A Cacophony of Chaos
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For a moment I thought we might be in a brewery.
The enormous room housed two rows of silver globes which, to my mind, had to be vats of beer.
But then, why were they networked together with a series of cables?
Or, for that matter, why were they glowing green?
And why was that hum so damn familiar?
Virginia Neighborhood
Still Glowing Green
January 7, 2008
Problems for the residents of The Gate at Jones Mills began when lightning struck the generator complex at neighboring defense contractor Integrated Tech.
"They're all perfectly safe," said Integrated Tech spokesperson Anne Weltlich.
"The Murphys' mailbox has been following me around all day," claimed retired schoolbus driver Skip Henderson. "Does that sound 'perfectly safe' to you?"
Many residents claim trees in the development were humming the theme to Star Wars.
"Actually, the maples were whistling Superman and the pine trees were beeboxing Indiana Jones," said Henderson. "But in every case it was John Willams."... more
That was when I noticed the chamber at the end of the room, behind Jones' ship.
All of the cables lead to its pulsing tranlucent shell.
It only took my brain a moment to realize I was looking at an antiquated Temporal Inversion Core.The east wing was one big time machine.
So much suddenly made sense.
TS1 was clearly less advanced then Jones' time machine, and now I'd found the missing link in its' reverse-engineered evolution.
It still begged the question, Where did Jones get his time machine?, but I wasn't sure I wanted to stick around to ask him.
"PITA, can you access this... this time machine's computer?"
"One moment," it pondered while I stared at Jones' golden hull, looking for any activity.
"Yes, I think I can."
"Good, see if you can set it to self-destru-"An ionic burst lept off the dustbuster, arced over TS1 and hit the far wall.
The wall winked out of existence, the same way his ship does.
It was a bolt of vacuous space-time.
Jones, the ruthless bastard, had weaponized time travel.
I don't know where he sent that wall, but I doubted it was somewhere I wanted to go.
"Get us out of here!" I yelled at the computer.
Another time-ray shot past TS1 as it spun around.
"And see if there's a way to defend against THAT!"
"Hmmmm," PITA thought for a moment, then said, "I think I have an idea. If I configure the magnetic field in the aft section to create a temporal-"
"Just do it!"
"Okie-dokie, done."
Jones' time-ray hit my make-shift temporal shielding and bounced off.
"Nice job, PI-"
The deflected ray shot past Jones'dustbuster and hit the archaic inversion core at the end of the room.
The core's explosion, while not tremendous, sent a temporal isolation wave crashing across the neighborhood next door.
The wave had the glimmering sheen of green plasma, saturating the houses and detatching residents from their own causality.
They probably awoke with a burden few humans have ever had- the ability to see changes in the timeline.
From now 'til death, those people will see and feel the repercusions of Jones and I meddling with history, and not know what to make of it.
It can be quite disorienting when, let's say, the restaurant you're in transforms around you into a post office, and you wife has become a disgruntled talking walrus.
I felt sorry for them, but only for a moment.
Welcome to my war, folks.
"PITA, vortex us out of here!"
"I'll have to drop the aft shielding to create a sustainable vortex."
"Fine, then do it."
"While I prepair the magnetic field, do you think you could chip-in, sir? Maybe handle the evasive manuvers while I make several million calculations?"
I grabbed the controls.
"Fuck you, PITA."
"And where would you like to go?"
"Anywhere!"
"Sir, I can't make the necessary calcu-"
"Midwest! Next year! Go, go go!"
The spacial aperature opened in front of TS1 and I flew through it. next>>>
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