thermonuclear weapons. All ended in failure. The authorities were unable to contain the mayhem, the militaries of every nation were overrun. Chaos had fully descended upon the world; we didn’t even need the television broadcasts to see it anymore. People would occasionally run past the window of the electronics store in a panic, screaming.
Contact with other cities was lost as they fell silent, one by one. The newscaster, in the last broadcast before the network went off the air, looked gravely into the camera, disheveled and exhausted.
Our lip readers, pale faced and shaken to their own limits of sanity, translated what he was saying.
“Communication had been lost with London, Rome, Cairo, Zurich and Buenos Aires. Los Angeles and New York are in flames. The President of the United States, The First Lady and certain members of Congress and the Senate have reportedly fled Washington, D.C. for a secure bunker in an undisclosed location. I don’t think we can remain on the air for much longer. I…can feel…myself…becoming…strange…my body…I think…I think I’m beginning to change–”
He was interrupted when a grotesque, four-foot-long tentacle, dripping foul black sludge, erupted from his mouth, flailing around wildly. The newscaster, his eyes bulging in terror and agony, could only emit muffled, gargling sounds. His body began to swell, his clothes bursting, the skin underneath splitting, revealing more tentacles beneath.
Then the TV abruptly cut to a black screen with the words “SIGNAL LOST.”
There was no more.
I stared for a long time, rattled. Slowly I turned to face the others crowded into the lab with me, my colleagues, the researchers and technicians, the politicians and military officials. Some of them were trembling, others in tears. Some just stared blankly in shock.
My eyes met those of the Head Researcher. He looked at me grimly. “Shut down the portal,” he ordered me solemnly. I did as I was told.
We have eleven years left, give or take. Make the best use of them that you can. Embrace every precious moment you have left.