Author : Dennis Gray

“Where’s that gurney? Get it in here now!”

”Alright, hook her up, quickly! Forget the hand unit; let the gurney scanners do the work. Got the spinal lock in place? Good, seal it up and let’s move.”

The doctor kept shouting orders all the way to Medlab; with the Commander, Dr. Fatah and I following close behind. The Commander tried to follow the gurney into surgery but the sani-field snapped on as he reached the door, keeping out all except authorized medical personnel. As we watched through the observation window a crowd of technicians, soldiers and other personnel started to gather around us. The full force of the Commander’s tension lashed out as he span around.

“Don’t you people have jobs to do? I want answers and I want them now…”, his head snapped around to Dr. Fatah and I, a finger stabbed the air, ”…starting with you two. What the hell happened in there?”

Fatah’s reply echoed slightly in the now empty hallway, “You were there Commander. Right now, you know as much as we do.” A technician handed Fatah a terminal pad.

For years now we had been trying to create an artificial worm-hole. Dr. Fatah had demonstrated the theoretical possibility, but it took three governments to make the attempt a reality; and from the look of things we finally succeeded. Minutes ago the “switch” was thrown, the projectors powered up and an event horizon glimmered in the concrete pit we called ‘the bunker’. Military grade sensors probed their way down through the whirling darkness. Thousands of petabytes of data was collected then processed by the quantum computers into a video image on the monitors. That image was…

“Myra Benson – that’s who it is all right.” The doctor rejoined us a scant ten minutes later, “and she’s dead. Her whole body’s been affected by passing through that damn thing; massive cell damage, every organ shut right down.”

“But how can the body of a woman who died 172 years ago be here, now?”, the Commander asked no one in particular.

“Well,” Fatah scanned the telemetry on the pad, “it seems all that time-travel theory isn’t science-fiction after all. According on the data the worm-hole tunneled across time and space and did indeed open in the home of the United Nations president, 172 years ago. She apparently saw the anomaly, reached out to touch it; and, when her hand crossed the event-horizon she was pulled through and dumped out here.”

“So now what do we do?”

I thought the answer was obvious. “We send her back”, I said.

“Send her back? How?” The commander shook his head and added, “Doesn’t matter, even if we could, I am not sending back a dead UN President!”

“Look,” I explained, ”the techs are keeping the worm-whole open, locked on the same co-ordinates; we just put her in and let quantum physics do the rest. Besides, you have no choice! One hundred and seventy-two years ago Myra Benson’s aids walked into her office and found her dead body. No doors or windows compromised, no alarms triggered, nothing that gave any clue as to what happened.

“The whole planet went into mourning and as a result her campaign to dismantle the weaponized satellite network not only went ahead, it succeeded. The only unanswered question since then has been, ‘what happen?’ Who and/or what killed the most popular politician of all time?”

The Commander’s face went from worry to stark terror as he realized where I was going.

“Well, now we know; send her back.”