My sister had always been the real brains in the family. Younger by only eighteen months, she had become more successful than me the day she entered college. An aerospace engineer, she had been one of the driving brains behind the new ion propulsion engines NASA used to ferry equipment to the moon. The new US-EU Joint Operation Moon Base, which she had helped establish as the first woman to step foot on the moon, and one of the first to go back since the last Apollo mission, could now receive supplies from Earth in forty eight hours, as opposed to the seven days it took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins in 1969.
Like I said, she was the successful one. I remembered when she started getting her feet wet in the business, and tried to explain the concept of the new engines to me. By the time she used words like magnetoplasmadynamics, everything had gone way over my head, and she had to settle with describing it as, “Star Wars stuff.” That at least made some sense. The time travel stuff came up occasionally but usually she’d just roll her eyes and tell me to get my head out of the clouds.
I hadn’t seen her in person since my graduation day from BUD/S a little more than three years ago, my time in the service and her time in space keeping us apart.
Thinking about her sparked the first real revelation that I may never actually return home. Besides my SEALs, there were very few people left in my life I was close to, my father not even included. My sister was one of the few real friends I had, and the thought of never seeing her again finally hit me.
We really were stuck in ancient Rome.
I tried to push the frightening thought from my mind as we exited the building. The first thing I noticed was that our group was gone, and that our escort continued ushering us through the Forum, hopefully to meet up with them. It would probably be best to voice my concerns to Vincent before we regrouped.
“You did a good job with your Latin back there, sir. You really fell into it.”
“You’re not the only one schooled in the subject, Hunter. At the Vatican, I had many friends who were quite proficient in Latin, and we enjoyed conversing in it. We weren’t overly proficient at it, and we weren’t sure exactly how certain words sounded, but we did our best. Listening to it here has allowed me to fill in the gaps, making it easy to pick up.”
“Well, I’m pretty rusty, and I was barely following the conversation. I guess we’ll all have to figure it out pretty quickly. I feel bad for Helena, she’ll probably have the hardest time of us all with German being so different. Although, she’s probably had a Latin lesson or two considering her education.”
“Probably, but I have a feeling you have something else on your mind besides linguistics.”
The man was sharp, that’s for sure.
“Yes, sir, you’re right. I don’t think a weapons demonstration is a good idea. In fact, it could be devastating.”
“We need these people to trust us. We may need their help to get home.”
“I know,” I replied, hoping this conversation wasn’t automatically going to go unheard by him, “but I’m positive it may change too much. The Romans will get too many ideas. You know how clever they are. They’ll probably have primitive muskets in the next decade.”
“They’d need gun powder for that,” he pointed out.
“The Chinese have had it for centuries at this point. The Romans aren’t unaware of their existence. All they’d need to do is kill us and analyze our equipment, not to mention all of the supplies buried with McDougal. I have no idea what those people were doing in there, but if they were looking for a treasure, I’d say they found one.”
“So what are you saying?” He asked, giving the guards a paranoid glance, who for the time being seemed to be ignoring us. “We should get our people and run?”
“Doing that would be fruitless at this point. They don’t need us anymore. We’ve already shown them too much. That flashlight was just the tip of the iceberg. They know we have someone buried beneath the temple. All they need to do is go down there and discover our gear. These people are very smart. They’ll figure it out.”
“Then what should we do?”
“I have no fucking clue,” I said, my voice rising slightly. One of the Praetorians looked at me suspiciously, but I tried to ignore him. “I’m as in the dark here as you are. But I’ll tell you this, I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll even be able to get home.”
That caused Vincent to hesitate. “Care to explain that one?”
“Look, as I’ve said, I’m no expert, but what I do know is that through technological means, many scientists theorize that it’s impossible to go back in time. For many reasons. Ever heard of the Grandfather Paradox.”
“Passingly.”
“Well, say I was to go back in time and kill my grandfather before he spawned my father, therefore eliminating my chances in the gene pool.”
“Okay,” he said hesitantly.
“Well, the deal is, if I killed him, how is it that I existed in the first place to go back in time to kill him? I shouldn’t exist.”
“So, if you don’t exist, then you can’t go back in time to kill your grandfather?”
“Right. That’s why it’s a paradox. It simply can’t happen. It goes against the laws of time.”
“‘The laws of time’?”
“Yeah, well, that’s another problem. It’s called a paradox because it goes against the ‘laws of time’, but the word ‘law’ is hardly appropriate. No one’s ever been able to prove anything, so really the term is horribly misleading,” I said, chuckling at my own ridiculousness.
“But you just said this grandfather paradox doesn’t even exist, because we have no idea how these, so called, ‘laws of time’ work.”
“Well… kind of. It’s just one theory out of many. The point is, from what scientists think they know, these paradoxes do exist. Basically, physics and these so called “laws of time” equate to one universal fact: time travel is impossible, because anything done in the past, from an entity that does not belong in the past, has the potential to change the past, which is impossible.”
I took a deep breath, that mouthful of an explanation taking a lot out of me. If only we had a DeLorean and a suitcase full of plutonium, none of this would be an issue. I just wished I’d spent more time talking with my genius sister about this stuff. Maybe then we’d be a step closer to figuring this out.
“Then again,” I continued cautiously, “Einstein’s general theory of relativity does allow for time travel. His math states that it is possible, but again, no one really knows anything. There’s no proven math with all the variables in the universe involving time travel, and inevitably, that’s what you need to do it, and math was never my best subject. Nor am I an omniscient being with all the knowledge of the universe. Then there are those others who say that even if you could travel back in time, it would be impossible to change anything. Their theory revolves around the idea that fate’s grip on reality is too strong, and that one way or another, things will level out in the end, and nothing will change.”
“Destiny?”
“Call it what you like,” I said.
Whether it be fate, destiny, God’s will, or the “laws of time,” what’s done in the past is done, and cannot be changed. Yet, here we were, stuck in the past and in a timeline we didn’t belong in, probably already changing history as we live and breathe.
“So what about traveling forward in time?” Vincent asked, keeping me focused. “Getting home?”
“Going into the future is a completely different concept all together. Traveling forward in time is completely possible. The means are extremely plausible, only not that easy to replicate. The trick is speed.”
“Go on.”
“Well, the closer to the speed of light one travels, the slower time moves around that person, relative to those on planet Earth. In theory, if we took a ship and set a course to orbit our solar system, continuously picking up speed towards the speed of light, by the time a month was spent traveling in that orbit, hundreds of years would have passed on Earth. I don’t know the exact numbers, but that’s the gist of it. However, finding a way to travel that fast, let alone survive it, is way beyond modern technology.”