The Scalian Legacy

Captain Malarde walked Jack to the door and handed him off to the two guards that were just outside. As soon as she heard the doors swoosh behind her, she could hear Dr. Simon, the older commander at the end of the table speak up rather loudly. “Well, that was exciting! I didn’t know that originals could change colors like that. He looked like a chameleon.”

This drew some controlled snickers from Commanders Liu and Johar, while Rivas showed no reaction and the admiral remained deep in thought, ignoring the comment.

Captain Malarde was proud of her eclectic senior team. They each contributed in a unique way and helped her form solid judgments. However, the admiral was not as endeared to the variety of personalities. He understood that a wide diversity of talents was critical to good decision making, but he did not feel personalities needed to vary in the same way.

As the captain approached the conference room table, she glared at Dr. Simon in a vain attempt to control her older chief of medicine and biological sciences, who had been forced into military action several years ago and was not about to change his ways. Then there was Johar, charged with the many nonengineering systems on the ship, and who grew up believing any war was a bad war, until the Scalians proved him wrong. Always next to him was Liu, in charge of the engineering departments and a former professor also forced into duty, but not conflicted about war like Johar. Lastly, the youngest member of her senior team: Rivas. Charged with security and other special missions, he had not been forced into service. Like Malarde and Alterman, the military was exactly where he had always wanted to be, albeit his fervor could sometimes use some restraint.

As soon as Malarde took her seat, the admiral began. “So much for my thoughts that this was simply going to be another uneventful monthly checkpoint meeting with Tarza.” The admiral sighed. “Although I’m stating the obvious, this is possibly a very serious situation and we need to figure out what’s going on quickly. First, Anterian, is it possible that he stowed away undetected on a Scalian scout ship?”

“Yes, it’s possible,” Rivas answered. “Highly unlikely, but possible.”

The admiral asked him to explain.

“Well, on smaller scout ships like the one that our stowaway arrived on, the Scalians have two distinct life-form monitoring systems. One for the interior of the ship and one for the exterior. The interior monitors are usually set to detect the appearance of any new lifeform that’s larger than a rat, so he would have been detected by them; however, he wasn’t really in the interior of the ship. The sensors point inward and would be located just inside the area from where he came out. Then, there are the exterior sensors. Those detect way too much life, especially if they were to visit a place like old Earth, so they would be set to alert only on the detection of a known species. Given that Scalians never met ‘originals,’ I suppose you could conjecture that Jack Felder would fall into the ‘unknown life-form’ category and go undetected. Lastly, the Scalians cleanse the exterior of their ships of any life, even microbial, as they come in from space, but he would not have been affected because he was in an airtight, protected area.”

“Why do you think that this is unlikely?” the admiral asked.

“You mean besides the fact that he claims to be almost three thousand years old?” Rivas added sarcastically.

The admiral remained serious and took a deep breath. “Yes, Anterian, besides that.”

“Well, what are the chances that he stumbles accidentally onto this gap in their security and the Scalians happen not to perform some kind of search of the ship manually after returning?”

“Right,” jumped in Commander Johar. “But the Scalians have often relied too much on their technology. We have exposed this in the past.”

“True,” Rivas conceded. “But I just think it’s more likely that he was purposefully placed here by the Scalians.”

“Oh, here it comes,” Simon said.

“Here what comes?” Rivas shot back.

“The conspiracy theory, of course.” Simon laughed to himself. “What else?”

“That’s enough Simon,” the admiral said.

“As I was saying.” Rivas picked up where he left off. “Scalians are as good with genomics as we are. It’s not like they couldn’t create such a thing. And this is just the sneaky kind of thing they would do. It’s a lot more likely than them developing time travel technology.”

“But to what end?” Commander Liu asked of Rivas.

“I’m not sure. Perhaps to lead us astray so that we make a mistake, or to gather some key intel.”

Liu continued to protest. “Their genomics prowess aside, how could they have created a duplicate of a person that is three thousand years old? We couldn’t even identify him without his help because we didn’t collect DNA from everyone back then and thus his DNA was not in our database. I’m not an expert at how ‘originals’ varied in appearance, but the likeness is undeniable.”

Rivas seemed at a loss. He noticed Simon smiling devilishly at him across the table, but then Johar chimed in. “Could they have hacked into our records system and added Jack Felder’s information? In other words, created a fictitious person in our records after they had already engineered him?”

Rivas answered Johar’s comment while looking at Simon: “Yes, that’s a lot more possible than time travel.” Simon smirked, unconvinced. “Although, we’ve never had evidence that they’ve been able to hack into our systems…” Rivas continued lowering his voice somewhat as he discredited his own stance. “There’s a way to prove Mr. Felder’s statements, of course.” Rivas added.

“Oh come on, Anterian!” Dr. Simon jumped in again. “You really want to stick electrodes into that poor kid’s brain?”

“I don’t think we need to do that, Anterian.” The admiral had heard enough of that train of thought and wanted to turn to a more dangerous possibility. “Let’s change focus for a bit. Liu, you are the one most up to speed with theoretical gravitonic physics, so is there any possibility that the Scalians traveled into our past?”

“Yes, it’s possible.” Liu began. “Also, highly unlikely, but given what we just witnessed, it seems more plausible than this person being a Scalian plant.”

“What?” Rivas couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Since when can anyone time travel?”

“True, no one has ever recorded a time travel event,” Liu said. “However, it has been postulated by many theoretical physicists for almost three thousand years, that the existence of a time dilation wormhole was possible. We have never found one, but the absence of evidence does not prove the absence of existence.”

“How would such a wormhole work?” Captain Malarde asked.

“There have been several theories over the years, but the latest from Dr. Drakenaur, about three hundred years ago is still considered the most complete. At a high level, it’s simple to understand. The wormhole has two sides and the time is different on either side. For the longest time, the theory was that the time difference would be fairly static as it was supposed to be related to the distance covered as you traversed the wormhole. Thus, the time difference would only change if the two sides got closer or farther apart. However, with the evolution of gravitonic theory by Dr. Drakenaur, this model changed.”

The others in the room turned deafly quiet as Commander Liu continued his explanation.

“Dr. Drakenaur’s theory postulated that the time dilation is not fixed, but instead drifts exponentially over time, such that the difference becomes larger, until it finally cannot sustain the gap and breaks apart. Think of it like two watches that are out of sync. In the beginning they are almost at the same time, but slowly one falls behind the other, except that in this case the variance is not linear, but exponential.”

“So, if it did exist, it would have to be within the Scalian Sphere, right?” Dr. Simon said.

“Exactly.”

“How could that be?” Captain Malarde jumped in. “Wouldn’t it disrupt their systems or orbit?”

“Drakenaur did theorize that such a wormhole would likely be rather small and its impact on surrounding space would be negligible.” Liu shrugged, understanding that this was possibly as crazy an idea as Rivas’s conspiracy theory.

“Let’s say they have access to such a wormhole,” the admiral said. “What happens if they go back to old Earth and do some damage?”

“Now that’s a very interesting question!” Liu perked up. “There are many theories about that as well. Sticking with Drakenaur, he used the old ‘grandfather paradox’ to explain that time is not linear, nor is the universe static. According to him, if you go across the wormhole into the past and kill your grandfather before your father was conceived, all you have done is changed the current time line. You would still exist. You would not disappear due to this supposed paradox. You can even return across the wormhole back to your time, it’s just that you would never have existed in that time line, and thus there would be no record of you. It is not inconsistent that you were able to kill your grandfather, because you simply existed in a time line that is no longer the current time line.”

“So, if they go back to old Earth, they can change everything,” the admiral concluded.

Liu nodded.

“Oh, this day just gets better by the moment!” Simon declared. He exhaled and leaned back in his chair. “It’s not enough for these damn Scalians to try to destroy us, now they want to wipe us out of existence?”

“This is insane,” Rivas said. “If the Scalians had access to something like this, why wouldn’t they have used it a long time ago? They never seemed to care about how they won, just that they won. Also, why hasn’t any of my intel ever picked up that they could do this?”

“There are many unknowns about the limitations around traveling through such a phenomenon,” Liu said. “Maybe they couldn’t until recently, or maybe the dilation was such that it wasn’t useful or possible until recently? There could be many valid reasons for them not being able to use it before now.”

The admiral then asked if there were any other theories as to how an original claiming to be three thousand years old and looking very much like the person he claimed to be could have come from a Scalian ship.

No one proposed any other theories.

“Sounds like we still have many answers to get.” the admiral said. He looked at the captain. “So, captain, how do you think we should proceed?”

The captain smiled. She knew her old mentor well enough to know that this entire inquiry was simply for their benefit. He probably knew as much about gravitonic theory and the Scalian life-form monitoring systems as anyone, but he needed everyone up to speed, including her. “I think we should follow some advice that I remember hearing a while back. And that is that when you have two or more possible dangers, you need to address all of them—but with the priority and effort equal to the danger that they pose.”

“Very good.” The admiral smiled at hearing his own words being spoken back to him. “So, what’s the plan?”

“Well, the greater danger for now appears to be the possibility that the Scalians have access to a time dilation wormhole, so we should focus efforts on how we can possibly confirm this and then formulate a plan to address this danger. I will work with Commander Rivas to see if we can find any intel on time travel or a planned attack on Earth.”

“Very good,” the admiral said. “I will speak with the Drumans and Pendorans about this and get their thoughts.”

“As for Mr. Felder possibly being a spy—” the captain started again “—this should be easily addressed by restricting his access.”

“No worries,” Simon said, with a smile. “I can keep him locked up with the nurses.”

“Sounds good,” the admiral said. “But I would like to get more information out of Mr. Felder in such a way as to not expose us, of course. Any suggestions?”