The Time Traveller's Ball (The Erik Midgard Case Files Volume 1)

Chapter 8

VIII

It was not what he had just said. It wasn’t anything he had done. In fact, it was nothing obvious at all. It was just a combination of body language, behaviour and little déjà-vu’s, starting with the few synapses that had fired in the back of my brain when I first saw his face on the hanger floor, gradually building up until they suddenly all made sense and I could see what had been in front of me the whole time.

It was a good thing Hell was standing in front of me when he spoke. Otherwise, he might have noticed me stiffen. I did try to hide my reaction, but my shoulders still turned to ice and my heart rate leapt through the ceiling. I did a sudden mental intake of breath from recognition. It took a lot not to whip out my Unigun and stun shoot him – in the back – right then and there. I calmed myself, and quickly checked where Sebastian Sheol was – talking to Colonel Thor and Zachary Midnight on the other side of the room – which was not good. I needed to take them both together because, if Hell was who I thought he was; there was only one person Sheol was going to be. Right age, right height as well. They both were. I was such a draxing idiot for missing this before…

I killed that thought before it fully materialised. It was one that comes many times in every ChronOps Officers career. Everyone has it at some point in their lives. But for a moment, I just wanted to go back in time and change the past.

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Science fiction is the probably most important genre in the entire canon of literature. We will never know how many times it has saved us from disaster. Because time travel was being written and theorised about (H.G. Wells – 1895) over eighty years before it was mathematically proven (Frank J. Tipler – 1974) and a further ninety before it was first attempted (Deng Khe-Sang – 2046), everyone involved in the first, cautious back and forstep experiments, were well aware of the dangers of paradox creation. The first chrononauts – to whom the Time Traveller’s Ball would have been horrifying – had initially gone back wearing only wearing era-appropriate clothes, avoided populated areas, practised era-speech patterns to perfection and never, ever dropped litter.

            Time and experience inevitably relaxed the rules. Safe exploration limits and interaction levels were codified. The difference between history and the past (what was written about it and what it actually was) was realised – and ruthlessly exploited by UEO’s oil seeders. The dangers of killing your own grandfather and preventing yourself being born were still explained to school children, but with a new confidence in our ability to avoid them. This lasted until the Mercury Disaster of 2702; the first known occasion where a man attempted to backstep and change the past. With horrendous consequences.

            His name has been wiped from history, probably because of his own actions. I for one could never blame him. I understood his reasons too well. The fragments of data recovered from wrecked orbital hypernet satellites revealed he was an UEO space corps officer, based with his family at their oil seeding/drilling base in the Caloris Basin on Mercury, where, shortly before the Disaster, his wife died in an atmosphere accident. He was stricken by grief; and he had access to the base’s backstep equipment. It will never be known what he did, tried or failed to do in the past. There is an urban legend about a student at Oxbridge Luna who suggested backstepping to the hours beforehand and finding out. He was thrown out of the university. Whatever happened in the past is unknown. But the effects it caused were felt very hard in the present.