Chapter 03: Briefing
Start reading from the beginning…
Admiral Chan led Val through a secured doorway and into a long hallway. They walked several yards down the hall before Val realized that there appeared not to be any doors in the hall. She looked past Chan to get an idea how long the hall was, but it was difficult to tell.
“It’s a gradual downhill slope,” Chan offered, as he glanced back over his shoulder at her. “You don’t notice the incline very much as you descend, but you feel it in your legs coming back up the other way. It’s a private entry to our lab at the other end of the base. There are moving walkways on the upper level to get us therpe, but I prefer to walk after spending a few hours in flight.”
Val just nodded behind him, although Chan didn’t see, then she asked a question. “Sir, I was wondering about my mission. Isn’t there supposed to be a briefing of some sort?”
Chan stopped and turned. “If you want to know something, you need only ask. I will not guide you any more than you require me to. The briefing will be at your pace and at your request. I daresay, you have spoken up quite sooner than most do.”
Val wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, but it seemed that she was going to be in charge of her own briefing. “What do you mean sooner than most?”
Chan smiled, turned and began walking again. “Arthur was the slowest to receive his briefing. He was in the program for almost two weeks before he asked what his primary objective is. I had begun to wonder if he was just going to lay low indefinitely.” He chuckled quietly.
“You have already told me that my purpose here is to be a pilot,” Val said. “I am not questioning that at all. But I understood that there would be a specific mission for me, not just piloting duties. You invited me to travel through time.” Val was getting impatient now. She expected a briefing before they left Seattle, and here she was hours later, walking down a seemingly endless empty hallway under the lunar base with no idea what she was actually expected to do. “Sir, I want to know what my mission will be.”
“Patience is a virtue, but curiosity even more so.” Chan was silent a few seconds, seeming rather mysterious, and then he continued. “You have been selected to pilot a time machine into the past. There will be some work before you go however, that will hopefully prepare you for what awaits you there. You will be visiting to Earth in the late 1940’s. I want you to make contact with a handful of people, and learn whatever you can about the UFO craze that was happening during that time period. This is a reconnaissance mission. I want you to collect information and bring it back to this time with you.”
“I don’t understand. You can go to museums to research the 1940’s or most other periods of human history. Why do you want to send me there?”
“As I told you, I hold a great deal of interest in extraterrestrial intelligent life. It appears that during the 1940’s there were a great deal of flying saucers sighted, and even a legend of one being crashed into a field in New Mexico. History tells us a lot of things, but truth isn’t always one of them. A mission to the source seems like the perfect opportunity to see how Novikov’s Effect works at great distances.”
Val stopped for a moment, but Chan continued to walk. She shook her head trying to clear her thoughts, and then jogged to catch up to the Admiral. She noticed that the far end of the hall loomed in the distance in the form of a brown door, the only thing of color besides the two of them in this long white corridor. “But I won’t be able to interfere with anything in the past. It’s already happened.”
“Yes, that’s right. But purely observational missions don’t change history, you would merely watch it. Any information you obtain would help us in the future, but you would be physically incapable of actually making any changes. You could not change society, provide knowledge of the future to anyone, or etcetera. It would be physically impossible to do so, or we would have already heard about it in our history books.”
“You want me to bring information into the future though. Wouldn’t that be changing things in the future?” Val didn’t understand how this could possibly make any sense. She was aware that the reason humans had approached time travel slowly was due to questions of paradox. “What if this changes our future? You are saying that our past is already set in stone and cannot be changed, wouldn’t that apply to our future as well then? What would happen to my grandchildren if there is a problem and I don’t return?”
Chan slowed his pace and chose his words carefully. “Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov postulated in the 1980’s that the mathematical likelihood of someone creating a paradox is zero. What that means is you will be physically incapable of changing the past during your mission. Nothing you are able to accomplish while you are there will change anything. If you are successful in bringing new information back to the present, then it will not be able to change the course of our future.”
“Then why go at all? If anything I bring back will not change the future, then what is the point.”
“Cole will help you understand Novikov’s Effect better as you prepare for the mission. In the meantime, just think about it like this: the underlying result of your mission will be a test in free will. If the choices you make in the past cannot ripple through time into the future due to the Effect, then the choices we make now will similarly not be able to ripple through time into the future. It’s easy to see that history affects the present, but we are trying to ascertain the extent to which the present continues to affect the future, or will be able to affect the past.”
Val’s head spun for just a moment, not fully grasping the concept, so she changed the subject slightly. “Sir, does that message you received from Mars have anything to do with this mission?”
“I sincerely hope not,” he replied as they reached the door.
As Chan stepped through the door, he appeared suddenly light on his feet. Val stepped out behind him and felt as if a weight had been lifted from her as well. She shut the door and realized that they were inside another smaller docking bay. It appeared that it was big enough for only one or two vessels, but it seemed to be empty. Docking bays generally had no more or less gravity than the surface outside in order to aid the craft in entering and leaving. A sudden change in gravity can make it difficult to control a ship, so they generally only enter and leave gravity fields when entering and leaving orbits.
Something caught her eye though as being out of place, like a silver pie tin floating in mid-air across the bay from her. She though most people might not even notice it there in the big room, but she was trained as a pilot to look around quickly and notice everything. As she moved toward the tin, it seemed to grow larger right in front of her, and appeared to be closer to the size of a small personal craft as she got halfway to it. She backed away a bit and it shrank again slightly. With every bouncing step forward, it continued to grow until it occurred to her that it was actually very large, a ship unlike anything she had ever seen before. It was a silver disk with no widows or lights on it at all. On closer inspection, the edges of the ship seemed to blend into the surrounding area.
“Be careful,” the Admiral warned from across the bay, “It’s closer than it looks.”
Val bounded to a stop at what appeared to be several feet away from the strange ship, when she suddenly saw her reflection floating only inches from her face, like a holographic mirror projecting her image in front of the ship. She reached out and touched the hologram, but it was solid. Although the craft appeared several feet away, it was physically much closer. “How is this possible?”
“That’s something Arthur will have to tell you about. It’s a way to make the ship mostly invisible by tricking the eye. The body of the craft actually bends light through it, so that the reflection you see straight-on is on the surface, but an angled perspective makes any reflection seem farther away. From 20 yards, the ship is nearly invisible. You noticed it much sooner than I did when I saw it complete for the first time.” Chan let her feel around the exterior of the ship for a moment. “You’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted with your ship later. Let’s go upstairs now.”
Val turned to him to speak, but saw that he was jumping up to a landing about five feet up, and then up again to another. She saw that the landings rose in a circle around the cylindrical bay leading to a door about three stories up. He turned and motioned for her to follow. It took her very little time to catch up to him, since she was in better physical shape than the Admiral was, and then he went through the door ahead of her. She glanced back down and couldn’t see the ship at all anymore. She smiled and remembered that the Admiral had called it her ship. As she stepped through the door, her weight returned with the increase in gravity, and she slumped for a moment before regaining her composure.
“Admiral…” she started to ask what he meant by it being her ship, but never finished her thought.
“Cole, this is the newest member of our team, Valentina Cooper. Val, this is Cole Sydney.” Admiral Chan had just made an introduction that she thought she had been prepared for. Cole needed a shave, and probably a change of clothes, but he was very handsome to her; she thought he was beautiful. Both the sides of his hair and the short peach-fuzz on his face were just starting to go a little gray, while the rest of his hair matched his eyes in a deep shade of brown.
She was at a loss for words, completely caught off guard by his appearance. She stuttered for a moment like a nervous schoolgirl before Cole said simply, “Hi, so you’re the new kid?”
Val didn’t know what to say. So she just blurted out, “Yeah. Hi.” What was the matter with her? She never got like this. For some reason, today seemed to just keep catching her off guard, no matter what she did. She started to blush and turned toward the door as Cole began talking to Chan.
“Mars Colony is being very impatient. They want you to contact them right away. They have sent three messages for you already. I don’t know what’s going on over there, but I have never seen somebody so frantic as that Militia Commander.” Cole handed Chan a TekBoard and turned to Val again. “So I guess I’ll be seeing you around.”
“Um, yeah,” she muttered, trying not to look at him, and hoping he didn’t see her blushing. She pretended she was just looking around the room to save herself the embarrassment.
“Well, come along Valentina. I’ll show you to your quarters. I expect Ms. Audrey will have delivered your belongings in the time we took to get here.” Admiral Chan started walking through the compound. The entire compound appeared to be laid out like a semicircle around the docking bay the ship was in. There was the large lab area they were standing in which seemed to extend halfway around the bay, with various electronics and data centers that Val didn’t fully understand. It appeared there were three halls off the lab. Cole was wandering over to the furthest left of these. A wider central corridor went straight ahead of them. To the right, the third corridor went at a right angle from the left one, making the main center hall seem to run diagonal between them like spokes on a wheel. Chan headed toward the right corridor and Val followed, glad to be away from Cole until she could get a grip on herself.
“What’s down the other halls?” Val asked, trying to not think about her sudden infatuation.
“Cole looked like he was headed toward his quarters down the far hall. The Lobby is accessible down the central corridor, or if you follow the other two corridors all the way to their ends. There are sixteen total living quarters total, eight down each side hall. There are only six of us on the team currently, so there is a lot of space to move around. During earlier phases there were more on the team, but since the ship is completed, we have thinned down our numbers to only what is necessary. Arthur and his Daniel share one unit next door to Cole. Arthur is our engineer, and Daniel is our resident physicist. Lovely couple really, but they are very boring at dinner parties. They met here on the project.
“This corridor leads to the other half of the living quarters. This first unit on the right is empty currently, as it the unit across from it. The next door is Ms. Audrey’s apartment. Your unit is the first one around the corner.” Chan stopped as they rounded the corner and looked concerned suddenly. “Please wait here a moment, and hold this.” He handed her the TekBoard and jogged past the door that was presumably hers. He opened another door a few feet past it. The Admiral stepped inside and left the door slightly ajar behind him as he entered the dark room.
Val took a moment to orient herself a little. The corner seemed to be halfway down the hall, with the lab behind her, and what she assumed was the lobby ahead of her. Another side hall up ahead looked like it went back toward the lab, except it was halfway to the lobby. Chan emerged from the room after a few moments and collected his TekBoard from her.
“Val, I have some immediate matters to attend to. Cole has graciously offered to continue your tour from here.” With that Chan walked ahead toward the side hall, and turned down it, heading out of sight.
Val was dumbfounded. Cole should be at the opposite corner of the compound by now, since they had walked in different directions, and yet he emerged from the room Chan had just come from. “Where did you come from?” she asked, now too confused to be flustered by his presence.
“Val!” Cole exclaimed. He checked his wristwatch for the time and said, “What are you doing back so soon? You aren’t supposed to be back for another hour.”
“What do you mean ‘back’? I just got here! Don’t you remember? We met not five minutes ago in the lab.” Val didn’t understand what was going on.
“Just got here?” Now Cole looked embarrassed. “Oh, um… yeah. Right.” Cole straightened up and became businesslike suddenly. “Well this is your apartment here, then. If you go straight down that hall, you’ll be in the lobby, and beyond the lobby is the public area of LunaBase.”
Val noticed that Cole didn’t seem to want to give her the tour that he had apparently offered Chan. “So that’s the tour, is it?”
“Uh… I’ll tell you what. Meet me at the café across from the lobby in a half hour, and I’ll finish the tour. I… yeah. I need to go now.” Cole scratched his thick beard and shuffled quickly down the hall, leaving Val in awe of what just happened.
A bizarre thought occurred to her suddenly as she reached out to open her apartment door. Was Cole’s beard just longer than it had been in the lab a few minutes before?
