When the Data drop ended, the officer leaned forward and pressed forward and pressed the stop button. The room sat quiet for a while, I was the first one to speak. “What was that?” I asked in an almost hushed voice. “That’s an event that hasn’t happened, not yet at least.” I looked at him in confusion. “That was an event from 2044, it occurred at a summit discussing time travel. You see Mr. Garett, your research proves fruitful, very fruitful indeed. In fact, it goes so well that you are able to create lanes to travel, both forward and backwards in time. This development gets made in the year 2040.” He saw my confusion turn to astonishment. “That’s correct,” he continued reading my thoughts. “You manage to break through the secrets just a couple short years from now. However, you’re not the only one. There’s a colleague you work with named Dr. Chang.” I knew the name, I had been in contact with him very briefly over the last six months. He was one of the six that had been working on the project. We had swapped ideas and theories very briefly. “It turns out that you both make the breakthrough around the same time. A paper is published explaining the findings, which the two of you co-author. Though that paper isn’t released to the public. Instead, it’s held in a federal database which then prompts the president to create a patrol. That patrol is designed to stop future crimes from occurring, while not completely screwing up the timeline.” My look went back to one of confusion. “We’ve done research, ran simulations, and determined that if we remove you from the equation, time travel will still be discovered; though it will be just a few more years. Everything we’ve looked into says that this will affect nothing.” “Remove me?” I asked. “Who were those people? That I…” The words trailed off. “That I murdered?” “It was a symposium. It was the date that everyone had finally settled on to allow Time Travel to be exposed to the general public. While there was no audio on that data recording, there is a separate recoding.” The officer leaned forward and pressed a couple of buttons on the Data drop. The frozen hologram of me vanished and was replaced by an audio file that began to play through the room. This is what we were s upposed to do with this information. My voice began. There was a pause before a deeper voice responded. This isn’t what you wanted, but this was always the plan. You can’t hide something like this forever. Audio Me laughed. How do you figure, we hid aliens and UFO’s for 6 decades. Something like this changes everything, for everyone.
It does, but we’re also limiting access. You know better than anyone that this isn’t something the normal Joe on the street could do. There was another long pause before Audio Me spoke again. I know it isn’t that easy. It took us almost two decades of contestant research to design this thing, but think of the repercussions if you let this out. Do you realize the am ount of targets that get printed on us if this goes public? The US Government already has targets painted on it. You know that. The deeper voice said. This is a secret bigger than anything we’ve ever done. It’s been decided by those higher up than us. Who? Director of CIA, The President? I asked. There was a long pause before I spoke again. How can he agree to this, he knows what’s going to happen. He has to. It doesn’t matter what you or I think, or believe. This is going to happen. The president request your presence at the symposium. You can opt out but I wouldn’t recommend it.