Second Chance

Prologue

Colonel Robert Pendleton stood near the mound of an archeological excavation on a cold November morning, waiting for a helicopter carrying General Andrew Baldwin. The air was moist and Colonel Pendleton watched the vapor coming from his breath mix with the fog rolling in off the Chesapeake Bay.

The Colonel was an Intelligence and Public Relation Officer who had been sent to the excavation when the discovery had been reported. Upon his arrival he verified the findings, ensured the security of the site, and provided logistical support to the effort.

His heartbeat temporarily raced when he heard the rapid pounding of the approaching helicopter. The general was a top scientific advisor for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Colonel knew what he was about to present would have a major impact on his career. Heck, it could have a major impact on the whole world. Maybe the past was about to become a bit clearer; perhaps the future would be a bit harder to predict.

The General jumped from the helicopter and walked toward the Colonel with the confidence and authority expected from his rank and standing.

General, I hope your flight wasn’t too uncomfortable, Colonel Pendleton said.

What was uncomfortable was trying to decipher your messages regarding your findings, the General replied. Could you please show me this discovery that is supposed to be so important?

If you will come with me, General, we will show you what was found, the Colonel replied.

They walked from the landing area toward a large cluster of buildings guarded by several soldiers. The General could see the original site of the archeological dig was surrounded by barbed wire and a three-meter-high electric fence. A pair of guardhouses protected a single entrance to the site.

An inner perimeter had been constructed one hundred meters from the outer fencing. Inside this perimeter were a second electric fence and four observation towers manned by armed guards. Large floodlights ensured nighttime security. Several hastily erected buildings had been built to house personnel and security forces.

Quite a facility you have here, Colonel, General Baldwin commented. Do you really need all this?

I did not want these findings to be compromised, general, Colonel Pendleton responded. I thought it best to secure the site until the Joint Chiefs had been notified and determined what to do next.

The mound where the discovery had been made was covered by a large temporary building, which allowed scientists to work day and night. The enclosure also allowed the contents of the site to be protected from the elements. Finally, it provided a degree of security from aerial observation or curious onlookers.

As they approached the site Colonel Pendleton began by explaining that an archeologist had made the discovery while working on a grant from the Federal Government to explore ancient tribal sites. Her project entailed looking for evidence of early contact between Europeans and indigenous people living in the New World. Initially, she found the remnants of a settlement that seemed to date back to the early seventeenth century. As she continued her excavation, she discovered something remarkable and unexplainable. She immediately notified the government agency funding her project. Once apprised of her findings, they notified the military. Colonel Pendleton was called in to take over the project and determine what should be done next.

As they talked, they walked into the facility where the dig had taken place. The entire area smelled of freshly turned earth and you could feel a sense of urgency as others were carefully digging up small amounts of soil to look for more clues into the past. They walked until they came to a screen that covered the portion of the dig which contained the most important findings.

Colonel Pendleton hit a button and the screen moved to show the petrified remains of an ancient soldier who had been buried with a wide assortment of ultra modern devices and armaments.

Colonel Pendleton watched as the General tried to comprehend the sight before him. Talk to me! the General said.

Colonel Pendleton waited a few moments, then said, General, based on the analysis we have run to date, you are looking at the remains of an individual who died hundreds of years ago but who was buried with items far more technologically advanced than those currently in existence.

The General looked at the body skeptically. The person had been buried wearing some sort of fabric which had not decomposed. Next to the body were several weapons that were obviously different from anything he had ever seen.

The General was confused. Finally he said, I don’t know what to say. My first thoughts are that this is some sort of an elaborate hoax.

Colonel Pendleton responded without hesitation. General, as soon as I saw the discovery I called in a limited number of our best scientists to exam the remains. They all agreed, the body has in fact been dead for hundreds of years and the materials surrounding the body have been buried since that period. We do not believe this to be a fake.

The General stepped closer to the exhibit, his eyes probing. Good lord man, are you trying to tell me someone with this type of technologically existed hundreds of years ago?

There is more to tell you. Please follow me, Colonel Pendleton said.

They then proceeded past a guard station that was set up to secure a room constructed in the corner of the site. The entrance to the room was also guarded and Colonel Pendleton could only open the doors once he passed a retina scan. As the door opened, the General, who had thought until this moment that he was surprised by very little in this world, found he was breathing heavily. His heart was beating faster than usual, and his palms were unfamiliarly sweaty as he walked into the room. Inside the room were several overstuffed chairs, a conference table, computer stations, bookshelves, projection equipment, and a case housing various items taken from the grave site.

General along with the body we found some books which you can see in the case. We also found a recording made by the individual whose body you saw in the previous chamber. It is a chronicle of what transpired at this location hundreds of years ago. It is a strange story that you will find as hard to believe as anything you have ever imagined in your life.

With your permission I am going to play the recording. When it ends we can decide on how to proceed.

The General sat down in a chair as the recording was turned on.

Chapter 1

The recording began.

My name is Josh Holloway. I have made this recording in hopes it will allow those who listen to it in the future to understand what my friends and I tried to accomplish in the past. What this recording contains will give you some insights into the past you may wish you had never uncovered.

There will be some who will think I should never have left this record for future generations. I decided to produce this recording because I think someone needs to understand why the events I’m about to discuss took place and then determine if and how that information can best be used to secure a safe and productive future.

I should begin by introducing myself. Again, my name is Josh Holloway. As my story begins I am thirty-seven years old, six feet tall, weigh one hundred ninety pounds, have brown eyes and black hair. I live in a country we call the United States of America, and I am a time traveler from the year 2155 AD.

I was sent back in time to the late sixteenth century to save the planet Earth.

During the course of this recording I will explain how and why this jump back into the past took place. Many of the concepts and technologies mentioned in this recording will be discussed in basic terms. I’m doing this because I have no idea what the planet will be like when my remains are uncovered and this recording is played. There are certain scientific concepts I do not want to describe in sufficient detail for them to be replicated. The decisions made by people who live during your life time should be of your own making and not as a result of hints or descriptions supplied by me.

I am also certain that many of the terms, names, and descriptions I use will be foreign to those listening to this recording. I have had buried with me books that will help you understand what I am presenting better.

In order to understand my mission one has to be familiar with history as it existed during my time line. For this purpose I have enclosed a book containing a history of the world as I have known it from the late sixteenth century until the year 2155. The book is intended to provide proof of what I am reporting and as an informational source to help the people in your time line avoid making some of the same irresponsible mistakes that were made in the past, as I knew it.

I’m assuming our histories are identical until the point at which our time jump took place. I think it is also safe to say if you are listening to this record, your history from that point in time until your present is likely to be different than the one I knew.

In order for you to appreciate what I’m about to tell you, you must first understand why people in my world thought time travel was necessary. You also need to grasp what we were trying to accomplish with our jump back in time.

To accomplish this I need to first give you some idea of what the planet Earth was like during my lifetime. I will do this in summary form because I am only trying to explain why we did what we did and to give you some idea of the situations with which we were faced.

The world in which I grew up was a world in conflict. There were great gaps between the countries that had advanced infrastructures, educated populations, sound industrial bases, and elaborate defense systems and the other nations ruled by corrupt governments with populations who had limited freedoms and were faced with constant starvation and despair.

The sheer number of people on the planet earth had grown so huge, even under the best of conditions self-sustainability would have been problematic. During the twentieth century the Earth’s population increased from one and two-thirds billion to six billion. During the following one hundred fifty-five years the world’s population continued to increase until it reached fourteen billion. Population rates in most developed countries had grown lower or even declined for a long time but the populations of lesser developed countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America had grown out of control. More than eighty percent of the world’s people lived in underdeveloped countries.

Poorer nations had long ago burned whatever fossil fuels and other natural resources they had to meet their energy needs. Forests had been cleared, poor farming practices had caused topsoil to be washed into lakes and rivers, and pollution from these masses of people flowed unabated into the world’s oceans.

Energy demands fueled by this huge population became enormous. Fossil fuels had all but been depleted and the availability of affordable energy had become critical to all humanity. Wind was converted into energy by windmills that dotted the skylines of all nations. Tidal currents, rivers, and lakes formed by dams had been tapped to help supply hydro electric energy. Geothermal systems, nuclear power plants, and solar panels that captured up to eighty-five percent of the energy received from the sun were heavily used. Fuel cells were developed that used hydrogen to power most moving vehicles.

Unfortunately, all nations had been slow in providing the resources needed to convert their infrastructure from fossil fuels to alternative sources. The environmental impact of producing, delivering, and using energy had been underestimated. The quality of life of future generations was sacrificed because of humanity’s inability to come to grips with these environmental problems.

Humanity’s struggle with environmental issues began with the dawn of the industrial age and only got worse as populations continued to grow. Those who stood to gain more wealth and power by allowing old practices to continue corrupted political leaders and misled the public into believing problems were manageable. Unrestrained greed became the philosophy of those who had the most to gain.

Greed and corruption were only part of the problem. As populations grew and petroleum supplies dwindled, people in lesser-developed countries turned to coal to meet their energy needs. The burning of coal only exacerbated growing environmental problems.

The real problem was complacency from a population that didn’t bother to become more informed or to react in time to demand change. People began to love the lives they were living more than they cared about the lives of future generations. They became addicted to new forms of luxury and the consumption of goods. They lived in an era where scientific discoveries were providing unimaginable revelations. They became confident problems of any type could be dealt with by their growing technologies and scientific expertise.

Those in power kept the people confused and misinformed about the damage being done to the air, water, and environment. They tried to convince people problems were cyclical patterns of the planet and not a direct result of pollution. Those who tried to make their concerns understood were branded as tree-hugging liberals who wanted those who were enjoying their existing lives to make painful changes that would unnecessarily diminish their quality of life.

It was only when acid rain had destroyed all life in numerous lakes, when ozone depletion had lead to increases in skin cancer, when oceanic coral beds began to die, when arsenic level in fish began to rise, and when global warming had started to melt great chunks of the polar ice fields that the public started demanding more attention to the environment. Lip service was paid to the problems but little was done to make meaningful corrections. Common sense was still being sacrificed at the altar of greed by those seeking more wealth and power. Complacency ruled over the need for immediate and decisive action.

Global Warming, caused by pumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, became the biggest problem of the planet. The problem was first predicted in the late nineteenth century by a Swedish scientist who calculated that the burning of fossil fuels could increase worldwide temperatures by as much as nine degrees; a condition that he thought would take over a thousand years to happen. In 1988 scientists and scholars around the world noted that global warming could have a devastating impact on the planet but their predictions were not seriously addresses for decades to come. Sadly, even these projections relating to the extent of the problem were proven to be vastly inaccurate and understated.

The planet began to warm faster than anyone had predicted. This effect caused the water near the equator to heat up rapidly. The warm waters spawned unimaginably fierce storms. It was then that another problem became apparent, one we called global dimming.

Global dimming is what we called the effect created when clouds became heavily laden with particles of pollution. These clouds then reflected huge amounts of the sun’s heat back into space. Climatologists soon began to realize they had underestimated the impact of global warming because of the cooling effect these pollution-laden clouds had on the earth’s temperature.

Once pollutants in the air began to be reduced due to controls placed on the burning of fossil fuels, the clouds began to reflect less of the sun’s heat. The planet then began warming at twice the speed thought possible.

Rising temperatures caused the ice in the Arctic to begin melting, snow capped mountains began losing their ice and glaciers began shrinking across the planet. The Greenland ice sheet and the permafrost in the northern reaches of the tundra began to melt. The melting of the permafrost resulted in huge amounts of methane gas being released into the atmosphere, compounding the problems. Sea levels began to increase. Most of Holland and Bangladesh became flooded and coastal erosion became a crisis.

Unfortunately, over two-thirds of the world’s population lived in or near huge cities. Because water sources have historically provided a natural means of transportation, many of these cities were originally built on the shores of rivers or oceans. As the ice caps melted and water levels rose, cities located near the ocean began to build elaborate dikes and pumping systems to try to protect themselves from the ravages of the sea. Some systems worked better than others but all came under unmanageable pressure as weather patterns changed and storms became more powerful.

Soon entire cities were flooding but still people tried to live in them. Horrific urban poverty developed, sanitation systems broke down, and fresh water soon became a hard to acquire commodity. Cities near the coast began to swim in pools of uncontrolled waste and the environmental damage caused by these urban cadavers, cities that were either dying or dead, continued to erode the ecological balance of the planet’s oceans.

Tropical rain bands shifted causing droughts that impacted huge numbers of the world’s population. By 2060 much of the world’s tropical rainforests started to wither in the heat leading to massive fires releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases increased and temperatures soared even higher. Tropical jungles that were once rain forests became deserts. The oxygen produced by the rain forests could not be replaced and the quality of the air itself began to diminish.

Drought in many parts of the world affected hydroelectric power production and in those areas the water level of rivers fell making it difficult to cool nuclear power plants. All citizens of the world were hit with rising expenses resulting from increasing energy costs, new health threats, a lack of affordable insurance, and lost jobs.

The vital resources of the planet were becoming depleted. Petroleum was all but used up by the end of the twenty-first century. Coal and natural gas lasted a bit longer but coal use only created more pollution.

Cold fusion reactors began producing less expensive and cleaner energy but only for the wealthier nations. It became increasingly harder to grow the food needed to feed the growing population because of ozone layer destruction and the loss of topsoil due to defoliation of the earth. As the oceans became more polluted massive fish kills became common and entire ecosystems began to fail. But even more damage was yet to come.

As the number and degree of disasters increased and problems grew, the amount of aid given by wealthy nations to poorer countries fell dramatically. In time there was no attempt to improve the quality of life in poorer nations. In truth, the more advanced nations wanted the populations of the other nations reduced and if nature had its way of doing this, then so much the better. People began to become less concerned for the plight of their fellow humans. As problems continued to grow self-preservation was the priority.

Environmental refugees from underdeveloped nations sought relief from those who still had some sort of existence. All came wanting to escape the floods, the droughts, the storms, the famine, and the resulting conflicts. The industrial nations that created most of the problems plaguing the world were forced to isolate themselves from the less fortunate. They closed their borders and expanded their military power to defend their dwindling food, water, mineral, and energy supplies. They became isolated and despised by those who blamed them for their own misery.

The final blow came from the ocean, a body that had been abused by mankind for thousands of years. Bacteria that eat dead plankton produce something called Methane Hydrates. These molecules are compressed by water pressure and stored in a solid ice crystal state deep in the ocean’s depths. As water temperatures increased, these frozen molecules went from a frozen state immediately into methane gas. Huge sections of the ocean would suddenly start bubbling as the gas rose to the ocean’s surface and went into the atmosphere.

The greenhouse gas impact of methane gas was twenty-six times greater than carbon dioxide. Methane gas is also highly flammable. Lighting storms hitting pockets of methane gas caused huge explosions that lit the skies above the world’s oceans. Only then did the world leaders realize humanity had sent the world spinning out of control and Earth’s surface temperatures were heading toward levels not seen in four billion years.

Civilizations in the past had been destroyed from changing weather patterns but it now appeared all life on the planet was in danger. The planet Earth was becoming uninhabitable. The saddest part of these world-wide disasters was mankind had more than a sufficient number of advanced warnings of the problems but had failed to take the actions necessary to prevent them.

Compounding the problems of those who lived in these sad times was the plight of the poor who lived on the planet. As I said earlier, eighty percent of the world’s population lived in abject poverty, in nations that could not possibly take care of the needs of their citizens. The industrialized nations had closed their borders and used their resources trying to find long-term solutions to the needs of their own citizens. The people who lived in the underdeveloped nations believed the irresponsible actions of the industrialized nations had caused the world’s problems and they felt it was unfair for their citizens to still be leading better lives than most others.

This series of events became a fertile breeding ground for religious fanaticism and terrorism. Armies of hungry and fear-driven people wanted to take what they could from the haves and redistribute it to the have-nots. If they could not save the planet, at least they could make the last days of mankind more equitable.

The military might of the industrialized nations made direct confrontation impossible, so these people resorted to terrorist actions intended to weaken the power of those who were better off than they were.

Terrorists attacked chemical manufacturing facilities, pesticide plants, and repositories where waste had been kept from the nation’s nuclear power plants. Power plants, dams, pipelines, railroad lines, bridges, and tunnels became targets. Forest fires were set in locations throughout industrialized nations.

But the worst was yet to come. Dirty bombs were detonated and left huge areas of major cities unusable. Nuclear weapons were smuggled into industrialized nations and set off.

As always, the human mind became the deadliest and cruelest of weapons. Scientists began engineering deadly bacterium that were resistant to known drugs, were hard to detect, and quickly spread through targeted populations. New vaccines were developed and devices were invented to quickly identify infectious agents. Even with these advances, death continued its march.

New defense strategies were developed and instituted, as the world had to live with the consequences of growing problems associated with terrorist attacks. Vast spy networks were built, borders were ever tightened, new surveillance techniques were instituted, and civil liberties were given up in attempts to make populations safer. Nothing seemed to work.

Anti-missile systems and space-based laser weaponry were developed and used, but even these were ineffective in keeping small radical bands of individuals from wreaking havoc on large numbers of people. Resulting counterattacks by those who had been victimized left more death and destruction.

The youth of the day were made old by the problems thrust upon them by the environmental damage done by previous generations and the deteriorating condition of life on the planet Earth. There was no hope for the future. The world began to resemble more of a nightmarish representation of Hell rather than the planet God had entrusted unto humans to protect and enjoy. The human spirit itself had come under fire and lost.

Chapter 2

The leaders of every nation did everything they could think of to help solve the problems of the day, studying and considering all types of new strategies and weaponry. Money was poured into any system that offered the slightest possibility of success.

Finally, research in a relatively obscure dimension of quantum physics provided a potential answer for dealing with terrorist attacks. There appeared to be the theoretical possibility that a passageway could be constructed into the time continuum that would allow humans to travel back into the past.

If this became a reality, people could then study the causes of a given terrorist attack and determine what could have been done in the past to keep it from happening. Once those causes had been determined, time travel might allow a select team of experts to go back in time and take the necessary actions to ensure the attack never took place.

In other words – the best way to predict the future and to secure the present was to alter the past.

It seemed like a crazy idea that many did not take seriously, but it was worth a try. What they didn’t know was that a breakthrough was about to take place.

Josh intervened in his story to say The science behind time travel is too complicated to do justice in this recording and I don’t intend to go into the specifics of what made time travel possible. I don‘t want what I’m describing to be used to supply others with enough information to attempt jumps back in time. However, I will give a very brief overview of the process.

I am assuming the concept of time travel is new to whomever is listening to this recording. The sheer thought of time travel requires a person who is not familiar with the concept to think way outside of his or her comfort zone.

People live daily with the concept of the past, present, and future. We tend to believe what we have been taught about the past by our predecessors and accept what our senses tell us to be true through our own observation. However, we are often presented with new knowledge that contradicts what we believe and observe to be factual, or the accepted norm.

Not too long ago people were convinced the earth was the center of the universe and that the earth was flat. People in the past felt the best thing to do for the sick was to remove as much of their contaminated blood as possible; nothing was known about germs, blood cells, or microscopic organisms.

The concepts dealing with subjects