//------------------------------// // Chapter 21: Going Backward, Part One // Story: On Getting to the Bottom of this "Equestrian" Business // by McPoodle //------------------------------// Chapter 21: Going Backward, Part One “Gnosi, your power clearly has levels to it,” Gus told him. “There are things you can do all the time, things you can do in the Solarium, and things like invading my mind without my permission that need the power of an exploding nuclear bomb to achieve.” Gnosi crossed his arms. “Would you rather I left you there?” “Well that depends on if we succeed or fail in saving everybody or not.” Gnosi shrugged. “Alright, levels. So what?” “So I’m going to say that Meridiem here has levels as well. And the power she gains from having a nuclear bomb exploding as a power source is time travel.” “Time travel?” “Sure! You’ve got an hourglass mark, which signifies time.” Gus looked hopefully into Meridiem’s doubtful eyes. “The least you can do is try it.” “Well…alright. How do I do it?” Gus rubbed his hands together eagerly before turning to the board. “Let me show you some formulas…” Gus, Gnosi and Meridiem appeared back on Pan Am Flight 103, between the First Class restroom and the velvet curtain. It was not a pretty sight. In the bloody red tint of stop-time, people were frozen in the act of panicking. The nose of the plane was tilted downwards. Cracks in the floor showed that the plane was in the act of breaking into at least two pieces somewhere past the curtain. Gus wanted to get up and explore past the curtain, but found that the damage to his hip was too severe. Gnosi dashed to Gus’ seat and returned with the white umbrella. Using the umbrella as a cane, Gus hobbled over to the curtain. He had a hard time making out what was on the other side, thanks to a blinding light emanating from the cracks—the light of the bomb. He saw that Delver had been positioned carefully in the aisle away from the cracks. Finding that his proximity to the bomb was making it a little hard to breathe, he retreated back to First Class and looked up the spiral staircase. There he could see Gwen lying down near a Pan Am stewardess. He didn’t like the angle of her neck. He tried to climb the stairs, but found he couldn’t in his current condition. “Gnosi?” he asked. “Could you go up there and see if my wife’s alright? I can’t go up there.” “We’d have to start and stop time again to really see if she’s fine.” “Just do your best with time stopped.” “Alright.” He went up and took a look, before going into the cockpit, looking around, and finally climbing back down. “Nothing’s broken, if that’s what you’re worried about. But she’s beat up pretty bad. I think I saw Air Force One on the radar display. She’s around five miles to the northeast—8 kilometers. And our altitude is 20,000 feet, or 6 kilometers.” The three of them found a spot on the carpet in the middle of the First Class compartment, sat down in a circle, and clasped their arms together. Despite the uncomfortable angle, they were able to get into a comfortable position, largely by use of those arm-clasps. “I’d like you to take us back twenty-four hours,” Gus instructed Meridiem, “and put us in back in the same Heathrow concourse we left from, behind that one pillar that was next to the restrooms, so we won’t attract that much attention.” “Professor?” asked Meridiem. “Actually, what am I thinking? Put us right in the middle of the concourse where everyone can see us! That way they’ll have to believe us when we say we came from the future!” “Professor!” “Yes?” “I can’t teleport! It’s not part of my mark.” Gus sighed. “The Earth revolves on its axis,” he said patiently. “The Earth goes around the Sun. The Sun orbits the Milky Way Galaxy, which moves in mysterious ways through the Cosmos. Any act of time travel automatically involves teleportation. Otherwise, you’d end up in empty space. Besides, any time travel story worth its salt takes you not only to the important dates, but also the important places.” “In that case, how do I do it?” “Disengage the spatial coordinates from the temporal ones. Then stick the new coordinates back in after the time jump.” “Would it help if you imagined you were the TARDIS?” Gnosi asked. “No,” Meridiem replied, sticking her tongue out briefly. “Alright, let’s try this…” As she concentrated, the redness in the air became even more intense. The floor beneath them began lifting towards a more horizontal orientation, and people and objects began drifting back into their pre-explosion positions. But this only went on for a few seconds before stalling. The world around them shook, then blurred, before finally reverting to stopped time. “I…can’t,” Meridiem said between gasps. “I can’t store enough energy to leave the explosion, either in space or time.” “Then we’re trapped?” asked Gnosi. “Not necessarily,” said Gus, chewing on a thumbnail in thought. “What if we traveled to another nuclear explosion, one in the past? Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union exploded thousands of test bombs underground since World War II. If we could leave a lasting message behind at one of them, that would tell authorities what was going to happen today, and then this bombing could be prevented.” “Wouldn’t that be a time paradox?” asked Gnosi. “Well we don’t even know if it’s possible yet. What do you think, Meridiem?” Meridiem signaled to them that she still had to recover from her latest attempt. With an exasperated snort, Gnosi brought them all into Meridiem’s head and healed her. “You can only do that so many times before there’ll be some sort of nasty consequence, you know,” Meridiem scolded. “I know,” Gnosi said with a cheeky smile. “So? What do you think of Pr. Guiseman’s latest suggestion?” For once, Meridiem was the first to the chalkboard. “I suppose the first problem is to find these explosions. It would be like developing a new sense, like we did for reversing entropy.” She drew a stick figure version of herself on the board, with wavy lines coming into her head, some of which had little explosions on the end. She then wrote and corrected some simple equations. “Something like this, Professor?” “Yes, that should work. I like the cheat that allows you to see the topography surrounding each site.” “It’s not a cheat. The surface of the Earth is just being illuminated by the light of the explosion.” “The entire Earth. It’s a cheat. But don’t let that stop you—magic-wise, I bet it’s a very small use of energy.” “Finding bombs is a mental ability?” asked Gnosi. “If that’s the case, then you should be able to use it in here as well.” “Hmm…” Meridiem squinted her eyes and slowly turned in a circle, moving her head around to see in all directions. “There’s one,” she said, pointing out a window. “No, wait…that’s a nuclear power plant, inside of a submarine on the other side of the Arctic Circle from us. We’re not only not going to be able to communicate from inside there; we also won’t be able to fit.” “And the radiation being so close would kill us,” added Gus acidly. “Well yes, of course. I’ll look for sources that are not so constrained spatially.” After a few seconds she pointed in a new direction, the angle a few degrees above horizontal. “What’s that? All I’m detecting is a power source, with no map around it.” “It’s probably the sun,” said Gus. “Oh, right. Plenty of power there, but again, no way for us to deliver a message. Also helps me calibrate my distances. So I can definitely conclude that the sun is the only other power source I can use within about a light year of us. Now if I added time as a fourth dimension…” She dropped her pointing arm in shock. “The future…I see another explosion northwest of Canterlot fifteen minutes from now, and then another one in central Asia a few minutes after that, and another one and another one…thousands of explosions, covering all the major cities on Earth, all in less than twenty-four hours. And then…nothing.” The natural light in Meridiem’s imaginary room seemed to dim, like a cloud had passed in front of the sun. Gnosi looked nervously around him, peering into the shadowy corners of the room as if expecting to see Death herself hiding in one of them. “It’s as I feared,” Gus said after several moments. “With all the recent tension between the superpowers, this rogue explosion was enough to trigger World War III. Well now we have to fix this problem. The stakes are too high for us to give up. Now, do you think you can cast your glance backward this time?” “Y…yes,” Meridiem said, shaking her head up and down a bit more than was warranted. She looked around her once again, her eyes out of focus. “Two days ago,” she said. “Underground. A little more than three quarters of the way between Canterlot and the Pacific.” “Nevada Testing Grounds, most probably,” said Gus. “The one before that was ten days ago. Also underground. In the middle of Russia—I don’t know enough geography to be more exact than that. I guess that’s the Soviet nuclear tests?” “Correct,” said Gus. “Question,” asked Gnosi. “What’s to stop us from going to one of these tests, getting as far away from the explosion as we can, and then starting time back up with your radiation shield in place?” Meridiem and Gus both went to the chalkboard. “The shield is tied to my mark,” Meridiem finally concluded. “If I’m not stopping or traveling through time, then I can’t create a shield.” “And I can guarantee that we won’t be far enough away from the explosion to survive,” added Gus. “Now if we happen to discover a fallout shelter inside the radius of where Meridiem can go, then we can try jumping in there the moment time starts—that would definitely be a possibility.” “…But don’t plan on it,” concluded Gnosi. After thinking a bit, he came up with another objection. “We weren’t getting hurt in the Solarium.” “Solar energy appears to be harmless to you,” said Gus. “The energy of an exploding nuclear weapon…not so much.” “And keeping the shield up alongside stopping time requires a lot more energy that I could get from the Solarium,” said Meridiem. “Indeed,” said Gus. “Now as long as we’re in this mental space, we have all the time to plan out exactly what we’re going to do…” & & & After spending nearly an hour of subjective time planning in the little room in Meridiem’s head, the trio emerged back into the stop-time of Pan Am Flight 103. Gnosi fished through the stowed luggage compartments of First Class until he found a suitable backpack to steal. Meridiem and Gus (supported by his umbrella-cane) collected up several magazines to put into the backpack—especially Time and Newsweek. These were for use as proof that they were from the future. A variety of other objects were looted from passenger baggage for possible use in their travels, including a Polaroid instant camera. “Now as a responsible adult, I need to remind you to feel guilty for all these acts of petty theft,” Gus told them. “Then why do you have such a big grin on your face?” Gnosi asked. “Oh, no reason,” Gus replied, before shoving a stolen Cadbury chocolate bar into his pocket. At one of the stations that the flight attendants used, Gus took some Pan Am stationary and a pen and wrote up a letter asking the reader for help and describing the timeline of what happened to Flight 103. While he was doing this, he asked Gnosi to retrieve the little remote control that the Captain had used to open the casket containing the bomb. He took it apart and added the details of what he found to the letter. After reading it over and making a few corrections, the three of them set to work making several copies of it each. Their plan was to find someone caught in a nuclear explosion, move that victim as far away from the blast as the limitations of Meridiem’s powers would allow, and leave them with a magazine and a copy of the letter. If that wasn’t enough to save them—not to mention the whole of humanity—then they would pick another explosion and repeat the process, over and over again until they succeeded. Gnosi looked up from the letter he was copying—a difficult feat considering the dim red lighting they were stuck with. “I just thought of something: If we succeed in preventing this plane from being bombed, then it will stop being a power source. So how do we get back to it? Or is this a plan were we have to sacrifice ourselves to save humanity? I…I’m not against it; it’s pretty much the ultimate representation of Markist values. I’d…just like to know beforehand.” “I have no intention of throwing my life away if I can think my way out of it,” Gus replied. “No, we’re going to be able to get out of this because alternate universes are impossible.” “I don’t follow.” “The moment we succeed in changing history, everyone on Earth will want to snap into a new timeline. But because we are time travelers, our existence in the past will prevent that new timeline from taking effect. Meridiem, you’ll feel this as an incredible pull towards our anchor, towards this place and time. All you have to do is let go, and all three of us will find ourselves back on this plane, on this very spot on the carpet. We just have to make sure that your anchor is relative to the plane, as it will probably be in a different location without a mad captain flying it.” “Anchor!” Meridiem exclaimed. A moment later, they were back in Meridiem’s room, watching her work out the equations to anchor her to the plane at 6:50 am on June 28th of 1985.