Our boat was flung away from the storm into a long, awaited peace and calm of the light of day. I finally had the silence I needed to process my own findings before the storm as the information itself was intriguing to the time period that we lived in. “Wait a second,” I said to myself, “this spike of emissions has never occurred before in these particular conditions.” “Dylan, come here now!” I shouted down the hall.
“What do you want? I swear you told me I had break,” my assistant, Dylan, complained.
“Take this,” I commanded, shoving papers littered with data into his hands, “run this through the program and see what could it possibly mean.”
He left my office when the boat jerked to a stop causing a stack of papers to scatter all over the floor like leaves on a windy day. I got up in complete anger as all my effort and time organizing my desk was meaningless. I started to clean up the mess when I noticed that a series of papers that I have not seen before, yet they have my own handwriting scribbled all over it.
I put them aside in the top drawer of the desk and continued to pick up the mess. Then I noticed an envelope with my brother’s address on it and with that anger filled my mind as I could recall the night I found out about my stolen work. I tore it up quickly and looked at the clock to check the time. But the clock hands were spinning for some reason making the known time indecipherable.
I reached for the clock hanging from the ceiling and pulled it down with no effort. I tried to reset it by removing the batteries but it kept on spinning at rate that hours were passing in seconds. It finally stopped revealing the time, it was pass midday.
Dylan came back with the results, “Greg, an anomaly has been spotted in the data and you have to take a look at this!”
He laid out all of the graphs out on my desk.
Bang!
“What was that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Dylan panicked.
We heard shouting up in the halls on the upper deck, followed by rushes of footsteps racing down the hall. With full force, my office door was bust open by soldiers and I was immediately apprehended.
“This is the one we are looking for,” one of the soldiers proclaimed. “Take all of the research, and the graphs too.”
“No, my work, let me go,” I protested, struggling to get free as my precious work was packed away in boxes.
I was handcuffed quickly by a soldier and he gave a frown, “We never wanted to this.”
The cuffs produced a huge jolt of electricity that flowed directly into my body and caused a tremendous amount of excruciating pain. Then in seconds, the black of night covered my vision.
I woke up sore and cold with my bare feet hanging off the bed and was alarmed by the setting that I jumped up, hitting my head on the ceiling. I settled back down on the bed, etching my head to release the pain when I noticed a peculiar map of the Bermuda Triangle. It displayed a forecast map of the Bermuda Triangle with another map of different navigation routes layered on top of it.
“I would not observe that map if I were you” spoke a man in the doorway. “I am Martin and we have many things to discuss.”
He dragged a chair into the room and encouraged me to sit on the bed I woke up on. He took out a packet of papers and nonchalantly took out a pair of reading glasses. He turned the first page slowly and asked the first question.
“What were you doing in the past day before our contact?”
“Why would I answer that? I was crudely abducted from my research ship by you.” I protested.
“If you refuse to comply with our demands, we will take legal action for your suspicious activities,” threatened Martin.
“Ok, ok,” I started,” everything started in the morning when results came back from a test of certain trace substances. Out of nowhere, the weather changed from a beautiful sunrise to ferocious storm that enveloped us immediately. The waters around us roughened and the waves pounded the ship anger. There was an abundance of lightning strikes all around us and the wind could not decide on which way to blow. Suddenly we realized that ship was going in circles around a fixed object that looked like a spindle. Right after, we hit an area of the storm that seemed to be the eye but the winds picked up and the water churned faster. The last of the storm we saw was the curtains of rain that refrained from the center and with one final burst of wind the storm was no more.”
“What were these tests for?” continued Martin.
“It was for determining the effects of different substances when they react to the atmosphere,” I replied.
“And why is this concerning or important?” Martin added on.
I smiled at that question and joy overcame me, for someone has been finally valuing my research. “I believe the future of the world…”
My speech was cut off when my vision started to blink between two realities several times before I was fully immersed into the second one. I observed in confusion as someone ran down a long narrow hall, carrying a pile of papers that he almost spilled when he stopped at a particular door. He hastened to grab his keys when the door was yanked wide open. After that, there was a flash and I was back in the real world.
“Are you alright? What happened?” Martin abruptly asked as I realized that I fell to the floor.
“I don’t know,” I answered, “I just saw something that came from nowhere. To answer your previous question, I was proposing that using these substances could alter the current atmospheric conditions that would in turn change the weather to our desiring. As a result of this everything would change; this would make the world more productive community, and give me the position to lead new frontiers in science. This discovery holds the key for the future and it is a race to control its capabilities.”
“That is fairly interesting but one thing is that I need you to give up on this fantasy and actually start researching something realistic,” Martin persisted.
“What?! This is nonsense, I will not give up on my life’s research,” I spoke vehemently.
I was silenced by another series of flashing images and this time I was in a darkened room with the only light coming from a desktop lamp. The desk had a letter on it but the text was blurred and my attention was shifted to a man entering the room who was burdened with the faults of the world. I reached over to ask him why he felt emotional pain, but when I touched him, I felt the glimpse of the pain he held. It was responsibility, that he was responsible for all the troubles of the world and that he condemned it. I appreciated that came flash to greet me and bring me back to reality.
Only after the vision cleared, I realized that there was only one time I felt a slightly similar feeling. Then I thought back upon the command to give up my research, and anger flowed into my mind when I remembered that they also confiscated my work. Finally, I justified a reason for this, they were hired by my brother! And these are not visions, they are hallucinations!
“I knew it! I knew it!” I raged, “you are working with him, my brother, that monster wants to steal my research! The place, the setting makes perfect sense, you injected me with hallucinogens to trick me into telling it all, it all!”
“You are a waste of time you idiot!” he scolded me, “I should have listened to my partners, that my father is just a selfish fool that cares about himself and finds any excuse to blame things on his brother!”
“What? ‘Father’, are you insane?” I fired back.
“Yes, I am your son Martin, born twenty years ago, you are just out of time,” he addressed.
Right after that, I saw the similarities between the both of us and they were undeniable. Everything changed in my mind but one question came back to me over and over again, “Where am I?”
“This was not intended,” replied Martin. “You are in the future, marooned 50 years from the world of your time.”
Those words sunk straight into my mind, “the future”. The shock I experienced from the truth being told by my future son petrified my body into stone and my mind went blank.
I looked directly at Martin. “How, why did you bring me here?”
“Time travel was my life’s work,” proclaimed Martin. “I made all the discoveries relating to time travel and its grave consequences. There are multiple consequences to time travel which come in two main forms. First, when you come to a future time, you experience flashbacks to your future life. Second is that when you time travel, you break the field of time causing everyone to relive their decisions again. Considering these risks, I brought you here through the form of the storm to explain your disappearance. But now in this time, you made the discovery of the century, and weather is controlled everywhere by emitting chemicals in the air. However, it destabilized the atmosphere causing oxygen to be lost to space. The Earth is dying Father, and there is only one way to fix it.”
I was sent back to my room and I pondered upon the situation I am in. I know the future, I get it all in the end, the fame, the money, and everything I could ever want possible. But if I do nothing, I leave the children of the world to die from circumstances that should never been possible. Finally, a guiding light came in the form of a flashback, I saw myself opening the door to making the discovery of a lifetime and the intention of making the world a better place. Chills vibrated down my spine as the idea haunted me, knowing that it would all bad.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Martin blurted as he popped into the doorway. “Time to send you back home.”
The decision I have to make is still present to this day but the results to those actions will come in time.