Chrono Voyage

Chapter 9: Pripyat

     “Are you alright?” asked Benjamin as soon as the machine landed somewhere unfamiliar or rather crashed.                                                                                             

     “Yeah,” Elizabeth sprang up to look only to see a big valley of grass that sprang as far as the eye could see, the atmosphere seemed depressing, the skies were gray, the scene looked pale and it looked like it was going to rain. Elizabeth shivered and crossed her hands as her chin started trembling.

     “Here,” Benjamin took off his coat and gave it to her, she stared at it as she couldn’t believe the gentleman that was in Benjamin, but nonetheless she took the coat and put it on, it was a bit bigger than her but after all Benjamin was taller than her. “This can`t be good,” he said as he stared at the console, and then looked up at the depressing scenery.                        

     “What?” asked Elizabeth.                                                                                          

     “What do you mean what?” he couldn’t believe it. “We are nowhere, in a desert with no food no water…” Elizabeth ignored him and took a few steps forward, she saw some houses and buildings in the distance.

     “Not nowhere,” she pointed at the houses, she just knew it, she programmed the machine well, almost too well, every time to land near civilization and not so near as to be seen materializing out of thin air. In fact, it was the first thing she came up with, she realized it while she was building the machine. You see time machines will take you back in time, and in the future. But since Earth always rotates around the sun, its position in the solar system changes constantly, therefore if you were to jump in the future the machine will take you to where Earth is supposed to be but hasn’t yet come since it is its future, and you wouldn’t want to be floating in space without a spacesuit. Elizabeth thought that this could be a possibility but she learned that as you move through time everything moves with it, if you bought a carton of milk in the present and went back in time the carton of milk would be on the shelf of the store until the present comes and you buy it, this didn’t matter to Elizabeth which she has already built the system but she later found out that it wasn’t a total waste after all, since if you were able to pinpoint Earth’s position in time, there is a high chance that you would teleport inside one of the oceans, thus Elizabeth came up with a solution for it to land every time near but not too near a city or a village.         

     “Well, where are we then?” Benjamin took a few steps forward and looked toward the city in the distance.

     “I don`t know,” Elizabeth was unsure, “But judging by the depressing scene, I’d say Eastern Europe?” she then noticed there was a highway nearby that led to the city as sure enough there must be some signs that indicate or tell the name of the city. Both of them walked towards the highway, but it wasn’t like they were going to find a sign right away, it wasn’t like they were placed a meter apart from each other, but they had luck that cars were passing through, Elizabeth lifted up her thumb hoping a car would stop, Benjamin, of course, had no idea what she was doing and why lifting the thumb up to fast-moving metallic contraptions could be helpful in the situation that they were in. Until finally Elizabeth’s thumb efforts had finally paid off as a BMW series 7 car slowed down and stopped next to them.

     “Privet!” spoke the man from the inside.

     “Russia…” spoke Elizabeth quietly, still wondering where they were and why Russia of all places?

     “Privet,” Benjamin greeted him back and that was it, he had no idea what to say further or what to do as he suddenly turned to Elizabeth.

     “Tell him we need a ride to the city,” she instructed.

     “Nam nuzhna poyezdka v gorod,” spoke Benjamin still confused about what they would ride on because you ride a horse and what else would you ride? The man simply opened the door for them and tapped on the leather seat, Benjamin stood still watching the man smiling at him from inside the car, Elizabeth looked at him and made a grimace for him to enter the car, but he still stood still and had no idea what to do. She opened the door and sat in the back as Benjamin followed and left the door open, this door wasn’t like the one in Monte Carlo to close itself automatically. That was it for Elizabeth, this was the last time they were going to the future to where everything is unfamiliar to him, she closed the door and Benjamin just copied what she was doing.

     “Kak tebya zovut tovarisch?” asked the man. Benjamin told the man his name as they passed by a yellow sign that read Pripyat, Elizabeth read it and she couldn’t believe it.

     “Oh you’ve got to be bloody shitting me!” she thought to herself stroke her forehead and leaned back on the seat. The man driving looked at Benjamin again and asked why she isn’t talking that much. And with Elizabeth having no idea what the man had asked him, she couldn’t guide Benjamin on what is appropriate to say. Benjamin on the other hand as friendly as he tried to be, explained to the man that she is British and does not know Russian, being friendly is nice and all but what he did not know was the current political situation and also proceeded to say that he is American, which is something that you don’t say to a Soviet Russian at least not in the year they were. All of a sudden the man stopped the car and reached for the glove compartment pulling out a gun and pointing it at Benjamin.

     “What!?” Elizabeth opened her eyes and looked upfront as the man had pointed a gun at Benjamin. Now Benjamin the old chap here just like Elizabeth also had no idea what is going on and why he has a gun pointed at him.

     “You American spy?” asked the man in a mixture of Russian-American.

     “What? A spy? No sir, I am a doctor…” Benjamin was panicking.

     “You told him you are an American?” Elizabeth looked at Benjamin.

     “What was I supposed to say?” asked Benjamin.

     “Quiet!” yelled the Russian guy. “You speak Russian and you dress good, you a doctor, what doctor of?”

     “Physics!” yelled Elizabeth from the back. “We are physicists, we came to assist in the nuclear power plant.”

     “Nuclear power plant?” Benjamin was confused as to what that whole thing meant.                                                                                                             

     “Nobody mention at work that delegation coming from Brittain,” the man pointed the gun at Elizabeth, he caught her in the lie, besides how was she supposed to know that he works there. “You spy, you blow up the power plant, you kill many, but no I kill you, I become hero for Mother Russia. The man turned his gaze away from Benjamin and looked at Elizabeth, his fisting tendencies kicked in at this moment as he struck the man and knocked him out while he was distracted. It would seem that he only hits at people who threaten Elizabeth like the one time he hit Robert and the policeman.

     “Okay, crisis averted,” sighed Benjamin.

     “Is this your solution to crisis averting? Punching people?” asked Elizabeth.

     “Would you rather he killed you?”

     “Whatever…” Elizabeth came out of the car and opened the trunk, finally, the luck has turned on their side and found some rope in the trunk, she took it and tied the man up.

     “What are you doing to him?”

     “Benjamin…” she looked at him while she was tying up the Russian dude. “We are about to blow up a nuclear power plant,” so the man was technically right when he tried to stop them not to blow up the power plant. “And there is a man on the loose telling the authorities that an American blew up a power plant-killing Russians in the process. And let me tell you how close are America and Russia to launching missiles at each other.”

     “Well…?” he waited for the information.

     “Well what?” she looked at him annoyed.

     “How close are they?”

     “About Planck`s length… Are you satisfied?” he nodded.

     “But blow up a power plant, and kill people in the process?” he kept asking. “What is a power plant?”

     “Don’t worry about it, he was just being dramatic,” she lied as she sat down on the driver’s seat and turned the car around away from Pripyat and toward the machine.

     She parked the car in the woods to cover themselves, opened the hood, and removed the automotive battery. She then moved to the back of the car and lifted the hood and stopped for a moment turning towards Benjamin. “Can you carry him to the machine?” she looked at the Russian guy.

     “I’ll try…” Benjamin pulled out the unconscious dude from the car and onto his shoulder he carried him toward the machine. They walked a couple of meters to the crashed machine that was unapproachable by car. They reached the machine and Benjamin just lay down the guy as Elizabeth noticed the destroyed panel and the cables that were torn out.

     “Bloody wanker!” she was talking about the Prophet and the damage he had caused. “We have to go into town and grab some supplies, to fix this thing,” she waved with her hand to push out the smoke that was coming out from the machine. It seemed rather convenient that the machine just crash-landed in an era where you can buy supplies to fix it, for example, it could have landed in the distant past before even iron was discovered and she wouldn’t be able to fix the machine. It wasn’t convenient at all, it was one of Elizabeth’s genius things that she did, the machine was made so that in case of crashing it would always land in an era where electronics were easy to come by, just like the part where it lands near civilization.

     “What do we do about him?” Benjamin looked at the Russian dude that was lying on the ground unconscious. “He is going to report us to the authorities.”

     “No he won’t,” Elizabeth tied up his hands and then tied him to the machine with cuffs, closing the machine shut with him inside, there was nowhere he can go, and if he screamed nobody would hear him.

     “The Chernobyl disaster is the biggest nuclear disaster in the history of humanity, it was going to happen about two hundred years from our time if time itself hadn’t been altered by The Prophet,” Elizabeth was explaining to Benjamin whilst they were walking on the streets of Pripyat.

     “What exactly happened?” asked Benjamin.

     “There…” Elizabeth pointed in the distance towards the four nuclear reactor buildings. “In exactly ten hours an experiment is about to begin, an unprepared shift comes to work and the fourth reactor blows up releasing large amounts of radiation.”

     “Let me guess, we are going to blow it up?” Benjamin looked at her.

     “The new history states that the experiment went well and gave advancement to nuclear energy as a whole, not only that but it paved the way to new technologies that concern the prophet… and us.”

     “What kind of technologies?” asked Benjamin, but Elizabeth remained silent. “Elizabeth what kind of technologies?”

     “The ones that are nuclear powered… The suit that the prophet wears is nuclear-powered, and with that, he is a step closer to developing the technology of transferring consciousness and gaining immortality. Taking this away from him is a step to bringing him down, but it also is a step of slowing down the progress of humanity. Never the less we’ve got to do it,” Elizabeth finished as she stepped down from the ledge that they were standing on so that she can show Benjamin the location of the reactors.

     They went inside an electric store where Elizabeth wrote down all the things they need to buy and gave Benjamin to read it in Russian so they wouldn’t be suspicious. Not that he knew what any of that meant nor what’s it used for, all of that technology seemed like magic to him. He bought cables, a welder, a device that looked like a capsule, some duck tape, some plastic, and they were on their way out of the city and towards the time machine. There was a loud thumping sound coming from inside of the machine and some muffled screams. Elizabeth opened the machine and the Russian physicist dude just jumped outside and fell on the ground, Elizabeth looked at him with pity and ignored him as she moved the to the back of the machine and set the tools they bought on the ground, there was no time to be wasted it was getting dark and work had to be done the machine had to be fixed. Benjamin walked up to the guy and removed the cloth that was stuck into his mouth, surprisingly he didn’t scream nor say anything not that it would have helped him, they were far from any civilization. He just starred at Benjamin as he stood up and grabbed a sandwich from the plastic bag. Both of them looked at each other because the guy couldn’t eat the sandwich with his hands tied to the back and on the other hand, Benjamin did not want to untie him.

     “I wouldn`t do that if I were you,” Elizabeth warned him from the back of the machine.

     “Are you saying that…” Benjamin realized what had to be done, he sighed and sat on the grass next to the guy feeding him the sandwich.

     The Russian dude finished eating the sandwich as Benjamin held the plastic bottle of water for him to drink, he was really careful of people’s needs, even if for him the plastic was an unreal thing, it was glass but softer. It was evening the sun was setting as Elizabeth came out of the back and sat inside the machine, she pressed a button and booted up the machine. “Alelujah…” she said quietly, the lights shone, the engines revved, everything was working as it should. “Hold on I’ll be back in a jiffy,” she said to Benjamin as she closed the door and the machine disappeared.

     “What the…” The Russian dude jumped he didn’t know what to feel, surprised, amazed, scared, for Benjamin it became a normal thing even though there are a lot more things he does not know. Elizabeth did not lie and she did come back right away as the machine appeared at the very same spot with a whooshing sound and a wind blast.

     “I’ve got it,” she came out proudly from the machine, carrying a cylindric device.

     “Got what?” asked Benjamin. She was going to answer him but then looked at the guy just laying on the ground.

     “We have to do something about him,” she stared at him.

     “Like what?” Benjamin looked at her suspiciously.

     “Why are you looking at me like…” she starred at Benjamin. “No! No! I am not going to kill him,” she breathed out in relief.

     “Well what are you going to do?” he asked as Elizabeth just looked at him and then picked him up from the ground. She dragged him inside the time machine and closed the door.

     The time machine popped up in a dark cobblestone alley barely illuminated with a couple of torches.

     “We are in the 14th century Russia, yes time travel is real, talking about it will get you burned on a stake, actually… talking about science, in general, will get you burned. There is money here to live like a noble.” She pulled out a knife from the machine and cut the rope from his hands, lastly she handed him the brown pouch filled with money to the top. “One question,” she looked at him. “You don’t happen to have a family do you?”

     “No…” he said quietly.

     “Well good then, if our mission goes well, I will bring you back in your timeline and you won’t remember any of this, well then… Cheerio!” the guy was just at a loss for words from all the shock he just lived through, who would have thought that waking up early for work could end you up in the medieval ages.

     “What did you do to him?” Benjamin was startled as soon as Elizabeth returned with the machine.

     “Nothing…” she started moving toward the car.

     “It’s not nothing, he is gone,” he chased after her.

     “I made his life a tad bit more interesting other than the one he had back here, alright?” she stopped dead and stared angrily at Benjamin. “Now I would fancy it if you could stop asking me questions on this topic,” she pulled out her driver’s license from the machine and entered the car. Elizabeth was ready for anything, it would be rather stupid if you were smart enough to build a time machine and got caught driving a car without a license. The first time Elizabeth went on a trip to the future and saw the cars, she wasn’t amazed nor surprised, as should nobody be, everybody from her time knew that carriages exist and it’s only a matter of time until they evolve into something better, in this case, cars. Benjamin sat in the co-drivers seat and they drove off away from the machine and toward the highway leading to Pripyat.

     “This device,” she lifted up the black cylindrical device will heat up the reactor enough to explode it, it needs time so that we will have enough to escape,” she looked at him as he was nodding. “I will plant it where it needs to be planted, you will go in the control room, talk to your colleagues and open some doors that need opening.”

     “My colleagues?” Benjamin was confused.

     “You are now Comrade Lev Ivachenko, nobody will recognize you you are from the other shift,” she pulled out an ID card from the glove compartment.

     “Elizabeth… you didn’t pick this contraption from the highway on just pure coincidence did you?” he looked at her but she remained silent and focused on the driving. “We’ve got a problem,” he kept persisting. “Stop the car!” he raised his tone at her.

     “What is it?” she asked angrily.

     “You said, colleagues… There’s going to be people in the building when the explosion happens, what will happen to them?”

     “Nothing…” she said quietly but didn’t even look him in the eye, Benjamin knew that she was lying, since the kids that he treated at work would always look away from him when they were lying to him. 

     “Don’t you dare lie,” he starred. Elizabeth stopped the car instantly and moved away from the road.

     “What do you want me to tell you!?” she looked at him annoyed. “Do you want me to tell you that they are going to be fine after they’ve been irradiated? Do you want me to tell you that the air in the city would be clean so that people won’t die living in it, is that what you want to hear?”

     “Irradiated? People dying? Entire city dying?” he looked at her with his jaw dropped, as Elizabeth looked down in shame, she couldn’t believe it slipped from her tongue. “Elizabeth we’ve got to help those people,” he said, “We can’t just let them die! When were you going to tell me this!?” as a matter of fact she was never going to tell him, she was ready to sacrifice those people so that she can achieve what she set out to achieve.

     “Benjamin…” she grasped the wheel tight from all the anger. “We can’t save an entire city, and you should make peace with it since we are doing this for a bigger cause.”

     “What!?” he jumped, she must be some kind of a psychopath because who says things like that? “For a bigger cause?” he couldn’t believe it. “They are people who have their own lives, their own families, their own dreams! And what? We are just going to take that from them?” he stopped expecting an answer but she remained quiet, her mind was set. “You think they care about our bigger cause?”

     “It’s a sacrifice that needs to be made,” she spoke.

     “No… I am not doing this, I’ve crossed the line with killing that Russian evil guy, but not this,” Elizabeth just slammed her head on the wheel, she couldn’t believe they were arguing about this, she looked up front and thought for a minute.

     “Prypyat is a city surrounded by not one but four reactors,” she looked at Benjamin.

     “So?” he was confused.

     “That means there’s got to be an evacuation system already planned in case of an emergency, that means we need to trigger the alarm and once they start to evacuate we will blow up the reactor,” she clenched her fist and struck the wheel, she had the perfect plan, everybody wins, except not quite. Activating the alarm would mean that the Prophet himself would be alerted about the goings-on in the city and he will be on the hunt for them since it's so important to him that the reactor doesn’t explode. Elizabeth knew it would take him time to find their exact location if they were to create a diversion to send the Prophet looking the other way, then maybe just maybe they would have a small window to evacuate the city and blow up the reactor. It wasn’t the perfect plan anymore since it wasn’t so simple now, there were a lot of moving pieces and each depended on the last, which meant a high risk of failure, but it was a risk that Elizabeth was willing to take, just to set back technology and to prevent the Prophet from ever reaching immortality.