The Axiom of Time- an excerpt
In the distant future, humanity's poorest grapple with an impossible choice: go back and live or stay and starve. | Est Read Time: ~13 minutes
“You ready for this one?” Gabriel said as he burst through the conference room’s opaque glass doors.
“Sure am,” Frankie said, scooting two faux leather chairs to adjacent sides in the corner of the dark mahogany table. She opened the appropriate files on the monitor up front without looking at Gabriel. It was her last appointment. Twelve hours of back-to-back meetings had burnout knocking on the doors of her psyche, but she refused to open up.
“I bet,” Gabriel started. “but for my own sense of security, walk me through it.”
Frankie sighed loudly enough for Gabriel to hear but softly enough for its exasperated nature to remain ambiguous. “He doesn’t have too much of a presence on socials, which has been a bit of a challenge. But we have enough data from his Device to know what makes him tick. There’s still a lot to work with.”
“Give me the abbreviated version.”
“We have the usual stuff: health records, family and job history, diet, daily schedule, financials, eye-tracking data, search history, all of that. You—”
“Can you be more specific? Gabriel interrupted. “That’s a lot of whats. Give me the whys. Why would he leave his situation?”
Frankie cocked her head toward Gabe. “If you were going to need an itemized list of all this info, why aren’t you the one running this meeting?”
Gabriel stretched out his palms, “I’m not trying to micromanage. I just want to make sure we’re being attentive. Our numbers are lower this quarter, and I’ve been feeling some pressure from Craus.”
“Well, don’t turn your pressure into mine.”
Gabriel inhaled deeply before continuing. “We need this one, Frankie. And the data suggests that he’d be more receptive to a woman. I know you’ve had a slower year, but you’re one of the best here. I’ve seen how you are with people—that’s why I put you on this account.”
Frankie swiveled in her chair until fully facing Gabriel. He was right: it had been a slow year up to that point, and she’d been irritable.
“Why would he leave his situation?” he repeated.
“From everything I’m seeing,” Frankie began, “purpose and his brother.”
Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“We could make an easy case on purpose. Predictable schedule. He rarely gets out of his routine—no satisfaction from his job. No spouse. At first, I thought it might be tough to get him on board without a partner or children, but I think his brother and sister-in-law satisfy what we need them to.”
“What price point are you thinking?”
Frankie turned to the financial statements she had pulled up on her tablet. “It shouldn’t be too crazy. Getting him would take an amount on the lower end of our band.”
Gabriel opened the glass doors to leave. “It looks like you’ve got this.”
Just before he exited, Gabriel stared at Frankie until she felt his gaze and raised her eyes to meet his.
“You know you do an important thing, right?”
“I know, Gabe. Thanks. Please bring Jericho in.”
* * *
The walls were lined with framed images of smiling strangers, all shaking hands with the same silver fox of a man. An engraved plaque positioned beneath each portrait read a name and year. Marie Curie, 1891; Martin Luther King Jr, 1952; Adebayo Adeleke, 1983; Greta Thunburg, 2036. There were more images than Jericho could count in the time it took him to walk down the hall toward the conference room.
As he approached, Jericho grew hyperaware of his machinations. No matter how deep a breath he took, his lungs would not fill. He felt every square inch of clothing touching his body, from how the stitching of his olive thermal shirt scraped against his chest to how the pant legs of his washed jeans wisped by his ankles. He hoped he didn’t look as uncomfortable as he felt. He took a deep breath before pulling the door open, shook his head, and envisioned Henry waiting for him inside the conference room, withered. Jericho exhaled all his nerves and apprehension and swung the door open with the confidence of someone who knew why they were there.
Jericho had seen more rooms like this one in movie scenes than in person. Plush leather chairs lined the dark wooden table, and a massive monitor was displayed at the end of the room. The walls were lined with opaque glass to ensure privacy. At the end of the table sat a woman looking up from her myriad of devices he presumed was being cast to the even larger screen up front. She flashed Jericho a brilliant smile as she rose from her chair to shake his hand.
“Hi, Mr. Israel. Please—have a seat,” she gestured toward the empty chair adjacent to her. “I’m Francine. You can call me ‘Frankie’. What do you prefer? Mr. Israel? Jericho? Jeri?”
‘Jeri’ rang through his chest like a church bell. Reminding him of Miranda, warmth and familiarity flooded him as they permeated the cracks of his exterior, but he tried to reject it.
“‘Jericho’ is fine.”
Frankie paused for a moment before continuing. “I appreciate you coming in and meeting with me today. I’ve done my research and learned a ton about you, and I’m really excited that you and I finally get to meet.”
“What’s there to be excited about?”
“I’m going to be overly up-front with you,” Frankie started. “I know a lot about you. Probably too much. Because the State sponsors us, they give us access to all your files. All of them.”
Jericho continued staring at Frankie. He figured she had a lot of intel from the State, but he couldn’t couldn’t imagine what ‘all his files’ included.
Frankie must have seen the look before because she began answering questions he wasn’t asking yet.
“Anything your Device knows, we know. From biometric data to your most recent search history—it’s pretty complete, Jericho.
“And I know it might feel weird knowing how much I know about you, but I’m going to be honest with you—it helps me. What we’re doing here is important, and the more I know, the better I can tell how good of a fit someone will be in our operation here.”
“And what makes me a ‘good fit’?” Jericho asked.
“Well, that’s just the thing about my job here. What was in your file is not why I was excited to meet you today. But who you are.”
“And who’s that?”
“A giver,” Frankie said, allowing the word to marinate before looking at Jericho and continuing, “We know, of course, about Henry and Miranda.”
Jericho nodded through gritted teeth as he tried to keep the rocks in his stomach from coming out his mouth.
“You’re someone whose world started falling apart, and instead of running away, you stuck around to figure out how to put it all back together. You’re that kind of person.”
“Sounds dramatic.”
“Maybe a little,” Frankie laughed. “But it still stands to say you’re a good guy. And good guys who put a cap on their potential limit the amount of good they can do for the world.”
Frankie sat up straight in her chair and pursed her lips.
“So,” Frankie began. “What do you know about Aeon Industries?”
“I don’t know much,” Jericho said, straightening up. “The only things I know are the things I’ve heard. So that’s part of why I’m here—to learn more.”
“What have you heard?”
“You send people to the past.”
“More or less,” Frankie leaned back in her chair. “There is a lot more to it, though. How about this—I’ll give you all the background you need. I’ll explain why people do it, how it works, and the risks involved. And if you feel good about it, we’ll go from there. But if you don’t, then that’s okay too. You’ll at least walk away with a greater appreciation for those who have already Jumped. How does that sound?”
“Sure—I’ve got time.”
* * *
‘Time travel’ was impractical—fantasy dressed as science.
Meanwhile, learning to “traverse wormholes in space-time through quantum tunneling” was something investors and state governments could get behind.
Jon Lemon, the founder of Aeon Industries, was a tech luminary and entrepreneur who pursued anything that would propel the human race forward. Life was a perpetual chess match, and his endgame was to own a majority stake in any worthwhile company, from artificial intelligence developers to space systems.
Interstellar travel was always his ultimate goal, and the vastness of space made the development of technology sidestepping the light-speed barrier paramount to the human race’s survival. Yet, he understood that expanding beyond Earth required unity. If human civilization was to stretch across the stars, it could not be fractured. And unity, as history has shown, rarely came peacefully.
It didn’t matter to Lemon who ‘won’ as long as they had him to thank for it.
He invested billions of dollars in developing teleportation technology, initially used for military applications. Munitions and medical supplies were tested first. What once required cargo ships, transcontinental flights, and immense fuel reserves now happened instantly. Eventually, refugees, migrants, and war criminals could be brought in—or out—with ease.
After fifty million deaths, only the State remained. The world finally had peace, and Lemon began constructing his next facility—one built to focus on the stars.
Shortly into excavation, the construction crew unearthed a chest buried deep in the Earth. Inside was a single parchment, aged yet intact.
The message was short.
Lemon—
Do not send us beyond.
Send us back.
Carbon dating placed the document in the 16th century A.D.
Lemon shifted his focus from the future to the past and how to get there. As it turned out, using a wormhole to travel through time instead of space was only a minor technological pivot, even if it was a larger philosophical one.
He opted to be the first human test subject, and the task was meant to be simple—ten minutes backward.
He materialized in the void beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
The technicians made a simple but fatal oversight: Earth’s movement around the Sun. A 10-minute Jump meant Earth had already moved over three thousand kilometers through space.
But one fact was inescapable: had his Jump succeeded, an older version of himself should have appeared before he stepped onto the pad. He never had a chance.
Some believed it was sabotage—a plot by the State to seize control of Aeon. Others believed he never missed his mark—that he Jumped to a calculated point on Earth, biding his time for a return.
Over the next one hundred and fifteen years, more than one hundred million Line Engineers were sent into the past. Each was assigned a mark—an identity to assume, a life to inhabit—to ensure history unfolded as it should. When a Line Engineer is recruited, they’re grouped with other LEs jumping to the same period and geography, and the remainder of their time in the present is spent engrossing themselves with knowledge of their mark and period.
Unlike Jumping’s applications in war, however, a Jump to the past is a one-way ticket.
* * *
“How do you decide who’s a mark?” Jericho asked, swiveling slightly in his seat.
“Anyone who has had a significant impact in history can be a mark.”
“Can’t you argue that everyone’s had a significant impact?”
Frankie smiled, “That’s right. Everyone profoundly impacts the timeline, even if they don’t realize it. You don’t have to be a Gandhi or Martin Luther.”
“Or a Hitler,” Jericho added, tilting his head as he pondered his comment’s implication. “Did you send someone back in time to make sure the 20th-century Holocaust happened?”
Frankie began speaking slowly, clearly enunciating each of her words. “When interviewing to be a Recruiter, that was one of my questions, too. Even Mr. Alvarez—who brought you to this room—felt the same way. ‘Who were we sending back? The MLKs or the Hitlers?’ But what we found was this: what’s done is done. The past we’ve experienced has already happened. And whether the Hitler who carried out the 20th century Holocaust was an Austrian born in 1889 or if he was a Line Engineer born today who Jumped back, it makes no difference. The Holocaust would have happened regardless.
“You didn’t answer the question,” said Jericho.
“I don’t know if we did it,” Frankie said. “As a Recruiter, I only know about my accounts. I know I didn’t. I can’t speak to the operation as a whole.”
“Convenient,” Jericho responded through slightly pursed lips.
A silence overtook the conference room, softly undercut by the slight hum from the ventilation system overhead. Controlling a silence was a skill Jericho was not yet proficient in, but Frankie seemed well-versed in the art. Her eyes glued themselves to his. Her blinks were deliberate and calculated. She squashed the compulsion to speak by channeling it into an ever-slight nod.
Jericho broke first.
“Why would anyone agree to do this?”
“Why might you?”
“I don’t know if I would.”
“But if you did agree, what would the reason be?”
Jericho looked up to the ceiling, covering the lower half of his face with his hands.
He wasn’t miserable, but Jericho was far from happy. A comfortable monotony plagued the day-to-day, making it hard for him not to marvel at his insignificance. He’d often spend his nights staring at the popcorn ceiling of his apartment, pretending each mound was a star shining a one thousand-year-old image of what may no longer be all to remind himself of his own temporality.
“Probably the money.”
Frankie raised an eyebrow. “The money?”
“Yeah. Is what I was quoted still the offer?”
Frankie slid her tablet over to Jericho, highlighting the appropriate figure. “It’s actually a bit more than you were quoted.”
The number was a lot to Jericho. It was enough to pay off all of Henry’s medical bills—to get him the medical attention he needed to get better, not just survive. It was enough for Miranda to see a light at the end of the dark tunnel that loomed above for the last few years. It was enough to take care of any child Miranda, and Henry might have if he did get better.
It was enough to take care of any child Miranda might have if he didn’t.
With Jericho lost in the figure, Frankie leaned back in her chair and spoke slowly.
“What’s made this process so easy for everyone,” Frankie began, “is that when you sign on with us, we take care of everything you need us to. We provide you with everything you need to complete your training for your Jump. Your entire estate will be liquidated and passed to whichever beneficiaries you list. Not having to worry about what to do with your belongings and assets back home would probably be helpful, wouldn’t it?”
The word ‘beneficiaries’ sounded odd to Jericho. He wasn’t dying, but it did feel like it. His time in this period would come to an end. He’d leave everything and everyone he knew and start again somewhere else. A clean slate. Tabula Rasa. If that wasn’t death and rebirth, he didn’t know what was.
“Another thing that has made this process easier is that the training program goes at your own pace and comfort level. It doesn’t matter when you feel ready to Jump—as long as you eventually end up in the right place. You can take as much time as you need before Jumping. That’d make it a bit easier, wouldn’t it?”
Time was slowing down for Jericho. He started to feel calm, but his jumping knees under the table told another story. The contagion of Frankie’s affirming body language was impacting his judgment.
“Is it okay if I take a few days to think about it?”
Frankie smiled and leaned even further back in her chair.
“I’d be concerned if you didn’t.”