The Theta Prophecy (2 page)

Year: Unknown

The native girl gasped.

Instead of hovering toward her, the god that appeared from the light fell like a sack of stones right toward the water. For the first fifty feet, she watched the god—who looked just like a normal man, albeit with lighter skin—fall without any movement or sound. For the next fifty feet of his descent, the god yelled and flailed his arms and legs as if trying to run in place. The final fifty feet, she watched the god take a deep breath and straighten his body into one tight line, before disappearing into the water.

Whatever she had just seen plunge into the bay was underwater for so long that she thought he might simply have passed through her world on his way to yet another realm. But a minute later, the deity surfaced with flailing arms and began yelling.

“Holy shit, the water’s freezing,” the god screamed as he started swimming toward shore.

Of course, the little Mi’kmaq girl had no way of knowing what these words meant. To her, they were part of the deity’s strange language. All of her elders had taught that the gods acted in bizarre ways that normal men should not try to make sense of. Because of this, the girl merely smiled at everything the being did, starting with the funny way he acted as though he couldn’t fly, the hilarious way he yelled as he swam, and the way he grumbled once he got to shore.

“Holy shit,” the god said again, sitting on the rocks once he was out of the water.

He took a series of deep breaths as he removed his soaked burlap clothes and rubbed his hands back and forth across his arms and legs to get some feeling back into them.

“Of course I can’t land on a nice beach,” he muttered to himself. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in water that cold.”

The girl assumed he was talking to a second deity only he could see. From the forest’s edge, she watched as the being sat, his back to her, and continued speaking in his funny foreign tongue.

“At least I didn’t appear underground. I guess I have that to be thankful for.” And then, looking at the rocks that jutted out from the land, imagining what his body would look like if he had fallen a few hundred feet to the west, added, “I guess the water wasn’t so bad.”

The girl, having completely forgotten her berries, watched in fascination as the god spoke. As much as she looked for a second being, she couldn’t find one, and she couldn’t tell if the god was talking to himself the way some of the eccentric village elders did or if he could see things she couldn’t. After a minute, the god stood up and looked around at his surroundings. She had no idea deities would pretend to shiver so much!

The being was still muttering to himself as he surveyed the bay, the beach, and the forest. Nothing but water and trees for as far as he could see. He immediately fell silent when he saw her. The deity’s eyes narrowed, seeing her outline, then widened when he realized she was a living person. The girl scrunched herself tighter against the tree as if this would make her disappear or at least make her less interesting to a being powerful enough to appear from the heavens. She had heard many times how capricious and petty the gods could be, and the last thing she wanted was for one of them to turn her into a muskrat just for laughs.

“Hello,” the god said, letting the word stretch for seconds.

She saw how the thing in front of her smiled as it spoke, as if it had said something soothing, but to her the word was just gibberish. She thought to repeat the word back to him, but her elders had never told her whether or not she was allowed to speak directly to the gods. And even if she could, she had no idea if ‘Hello’ meant “I am going to kill you,” or “Don’t say a word unless you want to be turned into a muskrat.” Wasn’t it rude, though, she thought, to stare and say nothing?

And so she did the only thing a six-year-old girl in her situation could think to do. She ran. Little berries fell out of her basket as she darted back toward her village.

The deity watched the girl run. As she disappeared from sight, leaving him alone, he muttered “Crap.”

Then he sat down on the rocks again, this time to get his bearings, and began to think of what he should do next.

The village that the girl was running toward was not visible, but the billows of smoke rising in the air, gentle dark grey puffs, let him know a collection of huts was positioned a few miles off. He did not try to chase the girl down and tell her he meant no harm. He could tell she hadn’t understood the simple greeting. Trying to tell her anything more complicated would only confuse and scare her even more than she already was.

At least this way, when she told the village leaders what she had seen and they asked why she was running, she would have to admit she had been scared for no real reason. They would surely ask if the visitor had tried to harm her. Unless she was a liar, she would have to say no. A group of men would be dispatched to investigate the area where the light had illuminated the sky and the spot where the girl had seen a man fall into the water and then swim to shore. Maybe these men would think the girl was just trying to play a trick on them with her fantastic story. Or maybe they too had seen the burst of light and might believe something miraculous was taking place.

That was why he didn’t run after her. It was also why he didn’t run into the trees to hide from them. They could probably track him through the forest anyway. Without any other option he could think of, he found a large rock and sat, waiting for them.

The time traveler did not fear the native people the way many from his time were taught to fear them. There were horror stories that natives used to ambush random settlers and scalp them. The dead men’s wives, if they weren’t also scalped, would be abducted and married off to others in the tribe. But for the most part, stories of barbarians in the centuries prior to the Tyranny were just one of the ways the Tyranny tried to make its own actions seem more civilized.

Their warfare was acceptable because, rather than riding horseback upon a helpless farmer, they decimated entire cities and countries using remote controlled flying robots. Their killings were acts of superior intellect rather than mere senseless barbarism because they used computers to analyze threats and kill people from thousands of miles away. And even when the Tyranny’s security services blasted away men, women, old and young alike, in their own homes or on crowded streets, this was still better than preying on settlers unlucky enough to be traveling in small numbers. The Tyranny committed their crimes against everyone equally. Compared to bloodthirsty natives, the Tyranny was gentlemanly.

What the time traveler knew, though, what the others like him also understood, was that most natives were the exact opposite of the way the Tyranny described them. They weren’t eager to slaughter settlers. In fact, they were often peaceful to a fault. They trusted visitors when they shouldn’t. They forgave when they shouldn’t. And they refused to fight when they should.

That was why the time traveler sat on the rock with his burlap bag of supplies intended to hold him over until he found signs of civilization. Although he could no longer see the girl as she made her way back to her village, and wouldn’t be able to see the men approaching until they were within a quarter mile of him, he was confident they would treat him as a guest—not as an enemy.

In the meantime, he took in his surroundings. There were no AeroCams overhead. It was the first time, since before he had started middle school, that he saw a sky free of the flying cameras, the largest of which were equipped with rockets to destroy any perceived threat, the smaller ones able to sneak between homes. He remembered how, at sixteen, playing left field for the junior varsity team, he had looked up at the sky to catch a pop–up and had seen more AeroCams above him than birds. One of them had been flying in the same direction as the ball and, before he realized his mistake, the baseball dropped to the ground. The thing he had momentarily thought was the ball continued to zoom around, recording the identities of everyone in the bleachers.

The second thing he noticed was that his ears were ringing. Initially, he blamed this on the tremendous noise and vibrations of the machine that had sent him into the past. Even without knowing exactly when he was in history, he could tell from his surroundings that he was looking at the world at least two hundred years before his own time.

To get here, he and nine other men who wanted to change history and prevent the Tyranny from arising, had lined up in a dank cellar and allowed themselves to be enveloped by the energy of an antimatter machine. As pure as the light had been that engulfed them, somehow it hadn’t made him squint the way the sun always did. But the noise that accompanied the light had made him feel like he was standing directly behind a jumbo jet. Toward the end, right before he blinked and found himself no longer standing on concrete but falling from the sky, he hadn’t been able to hear anything the man next to him had been saying.

That kind of intense humming noise had to cause permanent hearing damage. He could hear the birds chirping, though. And he had been able to hear the girl’s feet kicking up rocks as she ran away. Even the water, calm as it was during low tide, was audible. He began to realize the odd buzzing in his ears wasn’t from the machine’s reverberations at all, but from the relative silence of a sky free of AeroCams.

The latest models were touted as noiseless, but that was only in comparison to other flying machines the Tyranny employed. None of the Tyranny’s words actually meant what they were supposed to. Lower taxes didn’t mean people paid less; it meant taxes weren’t raised. A law passed to ensure the people’s safety actually ensured the Tyranny was more enrooted in their lives. And a “noiseless” killing machine wasn’t silent; it was only quieter than the previous killing machine.

Anyone who listened carefully would still hear a soft humming that became more obvious the closer the AeroCam got. No one paid attention to the noise produced by just one AeroCam. But the Tyranny didn’t use only one of the flying machines. They used millions. Hundreds flew over every neighborhood. Thousands over every city. Almost anywhere people could go, the Tyranny had flying robots recording their every movement. The result of so many machines filling the skies was a dull hum that people became oblivious to. But once it was gone, as it was now, the difference was remarkable.

The time traveler was reminded of the apartment he had lived in just after college. It was one city block away from a major highway. At night, he watched streams of headlights blur into one elongated glow as thousands of cars crept home for the evening. After a couple weeks, he had forgotten that the massive amount of vehicles produced constant noise. Only when visitors came over and commented on the sound of traffic did he remember it was still there. But then, a year later, he moved from the city to the suburbs, to a quiet house, and his ears wouldn’t stop ringing. The traffic was gone, but in its place was a ringing that reminded him of the damage that thousands of cars could cause to someone’s hearing. So it was with the AeroCams.

He laughed then, not only because he was someplace where the AeroCams weren’t, but because the trip had actually worked. Knowing the risks of what he was doing, he had been fully prepared to vanish from his own time and immediately die. Such was the nature of trying to go back in time when the technology couldn’t guarantee
when
the traveler would appear, and because of that, couldn’t guarantee
where
they would appear. While time travel was now possible, the precision of the journey was by no means scientific. That is to say, it wasn’t measureable and repeatable. There was no telling how far someone would be sent back in time.

He knew he would appear somewhere along the 44N latitude, but other than that, he had no say in whether he went back ten years in time or ten thousand years. Without knowing the exact moment he would appear, guaranteed to a fraction of a second, he also had no control over whether he entered this new time over land, underground, in the middle of the ocean, or anywhere in between. With the earth revolving, and with time travel being dependent on a dominant gravitational force, Earth’s core, the only thing the scientists knew for sure was that the time travelers would appear somewhere along the same latitude they had departed from, at the exact same height from sea level as they had departed from. This meant that if he appeared where the land was higher than one hundred and fifty feet in elevation, he would appear under the earth and immediately die. If he appeared over the water, well, he just experienced what would happen then.

“Where the hell am I?” he wondered aloud.

Looking around him, he narrowed down the options of where he could possibly be. The sun was rising from the direction of the water, the east, so he knew he was either on the shore of the Great Lakes, Canada, the Adriatic Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, or the Pacific Ocean. From the brief glimpse he had of the girl before she ran away, her slight cheeks and pitch-black hair, he guessed it was one of the first two possibilities.

With at least a decent idea of where he was in the world, he then muttered, “
When
the hell am I?”

There were no AeroCams in the sky, so no matter where he was, he knew he had been sent back in time before the Tyranny existed. But there were also no airplanes in the sky, no telephone poles, no boats off the coast, no lighthouses to warn ships of the approaching rocks. The only signs of human life he had seen were the girl and the smoke from distant campfires. Assuming he had appeared at either the Great Lakes or the Canadian coast, he would had to have been sent back well before the twentieth century in order to find such a technologically primitive group of people living near the coast. But while he couldn’t see if the villagers were in huts or cabins, he also didn’t see a flag raised above the town. Without a French flag hoisted above the treetops, it was safe to assume he had appeared before Europeans had come across the ocean. If the natives who were no doubt on their way to greet him hadn’t yet been converted to Catholicism, it meant he had not only appeared before the twentieth century, he was sometime before the sixteenth century.