“My involvement in the foundation is a closely guarded secret,” Roche went on before Professor could respond. “For my own safety. If they knew…” He shook his head and left the ominous statement hanging. “I wanted you here, Dr. Ihara, because despite the unpleasantness of our previous encounter, I knew that you were the one person I could trust.”
“You’re not making any sense, though I suppose that’s par for the course with you. Oh, by the way, I quit.”
“Dr. Ihara, please hear me out.” The fear she had noticed earlier in his eyes was back. “The noose is tightening. I may not…” He took a deep breath. “I may not survive this. I have to tell someone.”
Professor laid a hand on her arm. “Jade, let’s hear what he has to say. What could it hurt?”
A dozen rejoinders popped into her head but she knew Professor was right. The curiosity that had brought her to this meeting remained unsatisfied. “Fine.” She stabbed an emphatic finger at Roche. “But I don’t trust you.”
Roche gave her a relieved smile as if distrust was her most compelling personality trait. He sat up straighter. “Have you ever heard of Phantom Time?”
Jade almost groaned aloud. “Phantom time?”
“Actually,” Professor said, almost before Jade had finished. “I have.”
She threw him a sidelong glance. “Why am I not surprised?”
Long before finishing his first PhD, Professor had earned his nickname with his almost encyclopedic knowledge of trivia.
But still…phantom time?
“Is it as bad as it sounds?” she asked. “Because it sounds like the name of a really bad science fiction movie.”
“Even worse,” he replied. “The Phantom Time hypothesis is a conspiracy theory first advanced by Herbert Illig and Hans-Ulirch Niemitz, which — in very broad terms — posits that during the early Middle Ages, the Church added an extra three hundred years to the calendar.”
Jade’s forehead creased in a frown. “What do you mean by ‘added’?”
“Four centuries after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity,” Roche explained, “and about seven centuries after Christ was thought to have walked the earth, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II, along with Pope Sylvester II and the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, made a pact to change the calendar system in such a way that their respective reigns would coincide with the end of the millennium.”
“Like a kid tearing out pages in a calendar in the belief that he can make Christmas come sooner,” Professor said.
“The deception endures to this day,” Roche went on. “You see, it is not actually the 21st century AD, but rather the 18th.”
Jade gaped at him. “People actually believe that?”
“Not nearly enough people,” Roche said, gravely. “Most have been completely hoodwinked by the great hoax.”
“Phantom Time is the hoax,” Professor countered. “The entire hypothesis rests on an alleged error during the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar in the year 1582.”
“Oh,” Jade said. “Well, that clears everything up.”
“According to the Julian system,” Professor continued, “the solar year was 365.25 days long.”
“That’s why we have a leap year every four years.”
“Right, but the solar year is actually 365.2425 days long. I know it sounds like a meaningless difference, and practically speaking, it is. About ten minutes a year. But over the course of a few hundred years, it adds up.”
“The Julian Calendar was introduced in the year 46 BC,” Roche said. “The error was known even then, but it was thought too insignificant to correct. Ordinary people lived by the turning of the seasons, not some arbitrary system of time-keeping. The Church however was very concerned with dates since it was necessary for Easter to coincide with the vernal equinox, so Pope Gregory instituted the calendar system we use today, which corrects the problem by skipping a leap year at the turn of each century, except in years divisible by 400.”
“Which is why we had a leap year in 2000,” Professor supplied.
“Instead of twenty-five leap years per century, there would be ninety-seven leap years in every four hundred year period. However, to adjust for errors in the preceding years, it was necessary to delete the days that had been inadvertently added over the course of the centuries, so Thursday, October 4, 1582 was followed by Friday October 15, 1582.”
“That part really happened,” Professor said. “It’s well documented in history. Unlike the so-called Phantom Time conspiracy.”
“The Gregorian calendar adjustment accounted for ten extra days,” Roche said, ignoring the barb as he closed in on the crux of his argument. “Counting forward from 46 BC, there should have been 394 leap years, but under the Julian calendar, there were 407. But if it was really the year 1582, the correction should have been thirteen days. Gregory knew this, and he knew what his predecessors had done. That’s why he only moved the calendar forward ten days. He knew it was really the year 1183.”
Roche delivered this pronouncement with such gravity that Jade almost felt guilty for not caring.
“See what I mean,” Professor said. “It’s pretty thin soup.”
“Look, this is really interesting,” Jade said, openly disingenuous. “But it seems like something that should be pretty easy to prove or disprove.”
“There is surprisingly little physical evidence against the hypothesis,” Roche said. “The Church was the accepted time-keeping authority in its day. The historical record relies heavily upon medieval chronicles, which were fabricated for the sole purpose of reinforcing the deception. Many of them, such as the so-called contemporary accounts of Charlemagne, are little more than romantic fiction, but scholars do not question their veracity. To do so would undermine everything we think we know.”
Asserting that all evidence refuting a viewpoint was manufactured and proof of a conspiracy was a common defensive tactic among the true believers, but as Roche spoke, it finally occurred to Jade that the man actually believed what he was telling her.
“Hold on,” she said. “You’re saying that everything that happened between 600 and 900 was just made up?”
“That’s what he’s saying,” Professor said. “Charlemagne, the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire, Muhammed and the rise of Islam, the Tang Dynasty in China—”
“Fiction,” Roche insisted. “Every bit of it. Tug a loose string and the web of lies unravels.”
Jade raised a hand. “Just for argument’s sake, let’s say you’re right. What difference does it make?” And why on earth, she did not add, do you think I would care?
“Don’t you see?” Roche stared at her as frustrated that she could not see something so obvious. “If those three hundred years never happened, then the foundation of our entire world is built on a lie.”
“So? A lot of people believe things that have been scientifically disproven.”
“And many of them are willing to kill to protect those beliefs,” Roche insisted.
Jade realized he was not talking about wars fought over religion but rather a much more immediate threat. “You think people are after you because of this?”
“Phantom Time is a fringe theory,” Professor added, “but it’s hardly a secret. The ‘truth’ if you want to call it that, is already out there.”
“There’s more going on than anyone suspects,” Roche insisted. “Illig may have uncovered the truth about the conspiracy, but he was wrong about the motive behind the Phantom Time adjustment. It wasn’t just to fool the world into thinking the millennium was at hand. There was a much darker purpose at work. It was my intention to explain everything in my next book, but there are powerful forces working to keep the truth from being revealed. They murdered my publisher to prevent the book from being released.”