Caught Somewhere In Time

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Cole tried to think of how to make all of this clear to her. Most people in his project had a better understanding of how this kind of thing works…

His project. He couldn’t even think about it without it bothering him. This was like a nightmare for him, this not knowing. He was going to change that. Cole felt badly that he might be dragging Val down with him; he liked her. She came across as impulsive and a little naïve sometimes, but nice. She was risking her neck for him now, and they could easily be caught and get into a lot of trouble. Probably more than she knew. Humans actively travelling into the past was the one part of his project (there it was again!) that he had hoped to test prior to sending Val on her larger mission. In a way, he was continuing his life’s work still, only he was doing so illegally now.

“You think it was this ship? You think it was me? I’m starting to think this was a bad idea, Cole!” Val was starting to freak out just a little bit.

Cole knew he would have to explain this to her better to calm her down, but wanted to do it once they were in the past. He was a little concerned already that Novikov’s effect had allowed future-Val to approach present-Val so closely that she appeared in the display like that, and he knew this was still all very experimental. He couldn’t have her changing her mind now and trying to find her other self. She was a pilot though, one of the best according to her record, so she was trained to handle a job under pressure. The only thing Cole had working for him right now was pressure. “We need to get into the past, now. We will be safer there. If someone saw us leaving the bay, they could look for us. We are in danger as long as we stay in this time. Once we go into the past, then local time will be before we stole the ship, so no one will be looking for us yet. The longer we stay here in this local time, the more danger we are in. Let’s get moving, and I’ll explain it all once we are safe in the past!”

Cole stood up and moved beside her, ready to help her work the time controls. Val looked him in the face with her beautiful green eyes on fire. She said, “I can fly anything, anywhere, at anytime. I need help flying to anytime however. Copilot me?”

“Sure.” He reached into her display, knowing he would be unable to affect anything in the hologram. He wanted to make sure she understood, but couldn’t afford a long lesson. Hopefully she would be able to figure it out on the fly. “This over here, you will recognize as your vector display. There are short white lines showing this ship on the x-, y-, and z-axis in space. It will display a red line that shows the quickest space-route to your destination once you input one. It will also display a blue line that shows the quickest time-route to your destination. If we are travelling in normal time, like a normal ship, our vector line will be violet, with the fastest route being the same in space and time. This is the first ship that allows the separation of the two headings however, lending two different lines.” The readout was very minimal, with just a small white orb with the axis sticking out of it representing the ship. With no destination given yet, there were no other paths available.

“We need to head to back to LunaBase then, so you can do your digging around. I assume I put in the space route to there,” she spoke as she selected LunaBase in the vector display as the destination. A violet line appeared down from the representation of the ship in the vector display, showing her that she needed to angle the ship down to return to the surface.

“That’s right. See how the line is violet? That’s because the default is to use this ship in normal time. It will never assume that you are going to change times; you have to be deliberate about that.” He motioned down below the space-heading to show Val where to select the time-heading. “These are three displays showing time and date. The first one is the constant, and so is not changeable. It tells you the date as if this ship had never travelled through time at all, so it can be used as a base measurement. The second shows the current local time, and it changes automatically to show when the vessel resides currently. This can be compared to the constant to show how different this is from where the ship would be without travelling at all.”

Val interrupted, “That says that local time is about one hour ahead of constant time though.”

“Yes,” Cole answered. “As a test, this ship was programmed to go forward in time two hours unmanned, and then move backward again one hour. When launched, the ship disappeared, and returned an hour later, with only a few seconds passing onboard. Then an hour after that, what looked like a second ship appeared nearby for a few seconds and disappeared again into the past where we had retrieved it. The trip forward and back left the ship missing for one hour of our time. That time passed for us, but not the ship. The local time reflects the time we experienced outside the ship as the local time, but since it only spent a matter of seconds getting there, the constant time is about an hour behind it.”

“I get it. So the third display must be where we adjust for our destination time, right?”

Cole was glad she understood; that certainly made things easier. “Roll it back about four hours so I will have enough time to do my research into why I was fired.” As she rolled it back, the blue vector line separated slightly from the red line, curving and becoming longer than the red one. “See what happened? When you changed the clock, the time vector showed where LunaBase was four hours ago. Both lines point us to LunaBase, the red one in local time if we just flew there, and the blue one according to the time you gave it. The moon is in motion around Earth, just as Earth is in motion around the sun. The blue line will arc to find the location over time relative to where and when we are currently. If you were going to LunaBase and changing time two weeks, the blue line would send you around to the other side of Earth in the moon’s orbit. If you were changing time to six months ago, Earth would be on the other side of the sun in its orbit.”

“With normal flight, the vector only shows where I should fly, it doesn’t do the flying for me unless it’s put into autopilot. Does the time function work the same?” Val was a good pilot. She was asking all the right questions it seemed.

“That part is different. We are still new to time travel, and we hope someday to move manually through time, but for now, time is handled by autopilot only. You will still have the ability to move the ship through space as time changes around you, to avoid possible collision with objects flying through our path, but your piloting skills need to be top notch to accomplish this. Once time starts moving in autopilot, you will have to follow the blue vector display, and the red will gradually join it as the local time changes around us. As time changes, there will planets moving in strange directions, comets and asteroids will move past very quickly if there are any in our path. You may need to stray from the blue vector to avoid something catastrophic, but as you change direction, the vectors will change as well.”

“Wait, what does that mean?”

“The autopilot moves us through time as we move closer to our physical destination. Our trip to LunaBase four hours ago will be a relatively short trip, given that we will be moving a relatively short distance through space. If we were travelling to Jupiter at a time several months from now, the destination would move partway around the sun. As we moved closer to that location in space, time would pass around us according to how quickly we approached the destination. If we took a longer trip around the sun to reach it, time would change more slowly, but a more direct route that brought us closer to the sun would make time change quickly. I guess the short explanation is that when we travel through time and space simultaneously, we will always arrive at both the destination time and destination location simultaneously. The autopilot adjusts our time-dilation to match the distance to our destination.” Cole was itching to get moving.

“OK, I’m ready. Let’s get out of here before someone spots us. Locking in the space, and locking in the time.” She flicked the holographic switches and the display turned red, then violet. “You might want to buckle back into your seat, Cole.”

Cole though that was a good idea as well, so he moved back into the passenger seat and buckled in. He didn’t think the trip would be bumpy, but didn’t want to risk it. As Val began to accelerate the ship, the display around her head shifted rapidly. She followed the blue vector perfectly, causing its display and the red vector’s display to apparently zip themselves closed at the point where the ship was, and then split again behind that point. The moon ahead of her in the display seemed to approach at a normal rate, a couple of ships in her display flew backward around her as Cole and Val zipped through time nearby to them. Since the time vessel was moving backward through time, these other ships seemed to move backward also, staying in their normal time. From the perspective of the other ships, Cole and Val were the ones moving backward, but they likely could not even see the ship, given its light-bending hull.

As they neared the base, Val reached up and turned the destination inputs off, moving them into the normal flow of time again. Cole spoke up when he saw where she was heading. “We can’t fly down into the private hangar! This ship is already in there. We are in the past now, remember? Go to a public dock and follow someone else in, a big passenger ship would be best, so we can hide behind them and I can join the crowd heading into the base.”

Val circled around the base looking for incoming ships. They found one right away and snuck right in behind it, following close enough to make Cole nervous. Val seemed to be confident though as they landed only about two feet behind it. While they waited for the passengers to begin leaving the passenger ship, Cole got up and went over to her again.

“Remember, we are going to steal this ship in about four hours. You need to be there, outside the private dock when that happens so you can return the ship. Hopefully, no one will notice that it’s missing at all. You need to stay hidden until that happens. Don’t let anyone see you!”

“And you will be trying to find out why you got fired? Do you have a plan for that as well?”

“I have an idea about that. I told you in the café that there might be a connection between the message Chan received from the Martian Militia and my release from the project. I will start by listening to that message. I’m not sure what I will do after that though.”

“We should meet after I land,” she said. Cole thought this was a good idea.

“Yes, let’s meet at the café again, same table. I’ll tell you what I found out, and I’ll know you made it back without getting caught.” Cole looked forward to seeing her again.

“The passengers are starting to file out of the shuttle. You better get out there if you are going to join the group.”

Cole looked into her eyes, and she met his gaze. “Stay out of trouble Val. I don’t want you getting yourself caught.”

“All I have to do is land inconspicuously, and meet you for coffee. There’s no way I’ll get caught. You’re the one that needs to watch yourself.” She smiled at him, and he started to feel a little warm.

“You know,” he started, “I don’t know if I would have recommended you to Chan if I knew you were capable of stealing a ship like we did.”

“You recommended me? Why?”

“Your record shows that you are a great pilot, the youngest woman to even make the list. I thought it might be good for Audrey to have another girl around. I’m beginning to think maybe you won’t be such a great influence on her however. I mean, you weren’t in the lab much more than an hour before you were off to steal the culmination of years of work and research to help a stranger with personal gain…” Cole trailed off with a crooked smile.

Val mirrored his crooked smile, and giggled. When she did so, Cole leaned forward toward her face, immersing his head in her holographic display. She didn’t move, but her eyes darted down to his mouth, and then back up to meet his again. She was still smiling. Cole kissed Val lightly on the forehead, and then pulled away.

“For luck?” she asked.

“Something like that,” he replied. “I need to go.” Cole moved over to the exit hatch in the floor, and dropped out of the ship and jogged over to join the throng of people exiting the passenger line. He stopped and glanced back at where the ship was. It was barely visible, like a knife blade without a handle, and it rose up and out of the hangar. Looking around, no one else seemed to notice it.

“Excuse me!” somebody said as they bumped into the stationary man looking around the bay at something nobody else could see. Cole apologized to the  stranger and started walking with the flow of people into LunaBase.

Continued on February 13, 2010