FINGAL DARED HIMSELF to open a window. Instead of the cool October breeze that blew around him on his way to work that morning, a gust of hot air smacked his face as if he was the original naughty boy.

Naomi Lessing’s scream bounced around the lab with more energy than the particle accelerator a moment ago. Fingal quivered in his chair hoping that his error could swallow him into another dimension before the director calmed enough to hurl actual words. No such luck.

“What have you done?” Her voice descended, decelerated but retained a staccato edge. “I allow a CalTech mathematician into my lab and you do what? Fuse the entire building?”

“Noo,” a gravelly Scottish voice jumped in. “More like fused the freaking planet.”

Fingal glared at the physicist. “All right, Carnegie, no need to exaggerate.” But had he?

He thought back six months, Fingal had beamed twice in succession, first as his plane landed at John Lennon Airport, Liverpool home to his musical obsession, and again at the reopened 70-metres-high Van der Graaff generator at his new internship, the Daresbury Particle Accelerator. All the way over the Atlantic, he clicked his fingers when he thought of his luck gaining this secondment to work on his hypotheses to use quantum entanglement to put distance from his workbench and a dimension folding experiment. Daresbury was insignificant in the global consciousness but it was one of the first to accelerate particles and he’d a feeling it was going to be put back on the map. If only he could turn back time to his first day...

Someone clapped their hands right behind him. “Fingal!”

“Keep your hair on…” then he realized it was the director. “Sorry, Ma-am, all I did was run a standard, well not that standard experiment, just an app that kinda tweaks a couple of the assumed eleven dimensions.”

“Tweaks?” Her arms were so tightly folded her breasts threatened to burst through her ‘Keep Calm and Particle On’ T-shirt.

Perspiring with guilt, he nictated his eyes away from Naomi Lessing to his screen, back and again then stammered, “Folding, Ma-am, I’ve been theorizing on the dimensions.”

“There was nothing in our interviews that said you were going to tamper with existence.”

He laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. “It’s a kinda private project. It’d never work, just a mad theory, and in any case, I used a QM device to distance the effects far away.” He knew his grin was more like that of a chimpanzee baring fangs to scare enemies or in embarrassment.

“Fix it before you’re fired, and that will be by noon.” She stormed off.

Phew, he was expecting the two bulky security guards, George and Edwina, to frogmarch him out of the building into the weird hot weather. He was needed after all. He frowned at his screen. The only difference in the input of data to his QM equations was a random number generator he’d written as a simple sub-routine just as a test. It should have simulated the effects of running their new accelerator. It was nowhere as powerful as CERN, just different. Thirty million volts was nothing these days. He zoomed in by putting his face closer and ignoring his reflected dark bushy eyebrows, wayward hair and designer five-day stubble. Strange, the numerals in the equation were changing as he watched. They should be fixed after the run. Ah, it was still running, but that shouldn’t be a problem unless...

A voice inveigled his right ear. “Fingal.”

He swivelled his chair to face Fiona Ridd. He’d been drawn to her auburn waist-length hair and ability to cut straight through crap. She’d rebuffed his inexperienced attempt to date her during his first week but he hoped to win her over in increments. Wasn’t working. Perhaps she’d—

Her voice transformed from sweet, mellow to a harsh, demand, “Why the hell is your program activating my accelerator? And why hide your origin via encryption, making me worry it was a hack from outside?”

Fingal looked up at her fiery hair and hands on hips. He jolted into his answer, “Ah. I didn’t realize it was still running ‘till just now and the encryption? Force of habit, sorry.”

“You’re not a student anymore, Fingal. I’m terminating your access right now.”

“You’d better pass that by Naomi. My run has induced a problem. Did you feel—”

“That earth tremor?” her frown deepened. “Or was it your experiment?”

He wasn’t sure, but Naomi had accused him. His mother was also a Naomi. She’d have hugged him but would need to sprout long arms to hug him from her retreat in Arizona and she wouldn’t fuss over a few extra degrees.

Damnation, Fiona had been talking while Fingal’s mind was absent.

“...on desktop simulation only until authorised by Naomi. Understood?”

“Sure, and you’ll be pleased to know I’ve several scenarios to test and buddies back in the States are working on it. We’ll have solutions in no time.

A WEEK WITH NONE of those solutions later, no one smiled in the sweltering heat. Fingal wore shorts and a T-shirt like everyone else in the emergency meeting at Daresbury. Luckily, their air con worked whereas most in the UK had fallen silent when the overloaded National Grid tried to keep people below blood temperature in their homes, offices and industry. Naomi had been made to accept Burl Downing, a climatologist professor from the Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia. He was in front of the fifty researchers giving them death by Powerpoint. Fingal sniggered behind his hand at the academic’s basin haircut, but then he admonished himself. His own straw thatch yet with incongruous dark bushy eyebrows attempting to hide one green and one brown eye afforded him no leeway to mock the appearance of others.

Instead, Fingal envied the prof’s deep, Welsh accent. “Thank you Naomi, I’ll not take up your time for more than is necessary. I find it ironic that climate organizations have urged governments and industry the world over to work at holding global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius over the next fifty years and now something this centre did in two seconds caused temperatures to rise to fifty degrees.”

Among the harrumphs and shouts of protest, Carnegie stood. Naomi glared at the staff. “No one leaves until I say so. Professor, the world will not gain by antagonising my people.”

He grinned through his badger beard. “My apologies. You all know the atmospheric temperature has risen dramatically, unaccountably—nothing to do with so-called greenhouse emissions.” A slide of NOAA satellite views of Greenland’s ice sheet zoomed on the screen. “Melting is occurring at an unprecedented rate. Luckily with its high specific heat capacity the deeper ice isn’t melting as fast as the media say. Even so…” Another view appeared of the Indian Ocean. The tops of churches showed all that’s left of the Solomon Islands. Another slide drew a gasp. A map of the world in the present, and another with dramatically increased blue areas. The slide became animated as the camera zoomed over coastlines. No more Bangladesh, Cairo, The Netherlands, much of California and most of the Eastern seaboard disappeared. “This will happen within two years if the mean global surface temperature remains at the forty-seven Celsius it has reached this week. You, my friends, will need to move house.” The animated map hovered over the Daresbury Science Complex with its Van de Graaff generator building. The blue filled the area of Liverpool, Runcorn and lapped where this meeting took place.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the oceans will rise fifty-five metres when all the ice melts along with thermal expansion. Most of the world’s population live near the coast. They’ll have to be evacuated to upland areas. More difficult would be the migration of delta and other low-level agriculture, staple foods such as rice and the billions of square hectares of other cereal crops. How resistant will upland people be to such—”

Fingal’s ears stopped listening. He knew all of this but he’d not factored in the speed of rising sea-level and although the plight of others was far greater, his mind became occupied over the triviality of his own situation. Not merely the temporary house he lodged at, which would be submerged if this damned heat persisted, but his many relatives near San Diego. At least his mother dwelt at altitude.

“—if greenhouse gases are not responsible for this warming, then what is? Some speculate on tectonic activity. No, let’s get to the chase. Solar brilliance has increased by ten percent.”

The room erupted with a cacophony of denials.

Fingal too had yelled his displeasure with a ‘No way!’ but Professor Downing continued in anticipation of the response. “Ten percent wouldn’t be noticeable to your average indoor physicist but it rang bells on NASA’s heliospheric observatory.”

He paused. Silence. “Ah, now I have an intelligent audience. Most ask does that mean the sun’s giving out more heat, but you’ll know that our atmosphere isn’t warmed directly from the sun but from its ultra violet light, which excites atoms on the ground to produce infra-red and that is what’s heating the air. I’ll take questions after my next bombshell. Are you ready for this?”

Fingal was beginning to hate him and fidgeted, looking for paper to make an airplane to launch at the showman.

“It appears, my learned friends that the Earth has travelled through a cusp in space-time to a billion years in the future.”

Derision filled the room until Naomi shut it down with one of her glares.

“It’s known that solar luminosity increases at the rate of ten percent per billion years with the burning of hydrogen, creating helium. Models predicted the heat created on Earth from such brightness would, by half a million years, evaporate surface water. The atmosphere would be saturated with the upper atmosphere bombarded by solar particles boiling off the water to space. No life as we know it.”

Fingal was about to stand to object but Carnegie beat him to it. “Every other sci-fi movie has a spaceship flitting harmlessly through wormholes or space/time discontinuities but not a whole planet. Instead of the environment and life adapting over a billion years, it’s happened in an instant. Is it possible the ice we have and ocean currents, et cetera, will create a more survivable scenario?”

The professor smiled, although with that beard it was difficult to be sure. “I’m afraid not. We’ll all be gone within a year. Temporarily, it will be cooler at the poles but there are no crops nor infrastructure there. Going underground will work for a few if they take long term rations and power. There’s only one hope, ladies and gentlemen. You, correct your error. Take us back.” His finger described in an arc around his audience.

The noise of angry muttering and chairs scraping signalled the end of the meeting. A dart made of an ice-lolly wrapper flew past the professor’s nose.

FINGAL CAUGHT UP with Fiona Ridd on her way back to the particle accelerator lab. Her gardenia perfume worked overtime with the global warming. “Miss Ridd, may I ask you a question?”

“You just did, Fingal.” She carried on walking, lengthening her stride. She too sported shorts, maybe too brief for a young man to stay undistracted.

“Okay, two—no, dammit, three questions. Important. Life of the planet and all that.”

She stopped, turned and lifted an eyebrow. “So it is all your fault?”

“Everyone thinks it. Anyhow, I’d like to match my logs with your logs.”

She stood waiting for a moment. “Say please.”

“You Brits. Okay, pretty please but now, as in yesterday.”

She marched off down the corridor to the basement lift waving her access badge at him to follow.

His neck hairs stood to attention in the factory-like laboratory. “Miss Rodd, does this hum all the time, even when you’re not here to comfort it? I assumed the accelerator only activated when asked nicely to do so.”

“You can call me Fiona.” She typed a password on her screen and flicked to open the log spreadsheet.

Fingal bluetoothed her data to his iPad. “I’ll run a correlation subroutine to see what time-related activation of the accelerator coincided with my dimension-folding experiment. You see, Fee, my ques—”

“It’s Fiona. Call me Fee again and you’ll have your front teeth so missing you’ll not be able to say any effing word.”

He grinned unwisely. “My question, Fiona. Can the particle accelerator be activated at any time, such as when my program somehow asked for it?”

She twisted a few strands of scarlet hair while examining him. “Ordinarily, no, but two things might have conspired to enable that. One is this prototype accelerator isn’t like a Hadron Collider but has an unknown short scale intensity. Second, you.”

“Eh?”

“You’re too clever for your and our own good. No one has tried your type of coding here at Daresbury before.”

Fingal took it as a back-handed complement so jumped in. “Fiona, when our shift ends, how about we—”

“Weren’t you listening to Naomi? None of us are leaving until you take us back a billion years?”

“After that?

She smiled just as both their bleepers commanded a return to the meeting room. Fingal tapped on his iPad as he walked.

“There’s been a development,” Naomi said. “You might have noticed our moon is still where it should be. So have astronomers. Does that mean a bigger chunk of our solar system zapped into the future? Apparently not. Just one. The sun.” She glared directly at Fingal as if she could radiate a solar flare at him.

“Ah, she remembers,” he said to Fiona sat next to him. “I told her I used a quantum entanglement component to direct the action of my dimension-folding to a place off-world. It was the sun.”

She turned to him. “You idiot. Why not Neptune or an asteroid? You had to select something critical for our survival, didn’t you?”

His cheeks burned as he bent closer to his iPad. “Yeah, well, it would’ve been hard to detect changes in a far-flung lump of rock. This news might actually help me invert that previous result. Kinda reverse engineer it.”

“All right. If you need me to take a reverse spanner to my machine, be sure to let me know.”

Still swiping and calling up apps he’d designed to crunch his equations, he walked to the exit. He needed some fresh air.

George held out his arm to stop him. “Orders, Mr Parr, sir. You are not to leave.”

“Jeez, just round the block. I need fresh air to help think this through. How about you come with me, George?”

The big man muttered on his comms. “Just a minute then. Edwina will take over. Here, smear this factor fifty over your freckly face.”

The double doors whooshed open letting in a wall of heat. Fingal gasped. “It’s just like leaving the cool air con of Orlando airport!”

They couldn’t walk on the melting tarmac paths so they trod on the withering brown grass. Ironically the aromas of lavender had become more heady. He couldn’t see the sun through thick stratus clouds, and within a few minutes, his skin beaded with perspiration. Fingal couldn’t see any birds, nor anyone else. No vehicles on the nearby M56. He heard a plane heading for the nearby Liverpool Speke Airport. “Let’s go back in, the air’s cooler in there.”

TWO HOURS LATER Fingal called Naomi and Fiona. “Ready to try again. Any protocols to inform or prepare?”

Fiona replied with, “All set.”

Naomi said, “I should tell NASA and our government, but nothing they do will make any difference. So, what the hell. Better be right, Ridd or we’ll find a cave for you and block the entrance.”

He jogged to engineering to be with Fiona. Together they stood behind toughened glass while his finger hovered over RUN. “Do you want a countdown, Fiona?”

“Just do it.”

He did. Nothing happened. He turned to sit at her desk to call up a copy of his workspace on one of her consoles. As he squinted at the screen the building shook. His chair wheeled away from the desk as if he was on a rolling ship. He heard crashes, cries, swearing and an eerie, worrying creaking from the safety glass. He wrinkled his nose at a stench of burning plastic. Fiona grabbed him with a big hug but only to stop him rolling away. The shaking stopped. Sirens took up a wailing but were cut off before they reached full throttle.

Naomi rushed into engineering. “Has it worked?”

Fingal laughed. “As far as I can tell, the math worked but I can’t see the sun. Have to ask astrophysics if they have a direct link to the solar watch telescopes. Sticking our heads outside won’t help—it’s only a ten percent reduction in sunlight so I don’t suppose the clouds will suddenly thin, nor the grass grow green.”

Two hours later they received confirmation that their own time-wandering sun was back.

Fingal heard over the speakers as he’d continued working on new algorithms in case he had to try again. A quiver of relief ran through him. Fiona hugged him.

He grinned. “Now then, Fiona, how about that date?”

“Well, I have a soft spot for nerdy Americans so—”

Naomi’s voice crashed into the room just before she did. “Fingal! Whatever it was you did has affected our orbital geometry. We’re on a collision course for Mars. Get back to work!”