Tapping at her shiny new laptop on the kitchen table in Jackson, Tabitha couldn’t believe her luck, nor how her bank account bulged.
“Mom,” Roma said, “do we have to move? I just got used to Five Oaks Junior.”
“You hated it last week.” Tabitha took no nonsense from her twins, even if she felt guilty for the time she left them with Poppa while she abandoned them to fly away on assignments. “And Charlie is keen to move to Ridgeland. We can now afford a bigger house. You’ll have whatever clothes you want.”
“Can I have my new friends over?” Roma snuggled up, nuzzling like a puppy on Tabitha’s right arm.
Knowing this ploy but playing along with it, Tabitha said, “Run along now, hon, while I make us some more dough.”
She smiled again, couldn’t stop herself if she tried. After her piece on the spheres leaving to escape the incoming asteroid catastrophe syndicated globally, along came another Godsend. So the spheres have aligned themselves to intercept said asteroid. A shield. A wonderful alien saviour to Earth’s inhabitants. Maybe they’re gonna sacrifice themselves for our unworthy souls. She hardly had to put effort into the new copy for the NYT. They’d won her auction after she’d faxed around that she’d had new news from a NASA insider.
She stopped smiling for a moment as she looked again at the e-mail from the Johnson Space Center. Her usual contact didn’t write like this one. No siggie, a scrambled sender’s data. The IP address originated from the NASA network. Unsigned but she’d stretch validation for the sake of a great story.
Whatever. The spheres had gone from wreckers and deserters to white knights within thirty six hours. Way to go. Perfect.
* * *
Kallandra sucked air in between her teeth. “Hey, we have an image. Jeez….”
The asteroid heading for planet Earth was a perfect sphere, shiny metal, and a perfect match to the others.
“Yes,” Derek said, “they’re going to meet up.”
In some ways Kallandra wasn’t too surprised. “So, no obliteration of Rome. All that woe to Catholics and terrifying the population. Followed by the spheres being a shield. Good grief, the nerve of the woman. You don’t have Miss Wish’s phone number by any chance?”
“You wouldn’t let me find it a week ago, remember? Rob Summers has been communicating with her. And Claude probably has the number of every woman on Earth in his address book.”
Kallandra put an arm around his shoulders. “Envy doesn’t suit you, Derek.
Anyway, Disraeli has just released a statement about what the incoming sphere appears to be. See?” She pointed at a document window on her screen.
“Interesting. He likes to keep cards up both sleeves. He must have felt pressured to release a keep-calm notice. He says the incoming sphere seems to be meeting up with the others. Of course it could collide with them and they’d scatter like skittles.”
“Yeah, it’ll help Rome, but the rest of the world will still wonder what the hell is going on.”
Kallandra’s and Derek’s bleepers harmonised with others in the comms lab. A call to another meeting with the worriers at the top.
“You’d better reveal Blake’s trip back in time.”
“I’ve already sent a note to Disraeli about it.”
Kallandra pulled a long face. “I thought I was the first in the know. What did he say?”
“He thought it was nonsense. But I’ve been thinking since that if Blake did see the tiny sphere go up to where another larger sphere was rising, then perhaps we are seeing that same sphere up on that screen.”
“You are making a leap there. A present-day big sphere, releases a tiny one—”
“Perhaps a communication module with data.”
“Maybe. It needed to go back twenty millennia to link with a medium-sized sphere that is leaving the planet—”
“To go back to mother, perhaps a planet light years away or one of their space stations, or—”
“And then comes back twenty thousand years later. To do what? Bring news of home?”
“Possibly, and to coordinate whatever they need to do before all going back together.”
“Seems to fit—in a way—although rather convoluted.”
“All right, Kal, you tell me how you would communicate with your home planet thousands of light years away in only a few hours. If it works then why have another method? But was Blake an accidental passenger or a necessary carrier?”
“Not being funny about your family, Derek, but—”
“Say no more.”
“Are we going to this meeting? It’s only going to be a let’s-wait-and-see, isn’t it?”
“Unless some brass hat wants to lob a few nukes at the spheres again, now they’re out of the atmosphere. Coming?”
* * *
“I’m sorry but this meeting is cancelled,” said a worried-looking, grey-suited man Kallandra hadn’t seen before.
“A mixed blessing,” Claude muttered. He sat, as usual, on Kallandra’s left, with Derek on her right.
The man turned to go.
“Hang on,” Kallandra shouted.
“Here we go,” said Claude to Derek, who raised his eyebrows in return.
The suit turned to face her, along with the other dozen in the hastily convened and now abandoned meeting.
“Where is Colonel Disraeli?” She glanced around the room. “And any of the military personnel? Are they in another meeting?”
The poor man trembled, and his handheld papers shook with him. “I am not at liberty to say, Major.”
Claude called out. “What are you at liberty to say, Mister…?”
“Only that this meeting is cancelled, Mister Lapointe.”
“Can you, at least, tell us if we will be informed when this meeting is reconvened?” Derek said. “There are developments in space, and—”
At last the suit asserted himself, standing straighter. “You have access to the NORAD, JPL and NASA data as much as anyone here, Mister Stone. As for if you will be informed, that is not my remit.”
“Aide moi,” Claude muttered, “he’s remarkably well-informed as to our identities considering we’ve not seen him before.”
“Let’s go,” Kallandra said. “Getting information out of Mister Happy is like milking a chair.”
“I’m afraid it’s obvious what’s going on,” Derek said.
“Sure it is,” Kallandra said, walking briskly down the corridor to the comms lab.
“Those brass-studded bastards want to shoot the spheres out of orbit.”
“Stop!” Derek yelled.
To her surprise, Kallandra did stop, mainly because it was so out of character for Derek to issue commands. He pulled the other two into an empty side room, and closed the door. He leaned on a conference table rather than take a chair.
“We’d be making a mistake to rush in guns blazing.”
“Do you have a better plan?” Kallandra said. She grabbed a chair and sat, her chin supported by her hands as she elbowed the table. She glanced at Claude who seemed bemused at the unusual situation.
“The military are used to this kind of situation,” Derek said. “We mustn’t treat them as clichéd military types. Remember, they not only play wargames in peacetime, they use game theory in wartime.”
“So you’re saying we use game theory against them?” she said. “But I only know paperback outlines.”
“Maybe,” Claude said, fingering his moustache. “On the other hand, I bet we know a man who knows a lot about game theory, don’t we, Derek?”
With a raised eyebrow, Kallandra looked at her fiancée, who’d cast his eyes downwards while shuffling his feet. “I know a bit.”
This was crazy, she told herself. Her heart bounded against her ribcage, more than when she performed dangerous flying manoeuvres. How could a trivial matter like not knowing an aspect of your fiancée’s life and personality be so upsetting? A nervous smile betrayed her feelings.
“But, Derek, I’ve not seen you playing wargames, neither on your computer nor in clubs where—”
“Not wargames, as such. There are many ways in which game theory can be employed.”
Claude touched Kallandra’s arm. “You didn’t expect him to be moving Napoleon’s forces around at virtual Waterloo, did you?”
“Maybe I did, but then I suppose I haven’t been in his company lately.”
“Does anyone want to know how I use game theory in my recreation?” Derek said, looking hurt, presumably because the other two had been nattering during his exposition.
“Go for it, Derek,” Kallandra said.
“In London there’s a club I’ve been going to since uni days. Every third Thursday in the month we set up an ancient battle scenario—one that really happened. We then apply various game theory strategies to see if they would have changed the outcome.”
“I thought you were going to some secret Gentleman’s Club, to put it politely. But what’s the point?”
“Pure intellectual satisfaction, although it might come in handy now. No, not that Julius Caesar had to confront alien spheres, but he had to persuade his officers to undertake apparent daft actions, which often won the day. We also apply Games Theory to economic models and business strategies. Then we—”
“Our immediate battle,” Kallandra said, “is with the military all set to fling our most powerful nukes at the spheres.” She looked from Derek to Claude and back, wondering if they felt the spheres should be taken out. Was the nod from Claude a perfunctory solace? Had she become too involved with the spheres? Perhaps that first contact in Glastonbury and the falling into the one at El Capitan…. No, that was a dream— probably.
She worried that her emotional ties with the spheres clouded her judgement, but her pilot training drove a sure wedge between passion and harsh reality. It made no sense to destroy objects that were leaving. Worse, their departure appeared to be causing chaos on Earth. She had to entertain the idea played around in the physics web-chat-groups that the spheres somehow absorbed time decoherences and that the linear smoothness they’d experienced with time before this year was not going to be the norm in the future.
Again she scrutinised Claude’s face. She searched for telltale half-winks, quivered eyebrows, the nearly imperceptible grin. Anything that might give away a clue that he felt as she did, or not.
Derek’s face looked like a weasel’s. A physiognomy narrowed, it seemed, into a nose-led cone of concentration as he tapped on his iPaq before announcing the results of his game theory analysis. She worried that he might conclude with solutions she wouldn’t like. Maybe he’d find that the military would have an edge by displaying huge force. Even if they didn’t destroy the spheres, they might reveal humans as a significant entity.
Derek disrupted her ruminations. “Let’s consider one event at a time. First being, stopping the military from nuking the spheres. Second, if we get there, is to persuade the spheres to communicate with us or in some other way give us our normal time back. Is that right?”
Kallandra nodded, though her gut reaction worked against the spheres talking to them. If they’d had the urge to natter, then why hadn’t they up till now?
Derek continued. “Game theory places scores on the consequences of various actions of, say, the military and us—or the military and the spheres. The simplest situation is called a Zero-Sum game in which no player gains except at the expense of the other player.”
“This isn’t a game with players, Derek.”
“I know that, Kallandra but, for the sake of the theory, lets proceed as if it is. For years theorists couldn’t apply game theory beyond simple situations but then the Nash Equilibrium was dreamed up where sets of optimal strategies are considered in non-cooperative games such as in our situation. We apply scores in a matrix and let the computation choose the best strategy.”
“But—”
“I know what you’re going to say. OK, so the colonels and us are not machines.
But drama theory has been added to game theory recently to take opinions, emotions and the theatre of both sides into account.”
Claude brightened as if a light had been switched on in his brain. “You mean the cold matrices of game theory have a touchy-feely component now?”
“Exactly. Anyway, let’s consider what is in it for the military to go for a pre-emptive strike against the spheres.”
“If the nukes work, then, voila, the spheres don’t exist any more,” Claude said.
“No problem for the military, and we all go home.”
“Except that time—”
Derek interrupted her, holding a hand up. “Let’s be systematic here and only consider positive aspects first.”
“Oops, sorry,” she said, looking up at the ceiling as if help was up there. “How about it demonstrates we are dangerous and so, if they survive the blast, they know to go away and not return.”
“A moment,” Claude said. “The Pacific sphere already took a nuke and ignored it. Ah, but it was low yield. Presumably, the colonels have duct-taped several together.”
“Don’t miss the main point,” Derek said. “It’s possible the spheres haven’t noticed us at all, let alone as an intelligent species.”
“I’ve been thinking that,” Kallandra said. “In spite of our prodding and throwing our sharpest toys at them, it could be their auto-defence systems have reacted, rather than any higher order intelligence. Interacting with us isn’t programmed into their systems so they take no notice of us.”
“But they must have some threshold programmed in,” Derek said, “to prevent them being destroyed. Ah, they do…the timequakes that apparently allow them to cut through solid granite and survive tectonic upheavals.”
“They must have a very rapid reaction to an event in order to skip out of ambient time,” Kallandra said. “So maybe, no matter what the military does, they’ll not be aware it was humans.”
Claude nodded. “But we suspect some spheres haven’t made it to the surface, and the Caribbean one was delayed, it seems. Perhaps they aren’t infallible although surviving two billion years is impressive.”
Derek looked up from his iPaq on which he was entering data. “My guess is that, if they were placed here by an intelligence, there would be contingencies to both protect their long term investment—the spheres—and to react if another intelligence—us— threatens their existence.”
“Maybe we wouldn’t be considered intelligent compared to them,” Kallandra said.
“And nothing we do can really threaten them.”
“I agree with the first part,” Claude said, “but it would be risky to assume the second. What do you think, Derek?”
“From a game point of view, the second carries a retaliation threat. Worse for us, they might be able to sense a nuke heading for them, nip back in time a second or so and disrupt time on Earth in some disastrous fashion.”
“Like one half of the planet stop in time while the other half goes forward,”
Kallandra said. “Or shift the space-time of the nukes so they detonate on Earth instead of in space.”
“Interesting, but we’ve wandered away from my request for positive angles for the military to fire first.”
Claude grinned and held up a finger as if it were an antenna gathering inspiration. “Does game theory allow morale as a parameter? A strike by Earth at the nasty aliens who messed up our time, could help people feel better.”
“Only if it worked,” snapped Kallandra, who didn’t feel the spheres were enemies as much as unaware artefacts, and so technically innocent. “If the attack failed or backfired; such as contaminating parts of Earth with radiation fallout—”
“Yes, but game theory handles consequences in a separated, but linked, cell in the matrix.” Derek tapped his stylus again on his iPaq. “Now, why would it be better for the military to take no action?”
“Because there’s no way of knowing the outcome of blasting the spheres,”
Kallandra said.
“Any positive reasons?” Derek sounded tired.
Claude said, “It would leave open the option of a surprise aggressive action later.”
“And it wouldn’t aggravate the spheres.”
“If that’s the best you can do, it looks like the military first strike option is optimal.”
Derek’s eyebrows twitched, in a show of looking pained yet confident of his conclusion.
“You see, if we apply Zermelo’s Algorithm: where we use a backward induction from the result you want, that is, no action, then the spheres might continue to leave and the Earth continues to have time decoherences until normal life becomes impossible.”
“I smell a rat with conspiracy disease,” Kallandra said. “You must have assigned a higher negative score to the time problem than I would have, and you believe the colonels when they say destroying the spheres ends our problems.”
“To be frank, I think it would too,” Claude said.
Kallandra’s mouth opened in silent disbelief. She’d suspected Derek would be a sycophant and side with the military. He’d always choose the path of least revolt although he could often be persuaded by logic to travel in her maverick directions. But she’d formed the impression Claude was a natural freethinker. Had she missed the point here? He seemed to be avoiding her glare, but he pre-empted her scold.
“I don’t think, Kal, you’ve taken into account the possibility that, yes, the spheres might have been absorbing our planet’s time decoherences and so we’ve assumed time naturally travels smoothly. But we’ve absolutely no idea how they’ve done that, nor what they intend to do. There’s a chance, n’est pas, that if they were destroyed, the aspect of their existence that absorbed time decoherences will fall back to Earth and—”
“Our time continues uninterrupted as before? Are you crazy?” She felt her cheeks reaching meltdown. “Won’t whoever owns the spheres come whizzing back and investigate? Do you think the potshot technology we have will defend us against a system that had technology far beyond our comprehension two billion years ago? Ye gods.”
Claude shrugged and fingered his moustache before he said, “OK. So many unknowns.”
“I agree,” Derek said, “which is why a methodical decision making process, such as game theory can help.”
“For all we know, the spheres have done our planet a good service. Time displacements might be the norm, resulting in chaos and possibly no evolutionary or life development as it timequaked back and forward.”
“Or,” Claude said, “evolution would have occurred quite differently to our experience. And two billion years ago, maybe some of the ingredients of proto-life, such as eukaryotic cells, were planted here by the spheres, or whoever built them.”
“So why blow up our parents,” Kallandra said, and then, arms folded in frustration, walked away.
* * *
She threw herself face down on her bed. Exhaustion had overtaken her adrenalin-fuelled energy. In pilot and astronaut training she’d felt in control of every situation. Indeed, she’d manipulated her superiors and had shamelessly exploited her intelligence and looks, knowing both put men on the defensive. The last few days had seen enormous setbacks for her, upsetting her confidence and making her distrustful.
She wriggled with irritation at the knowledge, whispered to her by Claude that some of the other women considered her to be a spoilt brat. It was probably the envy monster at work. It didn’t used to get to her—she’d never felt she had to justify her natural tomboyish childhood skills. If pressed she could’ve lectured them on how her dad was as grubby-finger-nailed a rancher as any, and the sacrifices both parents and grandparents went through to help her with extra tuition, flight school, and college fees.
She rolled onto her back and studied the faint cracks in the white ceiling paint.
They formed straight lines like the once-believed Martian canals.
Back to Earth. It felt as if she was the only one on the planet who felt they shouldn’t try and blast those spheres. Maybe her gut reaction was the fabled woman’s intuition, and she’d got it wrong. Damn. It was times like this she wished she still smoked. With closed eyes, she imagined a good long pull on a King Size, ignored the inclination to cough, and exhaled slowly.
“That felt better,” she said out loud. “Come on, Kallandra, dear. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something constructive.” There was the option to go and see Colonel Dwight Disraeli. He had the President’s ear, not that he would bend it on her behalf. Damn, she needed strength. That comes from public pressure on politicians and who influences the public but the press—Tabitha Wish.
Kallandra reached for her cellphone, but was interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Go away.”
The door sneaked open and Derek crept in carrying a carton of steaming coffee.
“Apologies for disturbing you, Kallandra, but I thought you’d like to know.”
“The spheres have been obliterated, and we now wait for their creators to enslave us?”
“Not yet, and possibly. But a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Lab has been investigating historical records in a cooperative project with Chinese and Brazilian historians.”
“And I should be interested, because? Oh, sorry, Derek. It’s funny we three work so well together with occasional input from Rob Summers. I forget that hundreds at NASA and the JPL along with thousands all round the planet are also working flat out on the spheres.”
“Sadly, in spite of the combined mass of global brain-power, and a range of weird international technology, no one has managed to learn more than we have about what the spheres are made of, or why.”
“At least other countries aren’t sending annihilation greetings to the spheres. Are they?”
Derek sat on the corner of the bed while studying his iPaq. “Some interesting coincidences have led to an alternative view of the time decoherences.”
“Are you telling me other countries, consortiums, whatever, also plan to attack the spheres?” She knelt on the bed shaking with anger, the more so as her rage was directed at herself for not seeing it coming.
“Actually, I’m talking about the time decoherences—they may have been with us for some years—possibly always.”
She looked at him through narrowed eyes, as if he was more alien than the spheres. How could he ramble on about theoretical niceties while she writhed in angst?
But then maybe it’d lead somewhere if she played along.
“You mean like the Bermuda Triangle? Old news.”
He lowered his iPaq and looked at her with a half-smile, in what she interpreted as a pitying mode. She curled fingers around the corner of a pillow ready to hurl at him.
“They—the researchers—have catalogued hundreds of unexplained disasters.
Not that smaller accidents wouldn’t count but they aren’t documented so well. Airplane crashes like that one the other day. Did you know that Tabitha had a call from the wife of her editor, Roger de Griffe? He’d sent a text message from that plane disaster.”
“Yes,” she said. “Weird wasn’t it? He was on that plane that we think split when the front displaced in time from the back? Would you think to send me a goodbye love message, Derek?” She said, instantly regretting it because of course he would. But she wouldn’t have done because she’d be fighting death all the way down.
“Anyway,” he continued. “There’ve been many accidents that could be explained that way, from the beginning of aviation history.”
“So now we have a convenient scapegoat for human error?”
Derek gave her a short laugh. “Fair enough, but we now have an alternative explanation for some unexplained accidents. For instance…” He consulted his iPaq.
“KLM Flight six-oh-seven. August fourteenth, nineteen fifty eight. Unexplained crash two-hundred-and-eight kilometres west of Ireland. No survivors, Ninety nine died.”
“I hope you’re not going to read me an uber long list of disasters that might be the result of time decoherences.”
“I won’t. But listen, there was always doubt about the North Sea Piper Alpha oil rig explosion in nineteen eighty eight. Gas leaked into a compression chamber and led to an explosion with a hundred-and-sixty-six deaths.”
“And you’re saying a timequake ruptured a gas pipe?”
“Possibly….”
“Evidence, Derek. Come on, you should know better than this speculative hearsay. Have you become Tabitha Wish?”
“Recovered monitoring equipment indicates discrepancies in times recorded for the accident. And men the previous few hours reported feeling weird—headaches and nausea, which could be a feature of time decoherence, couldn’t it?”
Kallandra closed her eyes. “Maybe, dear Derek, they were breathing in leaked gas.” She lay back on the bed and stared again at the ceiling. “Is there a useful point to this list?”
Derek followed her gaze up to the ceiling. Kallandra released a smile, even though her upward gaze wasn’t meant as a trick, the play tickled her. He returned his eyes to hers.
“It seems to me, not only me, that if mankind knew about time decoherences in the past, we wouldn’t get so upset about them now. It could help your appeal to leave the spheres alone.”
She sat up, eyes now wide open. “Really? Ah, I suppose if their leaving makes time just more erratic rather than being a completely new problem, people mightn’t think they’re so bad.”
Derek stuck out his bottom lip. “Well, maybe….”
“And that would be especially so if most of those unexplained disasters were in areas far from where the known spheres were buried.”
“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. “Putting aside, for the moment, the notion that unexplained means a phenomenon about which we have insufficient facts.”
“Or insufficient belief in the few facts we have.”
“Agreed. Let me tell you about a particularly accident-prone region in Canada, between Nova Scotia on the East coast to Ontario. On a disaster-map of the world, that region is splattered with red dots when larger areas elsewhere have none or only one.”
“And these unhappy red dots are?”
“The weirdest is a DC-4 that crashed heavily near Quebec in nineteen fifty seven.
It hit the ground so hard one of its engines was buried twenty-six metres. The seventy-nine people were virtually unidentifiable.”
“What caused the crash—engine or human failure, a storm? What makes it weird? There must have been sufficient parts, and the black box, for the investigators to work it out?”
“Black boxes were in production by then but not in general use. There was a storm—”
“Well, there you go, Derek. I need more convincing. Next one.”
“There was a survivor. A baby was found sitting in the pilot’s seat. It was over a hundred metres from where the rest of the passenger bodies were found.”
“A baby—alive. It must have got lucky. Even so, I agree that is rather Twilight Zone.”
“Hardly anybody’s watches had the same time as each other.”
“If they’re within a minute or five that would be the case in this building. In fact, Derek, it’d be more impressive if everyone’s watches told the exact same time.”
“Fair enough. Next is a massive explosion in nineteen seventeen, in Halifax Harbour, and no, it wasn’t the Germans. A Belgian ship, the Imo, collided with the munitions ship Mont Blanc. Eight million tons of TNT detonated, killing up to seven thousand sailors, dockworkers and even over five hundred local children in their schools.”
“OK, so a munitions ship explodes—it happens.”
“A survivor on the Imo says his ship seemed to suddenly be further forward and so avoiding the collision was impossible.”
“Um, and I suppose his testimony wasn’t taken seriously then whereas it would now. What’s next?”
“Right, a liner went down in a storm in eighteen seventy three. It was built to withstand worse storms and there were conflicting reports. Similarly, two boats collided with over five hundred deaths in eighteen ninety eight and another two boats with over a thousand deaths in nineteen fourteen. Remember these are all in north-eastern Canada.”
“There could be many reasons why that area is prone to accidents. The Newfoundland fogs, and North Atlantic storms and freezing winters all contribute to accidents queuing up to happen.”
“I’ve only mentioned some of the worst accidents. Comparing stats for other areas with fogs, stormy weather and shipping business, that area gets more than it should—far more. Of course you’re right to be cautious, Kallandra, but open your mind to some of this.”
“Cautious? I sure am. You can prove anything with statistics and imagination.”
“That region had no known sphere.”
“Ah, so time decoherences weren’t being collected over the years and so more accidents happened there.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“I do, but what about the most accident-prone area on the planet?”
“I know, I know. The Bermuda Triangle does have a sphere—or did. But then it seemed something wasn’t right with it. Delayed compared with the other six. So, perhaps it was malfunctioning.”
Kallandra walked over to the open window and breathed in the heady aroma from the wallflowers below.
“Don’t forget the eighth one in the Pacific. That was slow too. But then no one lives there so time decoherences could come and go and we’d never know.”
Derek stood alongside and put an arm around her waist. “We have to accept that there are many incidents that could’ve been triggered by even a small timequake.
Or could equally be something else—unexplained. For example in nineteen ninety-two, sewers in Guadalajara seemed to zigzag underground. Manhole covers shot into the air and streets split like earthquakes. Two hundred died.”
“Maybe it was an earthquake?”
“Not according to the Mexico Seismology Institute. If we assume the Bermuda sphere was faulty, then it’s interesting that Guadalajara is halfway between the spheres at El Capitan and Sugarloaf in Rio.”
She banged her hand on the windowsill. “Why are we pratting about discussing these accidents? If time jerked Earth around in the past, we have plenty of circumstantial evidence all around us. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, avalanches, landslides and freak weather could all be blamed on one spot suddenly moving forward or backwards in time. It was right under our noses all along.”
“You’re not saying the spheres made no difference?”
“No, Derek. I’m saying that it seems they were absorbing time decoherences but not equally around the globe and that maybe some of the accidents and disasters over the years could have been influenced by time-quaking. We know it’s gotten worse since the spheres started leaving. We need those spheres to return or do something to stabilise our planet.”