This is Maria Somerton, Project Key, documenting my return
meeting with Jeff in follow-up to the delivery of Proof-of-Fact. On Monday
evening, May 4, 2015, I received a text message from Jeff asking if I would
meet him the next day, at 2pm, in front of the Broadway Performance Hall at the
college.
I texted him back, “I’ll be there!”
On Tuesday, May 5, 2015 at 1:55pm, I transported back to the
college. Jeff was late. By 2:15pm, I was getting ready to text him when from
behind me I heard his voice.
“Maria?”
I turned around and even before seeing his face, I said, “Jeff, thank you for meeting with me.”
“I think we should talk in my office,” he said. He seemed
nervous and spoke in a shaky voice. He turned, and I followed him. We walked
across the campus, then into a building. We walked down halls lined with
classrooms and into another smaller part of the building filled with individual
offices. When we got to his office, Jeff went straight to the chair behind his
desk. He quickly sat down, and motioned for me to sit in the chair positioned
at the corner of his deck.
He stared blankly at the surface of his desk, then said,
“So, tell me again. You’re a time traveler from 400 years in the future. You
work for a time travel agency, and you want…what from me?” His voice was
emotionless.
I leaned forward in my chair, and in a calm, quiet voice, I
said, “Jeff, I know it’s scary. I understand.”
He took a shallow breath. His hands were on the desk with
palms flat. He nervously looked out the window, then back at me, then back down
at his desk. He took a sip from a mug he had placed off to the side. Then, he
started to talk.
“I looked at the newspaper on Friday. I thought you were
crazy. I thought it was something you had mocked-up and printed, but it looked
authentic. Yesterday morning, I walked down to the QFC grocery on Broadway and
I bought a copy of the Monday Seattle Times.” Jeff’s voice dropped to barely a
whisper. “I compared the two newspapers, all day…and line for line, word for
word, I couldn’t find one word, period, comma, or space that didn’t match-up.
The two papers—the one you gave me on Friday, the one I bought myself on
Monday—were identical. How is that possible?”
Jeff sighed heavily, and took another sip from his mug
before he started to speak again. “I thought maybe I’d imagined you and our
conversation. But, I checked on you….
You’re registered here at the school. You’re real.” Jeff leaned back in
his chair and sighed again. He looked like he hadn’t slept.
“Jeff, listen. You’ve been confronted with something that
contradicts every law of nature and science that you know. Give yourself some
time. Breathe.”
Jeff closed his eyes, leaned forward, and rested his head on
his desk. He took a deep breath. The room was silent for a few seconds, then a
police car came screeching up the street, red and blue lights flashing past
Jeff’s office window. My heart jumped. I thought he had called security. Jeff
raised his head, almost like he was expecting the police. I pulled my CRM out
of my messenger bag. I stood up and looked out the window. I could see there
was some commotion out on the street. I couldn’t tell what had happened, but it
soon became obvious it had nothing to do with me or Jeff. I felt safe again and
went back to my chair.
Undistracted by the noises outside, Jeff said, “Maria, you
told me to call you if I wanted answers…. I want answers, and I want to
understand what’s going on—but the implications of all this are beyond me. It’s
all beyond me.”
I tried to keep my voice calm and quiet. “No, no it’s not
beyond you. Think of it as just another mystery. You live with mysteries. Why
are we here? Where do we go after we die? Everyone lives with mysteries every
day.”
Jeff peeled off a small, yellow adhesive note from its pad
and began folding and unfolding it nervously. He kept looking at the note, then
he would glance up at me, and then back down to the blank note.
“Yeah,” he said, “Everybody lives with mysteries.”
“Jeff…Jeff,” I said. “Look at me.
Everyone speculates about time travel. Time travel has been at the intersection
of imagination and science for hundreds of years. You’ve just been confronted
with the reality that science—as it has for thousands of years—has once again
built a bridge from imagination to actualization.
Jeff didn’t respond. He fumbled silently with the yellow
adhesive notes. We sat there in the quiet of his office, for two, maybe three
minutes.
I told him, “You don’t have to believe I’m a time traveler.
You don’t have to believe anything I’m presenting to you—it doesn’t matter if
you don’t believe it.”
Jeff laughed, then asked, “Okay, where do we go from
here?”
“Information exchange. That’s all. A series of meetings—with
me first—and later with other members of my team. You choose where we meet. We
ask you questions. You can ask us questions.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” Jeff said. “What if—what if you are—a time traveler? And I tell you something, give you information
you act on, and….”
I interrupted him. “Jeff, you’re concerned about the temporal
paradox—the butterfly effect. Is that it?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“It doesn’t work that way. Time travel doesn’t work that
way,” I said. “As science and technology moved into the realm of time travel,
scientists uncovered a whole new set of rules. These rules made it impossible
to inadvertently change or alter time.”
Jeff stared at his yellow notes, then looked up at me. As he
raised his gaze, I said, “Jeff, we’ve been traversing the strings of time for
200 years. It’s solid science.”
I sat up in my chair and said, “Alright, I want you to think about what we’ve talked about. Think
about your concerns, and then think of a place we could meet, and how much time
you’d like our meetings to be. Then, when you’re ready, call or text me.”
