Atlanta’s story

It was really cool to meet Atlanta in Manchester the other day. I’m so glad I got her number, not like when I met Alex and I had to hatch some elaborate plan to go to Scotland to try to meet up with him again. It helped that I met her in a 21^st century museum, and not a medieval prison!
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about…

https://travellingthroughtimeispossible.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/rescueing-alex-mclean/

Anyway, me and Atlanta have been texting and emailing loads. She says she’s well jealous of all the adventures I’ve been on (she’s been reading my blog too), but she’s been up to some pretty cool stuff as well!

Apparently, as soon as I fixed her phone, SHARP were able to get back in contact and sent her on an awesome time travelling mission. She went through the usual protocols and found herself plunged into total darkness – and not like the darkness you get now, with a tinge of orange street light covering everything – darkness in the past is so black and inky, you can’t see anything at all. It turns out she’d landed in a dorm-room full of sleeping girls. It wasn’t long before an older woman came in and woke everyone up, and it wasn’t even light outside! She soon discovered she was at a kind of workhouse place, but in the country, where young orphans had to work long hours in a factory. And the kids were sickly and skinny – that’s the weirdest thing you notice when you go back a few hundred years. The kids are so much smaller and younger for their age than they are now – I usually pass for a 16/17-year-old, I mean I was a soldier in World War 1 (briefly) and no one even batted an eyelid! She even met a poor boy who’s hand was missing – and she found out why… she had to work in a factory where kids had to put their hands inside the machines to unravel cotton threads that got tangled – talk about dangerous!

While she was there, she met a girl called Esther. Esther had a plan to run away, and I guess that’s why Atlanta was sent back, to help her. You see, we always end up doing something to help people – to make life better – and I guess that creates positive energy, which is what SHARP is trying to harness and prevent some kind of apocalypse in the future. Atlanta understood Esther’s need to get away, she couldn’t even cope with working one day there – with the noise of the mill, the porridge and the machines that chopped fingers off!

Atlanta could barely keep up with Esther as she followed her over the fields and away from the mil, puffing and smoking in the background. The plan was to find a random barn to sleep in overnight and then try to sneak on a train heading into Manchester from there. It was clear this Esther girl had no clue what she was going to do next, but she didn’t care, she’d got away from the prison of the factory. And then Atlanta’s phone starting buzzing her, giving her the cue to return to the present, but when she pulled it out she got a that awful surprise that makes your stomach lurch…

(this is what your phone looks like when you get a message from the future):

<endrant command>
Boson field stability 36% and falling
Quantum lock disengaged
### system error ###

The screen filled with gibberish and meaningless symbols. Now Atlanta began frantically pressing every button. No response. She could hear the whining sound that came with every trip back in time, but it sounded different. It was always a high C note, but now it was wobbling, up and down like a siren. It grew louder and louder until it filled Atlanta’s head.

Then… Nothing.

Atlanta opened her eyes and her heart sank; this wasn’t her house! They had not got her back home. She was still outside, in the country, but now it was daylight. She was standing by a cobbled lane. A stone signpost poked out from the bottom of a bramble hedge, claiming Derby was forty miles in the direction of the hill. Atlanta was really scared now. She was alone and lost, with no idea where, or when!  Suddenly, she heard whistling coming from up the hill. She quickly tucked the phone back inside her clothes. When she saw Esther’s yellow mop of hair coming towards her, Atlanta had to resist the urge to run over and give her a hug.

“I got some apples from that wagon,” said Esther, as if carrying on a conversation that Atlanta had missed, “And a few crusts of bread.”

Atlanta looked at her friend. If she had been dirty and scruffy back at the mill, she was even worse now. Her dress was streaked with mud, her skin was even paler than before and her eyes had lost some of their cheeky sparkle. It must mean that she had been pulled forwards in time, but for how long? A few hours? A day? Or more?

They kept walking for a while and then the sound came again. Atlanta cautiously opened her eyes a second time. Darkness. Complete and total darkness. She swayed unsteadily; the repeated trips through time were leaving her dizzy. For a moment, she feared that she had been pulled out of time and space and left in some empty void, but she refused to panic.

She soon detected the smell of porridge and realized it was worse than ever; she was back at the factory! When her phone went again, she didn’t even bother keeping it secret. She pulled it right out in front of her fellow factory workers; she could already hear the distant high-pitched ringing in her ears as she read yet another error message:

<remote system reboot>
Code operative 15799 located
Emergency retrieval plan initiated…

Attempting subspace contact>>

 

Atlanta’s heart soared. She didn’t understand the technical words but the intention was clear: Mela had found her and was going to get her home.

The screen cleared and another message appeared.

Atlanta,

We had to scan each time quadrant to pin you down.

First of all – don’t panic! I’m coming to get you. We need to pull you to new coordinates where we can extract you. Enter your code to confirm you are OK and we’ll get you out.

 

Atlanta quickly keyed in her code and pressed the green button. Almost immediately the phone buzzed three times, one after another, and the high-pitched whining sound rushed in around her. Atlanta curled into a ball, closed her eyes, and hoped that nothing would go wrong this time.

The noise built to fever pitch and then, once again… Nothing.

But she wasn’t home yet; she’d been pulled forward in time – to 1863!

Danny meets Atlanta

“…I’m a time traveller, too,” I said, so matter of fact – like I was talking about my favourite ice cream or something. I was trying to keep it cool, when inside I was so excited and nervous to have found another person like me.
“Oh, right. Of Course,” she said, like people came up to her an introduced themselves as time travellers everyday.
I frowned a little, trying to hide my disappointment at her coolness.
“SHARP told me you’d be coming,” she whispered, offering an explanation for her casualness.

I stuck out my hand, not really sure how to greet her – should I go in for the hug, or would that be too much?
“Pretty weird, huh?” I said.
“Yeah,” she shrugged.
I looked around at all the displays – the old coins and artefacts from Manchester’s industrial past and that.

“It’s a shame,” I said thinking out loud, kind of to break the silence between us, “all this stuff is behind glass – makes them look stuffy and boring. You forget that these were just normal things for normal people. I wonder who was the last person to spend them, before they ended up buried, waiting to be dug up and put on display?”
“I was just thinking that,” said Atlanta. And then she laughed, like she’d had a crazy thought.
“What?”
“Do you think we’ll get to meet them? The people who had these coins?”
I’d never thought about that – but it would be awesome.

Soon the awkwardness of meeting a new person was totally over and we had loads to talk about. Atlanta told me all about her time travel missions she’d done with SHARP.
The first one – she’d travelled back to 1631 and helped Sir Humphrey Cheetham (whoever that is) escape from the King’s soldiers down a secret passage in a well. Then she told me about her second journey, it was a night in 1940 when German planes had bombed Manchester Cathedral. She told me how scared she had felt, but also how exhilarated.

“It feels good,” she said. “No, better than that, it feels great to actually talk to someone about my adventures, someone who won’t think I’m crazy.”
I knew how that felt.

She was younger than me and had travelled less. There was no way we had time for me to tell her about all the different places I’d been and about SHARP and STRAP and the weird stuff that’s been going on. So we exchanged numbers so we could call and text. And then I remembered… that’s why I was meeting her in the first place: SHARP wanted me to do something to her phone.

But then I got a message from SHARP, for Atlanta. Which was odd, I mean why can’t they just contact her themselves. And then I read further – SHARP were having technical issues and can’t contact Atlanta. Great, so I’m a glorified messenger boy!

“I’ve been sent by SHARP to talk to you about your next journey. The reason you’ve not heard anything from Mela is because they’re having problems. There’s another time travel outfit called STRAP, and it seems like they’re deliberately mucking up SHARP’s systems, hacking into stuff, taking over time streams. STRAP’s already sent a boy called Alex back to a rebellion in Edinburgh Castle, in 1314, and it sounds like they didn’t care if he came back alive or not.”

“That’s horrible!” said Atlanta. “Was he OK?”
“Yeah, he got back all right in the end, but it sounds like SHARP is really rattled. How much do you know about them?” I asked.
“Not much,” admitted Atlanta. “Only what Mela has told me. They’re trying to reclaim art and history from the past because of something horrible that happens in the future, wiping all the records.”
“Yeah, the Dark Chaos,” I prompted her. “No idea what that is, or more importantly when in the future that happens, but it sounds pretty bad. Sometimes, I get pretty horrid thoughts that it might be just a few years away and that we will be living through it.
“Oh my God, I’d not thought of it like that!”
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have got on to that subject, but it is one of the reasons I do all this stuff. But to get back to what I need to tell you. My contact, Kaz, was able to get through to me because my phone was the first one they altered. It had been exposed to the time stream longer and built up a stronger connection, so STRAP’s interference had less of an effect. At least, that’s what they told me.”

 

I rummaged around in my pocket for the coding sequence they’d given me. I had to alter Atlanta’s phone, so she could get back in touch with her contact – that girl called Mela (I wonder if Kaz knows her?)
“They’ve given me a code that will make your phone work again by, er,  re-routing, something called the quantum tunnel effect using a…Heisenberg bridge, I think, to stabilise the neutrino flow… I try to listen to what they tell me but to be honest I don’t really understand any of it. In a way, I wish I did but the science is probably beyond even people who are studying this stuff in our universities.”

She nodded and handed over her phone. It was much older than mine, no touch screen or built-in iPod. I figured I should just start typing, so I copied down the code and, after a few seconds, the phone chirruped a few odd sounds. Atlanta took the phone back  and the futuristic screen that SHARP had installed expanded and hovered in her hand. Almost immediately, a message from Mela came through. Atlanta grinned and couldn’t help but start to read it. I looked around to check no one was watching…
“Probably best to find somewhere more private before doing that again!”

 

Looking at her phone, I suddenly realized the time – we’d been talking for ages! And now I needed to get back to the train station.
“Thanks Danny,” she said, as I was rushing away.

 

I told her about my blog and to google me or something to find it, plus she had my number. How cool is this – now I’ve got two time travelling friends!