Chapter 1
**EVENT HORIZON**
March 13, 1953
“Come on”, an exasperated Samantha tells her younger brother - “Here” she hands him a tri-beam eluminating the gentle rain of ash in a city turned monochrome and smelling of burnt hair and plastic.
Trucks stand vertical - crushed in the shadows and nothing moves.
“They could still be alive”. All he can do is snort and trample on, careful stepping - to avoid melting the boots.
They were watched from the shadows, of the radioactive mist.
7 floors up the back staircase of this warehouse and she developed a biting side-ache and another bloody nose. Why all this? Like a nightmare there was no beginning - no memory of Sunday school and school busses to the lake.
“I’m tired” -- they collapse on a pile of insulation in the shade of a 30 foot brick wall == and sleep comes quickly.
Princeton University Physics Dept Classroom 300, 2006
“The periodic table of the elements is fixed - iznit ? The alchemists of the Middle Ages tilted at windmills and came up empty handed”. The professor lectured to a sparse hall. “That is until 2003 when doctor Ivanakov presented in Geneva his lab’s recent work”.
“If lead could be transmuted to Gold with a process involving beta particle addition {nuclear waste decay} -> a far more significant prospect exists”.
Plutonium 249 would become Lavrovium 4096 with an energy content of 364^364^364 newtons to evidently create an, in the words of a perky female PhD student, a super-cavitation of space and time. A weapon that would one day deliver Glory to an empire inchoate.
When she snorts awake he’s gone and a wind calls -- stumbling to her feet and across the room she hears something ahead down these corridors. Tribeam in hand she flies from room to room her rubber soles warm and soft.
“Sam”..., she hears, and then its upon them both. Tom is at the far end of what could be a ballroom with torn murals no longer visible. Both direct their tri-beams to illuminate a twenty foot tall creature in what looks like a striped peticoat or .. business suit but who’s face is a circular octopus of black-oil tentacles in 9 directions.
His name is Gorn, and while a person in the legal sense -- he is anything but human. Super-human : yes. Pschitzophrenic : aye. In the future he was something of a syndicate -- that will be clearer soon.
Time is distorted -- finally fumbelling in her cargo-pants she manages to lob two tazer-lit M-100s at its feet.
She charges, and dives under its reach and through to Tom who is tackled and pushed out the broken industrial window frames and onto the fire escape.
“Where the hell were you going” ?
“Looking for water” he says.
As they descend the rusted stairs - something has surrounded the creature. Gorn is contained, like the Wolf engulfed by torch-wielding neanderthals.
They Run.
December 3, **2018** Arkham air force bunker, Alaska.
12 stories underground.
Colonel Deek : ” How long to counter-strike ready” ?
Admiral Lenon : ” Casualty report ! ”
The subs are offline, infected and have launched.
“Target trajectory ?” inquired Deek.
“Every city, military base, and power plant ; both coasts.. Including this installation.. impact 127 minutes.”
Like a tree struck by lightning whose deepest roots are electrocuted.
A planet with an orbital period of 365 days orbits a sun that is in turn impossibly circumscribing a milky way at one half a million miles per hour. In turn this galaxy is in motion vis-a-vis galactic center.
And thus like an eclipse’s shadow cast upon the Earth -- the E-900 experimental nuke perhaps punctured and projected a shadow across space-time and thereby brought the wicked storm upon Samantha and Tom’s city : 65 years earlier.
That sequence of tactical events that rapidly overtook the efforts of Admiral Deek and the Colonel; against a concealed enemy of trident submarines. The experimental nukes - the implosion & genocidal intentions .. fulfilled; also threw countless souls, bodiless and scattered in infinite space-time to congeal like magnets tossed in a bag.
1953 ::
They ran until their sides ached, and their faces were wet from the fog.
Finding a gas station, Samantha walked to the bathroom.
She looked in the mirror and evaluated her arms, her pretty face.
Behind her, as if made of smoke, appeared an old lady with hair like hers. Samantha turned to confront the creature.
“Why isn’t that remarkable”, “I was such a beautiful creature.” The ghost reached out her hand - and Samantha screamed.
Tom barged in swinging a 3 foot long piece of rebar and near shattered the mirror, as the apparition dissipated like smoke.
“What the hell are you..”
“What was that?”
“I think it was me.. in the future”.
