MindThrust

Frank, my intern, turned up twenty minutes late. I heard the clatter as his trail bike hit the dirt before he crashed through the door.

"Sorry! Puncture on the way up. That track rips the crap outa my tires."

"You should buy yourself a 4x4," I advised.

"On what you pay me?"

"You'll thank me when we're famous."

It was true that Frank worked for a pittance plus hopes of glory. Setting up the mountain-top cabin as a radio observatory had demolished my life savings, and my SETI grant hardly covered the fuel bills for my generators.

I was contracted to detect transmissions coming from deep space, but that was just my day job and the computer handled most of it. I'd applied to be a Principal Investigator with SETI because it left me plenty of time for the pet project Frank was helping me with. The project I'd christened 'MindThrust'.

Ever since reading H.G. Wells as a kid, I've been fascinated with the idea of time travel. I'd spent half my life trying to figure it out. But I'd come to the conclusion that physical time travel was impossible. Instead, I was working on projecting sensory perception into the future. My theory all hinged on accelerating cerebral neurons, which have a tiny electrical charge, to more than light speed using a ring of powerful electromagnets. The ring was wrapped in a layer of tan-coloured foam padding. The first time Frank saw it he said it looked like the world's biggest doughnut. We'd run the electronics with rats in the headspace and none had been fried up to now. But today was to be our first human trial, and I was the guinea pig.

The doughnut was bolted to the wall above an antique barber's chair at the back of the lab. It was shaped to fit my head, which ruled Frank out as first reserve. His head was the size of a basketball.

Two large screens on the front wall displayed news channels. Both showed the time and date in the bottom corners. If the MindThrust worked as planned, I should be able to see the screens at a future date. I was hoping to see some significant events occurring. Frank was hoping I'd see the winning lottery numbers.

I settled myself in the chair and slid my head inside the doughnut.

"You've left your last will and testament where I can find it?" Frank joked.

"Yeah, don't worry. I've left you enough for a puncture repair kit."

I flicked the power switch on the armrest before the butterflies in my stomach turned into vultures.

The first thing I saw was myself.

The guy sitting at the desk holding his head in his hands didn't look any older than me except for a monkish bald patch. I was hugely relieved to know I was going to survive the test, even if my hair follicles didn't. But my relief turned to shock when I read the words marching across one of the screens in block letters;

'NEW YORK OBLITERATED ... MOST EUROPEAN CAPITALS DESTROYED ... NO NEWS REPORTS COMING OUT OF SOVIET UNION OR CHINA ...'

The other screen was showing shaky images of flaming buildings and violent explosions accompanied by a feverish commentary. The date in the corner of the screen was 5/4/2034 and I caught the words 'alien attack' and 'Canis Major'.

And then I woke up in intensive care.

I'd been in a coma for two weeks. They told me the first thing I mumbled was; 'what's the date?'

May 10th 2025 was the answer, and it was a month before I was discharged and deemed fit enough to go back to work. Frank had kept me up to date with our SETI work during visits to the hospital. I hadn't missed much. A few microwave bursts in the vicinity of Andromeda but they'd been attributed to dying stars.

I told Frank I couldn't remember anything about the test and, in truth, I wasn't sure if what I saw had been real or a coma-induced nightmare. He'd described how, seconds after flicking the switch, I'd started jerking around like a jackhammer. He'd turned the power off and pulled me out of the chair. I was still breathing but unconscious. He'd bundled me into my jeep and driven me straight to A&E.

By the end of the summer, I'd dismissed my experience as nothing but a hallucination and decided that my MindThrust project was a reckless failure.

We dismantled the machinery and I began working on new theories while we carried on with our monitoring duties.

And then, a few months later, we picked up a signal from deep space.

"Look at this!" Frank yelled.

The computer screen was going crazy. Row after row of symbols appeared, scrolling at breakneck speed.

"Get a fix on it," I told him and he started triangulating our receivers.

"It's coming from the region of Canis Major," he announced triumphantly.

The mention of Canis Major brought it all back. The scenes of destruction. The sight of myself looking distraught. It all fell into place. In my vision of the future, Frank and I must have responded to the signal and made the aliens aware of life in our neck of the galaxy. We had paved the way for the alien invasion years later. But now I had the chance to prevent any contact that would jeopardize the Earth.

"Don't get too excited," I said. "It's probably a glitch in our systems. Go and call the other monitoring stations to see if they're detecting anything unusual."

He dashed to the landline in the office as I watched the message repeatedly filling the screen. Reaching behind the computer, I loosened the input connectors, then I highlighted the entire file and pressed delete. I would fake a more convincing fault when Frank went home.

"Only us!" Frank said jubilantly when he returned. "No one else has picked it up. We're gonna be on all the talk shows!"

I whispered a silent prayer of thanks ... before I broke the bad news.