Time Virus

Chapter 1

Jason turned down the sedative offered to help ease him through the emersion process. He wanted to be awake for his final few minutes as a man.

After more than an hour of being poked and probed, Jason found himself abruptly alone. No more technicians scurrying about, connecting wires, loading software and thrice checking the nano-bath. Now it was just him, lying alone on the bottom of what appeared to be a glass coffin positioned in the middle of a sterile room; Banks of electronics lined the walls along with a single plate glass window. White coated men on the other side of that window tried to stay calm as they watched to see if the only hope for mankind would survive the next fifteen minutes.

Five hours earlier had seen Jason leave his wife of ten years at their doorstep. She had been weeping openly knowing that this was their final goodbye. Today had been a long time in coming and both tried to prepare for it as best they could but in the end, it still hurt almost more than either could bear.

When he had volunteered for the mission only eight months ago, he knew it would be a one-way trip. It had been difficult telling Mary. She had listened carefully as he explained the mission and its importance. She nodded at all the right places and asked all the right questions, but in the end, there had still been that speck of denial. “Will you come back?” she had asked. He simply took her hands in his and shook his head. They both knew that the idea of growing old together would have to wait for another lifetime.

The solution began to slowly fill the bottom of the “coffin” as Colonel Jason Briggs mentally prepared to end his life as a man. The yellowish liquid was saturated with nano-bots; microscopic devices programmed to interact with their carbon-based host to become something that was neither man nor machine. No one knew for sure what would be created but if all went according to plan, it would fight a battle in defense of earth; a battle that would take place five light years away and more than ten thousand years in the future.

Seven miles to the south, the largest, most advance spacecraft ever built waited restlessly. It’s chemical propellant tanks made up for most of its size. Ironically, they would only be used for the first thirty minutes of this long, long voyage. They would drop away prior to achieving the moon’s modest orbit. The nuclear fusion propulsion system would fire for just over ten years, taking the spacecraft to nearly the speed of light before detaching.

All that would remain was a needle shaped craft about twenty meters long. Inside was the most complex device ever created; the Probability Chamber. Quantum theorists believed that this chamber held the promise of FTL, Faster Than Light travel. At the time of its launch, the Probability Chamber was not yet complete. The greatest minds in the world were simply incapable of solving the final stages of the complex math needed to make it work. Thousands of line of code and trillions of calculations were still left to be completed.

The brain of the spacecraft would have to work out those last details during the trip. The result of the union of Jason and the digital bath was to be that brain.

As the fluid crested the top of his face, Jason tied to calm his instinctual fear of drowning. He held his breath as long as he could and then breathed in deeply. His body jerked against the restraining straps as he involuntarily struggled to survive. After a few moments, consciousness left him.

Unheard cheers filled the far side of the glass window. All indications were that he had survived the immersion process. Two hours later, It, the thing that had once been Colonel Jason Briggs, was loaded into the tip of the rocket. The countdown began immediately.

Word count 669



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