THE TIME TRAVELLERS’ DILEMMA

i

As Inti took in the local view before her, she looked at the sun, noticing that it was high in the sky. It was the day of her mother’s scattering. The weight of despondency melted away as she surrendered to the stirring sounds that were coming to her ears from Mount Pleasant cemetery’s pool of reflection and its waterfall. With each moment, she felt less constrained. As Inti soaked in the warm sun of a Toronto summer, her eyes glinted with sorrow for the life she was bearing, the enigmatic journey of her life behind her. Her recurring visits to Toronto marked the passage of time displaying the scattering as a cause for her to mark fifty years of knowing her mother. It wasn't just another day; it was an anticipation that beheld what the day held in store. With graceful movements of her body, Inti began to wend her way up the hill to the beginning of the ceremony. Each step, each sway of her body, was a tribute to the mother whose memory drifted through the air from a time long past, and Inti used her body now to derive meaning from the movement. As she reflected, a sense of freedom arose from the release of the event. She wasn’t just a performer in the ceremony; she was enmeshed in the world through her feet, her hands, shoulders and what she called her torso. She was a worldly woman like her mother had been, about to meet the others in the drama that had been her mother’s life. In that moment, the dressing up was all worth it; the black outfit, shoes, and in the declaration of her independence with a dark red and black scarf around her neck.

As she walked, Inti felt the family's support. Johnny Antunes was stood under a tree contemplating the woman he called the female James Bond, now deceased. His wife Sally was attempting to mingle with the observers who attended, the sisters Rio and Giselle who were in dignified attire; there were other performers like the minister who had absorbed the details by osmosis about which she was to speak and the official who acted as scatterer. By repetition, and the rare combination of both empathy and projection, the resident group melded the mourners together under a tree. And as their presence filled the air, Inti knew that she had touched them with a richly detailed speech and a poem, both the women with their serious looks, and the restrained uniformity of the men.

Inti behaved for the scattering in the manner of a shy woman not wishing to break into the faults of a stranger. Afterwards she walked back north and westwards to her accommodation and shut the observatory window and then the event that had already passed sharply increased her torment. She stared down at her skirt zip, her beautiful back with lustrous black hair shaken out of the way and remembered suddenly that she was still a young woman with a young woman's ardour.

The observatory was a place to watch the events of the past, not the events of space. There one could spy with serenity without danger behind its protective walls on events which happened hundreds even thousands of years ago. The danger of accidents and even catastrophe could not touch her personally as it had with the death of her mother who had had a serious fall the previous year; it was like watching a cobra poised to strike from behind a pane of glass. She got a tremendous thrill just thinking about the dreadful and deadly monstrous events which could end lives on any given day. Sometimes the observatory would show a death and Inti would look away; sometimes it would retrace its course and circle back as many times as the observer wished, but the machine itself was one of the major achievements of the late 21st century. As such it terrified her.

She looked again at the high arching surface of the metal casing and visualized the maze of intricate control mechanisms fitted into spaces so small it took a new factory in Taiwan to manufacture them. Swiftly and competently her fingers moved over the instruments of science which only a completely trained operative would know how to manipulate. It was an acid test and she knew it as she worked the time observatory's controls which operated a machine designed to puncture the veil of time.

Inti lowered her eyes and closed the observatory window cautiously. 

ii

The Canadian Spacetime Agency at 777 Nebula Drive was a circular building on the east side of Ecliptic Heights, apart from the smart neighborhood of residential properties of Bayview, shrouded by a canopy of whispering trees, leading to Rouge National Urban Park. The façade did not invite passersby in. Beside it, a row of low offices with modern lines of vine-covered stonework, created an urban enclave to emphasize normality. Similarly, residents of that area had the dilemma of cautious movement around its blank façade. Shortly an RV marked with the David A Dunlap Observatory’s logo sped unnoticed towards it. The nearest space observatory to Toronto, the David A Dunlap Observatory (DADO) was located in Richmond Hill, Ontario, about 25 kilometers north of downtown Toronto.

Inti who was at the wheel drove through the underground garage into the CSA’s inner courtyard, parking it by the back door. A reflective cylinder marked ‘part replacement’ was being wheeled in down a bare corridor. She took the corridor with the carpet. There was an ongoing physics experiment requiring a bunny suit which she took from the wall and donned.

A man and a women, both heavily protected appeared. "The experiment will be starting within ten seconds, so get under cover," one of them warned. She read the words ‘Vase arme (sic) sent from David A Dunlap Observatory’ which her cryptanalytic mind saw as, ‘Vetoed - modern day favor – past Lunar Base II Mars’. Immediately she saw four messages on her phone – One said simply, “No interstellar travel”, ‘another “MISSION TO SIRIUS HALTED” in capitals as a headline.

Inti parked under a heavy steel pillar marked with her name and walked to her cluttered desk, the glow of her iphone casting eerie shadows in the dimly lit room. Her eyes, trained by years of decrypting the most complex codes, were drawn to the screen. There, innocuously displayed, were various ‘jobs’ from which she got her income.

Her fingers moved instinctively to her worn notebook, scribbling possibilities of what the signal from the aliens meant. It certainly referred to the Nazca lines, that much she knew from JOHNNY ANTUNES. Suddenly, a memory from a decade past surfaced—a lecture on ancient symbols and their connection to extraterrestrial messages. She realized they all contained the word "Nazca". Inti's breath caught. The Nazca lines—those mysterious geoglyphs etched into the Peruvian desert over two millennia ago. Her fingers flew over the virtual keys, decrypting the file with a fervor she'd not felt in years.

The blueprint unfolded—it was a device which would transform the time observatory into a means of traveling back with human explorers 2,000 years to the creation of the Nazca lines. The realization hit her, "Objective - Obliterate." Why would the aliens give humans the means to remove the necessity for their presence?

The lines weren’t just ancient art; they were a message. Someone, or something, wanted them erased. Inti stared at the screen, the weight of her discovery pressing down. The iphone in her hand revealed a portal to a past, a past that was never meant to be altered.

The woman’s untamed hair worn long was more of a rebellion against conformity than of any lack of care. Was she capable of working for the CSA, the most demanding organization for conformity that existed, already including Johnny Antunes and Sally Padeira in its ranks? This question lingered in her mind. Before the scattering, she had harbored dreams of working to decrypt the Nazca lines using Maria Reich's work, the mathematician who had made it her life’s work. However, after conversations with colleagues in academia, she'd decided against it. Now something or somebody living all the way from Sirius, eight and a half light years distant, was indicating that the world's attention should be focused there. But having never had the Nazca lines would leave humans free to roam interstellar space.

‘Their incessant petty tinkering has ruined everything, according to the wise future people of the Hidden Centuries. They have “bred out the unusual.” In forestalling disasters, they have left no room for triumphs that come only from danger and insecurity. In particular, the Eternals have adamantly prevented the development of nuclear weaponry, at the cost of forestalling any possibility of interstellar travel.’ James Gleich Time Travel: a history (2017) concerning Isaac Asimov ‘The End of Eternity’ 1971. The note was pinned to her desk as a reminder.

What level of intelligence wanted to remove its own influence on a less intelligent species? An altruistic one? This was a cliché - that a superior species could be benign in a way no human could be, but Inti had no time for reflection as she was sat staring at a photo of the Cube, its perfectly smooth, metallic surface reflecting the harsh desert sun. It was mesmerizing in its simplicity, yet utterly baffling in its complexity. Eight billion tiny cubes, each just 2.5 centimeters wide, all packed within this structure that was no larger than a small building. It was a marvel of alien engineering, a puzzle that taunted human understanding.

Inti felt the weight of her task pressing down on her. The Cube wasn’t just a physical object; it was a statement, a challenge from an intelligence far beyond Earth’s comprehension. The fact that it was here, in the middle of the Nazca lines—only added to its unsettling presence.

A constant, repeating stream of data, undecipherable to most, but holding within it some code, some key that might explain why the Cube was here. Why now? Why in this place? The questions swirled in Inti’s mind, but the answers were elusive, hidden behind layers of meaning that she wasn’t sure she could peel away.

Inti felt small in the face of the intellect that had crafted it. She couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a test, that the Cube had been left there deliberately, placed with precision on the ancient lines, a cosmic breadcrumb for humanity to follow. The lines themselves, vast and intricate, had always been a mystery—some said they were markers for gods or alien visitors. Now, this Cube seemed to confirm those wild theories, grounding them in a reality that was far stranger than any fiction.

The code in the signal. That was her task. It was daunting, like trying to decode the language of a god. She knew it would be a laborious process, sifting through the data, looking for patterns, meanings, something—anything—that could make sense of this.

As she began to work, a thought gnawed at the back of her mind: what if the Cube was the message? Not just a relic or a probe, but a direct communication. What if this was their way of speaking to us, of seeing if we were ready to understand? And what if, in the end, the message was something we couldn’t comprehend at all?

Inti felt a chill despite the heat. The Cube was more than just an object; it was a mirror, reflecting humanity's place in the universe back at them. A reminder of how little they truly knew, and how much there was yet to discover.

At the CSA, she was handed the recorded signal, with the straightforward explanation -

‘A radio signal from Sirius.’

‘How long ago was it sent?’ she asked.

‘Four weeks ago.’ Inti was able to mount the symbols for each animal on a portion of the text relatively near the signal’s beginning and from there she could imagine the astronaut pointing into the unknown depths of the message which was as long as one of the Nazca’s longest lines. The human race was captured by a mathematical barrier. Only time manipulation could break it, so it wasn’t as if some inexorable logic fixed it forever.

‘Get Rio Euwe here immediately.’

‘How would you convey ‘monkey’ to aliens? she asked the animal psychologist.

She hardly paused for breath. ‘There are problems as I see it. Its origins are pretty early. I’d suggest something like ‘speechless man.’

Inti explained the situation. ‘They’re basically saying if we achieve interstellar capability, we won’t be able to exploit it. Instead, we should accept benefits which are implied in the terms ‘bred out the unusual’ and the Cube will give us that, as a species.’

‘What benefits?’ asked Rio.

‘Forestalling disasters, in case you were wondering. I also connected the dots by considering the context, the cube, and the Nazca lines. It’s a bit like solving a puzzle—using logic, intuition, and a touch of imagination.’                                 

Rio pushed the pad and pencil across the table, turning it through 180 degrees. ‘There’. Inti picked it up by the tips of her fingers and cast an approving look across the serried ranks of ever-reducing lines which ended with a spider and a hummingbird, as she beamed across the table.

‘That’s what the Cube intended!’

‘I know. At the midpoint of the two images. It’s all too coordinated to be a coincidence.’

‘There won’t be any more, will there, cubes I mean?’

‘No, the radio transmission only mentions one such cube.’

‘Why blue?’

‘I don’t know, they knew the color of our sky?’

‘How about their knowing our wealth – about whether we’d put a huge budget not to say our best scientists into time travel.’

‘Beats me, if they’re advanced, they’d know everything, maybe.’

iii

Inti could travel across the great span of time. She knew precisely what adjustments to make to the time observatory to make it interactive now. Just enough to accommodate only one particle. At first there was the barest glimmer of light in deep darkness but as she adjusted the controls brighter and brighter she was kneeling in a circle of radiance. This time she was sure of the knowledge of actual contact with the past. There were years when she’d been sealed in high confusion about ancient sounds and voices. Now they would not confuse her again.

There were mesquite trees. These trees were hardy and adapted to the arid conditions of coastal Peru. The songbird she identified as a Pacific Parrotlet (Forpus coelestis): it was repeating its call close to her ear over and over with tireless persistence. Abruptly she sat up and stared about her. Running parallel to the field was a winding country road and down it came a man on a llama whose entire upper section was loaded with textiles. Alongside it was a saddled llama. Inti stopped watching as the sunlight shone over moss covered rocks and silver fish darted to and fro beneath a tumbling waterfall. He passed by, scarcely noticing her.

 Inti followed his route to the central plaza of Cahuachi where there was a wind instrument by a door which startled her as it seemed to utter a sound on its own. The music went round and round the plaza.

A tall man in a red shirt approached and interrupted her reflections. She could see the green surface made from flashing textiles as a man gave a table a brushing over with a cloth. Then he thrust his head forward enquiringly and seemed to be looking at Inti. She nodded and the man went away. Then she turned watching a girl as she danced in the plaza. The translating machine on her wrist had crunched the language it heard ambiently in mere minutes.

She watched all of them as a passive receiver as they reached the door and the girl turned and smiled. Inti forgot the language difficulty so completely but it was what was inside her head which stayed inside lest she give herself away.

Inti was under intense pressure to find a way which would stop the Nazca lines. “It is good to have someone to talk to,” begun the man, who appeared to be drawing geoglyphs as if feeling a presence. “So, even if there are the inappropriately dressed they are no bother.” The translating machine was not sure about this bit. The red-shirted man’s rhythms of speech had Inti listening in complete silence and feeling sure that her silence was taken on trust.

Inti had always known there were a few people like that. People who had a sixth sense and in that era they became shamans. Of course, there was a single person behind the creation of the Nazca lines. He had to be stopped. His era (Inti’s) would not survive if he wasn’t stopped.

“The Canadian Spacetime Agency specifically told you not to break the protocols by using the time observatory unauthorized.”

This message came across her transceiver and Inti raised her hand to her lips to reply secretly. “But I must.”

The shaman smiled. Inti put her hand to her gun and pulled it out. They were looking at each other, face to face, Johnny Antunes and Sally Padeira were clustered round the transceiver. “Don’t! Inti! Stop!” They confronted her. “You’ll be suspended.” She hoped it would still be negotiable.