Out of Time by Ryan Matthew Harker (ebooks online reader txt) 📕

This is all happening though whether I want it to or not. I scroll through some more dates and find many more from the future. I believe it might be time for the hunted to become the hunter, but first I need more supplies.

I just hope my luck holds out.

ACT TWO

Hard to believe how beautiful the Earth looks from its moon. Lazily swirling white fingers caress her like the finest gem, one that sparkles with the deepest blues and greens tempered with some brown and grey. I have to stare to see the clouds move and for the first little while I wonder if they really are or if my eyes are playing tricks on me. This has to be one of the most awe inspiring moments of my life and I can feel wet on my cheeks as yet another hereto unattainable dream is realized.

Have I said this already? I LOVE TRU!

I touch my jacket and feel where she’s nestled deep within its breast pocket. This little device has brought me a lot of good fortune, a fair share of stress as well but so far it’s all been worth it. I’m wearing a new charcoal grey trench coat now (Brand spankin’ new!) and a matching fedora. Who would’ve thought the fedora would make a comeback in the future? But I make it look good if I do say so myself. I tear my gaze from the beauty of a far away Earth and take a moment to admire my reflection in the four inch thick glass that’s the only thing standing between me and the subzero vacuum of space.

I’m a far cry from the scared little pizza delivery boy who flew out an apartment window all those centuries ago. I had sat in the grass back in 1492 for quite a while learning all I could about TRU and all of her functions. She really is quite the device, capable of so much more than just traveling back and forth through time. Through careful planning (very careful, and extremely well thought out planning), wise and responsible use of the TRU device, and more than a little luck I’ve managed to pave many advantageous avenues for myself.

Most of these avenues form quite a large trust fund I can access in just about any time period from the Renaissance through the 23rd and a half century. No matter what time I’m in I’m comfortably well to do. Even though I’ve been hop scotching through time now for a little over three years, and own quite a few comfortable properties, I don’t dare stay at any of them. No, as a security precaution I usually stay in motels and hotels, never in one place longer than a day and never in one time for longer than a week. I’ve had to be smart to stay off the Gunman’s radar.

I haven’t always been smart enough.

There was this one time during the Crusades when I was desperately searching for a holy relic that, if I could get my hands on it, would be worth a fortune. I had crisscrossed the same few weeks more than I would now consider prudent when he confronted me again. I wasn’t as lucky as I had been during our encounter in the alley and barely ended up crawling away with a shattered knee and a bullet in my leg. Thankfully I had already visited the future and purchased some rather ingenious medical equipment which allowed me to remove the bullet and repair my knee over the course of a few days of paranoid convalescence at a motel.

One more lesson learned from the School of Hard Knocks.

But this is the future and I’m not a naïve novice of Rift Travel any longer. I know a lot more than I used to. For instance I know the Gunman’s name and I know why he’s after TRU. His name is Adoc Raheem, domestic terrorist, space gypsy, time machine owner; and it’s a fact that TRU is the first of her kind.

She’s what’s referred to as a self evolving AI device, or SEAID (pronounced ‘said’). What this means is she’s capable of learning and is entirely self taught. Besides being a time machine she’s also a dimensional navigator which is to say she’s capable of travelling not just back and forth on a linear timeline but capable of navigating multiple timelines as created through every choice I make.

Every moment in Time is a choice. Most choices are, what’s called in the 23rd century, nominal impact which means they’re subliminal and simple in nature such as whether I’m going to stand up or hold my breath. Then there are the mega impact choices, these choices are the ones that are life changing in a perceptible and personal way such as when I bought my first car (mine was a ’76 Nova by the way), or if I get married, am I going to join the army, or maybe enjoy a life of leisure and luxury.

The mega impact choices are the ones that define our lives. They also define Time but Time is defined by human experience so everyone exists along a single timeline. This timeline is more like a giant time tree created by everyone living out their lives; it grows up out of the fertile mulch of the past and sprouts ever forward into the future but, this tree has branches. (And let’s not even get into the fact that outside the experience of sentient life all moments in Time exist simultaneously, whoa!) Anyway, every mega impact choice anyone makes causes a branch to grow off of the, let’s call it the time trunk, and each one of these branches is an alternate universe where we live out the experiences and consequences of the choices we didn’t make (the other car, the other girl, navy, a halfway house, etc.) And, well, what TRU does is she plots out these divergent branches in Time and creates a Rift Gate which allows travel between these universes.

There is nothing like TRU in all of existence and believe me, I’ve done my homework. That is to say none like her in the time trunk anyway. I’ve learned all about TRU’s functions but have yet to explore any time branches. Being displaced in Time is one thing but being lost in the multiverse is a whole ‘nother ball game. But this unique capability is why Adoc wants her so bad. I guess he never watched Sliders on TV.

Unfortunately ol’ Adoc Raheem has some way to analyze temporal anomalies in the time trunk and with effort he can use the analysis of these anomalies to track me all along its length, from the distant past to the far future. Fortunately though, I’ve learned how to cover my tracks in a way that reduces my temporal footprint thereby making it nearly impossible for him to track me. Reduces but not erases and nearly impossible but not completely impossible, even with all of my precautions the tenacious scoundrel may catch up with me.

With effort I peal my eyeballs away from the spectacular vision of the slowly rotating planet below and heeding the insistent rumble in my stomach head towards the Moon View Café, supposedly the Moon’s most prestigious eatery. I honestly don’t know how five star any café could be but hey, at least I’ll be able to continue my Earthly observations. I assume so anyway, why else would it be called Moon ‘View’?

The Moon has been colonized since about 2065 or so. It was about then the population of Earth was reaching a boiling point. The world economy was in shambles, war was widespread, pollution and disease were rampant, and governments were scrambling to stay in control. I’m not sure exactly how they pulled it all together but from what I’ve gathered if it wasn’t for some pretty huge advances in propulsion technology we would have outgrown Earth’s ability to sustain us well before 2075. As it is with the advent of these new technologies we were able to extend our reach beyond our tired little planet into the furthest reaches of the solar system. Currently there are colonies on the moon, Venus, Mars, Io (one of Jupiter’s moons), and even one lone little base established on Pluto.

The Venus colony was the last one established and from what I’ve read it was also the hardest. Doesn’t surprise me seeing how the atmosphere is made up of 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen with an atmospheric pressure equivalent to 90 times that of Earth or about 1300 pounds per square inch. On top of all that Venus also averages a whopping temperature of around 900°F. I’m sure they had a pickle of a time developing a material that would withstand the environment.

Of course the Mars colony is the most successful and in all honesty without it the other colonies still wouldn’t be enough to offset the human presence on Earth. But Mars is incredibly prosperous and wildly popular. What started off as a single self contained building only capable of housing a couple hundred people has turned into a planet wide community of almost a billion. Established in 2082 Beta Home (as the colony was called) survived on a combination of oxygen scrubbers and a sophisticated greenhouse system. By 2112 a combination of oxygen generators implanted in the polar icecap and specially bioengineered super algae were well on the way to making the entire planet habitable.

Mars is a paradise. It runs a little cooler than Earth with what would be the tropical climates only getting hot enough to support a deciduous rainforest quite similar to that found in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Purportedly there are some scientists somewhere developing some kind of atmosphere enhancer that’s suppose to be able to magnify sunlight and increase the planet’s overall temperature. Who knows if this is true or not, it’s just one of those things I heard from the grapevine. I’ve been further into the future and didn’t see any evidence of this technology but that’s not to say it won’t exist sometime.

At this time, however, the Moon is thriving with the hustle and bustle of a couple hundred thousand people. This may seem only a drop in the sea of humanity, and with a total population of thirty-three billion it is, but the Moon colony is considered by some to be the most important of all the colonies; more important than Mars even. The Moon is seen as the first step in solving the population crunch. Colonization of the Moon is what gave mankind hope for the future (of all things) and proved that yes, man could make a home beyond the security and comfort of Earth.

Moonport is the lunar city and it extends across the entirety of the Moon's surface. From Earth at night it pulsates with billions of little lights, almost a little solar system of twinkling stars all unto itself. The architects of this wondrous modern marvel had to be especially particular in the design and construction of Moonport. With a justified fear of the Moon breaking apart and crashing into the Earth or just plain crashing into the Earth from gravitational deterioration, the city was built to exactly mimic the Moon’s natural balance points. Being such an integral part of life’s continued existence as we know it, these scientists and engineers had to be sure to do nothing to upset its orbit in any way.

If not for its moon Earth wouldn’t be the stable loving mother of mankind we all know and love. No, instead it would have an increasingly unstable rotation, hurricane force winds, and any life