The Time War
By Gary LM Martin
Chapter 3: The Continuity Service
Those glowing orange eyes....
Consciousness slowly returned to John Calle.
He was sitting in an elaborately furnished office. A man was staring at him intently. A man with bright blonde hair, combed in a wild way over his forehead. The man had very strong blue eyes. He was wearing a severe looking white suit with high collars. The man looked somehow... familiar.
"He's coming out of it now," said a familiar voice.
Calle turned and saw Doctor Vladek.
"What... what did you do to me?" Calle's voice was raspy for a moment.
"Forgive me," said Vladek. "But it was necessary. I have brought you to a sensitive location."
"Where am I?" Calle asked, rubbing his neck.
"Not far from where you were, in Straykerland," said the blonde man.
"And who are you?" Calle asked.
"My name is Ted Strayker."
********
Calle blinked twice. "Ted Strayker? The founder of Straykerland?"
"The one and only," Strayker smiled.
"What does the founder of Straykerland want with me?" Calle asked.
"You did something quite remarkable today," said Strayker. "You went on a highly programmed innocuous ride, to have an innocent round of sex with Eva Braun, and somehow you ended up changing the entire course of history, in that brief pocket of time. How did you do that? How did you know exactly what to say to Eva Braun to get Hitler to change his war plans?"
"I... I don't know. It... it just felt right," said Calle slowly.
"It just felt right," Strayker smiled, as he repeated those words. "We could use a man with your talents here, Mr. Calle. Or may I call you John?"
"You want me to work for Straykerland?" Calle squinted his eyes.
"Not exactly," said Strayker. "Straykerland is the least of what we really do here. It's a training ground, meant to uncover diamonds in the rough, like yourself."
"Then what is it you really do here?"
Strayker paused. "If I tell you, you have to understand this must be kept in the strictest of confidence."
Calle looked at Vladek and back to Strayker. "Of course."
"I'm in charge of a top secret global security organization called the Continuity Service. We're an organization which protects against tampering with the timeline."
"Tampering with the timeline?" said Calle. "How can there be tampering with the timeline? Only the World Government has the ability to travel through time."
"An ability which we gave them," said Strayker. "Hence their... generosity in licensing the technology back to us so we could operate Straykerland. Among other things."
"You gave them time travel...." Suddenly, it became clear to Calle. He had always wondered how Straykerland had persuaded the World Government to let them open a time travelling amusement park. Now it all made sense. "But in Straykerland, everything that is changeD occurs in discrete pockets of time, which are quickly overridden by the next customer."
"Correct," said Strayker.
"But you are saying that there is someone else out there, someone with real time travel ability, who is trying to make changes to our timeline?"
"Many someones, actually."
"How can that be?" Calle said.
"And therein lies a story," said Strayker.
********
His name was Carl Voidovich, and he had invented the first device to travel through time. Originally, the United States military had given him funding for a more modest goal, to create a portal which could enable people to travel through one point in space to another in an instant. Galactic Physicists had theorized that the connections between two points in space could be bridged by a gateway, if space could be properly bent and twisted and turned, like a party balloon.
But Carl Voidovich did much more than anyone expected. He succeeded in creating a gateway that allowed people to travel from one place to another in an instant. But he also created something else, a gateway through time.
When he realized what he had created, he swore his assistants to secrecy; he didn't know how the military, which funded the project, would use a device which allowed time travel. Instead, he decided to write false progress reports, and surreptitiously explored the nature of time himself, with his key senior technicians.
Voidovich discovered that he not only he had the ability to travel through time, he found he had the ability to change it. He went back in time to the night before, when he knew no one was in the lab, and purposefully left a marker on top of a scanning unit. When he returned to the present, he found the marker still there.
And it hadn't been there before he left.
The implications were enormous. Anyone with access to the device could change the course of time.
********
"And what happened then?" Calle asked. "The World Government took over, right?"
"Wrong," said Strayker. "One day, Professor Voidovich simply disappeared."
"Disappeared?"
"His senior assistant, William Bright, entered the lab one morning to find the Professor gone. But the Time Corridor was still active."
"So Voidovich simply went somewhere in time...."
"And never returned."
"That's so frightening," said Calle. "Who knows what he might have changed in the timeline?"
"Apparently, he didn't change a thing," said Strayker. "But, on the other hand, we wouldn't know if he had. We would have changed along with it. Professor Voidovich's senior assistant, William Bright, took over. One of his first acts was to build a Time Suppressor into the Time Shaft."
"Time Suppressor?"
"It's a kind of.. shield of anti-time particles which protects the building around us," said Strayker. "If time is changed, this building, and everyone inside of it, will be protected from changes to the timeline."
"But what happens if you go outside?"
"We have developed a treatment which coats the body with anti-time particles which protects individuals for several days. That's the only way can safely go home at night, confident that we'll wake up in the morning."
"You said 'we'. I thought this William Bright was running things."
"He was. Until a few years ago. Then Doctor Bright handed the reigns over to me. He put me in charge of the Continuity Service."
"Tell me more about this... Continuity Service," Calle said.
"At the CS, our motto is to 'Leave things as we found them'," said Strayker. "Our prime directive is to prevent any changes to the timeline."
"Why would there be any changes to the timeline, if you have the only time machine in existence?" Calle asked.
Strayker grimaced. "When Doctor Bright took over, his first step was to move the lab to a new location. He didn't want the military discovering what had been done. Bright found a sympathetic industrialist who helped him set up shop in a new location. But all was not harmonious from the start. Many of Professor Voidovich's senior assistants had different ideas on how the Time Shaft should be used. Some of them wanted to go back in time and right historical wrongs, to end slavery, genocide, world wars. And then others had... different ideas."
Strayker stared at Calle meaningfully before continuing. "Doctor Bright was opposed to all changes in the timeline. And so, one by one, the senior assistants all left. There were four in all, Ken Larson, Marsha Kalinsky, Mercury Jones, and Richard Smith. Each set up their own lab in other locations, and each successfully created their own Time Shafts. Thus were the temporal factions created."
"And so these guys are all trying to change the timeline?" Calle said.
"Yes," said Strayker. "And our mission is to stop them."
Calle laughed.
"What's so amusing?"
"Well, I would think your solution is simple. Go back in time before all those people defected, and stop them."
Strayker shook his head. "It isn't that simple. Looping ourselves is very dangerous. It can create rips in the fabric of time. And if we handle it improperly, the entire Continuity Service could cease to exist. Remember, the Service was created after the factions broke off. If we tamper with this event, we may wipe ourselves out of existence."
"But... you won't need a Continuity Service if you stop these other assistants, would you?"
"The risk is too great," said Strayker, in a tone that tolerated no argument. "We are in a deadly fight against these factions. Whenever they make a change to the timeline, we can determine what changes they make. But
how
they make the changes can be very hard to determine and how to fix them without causing even more harm can be even more challenging. We think someone with your talent, with your... intuition, for want of a better word, would be of tremendous help to us. Will you join us?"
Calle paused. After what had happened at Mohonk, he had retaken his old job at Astrodyne in San Diego. But with Marion gone, all his love for his work had dissipated as well. What Strayker was proposing was exponentially more important than the work he was doing designing rocket engines. He was tempted.
But....
"And what happens if I say no?" Calle asked.
"If you say no?" Strayker looked at Doctor Vladek and smiled before turning back to Calle. "Why nothing, of course."
"I'll be free to go?" Calle asked skeptically.
Strayker spread his hands. "You'll be free to go."
"Aren't you worried that I'll reveal what I know?"
"And what is it that you think you know?" Strayker asked. "You don't know where this facility is, which is really the only secret information we have. If you went public and claimed that Ted Strayker, the founder of the time travel amusement park Straykerland, also operated a secret temporal security service, you'd be treated as a lunatic or conspiracy theorist. No, we're not afraid of anything you might say."
