London: 2084

[Lattimer Elver]

Part One: History

War.

War never changes. The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth. Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory. Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic and military superpower.

But war never changes.

In the mid to late 21st century, two of the last true world superpowers, the United States of America and The People's Republic of China, began to fight over the last of the world's precious resources: Oil and uranium. At first, the battles were trivial, pointless skirmishes for oil fields and mountain ranges. Precious resources in the Ural Mountains and the desert flats of Saudia Arabia were passed between the two nations sometimes daily, with neither side able to hold them for very long.

Prior to 2050, before the skirmishes in the East, the United States' only local fields for oil were located in New Chihuahua (a territory combining what was formerly known as Texas and the northern Mexican province of Chihuahua) and Alaska, though the annexing of Canada in 2051 provided the United States with a stable foothold on oil to last what scientists thought could be another ten to twenty years. China, on the other side of the globe, had gained control of most of the world's petroleum sources on the eastern hemisphere through violent military conquest. However, the United State's main enemy was not China, but time itself. After twenty years, the oil ran out as expected, and panic ensued among the government and among the people. Gasoline shortages grew rampant. Thousands died in violent riots in Los Angeles and Detroit. As a result, the skirmishes for the remaining oil fields began.

As with all great wars, however, they start with these trifles. World War I resulted from the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarejevo by Galvo Princip. World War II arose from the ashes of the first War as Hitler invaded the Balkans. But the ego of the human spirit can never be satiated, so with each defeat came a more severe response. with every victory, a devastating loss.

The details of these skirmishes are trivial and pointless, though it is sufficient to say that they escalated into large scale troop conflicts on the ground in the Middle East, Asia, China, and even a scarce number of times, on U.S. soil.

Historians can only speculate as to the events that occured in the fall of 2083, after twelve long years of escalating conflict in the Middle East and Asia, though there is one fact that cannot be disputed.

It is not known which side made the first move, but it is known that at roughly the same time, nuclear blasts were reported in Shanghai and in New York City. Within thirty minutes of these two nearly simultaneous blasts, the entire world's population plummeted from 65 billion to roughly greater than 750 million as city after city fell victim to a catacylsmic assault.

Humanity had failed itself. More specifically, it failed its future.

[Lattimer Elver]

Part Two: Hope

Lattimer Elver hated the world in which he lived. Prior to the nuclear apocalypse of 2083, Lattimer had been assigned a very important role in England's military: he was a scientist researching the practicalities of time travel via controlled, synthesized wormholes.

London, his hometown for his entire twenty-four years, was surprisingly spared from any direct attack from the Chinese, due primarily to England's role as a major world player plummeting so far that historians often draw the parallel that they were to the 2080s as Madagascar was to the 1990s. Suffice it to say, not very important.

Even with a majority of the city still intact, life was hard. Nuclear winter set in not long after the world was engulfed in man-made hellfire and temperatures fluxuated rapidly as a result. Winters were bitter, Summers were unbearably hot. Spring and Autumn, for all intents and purposes, had ceased to exist. They were no longer transitional phases between the two extremes, but more of an extension of both.

This is why Lattimer Elver hated his world. It was just too damned hard.
As the saying goes, though, when life throws lemons in your face, make lemonade, and that is what young Lattimer did, though every drop of his lemonade was bitter.

He had not once thought about the merits of time travel after the war. Scientists had no place in post-apocalyptic earth. Neither did entertainers, poets, philosophers, or anyone whose occupation that served no practical, survivalist purpose. These people became farmhands, labourers, and doctors out of necessity, out of the fog of war.

This changed for young Lattimer Elver one uniquely sunny day, when he heard a knock at his door.

"Go away." He responded curtly, coldly.

"I have an urgent message for you, Mr. Elver," replied a meek voice from behind his oaken door.

"Damn it, fine. Just give it to me and then leave me the hell alone."

A small hand opened the mail slit in the door and slid the envelope through. Lattimer heard a pitter-patter of footsteps fade into soundlessness away from his door as the messenger ran off.

Taxes, he thought. Damned government doesn't do anything for me but they sure as bloody hell want this undervalued money of mine.

He opened the envelope with an unnaturaly long thumbnail. To his benign surprise, it was not a notice of back taxes. It was, however, marked with the insignia of the Royal Air Force, his former employer.

"The bloody hell?" His eyes widened as he read the missive.

Col. Elver,

This letter has been urgently sent to you in the hopes that you can come to Bristol post-haste. Watson has made a breakthrough in controlled wormhole technology and time travel and thinks a working prototype is imminent. We can go back and fix this, Lattimer, and make things right again; for our children, for our future. Her Majesty's panel has chosen you to lead the mission into the past. The details are far too complex to appropriately debrief you in this missive, but come to Bristol as soon as possible and we will fill you in.

Signed,
Gen. Robert Montgomery

"Watson, you crazy son of a bitch." For the first time since the bombs dropped, a smile came to Lattimer's face.

[Lattimer Elver]

Part Three: Remembrance

He saw the faces on the television. Children charred from the hellish maelstrom that engulfed the globe held tightly in the arms of weary mothers. Grown men cried tears of anguish upon the tainted soil covered by the ghoulish ashes of those who had perished. Cities mangled, unrecognizable, like lumps of twisted scrap metal piled in large radii.

He hoped that no one felt pain, that it was quick and painless.

He awoke, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Ever since the war had transpired, he had the same dream every night. It haunted him, tortured his soul. He stepped into a pair of loose fitting trouser, a pair of red, vintage Pumas, and a white golf shirt and headed out the door of his abode.

He stepped into the street and flagged down a horse and buggy. Since all of the oil refineries had been destroyed, this was the only mode for mass transport. The buggies were covered, like those that were used by pioneers on the Oregon Trail in old America. They could comfortably sit six to eight people and had a maximum capacity of 2000 lbs.

Lattimer paid his fare of three pounds and stepped into the back of the buggy. He offered the man next to him a small nod and a grim smile. Grim as the death that still hung over the Earth, an Earth waiting for a savior.

[Lattimer Elver]

Part Four: The Mechanism

The drive, if one could call it that, from London to Bristol was long and brutally dull, and the dreich weather of the post apocalyptic world made it that much more dreary.

He had packed appropriate reading material for the journey. Notes and journals by Einstein and Carl Sagan and Hawking's A Brief History of Time, required reading at Cambridge where he was formally schooled in physics and cosmology. He had to catch up on the basic principles and theories that he had all but discarded from his mind over the previous months.

After many hours, the ride was over. The coach yelled to the covered area that they had arrived at Bristol. Lattimer stepped off and looked around. The air was yellow and thick, worse than London because of the wind currents around the ocean. It lresembled in many respects pre-war Calcutta or Bombay (both of which had been obliterated during the war).

Lattimer made the brief trek on foot from the transportation depot to Tyndall Avenue, where he was to meet General Montgomery and the others at the University of Bristol. He stepped into the Eric Thomas building, a sixty-five year old construct named for the early 21st chancellor of the school.

He was greeted by two men in surprisingly nice dress.

"We'll take your belongings, sir."

Lattimer silently shoved his books, journals, and notes into the first man's chest and stepped inside. The building was of beautiful architectural design. Although it was built in 2019, it was constructed in the gothic styles of the early 1700s, with large, flying buttresses and elaborate murals painted on nearly every wall.

"Good evening, my friend."

Lattimer looked up to see General Montgomery resting comfortable in a large, well-cushioned chair. In his mouth was a very fat cigar, making him truly look like the hard-assed, stereotyed general of early 21st century militaries.

"I can't say any evening has been particularly good in the past several months, but I accept your sentiments as genuine." Lattimer forced a smile to his face and took a seat at the large, round table, filled with England's top scientists, military minds, and even a phliosopher, a meek man who seemed less-than-eager to stand out from the bunch.

"Now that we're all here, let's get down to business. Dr. Watson has developed a theoretical model for a controlled black hole regulated by a device called a flux capacitor," explained the General.

Watson chimed in quickly, as to keep Montgomery from stealing all of his thunder. "I got the name from a 20th century movie, Back to the Future." He grinned, proud of himself, but the one word that came to Lattimer's mind was "nerd".

"It works like this. As professor Hawking stated a hundred years ago, time travel would, in theory, be possible by travelling through a wormhole or black hole. However, he made it clear that due to the immense gravity of the collapsed star, any human body would be immediately crushed to the size of an atom once in the vicinty of the black hole. I've developed a solution to the problem. The chrononaut, Lattimer, presumably, will be encased in an eight by eight spheroid craft. Inside, the flux capacitor will generate an energy field that I have developed that will exert an equal force back upon the black hole, rendering you safe to travel through it."

He took a breath and continued.

"The trick will be sending you through at the right coordinates as to send you back to the intended place in time. A .02% deviance from the intended deployment area could result in you being sent to any number of fathomable times, either in Earth's past, it's future, or in an another universe not associated with our time. Hell, you could be sent to a realm where dragons roam free and people fight each other with magical spells."

This comment drew a brief bit of laughter from the gathered.

"Thanks, I'll be sure to keep that in mind," Lattimer responded dryly, unable to find the humor in that.