the Romans assigned us watch shifts to participate in during the course of the day. Each of us was assigned a different shift, which were rotated biweekly. My first shift landed me patrolling the ramparts between midnight and six in the morning. By the grace of God, our gear had managed to find its way to our camp a few weeks after our arrival, carried by a few loyal slaves of Caligula’s, and was greatly appreciated by us all.
We found cold weather gear in the supplies, which made those long windy nights much more bearable. I didn’t know how the Romans didn’t freeze to death, but they endured, and somehow remained healthy. It honestly seemed like a miracle.
My watch shift rarely synced up with Helena’s so we rarely had time to speak with one another. I missed her during that time. The sparks we’d felt months earlier had yet to rekindle, but we cherished the time we spent together nonetheless. It wasn’t until late January that we were lucky enough to land watch shifts that kept both of our nights free, and while many of them were spent talking about our pasts, most revolved around current affairs and our lives in the Roman world.
We always had plenty to talk about. Over the past four months, I successively began lumping more and more responsibility for our predicament on my shoulders. My responsibility notwithstanding, I took it upon myself to be the one who tried to understand the situation and find a way to get home. And even though it was hard without anything to reference, I wracked my brain around the topic day and night. Neither Varus nor Caligula had thought to bring the sphere or manuscripts with them, so all I was left with was to think on the subject, something I did in excess.
The problem was that there wasn’t anyone for me to talk to. Vincent knew the classics, but time travel was a mystery to him. Varus knew about the orb, but not how it was related to time travel. Santino had watched a lot of movies in his day, but was hardly the guy to go to for an existential debate about anything. Everyone else fell into one category or another, and it forced a sense of ownership of the problem onto no one but me.
It was compounded by my new leadership position within the group when Vincent ordered me to attend Galba’s meetings. Even there, he took a backseat during the proceedings to let my more — eclectic — mind cogitate on the issues. Vincent himself had even become a major internal debate because of those actions. I’d yet to understand a single decision he’d made in the half year we’d been stuck here. It all culminated to make my life extremely stressful, and Helena knew it.
“What’s wrong?” She asked quietly one night, feeling something was amiss from across the tent.
“Hmm? Oh. It’s nothing,” I replied, likewise keeping my voice to a whisper.
She shifted onto her side to see me more clearly. “Come on, Jacob. I know you better than that by now. You have that far off look again. The one that says you’re trying to wrap your head around something so complex that no matter how hard you try, you know you’ll never figure it out. You know, like Santino when he’s trying to figure out which boot goes on which foot.”
I chuckled. “You always know what to say to cheer a guy up.”
“I know,” she said playfully. “So what’s wrong?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. I hate to sound like a broken record here, but I just can’t shake the feeling that somehow we’re here for a reason, and I don’t mean just in this camp, but in Rome, in 38 A.D. Based on the decisions Vincent’s made since we arrived here I can’t help but think this whole thing is a setup. Somehow he knew we’d get sent here, and he knew that sphere would do something crazy, and now he’s on some kind of mission he hasn’t filled the rest of us in on. Except, everything we’ve done since we’ve been here is a mistake, and as a result, we’ve totally fucked everything up.”
“Are you sure you even deserve an answer?”
My eyebrows furrowed. “Of course I do. It’s my fault we’re here to begin with and I deserve to know everything I can to try and figure out a way to get home.”
“Maybe that’s not really you’re responsibility either,” Helena insisted.
“Not my… How can you say that? If not me, then who?”
She sighed and looked away. “If you want my advice, then I say you should forget about it, but if it means that much to you, talk to Vincent. Get him to tell you the truth. You can’t let this eat at you forever.”
“I guess. To be honest, I’ve been hoping to avoid that conversation. Have him come out to us on his own.” I took a breath and thought. She had a point that the longer I let this fester, the worse it was going to get. I had to clear my own conscience and there was only one way to do that. “I’ll talk to him.”
***
If Helena had been right about one thing, it wasn’t that talking to Vincent would make me feel better, but that by talking to him I would at least find the truth. I wished I’d never even tried.
A few mornings after we had talked, I’d went looking for Vincent. I found him eating breakfast with a number of centurions, talking and laughing with the fellow career military men. I loitered around the area while I waited for him to finish his breakfast, before approaching and asking politely if we could talk. He excused himself from his buddies, and took a walk around the camp with me.
We spent the first two laps discussing camp gossip, which believe it or not, was prevalent, the weeks itinerary, and the weather, everything but what I had intended to confront him on. He noticed I was keeping something back, and demanded I just come out with what was bothering me.
So I did.
“Sir. Prior to our arrival here in Rome, did you, or any of your superiors, have any preconceived notions or intelligence regarding the methods, means, or motives behind how we got here?” I’d practiced the line over and over in my head for months, but I’d never had the guts to ask. I wasn’t sure if I feared a reprimand or the truth more.
Vincent continued walking around the camp, thinking deeply before answering my question. “Yes.”
I snorted out a laugh. Of course he did. There were too many plot holes in this story for him not to have.
“So, are you going to tell me, or am I going to end up dead tomorrow before I can tell anyone?”
“I’m not going to kill you, Jacob. You have a right to know.” He sighed, and I felt frustration flowing off of him. “It wasn’t supposed to happen the way it did. We had no idea things would turn out like this.”
“Maybe you should start at the beginning.”
He took a deep breath before continuing. “Six years ago, in 2015, papal historians were conducting routine research in the Vatican archives when they came across a document which spoke of a means to change the past. From what I was told, and from what I’ve learned here, I assume that document was the very same one you and Varus had discussed, or at least a copy. I assume so because the historians indicated it was written in a very old language, Etruscan they guessed, which proved nearly impossible to translate. However, it had numerous notes, scribbling, and translation attempts scrawled all over it, as well as on attached notes. I assume the document you saw had no such writing?”
“No, sir. It didn’t.”
“You see? I’ve been learning from your little lectures. The notes must have been written sometime between now and when we found the sphere, as more and more people attempted to unlock its secrets, before it somehow wound up in our archives, lost and forgotten. Anyway, the few discernible facts historians pulled from the notes were about a blue sphere. At first, we thought nothing of it, until a news report surfaced in 2016 concerning the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities break in. The one in Cairo.”
“I remember reading about that,” I replied, vaguely recalling the morning I read about it on my news feed. “Apparently nothing of value was stolen, except for two items, neither related in any way to the other. They never released what those artifacts were.”
“That’s probably because they thought their importance wasn’t significant. However, we quickly learned that one of those artifacts was actually in fact our lost blue sphere.”
“Really?” I asked. “The plot thickens.”
Vincent ignored my sarcasm. “We knew the robbery was committed by known terrorists from the security footage. Most were unrecognizable nobodies, but there was one the CIA identified for us. Abdullah.”
Now things were getting interesting. “So, let me get this straight,” I said, hoping I hadn’t missed anything. “Your researchers recovered evidence of an ancient time machine, which just happened to be residing, inconspicuously, in an Egyptian museum, only to have said museum broken into by Islamic extremists and the
