Temporal Incursion. Stellar Flash Book Three. By Neil A. Hogan
Available in Digital and in Print Formats from Amazon
Episode 1: The Hand Continued
Chapter 3
“27 scientists have disappeared, and Victoria has a date. Interesting.” Patel leant back in his chair with a curious look on his face, and steepled his fingers. “Very interesting.”
“Putting aside Victoria’s personal life for a moment, John, Proxibee is your jurisdiction. It’s my understanding that the Secret Services has a gravity and frequency research base there in association with the F.R.I. I realize you can’t personally monitor all S.S.’s 100 billion projects, but 27 scientists?” Zhou paused and leaned forward, looking Patel in the eye and smiling slightly. “You must be at least a little curious. With me now in charge of the station, perhaps you should check it out? You’re probably the best person for the job.”
Patel frowned. “Young lady, you might now be my superior on this base, but I’m over 150 years old. It is not possible for you to use subtle persuasion targeting my curiosity to get me off this space station quite so easily.”
Zhou grinned. “Only looking out for your best interests, of course. Your I.Q. is off the charts.” She leant back in her chair. “This station must be incredibly boring for you. You know. Really, really boring. After all, you did originally hire me so that you didn’t have any excuse to stay.” She tapped her chin. “I know, maybe you could go spelunking on Enceladus again until we find out some more information.”
Patel blinked. “Wait. You are doing it again!”
“Then, tell me why you’re still here? You’re practically maintaining all of human occupied space. Why hang around Space Station X-1a?”
Patel allowed a slight smile, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. He then turned to the center of the room. “My turn to supply a recording, it seems. A.I. Display Saturn orbit survey 15th February 2129 video stream. Reference: Temporal Incursion. Slow the video to a speed we can comprehend. Authorization vibration Doctor John Patel.”
“Confirmed,” said the A.I. “Accessing. Displaying.”
An image materialized of Saturn and its rings, blurred and seemingly frozen. A green, circular target moved across the image then snapped at a tiny spot towards the center. It zoomed to show a floating object shooting away from them, leaving a black line through the rings in its wake.
The image shuddered as the drone adjusted its position, flashing closer. What previously looked like a glowing light now looked like it contained multiple stars flickering in and out of it.
“Is it alien?’ asked Zhou.
“One moment.”
The drone shot forward several times as the light flashed further away from it, but it quickly lost it.
The recording turned off.
“So, maybe it was a drone from another civilization,” offered Zhou. “You know, Earth has been visited by billions of drones from other civilizations in just the past thousand years. As UFO traffic officer monitoring Earth’s intersection, I should know.”
“Not exactly,” said Patel. “It was a piece of time. In fact, a piece of reversed time. When we retrieved the drone, we found it had become several minutes younger, just by being near it.”
“But, time doesn’t usually travel around in chunks. You can’t have time without space, or matter. They’re inseparable. And it looked nothing like a rogue, hyperdense black hole.”
Patel leant back. “An unsolved mystery. What concerns me is that, at that time, it wasn’t the only one. There were several occurrences of these pieces of time in the Solar system in 2129. Admittedly, most of them were on either side of the Oort cloud, apart from one we suspect caused something similar to a Tunguska event in Bimini. But one thing we know for sure is that they were all heading in one direction at close to the speed of light.”
Zhou thought for a second. “The date was just over four and a half years ago? And from the stars in the background…”
“They should be arriving at Proxima Centauri B any day now,” finished Patel. He got up off the chair. “Which might even explain the missing scientists. So, I hope you don’t mind if I hang about the station a bit longer?”
“But, what can we do about Victoria?”
“Well,” Patel said as he dissolved the door and exited. “I’m sure she can look after herself. And if she runs into a micro time particle, I guess she’ll get a bit younger!” He nodded goodbye to Zhou, and the door reformed behind him.
Zhou knew Patel was being cryptic again. If the drone only had to be near the object for less than a second to become a few minutes younger, she was sure Heartness wouldn’t just gain a few years.
She could be quickly reduced to a fertilized egg.
Temporal Incursion. Stellar Flash Book Three. By Neil A. Hogan
Available in Digital and in Print Formats from Amazon