I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.  I don't want to give away any spoilers, so I won't say too much here.

NOTE: Our main character is still nameless at this point.  Here you have a chance to influence the story, just reply with a comment to tell me what you think this main characters name should be.  I'll pick a name from the suggestions and if I choose the name that you came up with then I'll give you a prize of 1.0 SBD as well as attribution for the name.  Feel free to shout out as many names as you want.

Chapter 1 – The Path Of Least Resistance

  I had just finished giving a lecture in Chicago on the emergence of super-germs in modern society when I was approached by a mysterious character.  They brought me in on a government war game experiment designed to test the viability of time travel.  My part was to help analyze the evolution of viruses in computer simulations.  The goal was to predict what kind of germs might hitch a ride on a time traveler, and possibly how to prevent any time traveling germs from evolving into plagues.

  Apparently scientists had already worked out how to achieve time travel, but the problem was finding a source of energy that would be powerful enough to make it work.  Unfortunately the real problem it seemed was that the scientists who figured out time travel didn't keep their work a secret, and nearly every government on Earth was now racing to find an adequate power source for time travel.

  The good news was that nobody was even close to generating that much power.  Some had even joked that it would take more energy than there was in the entire Universe.  But we were assured that someone would do it at some point, it was just a matter of time.  So in the mean time we were conducting as many tests as we could to predict what kind of consequences might happen with time travel.

  I was just thankful to be working on the biological part of it.  Those theoretical physicists who spend all their time crunching numbers about cause and effect must go crazy with the math behind it all.  Most of the time I spent just looking at computer simulations of biological samples, analyzing the potential evolutionary progress of viruses. At one point I heard a rumor that some people were working on trying to find evidence of time travelers already having gone back to historical times.  I thought it was a little silly, but then again it was all just a war game.  So I half-jokingly suggested that they look into the spread of the Bubonic Plague, because my research had suggested that time travelers would probably bring back germs with them, and that people in their past would not have any immunity for those germs.  He got very quiet after that and I got the feeling I said something I shouldn't have.

  I had not realized how absolutely necessary all the secrecy was for the research.  Even in my mid 50s I had been as naive as a child to think that I could just speak openly about my work.  I heard all that and more when the administration officers chewed me out for speaking to someone about the research I was involved in.  They were furious, and couldn't believe that it was me who leaked the information from my department.  They took me off the job immediately.  I tried to argue my case and in my defense I managed to convince them that sharing some information between research teams could be beneficial to the work in the long run.

  Ultimately they decided to reassign me to a less critical position.  My new mission (if I chose to accept it) was to research hallucinogenic drugs known to cause prophetic visions of the future and a sense of deja-vu.  The thought of studying smelly mushrooms didn't appeal to me at all but at least it wasn't the end of my career.  I really must have been naive because eventually I accepted the new job. About three or maybe four months later, I made another mistake.  I leaned a little too close to one of the testing subjects right after they had finished a DMT session and they burped out a little bit of smoke at my face.  Before I could even remember what dimethyltryptamine sounded like as a word it had already begun affecting my mind. What happened next was absolutely impossible.  I tried to stumble out of the room.  I think I must have bumped into the wall a few times on my way out because I could swear I heard people laughing at me.  The weird thing was that the only people in the room were myself and that hippie who whiffed the smoke at me.

  He was just standing there in his lab coat starring at me while I was twitching on a cot.  No wait, that's not right.  I was watching the hippie twitch from the comfort of my lab coat while some moth was bugging out about going through a window or something.  But for a moment I could have sworn that I was the moth, and the hippie, and myself at the same time.

  I rushed to open a window and get some fresh air.  Some how I think the moth beat me to it, but I still needed air so I opened the window and stuck my head out.  The cold air felt like hundreds of tiny balloons on my face and I leaned into the wind.  As I fell over the window ledge I spread my arms out and up and took another breath.  Before I knew it I was flying over the trees and away from the building, off into the distance over the street intersection beyond the window.  And then splat!

  For some reason I didn't panic when the moth I had been thinking about died on the windshield of an old rusty truck.  But suddenly it occurred to me that the window was closed, because I couldn't breath through the glass with my face mushed up against it.  Everything seemed perfectly natural again when I stepped back away from the window and looked down at my weird gigantic hands.

  Trying to think rationally again I decided that I needed to reconcile the logic of what had just happened.  I looked around the room for a moth, but there were only myself and the hippie who was now mumbling something about hidden rooms and levels within levels.  The door was closed, and I was pretty sure now that all of the windows in the room were sealed shut.

  So then why was I thinking about a moth in the room just before I looked out the window to see a moth get hit by a truck outside?  I was definitely thinking about a moth before I looked out through the window at a moth, but there was no moth in the room.  For the life of me I couldn't figure out how I knew I was going to see a moth before I could have seen the moth.  The hippie was starting to come out of it and I needed to get back to work and act normal before he noticed that I had been affected by the DMT smoke.  Very quickly I wiped away drool from my mouth and checked for wings hoping I hadn't eaten any moths.

  I picked up a notebook and started reading silently about what exactly was in that smoke.  Apparently DMT is a molecule found in almost every living thing.  The brain always produces higher than normal doses of DMT specifically at two different times, first during sleep in the dream state, and again in much higher quantities at the moment of death.  It's theorized to be the hallucinogenic source of dreams and the reason why people have afterlife mythologies.  I should have already known all that, but my memories still felt a little hazy.  I looked around the room again, that hippie was staring at me now.  I felt out of place and then I remembered that I was going to leave the room ten minutes ago.  My sense of time was way off.  Quick, what year is it?  It's 2036, of course.

  Yes, I was definitely coming out of that drug induced state of confusion now.  What a wild trip, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of dosage level my hippie friend had gotten.  I looked out the window again, but now the sky was turning a dark shade of red.  At first I couldn’t tell if I was hallucinating the changes in the sky or not.  But then I realized that some of the cars on the street had pulled over and people were beginning to get out of their vehicles to look up and see what was going on in the sky.

  One of the cars rear-ended another car causing a chain reaction pile up on the street in front of me.  None of the people outside seemed to pay any attention to that though, they were all more concerned with whatever was happening in the sky.  I began to hear a hurried panic in the hallway outside the room.  I didn’t want to look away from the sky for fear that I might miss whatever was happening up there, but I walked across the room and opened the door to peek out into the hallway.

  A group of medical assistants were gathered around a radio at a reception desk.  They were crying, and one of them looked like she was about to faint.  With the door open I could somewhat hear the announcers voice on the radio.  It sounded like one of those emergency alerts.  A couple of people ran past me down the hallway.  I managed to make out the words ‘Asteroid’, and ‘Extinction Level Event’ coming from the radio.  I tried to listen more carefully but it was hard to tell what the radio was saying over all of the noise going on around me.

  Suddenly i felt the entire building lurch sideways by a couple of feet, pieces of the asteroid had already begun to break away from the main chunk and some were colliding into the land while other smaller fragments were exploding in the sky above us.  The doorknob was wrenched from my hand just in time for the very real and very solid door to come swinging back and hit me right in the face, and I knew instantly that this was no hallucination.  I felt scared.  Stammering my way back into the room, I could see the window had been blown out, there were broken pieces of glass everywhere.  That’s when the old hippie opened his eyes and looked at me.

  “Please tell me this isn’t another intervention...” he mumbled.  I didn’t know what to say, I just looked out through the hole that used to be a window at the chaos unfolding in the skies above us and in the streets below.  Why was this happening?  Why hadn’t the government detected this massive asteroid before it hit us?  And why, oh why, couldn’t it have just happened after we got time travel working?  Now there was no time left.  The planet was being torn up like a shotgun blast from space, and all I could do was watch it happen in front of me like some kind of horror movie.

  The whole building jerked quickly in an awkward direction as another piece of the asteroid hit relatively nearby.  I almost fell out through the window, but I was lucky and fell backwards instead.  Our building, however, didn’t seem like it could handle much more of this, debris was falling all over the place, and even though the noise was deafening I could still hear the sound of support beams bending and twisting under the cataclysmic assault.  There was just no time left.