Christopher Golde

                                               

                             Chapter one

            The Time Traveler






                                               











Date:         December 24th 2025 
Location:  International Space Station 6

 

 
Major Cheng looked at the virtual monitor in front of his visor. Off to his left, he could see the moon just appearing over Earths horizon, silhouetted by the giant solar panels of the space station. Below him, the blueness of the Pacific Ocean was just spectacular. Views of the Earth like this often distracted spacewalkers as they moved around outside the station, it was something you just never got complacent about. He looked across at his partner, Commander Chekov who was next to the long barrel of the laser cannon and gave her the thumbs up. Chekov acknowledged and turned to the panel on the side of the cannon pushing a series of laminated panels.

The cannon responded by spreading its end like a giant flower bud. Once at full bloom, Cheng put his hand out and touched the virtual screen. A blinding flash erupted from the bud of the cannon and burst forth into the blackness of space, shooting away from the Earth and it’s rising Moon. Both Cheng and Chekov stayed motionless and watched the ball of light as it vanished into space at the speed of light.

            “Into time itself speeds the ‘Eye of God’, may it save us all,” said Cheng. Those on Earth listening and those also in the Space Station that could hear him, could not agree more.

              The light was a piercing point entering an immense blackness. The microscopic space vessel now calculated that the distance to the event horizon was almost exactly one million kilometres, this being only a small fraction of its incredible journey so far. The tiny probe was no more than a group of electronic particles carried by an intense, concentrated ball of light that had been travelling for more than fifteen thousand million light-years from the Earth, on a collision course with this super-sized black hole that it was now rapidly approaching.

              The wall of light appeared to spin blindingly fast as the probe approached, expanding and contracting as it rotated. The craft's instruments calculated that it would breach the distance to the probe in one more cycle of expansion, which would be less than another sixty seconds. As per the pre-set timing in the microscopic machine, the moment the particles would have hit the wall of light, they immediately moved into a fifth dimension and like an elevator climbing a building, flicked through dimension after dimension until it reached the mathematical anomaly called the eleventh dimension. In this dimension, the tiny vessel was no longer part of the same Universe as the Earth and for just milliseconds, which could have been billions of Earth years, its relative space and time no longer existed. Instead, it could now exist at a point where time began and ended simultaneously. 

              As it sat at this point for a millionth of a second, the probe sensed a colossal wave of energy approaching at a rate the probe's instruments were incapable of measuring. Like a surfer riding a wave the energy pushed the probe along at impossible speeds for another ten billion years until its instruments began to focus on one particular large ball of nuclear activity. Around this was forming a spray of debris that over the next two thousand million years would become planets.

              These satellite planets were now caught in an orbit of creation by the gaseous inferno at the epicentre of their revolutions. The probe began to track one, in particular, that was the third in distance from the glowing giant. Over the next two hundred million years the tiny probe would orbit and record this particular rock as it evolved.

              Life forms would eventually crawl from immense bodies of water that formed a majority of the planet’s surface, onto constantly moving and changing landmasses. Small creatures evolved into larger creatures, then the skies were filled with those that flew and still the probe continued to orbit and record. On two occasions spectacular dust storms completely obliterated the view of the tiny unseen observer and after thousands of years when the skies cleared the seemingly dead planet would again explode into life.

 

              Fiery mountains erupted at regular intervals and engulfed entire landscapes or created the land where once only water had been. At times the surface of the planet seemed entirely white, covered in ice and snow from one side to the other, seemingly devoid of all life for more than a thousand years.

              The recording equipment within the craft was programmed to speed up their data activities throughout the life of the probe and when these reached intervals of once every one hundred years the first signs of intelligent life appeared.

              Over the next two million years the probe decreased its recording intervals until they were only ten years apart.

              Eventually, a trigger device activated by the gravitational forces of a planetary alignment commenced an internal reaction in the probe and it now started to absorb energy from the sun and increase its mass. Over the next Earth year, the electronic particles would piece together a perfectly round black carbon fibre ball that would orbit the Earth waiting for another programmed event to occur. 

 

Soon it would be time.

             

The dragon’s tail is but a sign
For mankind’s fall and man’s decline.
 You think I utter blasphemy

You’re wrong. These things come to me

The prophecy will come to be.

 Mother Shipton            1488-1561