The news of the sinking reached us in the morning. The men who ran the docks knew from the moment they received the radio transmission, of course, but they'd chosen to wait until everyone was awake for breakfast to break the news.
Mostly people just mourned the loss of the brave sailors and the ship that had carried them. But Mayumi's sharp brain caused her more concern, which she shared with me once everything had calmed down.
“The radio transmission said they were being fired upon by a battleship.” She said, deadly serious.
“But they said it was just an attack, it could have been a boarding.”
“I talked to the radio operator. You know what this means?”
I wasn't sure what she was getting at. “It means that those things can sail ships? It'll make crossing the sea more dangerous.”
“Yes, but if they can fire shells at ships, they can fire shells at cities. We're safe from land attack here, but we're not safe if they start shooting at us from the seas.”
The impact of that was similar to being told that your car is wrecked. I didn't feel immediately worried, but something told me I'd be needing to get a new car. Or in this case, somewhere new to live.
“So we'll have to move inland?”
“Listen to me carefully. We can't move, they'll just overwhelm us. As soon as they sail that ship towards us, we're either going to have to hide underground and not come out, or just accept our fate. There won't be any of this 'future city' nonsense.”
“I've spoken to the Professor, and he think they may have the only solution to this problem. Will you come with me?”
I agreed and we took a short walk across the city streets to a low building that had been partially rebuilt. There were a few people inside, and Mayumi seemed out of place surrounded by middle-aged men drinking coffee.
“I brought him. I'll leave you to it.”
“Thanks you, Mayumi.” Professor Franklin said, approaching me. “Will you help us?”
“What with?” I was definitely confused now.
“It's complicated. Do you want me to explain the science?”
“Go ahead.”
The Professor walked through into another room, and I followed him. On a table in the centre of the room was a shiny metal object that looked like some kind of machine. Like an engine of some kind, but chrome-plated.
“Have you seen one of these before?”
I had, but not for years.
“It's one of their weapons, those things they use.”
“Precisely. We don't know what they call it, but we do know what it does.”
He pointed to a kind of nozzle on the end.
“This fires a ray... it's complicated, but we think it's to do with quantum light. Anyway, what it proves is that time is non-linear.”
“What? What does non-linear mean?”
“If you think about a time line, that's linear. It means that everything just progresses at a steady rate and can't be stopped.”
“So if it's non-linear, it can be stopped?”
“Er, well, no. You can think about it like a memory. What this machine does is allows the target to return to some point in its memory. If I use it on you, and set it back twenty years, you'll turn into a child.”
“So it lets you get younger?”
“That's not really why you'd use it. They use it as a weapon like that, though. They can turn steel girders into what they used to be – iron ore. That's why they can turn skyscrapers into rubble and sand in an instant.”
“Everything has a memory?”
“Yes, a perfect memory. I could turn a sheet of glass into sand, or into the rocks it was before that. You could make fossils back into living creatures, or bring people back from the dead.”
“Wow.”
“Very wow. But it has little practical use for us, except for saving anyone who dies. We think it's how those ghosts disappear when they're attacked – they simply go backwards in time until they reach their old constituents.”
“Then why do I need to see it.”
“This is the important part. Because everything has an eternal memory, it can remember the origin of the universe. Or the French Revolution. Or the bronze age. Crucially, it can remember when they launched the mission to save Nightmare Moon.”
“So we can fire it at Nightmare Moon?”
“No, no. She'd never get close enough, and if she were we could just shoot her. No, what we have to do is prevent the mission from succeeding, which means we have to send someone back in time as they are now.”
“But won't they just get younger, but be stuck here?”
“Precisely. That's the snag. We have to reverse the way the beam works – do the inverse. Make everything else travel back, whilst the target remains in the future. But, the gentlemen next door think they've cracked it.” The Professor smiled.
“So, do you want me to go back?”
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
“Why not? It's you or Mayumi, and Mayumi claims she has a good reason not to.”
“Well, okay. How would I stop the mission? Blow it up or something?”
“Not quite. There are two key things we need to succeed. Firstly, we have to get something that was created around the time we want to go to. Because it was created then, it has a memory of that exact point. A rock, for example, is so old that it's like throwing a dart at a time line millions of years long. But something like a sheet of paper was only manufactured a few months before it was used, so the manufacturing would be a big event, easy to track down. A newspaper would be perfect.”
“So what else is needed?”
“The object that we're obtaining the time from has to be destroyed. If it were a newspaper, for example, you'd have to find that newspaper and burn it before the events that we're trying to avoid, happen.”
“So I'd burn the newspaper before Nightmare Moon is rescued. But won't she just get rescued anyway? One newspaper won't stop that.”
“That's why we have the key item. The thing that caused Nightmare Moon to be rescued was a photograph, taken on the moon, of part of her. If it was destroyed, nobody would ever know, and the reality would collapse and shift into a new one.”
“Would the new reality be better?”
“We've no idea. It could be worse. But anything is better than the imminent destruction of the human race, I suppose.”
“But if the photographs are key, that means we need those now. To get the date from.”
“Absolutely. But of course, they're surely lost to time?” The Professor's tone of voice suggested he knew differently.
“Well...”
“I didn't know this until recently, but apparently the original and only copy was given to someone. Specifically, the astronaut who went to the moon. Now, he was assassinated years ago and the chances of his belongings surviving are slim. But I hadn't bet on the assassins being trophy hunters.”
“So whoever killed him kept the photographs?”
“Yes. In fact, he had them right up until Nightmare Moon killed him. Then, two years later, his old colleague retrieved them and brought them here.”
“Who? You?”
“No, Mayumi. She's so skilled with a sword because she used to be a paid assassin.”
“Wow. So she really wanted these photographs before we left the city?”
“Yes. I told her to get them.”
“So the two of you knew about... all of this, even before we came here?”
“I heard that one of these weapons was here, so we had to come. Everyone else wanted to make a resistance city, but I knew that this was more important. I'm sorry we had to lie to you.”
It didn't bother me that I hadn't known. What bothered me was that something didn't seem right.
“I have to go back and destroy the photographs?”
“Yes. You should be able to do it without too much trouble – they were never top secret.”
“But if Mayumi killed the astronaut, why doesn't she do this?”
“Because she met him before he died, there's an unfortunate problem. He will recognise her future self, if that's understandable. She'll be from a time in his future, so he'll recognise her as an assassin and probably run away from her. It just won't work.”
“Right.”
“Finally, if you do this, there's on thing to remember. We'll all cease to exist once the reality changes, and you'll be stuck with the consequences. It'll seem very similar at first, apart from Nightmare Moon, but the tracks will diverge until it's totally different. You have to live with whatever happens.”
“Okay. Can I think about it?”
“Don't think too long. We haven't got long until those ghosts will attack us.”
***
“Those humans are up to something.”
Nightmare Moon paced before taking a seat on her carved throne, her head resting on a hoof.
“I know they are. It's just too... easy. They want me to attack.” She looked at a map. “It seems so easy to just... destroy them. They've even gathered themselves together.”
“Advisers?”
“Your highness, we humbly suggest you send one battleship to attack them. If they're bluffing, we will only lose one battleship's worth, we have many more.”
“Hmm... good advice.”
Nightmare used her magic to turn the map around, so that she was facing the coastline. “So simple... something must be going on.”
She looked at her advisers again.
“Any other news? Rumours, something overheard?”
“No, your highness.”
“Maybe I should pay them a visit... just a quick one, to remind them who their ruler is.”
The advisers didn't make any comment. They learnt early on not to question Nightmare's musings.