Caught Somewhere In Time

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The Morlock spun around falling backward into the hangar, out of control. Once more, Audrey and the others were thrown about the cabin, but this time the artificial gravity was interrupted by the crash, causing everything to move around the cabin more like a slow, underwater ballet. Bits of the console flew free of the wall, and Audrey spied other Protector ships in the display before it blinked off along with whatever flickering light was left. She hoped that they were slamming into other ships, parked and unmanned, rather than mowing down innocent bystanders in the hangar.

When everything stopped moving around, Audrey found herself lightly perched on top of a pile of machinery, in the dark. “Adam!” she cried out, “Adam, are you OK? Where are you?”

She pushed herself up and tired to look around in the blackness, but she heard nothing. Her face felt warm, and when she touched the cut along her cheek, it seemed as though it had started bleeding again. No doubt her blood would be floating all over the ship if she moved around too much.

Can anybody hear me? Is everyone all right? Audrey projected as she floated into a solid surface.

“I’m fine,” Egypt answered first.

“Me too,” called out Ire, and then said, “And Zimba is right here with me.”

Where is Adam? Zimba asked.

“Adam? Where are you?” Audrey asked again.

A glow appeared a little below Audrey, beneath some of the debris. She pushed off from what she thought was the ceiling and began pulling on things, yanking them out of the way. It wasn’t an easy task, but as long as she could keep her feet hooked into something, the lack of gravity aided her. The hardest part was wrenching things apart from one another, where they’d been twisted and bent. As she got closer to the glow, she saw that it was Nanny. Her skin glowed a faint luminosity in the pitch black of the ship, which made her look like an angel. She was holding Adam in her arms protectively.

Nanny? she thought to Adam’s guardian. Is Adam alive?

Faintly, as if over a great distance, Nanny responded, We call ourselves Protectors among your people, but your people have always called us Angels. We are not angels however, only mortal beings like you.

Audrey saw Adam move in Nanny’s embrace. Nanny was motionless as Adam spoke, “Nanny? Are you hurt?” He moved free of her and Audrey could see there was a brighter spot on her back, as if all the light throughout her body was being siphoned from that one location. “Hold on Nanny, we’ll get out of here and you’ll be cared for.”

With a fluid motion, Adam put his feet on one piece of tangled debris, and pushed with his arms on another, wrenching them apart. The effect of this was that the bulk of the pile separated, scattering wreckage in every direction around Nanny’s glow. It was like watching a miniature supernova exploding in slow motion.

A hiss grew from the darkness behind Audrey, and as she turned to face it, she could see that light poured in from the hole in the floor where the ramp was opening. Suddenly the whole ship was visible, pieces of all sorts of metallic and crystalline material hovering and twirling slowly everywhere, and in all directions. The passengers clung to walls, the floor, or whatever they could to keep from drifting freely like everything else. Adam pushed Nanny’s limp form away from the ceiling, toward the opening. Audrey, swam beside her through the air, reaching one hand out of the opening to grip it, and the other hand taking Nanny’s arm.

“Audrey!” cried Cole, as his head became visible beneath the ship. “Is everyone OK?”

It occurred to Audrey that the ship must be upside down on the floor of the hangar, because Cole wasn’t laying on the floor looking up, he was laying on the hull of the ship looking down into the bottom. “Nanny needs medical attention, now!” She pulled Nanny’s arm to the opening, and Cole reached in with both arms to grab her. “Everyone else says they are fine.”

It took several minutes to get everyone pulled from the ship. As it turned out, Egypt’s leg had been the worst injury to any of the humans, but Nanny had fused the bone back together already. Nanny was in pretty bad shape though, and it took some time to find another Protector admitted to knowing how to help her, mostly due to the fact that only a handful of them could communicate verbally with the humans. No humans were ready to remove their hoods to save Nanny’s life, so communication could only be verbal.

Before debriefing them from their mission, Admiral Chan hugged his daughter, one of the only affectionate displays she had ever received from him. That he did so in public was a testament to how worried he really had been. Adam received hugs from Cole and Val as well, and he looked less than happy when Val kissed her son on the cheek. Once they had all gotten their injuries attended to, they settled down in one of the classrooms within the compound. All the introductions had been made between the parents and Adam’s three friends, the debriefing began.

First, Adam talked about how he had stolen the Morlock to come back here, and how it was not immediately clear that he had missed any time at first. Audrey thought he was glossing over some details regarding how he figured out that he was late, before he moved on to talking about a chamber where the Protectors had murdered one of the girls. From there, Egypt, Ire, and Zimba took turns describing how Nanny had burst in to let them know that about the Magister’s plan to leave the compound with hostages in an attempt to keep the program going forward, despite the attack by Chan’s forces.

Adam added that Nanny had no plan of her own, but he knew she would help any way that she could. She had previously helped him escape the compound by giving him information about the Morlock, and the approximate date to set it for. Without her aid, he would have never come to the future at all. In the end, she saved Adam by wrapping him in her arms during the crash as they were reentering the hangar. Cole noted that this was the same maneuver Val had described using in the Roswell crash.

The discussion continued through their trip across the galaxy, and it wasn’t until it was finished that Val spoke up. “What I don’t understand is this: you weren’t gone an entire second. It looked like you just bounced off the airlock, crashing rather than flying off.”

“What do you mean?” Audrey asked. “We were gone for hours. Magister flew us across the galaxy, and then Adam brought us back.”

Cole seemed to have the answer, “Then the only explanation is that you crashed into yourselves. Upon leaving, you bumped into your future selves. The ship couldn’t have become too damaged to make the trip through time, space, and back again, otherwise, it wouldn’t have been able to be at the same place at the same time to crash on reentry.”

“Then the returning ship took the bulk of the damage,” Audrey continued. “So then the theory of Novikov’s Effect, needs to be altered. The ship in the past, although affected by its future-self, could not be fall prey to Novikov’s Effect, since it was on its normal course. The returning ship could show signs of the Effect however.”

“More than that,” Cole asserted, “When I influenced my own timeline, the only Effect that I really felt was at times I was in close proximity to myself. The act of changing one’s own timeline does not inherently create the Effect, only the intent to create interactions that didn’t previously exist.”

As the rest of the room, except the other three girls who had no idea what any of this meant, came to the same conclusion at the same time, Val said it aloud. “Novikov’s Effect can’t result from an accident then, only from intent.”

There was a long pause as the team mulled this over in their heads. Finally Adam asked, “Then why did I have the seizure when I first went to the future? I didn’t know what it was when it happened, and not even when I went back to that same hallway with Audrey. After I spent some time learning about the team and its mission, I realized that my seizure was just the Effect working on me.” Adam made eye contact with Audrey. “I didn’t have any intent to change the past when it happened.”

What were you thinking, when it happened? Do you remember what was in your mind? Audrey knew that something was there. When she had realized he came from the past, it had occurred to her that it was probably the Effect working on him, even if Adam didn’t come to the same conclusion until later.

“I was thinking… I was thinking about running back to the Morlock. I was thinking about just going back to the Protectors and my life like it was before. I was scared that no one was going to help me, that I’d made a mistake in coming.”

Considering that a moment, Audrey said, “That wasn’t an intention to change your past though. And I know you thought about that many more times since then.”

Chan charged, “I believe the term used in the definition should be ‘viable intent’. Novikov’s Effect is the result of viable intent to change one’s own past. It is fine to decide that someday you will change history, but without the means to do so, there is no conflict. Adam had, at that moment, the means and intent to go back where he came from.”

“But the Militia would have stopped him,” Val pointed out.

“Possibly, but I understand that they had lowered their guard, and Adam was not being treated like a prisoner at that point. There was an opportunity, however slight, for him to run from the room and escape with his ship. However, if he had not remained at Mars Colony, our team would not have come when we did. Without our voyage there, and my subsequent discovery of Adam’s origins, there would have been no time or opportunity for Adam’s parents to conceive him before Ms. Cooper left on her mission to Roswell. ” The Admiral looked around the room, his eyes falling at last on Adam. “The crux of your timeline, Adam, was that you be an unborn child in 1947, something that would not happen if you had not stayed at Mars Colony.” Then to the room at large, “Novikov’s Effect kept this young man at the Colony so that his past would exist uninterrupted. That it was the strongest Effect seen thus far, causes me to believe there are a great deal of things that depend on his continued existence.”

Audrey’s mind raced as she put together all the details about what might have been different if Adam had never stayed here. Things that happened to her, the rest of the team, and to the people in the alien compound might have become nonexistent simply by his never leaving the compound. Adam himself likely would have ceased to exist had he not left. Everything seemed to converge on his escape to the future, and that he remain there for a time.

She was so wrapped up in her thoughts, that she didn’t notice that a small team of military personnel had entered the room. “Admiral, sir,” said the team leader as he saluted. “There has been a discovery made in the lower levels of the compound. Hundreds, maybe thousands of human embryos, frozen in some kind of stasis, are down there. Sir, what are we going to do with all of them?”

Epilogue on October 22, 2011