Government Involvement

Government Involvement

The previous night, I had been unable to sleep, a vivid and quite illogical masquerade between my dream world and reality taunting my subconscious.

As I looked through my phone, I couldn’t help but wonder what message I could have possibly sent to a coworker. For a time, I was convinced that I must have said something embarrassing, something that I would have had to explain later in the hopes of salvaging a friendship.

Instead, I found this message, marked ‘sent’ at 5:08AM;

“The government is after me. I need you to listen to me.”

I stared at it completely dumbfounded for a few minutes. This wasn’t something I remembered doing at all.

I decided to return to Quyen, hopefully to help me make sense of the whole thing. I asked her if she remembered some kind of context to the message, or in a sheepish tone, if it had abruptly woken her from her sleep.

“It didn’t wake me up, but I thought it was really weird,” she answered. “Were you drunk?” She asked.

I certainly wasn’t drunk during session. If I only had four hours of sleep available to me between required new student interactions, getting sauced would have been one of the last things on my mind.

What really bothered me was that I didn’t remember sending it. Not to mention, even if I were drunk, the words and punctuation were all perfect. That’s not something drunken people tend to do. Not even drunken journalism majors.

I began to think more broadly about the potential context of the text message, and shared the strange text with both Sherman and Brad. Maybe my job was getting to me, frying my sanity for good.

Either way, nothing added up. At this point, all I could do was to wait patiently for some other clue to spring up. None of these crazy events lent itself to a complete explanation, only conjecture.

I spent a long while sitting down to think. I thought about the four dates, the Hadron Collider, the pens, the text message, the change in time zone, the political ramifications.

I came to one solid conclusion among all of this madness. I knew that if some future version of myself was trying to contact me about whatever was going on at this point in time, it would have to be a warning. The global connection and the four targets in Abu Dhabi were far reaching, enough to get the attention of people elsewhere in the world. Maybe even elsewhere in our timeline.

If for some reason humans are able to control time in the future and all of these things are centered on me and my life, it meant one thing for certain.

My life at this moment could be in danger.

Next Chapter -- A Few Theories

The Change in the Timeline

The Change in the Timeline

That night, I found myself unable to sleep. Like every new session, I was supposed to wake up around 6AM to wake the new students up and get them over to breakfast. The next morning certainly was going to be very difficult for me.

I stayed up watching the clock, every moment that I began to drift off interrupted with delusion, startling me awake again. Every moment until 5AM, I began experiencing the half-sleep half-reality that I had grown to hate so much.

Do you ever have moments where you’re not yet asleep, but you begin to dream regardless? You are just asleep enough that your dreams start mixing with your reality, fusing them together in an undistinguishable trance state which is neither real nor imaginary?

My dream world kept insisting that I needed to wake up for job-related appointments, that every moment spent in bed would make me ever more late for a tour, an escort, an advising appointment…an assassination.

I was startled out of my half-sleep around 4AM, wondering why it was that a cold-blooded murder had crept into my half-conscious. I had semi-consciously depicted myself behind the barrel of a smoking firearm, with no emotion leaving its mark on my face, my inner self. It was enough to keep me awake until I was supposed to be up for work.

Later that day, I received a message from Brad. He had been doing some research himself, and told me that he had some news from Geneva. He proceeded to tell me that due to unforeseen problems, the Hadron Collider activation and subsequent test run would be delayed until August. This enormously important scientific landmark was being delayed a month.

No documented explanation for this could be found in the recesses of the internet. I passed the message on to Sherman, curious to see what he would think. Could I, by merely knowing about the collider, by some supernatural means have possibly affected or changed the present timeline? Was this even at all significant?

I didn’t know at all what to think regarding the matter. I was interrupted later that day in my deep thoughts, approached by one of my co-workers.

“What was up with the weird message you sent me last night?” asked Quyen. She was one of the smallest full-grown people I had ever seen, but never without a smile—clearly her height didn’t bother her. Our interactions had been awkward for a time when we had first met, but I was really enjoying getting to know her since then. I hoped that the ultimate answer to this question wouldn’t fuck it all up.

“What message?” I asked. I honestly had no idea what she was talking about.

Quyen gave me a strange look. Her crooked smile and head cocked slightly to the side was a reactionary pose that seemed to say ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

“Check your text log for yesterday,” she said.

I assumed that she was playing it like this because she already felt defensive about being regarded as the most gullible counselor. On staff, some of the other counselors had her convinced of a few outlandish ideas. She believed for a time that there was a “B-Team,” a reserve of 30 or so backup counselors to fill in for us if we all got fired, that “World War Z” was going to be the next required reading book for the Commonwealth College students, and that our boss was college roommates with her arch-nemesis queen of undergraduate advising, Sheila.

I presumed Quyen thought the message was another attempt to get her to believe something ridiculous, and that she was playing it like so.

Then I read what the message said, and it frightened me cold.

Next Chapter -- Government Involvement

Business and Politics

Business and Politics

Hadron Colliders. What an interesting concept in theoretical physics. Even I couldn’t grasp the ultimate meaning of these findings, but I tried hard to find out.

Supposedly, the Hadron Collider was a very expensive device whose only purpose was to enable subatomic particles to smash into each other at incomprehensible speeds. It seemed to me that something that simply explained couldn’t possibly be capable of tasks so intricately complex.

But what did I know? I was a journalism major. Comically enough, I had written science-based news stories before, which basically taught me how to explain complex scientific principles and workings to others without knowing a damned thing about them myself.

I decided to share the information I had so far with an old acquaintance of mine. Although he didn’t work at the same job I did, Brad worked less than a block away, as a tour guide. At 5’9”, with brown hair, and a neatly-groomed beard, his appearance lent itself to a pensive personality.

I told him to drop by the building I was working in around ten o’clock during one of my sit-down desk security shifts, so I could bounce my findings off of him.

He showed up late, having run into a few of my coworkers whom he knew pretty well. I didn’t mind much, because every boring minute sitting at a desk and doing nothing seemed pretty much identical to the next.

He listened closely, periodically nodding at certain details. Once I finished, he agreed that the situation was strange, and that he would find out what he could. He was the type that listened in on the findings and news of the world scientific community, and if this was relevant, it certainly would be one of the most popular topics on the airwaves.

Not that it would have been hard to find out whatever I wanted to know about Timken Aerospace Inc., but I would have had trouble on my own ruling out or making sense of other related anomalies in the science media.

It was about 11 thirty, almost time for me to knock off and go to bed. I attended the evening’s house meeting as per usual, listening to the other five counselors in my building talk about the perks and problems of the day. Afterwards, Sherman had something to tell me.

“Devon, you might find this interesting,” he said.

“Oh?” I asked quizzically, which was my typical response to that kind of declaration.

“Timken Aerospace is working with the international scientific community to build the world’s largest Hadron Collider in Geneva,” he relayed.

“It’s going to go operational on July 14^th,” Sherman finished.

I paused for a moment, realizing something--that was less than two weeks away.

I thanked him for telling me, and departed for my room to maybe try and get some sleep. One thing kept me awake that night, however. If this major breakthrough in science as we know it were to be happening soon, almost at the exact moment that strange and inexplicable occurrences were happening to me, it had to mean one thing for sure;

This was a very significant point in time.

For some reason, maybe a future version of myself was trying to warn me about something in the present. Maybe someone wanted me to know something about this collider, some pivotal piece of information which held a significant role in the future. That someone might want this collider interfered with, protected, or even stopped in some way for an end that I couldn’t imagine.

I wanted so badly to find out.

Next Chapter -- The Change in the Timeline