The Tapestry of Time
The retro-effective population inoculations should’ve been discontinued after the first trial run…
It really seemed like a great idea, but the retro-effective population inoculations should’ve been discontinued after the first trial run…
The young Sikumiut girl squirmed helplessly as the two security men, Locke and Sawyer, put her in the restraints. He was a doctor, supposed to be helping people—but the scene gave him the unshakable feeling of being a mad scientist.
The tent was marked with a useless red cross—the “locals” as he had come to call them, would have no idea what the symbol even meant. Inside it were many chairs, all of which were empty. What had he expected? For the “locals” to line up and patiently await their shots? Yes, that must’ve been what he thought would happen. But there were more doctors than indigenous in the tent now. And that was basically how it had been the whole time. All in all, he considered the first of their experimental expeditions to be a resounding failure. At least it was almost over with.
At first, it had almost felt like being on another planet, an alien world or something. Doctor Isaac Daniels Jr was an American, and he’d traveled to Canada many, many times over the last few years, so of course his logical mind understood that he was technically still on the same continent. But to be sent back in time like that—he felt as though he’d been stranded on Mars. Like the shuttle dropped him off, took flight back to Earth, and told him they’d be back to pick him up in a fortnight.
The whole idea didn’t sound so frightening when the plans were originally drawn up, hell he was excited about it! But as soon as he’d opened his eyes in the past, he had this terrible sensation of being stranded. Especially for the first couple of days. Once they had gotten the tent set up, it wasn’t quite so bad.
The medical triage tent of the first (and last) Doctors Unstuck in Time initiative was set up somewhere in the woods, not far from the coast of the Atlantic, in North America. Almost certainly they were somewhere in Canada. But it was hard to tell when the GPS didn’t work (there wouldn’t be any satellites launched for at least six-hundred years), and the geographical computations and estimates of the time travel were not an exact science. There were too many variables involved. Professor Anderson had tried to explain it to him once, but it was far too confusing and complicated.
Daniels preferred the science of medicine, not time travel. His passion was in making people healthy. And so, when Professor Anderson had come to him with his break-through technology, Daniels’ imagination had quickly turned to what good he might be able to do. He quickly brought his plan to the public sphere.
The humanitarian experiment had been met with resounding support back in the present—their funding goals (which were not insignificant) were met in less than forty-eight hours. And Doctor Isaac Daniels Jr had become a bit of an overnight celebrity in the process, being invited onto Late Night talk shows, even having a televised audience with the President of the United States. And the public pressure to follow through with his crazy plan, and the vocal support coming from nearly every activist organization on the planet for Daniels and his colleagues, were too momentous to ignore.
It was almost a cliché, he’d thought then: You are given the chance to go back in time, what do you do? Well, you’d go back and stop some of the worst atrocities from happening. Wouldn’t you? At least, if you were thinking of the betterment of humanity and not only of yourself. You’d go back and stop the Nazis or the Communists, push Hitler or Stalin off a bridge before they ever got started—prevent the horrors that occurred because of them. Well, Isaac’s idea wasn’t too dissimilar, he proposed going back in time to stop one of the worst genocides in history, the mass death through disease of the native populations of North America. A horrific disaster which nearly wiped out an entire hemisphere, erased untold histories, and brought many thousands of generations to an untimely halt.
People loved his idea.
It saw overnight popularity and Daniels was trending in over a dozen nations and on the cover of every newspaper. Though the limelight was never his goal. His goal was always only this: to save lives. It would be an incredibly tricky idea to execute, he knew, and took many months of planning. But then they were set to go. The first step would be a short trial run with only himself and couple of colleagues. And then, after they were successful, they would return to the past yet again and really get to work. The subsequent expedition would be the real deal. That was the plan.
But now…
This isn’t how it was supposed to go. The feeling of guilt hit him again as he administered the vaccine and watched the squirming, frightened girl struggle against the restraints, her eyes wide with terror and horror. She screamed when the needle pierced her skin. You’d have thought he was torturing her, but the tiny pinching sensation the girl was experiencing was no worse than the average flu shot and the only side effects she was likely to have would be a sore arm in the morning.
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