The Waters of the Past

How long have I been here? Hours? Days? Time has always been…relative to me. Now it feels as if I’ve lost all sense of it entirely. Here in this room, these metal walls, time takes a different meaning. Seconds, hours, days, months; these simple concepts evaporate into thin air within these cold walls. Time is warped, transformed from words into questions. Time for Question 1; time for Question 2; 3,4, so on and so forth. And like any reliable clock, time inevitably resets itself with the repeat of the same questions. Why do they ask the same questions? Do they think my story will be any different? Do they think that if I give the same answers enough times, I’ll feel regret about what I’ve done? I only ever had one goal: to improve the health and living conditions of the forgotten and unfortunate. Why should I regret that?

You know who should live in regret? Their masters.

The Triumvirate of Planetary Republics. “Safe-keepers of us all.” Three solar systems, 37 planets, and nearly 100 septillion citizens who live and die to keep a grand total of five capital planets wealthy while they choke and wither from within. God forbid anyone should try to help the common people without giving the Triumvirate their fair due.

And by fair due, I meant total control.

When they found me, I knew it was pointless to run. They force-dropped out of orbit and made landfall within the span of minutes to try and cut me off from running to my ship. They’ll have figured out their little maneuver was for naught by now. If they took the time between questioning me and securing my work to give my ship a good look-over, they’ll have discovered I had to strip the wreck for my equipment.

For the greater good.

Then again, the greater good is a concept that flies a little over their heads.

Look, here they come again with the same questions. Shuffling in with their dark suits, their pads, those gaunt, contemptable faces. They think I’m beneath them, another criminal in a long list of criminals.

Idiot lap dogs.

Question 1: What’s your name?

Again? This is pointless. You have it on the record; you have my birth certificate, my school history, my diploma—

What. Is. Your. Name?

Oprom.

Oprom Poswell.

Dr. Oprom Poswell. I may have never earned my doctorate, but I’ve done everything and beyond lesser people who call themselves doctors have done—

Where did you acquire the equipment?

I didn’t acquire it. I didn’t steal it.

I made it. Me, along with my colleagues and Professor Tyrell.

That’s right, I’m one of Tyrell’s Twenty. Probably the last of the Twenty now. You can stroke your chest and scratch another name off your list now. There was twenty-five of us back then; young, bright dreamers from all walks of life that Tyrell cobbled together for a dream larger than the galaxy itself.

I was so young back then. Fresh out of college, diploma in hand, and hungry for success. The only thing that mattered to me was getting a scholarship for the Regenesis Program. You know the one? At the time, it was a privatized program that focused on reseeding dead worlds, terraforming their environments to be sustainable for human life. Success meant having my name written in the history books as one of the greatest environmental scientists of our time, plus a lucrative financial share in the initial investments of said planet. Money and fame; it was all I ever asked for. Professor Tyrell showed me differently.

Did you know Tyrell’s research was approved by your masters for the Regenesis Program? He argued that select planetoids were too barren, too unstable, to respond to our more natural terraforming equipment. Instead of forcing evolution on a planet, he argued, what if we could reverse evolve planets? Return them exactly to the pinnacle of their prime?

A madman, they called him. A Day Dreamer. Even in the age of intergalactic space travel and unparalleled medical breakthroughs, he was dubbed a science-fiction idealist.

Until he proved it could be done.

I remember the first testing with the Triumvirate representatives, the Grant Committees, and skeptics of all fields huddled in our tiny room to watch Tyrell and his flock of deluded followers fail to turn the figurative water into wine. I remember their slack-jawed, dumbfounded faces when we proved them it could be done. The Reverse Evolution Project! Larger than life and half as expensive!

Suddenly, the grants began to pour in. We were given tools, money, even a private lab in space orbiting Aronis! I was excited, I was devoted, I was all in on the project. I thought we were really going to change the galaxy.

But these things came at a price, one your masters were eager to set.

They came to him with fake pretenses at first; a private dinner with some very private investors, bedazzling him with money and dreams of his name being herald throughout history before asking him the big question: is it possible for his work to be reserved for defense contracts?

Military defense.

He’d never consider it in a million years, he told us. We were going to change the galaxy, not make weapons of war.

In time, our brand-new private lab began to feel more like a private prison. Rylock, my friend—whom you’re well acquainted with by now, I’m sure—was the mathematical nerd among us. He was also a programming wizard. He was the first of us to discover our personal servers were being monitored, our mail secretly copied and preserved. Our notes, stolen.

I didn’t believe, not a first. I wasn’t a fool; I knew the Triumvirate could be…persuasive, but they wouldn’t do anything rash to a group of teenagers, would they? Certainly not when we were on the verge of creating revolutionary work.

Suddenly, Professor Tyrell excused us all from the laboratory for a few days. We were working too hard for our young age; we deserved a break after all this excitement. Grab a drink, meet with family, enjoy the galaxy for a change. We earned it. He sounded…off when he told us these things. He was too calm, too casual, trying to convince us of something we already agreed with in our heads. I realize now he wasn’t calm, he was resigned. Accepting of fate.

Funny, I think I know how he feels now.

Two standard days later he was dead. The entire station exploded; half of Aronis could see the fireball above their heads. All our work was gone.

I had little time to process this. I was numb for days, maybe a week. Not soon after, two men claiming to answer directly to the Triumvirate assured me that I still had a place on the Regenesis Program, provided I transfer the remainder of Tyrell’s Reverse Evolution research to a private, government-controlled facility and sign a new, very restrictive, contract. I later learned almost everyone else involved in the project received the very same deal.

Five of us agreed out of fear, or desperation.

The rest of us, the other twenty including Rylock and I, chose to finish Tyrell’s work his way: on our own. Nine out of those twenty were arrested the very next day. I never heard from them again. The rest of us scattered throughout the galaxy, hiding, rebuilding, and eventually learning what happened to our professor.

Your masters murdered him. Tried to take what they couldn’t buy. You didn’t get far with Tyrell; you think you’ll get something from me?

Why did you go to Barris-5?

The answer to that should have been as obvious as the last time I’ve said it. Barris-5 was just another name on a map to most Triumvirate records, another mining planet on the edges of known space. Your masters irreversibly sabotaged its environment during the “Kanjur Culling,” your masters’ little plan to weed out the remaining rebels of the 12th Age Revolt by destabilizing almost all of the backwater planets they could be hiding on.

Key word being could.

They obliterated Barris-5’s water moon, the Tigris; the only source of water on Barris-5. Without the Tigris, Barris-5 dehydrated and turn into the red death ball you see today. Once the world was a barren waste, your masters decided to salvage their mess by turning it into a mining world, see what else they can pick from the corpse. Any of this ringing a bell?

Funny. I suspected it wouldn’t.

But I digress: why dwell on history that doesn’t matter to you? I knew the Triumvirate had left the planet abandoned for thirty standard years now and its barren environment was the perfect place to enact the final stages of Tyrell’s work.

Yes, the final stages.

While your masters picked off the remainder of Tyrell’s Twenty one at a time, we were finishing our designs for what we called “The Reverse Evolution Accelerator.” A stunningly beautiful, compact device capable of activating and maintaining the Reverse Evolution process in a controlled environment indefinitely, so long as we had a viable power source. However, it wasn’t quite perfected yet. Tried as we might, the RE process only lasted seconds before catastrophically collapsing on itself. The first time we tried it…my friend Elias died in the process.

I’ll…carry that regret with me for a long time.

Rylock and I splintered the rest of the Twenty into two groups: My team would examine the equipment and try to survey the problem through machinery, Rylock’s team would try adjusting the equations.

Months passed. Our families and friends gave us up to the Triumvirate eventually. Many of my friends sacrificed themselves to give the rest of us precious time to run, to hide. We moved from Exas to Maras, Tytos-16, even Warsov; we dwindled from twenty to twelve, seven, then four.

Eventually it was down to just me and Rylock, and you found him first.

However, he first showed me that he cracked the source of RE’s problem: it missed an equation. It was a small detail, but he once told me all the important details usually were. I think he secretly related to small details, feeling small but important in his own way.

I wish I told him he wasn’t small at all. He mattered to all of us.

…Is he alright? Will you at least assure me of that?

Hmmm, I suppose not.

Regardless, we already agreed that Barris-5 was the perfect planet to test the Reverse Evolution Accelerator. We waited on each other to fix that final problem, then we’d set out there together. When he sent me the equation instead appearing himself, I knew your people like you found him first and were undoubtedly on my tail. So, I procured a ship, some supplies, and set out to Barris-5.

I admit in my…hastiness, I may have dealt with a less than reputable dealer for my ship. One who recognized desperation and knew how to make a profit from it.

My ship transitioned to Faster Than Light easily, but I left the speed too closely to Barris-5’s atmosphere. Its initial gravitational pull violently fought my ship’s reverse thrusters, tearing a hole right through my ship’s hull.

I hardly had any time to react. One second, I was staring at that red surface, the next second was full of blaring sirens, a shaking to rival the fiercest of earthquakes, oxygen quickly being sucked out of the cabin, fires erupting one the wings, and a rapidly fast descent to Barris-5’s surface.

I wasn’t an extraordinary pilot, there was little I could do to repair the damage while burning through the atmosphere, and the ship came with a damaged automatic pilot control. I thought I was going to die.

That’s funny now, looking back.

Anyway, my final thoughts were ‘this had better not have been all for nothing,’ as the red planet shifted from a giant red blur to hardened, blood-red plains. A red, hard surface I was certain I was about to go splat on. Splat and then explode. And probably burn.

Then, darkness.

Who is your contact on the planet?

I’ve told you a million times already, I don’t have a contact on the surface. I didn’t even know the planet was still inhabited.

When I crashed on the surface, I blacked out from the impact. If I wasn’t dead, I expected to recover in a smoldering wreck of twisted metal and flames. Instead, I found myself on a…cot, in a room with bandages wound over my sorely broken ribs and this gash on my head sewn shut.

Official Triumvirate records state Barris-5 to be completely abandoned after they shut down the mining operations and I believed them. I had no reason to doubt the reports. Your masters surprised me once again with their compulsion to cover up the horrible truth.

They were the miners, or what was left of them after thirty years of isolation.

The eldest of them, the blind woman, told me they organized a revolt once the learned of the mine's closure. Part of the company’s original contract stipulated they had to live and work planetside for seven standard years, in which they survived off regular food deliveries and a minimum pay of 200 lunarii per standard month. If they survived all seven years, they’d individually receive a substantial bonus of a 1,200 lunarii. The closure was conveniently announced four standard months shy of the seven-year mark, letting the company feel this “unforeseen circumstance” gave them adequate cause to renege the contract.

The miners had to revolt; without that bonus, they would be homeless and destitute. Their plan was simple: sabotage one of the company’s deep core drills—the big one you see outside their community—and hold it for ransom. When the company recall their drills, they are meant to convert its massive reserves of stored minerals as a crude form of fuel to break through Barris-5’s atmosphere. Afterwards the drills would float amiably in space until the company sends a carrier craft to haul them over to some other poor planet. However, a hundred and fifteen of the miners seized control of a drill and deactivated the codes, made certain that drill wasn’t going anywhere.

I thought it was a bold plan, though reeking of desperation. The mining rig must have been worth 12 million lunarii alone; the Triumvirate would have slaughtered them all for threatening their pockets. Yet, in a most unusual twist, they simply left. They recovered the remaining rigs, severed transmissions to and from Barris-5, and left the miners for good. Perhaps they thought they could wait until the miners were all dead.

Years passed by. Many died from wounds, disease, and the massacres of untold barbarism between the miners. The stuff of nightmares, I’m sure. To survive, they stripped the drill bare: its bulky, metal hull was flattened into sheets that served to reinforce their prefabricated houses against Barris-5’s dust storms; they stripped and wielded the sprockets to their man-sized mining tools to construct crude, all-terrain vehicles they dubbed “landstriders”; they repurposed the rest of their tools with the drill’s empty fuel pods to create some sort of device that converted minerals into a sludge of nucleic paste for food. Still tasted like rocks though. Finally, their most prized possession: a massive mining vat staked in the middle of their shantytown. They called it their Humidifier Tower. Built from the very same vat that should have burned the drill’s rock reserves as ignition fuel for lift-off, now the community’s only source of water on the planet by burning “Hydronite.” Hydronite were small, blue ores the miners dug daily to acquire; ores saturated with—as the name suggests—hydrogen. The Humidifier Tower burned thousands of Hydronites daily, then supercooled the fumes to create a few liters a week of water droplets.

Thirty years passed them by in this deadly dance for survival. Near two hundred survivors dwindled down to simply nineteen, their days long and monotonous, spending every second doing what’s necessary to survive the next hour, then the hour after that, and the hour after that. They had long forgotten there was a whole galaxy out in the stars, lost all hope for rescue years ago.

Until my ship crashed on their territory.

Why did you involve these people?

Don’t take that tone with me; like you're holier than I. You and your masters didn’t even know these people were still alive before I got here.

It wasn’t by choice; I can assure you. They treated me well enough for a day or two, feeding me their sludge meals, redressing my bandages, and endlessly pestering me with questions. But I could hear them argue when they thought I was sleeping. They didn’t trust me. They thought that I was a lap dog sent by the Triumvirate for a myriad of reasons: to steal the Hydronite for the Triumvirate, to erase their community in order to hide a scandal, or even steal their children. The biggest issue they had with me was that their Humidifier Tower couldn’t process enough water to sustain their community plus one.

The solution to their problems…went without saying.

Leaving the implication not-with-standing, I didn’t want to burden them any more than their monstrous lives had done already, so I snuck away with my research and the accelerator when they weren’t looking. I…had to steal one of their landstriders. I knew that if they found me and caught me, they’d waste no time killing me to protect themselves. I had to finish Tyrell’s work, my work. And if it worked, I’d use it to help these people. He’d want that.

I rode out into what they called the Red Death for two days. Once in Barris-5’s history it was the deepest ocean floor the planet had. It would be the perfect place to assemble the RE Accelerator. And with Rylock’s added equation, I knew I could get it to work this time.

And I would have been right, if I hadn’t made a crash landing on the planet.

I knew most of my research was either lost or unsalvageable. Regrettable, but nothing I couldn’t recover if I backtracked through my notes.

It was my equipment I was worried about, and rightly so.

The fusion generator was cracked, containment shell was compromised, and the wires were so crispy I may as well have sprinkled salt over them. Most of it needed replacing, but the containment shell and the fusion generator were the most vital parts of the device. Without them, I neither had an energy source to sustain the Accelerator nor a shield to keep the Reverse Evolution Process contained, and no ship to fly off and get replacement parts.

I…had no choice. I had to go back to the miners for their help.

How many of them drank the contaminated waters?

Stop saying that.

They had no choice but to drink. Getting them to help me was hard enough without trying to explain twelve years of advanced science and engineering in the span of twelve minutes before they hung me to death. These people spent thirty years living in a relative stone age while the rest of the galaxy made technological leaps and bounds. They knew nothing about the Regenesis Program, or of Tyrell’s work. They couldn’t understand Reverse Evolution, chronology, any of it. I had to get them to accept the essential: my device—when repaired—can reverse evolve Barris-5 into a viable world again. It can reverse time itself.

When repaired.

With their help, I stripped my ship of its drive core and used it as a power source in lieu of the fusion generator, but a replacement for the containment shield had to come at a hefty price: the only equipment possible of containing my device was their Humidifier Tower. They had to sacrifice their only source of water for my device.

And it worked.

We took their landstriders and my wrecked ship out to the Red Barrens, assembled the RE Accelerator, and made the necessary repairs. All that was needed was to add Rylock’s new algorithms and activate the REA where I theorized was the last moist surface on Barris-5’s surface.

And it worked.

The ship’s drive core almost overheated, the makeshift shielding nearly flew apart, and an ungodly screeching almost rendered us all deaf.

But the Eye…

I called it Tyrell’s Eye the moment I first saw it. In truth it was a mirage, the human’s brain of processing the invisible anchors of time bending backwards—spiralling—before its very eyes. I don’t know how many years were reverted in front me, but in a matter of moments the hard, red waste began darkening in color. Minutes passed by and the ground was a thick, black puddle of mud. Then, as if a god had willed it into existence, pure, crystalline water burst from the ground in a geyser.

Their faces…oh, their faces. They never saw anything of the like in their entire lives. They thought I was a messiah, a god even! Everything Tyrell dreamed, everything we had sacrificed for, was achieved by me!

It was real, I made it real!

Me!

Do you remember Doctor Shia Adars?

Must you bring her up again? Yes, I remember her. At this point, I could never forget her. She was one of the first of us Professor Tyrell recruited for the Reverse Evolution Project. She’s one of the five who took your masters’ deal back then. They gave her no choice; they cut off her family’s health insurance—

What do you know about the Adars Adverse Effect?

I still can’t believe she named it after herself—

What do you know about it?

Stop asking this stupid question, it’s a pointless factor—

Did you know about it?

It’s speculative theory, it had no evidence supporting—

Did you know?

Stop taking that tone with me—

Did. You. Know?

FINE. Yes, I knew! Satisfied?

Rylock’s equations—they were the final piece to the Reverse Evolution Project, but they…suggested that prolonged usage of the Reverse Evolution process was impossible. The energy required to maintain Tyrell’s Eye would eventually need to increase exponentially to stay active.

And…and when it finally burns out, everything effected would revert to its modern state.

The…water in the miner’s bloodstream and intestines would revert to sand, but not before traveling through the time period when the remainders of Barris-5’s water sources were highly irradiated.

They’ll all die when RE Accelerator is turned off.

…I’ll die too.

When I initially turned on the Accelerator, I note my ship’s drive core could sustain the RE Process for approximately three weeks. A week and a half after discovering Tyrell’s Eye, I noticed power fluctuations. Fluctuations that suggested Rylock’s equations—Shia’s Adverse Effect—might be accurate.

That was…maybe a few days, maybe a week by now, before you followed my trail here. Plenty of time for the entire community to drink their fill, and me.

I’ve killed them all.

I’ve killed them and they don’t even know it yet.

You…you have to believe that I would have never if I had known—I was just trying to help them—anybody could have made that mistake! Tyrell would have made the same mistake! He would understand. He…

Tyrell…

Elias…

Rylock…

What have I done…?

Funny.

Time never mattered much to me these past few years. I always knew one day, I’d be able to turn back the clock and take all that lost time back.

Now I’ve done it. And I’m out of time.

THE END

The Past and the Future stand on opposite ends of the Present. To chase one is to reject the other.

I hope you enjoyed this story.