Time Influx (eBook)

Katie Mitsui (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
392 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3178-0424-4 (ISBN)

Infos

The snag in the fabric of time that engineer Johnathan Davidson's time machine created dragged every person in in the city around him out of the present, and each reappeared at random over the course of the next 100 years. Though it irreparably confused their lives and relationships and caused an entire network of professional and scientific support to be built around the time survivors, the close of the wormhole at the end of a century seemed to be the ending of the time disaster. A new chapter in the saga begins when the time machine is stolen by a mysterious entity before it can be destroyed. Terrorist threats to use the machine in populated cities and the discovery of dangerous rogue time zones all over the world necessitate the establishment of the 'Watchdogs', a group intent on finding the culprits and restoring order.

Katie Mitsui lives in the Chicagoland area where she works in industry marketing. Her spare time is spent reading sci-fi and other fiction, playing sports, crafting, and going on fossil and geode digs. Her first novel was The Time Anomaly.

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The snag in the fabric of time that engineer Johnathan Davidson's time machine created dragged every person in in the city of Toledo, Ohio around him out of the present, and each reappeared at random over the course of the next 100 years. Though it irreparably confused their lives and relationships and caused an entire network of professional and scientific support to be built around the time survivors, the close of the wormhole at the end of a century seemed to be the ending of the time disaster. Johnathan was the last to return from time, and to him the 100-year trip seemed instantaneous. Now he is just learning that his journey impacted hundreds of thousands of lives and is known infamously as The Time Event. He strives to take accountability, while also exploring his futuristic new home. A new chapter in the saga begins when the time machine is stolen by a mysterious entity before it can be destroyed. Soon rumors of illicit time travel for profit emerge, and terrorist threats to use the machine in populated cities cause concern all over the world. The discovery of dangerous rogue time zones that seem to defy the previous 'rules' of time travel also emerge, and a new team of "e;Watchdogs"e;, a group intent on finding the culprits and restoring order, is recruited from the Alpha teams of Orien-Sadler. In The Time Influx, we follow the intersecting stories of Johnathan and his newfound friends and colleagues in Lake City. As the scientists and engineers attempt to define the rules of time travel and find a way to reverse the effects of the rogue time zones, the Watchdogs track down the time terrorists in a global chase.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

Johnathan Davidson, Inventor of the Time Machine – Lake City Rehabilitation Center. 2 years, 1 month after the Close.

Well, hell. In fact, that might be where I’m headed after this is all said and done. It might not hold as an excuse in the minds of about half the people on the planet, but I swear I didn’t realize my time jump was going to affect anyone else at all. I thought it would just be me taking the trip (if it even worked), and I was just so desperate to escape my own time. It sounds selfish, but all I can say in my defense is that I had an incurable disease and was looking for a future with a cure… any future at all, really. And I know, I know… being sorry doesn’t undo anything. No one HAS to forgive you just because you feel bad; that’s one thing no one tells you when you’re a kid, do they? We’re all taught that when we screw up, we just ‘say sorry’ and then you’re all supposed to just forget about it. And that works when you’re just messing around on the playground, but in the real world, no one owes you their forgiveness. And I messed up thousands… no, HUNDREDS of thousands… of lives. No one owes me anything.

It’s shame that keeps me from seeking to make more new connections in this future world, even though so many people have been incredibly kind to me in the two years since I returned. And that’s even before the official verdict clearing me from jail time came down, just last month. I missed a century in the blink of an eye, and woke up to one hell of a mess that was all of my own doing. But people still say good morning just like they always have. Friendly ones, anyway. And unfriendly or distracted ones ignore me, and that’s normal and comforting too, in its own way. Some people out there in the wide world hate my guts and would probably just as soon spit on me… but luckily, I’m shielded from such venom here in Lake City.

Lake City… where do I even begin? The engineering of this place is amazing. They built it off the shore of Toledo and it’s an entirely manmade floating island. This type of building tech was starting to be used even in my day, but they’ve really advanced the science to create something that’s almost like a standalone ecosystem where they can even control the weather around the city… and from what I’ve heard it’s been made scalable to combat erosion over coastlines all over the world. I watched all sorts of documentaries about how it was constructed during the months I was here convalescing, and for an engineer like myself, it’s somehow more exciting than even a rip in spacetime, because this I can actually see and touch and feel all around me. Oh, and can I just mention that they have a device here that lets you watch documentaries and movies while you’re in REM sleep?!? Just one of a million new gadgets for me to learn how to use here in the future. I wish I’d invented something cool and useful like that instead of the time machine, which has basically been an unmitigated disaster.

Lake City was engineered to house the counselling services for what they’ve dubbed “time survivors” as they arrived throughout the decades – of everything, that was the part that I was most surprised to learn. The fact that I accidentally took the whole city around me into the future is crazy enough, but how could anyone have predicted they would come back one by one across the whole century instead of all arriving at the same time I did? I wouldn’t have gone at all if I had known everyone else would get pulled along with me, I swear I would have smashed the damn machine instead and just quietly died of my disease and that would have been the end of it. But I didn’t know.

I feel like I constantly want to explain myself and my actions, but what’s interesting is that no one really seems to care why I did it, they only care about the functionality of how I achieved it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m relieved… I guess not having an interest in some long and drawn-out spectacle of a public trial is an interesting development for a society that in my time was amazingly self-absorbed (and I include my own spoiled self in that statement). In my day they would have made it some kind of reality show and rehashed things a million times, waiting for me to have a dramatic breakdown on camera and admit it was all the fear of my memory being lost to eternity or something. Instead, there’s a permanent ‘get busy moving on’ vibe to this whole century that I find both impressive and intimidating. I guess after a hundred years, the reality of time travel is old news to everyone but me.

So yes… here I am in the future, where there is a whole infrastructure of counsellors and mental health professionals built around reinstating us time travelers into a new world and helping us move forward instead of wallowing in the past. It’s humbling to realize it’s taken a vast network of people, all working for a full century, to mitigate the damage I’ve done. The whole operation (run by Orien-Sadler, the keepers of Lake City) is amazingly organized, and compassionate in a way that a bitter ol’ millennial kid like myself almost can’t fathom.

I’ve always said my imagination was my most defining characteristic, but I never could have imagined anything like the reality I’m facing now. When I popped back into this plane of existence and found myself staring down the barrels of the many large and scary weapons of the Time Committee’s goon squad, I figured I would be dead in a matter of moments. Those moments passed and I thought ok, maybe I’ll live but I’ll probably never see the light of day again, because apparently something about my experiment went very, very wrong or they wouldn’t have brought quite so many guns just to subdue lil’ ol’ me. Even now, years later, I wake up in a cold sweat, reliving that critical moment and thanking my lucky stars I chose to do the smart thing taking my hand off that time machine button instead of pressing it again like I could have. I’ll admit it though, I thought about it for a second or three.

Sure, if I’d hit it again and “escaped” forward another century it would have seemed like just another blink of an eye to me, but I highly doubt it would have improved my situation. They already seemed pretty mad at me after a hundred years of waiting, so disappearing into time wouldn’t have exactly put me back in anyone’s good graces. Probably they would have had twice as many guns at the 200-year mark. No, putting my hands up and cooperating at least convinced people that I was not actually an evil scientist scheming to purposely rip a hole in the fabric of time.

One small consolation - it turns out that the disease that was killing me a hundred years ago really IS reversible here in the future just like I’d hoped. It was the whole desperate reason for me to venture forward in the first place, and though it wasn’t quite like my daydream scenario where I took one pill and returned to full strength like Super Mario eating a magic mushroom, it was surprisingly simple to rectify. Several months of bed rest and treatments that are a blur to me while my head was on the fritz, and then a year or so in recovery and physical therapy, but on the other side of that, yeah… complete remission. I may have lost a few brain cells while my body was giving up on me in the past, but here I am all ready to make a new future. Cured. So, I guess my experiment was a success after all, though I won’t say THAT out loud EVER, because it makes it sound like I think the whole time disaster was justified. One downside of living is that of course I’m never going to get away with so much as a speeding ticket for the rest of my entire life because I am on the radar of most of the civilized world at this point as that schmuck that invented the time machine. But I’ll take it.

Looking at the bright side, though I’m working from a real low starting point, things can only go up for me now. There’s no one I knew from the past here to witness what a bonehead I have been. I’ve got my health back, I’ve got some version of freedom (still in semi-isolation, but that’s better than downright imprisonment), and I’ve even got a new job.

That’s right – I’m technically a consultant now, and I’ve got a combined living and work space here in Lake City with a decent view of the gardens and access to all the amenities of the facility. I’m getting grilled daily by members of the Time Committee, the Orien-Sadler counsellors and various other researchers on how I designed the time machine and made it functional. Good cop/bad cop routines day and night, while they show me pages of my own notes and try to get me to decipher them and fill in the blanks for all of the things that I didn’t keep good records on (an embarrassingly large amount of my notebooks are chicken-scratching and doodles to be honest, but give me a break – I was just a college student when I did the heavy lifting and when I returned to the project years later, I just hit the ground running and didn’t bother to clean up my notes). It’s coming back to me piece by piece (I’m not normally forgetful, but I was dying at the time and needless to say it’s pretty complex), but I’ll admit I’m also holding back a little because I don’t really know who to trust with such dangerous...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.12.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3178-0424-4 / 9798317804244