Temporal Tantrum

Pre-log:

Truly knew that locating the other half of the code was going to be difficult - the greater challenge was going to be believing that time travel was real.

The HALF-locket, along with this whole kit and caboodle she had been saddled with was an enigma. Of course, that was an understatement.

Leaving the bar, Truly thought back 15 years, remembering her own BFF locket with fondness. Betty Jo may have been a bit “rural,” but still, she was her best friend in high school. Losing her to an opportunistic Slick-jacker had been tough.

Walking home, she held tightly to this new locket, given to her not by a best friend but a mysterious gentleman at a bar, into which she had had no business diving…

Log:

After complementing Truly’s blouse (i.e., her cleavage) and a little chitchat about how there was talk of adding another level to the already overcrowded Hive-X42, “Charles III” as he liked to call himself, was beginning to like this girl (even beyond the view).

After a tad, Charles cryptically espoused, “It’s going to sound wacko, but I’m going to cut to the chase: despite Prefecture Chairman ensuring that the recent rumors surrounding potential breakthroughs in time travel were ‘pure hogwash’ and snuffed shut with a resounding NO, I can tell you that temporal shifting is real.”

Truly had a good poker face. This didn’t seem to faze her.

Chucky3 continued, “Traveling forward is recognized by science, but a few milliseconds through travelin’ quick doesn’t really accomplish much.”

Truly felt that C3 spoke almost painfully casually; certainly, considering the subject matter. But he also spoke with sincerity.

“BACKWARD travel – outside of science fiction, is relegated to black hole & wormhole theory, but it’s been just pure theory.

Even with Chucky’s occasional “chest gazing,” this new stranger held an air of sincerity, so she would hear him out.

“My Uncle Isaias - “Uncle I” as I liked to call him – had been talking about temporal shifting for as long as I can remember. He was always working in his ‘Mad labor-a-tory’ as he called it.”

“He explains that the do-hickey works by combining both wormhole and blackhole phenomena and how all this is somehow packed into this Faraday cage thingy.”

“I’m no scientist” (THAT’S for sure, Truly thought) “but Uncle gave me a demo.”

“Uncle I wants to show me something in a StorageCell about a kilometer from his Hive.”

“After about three minutes, we hear this sucking sound filling the air… then, all of a sudden, quick blast of air almost knocked me off me feets!”

“BOOM”

“A black box was suddenly. Just… THERE.”

“Uncle I walks over, opens this panel and removes his pet lab rat, ‘Alice,’ feeds her a cube of cheese from his pocket and puts Alice back inside.”

“Then takes a little red paper heart from his other pocket, scribbles, ‘My Hair Wants Cutting,’ gives it a little tear, folds it in half, places it next to Alice and closes the panel.”

“After maybe a minute, there was a giant suck of air, BAM, the whole thing was OUT-TA-there!”

“Bopo -- just GONE.”

“Back @ lab, there’s what looks to be an identical black box. Roughly 1.5 meters square and matte black. Almost complete absence of light – more like an emptiness of space rather than a thing.”

“Uncle I removes a rat that looks identical to Alice from her cage and places her into the device.”

“Uncle clicks an icon on his comp screen and with that same sucking sound, the box is gone. About one second later, it’s back (with an attendant quick blast of air).”

“Uncle then walks over to the box, opens up the panel, takes a rat out, feeds it some cheese and puts it back in its cage.”

“He then proceeds to pull out what looks to be a red paper heart which has a rip and is folded precisely as the one he had left the same piece of paper in an identical machine 30 minutes ago.”

“He then opens up the heart which has written on the inside, ‘My hair wants cutting’… In the same scribble!”

“Never one to faint, I actually found myself almost blackin’ out.”

“Uncle had either pulled off a really complex magic trick or the sucker had somehow mastered time travel (as well as teleportation?)!”

“That was five years ago. Since that then, good ol’ uncle Isaias has become deceased Uncle Isaias when he was terminated by some thugs in a food raid in Old Sector D-Kevlck5.”

“After concerning himself with the Butterfly Effect, Isaias decided to hang up the time traveling gloves and place the ‘box with no name’ into cold storage somewhere ‘far away.’”

“I was given no clue of its location.”

“Ol’ Izzy had created a code - a string of letters and digits – that, using a calculation app, gave geo-coords to the machine.”

“He let me know that he was going to trust me with these geo-coordinates… but only halfway!”

“He split up the code into two halves of a locket and gave me one half. The rub is Ya gotta have both.”

“I’ve given up on trying to find the other half of this…” at which point, right there in the bar, Charles produced the heart-shaped Crimson locket, attached to a delicate silver necklace.

“Okay, so yeah, I’m giving you this.”

“Why?… Why am handing you half of what could change the world and life as we know it?”

“Well, aside from the… draw of your, um, blouse, I have a 93% success rate on reading people at first blush. You seem like the real deal.”

Truly recognized the attempt at humor but also sensed that he was actually nervous and that this was really important to him.

“Now, why am I passing this along to a perfect stranger (with a smile showing more sincerity than creeper)?”

“Um, well, I made a boo-boo and am being sent to prison for it.”

“Tomorrow morning I’m being put away for ‘safekeeping’ … 90-year sentence.”

“Found guilty of illegal food trafficking - replacing a D with B grade comestible containers apportioned for the kid’s sick ward down on sector Bowie-II. Well, I THOUGHT the guard wouldn’t discover me!!”

“I am giving you half a chance at arguably the most valuable machine on the planet. Only ask in return for you use it to travel back before I switched out the containers and convince me not to do it.”

Inside the ½ locket, Truly saw 18 random letters and numbers.

“Uncle said it would be nearly impossible to find the other half-locket and that I may have to go deep down a rabbit hole to find it; that I may have to be a bit mad to even try.”

“After four years, I’ve almost gone mad! “

“After his termination, after searching his HiveSpace & canvassing his colleagues and friends, as of about six months ago I officially gave up, realizing that I was starting to really lose it – down the rabbit hole indeed!”

“About 48 hours ago I realized something completely odd: I wanted to LIVE!”

“Realized only four ways of staying out of the pokey:

• Get myself knocked off

• Knock myself off

• Travel through time

• Get someone else to travel through time (to save me.)”

Truly stood there for a moment soaking this all in. Did she want to go down this rabbit hole? Did she, indeed, want to risk going around the bend?

Know how sometimes you’re thinking of something but you don’t know exactly what you’re thinking of? Something was itching on the inside of her being and she couldn’t quite scratch it.

Back @ Hive, trying to sleep … allergies to sleeping drafts was a mixed blessing, but now she was truly wishing she could partake.

About three hours after finally entering the Land of Nod, Truly SHOT up and felt a rush like none in her life.

She HAD it!!

“A rat named Alice…”

“My hair wants cutting…”

“Down the rabbit hole…”

“Have to be a bit mad to even try…”

ALICE IN WONDERLAND!!!

Truly had recalled with fondness being read “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” as a kid; The 1865 novel by English author Lewis Carroll (pseudonym of Charles Dodgson) tells of the main character, Alice, who falls through a rabbit hole into a subterranean fantasy world having all sorts of adventures.

Truly hurries to her VisioStation and using the calcu-app (to which Charles had directed her) enters the letter/digit string from the locket and adds “AliceinWonderland.”

“INVALID COORDINATES”

She then tries a number of attempts with such terms as,

• Alice

• Wonderland

• MadHatter

• Rabbit

• RabbitHole

• Cheshire

• CheshireCat…

She tries several dozen other words and terms from the book, all returning “INVALID COORDINATES.”

Truly scoured the text and spent two full days trying different combinations to no avail.

Going mad indeed!

====================

After a three-day break, she found herself staring in her full-length mirror wondering where the time had gone.

Indeed, where had her life had gone.

She started to think back on Alice’s adventures and, staring at herself there, wondered what it might be like to travel “through the looking glass” into another dimension, leaving her dystopian world behind…

HOLY SHIT!!

“Through the Looking Glass!”

Sequel to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland!”

Not but a moment after beginning to contemplate how long THIS new search would take….

She knew…

She knew the answer…

Truly swiftly typed into her keyboard:

“192eh29hh19188vjlkJABBERWOCKY”

Central America…

San Pedro La Laguna…

A church…

“Ministerio de los Dragones Desterrados”

(Ministry of the Banished Dragons.”)

=============

Truly walked into the door of the church and was happy to find that the

head Sacerdote spoke decent English.

She would try the simplest approach and simply explain herself and her story. Truthfully.

What did she have to lose? She perceived that the priest was sharp and would see through lies.

And there was an element of trust.

When she mentioned Isaias, the mood and countenance of the Sacerdote completely shifted to very determined.

Truly was taken respectfully and gently by the arm and led to an open elevator, taking them traveling down a long shaft of dirt and rock…

============

A cube of blackness seemingly completely devoid of any reflection whatsoever of light.

Almost beyond fathom.

The Father smiled and let her know that she could spend as long as she wished and gracefully exited the room.

Truly felt completely welcome here. Life in 2115 rarely offered opportunity to feel welcome, anywhere.

Opening the side panel, lying on a comfortable-looking seat was half of a heart-shaped locket. Inside, it simply read:

“Serendipity”

After glancing at what were thankfully fairly intuitive controls, she put in temporal & spatial coordinates + engaged the device.

She heard exactly three sets of “clicks,” which sounded very much like what she recalled the cicadas sounded like on warm summer evenings from her childhood in southern Montana.

==============

Truly saw Charles - who was surprised to see anybody in the comestible storage facility at that hour - gave him a brief wink and quickly located George Minkly, the security guard on duty.

If George wanted his wife to know about the dalliances he was having with her best friends fiancé, “Chartreuse,” that all George would have to do is locate & arrest the man that was about to help some ailing children receive higher level comestibles, so as to probably save their lives.

“Yup, just keep the man 200 meters down that corridor from doing a truly good deed and replacing a couple D with B Grade containers and he could learn life as a single (or dead) man.

============

The security guard and Charles quickly moved the disguised A-Grade containers to the loading dock for the transport that would take them to “Moppet Healing Center” in sector Bowie-II.

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Standing there.

Standing there.

Seeing Betty-jo alive again on this cool spring day was almost more than Truly could take …