Disclaimer: The following is a work of fan fiction based on the television series, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. It is not intended to infringe on the copyrights of Landmark Entertainment Corporation or anyone else who may have legal rights to the characters and settings. I do not own the characters. However, I am putting them into an adventure since the show was cancelled and the writers/producers/directors/actors can't put them into any new adventures.

BIG thanks to Kazthom for alpha/betaing this story and all her help on this one. :)

~0~0~0~0~

Author's Notes: The following descriptions are from :

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded R&D center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA. The Laboratory's primary function is the construction and operation of robotic planetary spacecraft, though it also conducts Earth-orbit and astronomy missions. It is also responsible for operating NASA's Deep Space Network.

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security, located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The laboratory is one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world that conducts multidisciplinary research for fields such as national security, outer space, renewable energy, medicine, nanotechnology, and supercomputing. Los Alamos is one of two laboratories in the United States where classified work towards the design of nuclear weapons is undertaken.

~0~0~0~0~

Story note: This story begins 225 years after the Volcania explosion that killed Stuart Power and wounded Lyman Taggart to such an extent that Overmind had to turn him into the half-machine being we're all familiar with - except that temporal physicists living in the year 2357 don't happen to like that particular timeline...

~o~ This Domino Won't Fall ~o~

Tuesday

March 19th, 2357

Cyclotron Laboratory

Built in what was formerly the Sequoia National Park, California

Obscurity had its advantages.

No one paid attention to you. No one noticed you. You came to work every day, did your job without acclaim, spoke to people who were pleasant to you in passing but who wouldn't remember you fifteen minutes after you were fired. To some, it was a fruitless, unrewarding existence; but to others, it was a way to hide in plain sight.

Yet, the best part of being obscure was that you weren't remembered. For instance, you could walk into a high security area using your top security clearance without garnering any attention. The guards would still have to check their logs to see if you entered because they wouldn't remember seeing you walk in the door.

Being obscure was exactly the facade William Custer had worked for years to convey. Other than using a surname that also belonged to a famous military officer who lived five hundred years earlier, his only known effect on the surrounding population was the fact he was a temporal engineer with a remarkable attention to detailed paperwork.

Throughout his career, his superiors loved to foist their paperwork on him for that very reason, and that 'trust' in his love for detail was nothing more to him than another stepping stone to gaining his objective. Self-developed obscurity would only aid him so far. After that, he had to be more proactive.

The Cyclotron Laboratory was a mere 180 miles from the Temporal Research Laboratory residing in the rebuilt Jet Propulsion Labs in the San Gabriel Valley, and that meant 180 miles of geographic obscurity. William Custer had taken the paperwork his superiors so eagerly trusted him with to gain access to employment placement rosters and 'transferred' himself to the remote laboratory as the lead Cyclotron engineer helping maintain the Temporal Cyclotron, cataloging the readouts of the temporal experiments as the temporal physicists determined them to be a success or a failure. Above all, part of his job was scheduling the temporal experiments since the physicists had to use the Cyclotron to power their experiments. With that one small bit of authority, he was able to time his own personal temporal experiments without anyone knowing what he did or supervising his actions because he controlled the paperwork, the timing of them, and the amount of information that came out of them.

Custer. He had chosen that name specifically because it was historically familiar to the other temporal scientists and historians. It was a perfect choice. It would get him noticed at first, create a predisposed acceptance of him by virtue of a familiar name, but then he would fall back into his self-imposed obscurity. He had considered other military names that survived history - Wellington, Washington, Lee, Patton, Kirk, Pyle, but Custer had a more 'romantic' connotation given that the name was generally associated with a single moment in history rather than the rich tapestry the person wove for himself during the 19th century. In an odd way, it heralded back to a type of historical obscurity since the name 'Custer' was best known for a single battle, but few knew anything about the man himself. If anyone had ever asked him, William only said that his grandfather told him that he thought their family was descended from General George Armstrong Custer and his wife Libby, but no one really knew for sure. Luckily, no one cared enough to pursue the question. Like the man whose name he chose, he was only known for one thing - in his case, detailed paperwork - but other than that, no one knew anything about him. No one paid him any attention. No one paid any mind to his comings and goings at all hours at the Cyclotron Lab - and that was how he wanted it.

He had a plan, a single desire. He had the means, motive and opportunity to make certain he wasn't an obscure footnote in history, and once time was put on a timeline he wanted, he'd use his given name again.

William Custer, the obscure facade he carefully created, would cease to exist.

So on Tuesday, March 19th, in the year 2357, he put his plan in action.

He walked into the facility at 2:11 a.m., signed in at the entry desk, gave his ident chip to the armed guard who verified he had the clearance to go further and then walked directly toward the Cyclotron Lab. Big, thick double doors made of durable steel were the next obstacle to entering the lab. A retinal scan, a voice scan and a digital entry code were required to unlock them. Once inside, Custer walked down a long corridor where everything about him was scanned. Heart rate, pulse, DNA - everything that proved he was biologically who the records said he was. Finally, at 2:17 a.m. he entered the Cyclotron Lab itself. That night, he scheduled himself alone on the night shift. He ran through the hourly maintenance checklist and re-checked the information on each of the temporal monitors as per his own protocols, and then he sat down and began to initiate his plan.

Checking, re-checking - his plan had been long in the making and the tracking. The laws of time travel and temporal aspects of cause and effect were fairly finite to their still-young technology. There were too many theories and not enough laws governing the fledgling science. The primary understanding was that the universe had a timeline it preferred. If events were changed in any way, the universe would try to restabilize itself back to that timeline even if it took millions of years. However, if there were adjacent timelines that the universe would be comfortable with even if it were kicked off the original one, it would gladly take up the new timeline as its own.

Contradictory but simple, right?

The actual laboratory was the heart of the facility. Two enormous rooms separated by a shatterproof glass wall made up the actual Cyclotron Laboratory itself. On one side of the glass wall was the massive Cyclotron. Nearly two hundred feet high, it created a power unparalleled by anything else on the planet. It took a lot of energy to punch a hole in the space/time continuum and move something through time itself, and the Cyclotron provided that power. On the other side of the glass wall, the side that Custer was on, dozens of monitors were mounted on the walls and desks, each showing various timeline patterns, monitoring their progress, measuring their viability and longevity, but there were only a few that Custer was concerned with. The first was the current timeline they were on which had produced a self-obscured temporal engineer who temporarily called himself Custer, but it was the adjacent timelines that he was concentrating on. They showed civilizations rebuilding themselves from the ruins of a war-torn world, but his place in those timelines was incredibly different from the one he was on currently. In these others, his family had been the most prominent with various branches of the family being the predominant members for centuries following the Badderdays.

For years, he had studied temporal changes and the ripple effects of changing one single event in the past. He had run simulation after simulation to determine exactly what needed to be changed in the past to secure him a more lucrative future. He wanted the false obscurity gone and his family in the dominant position he believed it should hold. He didn't care that elevating his social status would relegate the world to a longer political and social ruin during the Badderdays. He wanted fame, fortune, power, and glory.

That meant eliminating the past competition and moving the world to an adjacent timeline.

For years, he studied, he researched, he ran a multitude of models until he found the exact point in history that began the ripple effect that turned his family into an unimportant group.

And all he had to do was change that one point in history.

He set the date on the temporal controls to June 14th, 2132. As he waited for the Cyclotron to spin up and find the correct date on the timeline, Custer pulled out his diary and read the entry from the first page. He'd written it years earlier when he had first graduated the Academy.

Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with many quotes that have survived until our time. One is a statement that history is a set of lies agreed upon. The other asks the question what is history but a fable agreed upon?

One a statement, the other a question. We have sought for years to answer the question. Is history merely the agreed upon fable or is it something more? Do we cling to lies to give reason and purpose to our existence? How do we separate the lies, the fables, the truth, and the facts? We look at history through modern eyes and with modern sensibilities, not with the understanding of those who lived in those times.

The entry was over fifteen years old, written when he was more idealistic and had a tendency to write with a questioning prose. Over the years, extensive research and the realization that history really was a collection of agreed upon lies and tall tales had changed him. It had taken years of exhaustive study for him to find out the truths hidden behind the facts, fables, and lies. He kept flipping through his diary. He could see his personal changes shown in his writing style as the entries progressed. Overall, Custer had become less imaginative with his prose and more specific with his writings. He had become a more serious scientist, a more determined participant in his own fate.

He started writing his latest entry.

Over two hundred years ago, my family held influential positions in both the government and the scientific community. University chairs, scholarships with our family name on them, libraries and high schools named for us. We were influential in the establishment of a peaceful order. Our research, resources, and family position helped move the world to that end. The stories handed down in my family bear witness to what was stolen from us. It was not a single moment in history that changed our lives. It was a ripple effect beginning at a particular point in time. Temporal theory has a single proven reality: change one aspect of history and all history changes. I alone now have the ability to correct the moment that began the chain reaction that removed us from our position. I will retrieve our legacy.

The Cyclotron Laboratory, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and the Los Alamos Laboratories exist in a pocket of temporal nullification. Changes may happen to the timeline, and we will not be affected. We alone will remember the changes and each timeline. This fortunate happenstance will allow me to perform the necessary changes in the timeline before the scientists at the other laboratories become aware of them and can attempt to stop them. Los Alamos and JPL have an experiment scheduled using the Cyclotron in approximately ten minutes. They wish to pinpoint an uneventful date in 2217 and move an object one day into its future, hopefully with no ill effects. As their temporal experiment occurs, I will simultaneously make my changes on the timeline. If all goes well, then Doctor Stuart Power will die in the explosion in Volcania instead of surviving as he did in the timeline we are currently on. Once this change happens, it will take approximately seven days for all changes to ripple through the timeline to the present time, but my calculations indicate that early changes will be noticeable perhaps within the first forty-eight hours. These particular changes should be unpredicted by the JPL and Los Alamos scientists. They won't be expecting these particular outcomes, and their confusion will add to the havoc and chaos I plan to create so they won't uncover the true changes in the timeline I intend to make.

I know there is a high risk of the other scientists trying to correct the situation and keep Stuart Power alive once they realize he's been killed, so I have created a trap for them. I have pre-programmed their temporal wave to seek out similar events to the chosen event in history when they attempt to correct Power's death. The result should mimic the Brophy Theorem. This should cause my colleagues ample confusion as they try to repair the anomaly and what would be considered a disastrous situation while I maintain the new timeline.

The monitors pinpointed the moment in time Custer was looking for. Then, he began to pinpoint another date - December 25th, 2147. When his colleagues tried to correct what he was going to change on June 14, 2132, their time wave would pinpoint both target dates. The resulting 'problems' would keep them busy enough to ignore his changes.

Seven days later, his world was going to change.

~0~0~0~0~

Thursday

March 21st, 2357

Jet Propulsion Laboratories in San Gabriel Valley, California

"No, no, no, no, no!"

Doctor Philadelphia Aderholdt moved from computer station to computer station, shoving computer techs out of the way, adjusting various controls, scanning a multitude of readouts, cursing whatever gods she must have angered to mess up her experiment like this for revenge. If it could go wrong, it was going wrong. She knew it was a bad day to try to give up caffeine.

"No, no, no, no, no!" she kept repeating. "What the hell is going on?"

Doctor Elias Pitcairn was mimicking her movements as he studied the data spewing out from multiple computers in rapid-fire succession. "Delphi, feedback's coming in. Looks like the temporal beam locked on to another explosion!" he informed her, his voice louder than the din and hubbub of the surrounding panicked conversations of the lab techs. "Scite it all! Two explosions with the same trackers in one drecking timeline? Where'd that second one come from?"

Delphi rushed to Elias' side, checking his data, re-reading the information. "How? We double-checked the temporal coordinates, we triple-checked every spatial consideration, we quadruple-checked –"

"We didn't check for explosions with the exact same trackers. Blast it! The Badderdays were nothing but continual war. Explosions were everywhere, all the time -" Elias quickly placed the new data into the temporal-spatial array. "Uh, oh …"

"Don't uh oh," Delphi suggested. "I hate it when you uh oh. Uh ohs are bad. Don't uh oh when we're looking at a disaster. What's the uh oh?"

"You remember that theory about how one person could undergo two similar tracker experiences within a single lifetime but the tracker experiences might not be seen as two separate events if viewed from some other point in time even though both could affect the space/time/historical continuum?"

Delphi shook her head. Sometimes, it wasn't fun to prove theories in the middle of a disaster. "The Brophy Theorem. Two separate events look the same when viewed from another point in time."

"I think we just proved it," Elias pulled up the new data. First, he handed Delphi a cup of coffee. Apparently, her friend didn't want her uncaffeinated during a disaster. "Look at this. Jonathan Power, the first tracker, was at the explosion at Volcania in 2132 when he was in his teens. Major Masterson, the second tracker, got him out of there –"

"And Doctor Stuart Power was killed. That's the event that we're trying to change since it didn't happen in the correct timeline. Stuart Power escaped," Delphi added. "We know every nanosecond of those events."

"Right. Well, you're gonna hate this – first, take a sip of coffee, it'll calm you - you remember reading about the explosion of the Power Base in Colorado in December of 2147?" he asked.

Who didn't know that story? It was one of the bravest, most poignant stories to come out of the Badderdays. "Corporal Jennifer Chase was there alone when a biodread and a platoon of biomechs infiltrated and attacked. It's believed she was fatally injured but blew up the base before the biodread could get any information from her or digitize her, thereby allowing the Resistance to continue and defeat the Dread forces. I did pass my history classes at the Academy. Why?"

"In the correct timeline, the other members of the Power Team – that includes Stuart Power - were stranded in the jump ship when it happened. It was grounded. Damaged from a fight. The communications systems were down so they weren't able to communicate with the base. They were working on the ship, trying to get the repairs done on it. They didn't know anything had happened at the base until the sky bike arrived with the computer's personality matrix and the spare power suits. They got the computer online in the jump ship, he told them about the biodread's invasion, and then they flew to the base to find it nothing but rubble. Everything destroyed, mountain caved in, biobums crushed, and minute traces of a single human's remains somewhere in the debris. Power wasn't going to let Chase rest at the bottom of an imploded mountain so they searched for any sign of her. A few remains were found a week later. Genetic tests proved that they belonged to Corporal Chase. They buried what they could. We know how the war went after that."

"Yeah? And now?"

"Now, in the altered timeline with Stuart Power dead, things didn't quite happen that way." He showed her some of the new results depicted on their monitors. "Obviously, in the new timeline, Stuart wasn't in the jump ship when the Power Base explosion happened, but the rest of the team was. The ship was flying, not stranded, and they were heading back to the base at top speed because they knew it was under attack. But here's the kicker - in the newly altered timeline, Jonathan Power, our first tracker, was speaking to Corporal Chase during a vid-talk with the rest of the team listening in when she blew up the base."

No! "Please, don't say it – don't say it –"

Elias could only shake his head sadly. "Got to say it. In the altered timeline, both Major Masterson, our second tracker, and Captain Power, our first tracker, were at the explosion of Volcania in 2132 and were connected to the Power Base explosion via the vid-talk when Corporal Chase destroyed it 2147."

No, no, no, no, no.

Delphi sat down in the nearest chair and took a big sip of coffee. "And with the timeline altered, that created a temporal and spatial anomaly that linked both points in time because they reflected similar patterns."

"Two explosions," Elias interrupted. "With the two key individuals we used to track and pinpoint the moment in 2132 connected to both events in the altered timeline. We didn't see it. It stealthed in under the sensors."

The Brophy Theorem. It was true. Why did it have to be true? Delphi began repeating everything out loud. "They witnessed both explosions which means that both points in time are connected by individual experience and result. We try to aim for one, and we hit both even though they're, what, fifteen years apart? All because both explosions happened in both time lines but our two trackers we used to pinpoint the temporal coordinates for the first explosion were there for the other in the altered timeline. Not in the original and we didn't see it on the adjacent lines." Maybe repeating herself was a coping mechanism due to a disaster unraveling before their eyes and the semi-lack of caffeine? It must have been since Elias pushed her coffee cup toward her again.

"And hit them we did," Elias showed her. "I've never seen readouts like this before. No one has. Time waves are jumping off the grids. Look –" he pointed to the monitors, each showing a distinctive moment in their rescue experiment. He tapped the screen of the first monitor. "We focused our time wave on Volcania in 2132. Doctor Stuart Power's location, to be specific." Then he tapped the second monitor. "We tracked the lifelines of both Major Masterson and Captain Power to help pinpoint and intersect the temporal coordinates and exact spatial location of Doctor Power." On the third monitor, "We aimed the temporal beam directly for the moment before the explosion reached Doctor Power so we could extract him and move him forward through time by just a day or two in order to save his life." Then, he turned the fourth monitor toward Aderholdt. "We didn't miss it, but what we did do went haywire - and we did something none of us anticipated."

"How bad?" Delphi asked, dreading the answer she was hoping she wouldn't hear.

Elias cleared his throat and then turned his seat to face her. "Theoretically, in situations like this, it's thought that we'd hit one or the other temporal coordinates. In our case, the temporal beam could have targeted Corporal Chase instead of Doctor Power."

"Could have?" Delphi heard the tonal change in Elias' sentence.

"It could have, but -"

"But?" Delphi asked.

"The beam splittered."

Delphi closed her eyes in utter annoyance. She took another large sip of coffee. "It splittered. It splittered?" Splittered - the word developed by former temporal physicists to combine split and splintered when describing what a problematic time wave looked like if viewed. It was a theoretical view no scientist ever wanted to witness due to the extent of the oncoming disaster should one splitter. "I didn't think it could do that. We've never seen it do that. No one has. Over one hundred experiments, it's never done that. Splittering is just theory."

Elias sat back and nodded. "Yeah. All new. Even Brophy's Theorem which isn't theory anymore doesn't hint at splittering."

Delphi considered the possibilities. "Splittering means that each fractal of the time wave is weaker than the whole. Theoretically, that means it caused the targets to deconvolute. Their atoms would have been scattered all over the time continuum. They'd be dead."

Elias shook his head. "That didn't happen. According to this information, the beam splittered into two wave fractals, each wave fractal went for a different target. We reached Stuart Power in Volcania in 2132, and we hit the moment before Corporal Jennifer Chase was killed in the Power Base explosion in 2147. Right now, it looks like we grabbed them and moved them, and there's absolutely no scientific reason how that could happen. Scite it all! We should have checked further down the trackers' futures for similar moments in the altered timeline before trying this experiment."

"We checked absolutely everything we could think of," Delphi said, somewhat consolingly. "We went down the checklist, ten years in both directions to determine the magnitude of changes in the timeline and extrapolated others. We even went beyond the checklist. We spent a full day double-checking every moment we could. This is something we didn't see."

"Should have gone twenty years," Elias muttered.

"The equipment doesn't let us extrapolate that far," she reminded him. "It can only handle ten years before or after an event when trying to follow temporal ripples in altered timelines." She paused for a moment before saying, "I really hope our secondary experiment we ran on Tuesday didn't have an effect on any of this."

"It didn't," Elias declared. "There's absolutely no connection. I'd stake all our reputations on it. All we know is that the secondary experiment probably worked."

"We do?" Delphi asked him.

"Well, yeah," Elias explained. "Sort of. I mean, if it didn't work, we'd know about it by now, wouldn't we?"

One of the temporal technicians handed Elias another readout. The look on his face startled Delphi. Elias didn't really get blindsided. He was one to 'roll with the punches' as the old saying went.

"Please tell me it doesn't get worse."

"It gets worse."

"I said please," Delphi groaned.

Elias pointed out another computer monitor. "I don't have confirmation yet, but it looks like the Power Base explosion may have translated through the wave fractals since we didn't account for it. It made each fractal as powerful as a single time beam in itself. The fractals would have had the ability to grab both the targets and move them intact to another time."

"Alive? Not deconvoluted?" Delphi grabbed the readouts and started perusing them herself.

"Maybe. Theoretically. But look at this." Elias pointed to one particular reading. "The extra power going through the fractals affected the relocation coordinates for both ends of the splittered beam. We don't know where Stuart Power was sent to. All we know is that he wasn't moved forward twenty-four to forty-eight hours to the pre-selected site we chose in 2132. He's lost in time at the moment. As for Chase, it looks like the beam may have returned her to one of our geo-temporal test locations months after the Power Base explosion. In 2148."

They lost Stuart Power? They got Chase? Oh, things just kept getting worse. "This data isn't solid. How do we know Chase was transported to a test site?"

Elias pointed to a set of temporal readings. There was an algorithm printed out that was only evident when looking back in time and geography at other temporal experiments. There was no longitude or latitude, just the numbers indicating that the mystery site had been touched by time waves before.

Delphi held her breath for a moment. "Which one? We've got hundreds. And is she dead or alive?" Dead. Jennifer Chase HAD to be dead… history couldn't be changed that much without catastrophic failures occurring…

"I don't know yet. All of the alterations in the new timeline haven't caught up with us. We won't know for a few days of the full extent of what's happened. All we can say is that the data we're getting right now shows that Chase was sent to a temporal test site in 2148. Look." He pointed out a particular readout. "We haven't been able to distinguish locations yet by the algorithms, but wherever she was sent has our wave signature on it. Ours. JPL's. That means that it's been used at some point as a target location for one of our temporal experiments, not Jillian's at Los Alamos. We can eliminate their test sites, but we can't get a lock on the actual geographic coordinates yet. There's just too much turbulence in the time field."

Delphi nodded her head, then noticed her coffee cup was empty. How did that happen? She didn't even remember drinking the entire cup. She needed to work off some worried energy and she was going to need a refill. She stood and began to walk out. "Whenever we move something through time in our experiments, it creates an atmospheric disturbance at the relocation site, right?"

"Yeah, according to the data, there could be some unusual cloud activity developing around the target hour. Maybe some temperature fluctuations at the moment when the time wave deposits its transportee to the target moment. Who knows what else. The time wave does some things we haven't figured out yet, and there aren't any surviving records from the Badderdays that tell us about the weather."

So few records of that time survived to reach the 2350's. Maybe… "About twenty years ago, a team of geologists began a study on the geology of the various continents during the Badderdays. They were trying to determine the changes the wars caused in the planet during that time. Start checking their records to determine any readable weather patterns from the Badderdays at any of our test sites. See if anything unusual happened at any point. Maybe we can track Chase that way. Try to find Stuart Power. Tell the Cyclotron Lab to power down and run a diagnostic on the equipment. Discontinue any and all temporal experiments until we get this problem fixed. And keep an eye on things. Let me know the moment we know anything. I'll be back in a few minutes."

"You've got it," Elias' voice carried behind her. "Make another pot of coffee! Today's going to be a long one."

This was bad. This was very bad. In the original time line, Doctor Stuart Power had not died. He had escaped from Volcania. Then, 'something' happened. The timeline was suddenly changed by forces unknown and so far, untrackable. Stuart Power was dead. Something/someone/somewhere had affected the timeline. Only people in areas like JPL and Los Alamos and the Cyclotron Laboratory itself who were temporally shielded from changing timelines would know of the changes. Every resource available at all three laboratories had been focused on repairing that problem the moment it was discovered. Now, to find out that the Brophy Theorem was real? That a similar moment in time could misdirect and splitter the temporal beam going back in time? Who would have thought that was actually possible?

Then, a stray thought passed through her mind – had they changed history by trying to change history? Did they help kill Stuart Power by trying to save him?

But did they change history itself? Was the behavior of the timelines only an effect of the Brophy Theorem? Was it only an effect of the splittering? Could it be both?

But weren't they responding to someone else's activities that changed the past in the first place?

Instead of a simple case of cause and effect, could they have initiated a complicated case of effect and cause?

These questions could make someone's mind run in circles trying to figure out the answers.

What was worse, until they had solid Intel, Stuart Power was still technically 'dead', and Jennifer Chase could technically be 'alive.' This was very bad, historically speaking. Stuart Power had led the Power Team, his calm rationality leading them from one tactical victory to the next. It was his incredible intellect that allowed the war to be won by the Resistance. He was revered as a hero of the Badderdays, one who almost single-handedly focused the full force of the Resistance firepower against Dread's armies and was the one who accepted the unconditional surrender of whatever surviving Dread forces still existed at the end. True, he did ask the Resistance Council for mercy for the youngest Dread Youth, claiming they had been brainwashed, but that was the extent of any recorded magnanimity toward the Dread forces. There had never been any indication they were spared by the victors.

Jonathan Power had been humanity's avenging angel. According to every historical record and folktale that survived, it was losing Jennifer Chase that turned Jonathan Power into a fierce, unforgiving fighter. It was what turned his ideals on their heads. It was what gave him the angry, vengeful edge to defeat Dread. It made him a deadly foe that hunted the enemy without mercy, destroyed every vestige of Dread and Overmind in existence, and put an end to the Badderdays. His father might have been the intelligence behind the Resistance, but Jonathan Power was the driving force guiding it. Psychologists had studied the results of that particular event on Power's psyche for over two hundred years, trying to understand the exact reasons why losing Chase turned a once-idealistic person who valued all human life into someone who could wipe out a Youth division without losing any sleep. The studies all had varied conclusions. The lack of knowing the exact state of their relationship had meant no concrete diagnoses could be made. There were theories of a great romance between them, stories of unrequited love, tales of a not-quite-performed wedding... now, if Chase just happened to be alive…

But, then again, if she had been fatally wounded – which she might have been...

Scholars, historians and novelists believed it possible since there had been no evidence to the contrary. A lone soldier, fatally wounded, taking down the enemy in a final desperate act was much more attention-getting and dramatic than other scenarios, so that one idea had survived over two centuries. The problem was that no one knew if it was true. There had been no contact between Chase and the team during those last critical moments in the original timeline. Everything about what happened in those last few moments was merely supposition on the parts of historians given what was known of Chase's personality and character and the computer's report of what happened before the personality matrix download. Now, even in an altered timeline, if she had been fatally wounded, then she would have bled to death within a small window of time from the extensive wounds she must have received from the biodread Blastarr, right? They may have just moved her through time from the base explosion to a test site where she would quickly die. Power would never know she was alive, and he would become the fearsome soldier who saved the world – according to history. They could still find and rescue Stuart Power and have him play his part in the Resistance. Everything could still work out.

Unless the 'gravely wounded soldier making a final stand' scenario wasn't true and Chase wasn't fatally injured in those last few moments. She could be very much alive and well and transported months forward through time. She would try to contact Power. Power wouldn't become the deadly fighter and the entire war against Dread could change. The Badderdays wouldn't be just the Dread Wars anymore. It could be the entire time from then until the 2350's. One single change in history could change all history.

She was reminded of her temporal physics professor at the Academy. He would address each class on the first day with the same speech. She had thought it ridiculous at the time, but after all those years, she'd found it extraordinarily prophetic. "Time is like a game of dominos. You stand dominos beside each other, one after another, but we're talking maybe trillions of dominos. Then, you tip the first one over and it falls against the next one and it falls against the next one. Eventually, one by one, they'll all fall down. That's the way dominos are supposed to work. When that happens, everyone's happy. Life's working like a well-oiled machine."

"Now, imagine a domino doesn't fall or it doesn't fall the way it's supposed to. You've got to figure out why. Then to fix the problem, you've got to find and move that one particular domino, but you can't always see which domino it is at first. You have to look long and hard. You think it sounds easy? It's sciting hard. Temporal physics isn't that simple. As physicists, you're going to be faced with the problem of watching each and every one of those trillions of dominos, knowing the entire lifestory of each domino and how it fits into the grand scheme of things, how it affects the dominos around it, how it will affect a domino ten feet away, knowing exactly where it has to go in the row, exactly when and how it has to fall. You'll have to know that by making one change on one domino, you will change the entire flow of the row as it falls. Everything changes. Speed, consistency, smoothness, correctness."

"Now imagine that for every timeline in existence, there are hundreds, thousands, millions of adjacent timelines. For every moment in history, there is a multitude of choices that can be made by every person alive. Each choice creates a new timeline. That means timelines increase in number exponentially. And if each choice is a domino, then that's a sciting lot of dominos to fall and keep up with, right?" He would pause for a moment and then ask, "Sure you still want to be a temporal physicist?"

As a student, she never forgot that analogy. As a physicist, she found it somewhat elementary but accurate.

However, their current situation wasn't just one known point in time out of place. It was two and they honestly didn't have all the information they needed regarding Chase. If they couldn't repair those moments that had been changed, then humans could lose that war if they lost the legendary fury of Jonathan Power, a man who turned his anger into an all-out campaign to destroy Dread because... why? He had lost someone close to him? He lost a close friend? Or maybe he lost his heart's reason to live? No one really knew.

Delphi stopped walking and was about to take another sip of her coffee when she remembered her cup was empty. She had to contact Professor Jillian Barrett at Los Alamos with the updated news. She wouldn't like the results either, especially with the news that the Brophy Theorem was now law and splittering was a reality. She'd have to contact the Cyclotron Laboratory as well to get the equipment diagnostic status from them. The scientists at the Cyclotron Laboratory were more like equipment technicians rather than scientists. They kept the temporal equipment working. They didn't exactly work with actual temporal experiments such as pinpointing dates and target events. Still, their information about the Cyclotron's performance in the experiment would be valuable. They had to find out how this scite-up happened.

Sometimes, being a temporal physicist was not fun.

And given the stress she was faced with that day, it was definitely not a good time to think about giving up caffeine. She'd think about that in a few days.

~0~0~0~0~

William Custer sat at his desk, ignoring the data in front of him. He was listening intently to the conversations around him. For two days, there was a near panic when the realization was made that Stuart Power had been killed and the world had changed. Then there was the nearly hopeful comments about the rescue mission to move Stuart Power forward in time to save him from the Volcania explosion, now everyone at the Cyclotron Lab was talking about how Stuart Power's rescue had failed and how the time wave did something unexpected. All resources and sensors were targeted on the Badderdays to try to track exactly what happened and where he went. What was surprising was that no one was discussing Chase's inclusion in the rescue or the fact that she was somewhere in 2148.

Everyone was so busy trying to figure out what to do, they weren't looking for the reasons why it happened. That meant William was still safe and he had time to make contingency plans if necessary.

In an almost agitated fit of near-accomplishment, he wrote a quick note into his journal.

It's been two days since I changed the original timeline. The attempt by Aderholdt and Barrett to 'correct' what I have done to the timeline has also failed. According to all reports, Stuart Power is missing from the timeline. I had wanted him dead. Only with him dead would my family regain its natural status. Missing, there is still a chance that he was successfully moved and could reunite with his son and the Resistance but only if he's within a certain time range. With the labs temporarily discontinuing any temporal experiments until this situation is 'corrected' to their satisfaction, I will be unable to locate Power or make any adjustments myself. I would have no method by which to hide my movements.

A new development has occurred that I had not intended. Although I foresaw the possibility of the time wave splittering into two fractals and hitting both pre-determined targets, I did not take into account that the fractal would be strong enough to move both Chase and Power through time. All research shows that the fractals are weaker than the time wave itself and would deconvolute the targets. I had considered the deconvolution of Stuart Power as a back-up plan should mine not attain its objective of destroying him. As it is, there is evidence that Chase was moved to the year 2148 but Power is still missing. I had considered Chase unimportant to my history, but that opinion may change given these new parameters. However, Stuart Power's death is essential to my family's elevation to its rightful place.

JPL and Los Alamos are considering various scenarios. Although it would be to my advantage if Power were ripped apart by the fractal and lost to the continuum, there are indicators that he was transported elsewhen like Chase was. If that's the case, then I will have to develop another plan to destroy him. Until more details come down the timeline, I will have to wait.

He put away his journal and went back to working on his superior's detailed paperwork, appearing as if he didn't have a care in the world, remaining obscure.