chapter 7
TEAM 1, YEAR: 1200
Time Remaining: 185 Days
Jake Anderson opened his eyes. He had half-expected to disappear into thin air and cease to exist. He surveyed their surroundings. Seven deer stood in front of the group, startled by the team’s sudden appearance. The largest deer snorted; a blast of visible breath issued from each nostril. The buck turned and bolted into the bushes. The other six followed, bounding elegantly toward the forest and disappeared into the thick growth.
The scenery looked exactly as the prep team had described it, although more dreary than the image Jake had drawn in his mind. Although fully aware they were arriving in early spring, he had always envisioned a warm breeze, a cloudless sky and a lush boreal forest. In reality, thick, ominous clouds threatened to welcome them with rain at any moment. The woods beyond their clearing contained the various evergreens he expected—fir, spruce and pine with the occasional tamarack—but their muted, winter colouring washed over the forest giving it a dull appearance. Clusters of birch trees were peppered among the pines, their distinctively knotty white bark a stark contrast to their dark-needled companions. Strands of long grass lay brown and matted beneath his feet, damp with snow and weakened by decay.
The clearing in which Jake and his team stood was surrounded by forest with the exception of one corner where the grassy clearing gave way to a rocky outcrop that dropped off abruptly. The forest resumed at the base of the rock face and sloped gradually down toward a lake in the distance.
More noticeable to Jake than the cold, drab surroundings and the pungent smell of decaying grass and leaves was the deafening silence. Sure, he heard the wind, the sound of tree branches tapping against each other in the chilly spring breeze and somewhere in the distance flew a skein of honking geese, but that was all. No traffic. No music. No sirens, no neighbours, no electric humming of various bots, no TV. Nothing. Just him and his six teammates.
Jake surveyed the people for whom he would be responsible for the next six months. They stared at him expectantly and he realized they were waiting for him to issue an order. He felt his chest tighten. What have I gotten myself into?
“Okay, everyone. Welcome to the year 1200! Let’s start unpacking,” said Maya. Seeing that Jake looked a little green around the gills, she dove in, giving him a chance to recover from any post-leap nausea. “Tyler, please confirm the location of the deposit. Let’s see how accurate our fact-checkers are.”
Tyler pulled a yellow handheld device from his backpack, handed it to Jake and the two men walked east into the forest. Maya watched, perplexed, as Clint left the group and meandered toward the edge of the clearing. Hearing her name being called, Maya focused her attention back on the task at hand and joined her three remaining teammates at the supply container. They unclasped the clips securing the lid to the base and each raised their corner slowly and carefully, fighting chilly gusts of wind as it caught the tall cover like a sail. Once cleared of the contents, they set the lid down in the shelter of the trees at the edge of the clearing. Maya removed a black cylindrical tool from her jacket pocket and held it up to read the screen embedded in the handle. She scrolled through different options, selected COMPRESSION/DECOMPRESSION, then held the tool like a flashlight and pressed a button on its side. A narrow, blue laser appeared from the tool’s end, which she aimed at the pile of supplies. The blue beam encompassed the platform and its contents and began to grow. What had resembled little silver sausages only moments ago were now seven full-size, shiny aluminum house trailers. Parked beside the house trailers were two white, cylindrical mechanical monsters. An assortment of neatly stacked plastic crates and boxes covered the remaining area of the platform containing all of the food, supplies, tools and buildings the team would need for the next six months.
Maya Navaros had been assigned the position of Sitespace Manager for the six-month operation. She was somewhat green, having been with the NRD for little more than a year, and enjoyed the administrative nature of the position more than she had expected. The home base of a field operation—like a living organism—adapted and changed over time by its environment and the people that lived within it. It could be happy, stressed, tense or under-slept. Despite the satisfaction, like any job, there were parts that left something to be desired. The position had little glamour factor in comparison to other job roles at the NRD and, at times, it lacked respect; some people regarded a sitespace manager as little more than a babysitting housekeeper.
Maya knelt down at her corner of the steel platform and opened a small access panel revealing a series of coloured buttons. She called out, “Clear?” Three voices around the platform responded affirmatively. She pressed a black button which triggered the fall of a crate only a few feet away from where she knelt. The crate fell forward onto a black metal box, then to the wet grass. Its lid popped off, spilling cans and packaged food. On the far side of the platform, she heard a metallic thunk—the sound a metal toolbox would make if it were to fall on the lid of a hard plastic crate. The sound was followed by the unmistakable clattering of tumbling tools.
“That could have been a lot worse,” she said as Darren walked up beside her. “Something always seems to shake loose when you release that flex field netting.”
“Just be thankful it wasn’t the freezer,” he chuckled. Darren righted the fallen crate and put the spilled supplies back inside.
Darren Roy, Chief Executive Chef, dug through his backpack for his VersaTool—the same black cylindrical tool Maya had used to resize the supplies. He pointed a narrow beam of red light at a large, olive green crate. The red beam engulfed the entire container and he used the beam to lift the container into the air and away from the other supplies. Heavier than three men could carry, Darren guided the crate easily through the air in front of him. He set it down on the ground beside the platform of supplies, unclipped the lid and heaved it aside. Aiming his VersaTool at the contents within the box, he removed a doghouse-sized building with a white canvas roof. Still locked in the red beam, Darren carried the building effortlessly through the air toward the edge of the clearing and set it down gently. He released the beam and contemplated the building’s placement on the brown grass for a moment, then nudged it counter-clockwise, firmly but gently with his knee. Content with the position, he held up his VersaTool to read the display embedded in the handle. He changed the setting from MOVE to COMPRESSION/DECOMPRESSION. A blue light encompassed the small building and Darren backed away as he the structure grew to the size of a single-storey house.
Further down the clearing, Ben crawled beneath the two white, cylindrical drilling machines and released the tethers that anchored the metal beasts to the platform. Like Jake, or perhaps even more so, Ben Bishop possessed an extraordinary ability to fix almost anything. As the head mechanic for this op, he looked forward to the diversity of the machines and systems he would be working with. Everything from complex and ancient excavating equipment to house trailers, alarm systems and whatever else happened to break within the camp. The only problem was, he had never seen these massive, Mole model tunnel-drilling machines before.
Both of the hulking drilling machines hung knee-height above the platform of their own volition. Released from the clips that held them in place on the platform, Ben pushed the first Mole off the platform as effortlessly as if were a helium balloon. After setting it down a short distance away, he parked its twin beside it as Jake and Tyler approached, back from their trek through the forest to locate the Elevanium deposit.
“Have you seen Clint?” asked Jake, looking around the camp.
Ben locked the second massive drill in position so it would not be blown into the trees by the wind. “No, not since we arrived.”
Like Ben had done with the tunnel-boring machines, Lexi crawled around the platform on her hands and knees from trailer to trailer, reaching underneath to release the clips that anchored the housing trailers to the platform. After the seventh and final trailer, she stood and brushed off he
r knees and elbows. Her oversized uniform hung on her tiny frame like a little girl dressed up in her mother’s clothes. The rolled up sleeves of her shirt were loose and baggy and her pant legs were hemmed. Not a hair over five feet and weighing 105 pounds, none of the standard uniform sizes fit her tiny frame.
Lexi weaved her way across the platform, around the trailers and columns of neatly stacked boxes, careful to avoid smashing her knee on any of the trailers’ protruding hitches as she passed. She crouched down at the front left corner of the first trailer, opened an access panel and pressed a button. The trailer rose as if being lifted by an invisible crane. She pressed another button and the trailer’s eight hydraulic legs silently folded into the trailer’s undercarriage like the feet of a bird in ascent. Standing again, Lexi guided the floating trailer backward off the platform. She hopped to the ground and, with some difficulty because of the wind, guided the trailer to its new home at the corner of the clearing. She pressed another button inside the access panel and the feet returned to their down position. The trailer settled itself gently onto the ground and auto-levelled itself.
After positioning the five other house trailers alongside the first one, Lexi placed the seventh and final trailer at the opposite end of the clearing, so as to have a view of the lake in the distance. The exterior of the seventh trailer matched the first six, though the modified interior featured a control room for the two Moles, affectionately called Mole Control. Here, operators could monitor the large drills from above the ground instead of from inside the cramped control compartment within the machines themselves.
Lexi Grant had an unusually delicate build for a Non-Combat Field Equipment Operator; the nature of the work in this position usually involved a fair amount of physical exertion and manual labour. Simplification tools, like the VersaTool and Mules, did most of the work—the days of excessive heavy lifting were gone, but the job traditionally appealed more to men than it did to women.
In Lexi’s first year, she participated in a domestic recon mission to gather intelligence on an international drug cartel. One of her teammates had become violently ill—the operator of a remote-controlled stealth monitoring device—and she covered his position. The device was no larger than a marble with a camouflaging finish that made it nearly undetectable in any environment. It could take pictures, shoot video, take readings and measurements of its environment and transmit the data back to the operator. Lexi flew the device to the coordinates of interest from the safety of the field home base and monitored the area they were sent to investigate. Blowing things up was an adrenaline rush but she loved piloting remote machines and devices that enabled her to do things she could not, like fly or dive deep underwater.
For Lexi, the high stakes of this op made up for the dull nature of the Moles, but it was neither the stakes nor the machinery that motivated her to volunteer for this mission. Tunnel-boring machines were museum artifacts in comparison to the equipment she generally operated. What drew her to Operation TimeShift was the opportunity to take a six-month break from her life. This assignment would be the perfect way to focus on putting things back into perspective.