Time Virus

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Date: Launch minus five years
Location: Thirty kilometers south of Baghdad

Allison Kirby had been working on her section of the dig since sunrise, three hours ago. This was the third and final month of her thesis project, not that she wanted it to end. Every since she was a little girl, archeology had been the obvious choice for her. Her tom-boyish curiosity with caves, dinosaurs and anything that involved getting her hands dirty had not only stayed with her; it had become a passion.

Today, the attractive twenty-five year old woman was still digging, still covered in dirt and still looking for the next cool prehistoric bone or fossilized plant. At the end of this week, she would return to the states and write her paper; the doctoral thesis equivalent of “How I spent my summer.” The problem was that she really didn’t have much to write about. This was a mature site where just about everything had been picked over decades before. She sometimes found herself dusting off a bit of old pottery wondering, “How many others have dusted off this same chip over the years?” Her paper would be much more expansive if she were to write about what she didn’t find.

As she rose to go get a drink of water, she stubbed her toe on something protruding out of the ground and nearly tripped. People trip all of the time. People do, but not Allison, not here in a pit she had surveyed in detail. She knew every nook and cranny of this small eight foot square shallow hole in the Iraqi soil. There was nothing to trip over.

She glanced down and could not believe her eyes. There, sticking a clean six inches out of the ground was the tip of a very large bone. Her heart raced as she considered what this meant. She had found something new! The implications for her thesis were significant but relatively unimportant. She had found something new! She raced off to the main tent to get the dig director. It never occurred to her, at least not right away, that there was something strange about finding something where nothing had been before.

Date: Launch plus 10 years
Location: Deep Space onboard Earth Needleship Schrödinger

Jason became aware three days before the end of the fusion burn. He remained intra-emulsion until the reactor had completed its ten-year shove and acceleration dropped to zero. Had he emerged any earlier, the g-forces would have ended the mission in an instant. Such was the nature of the weakest link, the biomass life support device for the onboard computer.

Neo-Jason scanned his virtual instruments to make sure he was where he was supposed to be. All systems were operating as planned. He was presently travelling at ninety-eight percent of the speed of light. Time dilation effects had become noticeable. To him, he had been traveling for a little more than six years. Back on Earth, they had watched him launch ten years ago. Soon, in a matter of days, everyone he had known back home will have died of old age. He considered this for a moment before discarding it as irrelevant to the mission at hand. With his mind, he entered the Probability Chamber and began to sort through the trillions of possibilities that his future held for him; each represented as a probability curve. His first task was to collapse every curve that did not include his going faster than the speed of light. With that as his single goal, he got to work.

-Retrospection-

The best minds in the world had huddled together for months once the attack on earth had been confirmed. In the end, they had to admit that they were incapable of “ramping up” their intellect to the point where they could fight back effectively.

How could one fight off an invasion that was occurring a million years in the past? Time travel was the only solution. This had given birth to the Probability Chamber. There was only one problem, man wasn’t smart enough and computers weren’t fast enough to make it work. The once-upon-a-time Colonel Jason Briggs was the solution. No computer could come close to matching the speed and capacity of a human brain. The problem was the brain tended to be lazy and unorganized, doing barely more than just enough to keep the body from starving. The nano-bots would “wake up” the brain; get it energized and organized. That single, fully utilized brain would hopefully be enough.

Date: Launch minus four years
Location: University of California, Berkeley

Doctor Allison Kirby looked up from her desk at the sudden appearance of two unexpected uniformed guests. “Can I help you?” she asked not sure whether to be put off or intimidated by the square-jawed soldiers.

“Ma’am, we understand that you are in possession of a large mammalian skeleton of unusual characteristics.” It was clearly a statement of fact rather than an implied question. He obviously knew about her find last year. No big deal. It had been in all the papers.

“I assume you are talking about the fossilized whale I found in Iraq last year. I don’t know that I would call it unusual other than it is completely intact. What is this all about it?” she asked leaning towards an indignant, aggressive posture yet not quite sure she could pull it off. These men meant business.
“It is true, is it not, that the fossil was too young to have been deposited there by ocean waters?”

“Yes, that is an issue that we have not yet resolved. Carbon dating puts the whale’s age at around one million years and yet, during that period, there was no ocean within a thousand miles of Iraq. We have some theories but nothing that holds water,” she said; her attempt at a pun slide away unnoticed.

“Please take us to see your whale. It is a matter of national, no world, security.”

Forty-five minutes later, the military men left the building; their findings, unfortunately confirming their worst fears. The whale had died of radiation poisoning. The isotope, still active within its bone structure was detectibly decaying even as the fossil sat in a cavernous warehouse on the Berkeley campus. This was the sixty-fifth case of such contamination in the last ten months.

The problem this phenomenon presented was two-fold. First, the isotope was not capable of occurring naturally. It had to have been manufactured. Second, the fatal radioactive contamination, while apparently something that happened in the past, was starting to show up in the future. In every instance, the contaminated animal or artifact appeared where nothing had been before. It was as if someone, or something were going backwards in time and adding this to our history.

The first dead apes were found two weeks ago. Their skeletons were less than six-hundred thousand years old. Kill enough apes and there would be nothing left for man to evolve from. Mankind had to act before this new past caught up with him.

It was another year before the day of mankind’s demise had been established. Based on the increasing rate of contamination and the decreasing age of the fossilized finds, scientists were able to deduce the date, in local time, when the last ancient ape would die.

On December 21st, 2012, man would be no more. The cause of death, as if anyone would be around to write out the certificate, would read, “Failure to evolve.”

Focus shifted to the south. Why did the Mayan calendar end on the very date that man would cease to be? What did they know that no one else seemed to even be able to guess? The trail led back nearly three thousand years.

Word count for chapter 2 is 1,292

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