The Outpost Of Time
IT was sitting there, glinting and glittering in the sunlight as she approached, not being prone to knowledge of engineering she would not know how such a thing worked, but she did know that it was a time machine. She saw someone clasping the side of the pedestal that operate as the platform and she knew that person was the time traveler, "Help me, please God in heaven help me" the man was saying as he tried as best he could to climb up to the seat where the controls were mounted and her eyes took in the small rotating operation that had the year and date on it. 1856 December 2end, her birthday, "Help me Alisa, help me if you want to save your life." He said again, and she looked back to the place where her home was and the land her husband owned and wondered what she was supposed to do.
Manner and tradition had taught her to be loving, caring, and compassionate when it came to men and other creatures, she was a woman and the ideal woman would never turn away from another person in need, would she? Taking his shoulder which was covered in blood she picked him up and put him on the control seat, she sat down beside him with her hands beside the control panels, they taught you how to play the piano, not how to operate controls, this is not something you were meant to do. She looked back into the woods and asked "What did this to you?"
He was a legend in her family, her parents had meet because of him, back in 1775 and she would not allow him to leave her in the hands of her husband. "The Molcations, they did this to me, activate the emergency controls and send us off to another time, it is too late for this place, look there in the woods, the trees moving can you see them?" I turned and saw the things, moving an d twisting amongst the trees, like snakes with feet and hands that were seething with fangs which had the moonlight glinting off them in the night. Her parents told the girl he always talked of such strange and wondrous creatures, but where was he going? She looked back, knowing what her husband wanted from her was too great and she knew that she could never allow him to do such a thing to her, "We must go now, push the leavers up and send us back through time!"
Grasping the heavy controls she looked to see the things moving and slithering towards her with their hands and claws reaching into the skies, reaching at her. Before she knew what to make of the experience the scenery had changed around her and the machine was traveling through time. She looked down to see the date, and there was none. The date had gone and the colors swirled around her head and wished and washed like they might do in a stream. "Where are we going?" She asked as she looked at the horrible condition the time traveler was in, and what the creatures created by her husband had done to him.
"The outpost has technology that can help me heal, and it has technology that will help you my dearest Caroline, you are in more danger than you realize." In the distance some metal monstrosity was glowing in the eons that beckoned her to look at it, "The outpost, built by the people of Mondania Prime two thousand years from your time, to help someone in need."
"Who might that be?" Caroline asked as the time machine grew closer to one of the arms that reached out from the center and ended in what looked like a platform.
"You my dear." The Time Traveler said as he parked the time machine in the platform and walked off in a hurry, it was impressive to see how he was able to move now with his wound so bad.
"This is all impossible," Caroline had insisted, but knowing what her husband wanted to do with her baby resting peacefully inside her made her question even that.
Now the two walked from the platform toward an edifice in the metal that served as a doorway into the larger stations of the outpost, and already Caroline could hear alarms going off inside and voices chattering away in some foreign language that sounded neither human nor English. She stopped for a moment as she listened and the time traveler smiled at her, "You will understand them once your ears become accustomed to the tones and pitches they use." He held out his hand, and she took it, wouldn't you after all, this was the man who introduced her parents, and this was the man that they told stories about all her life.
Walking together into the room Caroline Burnfield saw dozens of tall men and women in white clothing walking from banks of computers to banks of computers, "What kind of people are these?"
"Mondanians, they are what humans evolve into fifty billion years into the future, but they have built this outpost at the dawn of time for one purpose." The Time Traveler began to talk in the language of the people around him and they all turned and looked at Caroline, "This is the woman that appeared in the computers, everyone this is the woman who will save your planet."
After this speech Caroline wanted to go home, she wanted to leave the time traveler and go back to caring only about the baby that was supposed to be born in eight months, but she stayed. One of the men walked over to her, and held out his hand, six fingers and a third eye posted in the middle of the forehead looked at her. "We are lucky to have you here, the woman who caused our planet to be torn to pieces is the woman who will take time and repair it all for us."
The time traveler turned and explained "You see Caroline, you are very special to time, time has singled you out and made you the vocal point of the stitching of time, and now in the future your descendants are beginning to vanish. Those creatures that you saw in the forests are the Serpents of Time, they were created in order to hunt down your decedents and kill them so the time stream would fall apart. They killed everyone who mattered to you, your children and their children as well, but they were coming after you that night. They attacked me and I stopped them from killing you as a baby, tell me do you remember your parents?" The Time Traveler spoke such wonderful and exotic things to her that she wanted to believe him, she wanted to believe that she was that special, that somehow time was revolving around her, but she knew she wasn't.
"No, to be honest I have lost all memory of my parents, my husband is a Doctor he says it is good for me to stay in the house and not trouble myself with remembering who my parents were." She remembered the stories though, but could never pin any faces to them.
"You see time has begun to erase them from your memory because the Serpents killed them after you were born, you are the only one who still exists from your family. After your parents were killed in 1799 the time distortions were so great that they destroyed our home world, the time traveler has helped us build this station so we can repair the damage that has been done to the time stream, and save history from the serpents of time. She backed away from this woman, the woman with three eyes and the woman who seemed to know her, "Your husband is the reason for the time distortions, you and the time traveler need to go back and stop him."
"No not possible, my husband is a good and honorable man, he has told me so himself, he runs a clinic in the city of London for unfortunate women who have become pregnant and cant care for the children. I love him and I know he would never do anything like what you are suggesting." Caroline looked at the other creatures in the room, they were all shaking there heads back and forth in shame as to what she was saying, "You cant be serious!" She shouted and then felt the time traveler place his hand on her shoulder, "Why do they keep saying this to me tell me why!"
He held her, and she could feel the blood from his wound, people began to walk up to him with odd looking devices that they placed on his shoulder and the shoulder began to heal. "You see Caroline, I know all this because I found out that your husband kills me."
She pushed away from him "Impossible, you are impossible and insane and I will not suffer your nonsense anymore!"
His grip on her arm was as powerful as that of her husband's and when he spoke his voice changed from a soft sweet tone to a commanding one and he said "You never went into the scullery of your house did you, why is that? Why would a lady of a house never go into the scullery which is supposed to be her place and tell me for that matter did the maids and servants of your house ever go down there?"
"No" she answered, and looked to the computers that were glowing and shinning and gleaming with light that made her eyes hurt. Above each was a image of glowing and shinning light that was so strange and bizarre that in all her born days she would never come up with words for it.
"Then this is why, because two years before he married you Yon Burnfield meet a future me in an alleyway behind his clinic and shot me. He took my time machine and hide it in your basement, that is how he has been effecting history and changing the flow of time as well. He has been opening windows and sending those Serpents of his through to effect the destiny of the universe. Your husband has become a madman and I am here to stop him. You have a problem with that?" He looked at her with eyes that conveyed only truth and sorrow for the person he was talking with. He was the kind of man who made you want to listen and believe him, "Tell me you remember the stories your parents told you at bedtime about my visits to the future?"
"Yes, of course I do, about the Morlocks, and what they did to your friend," Caroline watched as the wound on his shoulder began to heal itself after the Mondanian person took off the machine, "You impossible man, why would they tell me those stories?"
He smiled at her "Because you told them to tell you those stories, so you would hold onto their memory and the memory of being told those stories, so you will trust me. There are two things we have to do, number one is go back in time and get your parents to meet, number two is stop your husband, the honorable Doctor Burnfield killing me in 1797 you were twenty years old do you remember that?" Caroline shook her head, "Good, now I am sure you want to know how I found out all this, my future self told me this, come and meet him."
Down one pathway that lead out of the control room of the station was for all intensive purpose a room that could be called a hospital. It was coated in green paint and when Caroline stepped in she could see only one occupant laying in the table. "These Mondanians seem to regard me rather highly," she said as she walked into the room.
"Of course they do, they know time and they know how important you are to the flow of ages, you see they know that time centers itself around you Caroline, because once your parents were taken out of time by the Serpents then the distortions that resulted tore their planet to bits. It was measured on those computers you saw in the main room we were just in, and the man who showed them how to measure it is right over there." He pointed to the man lying in the bed, a man who looked ancient and old laying cradled in a type of blanket that warmed his dying bones. She saw him laying in that deathbed that was made specially for him, "This is the man who saw the crime your husband committed."
He looked at himself, a vision of youth that had never faltered in his memory, "I know how strange all this must seem to you, but you must listen to what this man says. You see Caroline Burnfield I saw what your husband was doing with his, patients, and I was unfortunate enough to be caught by him, and show by him. I remember laying in the alleyway watching as his grubby little hands ran over my time machine and fearing what he might do to the history of humanity. As I lay there I was picked up by a Mondanian ship and brought here, it is estimated that after that trip he took the machine to your home, locked windows around it, and began to change history through those time windows. You see my dear, his clinic was a front, in the basement he was working on the fetuses of the aborted babies, and the babies that women gave birth to and he said died, and he was manipulating them. He was changing them, and once he got the time machine he used his knowledge of time travel to create time monsters. Those monsters were the serpents that were mutated from aborted fetuses and unwanted children, they were changed to desire the DNA of your ancestors and your family Caroline, I am so sorry." He took in deep breaths now, heaving and panting as he struggled to speak, Caroline walked over to hold him and he waved her off. "No my dear, let me die, if I die now and you stop your husband from discovering my time machine then it will effect the course of history and I will never have been here in the first place. I know how confusing this must all be for you, but you must know that if you keep your husband from discovering the time machine then you will stop him from destroying the time stream. If you and my past self keep your parents meeting and tell them what happened then you will always remember even though time and history are changing around you and trying to say you don't remember, do you see?"
Even though she did not understand, she did say yes, "I will do what I can, but if we stop him from meeting you in the past then there will be two sets of you and two time machines."
"All you have to do is talk to the past version of me that you meet in the alleyway and tell him I sent you, then you will make sure he doesn't encounter my past self and that will end result set time back right. You see the flow of time will reset itself when your husband is deprived of my time machine, and then all you have to do is go back in time to when your parents meet and make sure you tell your mother knows about all this because she is the one who used to talk with you, wasn't she?" He looked through his failing eyes and faint weaker than week smile saw her eyes glow, "That is why you never freaked out when you saw this outpost, because your mother told you stories of it and the time machine." He was right of course, and she knew it.
Walking out of the room the time traveler had a supreme air of confidence about him, he waved goodbye to the Mondanians working at the stations remembering the home they lost. "I don't understand one thing; if my husband never finds the time machine then he never changed history, future history and past history by keeping that technology out of his hands. I know my husband is working with aborted fetuses and unwanted children, the question I have is if he is making those time serpent things what is to stop him from making them without the time machine?"
The two were getting ready to activate the controls of the machine when he answered her, "Me, Caroline I stop your husband from meddling around with the human genome, with this." He reached into the back of the time machine and pulled out something that resembled a homemade bomb.
Flying through time never ceased to amaze her, it she was always shocked when she saw how many colors were in the time stream and she wondered where they all came from. The man she knew of as her husband was always something of a controlling force in her life, in every aspect of her life, and she knew what he was operating that illegal and unlawful place. She didn't care, because she was beyond caring about her life and how it turned out, as long as comfort followed her. Comfort was one thing, but knowing what her husband did to children, and better yet unwanted children racked her mind and conscience as the machine approached the designated time and place. "What do I tell your past self once I meet you in the alleyway?"
"Tell him Weena would want him to listen to you, that is all you have to say, tell him you know about her and who she was. Tell him the story so far, tell him everything that you have learned in this hour and he will have to leave the alleyway and the dying old version of me in the hospital will never have existed. It will also save time itself, since the biology and DNA of your family line has become linked to your family, and that your family members are the ones who he is attacking." The time traveler was someone to be reckoned with as he landed the time machine one block away, one block away from where the other time machine and the other man was landing just now. "Go Caroline, go to the clinic your husband runs and tell the other me what you need to say."
Doing what he said the woman stepped off the machine and took in the surroundings that for once were familiar to her, the cobblestone streets that were so native to London that you think they could have become part of the ground, and that instead of being manmade they may have grown up from beneath the dirt. Her feet echoed on the stones, she felt the small life stir inside her and she feared for its life as she knew all the atrocities that her husband had visited upon others. He may be willing to experiment with other peoples' children, but never his own, right, it was acceptable for him to do this thing to the children of lower class hookers, prostitutes and rouges but never to a lady like her, right? Could he really be trying to manipulate the DNA of her child into looking like one of those snake things she saw in the forest before? All these thoughts dominated her mind as she walked the two blocks and one of the venders selling newspapers waved hello to her. Now she could see it, the medical clinic that served as an abortion clinic, the thing that kept her in such comfort, and now she knew what her husband was really trying to do. He was a controlling man, he didn't just want to control the life of the woman who was his wife, but he wanted to control her entire family.
Alleyways always gave her the creeps, they were stinky and dark and anything dangerous could be resting in inside that dark crevasse. Then she could see the light coming from the time stream beginning to filter into the alley, followed by the dimly light shape of the time machine that had taken her on these wonderful adventures. It finally materialized and that wonderful demandable man who operated the controls and who had changed her life in the past hour stepped out of the machine. He had a look of sorrow about his face, a look of loss and longing that a man who had lost so much in his life has on his face all the time. He looked at her, and then she shouted "Herbert, you need to stop and wait for me to talk to you."
Running towards him she waved her hand and he responded "Yah no problem" he replied in a bit of a shock to her shouting. Who was this woman, why did she know his name, and further more did she see the time machine materialize? All these questions were answered with one word, no four.
"Go talk to Weena," then his eyes widened and his face changed to one of infinite sadness.
Inside the basement of the clinic Doctor Moreland Burnfield shook his head as he looked at his morbid collection of things, they were all different kinds of creatures that he had torn from the bodies of screaming women who did not deserve nor want them. I should be able to make use of them, I should be able to do something with them and use them to my advantage. How much money can be made in you he said as he looked at a jar that contained a dead fetus that had a head sleek and snakelike. Then he heard a explosion on the far side of the street and he decided to go and see what had happened. He was going to be a father soon himself, maybe this would be a nice story to tell his son someday.
As he rushed up the steps and the sound of chaos rushed into his ears he heard fire brigades being called to the seen and he could see the flames of the department store across the street in his shop window. He knew something bad had happened, he began to fear for Caroline. As he ran across the street he merged into the crowd and the people did not take notice of the man who had caused the explosion, the time traveler as he walked into the clinic with a large bat in his hand. He knew that he could not bring himself to destroy the thing that was the sole source of income for the Burnfield family and he knew that the people who owned the shop across the street would benefit from the money of another shop they owned. He grabbed a huge piece of wood as the building shattered into a billion pieces, and decided this was a better way to end the experiments that would cause so much grief and anger to so many people.
Smoke was wafting into the alleyway as Caroline Burnfield saw her forty year old husband rushing across the street to see the excitement. "Go to Weena and it will all be okay."
Obeying this strange girl the time traveler shook his head and remounted the machine, this would be a nice time to leave, everyone was distracted and he would meet her latter in his life. After all, what were introductions when you had a time machine? He vanished and Caroline Burnfield was left alone, always left alone, and her memories of her parents were still gone, but she knew things were about to change. Now she could hear the crashing of glass and the smashing of shelves from beneath the shop, and in the secrete chamber that only she and her husband knew about. She turned and walked towards the backdoor and remembered when she used to help, she remembered holding the hands of the women in childbirth and telling them their children were going to be sent to homes that could care for them and love them. What a lie that was she told them, and now as she stood at the stoop of the steps she could see the time traveler smashing the remaining jars of dead children, and breaking the shelves they were on. She decided to help by rushing over and tearing apart all the notes and books that had been kept over the years that helped deal with his biological experiments. "We probably don't have much time, my husband is a very determined man, he wont stay away from his clinic for long." She told him and then the two began to run.
Always running with the time traveler and never looking back, Caroline heard the door to the basement open slightly and heard him scream in anger at unknown persons. "How do you like my handy work over there?" Asked the time traveler as he and she ran past the windows of the clinic and towards the alleyway where the time machine was resting.
"Very good distraction" she told him with a smile, and was never more pleased to get to the time machine and see those colors of time swirl about her than at that time.
Once upon a time my children a man loved someone very much, once upon a time he was lost and he had found himself standing on the ledge of a massive bridge that overstretched the Themes River. One night that was cold, wet, and rainy he held his arms open and stood there awaiting for death to overtake him, "Don't give death the satisfaction" said a voice from behind.
The time machine was there, with the time traveler and a beautiful woman standing beside him, the most beautiful girl in the world was standing behind him. She placed her hand on his shoulder and smiled a soft smile "Come with me and my friend" we have something to show you.
"No, my life is over, the university denied my application to medical school, I will never be a Doctor, I will never have a family, and even if I do I will never be able to support that family, who are you to tell me not to give into death?" He walked over to the strange man standing beside the odd looking machine and the two embraced. This was the first time that I meet the time traveler, for my children I was that man standing beside the rooftop waiting to jump, and then he talked. When the time traveler talks to you it is everything that you can do not to listen to him.
"He is always just out of sight, death, always there with claws that cannot be seen but claws that can be felt when they wrap their icy grip around you, and you have fallen into his grip. You need not sub come to him my friend because he effects our lives in more ways than you can know, he has affected yours, but I have saved your life." He walked over to the odd machine and reached into the seat of the thing, from whence he took a leaflet of papers. "I took the liberty of applying to Cambridge University Medical Department for you, Franklin Morrison," then he let me see the acceptance letter in his hand. I shook my head in disbelief, I had now become overcome with feelings, regret for the act I was about to commit and the people I would have left behind, and the future I would have discarded for want of faith that I would win out in the end.
The woman walked over to me and said "My name is Caroline Burnfield, my maiden name was Caroline Morrison, your daughter." She sat down on the machine and told me all the stories that had happened to her, and how she remembered everything about being my daughter and family. I saw in the leaflet of papers a story that she had written, I have retold you the account of my own above, because she said I need to tell you children the story so she will remember in future days.
Eyes that were filled with wonder looked up at the face of father, three little darlings who were about to go to bed. "Papa you never told us when you meet mother, and you never told us how you meet momma." All excited and curious about their parents the three girls decided to let me tell them another time, and my wife Annette kissed them each on the forehead and bid them goodnight, she walked outside of the room into our nice hallway and into the nice house.
"Everything is the way it should be, those planets are all back to their proper space time co ordinance, or whatever the time traveler said, our daughter Caroline is a mother of her own living in the future, and we are together. A shame you didn't get to tell the story of how we meet, but their will be another time for that I am sure."
Of course the time traveler would say there will be time enough for everything.
The End