"We have always been space travelers...We are also travelers in time."
Carl Sagan
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You walk down the hallway, feeling alone and vulnerable, even though you are surrounded by people scurrying everywhere—lab coated technicians, other interns, who are recognizable by the costumes they wear for the time and place they have been assigned to one day visit. Yet, everyone seems to intent, so focused; and you, you’re not really sure where you’re going, just that the Temporal Displacement Chamber is somewhere down this hallway.
You try to remember your first day of orientation. Did they tell you the room number then?
You tried to look attentive as you sat alongside other interns in your cohort. A veteran intern, wearing what looked for all the world like a vest woven out of some sort of animal hair and a leather apron, lectured you for what seemed like hours about the rules and regulations you had to memorize. You perked up when he got to the costume he was wearing.
“You’ll wear an authentic costume from the 'chronoscape,' the time period and geographical location you will visit. It is critical that your costume be authentic in every way. Your mission, and incidentally, your safety, depends on you blending completely in to the chronoscape. You don’t want to be burned for witchcraft because your smartwatch starts beeping to tell you the battery is getting low.”
He got a chuckle from the interns at that. The intern opened the vest he was wearing and stepped in a circle to show it off. “This is made out of camel hair. And it smells like it.” More chuckles.
“Though the costume is otherwise authentic, tucked into a pocket inside my vest is my Chronosensor. Your Chronosensor is your lifeline to the Institute. Lose it and you’ll appreciate as much authenticity as you can, because you’ll be stuck back there. ”
“The tech team is presently working on several updates to the Chronsensor, updates that should make blending into the chronoscape much easier. One of those updates is a local holographic field that would duplicate the cultural norms of the temporal and geographic location. The other is an AI function that would assist you in your travels. With the AI function you’d no longer have to look everything up on up in your Chronosensor—which can be a challenge when you really need it. The AI would suggest information you might need based on its assessment of the situation and danger.” He continued, on, but you lost track of what he said next because you were wondering about that one word, “danger.” But he didn’t elaborate. “However,” he said, “ the holographic field has proven erratic in field tests. No one has ended up in Babylon wearing a pink tutu yet, but it still needs work. And the AI—well, let’s just say the personality matrix has a little too much personality, and leave it at that.”
Like the rest of the cohort, you were curious, and thought about asking about the holograph field, the AI, and especially “danger.” You thought better of it when one intern’s hand shot up and he asked, “What about making changes to the past that might affect the future?”
The instructor gave him a disgusted look. “Didn’t read the manual, did you?” He shook his head, and dust flew off the camel hair vest. “I don’t know why they don’t read the manual before they get here. There’s a whole chapter on temporal drift. If you go back in time and murder Hitler, will that mean no World War Two? Doesn’t work. Believe me, it’s been tried. I won’t go into the math, but in a nutshell, time isn’t fixed, but it is elastic. Can’t make the kinds of changes that will change history. Take the classic paradox: go back and murder your own Grandpa. Go right ahead. I won’t miss you. The fact is, time may be relative, but the past isn’t. Stepping on a butterfly will not cause a hurricane two thousand years later.”
“But, how do you know it doesn’t work? If it had, how would you know?”
“Hitler’s still with us, isn’t he?” He shook his head and walked out, indicating the question and answer period was over. As he walked past, you got a whiff of his camel hair vest. Now that was disgusting.
After that, you hadn’t been looking forward to receiving your costume. Just that afternoon you had learned you were assigned Classical Greece, which you thought meant a toga. You’d only discovered at a later orientation that the Romans wore togas, the Greeks wore a tunic called a peplos. Time travel was going to be more complicated than you thought.
Walking down the hallway you bump into someone in a business suit, which pulls you out of your revere. “Excuse me, ma’am,” you mumble. She frowns at you and turns away without a word. You quickly lose yourself in the crowd. Anyone in a business suit is “ma’am or sir.” Politicians on a goodwill tour to see how the Institute is spending those millions, some said billions, in grant money. Anyone else who was in civilian dress, some in scruffy tees with unkempt hair, some in head-to-toe black, is a professor. They’re always interested in talking to you, even if you’re not going where they wish they could go. You’ve heard the rumor that interns were the only ones who were allowed to travel in time because they were expendable. You corrected yourself. No one ever said, “time travel” around here. It was always “temporal displacement.” You’d also heard a rumor that an intern in a previous cohort had been booted out of the program for calling the Temporal Displacer the “Wayback Machine.”
For your first trip today, you wouldn’t be in costume, though you held your Chronosensor in a tight grip. They’d just given it to you this morning. They kept telling you this was only a practice run. They’d send you back to Athens, 320 BCE, just to get you acclimated to the time travel.
That date was going to be critical to your mission when it started. 320 BCE was two years before Aristotle’s death. Your mission would be to find his library, before it was lost to history in a couple of years. He’d owned hundreds of books, or as they insisted, scrolls, when he died, which was enormous for a private library back then. And many of them would be lost classics, works that had influenced his writing. In his will he’d left the library to Theophrastus, who took over the Lyceum, the school Aristotle had founded. But somehow they’d ended up in the hands of someone named Neleus. Soon after that, they’d disappeared from recorded memory. Your job was to locate that library and photocopy it for posterity with your Chronosensor. Sounded simple.
This trip today was only to acclimate you. They told you that you didn’t have to do anything. In fact, they insisted that you shouldn’t do anything. Don’t interfere. You wouldn’t be there more than five minutes. Don’t do anything, they told you. No, you wouldn’t need your tunic, they told you. You can take your chronosensor along if you want. But you didn’t really need that, other than the built-in TGPS (Temporal and Global Positioning System) that would locate you and bring you back. It was just as well, though you wouldn’t mind that holographic thing. You still hadn’t learned how to tie your tunic. You couldn’t seem to make it stay on your shoulders more than ten seconds, which had caused some problems in the institute cafeteria. Today you were dressed in some Indiana Jones outfit they insisted you wear instead of your own clothes, or, thank goodness, the tunic.
You come to a door that has a sign on it. “Temporal Displacement Chamber.” This must be the place.
[[Open the door]]
“Just stand there. Right on the mark.”
The mark is a piece of tape, scuffed and torn, where the cables and wires crisscross the linoleum floor.
You stand where they tell you, and they ignore you, going about their business.
According to the manual, you should feel nothing at all, see nothing unusual, just feel a smooth transition from this dark room to the sunshine of a hillside outside Athens—which is why you’re surprised when the electronics that line the walls start spark, then explode one at a time. The flames that follow each explosion seem anticlimactic. The whole time, you hear nothing. Don’t feel the heat. But you can see the stunned surprise in the technician’s faces. They are as surprised as you are, more surprised. The room around you goes bright so suddenly you don’t have time to shield your eyes. Still no sound, but the room seems to burst with light.
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You close your eyes against the flash, and find yourself on . . .
[[A hill outside Athens]]
You open them and find yourself on a hill overlooking an ancient city. It could be Athens. Almost no one is around. You see some sheep and one shepherd watching you curiously.
You check your Chronosensor. The date is 431 BCE.
A voice, slightly nasal, seems to come out of nowhere. “Almost a hundred years before your assignment. You’re not going to find Ari books now.”
“What? Who is that?”
“Oh, I got a live one. I’m your Chronosensor AI. I won’t say your wish it my command. And if you call me Siri, even once, I’ll put myself in sleep mode, and then where will you be?
“They told me the AI wouldn’t be functional.”
“We’ll discuss the definition of functional later. Right now, I’d be worried about happened back at the Institute. For convenience sake, let’s refer to it as the Big Bang, since I seem to owe my existence to it. Sabotage you think?”
“The temporal displacement wasn’t supposed to happen that way then.”
“Ah, ‘He can be taught!’ Quick, where does that allusion come from?”
You make a sound that sounds inarticulate, even to yourself.
The AI answers with what for all the world sounds like a sniff, a superior sniff. “We’ll worry about your education, which is sadly lacking, later. Right now, I’d worry about what’s happening on the other side of that hill.
The shepherd who was watching you earlier has been joined by two men in light armor, carrying shields and spears. You know those must be hoplites, but you don’t know much about them. They look menacing as they walk toward you.
For a moment, you’re worried. Then you realize that it doesn’t matter. Whatever happened back at the Institute may have thrown you off course. But, you’ll be pulled back to your own time in five minutes.
“Hoplites,” the AI tells you. “Could be worse. Could be Stygians. Nasty characters, Stygians. I suppose it helps that we’re not in Stygia.”
Then your, still in your vest pocket, beeps, and you realize you’ve been hearing the AI inside your head. You’re not really sure how that’s possible, since you never got an ear implant. But you’ll have to worry about that later. You pull your Chronosensor out. The message icon is blinking.
“All temporal displacements have ceased until further notice due to damage to the Temporal Displacer. Interns in the field should continue their assignments until temporal retrievals can recommence. No additional problems are expected. Repairs should be completed soon. You will be notified when you can be retrieved, which will probably be in a few days at most.”
“If I were you,” the AI adds, I’d look up hoplites. While you’re at it, you might want to check out allusions. Won’t help with the hoplites, but it won’t do you any harm to learn a little something.”
You watch as the hoplites walk warily over to you. The five minutes that were supposed to go by before you were pulled back to the institute, had already passed. One holds grips his spear tightly; the other has his casually pointed in your direction. “Hail, Spartan spy,” the one who looks like he knows how to use that spear says. You wonder if Athens and Sparta are in one of their many wars, but can’t check your Chronosensor because they are watching you.
At that moment, the sky starts to fade and even though the hoplites mouths are moving, you can’t hear what they are saying. You recognize that you are making a time jump, but you’re not sure how or why. Are you going back to the Institute already? Or somewhen else?
[[Somewhen else.]]