Deja Vu (2nd edition): Travel through time from future space to the ancient past..., page 1
Déjà vu
By Billy Roper
Copyright 2016
Dedicated to my Tina, again and always, over and over, forever; and to second chances.
Foreword:
Have you ever wished that you could just start over, and do things better, this time around? ‘Déjà vu’ is that feeling that something that is happening or is about to happen has already been experienced before. What if time travel, backwards only, was possible? What if changes engineered from the future left small moments of ghost memory where the past had been
overwritten, like recording over an old fashioned audiotape? We might call that ghost memory of overlap, ‘Déjà vu’. Chapter One
2 Kings 2:11, King James Version:
“And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.”
Timeline A: The lights blinked out beneath them, sometimes one by one in relays like reverse fireworks, but more often in sheets, as whole power grids collapsed.
“For behold, darkness shall cover the Earth, and thick darkness the peoples,” somebody said quietly from behind him on the observation deck. Probably Marisa, she was the only other person on the whole base who might have read the Bible as more than a spoof. A nervous giggle followed from the back.
The communications channel was still open with Mission Control, carrying the thumping and crashing noises of looting and vandalism, and nothing more. When the government Affirmative Action hires had taken over after the last supervisors had fled the city, (what, a week ago?) it had been much worse. Screams of rape and murder which they could only imagine, thankfully, as they listened. It was hard to think there could be anything still worth taking, by this point. Just wanton destruction for its own pure hedonistic sake, then. Surely they'd get bored with it soon and just leave. But the silence might be worse. Nobody else on Earth was still broadcasting, not to them, at least.
Australia had held out the longest, broadcasting in Mandarin, the native technikies managing to keep things limping along after the rest of the world went off the air or off its rocker. That had helped them understand how the crisis had played out, the latest crisis...the last crisis. Famines and food riots. Governments toppling. Racial unrest and ethnic cleansing. Even without the news, though, they could have guessed from the darkening lattice of lights
punctuated here and there by fiery
mushroom clouds that rose up like angry boils towards them. It had been coming for a long time. Paul turned around to face the group. They were supposed to be a team. Somebody would have to hold them
together. Since the Chief Operations Officer had walked out of an airlock without her suit yesterday, there was nobody clearly in charge. That wouldn't do. It was his job, by right. He was next in line. Eighteen faces looked at him expectantly, many streaked with tears.
“Alright, folks, show's over for now. We all have jobs to do. Let's go back to our stations, and we can talk about it tomorrow at the staff meeting. Oh-eight hundred.”
Grudgingly, taking another look at their old home, they slowly shuffled out. Some cast glances at him over their shoulders, and he nodded reassuringly. Paul watched the fires for another minute before going back to Ops, himself. He would not think about Terri and the kids. He would not. Staying busy, that was the key. Marisa watched him thoughtfully from the corridor, her own mind working on far different problems.
There wasn't enough to do to keep his mind numb, and too much that nothing could be done about. At the meeting, it became clear just how bad off they were. The reports were grim. They'd gone on half rations and tried to ramp up the hydroponics production lab immediately when a now presumably dead NASA white coat had admitted there was no budget for a resupply mission. No, certainly not a rescue mission, either. That had been half a year ago. They'd made do. Like they had any other choice, except the airlocks.
It didn’t help that most of them looked to him for solutions, now. He hadn’t asked for the job. Well, that wasn’t quite true, he actually HAD lobbied for it, just not under these conditions. What worked for his sanity might work to maintain theirs, too. Assign tasks right away. Research hypothetical food production alternatives. Research
hypothetical Earth return methods. Research estimated global population loss,
extrapolated outwards in six month steps. Work on tentative contact with the Soviets. Attempt communication with anybody still holding it together down there. Bring back reports tomorrow. That was all they could do for now. Already coalitions were forming. Paul could see the telltale danger signs. Engineering favored return. Habitat favored turning into farmers. Security opposed having anything to do with the Reds.
Rancor poisoned the recycled air as they argued about whether to stay put or try to repair the damaged shuttlecraft docked in their hangar. Dr. Leslie pointed out that even if they could produce enough food, oxygen, and water, their gene pool was too limited to produce a viable breeding population without the risk of eventual mutations from inbreeding. Of the eighteen surviving mission crew, only six of them were women of childbearing age. She suggested the prospect of in vitro fertilization and
hormone treatments, despite the limited gene pool. Nobody dissented, but it didn't feel like any kind of solution. The Soviet base, hundreds of kilometers away on the far side, was larger and presumably better equipped. However, even over sixty years after the Third World War, they were more likely to be enemies than genetic donors. And, they might not be in any better shape than the U.S. crew on Luna base. It was hard to say, because they weren't talking to them, and hadn't been. Col. Ritter, as the Pentagon liaison and Chief of Security, wanted to keep it that way, and wasn’t shy about saying so.
If he was going to find a way back to Terri again, Paul knew that he had to keep a level head in charge. That meant civilian control over the base. Him. Losing a half dozen American cities in nuclear flame a generation ago had created a shrill paranoia among most military lifers, and hurt their pride even more. Ritter would have them all staging raids against the Soviets if he had his way. That would mean never seeing his kids again. It couldn’t be allowed.
Marisa and two technikies; Harris, the astrophysicist, and Jones, the nuclear engineer in charge of the reactor, backed him up in issuing assignments to the crew. At least he had some support. Christine Leslie seemed to be leaning towards supporting the Habitat faction. It seemed likely to Paul that she was more interested in the opportunity for unfettered genetic experimentation than in surviving or getting home. The mad scientist in her was already showing. He’d have to leverage her personality against Ritter’s to build a majority coalition of his own, and balance the three groups. It hadn’t even taken a second for him to decide what he wanted to do. Paul wanted to go home.
Two hours later the video loop of his last message from home was interrupted by a soft chime at the doorway of his berth.
“Assistant Chief?” Marisa’s calm voice asked from the narrow corridor.
“Enter.” Paul responded, closing the screen he’d been staring at blankly since the meeting ended. The soft hiss of the door sliding open and closed behind her made him turn in his chair. This end of the room was too narrow for two people to stand up in at once without an uncomfortable violation of personal space, even by astronaut standards. “How can I help Psych today?”
His forced smile was a healthy sign to the base therapist, who took at it as his attempt to cope. He had been put in charge by accident or fate, and was doing his best. Good. Marisa took a deep breath, then began her prepared rundown of each crew member’s mental state, one by one. The fact that she’s missed the Chief Operations Officer’s suicidal tendencies made her more diligent than she had been…perhaps obsessively so, Paul thought, but who was he to psychoanalyze the only shrink in ten thousand miles? When she ran out of breath and diagnostics, he held up a slightly trembling hand to stop her from going on. She noticed the ring on the finger, and held her silence.
“So, you agree with me about Leslie and Ritter. Both have their own personal agendas. Or rather, their impersonal ones. Who else might be a threat to themselves or others on base?”
Marisa blinked in surprise. That hadn’t been exactly what she’d said, but it was what she was working her way around to. The new boss wanted to cut to the chase, then. Okay. She could do that for him.
“Chief”, she replied, purposefully dropping the technically correct ‘Assistant’ qualitative title prefix, “you can count on my support, and Jones and Harris. That throws in the other three science technikies with them. That makes a third of the crew. It’s a solid base to build on. We all want the same thing. But Ritter has his supporters, too. So does Leslie. I think we both could make the same list of who they are, and will be, without naming names yet.”
It was Paul’s turn to be surprised. Marisa Crosseli didn’t fit the stereotype for a head doctor, especially since the field of
psychotherapy had gone completely
pharmaceutical. Her shoulder length brown hair and luminous dark eyes showed her Italian ancestry, but otherwise her
complexion was ivory, to match her almost elfin size. Her personality was just the opposite, which was what made her an effective counselor. Even so,
such bluntness was unusual from her. Then again, he reflected, they were living in unusual times, to say the least. Her eyes searched his face, questioning.
“Aside from your normal rounds, since there are no daily psych stat reports to make Earthside, do you think you could work up some profiles of the swing votes, as well as how to best, uhm, encourage them to see reason?” he asked, leaning back in the chair to shift his view higher than her torso in the confined space. Even if it was a nice torso. His mind skipped sideways to Terri, and the weekend vacation they’d spent in the Biloxi safe zone.
Marisa didn’t miss a thing. She watched his eyes drag upwards, and felt herself flush. There was a reason why long term duty assignments on Luna were discouraged for married personnel. Several, in fact. “Yes, Chief Riley. I can do that.” She focused on their duty, as she had a hundred times before over the last year. She wasn’t some
schoolgirl, after all, she told herself.
“Before tomorrow morning’s meeting, maybe?” Paul pushed. “I want to be ready for whatever comes at us from the others.” He made eye contact, judging her loyalty and motivations.
“I’ll bring something over by the end of second shift, Sir,” Marisa promised. “Right after the evening…” Her voice broke and trailed off. She had been about to say, ‘”right after the evening news feed”, but there wouldn’t be any more of those now. Not for a long time, at least. She looked down, then back at him. The little Crosseli girl had been a war orphan, with no
surviving family, like most of the NASA recruits chosen for long term missions countering Soviet expansion. To be exact, they’d survived the war, but died of
aggressive cancers a decade later from exposure to fallout from New York. They’d considered themselves lucky to have a child, first. The waif wasn’t so sure. Only the civilian admin like him had anyone left down there, close. If he even still did. He felt like he did. There had been no moment of loss, of pain, as if from an unseen death in his family. Paul hoped that meant
something. As to Faith…Faith hadn’t been much of a strong point for him since the Armistice. Mandated public atheism legislated by the capitulating Congress had made that the case for most Americans his age. He was a decade older than the early middle aged woman standing before him looking so much like the teenager who’d run away from public foster care. He had kids about ready for college. Or, he had. If Terri had gotten the family out of the city in time…When he looked up from his
thoughts, he was alone again. The therapist had discretely closed the door behind herself on the way out.
He’d exfoliated and u .v. rinsed before changing into a fresh coverall by the time Marissa came back to go over the profiles, but had forgotten to eat, so she ducked out to fetch him a tray and bring it back while Paul read her reports. Col. Ritter had digiposted a rant about using a dissident German techniki on the Soviet base to open their airlock access for a ‘reconnaissance mission’ that had taken a half hour to respond to
diplomatically, and two of the Habitat department personnel had come by in person requesting permission to begin
reconstituting human and other sourced biodegradable nutrients for recycling into fertilizer to mix with lunar dust. After ten minutes of jive talk he’d relented and allowed the toilets to be mined. At least that would keep them busy, and was relatively harmless, compared to the proposed military adventurism.
Marissa went back over her notes while he chewed thoughtfully, nodding at what seemed like the appropriate pauses. He’d already made up his mind what to do, he just needed her to convince herself to be on board with it. Even better, that it was her idea. She was smart enough to play along and let him think that she thought it was. After a half hour, it was determined that the potential for trade and mutual cooperation with the Soviet base could be used to cement what they were already coming to call the Farmers on their side against the Hawks. Funny that they didn’t bother to think of a name for their own pro-evacuation coterie. Col. Ritter a level down was sure to have come up with plenty, though. Their potential allies and enemies were discussed, one by one, again. Weaknesses were probed. Strengths were assessed. Shifting back into professional mode, the therapist in her could tell that he needed to vent, so Marissa let him wander off track and talk about the flowers his wife had planted in the yard just before they had left, and how frustrating it was that their youngest son couldn’t seem to function without having his face plugged into an electronic device or two. Paul’s voice remained quiet as usual, but the tears streaming down his cheeks screamed out his pain and fear to the vacuum.
Very few orphans believed in hugs, in her experience, but she had found them to be very therapeutic, and pretended not to notice how he responded unconsciously to the contact. Marissa kept her arms tightly folded as she squelched down the sterile white tube to her own berth. It was going to be a long night. Just like so many before.
Paul lay as still as he could in the coffinlike confines of his bunk and tried to remember his children’s faces, and the smell of his wife’s hair. Once his mind drifted sideways into semi-consciousness, though, it got lost in the vision of the world going black and the screams of the unprepared. He awoke in a cold sweat, the eternally dim light making it impossible to know how long he’d slept. Checking the chron embedded above him, it seemed unlikely that only three hours had passed. His mind tried to hold on to what felt like weeks of memories as they slipped away, out of his grasp, forgotten to wherever they had come from. It was probably just as well. Usually they ended badly. At least he had time to get ready for the meeting.
Dr. Leslie’s cold gray eyes regarded him suspiciously from across the table. She sensed that his giving the fertilizer
experiment request a go-ahead was some kind of trap, but she didn’t know quite how to counter it without seeming undiplomatic. People skills weren’t on her resume. That made it hard enough for the medical officer to understand and gently guide the four colored Habitat workers, three contentious females and a leering male, who chose to make up her coalition mainly out of hatred for the White scientists and soldiers who represented the dwindling minority of their former masters. They followed her lead in stating their preference for staying put not out of deference to her, though being a woman made her less offensive to them than if she had been a White man. They just wanted to be rebellious against the authority, even though their presence there as
representatives of the hiring quota laws showed who was really in charge. At least, who had been in charge before the lights went off down there. If the government had collapsed, as it seemed to, then all bets were off.
The Comm officer’s report this morning was grim enough to make it seem like total anarchy had broken out Earthside. There were still hourly databurst streams to the Soviet base from Moscow, but even Ritter’s techniki couldn’t crack the Kremlin’s encryption codes. They could only guess at what was being said, back and forth. She hated being talked about behind her back, especially in Russian. A few relay satellites still were carrying orbital rebroadcast of planetary communications from the U.S., most of them Emergency Broadcast System instructions on a loop to remain indoors and calm, or contrarily, to proceed in an orderly manner to listed evacuation and refugee centers. At least there had been no new thermonuclear explosions on the surface overnight, though plenty of big conventional ones had registered on their sensors, especially in the Middle East and Central Europe, which seemed to be rebelling against Warsaw Pact forces. That was some good news, at least.
The one person itching for a fight at the table was Ritter, she could see it in his florid face. If he couldn’t fight the looters and food rioters back home, or the Soviet proxies in Austria and France, he wanted to fight the Reds where he was, by God. Along with his three person security staff of Marines, who also pulled double duty in Comms, which gave the Colonel an insider’s control of the information flow, the flight crew grudgingly supported him, too. The doctor calculated that Riley and Crosseli would have to break that alliance if they wanted to gain a quorum of support to evacuate. Not even their scientists could fly them home, even if they did get the shuttle repaired, without the pilots and engineer.
She was perfectly able to compromise. Ritter might not be willing to let anybody take the shuttle, unless she threw in with the Assistant Chief against the Colonel and made him so outnumbered that he had no other choice. If the rats who wanted to flee what they thought of as a sinking ship were allowed to do so, taking the only means of escape with them, then the rest would be forced to go along with her plans to begin genetic cross-cloning and in vitro
