TimeRipper Read online

  Youssef Haseem.

  Without him, it had been slow going. He had an almost unnatural ability to traverse problematic situations and come to logical conclusions that had been overlooked.

  Unperturbed, they persisted without him, eventually coming to fantastical conclusions on their own. The best conclusion was the invention of a containment field that could not only harness the power of the Higgs Storm, but could also preserve it.

  Primarily, they were looking to use it as an alternative fuel source, but after several costly failures, this idea was disregarded.

  Then, unexpectedly, something occurred, something wonderful. A by-product of the by-product was revealed. They knew that the Higgs Storm was a devastating force that destroyed everything in its path, eradicating all life except. However, the scientists were dumbfounded when they discovered that, post exposure to the Storm, a secondary, and prolonged, exposure to the cultivated storm matter allowed life to grow, and at an expediential rate.

  Theoretically, this would allow them to reboot the planet. To terraform Earth from scratch; to start again. Adam and Eve style.

  Life that would normally take generations to evolve was emerging again in a matter of hours. Within a day, the cellar area of the mansion they had been squatting in, performing their experiments, was a veritable jungle. All it was waiting for was animal life to be introduced.

  Carrie and her second in command, the brilliant Mary Kelly, released the funds they had embezzled from the EA and purchased Inverness Castle. They changed their organisation’s name to The Quest, emphasizing their quest towards a utopian society, under one rule… theirs.

  They then began to recruit.

  It was easier than they thought it would be. A few promises of a better life here, a glimpse of a utopian Earth there, and the public were all but ready to throw funds and resources at them. Their numbers swelled, they redesigned the castle as a technological fortress, and they devised their plans. It was Mary’s idea to explore beneath the castle, and they were glad they did. It was a labyrinth of caves down there. Some with vast openings, some with freshwater lakes. The only thing that was missing was a natural light source, but they didn’t need it. The Higgs Storm produced all the power they required to build their farm.

  They began to harvest and store every seed they could find from across the globe before they released the Storm within the confines of their newly built laboratory. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. They then exposed the area to the secondary storm particles, and life occurred. Before long, another world, a better world, was emerging. New, fresh, and healthy within their subterranean compound.

  When it was safe, they planted their seeds, and the produce grew.

  They were now self-contained.

  As it turned out, they were more than self-contained.

  Within a year, they had more produce and resource beneath the castle than they knew what to do with. All the cards were in place for their master plan. The only thing they required was enough Higgs Storm to complete their reboot.

  This had proven a slow process, involving sending thousands, possibly millions, of objects back in time and harvesting the Storm on every occasion. Their new containment process allowed them to store it cumulatively, and experiment after experiment was performed. Inadvertently, they discovered another piece of this never-ending jigsaw. The larger the object they sent back; the more Higgs Storm was produced. Not only that, but the further back they sent something increased the amount of Higgs Storm exponentially.

  After nearly twenty years of hard work and sacrifice, they were finally seeing the fruits of their labours.

  The Event.

  Now, post Event, everything was within their grasp. Everything they had ever desired. All they needed was but one year away.

  Mary Kelly entered the office. ‘Carrie are you ready?’ she asked.

  Carrie turned to witness her best friend’s entrance into the darkened room. Mary was stunning. She stood a little over five-foot and had raven hair that spilled just passed her shoulders. She also had a brilliant mind. She smiled at the newcomer. Before answering she spared a glance towards the monitor readouts on her desk. ‘I am! Are you prepared for your meeting with the EA?’

  ‘I am,’ Mary mimicked. ‘I’ve already been magnetically tagged, so straight after my meeting, I’ll rendezvous with you. The next time we see each other, we’ll be in another time.’ She held her arms out.

  The women embraced.

  ‘Are the others ready?’ Carrie asked, fighting back tears.

  ‘Yes. Everything’s set. They’re just awaiting instruction.’

  ‘You know what you’re going to say to the EA don’t you? One year is all they have. You can even let them know the overall plan, there’s nothing they can do to prevent it anyway.’

  ‘I will,’ Mary smiled.

  ‘Good. Then I’ll see you back there. Godspeed, Mary.’

  9.

  YOUSSEF’S ALARM WAS screaming in the darkness of the room. It was a loud, static noise, specifically designed to alert you as soon as it went off and not allow you to go back to sleep.

  ‘Can you turn that thing off?’ Helen complained from her side of the bed.

  He was awake now, fully alert, as his legs swung out of the bed. ‘You know I can’t. I’m in charge, remember,’ he mumbled as he reached an arm over to turn the screaming off. He stretched and yawned, wrapping a housecoat around him, and made his way out of the bedroom. He closed the door, wanting his wife to catch a few more hours of sleep and not be disturbed by his business, and sat on the chair before a large monitor that was flashing red. He paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts, before clicking the button. His own image flashed up on the screen, scaring him a little. He hadn’t noticed that he was looking so rough. There hadn’t been much time to groom himself over the last few days. Shaking his head, he clicked an icon, and a young man’s image appeared. ‘Thomas, you sent an alarm. What’s happening?’ he asked, stifling a yawn.

  The man’s face was pale. ‘Sir, The Quest have been in touch. They’re going to visit us at ten GMT. Today!’

  ‘What? Today? Shit!’ Youssef blushed slightly at his cuss. He disliked swearing, especially in front of his subordinates, but on reflection, he thought that this news warranted a good curse.

  ‘What was the message? Did it give any details?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Thomas replied. ‘All it said was Prepare to accept a visit from Mary Kelly, ten a.m. GMT, to Orbital Platform One. She will teleport on and teleport off when she is done. That’s the sum total of the message, sir.’

  ‘OK! Listen, Thomas, while I’m preparing for this meeting, I need you to get in touch with Kevin Farley. I know he isn’t in good shape at the moment, but I’m going to need him here for this. If Doctor Hausen gives you any grief, tell him to speak to me. Have you got that?’

  ‘Yes, sir, speak to you. Got it.’

  ‘If he keeps on shouting, tell him that he can come too if he wants. Thank you, Thomas.’ He clicked the monitor off and sighed. There would be no going back to sleep now.

  Helen walked into the room. ‘Youssef, it’s three in the morning. What’s so important?’ she asked.

  He closed his eyes and said a small prayer under his breath. ‘They’re dictating the terms of our meeting to us now,’ he replied, shaking his head and looking up at the ceiling. ‘I really don’t know how much more of this I can take. I don’t have time to go back to sleep now.’

  His wife allowed the blanket she was covering herself with to slip, surprising him with her nakedness. ‘In that case, let’s see if there’s anything I can do to take your mind off it for a while. You never know, it might make you sleepy too,’ she whispered.

  For the first time in, he didn’t know how long, his grin was one-hundred-percent genuine.

  10.

  THE WOMEN WERE gathered in one of the subterranean rooms beneath Inverness Castle. They were all dressed in shabby clothing, attire that wouldn’t have looked ou
t of place in the poorer, lower class Victorian areas.

  ‘Today is a historic day in many ways,’ Carrie addressed the nine women gathered before her. ‘Today, we embark on the final stage of our plans. Today go back in time. We will be gone for exactly twelve months. It will not be a comfortable year by any stretch of the imagination. We have chosen somewhere where ten women can easily slip into society, and slip out again, without causing many, if any, questions. For this reason, we have chosen to travel back four hundred years, to Victorian England. London to be exact. We will live the lives of poor women, doing manual labours to earn our crust.’

  Everyone in the room shuffled a little, none of them comfortable with this news.

  ‘For our ultimate goal to reach fruition, we computed that ten of us, going back four hundred years, will produce the right amount of Higgs Storm that will be required to follow through our plans. We will each be tracked by magnetic tagging. This tag will emit quantum signals, allowing our colleagues, in this time, to follow our movements. It will be this device that will enable them to recall us at the allotted time.’

  There was a look of relief on the women’s faces.

  ‘Ladies, I will see you in London, at the rendezvous.’

  A cheer rose from everyone present, including the support team who would be manning the Hadron Collider that was pivotal to their plan.

  Mary Kelly was present to see them off. With a smile on her face, she addressed the man working the collider. ‘Brian would it be OK if I activated the Collider?’ she asked.

  He nodded and stepped away from the control panel.

  Carrie saw what was happening and smiled.

  ‘OK,’ Mary shouted over the room. ‘Who’s first?’

  The six leaders of The Quest had been natural choices to go, the other four had been selected for security purposes. They were women trained as able bodyguards; they knew it was going to be tough in, the male dominated, Victorian London, but they were up for the fight.

  Martha Tabram stepped forward. She was a well-built woman with a stern nature. She had volunteered to go first to secure the rendezvous location. To make sure there were no witnesses to the event of their arrival, or at least no surviving witnesses. As she climbed onto the track of the Collider, Mary gave her a hug. ‘Good luck, Martha,’ she whispered before stepping back to the control panel. A glass shield lowered over the woman, and a mechanical syringe implanted a very small chip into her stomach. She flinched a little as it pierced her skin. Everyone present smiled at this, Martha was supposed to be the tough one.

  Mary smiled again as the syringe left the collider before activating the quantum transcoder. Once the transcoder was live, the chip would enter the carriers blood stream. She thought this was a genius invention, mostly because it was hers. It was designed to hide within the body, avoiding any form of detection, but it would also allow the controllers, in the present, to locate the carrier with ease.

  She pressed the engage button and pushed the lever to release the regular hydrogen, and the Higgs-Boson modified hydrogen. As she did, there was a roar that filled the room. The collider began to spin.

  All eyes were on Martha as her hair began to blow in the wind within the chamber.

  With the exception of the collider, the room was otherwise silent, as Martha became bathed in a purple glow. She opened her mouth, and a small, muffled scream, or prayer, was heard before she disappeared in a bright purple flash. The light then drew back into a single, brilliant pinprick of purple.

  The expected cloud appeared within the chamber. A flickering yellow film enveloped it, encasing the purple smoke within its bubble. The sound of a vacuum became prevalent as the magnetic field holding the storm was sucked into the specially designed storage containers.

  The calculations had been made, checked, and then checked again. Ten women, sent back four hundred years, for a one year duration, and then returned, would generate enough Higgs Storm to complete their plan. The rebooting of the remaining sixty percent of the Earth’s surface.

  No one moved, no one even dared to breathe. The wait for the confirmation felt like an eternity.

  ‘I have it,’ Mary shouted, suddenly. ‘I’ve got the signal, it’s her. She’s arrived safely in eighteen eighty-eight!’

  The room erupted into cheers and applause.

  ‘OK, who’s next?’ Mary shouted above the cacophony.

  PART 3

  1.

  London, 1888

  IT WAS THREE o’clock in the morning, and it was raining. Spitalfields, for once, was quiet, mostly because it was cold and wet. The few bodies lying in the grounds of Christ Church were huddled together. Poor souls trying to locate the illusive warmth and safety that maybe, just maybe get them through the night. Many of them, children included, were drunk. They were so drunk that nothing in this world could have woken them. It was a means to an end. The large corner windows of The Ten Bells pub were dark, but that didn’t mean nobody was inside. Even though it was a damp, cold, Wednesday morning, there would still be stragglers and revellers who refused to give up the ghost of the last weekend, or who were starting early for the next one; or even those who would just never stop the party. Either way, when the strange wind came and the eerie purple light illuminated the dirty street, there were few witnesses to the event.

  In fact, there were only three.

  Under a bench on the opposite side of the road to the pub lay the first witness. He might have been a young man, or a middle-aged man, he may even have been an old man. No one, not even those who might have taking the time to notice him, would have been able to tell. His filthy, multilayers of clothing, and the long scruffy hair hanging over his bearded face, gave him an ageless appearance. He could have been anything from seventeen to seventy. He had been hanging around this area for the last two weeks. During the day, the more respectable residents, of which there were few, had in passing been complaining about his smell and the rude behaviour towards anyone who accosted him. As this was Whitechapel, that didn’t cause much controversy, in fact, he was part of the majority in this multi-national, but impoverished, area of the city.

  Tonight, due to the inclement weather and the fact that three out of the five streetlamps were out of commission, he had chosen to lie in the shadows, hidden beneath the bench, out of the view of any passers-by.

  Just the way he wanted it.

  The second witness was a man who was pretending to be a drunken reveller from The Ten Bells pub. He was smartly dressed, not expensively, but smartly. He had the look of a man who worked with his hands. There was dirt on his face and in his moustache, and a smell of oil, sweat, and booze about him. He was drinking with a gang of local workers who had just been paid off on a job they had completed, and had decided that, rather than go home to their families, they should spend a little of their surprise bonus in The Bells. This man had been quietly switching most of his beverages, so he hadn’t been supping half of what his colleagues had.

  He was a reporter; he was hoping to get a scoop on the unethical practices of a local firm of engineers. The very engineers he was drinking with now. For the moment, he’d had enough of the smoky, sweaty, atmosphere inside the pub and had stepped outside to get some fresh air. In reality, he had wanted to make notes on some of his overheard conversations.

  The third and final witness was also in hiding; purposefully keeping out of the way of any prying eyes. He was a large man with a thick, black handlebar moustache. There was an eastern European look about him; his dark eyes were smouldering, and his pallid complexion was suited to the shadows. In one of his hands was a cutthroat razor, a sharp one. As a barber, it was a tool of his trade, and he had always prided himself on the quality of his blades. The knuckles of the hand that held it were swollen and bloody. He had recently been dealing his woman some home correction, perhaps with a little too much vigour. His entire body, from his feet to his teeth, was trembling, but his bright, piercing, eyes never once wavered from the doors of The Ten Bells pub.

&
nbsp; All three of these men witnessed something strange that night in eighteen-eighty-eight, something that only two of them would survive.

  ~~~~

  A strong wind whipped from out of nowhere. It blew the driving rain into the doorway of The Ten Bells pub, soaking Michael Stratton, the undercover reporter for The Star newspaper, to the skin in an instant. In the shock of his soaking, he dropped the notepad he had been writing on into a muddy puddle. He cursed as he bent to pick it up. As he shook the dirty water off his expensive paper, he noticed something rather odd in the centre of the deserted road. It was a light, an unnatural, purple glow beneath one of the streetlamps, one of the ones not working. The very air around him began to pulse, he could feel it in his chest, and his throat, as the purple phenomenon began to expand.

  The glow also bathed the man beneath the bench in its strange light, giving up his location to anyone with a mind to look. Although, given what was happening in the middle of the road, there wouldn’t have been anyone watching him anyway. He covered his eyes as the glare from the light concentrated. He then covered his ears as the pulse intensified.

  The third man dropped his razorblade, the swollen wounds of his hand forgotten, as he gawped at the growing light. He looked like he wanted to bolt, to run from the strangeness of what was happening, but for some reason, he didn’t. His body swayed, but his feet remained rooted to the spot. His jaw mimicked his eyes, as if in competition to see which could open wider.

  The light continued to grow, and the wind intensified as it whipped and whirled into a localised mini tornado, right there, in the centre of London.

  A purple flash, at least ten times brighter than any of the dull and dirty streetlamps, took all three men by surprise. It burned for a brief moment before it began to ebb, taking the wind and the rain with it. All three men removed their protective hands from their faces and stared in wonder as they witnessed the bizarre sight.