Ellen Blake Destined To Return

48 - Rules for the temporal visitor

'Brook! Brook!'

It took a few moments for the woman from the distant future to return to the present and let Aaron take back the garment.

'This is unbelievable,' she said. 'I thought I had pretty much understood the space time continuum and paradoxical concepts, but I can't explain this.'

'You did say something about time travel having greater forces at play. Surely this must be one of those?' said Ellen.

'All the same,' said Brook. 'This is going to frustrate me for ages.'

'This is all very nice,' said Ellen, 'but you were telling us about the origins of time travel and the project.'

'Yes. I was. The project was made up of a number of different teams or departments each represented by a colour. The people running the show, the governance people: the board, the project managers, the coordinators, they were known as skullSTAR:black. SkullSTAR:white was the department who created the vaccines and antidotes, the bio-chemists and pharmacists. Purple were the quantum technologists, from various disciplines of science. They were the ones who worked out how to travel through time. Yellow were the psychologists and strategists, who found the people to make up the teams, made the rules and laid the foundations, as well as monitored the human effects. Red were the cause and effect researchers, like me. We were there to ensure historical continuity; and finally blue were the visitors - the people who actually travelled through time. No ... wait ... I was wrong. There was one other department. Green. They were the Temporal Enforcers and that is where Victor Garrone and his colleagues work.

'Whilst the purple team, the scientists, were working out how to actually achieve time travel, the yellow psychologists were considering how to approach this. They concluded that they needed to perform a series of short and easy tests to ensure the safety and sanity of someone moving backwards and forwards along the timeline. As well as guaranteeing no impact ... or little impact ... to anyone else.'

Ellen was shocked by this news. All the time she'd been worried about having travelled back in time but her priority and major concern was knowing that she'd get back to 2014. Not once had she considered that she could be subjected to elements that could jeopardise her safety or sanity.

'Is time travelling dangerous?' she asked, cagily.

'Yes,' replied Brook. 'That is why they needed to plan the process out very carefully. They had no idea whether sending someone back in time would work, would kill that person, would rearrange their biological form or addle their brains. And that's before knowing if they could make it back to their own time again. To that end they set about several years' worth of experiments with short trips back to the recent past. Later the durations increased or the time period was greater, travelling further back in time. After each visit there would be months of analysis before the next. That is where my department got involved. Being all history junkies by profession, education or interest we lapped up the task of wading through reams of data looking for fractures in the space and time continuum.'

Marianne was confused and decided that unless she said something she'd be spending a very long train journey hearing a woman, whom she hadn't hit it off with, saying "blah, blah, blah".

'I'm sorry but you're going to think I'm really thick,' she admitted. 'Clearly I don't understand time travel or even how such a thing is possible, but I do see that in all of those colourful departments of yours there will be lots of scientists. So why would they also need people who enjoy history and remember stuff like the dates of battles?'

'Good point,' said Brook. 'You're correct. In order to make time travel possible it does need a great deal of talented scientists with massive brains. But you can't send people back in time without firstly knowing a little about the past and secondly knowing that you haven't messed with the timeline.'