Two years ago I began writing this story. I came back to it recently and decided to finish it and submit it to a Science Fiction magazine in hopes of getting it published. I’ve re-written much of the first two chapters (which were all I’d originally written) and have now added two more chapters. It will probably be seven chapters long in the end. Please feel free to leave critiques and comments. I’d really like to see this published, so the more it’s critiqued the more likely I’ll be able to make it better and hopefully good enough to be picked up. I’ll start with just the first chapter and once I have the whole first draft done will post it here. Here goes…

This is part 1 of a multi-part time-travel short story. Enjoy.

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Gene did not trust Seth. (Chapter 1)

If it weren’t for the top secret nature of the project, he would have fired Seth three years ago. The problem was that Seth was a highly trained air force pilot with nothing to lose. No kids, no wife, no life whatsoever. So he was perfect for these experiments, and it was too late to find someone else.

Thirteen years ago the IRS notified the FBI that the US had been bleeding money to the Kremlin through a spy in the First United Methodist Church of Russia in America. The Arch-Pastor of the Church (who was at the time living in Manhattan) had moved to the US in 1965 with the mission of infiltrating and overtaking the Church to the highest level possible. The Russian government saw the quickest way to large amounts of cash as being the willing docile Christian American’s generous spirit. Through a string of events stemming from an arrogant disregard of American tax laws, the church failed to be fiscally transparent and responsible. The Arch-Pastor had been sending millions of dollars to it’s “sister church” in Russia. When one of it’s rich beneficiaries visited Moscow to see the cathedral/orphanage he had donated 30 million to fund, he found a gymnasium attached to a small chapel sporting 30 cots filled with starving children and one old saintly nun trying desperately to keep the pneumonia-ridden orphans from dying.

The anonymous millionaire’s shock turned into outright rage when the plaque stating that he was funding this debacle fell off the wall. It turns out the “church” had taken a neighborhood center, dressed it up as a church, and placed a magnetic plaque over a hot air vent and tried to play the whole thing off as the millionaire’s investment. Condensation building behind the plaque as the air tried to flow out caused the thing to come sliding off at just the most expedient moment to the horror of the Russian “Monk” (KGB Agent) who, in his shocked excitement, almost pulled out his gun and shot the millionaire on the spot, but thought better of it at just the last moment seeing as the man was holding a wheezing child at the time.

When said millionaire got home, he started looking into things, and three years later the whole church fell apart, ending with the Arch-pastor being placed in prison for tax evasion, fraud, money laundering and theft amongst other things, with a 230 year sentence.

With such a large amount of money, the FBI got involved, and through some plea bargaining the Arch-Pastor revealed that the money had been going to fund some sort of military project that the Russians had been working on for the last 40 years. The CIA got involved at this point, and apparently (to the CIA’s extreme astonishment and dismay) the Soviets were messing around with time travel. Successfully.

At the time Gene learned this, he was the second to top nuclear physicist working in the US. Since everyone at this point realized that nuclear war was never going to happen (as long as Iran or some other crazy rogue nation didn’t get their hands on nukes) energies were being moved towards more promising weapons possibilities. In fact, for a while Gene had toyed with a wave gun that emitted a noise so obnoxious it reduced it’s victim to a whimpering mass laying in their own puddle of vomit and other unmentionables. The problem was that you had to wear really thick ear-plugs to use it, and it just wasn’t feasible for combat situations. What if the enemy was wearing ear-plugs as well? It was too easily counter-acted.

So, as I said, Thirteen years ago it was discovered that the Russians had been toying with time travel. Roger, now Gene’s lab assistant, had been a spy in the Kremlin, and was able to steal designs for the actual time travel device. It was amazing.

Apparently when the Soviet Union fell, it was because half of the entire army and government had gone 50 years into the future after placing all of the government’s money into the US stock market. The plan was; they would pop out one day, withdrawal the cash, us it to mass-produce the new weapons their scientists had created over the last 50 years, and suddenly become the richest most well armed country on the face of the earth.

It was Gene’s job to make sure this didn’t happen. He had to replicate the process and find a way to block re-entry by the soviets into the timeline, silently and effortlessly killing 1.3 million Russian soldiers (and the US government would “claim” the stocks of course).

Gene and Seth had been perfecting the time travel technology over the last 10 years. At first they were equal partners working under one Dr. Endlyn. But upon the good Dr.’s sudden demise four years ago, there had been a power struggle for one of them to take over the project.

Seth had always been closer to Endlyn, because (as I said) Seth had no family. Neither had Endlyn. They spent hours in the pub after work drinking and dreaming. Gene had a wife and kids, and thus did not have the time to waste his life away in the bottom of a pint glass. Despite the fact that Seth was closer to the doctor himself, Gene was even closer to the doctor’s work.

The night the accident happened, the doctor disappeared and the almost working equipment was destroyed. It was presumed that the doctor had been drunk, and had actually (insanely) tried the machine out. He had apparently crossed a few wires, and six years hard work had been obliterated.

Seth was devastated. Or at least he should have been. However, he had just seemed pretty calm about the whole thing. He took a week off of work (as expected… well, forced), but then was back with a vengeance. He took all of the energy he had wasted on drinking and dreaming and poured it into the machine.

Gene was a natural leader. He was level headed and competent. Despite Seth’s newfound work ethic, Gene was the obvious choice for project lead now that Endlyn was gone and so Gene was promoted. Gene hired an old colleague from the government’s ever shrinking Nuclear Physicist dept. to take over his now vacant position and began to head up the Time Travel effort much to Seth’s indignant consternation.

Today was the day. (Chapter 2)

Seth had lumbered into his space suit and was adjusting his respirator. No one knew what happened when you went through time, so (despite Seth’s cocky protestations) they made every effort to compensate for any scenario. Gene thought that it was perfectly plausible that you went into dead space and waited until the desired time came for you to re-enter the timeline, and he wanted to make sure that Seth wouldn’t die of decompression if he was placed in a vacuum to be held for re-entry. They supplied Seth with enough oxygen for one week (as well as food). He looked like a goofy turtle with everything he needed being held in this massive shell on his back. He could barely walk. He hated the thing, and always seemed a little too willing to try the jump in plain-clothes.

Gene was tempted to let him try it. After all, it would get rid of him if it didn’t work, which Gene liked to think would make him happy because it would make his life much easier. But Gene wasn’t about to be responsible for sending someone (even someone he didn’t like) to his death.

They had agreed to send Seth one week into the future. No real rhyme or reason for the week long increment, it just seemed like a good amount of time. Long enough to be amazing, but short enough for it to be a bearable wait. Really what it came down to was that a week was how long Seth had insisted when Gene told Seth that he would be sending Seth on his first jump today. Fine, no need to have another screaming match, and Gene would be happy to be rid of Seth for a full week, plus (as I will explain) Gene (unfortunately) could not control when or where Seth went when he jumped.

Once they powered up the machine it would be possible for Seth to go to the future and have himself sent back to the moment after he stepped through the gate the first time, making it appear as if he were simply stepping through a door and coming out the other side. Meaning that if the future Gene were so inclined, he could send Seth back to the moment after he left. That would mean it would almost appear the whole thing did not work, but since then in one weeks time Seth would have to jump over the time he had jumped into the future to keep from ripping apart the very fabric of the space time continuum (or possibly just killing himself) by having his soul exist in two locations at once, they had all agreed that was a bad idea. Seth would go, and would stay in the future. One week. A one way trip.

The whole thing was controlled by a satellite, and really the door that the traveler was to walk through was only symbolic and didn’t actually do anything. The traveler had a microchip implanted in his head just behind his ear, which interfaced with his brain through electrical impulses that humans are constantly leaking and absorbing. The traveler simply concentrated hard enough on an exact date, which the microchip picked up and broadcasted to the satellite; which is why Gene had no control over Seth’s jumps. The satellite would pick up the signal, home in on the traveler and translate forward motion through physical space into forward motion through time to the specified re-entry date. Walking through the door was the psychological trigger that the traveler needed to initiate the time jump event. To jump back in time, the traveler (once in the future) simply turned on their heel (while concentrating hard enough) and popped back out the other side of the door. The satellite was designed to drop you anywhere in the world you wanted going forward, but only one place when going back. Kind of a stupid design, but it was a prototype so it was fine.

Roger, Genes replacement, finished plugging in the final wires and they all held their breath as Gene pressed the big red “power” button. The whole machine hummed to life. The new software successfully uploaded to their satellite with the final patches and bug fixes, and a little green light indicated all systems were a go.

Seth sneered at Gene and began lumbering towards the door. Just before he stepped into the door, he sarcastically called out “beam me up Scotty!” and then stepped through.

It’s an odd thing to describe watching a person, lumbering in a giant turtle-like space suit through a granite door-frame standing all lonely in the center of a dimly lit room, not disappear when you expect them to. That’s not to say nothing happened. It was like watching some sort of bad computer animated splice job. As the front of ‘space suit Seth’ went in, so the front of ‘sun-burnt, blistered, emaciated, bruised/scratched/beaten Seth’ came out, until all of Seth collapsed unconscious on the other side of the doorway.

Roger and Gene hollered out Seth’s name and ran towards the crumpled body on the floor. Roger got there first, and cradled Seth’s head on his leg. Seth’s eyes rolled open and looked lazily up at Roger. He opened his cracked lips and gasped “thank goodness… I’m finally back…”.

Roger and Gene looked astonished at each other. It had obviously worked, but something had gone terribly wrong.

Seth constricted his dry throat trying desperately to swallow, squeezing his eyes closed in pain. Then, abruptly, his eyes snapped open with clarity and urgency. He looked right at Gene and said “All of you are going to die from a nuclear holocaust sometime in the next week, and I have no idea why or how to stop it”. And then just as suddenly, Seth passed out.