Everything was Fine, Emery Garriott [read more books .txt] 📗

San Antonio, Texas: July 21,2013:0900:
George Thimbaca said to all the staff, “Ready to make history?” Many of those present for the historic experiment chuckled uncomfortably. George Thimbaca began a needless theatrical countdown, “Ten…Nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one.” He twisted the knob so the red arrow pointed straight up toward the red dot. At that moment the human race disappeared and never was.
George Thimbaca had been the head of a secret Temporal Displacement Commission, which had utilized one tenth of the entire electrical output of the four Texas nuclear reactors for the first historic experiment in manipulating time. Diverting that much energy took a special dispensation and the mutual blessing of the Departments of Energy, Commerce, Homeland Security and Interior. This unprecedented collaboration was instigated by a convincing treatise on the concept of time travel by George Thimbaca. He gave incontrovertible proofs from current quantum theory that time travel was possible and outlined the potential benefits to modern America. After one of the President’s key cabinet advisors was suitably intrigued, other departments, wanting to protect their turf, became interested in the possibilities inherent in time travel, so they pooled their resources to fund the first Temporal Displacement Experiment, thus claiming their own piece of the product. The goal of said experiment was ostensibly to create a rift in the fabric of time and open a portal to the San Antonio of one hundred thousand years in the past. The time displacement of one hundred thousand years was chosen for two reasons. One: if by amazing luck the experiment worked and a portal into the past was actually formed, they figured nothing much all that bad could happen, since human history hadn’t really begun one hundred thousand years in the past. So probably no humans were around in the San Antonio region at that time, and there could be no weird paradoxes with humans from the past coming into the present, learning about us and changing history. Two: one hundred thousand was a nice round number.
Unfortunately for mankind, George Thimbaca and his team of scientists had glossed over one detail of the calculations for the temporal portal- the small probability of a continuity of the temporal portal between points in time. History had to be made and the government had to be satisfied before the all the little irritating details could be ironed out and before their government funding ran out. There was inherent in any experiment a certain degree of uncertainty. For instance, take the Manhattan Project and the day the scientists set off the first nuclear explosion. There was a bit of speculation that the first experiment in massive nuclear fission might indeed trigger an atmospheric nuclear reaction which could destroy the entire Earth. But being good scientists intent on truth and a new weapon, they chose to cast their worries aside. So, too, did George Thimbaca and his team.
When George Thimbaca twisted that knob opening the portal, not only was San Antonio from one hundred thousand years ago on the opposite side, so were all intervening San Antonios right up to July 21,2013:0900. Every second of every year for one hundred thousand years was there. The portal punched right through all the times and existed for a hundred thousand years in that one place.
Since the portal was the size of a standard door, it didn’t take quantum science to figure out a hundred thousand years was plenty of time for a considerable amount of stuff, just by sheer luck, to pass through that portal, be it dust or rain, insects, birds or beasts. But all of it came into the time July 21,2013:0900 simultaneously. As any person knows, no two bits of matter can occupy the same place at the same time. If they were to try to occupy the same place at the same time they would both be turned into energy in accordance with the formula E=MC2. Thus tons of material, dust, rain, air, animals tried to simultaneously come through the portal from all one hundred thousand years. Of course, none of it was allowed to occupy the same space by the immutable laws of physics, so energy was released to the tune of a five hundred gigaton atomic explosion, creating a small artificial sun where southern Texas had existed. The energy of the explosion poured through the portal into all the previous one hundred thousand years, vaporizing matter in this area constantly for one hundred thousand years. The plume of ash and vapor was so vast as to outreach the extent of the explosion of Krakatoa. Vapor, dust and clouds enshrouded the Earth in a toxic pall raising the Earth’s atmospheric albedo to an amazing 90%, effectively shutting out the sun. That much sunlight reflecting off Earth‘s atmosphere made Earth quite stunning in the heavens.
The Earth would have cooled down considerably, had it not been for the tremendous heat produced by the small artificial San Antonio sun which, reflected back toward Earth by the cloud cover, gradually raised the atmospheric temperature to a uniform 130 degrees Fahrenheit. After a few thousand years even the seas, or what was left of them with the markedly increased evaporation, heated up to the same uniform temperature.
All higher plant life, simmering in the heat and devoid of sunlight, was extinguished. So were all the higher animals - fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and, by the way, humans. What was left of the Neanderthals one hundred thousand years ago all disappeared, and, in fact, Homo Sapiens never even had a chance to develop. There were no Cro-Magnons. There was no Mesopotamia, no Egypt, no China, no Rome. There wasn’t even George Thimbaca.
Fifty thousand years after July 21,2013:0900, the pall of noxious vapor and dust over the world finally dissipated and it was actually a pretty nice day. Since Earth had plenty of experience in evolving species, it only took a few hundred million years until new animals roamed verdant plains, flew in clean skies and swam in blue seas. None of the animals had what humans would recognize as intelligence. They ruled the Earth as animals had for eons and epochs, and everything was just fine.

Publication Date: 05-14-2011

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