Out of Time
copyright 2014 Faeriemage
Time is a cruel mistress, especially if you start playing with her box of toys.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: As so many of my stories in the past, this one started with a really vivid dream, and then just grew, uncontrollably, from there. I hope you like it.

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“Do you have any idea what time it is?” I say into my pillow. The sudden burst of light in my room was enough to make me flinch and pull it over my head, but I hope that I’ll be able to get back to sleep as soon as my roommate has the decency to turn it off.

“Yes, It’s five. Get your pretty little ass out of bed.”

I sit up and glare at him, but he just laughs. Once, when we were more than drunk, he commented that I have a cute ass. He thinks that it’s a shame that I wasn’t born a girl, because my behind is wasted on a guy.

Granted, I’m not much of a guy, but I am male, and happy to be so.

He uses the line whenever he wants me to get in gear, because he knows that it pisses me off whenever he talks about my gluteus. Somehow, I’ve got to find something just as humiliating for him so that he’ll stop.

“What’s the rush?”

“We’ve been activated. Apparently we have skills that they need.”

“Skills? What skills do you have that they could possibly want?” I assume, of course, that he’s the one they want, and I’ll be dragged along because they need him.

When you’re playing around with time there are certain things that you have to keep in mind. The first is that a single human sent back is unstable. It took a number of failed experiments before they realized this. However, as long as you send people back in pairs, they are a lot more stable.

They’re the most stable when they are a resonating dyad. You know the old myth about love at first sight? Well, science has determined that is just you recognizing that your chroniton particles are syncronized with the other person’s. Your body literally sings out to the other person in a Einstein-Rosen bridge sort of way. Think of it like a wormhole of the soul. This resonance not only makes you stable when out of your own time, but is really easy to pick out from the background chroniton radiation.

“So, any word on what it is? We weren’t scheduled to be sent upstream for another week.”

“Ray, when they say to hop to, I don’t ask why.”

“That’s what I love about you,” I say. The sarcasm drips from my words, “why think when they do it for you.”

“I know, right?” he’s laughing even before he finishes and I can’t help but join in. It’s not that I hate the guy, since we get along really well, it’s just that I hate being paired with a guy. Any guy.

We’re not the only ones walking around the campus at this hour of the morning, but we are one of the few dyads walking around. In fact, I notice that Candy and Andy, and Lois and Clark are the only other dyads walking toward the central building on campus, the sphere.

Candace and Andrew hate being called by the nickname, but with those names it almost begs to be assigned, and so it was.

I’m personally not even sure of the reference that it came from, but David is this tall guy with glasses. He’s a little built, sure, but nothing really noteworthy. It’s just that when you have a girl named Lois, and a tall guy with glasses it begs the nickname Lois and Clark? I don’t get it either.

We walk into the cool, still, atmosphere of the sphere not thirty seconds behind Lois and Clark. “Hey, any idea what’s going on here?” I call out to Lois as they stand waiting to go through the scanner.

“You don’t know?”

“Steve didn’t think to ask, and I was still asleep.”

“You really need to get a new partner, Ray,” David says from the other side of the scanning booth as Lois steps in.

“It’s something I’ve been telling the brass for years, but they never really listen.”

“It also doesn’t help when you two have spent more time relative than the brass has. What ratio are you up to now?”

“Five to one,” I say, grumbling.

David blinks and then begins laughing, “What happened to the mandatory vacation when you hit three to one?”

“The Jefferson Incident.”

David’s eyes get momentarily large and then he smiles weakly. No one who was part of that charlie foxtrot speaks about it. People who weren’t part of it just wouldn’t understand. That and we’ve received orders not to talk about it by top brass. “Why didn’t they just send you on your mandatory sync vacation after that?”

“Our ratio was at five to one when they were finally able to retrieve us. It’s remained pretty constant since then.”

Time travel is based upon windows of synchronization. From the beginning of the window in the past to the beginning of the window in the future you have a distinct period of time called a synchronized time window or sync-time for short. The most common sync-time is ten years. No one I’ve talked to knows why that is, since the math doesn’t even make any sense, but there you go.

The frequency that a specific sync time will re-occur is called a synchronized time wave, which of course we shortened to sync-wave.

I mention the beginning of the window, because here is where things get a little weird. Time flows at different rates on either end of the link. The most common rate is ten to one, again without any real reason, or none that I know of, so, if you spend what appears to be ten hours on the other end of the link, then you only really spent one hour according to everyone at home.

To stay at a one to one ratio, you would then have to spend nine hours at home. Since we just come back to sleep, no one wants to run the risk of an over-run, we end up with a 1 hour difference.

So, while the local time suggests that Steve and I have been partnered for about two years, with our current ratio that actually meant we had been doing this for ten years. There’s a reason why most dyads end up getting married. You spend that much time in someone elses company with everyone else just shuffling around it starts to make sense.

What really throws me for a loop is that while I feel like I should be going to my ten year high school reunion, most of my classmates aren’t even halfway through college.

“That’s rough,” David says, “wait...that means that you guys are coming up on your ten year anniversary.”

“Ha, ha, ha.” I say without humor.

By this point I’m standing waiting to enter the scanner. Lois steps out and I can hear David whisper, “ten years,” to her before I step into the booth.

There are two things that will prevent them from sending an agent upstream, one of which, as a guy, I don’t have to worry about. The one I’m always worried about is a buildup of chroniton radiation.

Sitting in one place, temporally speaking, is easy on the human body. We’re used to it. Going up or down the time-stream on the other hand is, well, another thing entirely. All of us in the program are bombarded with chronitons every time we either head out or return. Most of the time, this isn’t an issue.

Our bodies cleanse themselves of the excess when we’re given any sort of time on either end of the link. Traveling with less than four hours at either end is considered a no-no.

Occasionally, however, the particles don’t go away. If they start to build up, at all, then Bad Things Happen, capital letters and all. Most of the time, changing your own past is basically impossible. If you get chroniton sickness...changing your own personal history is the least of your worries.

It had happened once in the forteen year history of the program. Once was enough for them.

There is a moment when I’m in the booth, when the lights all go out, that I’m afraid that the red lights are going to come on. I’ve seen it often enough, someone has developed a slight imbalance, and so they’re put on the no-fly list for six months. Then the lights come on and I’m released back into the world. This time is no exception.

I smile at Lois and bump fists with David while we wait for Steve to be scanned. “So, what is this trip?”

“We’re going to The Pit,” David replies, all humor leaving his expression.

“What? There’s no fucking way I’m going to The Pit. They can find someone else with whatever combat/infiltration/whatever skills that they need for this...insane idea.”

David looks uncomfortable, and Lois actually looks sorry for me. I feel a sinking feeling in my gut when I realize it’s not Steve that they need. “Me?”

“First time?”

“They’ve never needed me. I mean, my ‘special skill’ is only useful during the last two hundred years...okay, a little less considering that the typewriter was invented in 1866, but still.”

“How did you get into the program with that skill,” David exclaims, and Lois punches him in the arm. All of the girls know what my ‘skill’ is. We get some downtime occasionally, and when we do I find hanging with the girls is more relaxing that trying to relate to people with training in ancient weapons, martial arts, blacksmithing, or any number of other skills deemed necessary by the PTBs.

There are just a higher percentage of girls who were there for the same reason I was; that they resonated with someone that had skills that they needed.

I’m not being sexist, trust me. There are some of the girls who know how to swing a sword and could easily kick my ass in a fight, but they don’t hold it against me that I have a useless skill, or should I say mostly useless. Apparently they’d tapped me to be a part of this mission, so it wasn’t completely useless.

“Steve, you asshole, why didn’t you tell me that they wanted me for this one.”

“Because I wanted to see your face when they told you.”

I punch him in the arm and the three of them laugh. The scanner behind us we move toward the center of the sphere and the briefing room we’ve been assigned. Each team has a briefing room assigned to them while they’re in the field. It acts as a common room, sleeping quarters, and meeting space for the duration of their mission. We’re allowed to leave the sphere, but with the time limitations we rarely do.

Andy and Candy are already in the room when we arrive. General Haynes walks into the room from the far side the moment that we enter the room. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, have a seat.”

We all sit around the table in the center of the space, and it feels empty. The next smallest mission I’d ever been on before this one had fifteen dyads. Even that number had made the room feel empty. It only really starts feeling crowded when you get up to about a hundred operatives or in other words fifty dyads.

As soon as we’re seated, General Haynes begins. “Janette got pregnant over the past month, so she has been replaced by Ray here. We would have considered Ray as a better candidate if it weren’t for some peculiarities of this mission.”

“Yeah, we’re going to The Pit,” I grumble.

“Stow it, Ray,” the General says, “Yes, you are late to the party, but you are going to The Pit. Since you’re the one who’s grumbling, why don’t you share with us what you know about it, Ray.”

“The Pit was a research laboratory opened by the US government into the as yet unnamed Chroniton particles that they had just discovered. Unfortunately, like with most radiation, they didn’t yet understand the implications of it at the time and were just looking for a weapon to use against the Axis powers.

“In 1944, they thought they had cracked the ‘code’ so to speak, and turned on their Chroniton generator. The Pit ceased to exist. Beyond that, it wasn’t until we began here that anyone even knew it had ever existed. With the seven year sync rate, we have attempted to enter The Pit three times.”

“Those are the basics. There is more information that you didn’t know,” the General begins, “the first is that there are three sync waves between us and The Pit that will be converging on this space-time in about two hours.”

“What?” I yell, and Lois leaps to her feet, “Three? I’ve never even heard of two before.”

“That’s because most of the time we only need to hit any one of the sync waves between us and any other point in space-time. With a truly unstable region of space-time, we might make sure that we have a double locus.”

“Is The Pit really that unstable?” Candace says quietly.

“If I thought this could wait ninety-six years for a quadruple locus, then we’d be waiting a hundred years. There is the other problem. We’ve determined that The Pit is in an unstable pocket of space-time. It both is, and is not, currently in 1944.”

“How many sync waves actually exist between two points,” I say, realizing that it’s suddenly become very important to hear the truth, especially with what Steve and I had been through with the Jefferson Incident.

“The largest number mapped so far is twenty-eight. The fewest is nine.”

I began to laugh, “So, even with the fewest, you’re always guaranteed to have a sync wave every ten years.”

“Well, usually it’s only after we have twelve or so waves that we get that sort of distribution, but you see what we’re talking about.”

“The Pit must be on the high end, then.”

“Actually, they are the only one we know of with only nine. We are just in the middle of a convergence of waves right now. We missed the first three waves at eleven, six and two years before we began the project. There was a double locus the first time we tried to link up and a single the previous time. The last of the waves will be in eight years.”

“I count ten waves in that.”

“With the span of time, one of the waves synced twice.”

“All of the background is cool and all,” Steve says, “but you said something about The Pit being unstable?”

“Yes, which is the main reason we can’t wait a hundred years. The bubble it is in is unraveling. If it was just going to deposit The Pit back where it came from, then we’d just let it go. The problem is, as long as the chroniton generator is running it will...as close as the scientists can describe it, it will bounce. Every time it bounces, it takes more of the surrounding space-time with it back into the bubble.”

“That sounds Bad,” David says.

“Why me?”

“Excuse me?” the General sputters at my non-sequitur.

“Why do you need someone who can type?”

“Because the generator is controlled by a computer. It’s a text interface linked to a mechanical typewriter.”

“Still doesn’t explain…”

“Because you need to enter in over ten thousand lines of code in order to re-initialize the system,” Andrew shouts. “I’m sorry, but you’re coming whether you like it or not, Rachel.”

“What?” I say.

Andrew, David, and Steve all color. Even the General looks uncomfortable. The girls look as bewildered as I do.

David is the first to speak, “Ray, well, some of the guys joke about, you know, how you’re almost useless. You know, how you’re here as a pair, not as a prime?” I wince at the slang term. It’s a crass reference to a woman’s body and used about someone who is here to ‘look pretty’ and ‘keep their man coming home.’

Hey, I knew I was useless, but to call me a that…

“You knew?” I say turning on Seve.

He just nods, his face ablaze.

“What the hell, you dumb mother-fuckers? Steve and I have been on more missions then the next two dyads combined. We were one of only two dyads to even survived the damned Jefferson Incident…” I felt my stomach drop out when I realized what I’d said, and in the front of top brass as well.

“That is enough!” the general roared. “Andrew, consider yourself on report. After this mission, you’re confined to barracks pending a formal review of your actions.”

“but…”

“No ‘buts’ Andrew. One in a room is enough.” There were some snickers around the table. “As for you, Ray, let me explain one thing, and one thing only,” the General said turning in my direction, “from this moment further, you aren’t even to think the words ‘Jefferson Incident’ in the same minute. Yes, you are fucking qualified. True, you only have one rare skill, but since you can out shoot anyone in this room with any handheld weapon from any time period except for your partner, I don’t give a damn whether typing is useful most of the time.”

“When did you learn to shoot,” Lois asks and I look at the General for permission. He frowns but nods.

“Well, when you spend three years as a soldier for the Colonies in the revolutionary war, you tend to pick up some skills.” Something clicked for the other two dyads and Lois’ face went very pale.

“Three years…” Candace whispered. “But I thought time sickness…”

Steve laughs ruefully and I just smile, “yeah, consider us part of the reason the regs changed six months ago.”

“Now that’s out of the way, let’s get you all to costuming and get the final briefing out of the way so we can get this all taken care of as quickly as possible.

***
“Uniforms?” I say eyeing the outfit that they’ve given me.

“Be thankful you don’t have to wear a skirt,” Lois says with a laugh.

“Don’t tempt them,” Candace says from behind me, “I mean the guys already seem to consider you one of us.”

“Nah, he’s not pretty enough,” Steve says.

“I don’t know,” Lois responds, “with a little makeup, and some padding.”

“Har-de-har-har,” I say, but I’m smiling. I like Lois. She’s a good friend, and although I haven’t spend much time with Candace yet, I can tell she has a wicked sense of humor.

“You’ll be going in as army personnel this time.”

“There are people still alive in there,” Andrew asks.

“Our last team said there were,” the supply sergeant says, but then clams up. We go and get dressed. I tie my hair into a low ponytail and tuck it into the back of the shirt. I could get it cut, but I’m hoping for people to overlook it, since we’ll be appearing in the midst of a crisis. Those are the best jaunts, in my opinion, since we’re usually able to move around unnoticed, if not unseen.

We shuffle into the room and take our seats again, looking suddenly anachronistic amidst the modern fixtures of the room. When we’re in our seats the General again enters the room. “You are to keep interaction with operatives to a minimum.”

“Did you say…”

“Yes, we’ll be sending you back into the same timeframe as the other two teams went back into. You can’t tell them the outcome of their mission. Any action you take with a member of a previous team will likely mean a shift in local time.”

“What in the hell were those people thinking? They actually created a flux point in space-time?” Andrew blurts out.

“Unfortunately, yes. So, keep that in mind, and hopefully the program will still be in one piece when you get back here. From what the previous team said, the computer system had been completely wiped by the time they got there. We’re not sure what happened to cause the problem, and since we’ve never been able to send anyone back to before the event began, we have limited knowledge, comparatively, over everything before the event.”

He spends the next half an hour going over the plan we’re to execute when we get to the other side of the link, including where to go, and all other related information. Luckily for us, as long as we were inside and wearing the proper uniform it was unlikely that we’d be stopped and even asked for our papers, even if those papers were in perfect order.

We were given one last bit of information from the General before we went out to the link platform, “From this moment forward you’re under strict operational security. No information about the mission is to be passed to anyone outside your group. You are restricted to the sphere for the duration. Communication with anyone outside your group is to be limited to the absolute minimum necessary to do your job. Before we return you to the past, you’ll key in the offset, in minutes, for your return trip. Under no circumstances are you to speak to control until your announcement that you are done. Provided the math is correct, you will have a total of 3 days, 8 hours and 23 minutes available to you upstream.”

We nod solemnly and walk through the black door at the back of the room.

As we take our places on the platform at the center of the spherical chamber that gives the building it’s name I wonder, not for the first time, what this would look like in a big budget hollywood movie. I’m sure there would be streams of ‘chronitons’ flooding the room as they saturated the environment with them in preparation for punching a hole through reality.

I’m sure they would be blue-white and stream around in ever faster circular patterns. We’d be illuminated by them and then the door would open, a black only ever imagined and never seen. It would suck us in and disappear with an audible pop...or something like that. I’ve come up with many variants over the years.

In reality, technology is sort of boring. We stand there for a few minutes and then from one instant to the next we’re somewhen else.

“Meet back here in sixteen hours,” I say to the group and we head out to accomplish our various tasks.

The area isn’t anything like I expected, but should probably have. It’s in a giant sinkhole. There are trees, both on the rim around the camp, as well as all through the base where we are currently located. The sounds of people moving around can plainly be heard, and it feels like a living breathing military base.

“Well, shall we,” Steve says, gesturing toward the processing center.

“Let’s,” I say with a chuckle. As we walk, I notice a number of things that just feel wrong about the base. Everyone else mentioned, the sun was always stuck at noon. It is just rising over the edge of the sinkhole as we walk across the compound. I notice a man I’ve never seen before in a WWII uniform, but using an iPod. As we walk, the iPod shifts to a walkman, and then a transistor radio, and then disappears completely.

I consider bringing it to Steve’s attention, but dismiss it as an overactive imagination.

That’s not the only thing that changes as we walk toward the center of the compound, but the closer we get to the center, the more everything settles down. I begin to get worried, but for a different reason.

“Steve, I think I might be slipping.” I say in a worried whisper.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I was seeing anachronisms all over the place.”

“It’s settled down now, though?”

“Yeah.”

“Relax. I’m sure it’s nothing. Let’s get this overwith and then we can get you all shrink-wrapped at home.”

I snort and put it out of my mind. It might just be all in my head. I’m not the first operative who’s thought they were slipping. It could easily be the stress of this operation as well, or the fact that we know there are only four other people we can rely upon until we declare the mission complete. The sun seems to be moving, though, which is truly a cause for concern.

“Steve...I think we might actually have arrived a few hours before,” I say, gesturing toward the sun.

“All the better. If this is really a flux point then we could just stop the event in the first place..”

“Steve, don’t even joke about that. We have to ensure that there is as little change as possible. The event has to occur as planned, the computer has to be wiped, the other teams have to fail, and we have to do it.”

“Are you trying to say..?”

“It was us all along. We’re the reason that it all happened. We’re the reason all these people are going to die.”

“We’ve got to tell…”

“Who? Who are we going to tell. We’ve been cut off intentionally. If we attempt to contact anyone else, then it could break things even worse.”

“I have just one question,” Steve says after letting it all sink in.

“What’s that?”

“How did General Haynes know what was going on well enough to institute the protocol?”

I don’t have an answer for him so I let it sit in the air, hovering between us. We enter the processing center and I come to a dead stop, just staring at what’s in front of me. I turn to look at Steve, who’s looking back at me.

As typing is my only skill, I make damn sure that I know what I might run into, the types of systems or machines, that might possibly need my skill. Sure, I can mix a mean vodka and tonic, I can speak fluently in six languages, make myself understood in another ten and swear in another fifteen more. I can fire and service any handheld firearm. I can even make a siege weapon if pressed. There are certain skills that you pick up when you’ve spent eight years in the past, going from one hotspot to another.

But typing is the one thing I do better than just about anyone I know. Because of that, and the knowledge that I have in my head, I know that the first terminal server with a monitor and traditional keyboard wasn’t likely to appear in 1944 in the US.

That being said, a teletype terminal with what had to be a combination of a number of different early electronic computer models into something that was, apparently, electronically programmable from the terminal.

Nothing like this machine ever existed. Nothing like this machine should have existed, especially since some of the part that I noticed integrated into the amalgam were being currently developed...in Germany.

Sat down at the terminal, and received an even greater shock that the one that this room represented. There, on the bottom line of the paper, was something that wouldn’t be implemented for another thirty years, at least.

C:\>

“Steve,” I said in a hoarse whisper.

“What is it?”

“Please, tell me I’m not seeing this. Please tell me this is a hallucination, or better yet, that I’m slipping free.”

He walks over and stands there, looking over my shoulder and says, “So, it’s a DOS prompt, I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“It’s 1944.”

“And?”

“MS-DOS, the one most people call DOS, wasn’t first released until 1981.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah...but I wonder,” I say and then began typing DOS commands into the terminal. The print head moves slower than I do, so I had to modulate my speed a little. A part of my mind, just along for the ride while I’m trying to get a listing of the operating system calculates I’d likely slowed to about ninety words a minute so I didn’t get ahead of the terminal.

“Lieutenant!” I hear a barking voice behind me and I leap to my feet and turned around. Upon seeing the general’s stars I salute. “Sir!”

“You’re obviously new at Camp Pit, so I’ll cut you some slack. that being said, the next time I see you, I expect you to be in the proper uniform.”

“Sir? I am in uniform.”

“Yes, you are in a man’s uniform. The women under my command are to be properly groomed and in the women’s uniform.”

“Sorry, sir, it won’t happen again, sir,” Steve says from the back of the room.

“Can’t the lady answer for herself, Lieutenant...Mace?”

“It’s just that she has certain...feelings regarding equality in the armed forces, sir,” Steve says with a smile that turns into a smirk as soon as the General’s back is turned. “We’ll Lt. Lewis, I can understand that. I have a feeling that some day both men and women will be allowed to wear pants in this army. That day, however, is not today. I assume you know the proper female uniform you should be wearing?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, with a sigh.

“Good, and make sure your hair doesn’t extend past your collar. While comfortable, I’m sure, you shouldn’t be tucking your hair into your shirt. It’s just not done...also, make sure you’re wearing the proper WAC patch the next time.”

“Yes, sir,” I say saluting again.

“So, is there something that I can help you with? You obviously have training on the directory system, and from what I can see you seem to be looking for something.”

“We were told to find the...operating system I think it was called,” Steve says, trying to draw attention away from me.

“My, but you are well informed, and I can see why you have an Army officer accompanying you.” The general walks over to a cabinet off to one side and opens it up. There is a rack of black vinyl discs that look like nothing more than records.

“I assume that this is about the orders to lock them up for safe keeping during the test today?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, visibly relieved.

“Well, good. Lt. Mace, if you could carry these for the lady, then I think you’re done here for the time being.”

“Yes, sir,” I say and we both salute.

After the general leaves Steve leans over to me and whispers, “so, did you notice who that was?”

“No, someone famous?”

“You could say that. Sure, he’s a couple of decades younger looking that that was General Haynes.