Return of the Time Traveler

"One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return?"

— H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, An Invention, 1895

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Chief Minister Cloe Martin stood at a floor to ceiling window in a conference room six floors up from the streets of London. Her spine tingled with a newfound fear that had struck her days before. She was overwelmed with gnawing thoughts telling her she was over her head; she couldn't sleep. The twisting grip deep in her stomach hadn’t waned. From this same window, on what had started as a city workday as any other, she had witnessed a scene like some B-rated Godzilla movie.

People on the street below had pointed at the sky in panic, cars had snarled, traffic had grid locked. She remembered looking up to see a contrail tracing a knife-edged line, much like a rocket’s vapor. But this had been no jet. It was like God had taken a scalpel and sliced the firmament—from heaven’s side. And through the fissured split a machine had emerged carrying one man. The next day, the London Standard splashed Time Traveler Arrives! across the front page. Bloggers were spouting about zombies, the living dead. The stock market was in a perpetual fall. 

And now Cloe watched protesters marching up Portland Place. Some carried signs saying, THE END IS NEAR. Others, REPENT! So far, Cloe thought, NSA has, for once, ignored the internal squabbling and jumped on the rumors and misinformation. EMS has controlled the panic, ordering a full-on police presence. But for how long can we hold? This is not fake news. The heavens did open up, but was this Christ? With one breath at a time, she collected her thoughts. She felt only the man she was meeting with had the answers. If London, and the world, were going to return to normal, the secret was in his hands. You’re a leader, aren’t you? And cooler heads prevail, don’t they? Let Emergency Services handle the street. You girl, keep your shit together. But then the other voice said, 'You're way out of your league. You need to resign'.

Returning to the conference table, she took her place at the head. Exhausted, it had been a long three days, and she’d been meeting all day. She had to focus. Around her were eight members of The United Kingdom’s National Security Committee, and they were in the situation room in downtown London. At the other end of the table from Cloe, slumped in a chair, sat a man no more than forty, wearing a black cloak across his shoulders. He was strikingly handsome, tall, with curling black hair, and he claimed he was a Time Traveler.

Sitting to Cloe’s right, a thick, heavyset man wearing a scarlet cassock with Roman sleeves stood up. He put his hands on the table’s white marble slate, palms down, as if to leap. “Christ,” he swore under his breath, glaring at one of the six wall monitors. BBC News was interviewing a lady in Richmond. She was asking if this was the War of the Worlds.

The priest looks like an angry argyle, Cloe thought, smiling to herself.

The Cardinal turned to the Time Traveler. “Citizens are calling you the son of God. Are you the second coming? People, as people do, assume, no, pray, for the second coming of the Lord. If you’re the second coming, you’ll need to prove it, don’t you think?”

The people pietists are heralding the second coming of Christ, thought Cloe, chuckling in her head at the phrase she’d just made up. I don’t believe this man is Jesus. And yet, who is he? He has emerged, and emerged from what? A man who has fallen through a cut and bleeding sky (Lord help us), and calling himself not God, but a simple time traveler? And he looks bored, checking his nails, like he’s done this before. If he’s a time traveler, maybe he HAS done this before.

The Time Traveler rose to stand. “We’ve talked for some time now about how you’re alarmed. I know you’re alarmed," and with a tight smirk winked at Cloe. Or maybe he didn’t. She wasn’t sure.

He’s had this same conversation before! Cloe thought, her skin crawling. He did wink though, I swear it. But why?

“It’s understandable to fear the unknown,” he went on, “but in time everyone will see they have nothing to fear.” He fidgeted in his chair. “Does anyone have a cigarette? This particular century has wonderful tobacco. Can’t get it later you know. Extinct.”

The Doctor tapped the table in front of him. “You were talking about how we have nothing to fear?”

“Oh yes. Sorry. I’m your first contact, but they’ll be others.” The Time Traveler leaned back in his chair and put his arms behind his head. He stared at the ceiling. He spoke to the ceiling in a monotone, a sing-song rhythm, like a spoiled child to his parents. “I’m not the son of God to save you, and not as some killing machine from Mars. I’m not even a robot from Alpha Centauri to rule you with AI, although that does happen. No. I’m a mortal man just like yourselves.”

He’s English, thought Cloe. The Time Traveler is bloody English.

“Are you from another planet?” asked the Cardinal.

“Another planet? I’m sad to say the only intelligent life we've ever found, if you can call it that, is on earth. No. I come from this very world, our world, and as a messenger of peace. Peace from the future, don’t you see?”

Peace my ass, Cloe thought. I’m a politician, a good one. And every sense I have is telling me; this, my dear, is trouble.

“I’m the first of many,” the Time Traveler explained in a soft voice. “The future has given us unheard of capabilities; the inevitable decline due to age no longer exists.” The Time Traveler laughed out loud but to himself. “I guess not a good time to be a plastic surgeon, would you say? The truth is, you, meaning you people of this time, would solve the dilemma of age on your own, but now there’s no need for scientific discoveries. We can transport you through the fourth dimension to the year 802,701 AD. Think, eight hundred periods, a thousand years each. Why if you calculate—”

“Hogwash!” interrupted the Cardinal. “Are you claiming immortality?”

The Time Traveler spoke distinctly, warmly. “No, it’s true we can die, and I know it’s hard to understand. Think of the world as two dimensions for a moment. Flat on a piece of paper. There is no “up”. But then take an apple, cut it, and place it on the paper." He reminds me of a spoiled child speaking to a parent who doesn't understand the new age, thought Cloe. Like my children. "The apple is the third dimension, but all you’d see or feel is the surface of the apple that touches the paper. No “up” remember? But the apple is so much more than the surface you see and feel, just as time is so much more than the linear dimension you’re stuck in. There is an “up” of course, the third dimension. Time is the fourth dimension.”

Dr. Hillyer, an eminent physicist with the look to match, boney shouldered, thin as a penciled stroke, peered above his glasses at the Time Traveler. He placed his right elbow on the table, his fist supporting his chin, a proud and protruding chin. “So if I understand it correctly, you’re saying there’s no need to invent time travel because you’ve brought the technology back to us? Is this right?”

“Precisely, Doctor,” said the Time Traveler.

Just like Hillyer, Cloe observed, taking in the Doctor. Ever the scientist. He’s thin though, too thin. How’s his wife doing? I need to ask him. Cloe turned to the Time Traveler. “If we go, what will we find?”

“In the future, we have achieved a balance of egoless power, a peace. There is no war, no poverty, no unhappiness amongst us.”

The meeting went on for an hour or more, the Doctor and the Time Traveler bogged down in quantum theory and black holes.

As dusk approached outside The Cardinal abruptly stood up, a tickle in his ear. He strode quickly to the window. My god, what's been going on while they talk science. The collapse has been much faster than I ever would have guessed. The day was turning a deeper blue to black, pink in the distance. Six floors below, rioters spread fires down a wide avenue, many buildings had flames spilling from windows and storefronts. It's just the beginning, he thought. As he looked down, twenty men smashed the windows of Harrods. They slammed at the double doors with rolling dumpsters. “Barbarians at the gate,” he whispered. A group of men beat a woman to the sidewalk. They gathered around her, obscuring his view. He could only imagine, and as he did, he prayed for her protection from the heathen hordes, and felt perhaps, from his thumping heart, there’d only be silence in return. It’s coming apart. The city, and soon the world, will unravel in the loss of time’s direction. If there is no time, does God exist? He shuddered and turned to the Committee. “Come see this! It’s worse, far worse!” The Committee members rushed to the window. He turned to the Time Traveler now standing behind the group. “By nightfall, the streets will be anarchy. That’s your peace.”

The Time Traveler laughed. “Have faith, Cardinal.”

The priest’s face grimaced and flushed, a faith-filled argyle once again. He sputtered. “Are you making fun? They call you Jesus, others call you Satan. I think I’ll choose Satan.”

“I’m neither,” replied the Time Traveler, while tossing to the Cardinal his limp hand, like ordering breakfast. He looked at Cloe. “And you, Weena, what do you say?”

“Weena? You can call me Madam Chief Minister, Time Traveler.”

The Time Traveler elegantly bowed to Cloe and held her hand, looking up to her. “I don’t mean to offend you, dear beautiful child,” he said. He kissed her hand, stepped back, and thrust his black cloak to the side, a verdant emerald belt exposed, shimmering. “You only remind me of someone else a long time ago. Someone who died in a fire, an Eloi lover I visit often in her past.”

The Cardinal’s wide face was sweating. “And when will we travel to this heaven you describe?”

The Time Traveler nodded to the beckoning sky, a blood wept hue. “When it’s dark. Only when it’s dark. Which is soon.”

Dr. Hillyer put his hand on the Cardinals' forearm. “The big picture, Cardinal. I know it’s bad now, but imagine what we’ll learn, the scientific breakthroughs. All leaps in science have been frightening. Why, we could, we could maybe see those who’ve died?”

The Cardinal yanked his arm away. “That’s not just frightening, Doctor. It’s heresy.”

"If we can do it, we will," muttered the Doctor.

Out the window, the early evening waned. A strip of clouds turned a red-orange vermillion. The city skyline seemed to dance in shadows from the flames, and like a drowning sun gasping from the sea, a flare eclipsed the welkin’s curve, the very edge of the horizon. Light slipped the earth, and died.

The doctor put his palms high against the glass. “What are those, meteors?” he asked. Dozens of pinpoints in purple beams streaked the atmosphere, dispersed, then slowed as they neared the ground. A few approached and settled on the street below.

“No Doctor, not meteors, but time machines. They carry Morlocks.”

“Morlocks?” asked Cloe.

“Earth evolves, Madam Chief Minister. Time is like the sea with infinite layers. The motion dips one layer into another, each a separate destiny. When my Time Machine took me in 1895 to the future, hundreds of thousands of years from your now, I found blind Morlocks living underground. They cared for those living on the earth’s surface, the Eloi, a timid race enjoying endless idleness, becoming as children. At night the Morlocks, sightless, rose to harvest Eloi, necessary for the Morlocks to live. For the Eloi, this was the price of peace, and utopia. And so it is for you and yours, my dear madam.”

Screams drifted from the streets below. Morlocks were chaining people, beating them with clubs, herding them into pods.

Cloe’s phone was ringing in her hand. She fumbled to answer it. She couldn’t think, her ears locked in a roaring static, her chest burning. So many people depending on me. She closed her eyes, her white knuckles clenching the phone. She paused as if stuck in time, but as if time sped up, her shoulders slowly relaxed. The twisting grip in her stomach, the tingling in her spine, stopped. She put the phone to her ear. "This is the Chief Minister. I'm here."

Each Morlock was naked in molted flesh, gray and slick like rotting fish. Their heads were featureless masks, without eyes, bubbling white muscle where the eyes and face would be. As each pod filled with half a dozen people, the machines began vibrating, a silver fluttering in the air, and simply disappeared.

The Time Traveler stood behind the group, his lips curled in a wry twist. “You see, we’re out of Eloi people to harvest. We solved our aging long ago, but each day, for hundreds of thousands of years, we go back one day further and reap a harvest. The sustenance of Eloi, surface people like yourselves, is the only way the Morlocks can survive.

“Meat, you mean meat!” screamed the Cardinal. “You slaughtered the Eloi one day at a time, starting by traveling back in time a day, returning with your HARVEST, then traveling one day further back! Now it’s finally our turn!” The Cardinal leaped for the Time Traveler, his hands gripping his neck. They both fell to the floor under the Cardinal's weight. He clenched the the Time Traveler's throat, his hands like claws of hell tightening with all his strength, his face scarlet red. “I’ll harvest you, you, you…”

The Time Traveler’s clothing flickered as if an electrical charge ran though him. “Enough priest?” he squeaked. 

The Cardinal yelled as the charge wrapped him, white sparks flickered around his body, crackling like a live wire. He was tossed violently away, like a negative charge against the positive. He lay on the floor as if he'd just been electrocuted, his face an ashen white, sweating. “What the hell are you?”

The Time Traveler stood up. He straightened his cloak, brushed his shoulders. “Imagine no old age," he said to the group. "But also think about the risk of even walking across the street. What you see in front of you is an avatar, as you call us in this time. A solid and breathing hologram, for lack of a better explanation. The real me is ages away."

"Avoiding death," the Doctor whispered to everyone.

"Yes, Doctor, Avoiding death, as you say, with all its repercussions. As the ages meander through thousands of years, I think most of them are frankly bad.” He smiled patiently. “We’ll leave today, and we’ll be back, yes, but it will be yesterday. Now, about that cigarette?”

The Committee was drawn back to the window. The sky flared against the black void, taunting the fleeting sun.