At first the statue seemed to fade into the background but as they got closer, it was clear that it stood right in the middle of the hallway. Under any usual circumstances Jaan would have thought it to be a statute or some artful installation of interior design that could not be subjected to conscious comprehension. But this was no usual circumstance.
Before them was a large rectangular pond, roughly three meters by three meters, filled with a liquid similar to dull mercury. In the ceiling above them, the only part of the ceiling they could see was a similar pond of similar size, with seemingly similar liquid in it. The liquid had no issues sticking to the pond in the ceiling as if gravity up there was acting in a different direction. There were ripples on the surfaces of both ponds, ripples of which he could not tell whether the ripple in one was a reflection of the other pool or not.
And then the weirdest element of all: the liquid seemed to flow from one pond into the other: from the pool in the floor into the pool on the ceiling, possessing the same kind of velocity and consistency as water from the edge of the roof during a downpour.
“What… the… hell… is that?” Jaan asked, with the strange object exerting a much greater effect on him than the low vibration in the air.
“This is a gate.” Mariann said. “It fills much the same function as the gate we entered this place by. However it it much more… advanced. This is some of the technology the commander did not want to let out of the base.”
“A gate? This?” Jaan asked pointing at the metallic liquid dripping towards the ceiling. “A gate?” He asked again.
“Yes. The parole in this case was not a password or a passcode which would allow opening a coded lock and not even a list of procedures how to manipulate some console, but instead information on how to recognize what it is.”
“It is a gate.” Jaan said again, still trying to calm himself. “How would knowledge here act as a parole?”
“If you know what an unknown thing is, then you regard it differently compared to when you have no idea what it is. You expect it to fulfill a certain function. In this form, that gate could lie in the middle of a conservatory or in the foyer of a university. Every day, thousands of people would pass it by, never figuring out it was a gate. Many small children would look at it with a sense of wonder, only thinking it to be a pretty pond with some strange water. None of them would think it to be a gate and with them it does not function as a gate.”
“So I would have to understand it as a gate?” The professor asked. “That I simply step into it and it brings us straight into the commander’s offices?”
“Not quite.” Mariann smiled. “That’s how it was supposed to work under an ideal case. Unfortunately they could not get it to work like that. Because of this, they use things like these.”
She put her hand into the pocket on her skirt and produced a small egg which seemed to be made or spotless black obsidian. She did not allow Jaan even a few seconds to admire the egg before she threw the egg into the bottom pond. He observed the egg slowly float towards the stream flowing towards the ceiling, and then a thin black thread, like a wisp of smoke appeared in the stream, reaching towards the ceiling.
“This is an anchor.” Mariann said. “Every gate produces it’s own specific element. An anchor, or a key is that very element in a concentrated form. If I take the anchor for gate A, and throw it into gate B, then I am tying gate B to gate A for as long as the element is affecting the gate as this black thread.”
“So this gate right on the floor before us exists in reality and is right before us, but the gate in the ceiling exists somewhere else, and we only see it as an apparition?” Jaan asked.
“It is an interesting perspective.” Mariann said. “Not necessarily wrong though. It is more precise to say that the thing in the ceiling is simultaneously all other similar gates in existence. You can think of it as an apparition but the way it is all other existing gates simultaneously is not an existence our minds can comprehend to the finer details.”
“What happens if I throw the pond’s own anchor into the pond?” Jaan asked.
“Then you get a circular gate which brings you back to where you stepped into the gate.” She reached her hand out to the professor. “Let’s go. If I were to step into the gate before you, I am almost certain you will not follow me.”
Jaan grabbed the girl’s hand and he allowed himself to be pulled into this strange silvery pond. The substance in the pond was not wet when his foot sank into it. It was difficult to even describe it as some kind of a liquid, it was more like a very, very thick mist. By it’s physical properties more alchemical and aethereal than fluid. It did not rush into his shoes nor grabbed his foot into itself. He however sensed that the pool had no bottom. His foot sunk deeper and deeper into the pond. His body lost it’s balance and he felt himself fall towards the stream in the middle of the pond that flowed towards the ceiling. It seemed like a central heavenly body in the small world of of that pond. The gravity it exerted was the determining factor, as all bodies within the borders of the bond started at once and at speed flowing towards the streaming pillar.
Along with losing his balance, his consciousness also seemed to change. His field of vision narrowed in such a way that the silvery pillar filled that whole field. All sounds and even the air in the room became background noise. Jaan suddenly felt indescribable fear as well as desire to get as far away as possible from what was happening, as if it was his last chance at life. He feared for his life but it was far too late to do anything about it. The paralyzing fear grew and grew, faster and faster until suddenly… he discovered himself face down on his knees on a floor covered in large tiles of fire red granite. Gasping for air as if he had just escaped from the clutches of death.
“It’s okay.” Mariann said, bending down towards him. “First time is always like this.”
“You’ve experienced something like this before!?” Jaan asked, still feeling the weakness of deathly fear in his body, his hands and legs still shook from fear.
“Maybe.” Mariann said. “I don’t know. But going through the gate neither surprised nor scared me.”
Jaan turned to look around him and then stopped. They were no longer in a mysterious military facility with smooth concrete walls. Of the humanly familiar military base now remained but a dreamlike memory. The place he and Mariann were now in could only be described by one word: a temple. Walls of orange red stone, tall, really tall walls turning into robust rough arches, megaliths making up walls, pillars and even ceilings.
Jaan looked around. The pillars were indeed rough pieces of single stone, standing around the pool of silvery liquid substance streaming upwards towards a similar pool on the distant ceiling. On either side of the pool there were short hallways between pillars ending in archways and under them staircases leading upwards. And everything, literally everything was bathed in warm diffused orange light, like during a sunset.
Even more surprising to the professor was that only the floor here has been polished to perfection. Everything else was rough stone surface, either cut and hewn by human hands or worn into their current shape by thousands of years of sandstorms blowing through the structure. Quite possible due to both.
In the middle of all that titanic architecture was feature Jaan could not get his eyes off. In the base, he had seen the pool filled with liquid metal like mist, and a physical reflection of that on the ceiling. And how the fluid was streaming from the bottom pool to the upper one. But here, the bottom pool resided in a circular depression in the stone floor, with the level of the substance being equal with the floor. The ceiling was high, by his estimate, some 40 meters away. And the substance on the ceiling was not contained in the circular pond but was spread out like a patch of tar. The silvery stream flowing up from the pool and towards the ceiling. As soon as it reached about one and a half meters in height, it had narrowed to a single silvery strand thinner than spider silk. This very same strand gave powerful reflections of light which although not blinding still played on the walls and when reflecting off the stand, made it look as the air itself above the pool was shining and casting the reflections.
Silence was all around them. Not a single sound besides their own steps and breathing. No smell other than stone dust. Even the air temperature was pleasantly cool and perfect to fall asleep in.
“Have you ever seen anything this beautiful?” Jaan was absolutely mesmerized.
“The way you are enchanted by this should scare you more than anything you’ve seen thus far.” She said.
“How so?”
“You don’t know where you are. You don’t know how you got here. And you don’t care. Your only concern is to be enchanted by a phenomenon you cannot understand nor make sense of. We did not come here to admire the incomprehensible. We came to the commander’s offices.”
“The base commander put his office in here?” Jaan asked, turning his eyes towards the girl. “Into this holy temple?”
“Yes, he did.” Mariann said. “I have no idea why, though. Or why he thought of this place as part of the facility or an extension of it, unless...”
“Unless what?”
“I don’t know. Yet. Come. I have a feeling that all of our answers will soon get resolved.”
She headed towards the stairs at the end of the hallway on the other side of the pond. Jaan rushed after her, soon being only a few steps behind her.
However this place had a trick in storage for them. Having walked for some time, the professor noticed that something was wrong. The hallway which had seemed no more than thirty meters long from the pond, was now growing wider, longer and taller. Also the portal at the end of the hallway kept growing bigger.
“This temple is playing with our sense of perspective.” Jaan said.
“With the ceiling as high as some famous cathedral it’s no wonder that the portal in the opposite wall reaching half the height of the room would not be of normal height. Which means the stairs may also not be normal.”
Even the floor which had been polished smooth by the pond was now growing more coarse and rough. Darker spots which he had mistaken for darker crystals in natural granite were instead shadows in large potholes, scrapes and nicks.
“This is the portal?” Jaan asked, standing before a towering stone archway.
The arch of the portal consisted of seven stones and was in turn supported by stone pillars made of seven layers of stone each. Even the first stone on the ground was several times taller than Jaan was. And every step visible from the portal was about 80 centimeters high.
“It’s gonna take me an hour to get up here!” Jaan sighed.
“You’re most definitely not that old and frail!” Mariann replied. “It’ll take me only a few seconds to climb up this. For you, it may take perhaps five minutes, I’ll wait.”
Mariann bent slightly and unbuttoned her skirt from the side, up to the hip, not really caring about the professor observing this. She then walked to the first step and then jumped on top of it. And then onto the next one, and the next one. In fact, it took her less than a minute to get onto the thirtieth step which was the halfway point.
Jaan only took a hard swallow, looking at that. He had no hope of making it up the stairs that fast. For that he was too old and too out of practice. The best he could do was climb the steps one at a time. This too did not take too long. Heavily panting, having reached the halfway point, he collapsed against the wall, staring at yet another thirty steps to get up. Also that Marian had already jumped up there, and was now buttoning down her skirt again.
“Who the hell wants to climb this staircase every day!” Cursed Jaan.
“You’re supposing that those who used this staircase were human.” Said Mariann. “That may be a mistaken assumption.”
She smiled only wider, seeing how Jaan’s tired face reflected the thought developing in his mind.
“Also, the commander of the base may also not have been completely human by the time he decided to move here.”
About five minutes later Jaan had made it up the rest of the stairs. It would have probably been sooner, but he had to take two additional breaks, one every ten steps.
“What was he then if no longer completely human?” Jaan asked.
“Somebody for whom running up the stairs with 80cm steps was no more difficult than with 15cm steps.” She said.
“Like you?”
“Do not expect that two similar phenomena produce two similar results.” Said Mariann, smiling.
She pointed at the wooden double doors not too far. The doors made of red wood were covered in all sorts of intricate golden symbols, the ordering of which reminded him more of magical diagrams than some sort of organized language with symbols and meanings.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“And here we are, the commander’s office.”
The tall wooden doors were so heavy that they had to push one with all their might, dragging it along the stone floor to have even a chance to peek into the office, let alone enter it. They finally managed to create an opening big enough for the professor to also slip through.
That which lied behind the door was a source of surprise but also disappointment to the professor. Behind it was the most ordinary office a commander of a military base would have. The only way it differed from the medical corps commander’s office was that this one was much bigger. But otherwise, a relatively normal office. Not a single outwardly detail to make one think that it was located at some ancient temple. The walls were plastered white, the was wooden parquet on the floor as well as red carpets. All walls except one were lined with dark gray metal archival cabinets. The one remaining wall was arranged to look like a fake window covered in heavy dark red curtains, which did not let in a single ray of light. Before it stood an intricately decorated massive white desk and an armchair, both facing away from the curtains.
“I still cannot see the reason why a person would want to make his office here.” Jaan said.
“You don’t? Because I do.”
With quick steps she slid across the office floor and stopped before the curtains. She pulled the curtains aside, revealing a glass surface which extended from floor to ceiling and from corner to corner.
Jaan had to hold onto a wall to not collapse with surprise. The view out of the window was simply stunning. It was that very same unearthly view the girl in black had described to him shortly after they had entered the base. He could see a stone geison surrounding the window on the outside on all sides. Beyond that were thick white clouds tinted in shades of pale orange quickly drifting by, both above the window level but also below the window level. He could almost see the buffeting wind blowing dust around. And far in the distance, slightly above their level in angle, was a bright circular body of light. But it was no sun. Neither Jaan’s thought nor tongue could muster the effect of calling that thing a sun. It could only be a star of some sort. The star of the local star system. It wasn’t even possible to say whether it was the only star here.
He slowly walked towards the window. He had no words to describe what he saw. He could have described the clouds, the winds, the dull gray-colored sky and the star. But all this could not convey this unearthly feeling it had giver rise to. There was nothing familiar here. It was as alien, mysterious and unexplainable as visions in dreams. An unreachable world a shard of which he could now see before him.
Jaan raised his hand to touch the window, but Mariann quickly stopped him.
“You do not wanna do that.” She said. “This is not a window.”
“This is not a window?” The professor asked.
Mariann grabbed and empty sheet of paper from the desk and crumpled it into a little ball. She then threw it towards the window.
To Jaan’s frightened awe, the piece of paper did not bounce off the glass, but instead passed it, immediately igniting and burning away into nothingness.
“This is not a window.” Mariann repeated. “This is a one-way gate. It allows nothing but light to pass through from that side, and everything to pass through from this side. Well, not quite everything. Not molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, CO2 and argon.”
“According to this external world, it was supposed that the facility and the temple are located at the same place?” Jaan asked.
“Indeed. This supposition too is a bit off-kilter though. Best one could say it that they are located on the same planet. Although even that is unclear.”
“You came here to look for the secrets of the base.” The professor said, still not turning his eyes way from the strange orange world outside.
“I did.” She said. “I already found the secrets. I have some idea what happened in here, or what is still happening in here.”
“Without opening a single drawer?” Jaan asked.
“I could say that all secrets of this place were reminded to me as soon as I took a step into this office. But that doesn’t make anything clearer for you, now does it?”
“No it does not.”
Jaan stepped away from the window and weakly sat into the commander’s chair.
“So tell me then, what happened here? Maybe that will help me better to make sense of it.”
Mariann opened her mouth to say something but before she could utter any sound, her watch did it for her with loud beeping.
“It is time for us to go.” She said, not even looking at her watch. “We have exactly 15 minutes to run through the facility back to the gate.”
“Fifteen minutes!?” Jaan exclaimed. “It’s gonna take me at least ten minutes to descend those god damn stairs!”
“The you have to act faster.” Mariann said. “There’s one other thing I must take.”
She reveled a set of keys in her hand and with that she opened the two locks on the top drawer of the commander’s desk and slid it open. She then removed a small gray cassette tape.
“We can go now.”
What’s that?” Jaan asked, rushing after the girl.
“A small program.” She said in a carefree tone. “As much as I gathered from the materials that made it to the 47th Secret Base, this should anchor the base to the world familiar to us.”
“You want to access it in the future as well?” Jaan asked, looking at the girl jumping down the giant steps.
“Which would anchor it, not grant access.” She said from the lower midpoint of the giant staircase. “Those are two different things. As I’ve said several times, the world in this place is hopelessly twisted out of shape. It will only get worse in the future. It may have a singular reason, it may have several different kinds. This facility being untethered from the world may be one of the reasons. Without this facility, the world is no longer complete, it has suddenly become something less than it has been thus far. Also if the facility drifts in one direction with regards to the world, the world drifts in the opposite direction with regards to it. It is quite possible that such a relationship is something that has twisted the world out of shape. Or maybe it is one of several such influences.”
“Is it not possible that what you are doing makes things worse?” Jaan asked.
“Of course it is. But I will never know it unless I try.”
“Wait.” She said, stopping the professor from stepping into the mercury pond. “You do not want to step into a gate with an undefined exit. You’ll have no way of knowing where you might end up at. Or whether you end up in once place or several.
“Do you have more of those… anchors?” Jaan asked. “To somewhere near the gate?”
“I do.” She threw a small black egg into the pond.
The ball dissolved and a black spot slowly drifted towards the center of the pond and then appeared as a thin black strand in the upward stream.
“Exactly where you want to get to.” She said. ““Somewhere near the gate.””
She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him into the pond right after her. This time Jaan no longer felt deathly afraid. However he also did not step into the pond with his feet first but instead the first thing to touch the stream of substance flowing towards the ceiling was his head as he lost his balance. He still felt the change in his state of consciousness. A thin silver stream quickly grew into a thick pillar and then filled his whole view. The air of an ancient temple and the taste of dry dusty stone disappeared and a moment later Jaan fell onto a cold damp and dusty concrete.
For a few moments he laid there, but the girl’s words forced him to get up.
“We have less than ten minutes! If you want to become one of the permanent inhabitants of the facility, just tell me and I’ll leave you behind.”
Jaan got up and looked around. The beam of Mariann’s flashlight showed that they were indeed quite close to the gates. On the other side of the chain-link gates. In the middle of dusty forgotten computing machinery and other mechanisms. It was absolutely surprising to see one of those gates looking like ponds of liquid metal be placed here behind the corner and into the darkness. When he had stepped into the base and stood earlier on the other side of this very gate he had had no idea that something like this could be hidden in here.
Mariann opened the gate and they headed along the hallway towards the lit gate room. They only stopped on the black steps which led down to the floor of the gate are with lighting underneath the floor.
Before and around them they could see different shadow figures flash into being and then disappearing into thin air less than a second later. Some of these shadow figures were so sharp that one could recognize them as individual people, changing their positions in the room between their appearances. It also seemed that each time, their flashes into existence lasted a bit longer.
“The facility is starting to turn away! We have less than five minutes!” She shouted, seeing the mechanical flip clock counting the fourth minute before losing contact with the Nameless Town. “Go through the gate! Right now!”
She paid no more attention to Jaan and headed into the small control room on the side. She produced the cassette and entered it into a tape receptacle in the console. She then pushed the button next to the receptacle which made the machine read the data off the tape.
A moment later, all lights in the gate room went out. Both illumination, as well as emergency and indicator lights on the gates as well. Only the button panels and keyboard with labels in Russian remained lit. At the same time she could hear how powerful low frequency power circuits cycled down.
“Now!?” She asked in an aggravated tone. “You decide to activate now, you fucking virus!?”
“Mariann?” Jaan’s voice asked from the darkness.
“God dammit! You didn’t go through the gate?!” The girl who was usually the essence of peace itself was now in panicky fury. “I told you to go right away! Fine! We’ll do it the hard way! I happen to have precisely three minutes available!”
At the very moment she said that, her watch emitted three short beeps.
She cracked her fingers and then let them run across the keyboard at a maddening pace. The green terminal screens before her came back to life and accompanied by the mad clicking of the key presses, she managed to bring back the lights as well as the low frequency power circuits. But the illumination and the lights on the gates remained off.
“The reactors have been given the startup order. They require sixty seconds to reach minimum power, then another fifteen to reach full power, it then requires 35 seconds for the first power impulse to reach the gates. That leaves us with 20 seconds to go through it.”
“Twenty seconds to run five meters and jump into the gate.” Said Jaan. “I think we can make it.”
The watch on the girl’s wrist made one last beep. A moment later a low frequency vibration shook the floor of the facility. It quickly grew audible and then faded again as quickly.
“Reactors.” She said. “The power impulse should be on it’s way. This leaves us with fifteen seconds.”
Mariann and Jaan held their breath watching the gates. Suddenly the flip dial above the gate lit up again and so did various safety lights on the gate. However the blue metal gates, which should have slid into the floor and the ceiling, remained closed.
“Fuck!” Cursed Mariann at the twelve second mark. “The doors opening is never automatic! Jaan, be ready to go through the gate as soon as the doors are open!”
She rushed back into the control room and hit her palm on the large button which opened the sliding doors.
As soon as the doors on the gate to The Nameless Town slid open, Jaan ran through the gate, barely managing to duck and not hit his head on the seized upper door on the other side. He had a painful landing on a cold concrete floor in utter darkness. A moment later, incandescent lights in the dark underground hall started to turn on. He turned on his back only to see the flip dial count down the last three seconds and then the opening into the facility in the gate was, in the blink of an eye, replaced with a wall of rough concrete.
Professor Jaan Kotkas was completely alone in this expansive basement hall with a gate made of strange blue metal embedded into concrete and also seemingly filled with it. The lights on it had just shut off and the next moment the semaphore next to the gate also went dead. The gate now looked as dead as it has most certainly been every single day before tonight.
Jaan slowly got up. But he did not head towards the exit, instead he walked towards the now unpowered gate, keeping the beam of his flashlight on the gate and the concrete between the doors on the gate as if there was some chance for the lights and the mechanisms to come back to life again. He even used the handle of the flashlight to knock on the concrete, only managing to make small dings into the surface of it. But this did not change anything. It was clear that if whatever just had happened was not some mad fever dream, the function of the gate had to interfere into how natural materials interacted with themselves and with space-time. This was the only conceivable way for the gate particles when activated to fill the same space that was now filled with non-soluble molecules of silicates and oxides.
Finally realizing that there was no point in remaining down here, he started walking towards the exit with heavy steps. The rusty staircase creaked with warning noises and left a layer of reddish brown dust to his fingers as well. This made him think of another option – maybe it wasn’t the moisture that had made the staircase as it was, maybe it had been all sorts of acids and salts. Although he could not imagine, how.
Having made his way up the stairs, he again found himself in the cleaning supplies closet at the back corner of the reception hall. But it was baffling to step from the dark supply closet into a relatively well-lit main hall. A moment later this faded. If course it was light outside. Mariann had woken him in the middle of the night. They had driven here and spent about five hours in the base. And now it was a sunny pleasantly cool early morning a few hours after sunrise. Completely unnoticed to him, a new day had started and the five hours they had wandered in the base now seemed like a bad dream he could not forget.
Now, in the morning sun, with no traces from the nighttime storm and rain, the broken windows and roof damaged by storms and partially ripped away were much easier to look at and examine. During the night, Jaan had been quite interested in it, but now, a much more important question was weighing on his mind: how to get his revolvers out of Mariann’s car. Also the fact that he had to walk all these kilometers back to town.
He walked through the post office and finally paused for a moment on the exterior stairs of the building. He noticed the girl’s red car with a tan soft top, a vehicle which beat in size just about everything the Soviet Union could ever produce. A bit further away, a partly black, partly olive drab pile of metal and rotor blades, broken plexiglass domes and some tail and side booms was still emitting black smoke, twisted into unrecognizable shapes.
Jaan scratched the back of his head. So what he had heard and seen in the night was correct. At least one Soviet military helicopter really did crash here.
“You certainly took your time to get out, didn’t you?” A familiar female voice said.
Jaan froze, seeing Mariann emerge from behind the car.
“Honestly, it got boring to wait for you here the whole night.” He walked up to Jaan. “I get it. You’re surprised.”
“You remained in the base.” Jaan said, stunned. “Not five minutes ago.” He even took a step back. “How, suddenly?”
“Our times are not synchronous.” Mariann said, smiling. “Let me tell you.”
“Let me...” said the professor, “...think a bit. Please don’t come closer.”
Mariann leaned against the car and gave a sad sigh. “Let me know, when you have figured something out.”
“Mariann was left behind in the base.” The man said to himself. “By now, slightly more than five minutes ago. How is she now suddenly before me…?”
He again looked at the girl in black standing before him. “You found another way out of the base?”
“Yes. Remember those shadow figures we saw when we reached the gate room? The gate closed after you and the shadow figures became real people. Who were very surprised to see me. Just like we had spent five hours wandering the base noting anomalies, they had spent five hours searching around for their anomalies.”
“Their anomalies… were us?” Jaan asked.
“Yes.” She nodded. “After a long discussion I managed to explain to them who I am, where I’m from and what I want. After that, the next time the facility was near our world, they allowed me to leave.”
“it was that simple?” Jaan asked in a distrusting tone. “At night you told me that if we let this chance slip by, then the next chance to access it may three months later. How do you explain that?”
“With the same words I started wen you existed the post office: our times are not synchronous. While three months may pass here, the same may not be true there. Only ten seconds may pass there, or minus seven days.”
“How long did you wait in there?”
“Waiting there was easy, that did not take too long. But it got difficult when I got back here.”
“When?” Jaan asked, already feeling he would regret that question. “When did you get back?”
“Three months and sixteen days ago.” She said. “If my timekeeping is correct.”
“How is that possible?” Jaan asked. “That isn’t possible! You got back before you left!”
“Yes, but that’s how it happened.” She said, now again smiling. “For the last three and half months, two me’s have been moving around in the Nameless Town and the Lost County. It is called a paradox. Well, rather the result of the thought experiment is called a paradox. The thing in reality is simple physics of our corner of the world. Nothing special about it.”
“You came back before you left.” Jaan quietly said. “Which meant you knew exactly what time to come here. For three months, you and your original model have been acting around in town. Have we met before?”
“It would seem so, would it not? No, we haven’t. My original me was of course aware of my presence, she sometimes allowed me to use her car. You may have seen me around, but we have never spoken for the duration both me and Mariann 1 were around. This is something I have agreed to with myself a long time ago. I will notify myself that a time loop has been created and try to keep away from myself before the originating moment of the loop.”
She again stepped away from the car and approached Jaan.
“The fact that there might be a hundred ideas in my mind and I am analyzing local rumors, myths, history, and only hell knows what and because of that sometimes it feels like I am not myself, it is only what seems.”
“You mean to tell me something like that has happened before?” Jaan asked. “You have created a time loop before?”
“That’s not a question I will answer. But it was not a good day. What I will tell you that there may well be yet another me in the Lost County right now who is keeping to herself and either is not aware of our agreement, doesn’t remember it or outright ignores it.”
“Enough, enough!” Jaan said, rubbing his forehead. “I think I’ve had to much of this kind of excitement for one night.”
“I agree. If it is amenable to you, we could to to Valgepalõ for a decent breakfast. I had to spend three hours walking here from the town in pitch black to make it in time and then sit by the car for another five hours until you emerged. I should have brought a book along.”
“So you you did not get here only now?”
“I saw you drive by me. Luckily it rained and you did not see me walk by the side of the road. And no, I reached here only a bit earlier than you did. You went into the post office, I came to the car, and recovered the necessary equipment from the car.”
“Necessary equipment?” Jaan asked. “You don’t mean...”
“You thought the choppers fell down on their own?” She asked, then shook her head. “No such luck. A PG-7VL shot from an RPG-7 into the tail rotor and down she came. Those that survived could not enjoy their luck for too long.”
“Honestly, I can no longer understand who you are.” Jaan said.
“Is that good or bad?” She asked.
“You have kept things from me.” He said.
“Yes I have. And there’s a ton of things I am still keeping from you.”
“Like the true nature that facility? The N syndrome, that temple?”
“Let’s go eat something.”