The Historians

Teryn looked at the drab, grey building hidden behind high fences. “Here we go again.”

“These so-called science stories are killing me.” Liz checked her camera equipment before hoisting it to her shoulder. “Oh, it’s a breakthrough,” she said in a mocking tone, “look, toast in sixty seconds.”

Teryn frowned. “At least your name isn’t attached to every one of these. As long as the network keeps sending me out to these nothing-burger stories, I’ll never get promoted. Always a junior producer, never a real science reporter.”

“Maybe there’s a story this time?”

“Yeah, Liz, and maybe I’m the queen of France.” Teryn looked at the camera operator. “Sorry. I know you’re just trying to cheer me up.”

“Exterior shots for B-roll finished, unless you want some more of the uh…is that astroturf or weirdly green grass?”

“It’s fine. If this is anything like the others, it’ll end up being a thirty-second piece to fill in between real stories.”

Liz let the camera down to hang by the straps that distributed its weight evenly over her shoulders. “Judging by the building, I’d guess we won’t get a PR person leading us around.”

“No ‘face’ then. So, what do you guess? Lab nerd or pasty, thirty-something founder that looks like he or she still lives in mom’s basement?”

The woman that came out the door at that moment to escort them in didn’t fit any of their categories. At barely five feet tall, her features were broad, her hair a curly mop of reddish blonde. Light blue eyes shone in her bronze face, enhanced by the deep blue of the skin-tight tee shirt that showed her strong arms.

Liz leaned over and whispered in Teryn’s ear, “I go to the gym, but god damn, she makes me feel like a slacker.”

“Head in the game, Liz. Get a shot of us meeting. For once, I won’t be the short one.”

The woman approached as Liz readied the camera. “Welcome to Avacorp, I am Jessica, and I will be your guide.” She shook hands with Teryn while Liz filmed, then turned to Liz and shook her hand as well.

As she led them in the door, she handed each of them a lanyard with a “Visitor” tag. “Sorry, you need to keep these visible at all times.” Three bored security guards sat in the bare entryway, only looking up long enough to see the tags, one of them giving Jessica a small wave.

“I think Alex has a little crush on me,” she confided to Teryn in a hushed voice.

Teryn kept looking at the guide. There was something…off about her. Some sort of genetic anomaly. It wasn’t anything like Down’s syndrome, but it was something. That, combined with the odd accent of swallowed r’s and lack of contractions left Teryn dying to ask a host of inappropriate questions.

Jessica smiled and winked at her. “I can tell you have questions about me. They will be answered in just a few moments. Please, ladies, follow me to the main lab.”

She placed her palm on a reader next to the elevator, which opened for her. Teryn took note of the high-tech biometric security in the midst of what was an otherwise unremarkable entryway within a drab building.

The elevator went down instead of up. It stopped on floor -9 and opened on a clinical-looking hallway. Jessica stepped out and led them to a door near the end of the hallway.

“Before we go in, I have to remind you that nothing you see or film in here is to be released until the fourth of next month; to coincide with our own public announcement.”

The lab was a cavernous space, one wall lined with banks of thrumming machines behind a glass wall. A monstrous coil of cables led from the machines to a device in a glass-enclosed, free-standing room in the center of the lab, surrounded with cameras and antennae of some sort.

A row of desks on the opposite wall held computers where men and women in casual clothes worked amid a constant, low murmur of conversation. It looked more like the office of an internet start-up than a science lab.

“Dr. Ball will be here soon to explain what this is.”

One of the techs behind the computers, dressed in cargo shorts and a faded band tee shirt, stood and started calling out a checklist in a nasal tone. “Spatial coordinates locked in?”

“Spatial coordinates locked in,” a tech replied in a booming basso.

“Temporal coordinate locked in?”

“Temporal coordinate locked,” another shouted with a thick, Spanish accent.

“Assist team, in the chamber.”

Two people in hazmat suits walked into the room with the device, closed the door with a hiss, and gave a thumbs up.

“Run decontamination in the chamber.”

A mist filled the chamber before being sucked out through vents in the floor. The two inside again gave a thumbs up.

“Decontamination complete. Spool up.”

“Spooling up,” a woman responded in a clear soprano, and the machines that thrummed behind the glass began to speed up their thrumming.

Jessica turned to Teryn, allowing Liz to continue filming the goings-on. “I just want to remind you, that Dr. Ball may decide some things are not to be released publicly.”

Teryn nodded. “I read the fine print before I signed the limited disclosure agreement. Are you the company’s legal advisor?”

Jessica laughed. “Hardly. I am Dr. Ball’s assistant. Which means I fetch coffee, file documents, categorize video, translate, and do some data entry.”

“Sounds like a rounded job. What was your major?”

“Major? Oh, no. I have not had any formal schooling. I am studying botany in my free time, though.” Jessica smiled but her eyes carried sadness. “Dr. Ball has been very good to me, since I cannot go back home.”

The thrum of the machines had grown into a whine that was felt more than heard. The woman who had called out last said, “Spooled up.”

The standing tech called out, “Spooled up. Call out levels stable post sixty seconds.”

She read off the countdown, not trying to carry her voice, but the clear, high pitch carried well in the room. Finally, she called, “Levels stable, seventy seconds and counting.”

“All silent. Initiate,” the standing tech called, a keyboard clicked once and, a swirling vortex appeared near the device in the center of the room-within-a-room.

As the smoky center of the vortex cleared, the space beyond it was woods, just near enough to see a small collection of skin shelters and stocky people wearing skins moving about.

“That was my home,” Jessica whispered, tears pooling in her eyes.

Teryn looked again. They were Neanderthal. That was what she found odd about Jessica. Liz continued to film, though her hands shook.

Jessica stepped over to the camera and helped Liz steady her hand. Then, something appeared that didn’t fit what they were seeing.

A hand and forearm in a hazmat suit propped itself against the floor, as if climbing from some unseen point below the vortex. The assist team pulled the person in the hazmat suit up into the lab.

Once he was in and had stuck his head through it one last time, no doubt looking for anything he might have left behind, he stood and made a “kill” gesture. The vortex disappeared in a puff, the machines quickly went back to their low thrumming, and a cheer washed over the lab.

“Run decontamination in the chamber.” His shrill, nasal voice was perfect to cut through the din.

Once again, the chamber filled with mist which was then sucked out through the floor vents. All three inside the chamber gave a thumbs-up.

“Decontamination complete. Exit the chamber.”

The door to the chamber opened with a hiss and the three inside stepped out. The door closed behind them with another hiss, and they stripped out of their hazmat suits.

“Lockdown status.”

“Generators locked on standby.”

“Targeting locked on standby.”

“Chamber locked on secure standby.”

“Thanks, everyone.” The tech sat back down and slumped in his chair. Meanwhile, Dr. Ball, the one that the assist team had pulled out of the vortex, walked to the desks. His dark hair was shoulder-length, with streaks of grey. His face had the lines and deep tan of a forty-something who spent many years outdoors, but he moved as though he was a decade younger than he looked.

“How did we do, team?” he asked. “Did we get all twelve cameras? How long did it take to calculate?”

“Got ’em all,” the nasal-voiced tech said, “and two weeks.”

“Great! In two weeks’ time, we’ll aim for group N1, same day, download only, and see what data we get, before we decide if we need to move and to where.” Before anyone could answer, he made his way over to Jessica, Teryn, and Liz.

“It is good to have you back, Dr. Ball,” Jessica said. “We missed you these past two weeks.”

“It’s okay, Jess, there’s no need for formalities right now. My name’s Mike,” he said, “and you must be Teryn. Sorry, they didn’t tell me what your camera operator’s name was.”

“I’m Liz, Dr. Ball.”

“Nice to meet you, Liz, just Mike, though. I’m only Dr. Ball when I’m giving a lecture.” He motioned toward the door. “Shall we go to my office to talk?”

He led them across the hall to a cramped office. A dry-erase board and map took up half the wall behind him, carefully sectioned into grids, and filled with dates and cryptic notes. He added the current date and the text, “N2: replace, zone A-19,” before turning around and offering them a seat.

He sat behind his desk while Liz unfolded a tripod and set the camera up. Before she could give the go-ahead, Teryn jumped in with questions.

“Was that a time machine? Those were Neanderthals. Were those Neanderthal? And does that mean that Jessica is—”

“Teryn, if I may.” He leaned forward. “Yes, what you saw was a time machine. And yes, that was a Neanderthal group of thirty-seven called Falla-intes, which we call N2, in their summer hunting grounds. They’ll probably move again in a few weeks, their time. Based on past data, to either zone B-18,” he pointed to a section on the map, “or over to A-11. Those areas already have cameras, so it’s just a matter of connecting and downloading.”

“But…you were there for two weeks?”

“No, I was there for six hours. Just long enough to replace some dead cameras while staying hidden.” He sighed. “It took two weeks to calculate the exact spot in space to pick me up, 63,017 years, 147 days, and…roughly nine and half hours ago in what is now northern France. We’re working on getting the compute times down, but we don’t want to make a mistake and open a portal in the vacuum of space…or the bottom of the ocean.”

“Okay, now I need to get this cleared up. You built a time machine to record the lives of Neanderthals…and maybe dinosaurs?”

“The time machine is a means to an end. How do we move from archeological inference to the actual recording of history? We are historians, first and foremost.

“We’re currently following three groups of Neanderthals,” he said, “and we have plans for other historical periods. Going back millions of years for dinosaurs, though…the compute time goes from weeks into decades, and there are a lot of unknowns about changed trajectories via asteroids and so on.”

“That makes sense, I guess. What I don’t understand…at what point did you decide to kidnap Jessica and bring her 63,000 years into the future?”

Dr. Ball just raised his eyebrows and nodded at Jessica. She smiled at them from where she’d been standing off to the side.

“I was hunting, and got separated from my group, Falla-intes. I was going back to the camp to wait for them but was cornered by a boar.” She took a stance as though she was holding a spear.

“I tried to fight him off, but he gored me,” she raised her shirt and showed the massive scar on her abdomen. “I passed out from the pain and expected to be eaten. When I woke up, though, I saw the portal. I thought was this was my rebirth, returning to the womb, so I reached for it, and crawled through.”

Jessica chuckled. “I don’t know who was more scared…me or Mike. He made sure I got medical treatment, which included too many rounds of vaccinations and antibiotics to count. Nothing from then is dangerous to you now—”

“That we know of,” Dr. Ball interjected.

“Right…that we know of, but plenty of your germs now I had no immunity to.” She smiled at Dr. Ball. “He sat beside me, day and night for weeks, talking to me until I was well enough to walk around. By then, I had learned a few English words, and we talked all the time. It took me a few months to get to a basic conversational level, but by then I understood what Mike meant by ‘germs.’

“I decided it would be dangerous for me to go back to my people with modern germs, so I stayed. I have been here three years local time, and from the time you saw in the portal, I have been gone, dead according to them, for twelve years.”

Teryn’s eyes pooled with tears as she understood just how isolated Jessica was. Her family and everyone she’d known dead for tens of thousands of years, and yet close enough to touch on a regular basis.

She pulled herself together and continued with the spate of new questions that now rolled around in her head. Perhaps her physics minor wasn’t wasted after all.

They talked for over an hour, covering topics from the power supply, to the generation of the wormhole and its stability, to questions about the many-worlds interpretation and whether anything done in the past could change the present. On the latter, Dr. Ball was hesitant to say for certain, but he assured her that he did everything in his power to leave the past untouched other than the small cameras, easily hidden and recovered when they broke down or were no longer needed. He also assured her that no biological material was allowed to go through either direction, thanks to their decontamination protocols.

As they finished up, Dr. Ball leaned forward. “I want you to understand something,” he said. “You are never to reveal the truth about Jessica to anyone. If her image, voice, or even mention of her presence other than ‘lab assistant’ leaks from your report, I will take your network for everything they have.”

“We’ll delete the footage of her, and any mention of her in the interview before we leave. I mean, we signed the limited disclosure agreement, but aren’t you being a little harsh?”

Dr. Ball shook his head. “No. Jess is not going to end up an oddity for research and experimentation, and she’s certainly not going to be exploited for others to gawk at. As far as anyone outside this floor knows, she’s Jessica Smith, from Little Rock, Arkansas. She even has a driver’s license that says so. I’m already worried about her safety once we release the first sixteen years of the footage we have from the Falla-allas, Falla-intes, and Falla-eswa groups. Even though we’ve edited around her, someone might see the resemblance, and then she’d have to go into hiding.”

Teryn rose and gave Jessica a hug. “I’m so sorry you lost…everything. I won’t tell anyone about you, but Mike has my card, and if you ever want to talk…about anything, give me a call.”

“Thank you, Teryn, it was nice meeting you.” Her eyes still had that sad touch, that Teryn understood now. “I have not lost everything without gain, though. I have made friends and learned much.”

Once they’d left, Liz loaded the camera in the trunk of the car while Teryn’s mind whirled. Liz pulled her out of her reverie with a poke on the shoulder. “Maybe this is the story that gets you promoted. If not, you know of a living Neanderthal….”

“Not happening. She’s lost so much already, you want to take away her privacy, too?”

“I wasn’t being serious,” Liz said. “Just trying to get you out of your funk.”

“Not in a funk, I’m just wondering if anyone got written out of history, due to Jessica coming here. I mean, she might have survived.”

“Would we even notice?”

Teryn hummed. “Not likely. Wait, we know time travel exists, but no one showed up to Dr. Hawking’s Time Travelers Party. Ugh! I should’ve asked why not.”