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I can't tell you how much this scares me. I mean, you ever feel scared? Maybe it's spiders for you, or heights, or whatever. Me, I'm not too fond of flying, but I get through it. But this has me scared.
A few years ago, some government agency decided that maybe all those sci-fi writers had a good idea, and they got a project going to build a time machine. Hell, I don't know, maybe it was some Congressman's cash cow, maybe it was just started to divert money to some other project. But they got some scientists working on it.
No, that's not the scary part. The feds aren't sending people back in time or anything. Best I can figure, all they can send back in time are some tiny particles. And they only go back a few seconds or so. But, you see, to even know that we... yeah, I'm part of this project, strictly on the mechanical side of things. But before we could even know if this thing worked, we had to be able to detect these things travelling in time. The thing's called the Chronoscope. Someone started calling it that, and it just stuck. And until a few weeks ago, everything was fine. They'd run a test, read the results, and clap themselves on the back. I was told that they were sending particles back almost a full quarter of a minute. Then one of the scientists had some kind of breakthrough in theory, and they spent several weeks recalibrating the scope... end result, they can look back in time... not exactly a crystal ball or anything, more like a radar. Beats me how they did it. I mean, I know the light from stars is light the stars emitted in the past, but how the heck they are able to get this thing to "look" at Earth is beyond me.
Anyway, it's not like they're actually watching the past. It's more like they're able to detect those time-traveling particles further back in time. That's when it started getting scary. They thought they had calibrated it wrong or something. Because what they were seeing was orders of magnitude higher then what they were doing now. Only it was happening in the past. Not the recent past either. Hundreds of years ago. Thousands. Millions. And a lot more powerful. When I asked how powerful, and I wish I hadn't, they told me. They said if it was like reading a seismic reading, what they were doing now was like riding by on a bike. And what was happening in the past was like a 9.0 on the Richter scale. Less then nothing compared to the Califonia coast sliding into the sea.
They thought at first it might be natural. Maybe some jumbo sunspot, or something. Then they got a reading they hadn't before. I mean, one day, that chunk of the past tested clear of these time-travel events, and the next, bam. Sometime in the mid-1000s, something just "happened". And it wasn't there earlier.
If this was one of those science-fiction shows, we'd have a time machine built and go stop whatever was doing this. We don't. This isn't the movies.
Now do you see why I'm scared?
A few years ago, some government agency decided that maybe all those sci-fi writers had a good idea, and they got a project going to build a time machine. Hell, I don't know, maybe it was some Congressman's cash cow, maybe it was just started to divert money to some other project. But they got some scientists working on it.
No, that's not the scary part. The feds aren't sending people back in time or anything. Best I can figure, all they can send back in time are some tiny particles. And they only go back a few seconds or so. But, you see, to even know that we... yeah, I'm part of this project, strictly on the mechanical side of things. But before we could even know if this thing worked, we had to be able to detect these things travelling in time. The thing's called the Chronoscope. Someone started calling it that, and it just stuck. And until a few weeks ago, everything was fine. They'd run a test, read the results, and clap themselves on the back. I was told that they were sending particles back almost a full quarter of a minute. Then one of the scientists had some kind of breakthrough in theory, and they spent several weeks recalibrating the scope... end result, they can look back in time... not exactly a crystal ball or anything, more like a radar. Beats me how they did it. I mean, I know the light from stars is light the stars emitted in the past, but how the heck they are able to get this thing to "look" at Earth is beyond me.
Anyway, it's not like they're actually watching the past. It's more like they're able to detect those time-traveling particles further back in time. That's when it started getting scary. They thought they had calibrated it wrong or something. Because what they were seeing was orders of magnitude higher then what they were doing now. Only it was happening in the past. Not the recent past either. Hundreds of years ago. Thousands. Millions. And a lot more powerful. When I asked how powerful, and I wish I hadn't, they told me. They said if it was like reading a seismic reading, what they were doing now was like riding by on a bike. And what was happening in the past was like a 9.0 on the Richter scale. Less then nothing compared to the Califonia coast sliding into the sea.
They thought at first it might be natural. Maybe some jumbo sunspot, or something. Then they got a reading they hadn't before. I mean, one day, that chunk of the past tested clear of these time-travel events, and the next, bam. Sometime in the mid-1000s, something just "happened". And it wasn't there earlier.
If this was one of those science-fiction shows, we'd have a time machine built and go stop whatever was doing this. We don't. This isn't the movies.
Now do you see why I'm scared?