Standing on the underground platform near Syntagma Square station waiting for an eastbound tram back to his apartment, Dr Alex White stared up at the amber matrix board that had just announced a twenty- minute delay.
It was the fiercest August Athens had endured in half a century, and for the past fortnight the thermometer in the shade had not dipped below forty degrees Celsius. Having just emerged from a windowless, unventilated committee room deep inside the Eastern European Government headquarters, Alex was drenched in sweat, his linen shirt sticking between his shoulder-blades, capable of dreaming only of a cold shower and a colder beer.
At thirty-eight, Alex White was still regarded as the golden boy of the Zografou University of Science and Technology. Having completed his first degree in 2024 at the age of twenty-one, he had gone straight on to read theoretical physics under the patronage of Professor Nestor Drakos, taking a master’s degree and then, to his own lingering astonishment, a doctorate in 2029. He had worked in the subterranean laboratories at Zografou for the whole of his adult life.
For the past five years, Alex and his mentor Dr Drakos had devoted every waking hour to superluminal particles and the causality paradox. Their landmark breakthrough in the summer of 2040—proving not only the existence of the tachyon field, but demonstrating that an object suspended within a stimulated crystalline lattice could be uncoupled from local spacetime—had placed Alex at the very centre of a classified scientific storm.
The fundamental question that haunted their briefings was simple: what if the object inside the field was a living creature?
In secret, and expressly against Dr Drakos’s strict orders, Alex had decided to find out for himself.
Suddenly the phone in his trouser pocket vibrated, dragging him rudely from his daydream of a shaded poolside bar back to the stifling, tiled platform. Drawing out his Handy-Comm, he frowned at the priority flash across the screen:
REPORT AT ONCE — TAD HQ — DEVELOPMENTS
Alex’s stomach gave an unpleasant lurch. Summoning him back to the Temporal Applications Directorate at six o’clock on a Friday evening could only mean trouble—the sort of trouble that would cost him a good deal more than his weekend. Had the internal auditors spotted the power drain from his unauthorised runs? Had they found the discrepancies in his equipment requisitions—or something far worse?
Turning his back on the delayed tram, Alex climbed the concrete steps out into the glare of Syntagma Square and flagged down a yellow cab.
Outside, a dry, dusty wind was gusting down from Mount Hymettus, rattling the fronds of the parched palms, yet as Alex sank into the rear seat of the taxi he was still sweating profusely. Was it the forty-degree heat, or cold fear for his own skin? In the worst case, the Bureau would strip his clearance and end his career; if they knew the whole truth of what he had built in his private locker, they might well make him disappear altogether.
As the taxi nosed into the evening traffic, the horns and exhaust fumes of the city faded from Alex’s awareness. Staring out through the tinted window, his mind drifted backward eight months to the deserted corridors of the laboratory during the previous winter vacation.
New Year’s Eve — 31 December 2041
The two-week Christmas holiday at Zografou University meant that the entire campus had emptied out. The student halls, the faculty lounges, the administration blocks, and—most importantly for Alex’s purposes— the third-floor tachyon annex were completely deserted until Epiphany.
Sitting upon Alex’s workbench that evening was the fruit of twelve months of clandestine late nights, falsified component logs, and missed dinners.
To the untrained eye it was an unassuming metallic box scarcely larger than an old-fashioned digital alarm clock, wired to a synthetic crystal core housed inside a heavy quartz cage. When stimulated by a calibrated capacitor discharge, the lattice released a coherent burst of tachyons across a three-metre radius. Whatever mass lay within that spherical envelope was cast forward or backward along the temporal axis in direct proportion to the voltage applied—and then snapped back to its origin point like a stone on an elastic tether as the capacitor drained.
In short, Alex had built a portable time retriever.
Earlier in the autumn he had successfully bounced a rhesus monkey holding an antique mechanical pocket watch three seconds into the future; the animal had survived without a scratch, blissfully unaware that it remained fractionally out of phase with its own afternoon, while the watch’s discrepancy had matched Alex’s equations to the fourth decimal place.
Now, at eleven o’clock on New Year’s Eve 2041, Alex was preparing a test twenty-four hundred times longer. He was going to send Flora, a three-year-old female chimpanzee from the behavioural wing, one full hour into the future—across the stroke of midnight into the year 2042.
Setting the digital timer on the metallic housing for a sixty-minute displacement and keying a thirty-second delay into the trigger circuit, Alex placed the box beside Flora in the centre of the yellow hazard circle painted on the polished laboratory floor.
Stepping hastily back behind the polycarbonate blast screen, Alex watched the silent metal box and the restless young ape. Ten seconds to go…
Pulling his Handy-Comm from his lab coat, Alex typed rapidly with his thumbs into his encrypted research log:
23:00:04 -- 12-31-41 -- TACHYON FIELD TEST #155 -------------------------- -- PRESENT: DR ALEX WHITE (EESB / UOA) ----------------------------------- NOTE: EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF TACHYON FIELD RADIATION ON LIVING PRIMATE SPECIMEN — 3-YEAR-OLD CHIMPANZEE "FLORA" ------------------------- > 20 SECONDS ON DELAY > FLORA BECOMING RESTLESS AT 20 SECONDS, REACHING FOR DEVICE HOUSING > ZERO > DEVICE EMITS BRIEF SPARK AS CAPACITOR CELLS STIMULATE CRYSTAL > APPROX 5 SECONDS OF BRILLIANT BLUE-WHITE LIGHT OBSERVED > FLORA IS SEEN TO BE DISTRESSED, CLUTCHING METALLIC BOX > THE ENTIRE PROCESS IS NOISELESS > BOTH DEVICE AND APE HAVE DISAPPEARED > Alex lowered the Handy-Comm and stood transfixed behind the glass.
Every previous trial had lasted mere milliseconds—appearing to the naked eye as little more than a heat-haze flicker in the air. Looking at a completely empty circle of polished floor where a living animal and a ten-kilogramme field generator had sat a moment before was chilling. And what Alex’s sensors in 2041 could not record was that as Flora’s frightened fingers had slapped the voltage regulator at 23:00:04, the field had briefly ricocheted seventy-one years backward off a winter ionospheric layer—materialising for three seconds between two terrified radar technicians in a concrete bunker at Orford Ness on the second of February 1970—before the retriever’s elastic tether hauled her back toward midnight in Athens.
For fifty-nine minutes Alex paced the silent laboratory alone, drinking cold coffee and watching the second-hand crawl round the wall clock.
From a kilometre away across the rooftops, he heard the first muffled booms of the municipal fireworks exploding over Syntagma Square to welcome 2042. On his Handy-Comm, the experiment countdown ticked down the final seconds: ten, nine, eight… At precisely four seconds past midnight on New Year’s Day, a blinding sphere of blue-white radiance bloomed open in the centre of the testing bay.
Alex threw up a hand to shield his eyes from the glare as a sharp wave of ozone and static washed across the room.
When the light vanished a heartbeat later, sitting in the exact middle of the painted circle where she had been an hour before was Flora.
She was shivering slightly and blinking at the overhead strip-lights, her knuckles white around the handle of the metallic retriever box on the floor beside her. Alex hurried into the circle and knelt by the readout.
The red digital display on the box read 12-31-41 — 23:00:05, the seconds ticking steadily upward—06, 07, 08—as though not a single instant had elapsed between 23:00:04 and 00:00:04. For the chimpanzee and the crystal core, the intermediate hour—and the brief bounce through a 1970 Suffolk radar bunker—had occupied less than a single beat of her heart.
After running a quick series of reflex and pupil checks on Flora and returning her to her warm enclosure with an extra ration of figs, Alex was able to conclude with a surge of triumph that his first long-duration biological jump had been an unqualified success.
Suddenly his Handy-Comm buzzed across the workbench, playing a recorded voice-message from Nestor Drakos:
‘Where the devil are you, Alex? If you pick this up tonight, call me—the whole department is having New Year drinks down at the Dungeon on the square.’
Alex stared at the vibrating communicator until his mentor’s voice clicked off. Turning toward the dark window, where green and gold fireworks were still bursting over the Acropolis in the distance, he caught sight of his pale reflection in the glass.
‘Happy New Year, arsehole,’ Alex murmured to himself. Snatching his coat from the hook, he locked the laboratory behind him and headed out in search of a drink.
