Traveller Manifesto
32. Los Angeles - Today

Los Angeles – Today.

The last time Zak had seen Allen was at a technology conference. They had barely spoken, for Allen was surrounded by his sizable research team while Zak had been beset upon by the usual political gaggle intent in convincing him to support their latest Traveller proposals.

Life was getting ever busier. Now a father of a baby boy, Zak’s priorities had changed. Mel kept little Sam in the office when she worked for three half-days each week, leaving most of the administrative work to their team or in working on-line from home. It was her choice, but she was now a stay-at-home mum. Zak was intent on introducing his son to the surf, but as he was only a few months old it might be as yet a little early. He wanted Sam to learn about the sea from as young as possible. When he was older, they would all escape to Bali and teach him how to surf.

Zak had been advised of the Helguard office meeting, how Allen and Phil were to update them on their progress which, they had been assured, looked positive.

“I bloody love this view,” commented Allen. Zak knew he had taken up flying and was well on the way to achieving his pilot’s licence, so he seemed to appreciate heights even more. Phil was jealous, not because he couldn’t become a pilot, but because he hadn’t thought of it first.

“Yeah, everyone says that,” replied Conti. “We get the best view in autumn, when we get both the sunrise and the sunset. It just pays to have the southern face, I guess.”

They sat with their drinks and Allen squinted into the sunlight.

“So! Progress?” asked Conti, impatient at their silence.

“Yes, Yes we have,” responded Phil with a satisfied grin. “But not without a price. First of all, we had to re-evaluate our initial replaceings. Allen was, how do I say it? Wrong! Not often I can say that! There doesn’t look to have been any physical intrusion into the Helguard offices. The schematics aren’t ours, though there will have been some collusion with our initial work. They hacked into our old, original research and built upon it to come to a similar solution.”

“So,” asked Conti, “someone copied our initial schematics, but not our final replaceings regarding the ganglion?”

“Yeah it might be as a result of the espionage conducted on us when we initially developed the system,” confirmed Allen, choosing to ignore Phil’s jokes. He was known not to be fond of being corrected. “Couple that with some of the work Phil completed when he was with the US Government and then maybe the theft of the results from our x-ray analysis of the ganglion. Whatever it was, the results are jarringly similar.”

“Oh, great!” groaned Zak.

“We aren’t too worried about that,” added Allen. “He can have our legal teams get started on that side of the business. It’s still theft of our intellectual property through espionage, so we should be able to take them to the cleaners. What’s more important is how we might have made some headway into the theory behind the Transporter. It’s about the elasticity of time.”

“There’s been a lot of papers about that lately,” replied Zak. “In fact, it’s the latest buzz at the conferences I’ve been attending.”

“Okay, what’s the rundown?” asked Conti. “This isn’t my favourite field. I’m always getting hit with one bullshit theory or another that points to why we have to stop using the Transporter. One lady even accused me of being the Devil and that I was opening the gateways to Hell.”

“What?” asked Zak. “I can understand the Devil part, but gateways to Hell?”

“Ha! Ha!” replied Conti.

“It’s about the growth of the Forest Green movement,” added Allen. “Many conservative and evangelical churches have become hostile about how many followers Forest Green are collecting. It seems their cobbled collection of Tatae’s beliefs has attracted quite a few of the young and, consequently, put other religions into attack mode.”

“Yeah,” chuckled Phil. “I hear Forest Green are planting forests as the place to worship and engage in their sacred sex rites. Damn them to hell for greening up the planet!”

“Oh yeah, of course,” laughed Zak. “I’ve been so busy that I haven’t really been following it.”

“Because of the trend towards natural healing, some of the larger Evangelical Churches have been receiving funds from pharmaceutical companies. Big Pharma has been hit hard by the combination of natural healing alternatives from roadside weeds and the continued legalisation and free access to marijuana,” suggested Allen with a chuckle.

“Of course,” nodded Zak. “Interesting times make for strange bedfellows.”

“Which is the perfect lead-in for our results,” continued Allen.

“Good. I hope you have some good news,” grunted Conti. Sometimes he became irritated at their light-hearted banter. Zak could see that Conti was stressed about the theft of their intellectual property. How could anyone have stolen plans to the Transporter?

“In some areas,” conceded Allen. “But we have to explain a few things before we get into it. It’s about some of the latest theories on the nature of Time itself. As I said, it’s getting back to the theory that time is elastic. We had a summit, of sorts, and gathered some of the brightest minds from our three companies.”

Conti screwed up his nose and winced, “Ouch!” was all he said.

“Exactly!” continued Phil. “We’ve tried it before, as you know. Talk about egos. Anyway, after we sucked up to that bunch of bloated heads enough for them to actually listen to each other, we got some good results.”

Allen chuckled as he shook his head in disbelief. “It was, as Phil would put it, one hell of a shit-fight, but on a level it actually worked. The consensus was to concede that the Time where Travellers are sent is actually our Time-line, that any anomaly or parallel universe isn’t accessed. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but the elasticity of Time tends to allow it to snap back into the existing Time-line. This, of course, is conditional upon the events experienced. Small changes require a small return, while large events, such as a military camp in Saxon Aengland will require more of a, um, snap, if that makes sense.”

“Jesus,” swore Conti. “I told you to keep it simple. Now I have to ask, who decides if the Time-line has been altered? Are you talking about God or something?”

“No, not God,” laughed Allen, “but the nature of Time itself. It seems that the time-line, once created, remains. We can make limited changes but the Time-line tends to repair itself. Consequently, the actions of the Travellers have an effect on the Time-line only as far as the Time-line exists with those changes.”

“I’m so happy you are sticking to the easier, more understandable explanation,” replied Zak with a chuckle.

“What it means is that the Transporter appears to create a bubble in Space-Time,” continued Phil. “The creation of the bubble tends to take place with a frequency within Space-time itself. That is probably the best way of describing it.”

“And, that frequency can be detected?” asked Zak, his eyes brightening.

Phil gave him a thumbs up. “Bingo! Give that man a new set of steak-knives!” he agreed, his jocularity the antithesis to Allen’s cool logic.

“So, after all of your bullshit, you can tell us that when a Transporter is used, it can be detected?” confirmed Conti.

“Yes!” conceded Allen. “I don’t want to step onto sensitive ground, but some of the best insights into understanding the Transporter and the bubble in Space-Time can be thanks to Phil’s team, when he was doing his sly research for DARPA.”

“Ohh, fuck off,” murmured Phil quietly.

“It doesn’t matter now,” continued Allen with a wave of his hand. “We still don’t understand why we’re locked to the 1000 year limit, or even limited to our Space, our individual location. When we think in terms of the movement of the planet, the Solar-System and the Galaxy at large, it leaves us all mystified. Some think that ultimately the Transporter’s Time and locational limits might be adaptable.

“What?” exclaimed Conti. “Are you suggesting that, if we learn to control the Time and Space issues, that a Transporter might be able to send someone, say, at zero time but anywhere on the planet, the moon, or even send them to another planet?”

“Jesus! That was a bloody jump in logic!” exclaimed Zak with a laugh.

“It was, but he’s right. That’s the theory,” agreed Phil. “But it’s only a theory. We have no more of an idea of sending any subject back further in time than 1000 years, or to any other location, than anyone else.”

“Yet!” concluded Conti briskly. “So a Transporter might allow us to send anyone anywhere into Space or Time.”

“Like Dr Who?” exclaimed Zak.

“A what?” asked Conti, confused.

“Nothing,” replied Zak with a small smile and shake of his head. “Please go on guys. I hate to say it, but these aren’t new ideas. What does this mean to us now?”

“You asked for a detector and the good news is we now have Transporter detector,” nodded Allen. “It took us a lot of effort and lateral thinking. Luckily that’s what we do best.”

There was silence as each of the men in the office let that sink in. “Sooo…” replied Zak.

“For the moment we can detect the two Transporters that we have operational,” continued Phil. “We have the unit in Turkey, for the final stages of Byzantium Traveller, and we have the unit for Mississippi Traveller in the USA. These are fine, of course. Every time there’s an activation, a bubble in Space-Time creates the radiation. Our team will probably get their own Nobel Peace Prize from that, believe me. It was truly an amazing accomplishment. But let’s just say that we’ve been able to detect those signals, even from Allen’s laboratories in Los Angeles.”

“That’s right,” added Allen. “Essentially, the device is a detector that shows the direction. When a signal is detected, we can follow it and it takes us to the Transporter in use. Because we only have one detector, it means we can’t triangulate any location as yet, but we’re working on building a second to make the process easier. The trick is that because the actual Space-Time bubbles last only a few nanoseconds, each of which is literally a billionth of a second, we can only detect the Transporter when it is activated.”

“So what we did was adapt the detector to include an alarm,” continued Phil. “The alarm also provides us with a time of activation. The funny thing is that the direction is in a straight line, through the globe of the Earth. It was tricky,” he nodded and Allen laughed in agreement and then shook his head at the wonder of it all. Zak realised the process of discovery must have resulted from a marathon effort. Phil continued, “With the detector, we initially hoped to record any rogue Transporter in operation. As we detect any unofficial test activations, we can then move the detector to another location to triangulate because Traveller missions take place with frequent Transporter activations. Armed with that data, we can decide how to proceed further.

“So, you detected our Transporters?” confirmed Zak.

“Of course,” confirmed Allen. “They were the ones whereby we calibrated the detector. Once we had the science, it was actually surprisingly easy, for Phil anyway.”

“We then added the functions of a digital global mapping system and we have been able to plot a grid,” added Phil. “Linking the gridline to computers we can take a reading and then detect a Transporter location in a process that is surprisingly fast and efficient.”

“We could have used that when I was kidnapped,” replied Zak. “It would have saved me from drinking bloody litres of Ukrainian vodka.” He paused and smiled. “I still have a taste for that shit.”

“But what are the results?” asked Conti impatiently.

Phil looked up with raised eyebrows and Conti sucked in his breath in shock. “You haven’t!” he gasped breathlessly.

Allen nodded and gave a downturned, bitter smile. “Yes! Just as we feared, we’ve found other Transporters!”