Page 5 of Reversal of Fate

4 – Time Jump or Bust

Dr. Mandell ushered Carter through a second door into yet another waiting room. It was as bland as the previous one, and there were no videos gracing the walls.

Carter was still digesting the news that the woman—or rather girl—he was supposed to romance and bring back to 2085 was a virgin. Not that Carter hadn’t slept with a virgin before—he had, once! He hadn’t exactly found it enjoyable, and wasn’t planning on repeating the experience. The girl didn’t know what she was doing, and the whole thing had been one epic failure. And now he had to romance a virgin to save humankind? Was somebody having a good laugh at his expense?

“Thanks a lot, Dad,” he grumbled under his breath. He had a good relationship with his father, better than most teenagers and twenty-somethings. But there were times when the two of them butted heads.

Well, Carter had to make the best of the situation. He took a seat in the waiting room and first studied the manual of the time travel device. The instructions were easy: set the time and date to where you want to time travel, and engage. Confident that he could handle the watch, he pulled up the girl’s file on his holocom to study it.

Julie Schneider was indeed a prolific user of a social media site named Instagram. He was able to get a good impression of what she enjoyed doing in her free time, who her friends were, and that she was a good student. He got to the end of her posts on social media and realized that they ended over a week before she was admitted to hospital with the virus.

Odd. Why would a girl who posted daily—several times a day in fact—suddenly stop? He pulled up her hospital chart and read through the doctor’s notes. The onset of Julie’s symptoms occurred on October 4. From one of the lectures during the one-week training, Carter knew that the incubation time of the virus was short and lay somewhere between two and three days. This meant that Julie was infected with the virus on October 2. She was admitted to the hospital in serious condition on October 6, and fell into a coma the same day.

However, her last post on Facebook was on September 26, a full week before she felt sick. Why had Julie suddenly stopped posting to her social media accounts? There had to be a reason for it. He clicked to download all of her social media accounts. In addition, he initiated a search of all official records for the week before she was admitted to the hospital and clicked on save to holocom. The records were already downloaded, but he didn’t get a chance to look at them.

There was a sudden sound in the room, and Carter looked up.

“You must be Carter Ambrose, the first traveler. Please come in.”

From a side door an Asian man in his fifties, tall and lean, with a full head of dark hair, and piercing green eyes motioned him into a smaller room.

Carter had heard about him. He was the head of the Time Quest program, a government funded institution that had been working for decades on making time travel possible.

“Dr. Hong,” Carter said and extended his hand upon entering the room that was furnished with a machine that consisted of several giant wheels and a vast amount of components that reminded Carter of the inside of a clockwork.“It’s an honor.”

Dr. Hong shook his hand. “I see you’ve heard of me.”

“Heard? I’ve followed your career ever since I learned to use my holocom.”

Dr. Hong smiled. “Thank you.” He seemed to notice Carter’s gaze resting on the machine, and motioned to it. “Our first prototype. The size is obviously very impractical, but it helped us understand the workings.”

“It looks amazing.”

Dr. Hong chuckled. “Well, let’s get you started. First, I need your holocom.”

With raised eyebrows, Carter asked, “Why?”

Once a person received their personal holocom at age five, it was practically never removed. It was dynamic and grew with the person.

“I’ll have to remove everything related to our time period in case it falls into the wrong hands. You’ll retain all files you’ll need for your trip, which were saved directly to the holocom. However, once you arrive in 2025, there won’t be any more live updates from our servers, because those servers, in fact, don’t exist yet.”

Carter understood. “But will the holocom still work at all?”

“It will. It gets continually recharged by your own body’s energy. But you won’t receive any new information, nor will you be able to communicate with anybody, even the other recruits who are sent to the same time and the same space. You’ll be on your own.”

Dr. Hong reached out his hand, and Carter removed the device from his arm and placed it in the doctor’s palm. Dr. Hong walked to a desk and put the holocom into a cradle. Carter followed him and watched as he pulled up the holocom’s settings and changed them. He worked faster than Carter’s eyes could follow.

“It’s all done,” Dr. Hong said finally, and handed back the holocom. “And remember, like they told you in your training, you’ll have to remove your holocom when you shower in 2025. The chlorine they used to put into their water supplies back then will corrode your holocom, and may cause it to malfunction. Understood?”

Carter nodded.

“Good. Now, the only files you’ll find on your holocom are the instructions about how to troubleshoot the time travel watches, how to operate the iPhone you were issued, a map of today’s L.A., which you’ll need in order to plan your return location, as well as the files on your target.”

Target? Another bad choice of words. Could these scientists not just use girl or woman? But Carter would never dare criticize Dr. Hong. He was his hero. And when Time Quest was successful in bringing civilization back from the brink, he would be everybody’s hero.

“I’ll give you an hour to familiarize yourself with the files on your holocom, then we’ll send you back to 2025.”

“I’m ready now. I’ve already memorized all there is to know about my, uh, the woman,” Carter said. He couldn’t bring himself to use the word target.