Free The Terminus by Oliver EADE

clever,
though. You’d understand what I mean if you were to meet him.”
    “But surely
you can’t just take off the specs? Won’t you vanish into the future?”
    “Give God a
little credit, Gary. He wasn’t
completely daft when he invented these things.”
    He fiddled
with something behind his ear and removed the specs without disappearing.
    “We never
showed you in the Retreat how they work. See, yours were pre-set by God, so you
and Beetie would meet up. Allow me!”
    Mike, too,
stared in silent disbelief as he listened to Redfor explain the workings of the
extraordinary specs. On each limb was a minute switch. With both set inneutral,
the wearer, upon removing the specs, would remain in whatever time he or she
had travelled to. One side had an option to push the switch forwards, taking
the person to the future at a defined point of entry into the ‘timeless
dimension’ (“Christ, man, you’ve lost me!” muttered Mike.). Backwards on the
other side, and they would return in a flash to the past… whenever the past
last visited happened to be. Mike appeared even more confused as Redfor tried
to explain how God had pre-set the default on Gary’s
specs to arrive earlier, and Gary
understood why the man did that: in case he might cause something in the future
that would need fixing as had happened with Beetie. Around each lens was a thin
diaphragm from ‘zero’ to ’infinity’, one side for forward travel, the other for
going back in time.
    “They’re not
to play with!” warned Redfor. “No one’s ever travelled forwards to infinity...
to the empty universe, as God calls it. As for backwards… well, you don’t wanna
find out what this place was like before the Big Bang, do you?”
    The diaphragms
controlling the spectacles’ travel through time intrigued Gary…
rings within rings. Mike stood gawping, speechless, but Gary
absorbed everything as Redfor explained the science, for he had to get
things right when the time came.
    “But with
Beetie… I… I can’t afford to make a mistake in the Hatcheries. Not a second too
late. Can I be that certain? I mean from where we are, now…”
    He couldn’t
bear to think of the ordeal the girl might be going through, despite what
Redfor had said about the future not yet happening.
    “Remember
this, Gary. You alone can save her.
Yes, the time-specs are accurate to the nearest trillionth of a second, if you
find this reassuring. It all came about in an underground place straddling France
and Switzerland. In the present.”
    “Like ‘now’
present?” Mike queried.
    “Research into
the micro-cosmos by busting elementary particles in something called the Large
Hadron Collider,” continued Redfor. “God loses me most of the time, but…”
    “Hey, I read
about the LHC!” interrupted Gary. “In Popular Science. Where
they found the Higgs boson. The God particle! Place called CERN.
They’re trying to explain dark energy and why the universe exists at all.”
    “Here we go!
Welcome back, Professor Brainbox!”
    “No, Mike! Be
serious for a change. The sorts of energies they’re using might, in theory,
open up wormholes causing closed time-like curves. Don’t you see?”
    “All I see
is a couple of weirdos in shiny, poncey suits. But the duck business was impressive.”
    “It’s the
start of something, Mike. Perhaps they find a way of trapping those wormholes…
joining them together… wow! Awesome!”
    Gary
quickly learned all he needed to about the time-specs, though the science both
troubled and fascinated him: truths way beyond the laws of physics they taught
at school, and he was determined to one day uncover them.
    He stared at
the specs in his hand.
    “And
meanwhile, dude?” asked Mike.
    Gary
remained pensive.
    “You’re right,
Mike. Gotta get on. Beetie’s relying on me. I understand now. Shall we decamp
to my place?”
    “What about
your soccer boots?” Mike asked on setting off. “Gone and left ’em under the
bench, you dozy