Tevun-Krus #100

49 - A Million Pigeons - @MotherMonster310 - Time Travel

A Million Pigeons

By MotherMonster310

1999, The Rosenfield Cemetery

Gwendoline Engel closes her hands ever so tightly, feeling the warmth and innate compassion of her companion while listening intently to what he has to say, as a stream of unbridled tears flow down her cheeks.

As her companion confesses the ramifications of his decision, he clenches his fist around a gun, mulling over the inevitable.

All the while, a figure cloaked in the shadows behind a tree witnesses surreptitiously what transpires in front of his eyes—vowing to himself that, no matter the cost, he will put an end to the events that have led to the current predicament.

Present

Max Daskalov opens his eyes as he wakes from a frequent fever dream—one where he hears "Look over the horizon, Max... and I'll always be there... waiting for you" being uttered by a feminine voice, beckoning him while humming a tune of unknown origin. Although he can't see the figure's face with much clarity, he is most bothered by the tune... as if he had heard it countless times, but can't seem to locate its origin buried deep within the chasms of his mind.

Keeping the dreams a secret, he continued to perform his prescribed nominal duties for Chrono Corp. And despite the dream, today is no different.

Time travel was discovered in the late 22nd Century and is stringently regulated by Chrono Corp. Its initial discovery was kept a closely guarded secret, hidden from prying eyes. Then the core heuristics of time-travel technology were inadvertently leaked out into the open by a surprise security breach in the labs.

Abused by criminals and international terrorists, whose abhorrent actions have led to the copious amounts of anachronistic events that slowly degraded the very fabric of the space-time continuum, time travel was outlawed and its knowledge erased from the public domain. Proliferation of contraband time-travelling tech and its misuse led to "The Great War," an apocalyptic event that nearly wiped out the feeble remnants of humanity.

That was when Jake Longfellow, grandson of Nikola Longfellow—the scientist who had discovered time travel in the first place—established Chrono Corp, a peacekeeping time-monitoring authority which occasionally puts an end to the multitude of anachronisms that destabilize the time stream. Ever since Chrono Corp's inception, Jake has headed the organisation, keeping a strict eye on the activities of everyone involved in the organisation—lest the technology falls into the wrong hands and causes more damage than it already has.

Max is summoned by authorities and is ordered to investigate a horrific murder in the city of Lost Angels. A writer named Lucile Benson was found dead in his bathtub in the wee hours of the morning. Hailed as one of the best agents since the organisation's founding, a perplexed Max requests the reason for investigating a seemingly ordinary murder unrelated to chronal tampering, when it's revealed that the chronal-anomaly detector had in fact picked up residues of chronal energy at the scene during the preliminary investigation. These residues are usually found after the use of time travel.

Max reaches Lost Angels, a sardonic and ironic play on the name of Los Angeles. Once a place of cultural renaissance, now a cesspool of scum and villainy—where the less-fortunate members of this decadent neo-society have taken refuge since the Great War.

Max begins examining the crime scene. He finds traces of chronal energy and four different crude symbols carved out of the man's flesh. Max then asks around Lucile's seedy neighbourhood. It is revealed by some neighbours that Lucile had visited a dentist for his treatment of gingivitis, caused by consumption of low-grade food scraps.