StarGaze

When Harry Met Lloyd

"And that was the time I found out about you," Thomas said and smirked.

"Me?" Raghav said but Thomas ignored him.

Thomas lit up the tenth cigar in the day as he worked on his plan. The dark wet basement was only lit up by his solar-powered lamp and tiny insects flew around the light, annoying Thomas from time to time.

As he closed another file, he impulsively reached for his rusty revolver and pointed it at the corner of the room. The cold room was as still as it could ever be, but Thomas’ cornea dilated as he looked closely. Just when he thought that this was only the alcohol inside him, the bright blue light lit up the room and Thomas got ready to fire while covering his eyes using his free hand.

“Relax Thomas; there will be no need for firearms. At least not today…” the man stepping out of the portal said.

“Director?! What the f**k are you doing here, with all due respect?” Thomas asked, combing his hair with a hand in an attempt to look presentable.

“I felt like I should have a real heart-to-heart talk with you on the topic going on in the agency. To be very frank, you are the only person I can talk to about these things.” The director said, looking around for a chair to sit on.

There was only one chair in the room and Thomas passed it to the old man to sit on. The man, in his sixties, sat down with a disappointed breath and prepared himself to deliver the knowledge.

“Thomas, you have always stayed loyal to the agency and I know you would do so time and again without asking anything in return. And I don’t want to…” the director said, crossing his legs.

“Just say it, old man. I am going to be killed now and forgotten like I didn’t have anything to do with the independence of countries.” Thomas fired up.

“No Tommy, we are not killing you. You didn’t sneak out on us to be on this mission. I always knew you would come here. And now that you know the objective but you are all alone, I have come to clear things with you.” the old man said.

“Okay, go on…” Thomas said, instantly cooling off after knowing he wasn’t going to be killed.

“Now I want to share something with you. Something so secret that no more than three people know it. and if someone were to get access to this information, we would be in a world of trouble.

A long time ago, terrorism plagued this beautiful earth of ours. You know that the White Feather was founded after scientists had a breakthrough in physics. They learned to treat time as a quantity that would be toyed with. That is all you know. But do you know how they learned such a mind-breaking thing out of nowhere?

It wasn’t out of nowhere. I found the book when I had reports of strange nuclear signatures around a house. People were getting sick around that house which was abandoned for a long time. I managed to trace the source of radiation to that particular book, journal to be precise.

It was written by someone named Raghav Dhaka, but when I looked up the name, no one relevant seemed to pop up. And when we read it, we were astonished. It told fancy tales or otherworldly beings.

Now we are scientists, so all this is nothing more than a tale to us. But when we examined the diary to see what was causing the radiation surge, we would significant evidence strengthening the legitimacy of the contents in this book. And so we seriously studied the elements and the things described in the journal. We had found extraterrestrial elements in the book itself, and we knew it might be a trick by the aliens to make us destroy ourselves.

So we invented time travel, but we kept it in safe hands to delay the apocalypse, if not deny it. I have dedicated my life to peace, and I know you have to, even if it requires you to use violence.

The agency is under grave threat now, and your mission decides whether we make it to the future or not. I may be dead anytime soon, so I want you to read the most crucial chapter of this tale and imprint it on your mind. Understand?” the director said, letting out a cold sigh and handing Thomas a dusty old brown-colored diary.