ISTANBUL

“And a river flowed out of Eden…” --Genesis 2:10

Latitude 39.055N: Beijing

Stacie looked up from the rubble on the ancient Chinese wall and saw the water coming. It was coming fast. The golden heart-shaped locket in her hand seemed to gleam, and she wrapped its chain around her wrist to hold it more securely. Even if she died in the process of saving it, she didn’t want to get separated from it. Inside the ornament was a lock of Alexander the Great’s hair. They say it has magical properties. She’d risked her life to get it. It felt odd thinking it could all end like this.

Not far below on another level, Roman saw the water coming, too. His stomach sank the instant the flood came into view.

“It’s the river!” He yelled, running up a dark enclosure to reach Stacie. “It’s coming, hon! Early! Brace yourself!”

A mountain of water, a skyscraper high, sped towards them. It was a mystical river, the waters of which could be felt and seen only if you knew it was there . . . and the river was magic, the river was light, and the river was pure energy.

The portion of the wall where Stacie stood was under construction. A rail was there for safety. Before the giant wave hit, she’d thrown herself around a metal post, wrapping both arms and legs, holding on for dear life. She glimpsed Roman coming up the stairs the instant the deluge exploded upon her. It slammed with a deafening roar. There was so much water. So fast. And when the water hit, he went one way, and she was hurled another. But they both caught hold of the rail. And though she held on against the force of the tide, completely engulfed at times, with her body like a ragdoll tossed about, she held on.

He was holding on, too. Roman had managed to grab the rail just in time, a few feet away from her. And like her, he was immediately submerged in the torrent.

A break in the clouds showed daylight on the locket’s chain for an instant, so that, momentarily, Roman knew exactly where Stacie was . . . And in an effort to reach her, before the flood swept her and the locket far out of reach, he held out a hand and tried to call to her above the crashing surge—

He had to act fast; he might not get another opportunity like this

“Babe! . . . Stac!” he yelled, his hand still outstretched—but not to save Stacie, exactly. He was reaching for the locket. Roman knew that if he had it, he could save her, himself, and the rest of the world. They had come here to find the river for this very purpose—though, strangely, it was much against Stacie’s desire to actually part with the locket. (He couldn’t understand the strange power this braid of hair had on her). But rid themselves of it, they much--Roman convinced her it was the right thing to do, to set things right. They’d have to surrender the lock of hair back to the river.

"C'mon baby!" Roman called, his face at times barely visible above the water, "Throw it to me! The damn locket! THROW IT!"

But Stacie couldn’t hold on any longer. Her fingers slipped and the water carried her a short distance away. Luckily, her sweater caught the branch of a tree.

Roman saw her in the flood. He knew he could reach her if he tried. He had to. He let go, letting the current carry him as he swam to where she was.

But even as Roman swam toward Stacie, it was hard to believe only a short time ago they were happy-go-lucky graduate students studying wormholes at Caltech. Roman led the team of student researchers, assisted by Stacie, his girlfriend of three years, alongside their faithful sidekick Jon Karl, whom, they weren’t quite sure which of the two he had a secret crush for, because it was known he leaned both ways--together they began the arduous task of trying to perfect the perfect wormhole. And some promising but minor successes had been made—with one milestone after another. And then, finally, they did it: in the laboratory, they made a wormhole.

Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before someone cracked the possible gravity-spacetime-Theory of Relativity-time traveling dilemma, to make an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. With such a wormhole time travel was not only expected, but ultimately possible. With it, they’d have the ability to tunnel from one place in time to another—“Because, time, as we know it,” practical Roman had once said to his team, “is a wave, a river, so that, by combining the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to the de Broglie matter wave equation, with other quantum-mechanical properties—that we’ll call ‘luck’—we’ve made the whole process as simple as baking a cake. We simply used all the right ingredients at just the right time, in just the right way--to bend the fabric of spacetime . . . backwards.”

And bending spacetime was exactly what they did. And when they did this, that's when “the river”—an actual river of energy--appeared. Roman called it The Big Splash, and he couldn’t be prouder of his team . . . They discovered that the river behaved just like the jet stream, only at a much lower altitude. Encircling the earth above the equator, at any given point, this electromagnetic field of energy can be charted, timed, and “splashed” into—to “splash” was the term they used to describe their time jumps, because the experience was like plunging into a cold pool of water. It’ll leave you totally drenched. “It’s the River of Time,” Jon Karl had proudly bragged one day. “It’s what Alexander went searching for—uhn, a Fountain of Youth--but instead he found a river!”

Alexander the Great was one of Jon Karl’s favorite historical figures, if not his absolute favorite.

Not fully ready yet to make their discovery known, the team did all sorts of fact-finding experiments. They did the math and worked the equations and found that a current or “river” of energy flows counterclockwise around the earth in intervals. These interludes of time provide a break between the space-time continuums. If you catch it at the right speed, at just the right moment, then a wormhole can be created. And with quantum computing, they were able to create wormholes to precise times and places to go observe amazing events in history. So far, they could only go back in time and not forward. And back in time they did. Back to witness the Kennedy, King and Lincoln’s assassinations. They witnessed the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. The day Martin Luther, the German monk, nailed the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg castle church door. Unannounced, they dropped in on Queen Victoria for tea and got chased out of Buckingham Palace. They went into the tents of Genghis Khan. They sipped beer with Hemingway in Paris. Jon Karl watched Alexander the Great cross the Payas River in a cavalry charge. And Stacie, who was Jewish, and loved taking risks, wanted to see the birth of her people’s deliverance from Egyptian slavery and went back and stood on the bank of the River Nile as baby Moses, in a basket, was drawn from the river by a servant girl of the pharaoh’s daughter. Tremblingly, Stacie went and touched the basket. There lay a baby boy, wrapped in a blanket, lying in hay. Looking up, baby Moses sees the pretty redhaired girl, and grabs a finger.

They could go and come back at will, so long as they adhered to certain time restraints.

The one problem they wrestled with was whether any changes to the fabric of time would alter the present. Say for example, if something from the present was left behind, or if something from the past was brought back to the present.

“I think a rift in time might occur,” Roman advised. “So, when we splash, we’d better not tamper with the past in any way.”

To celebrate their discovery Stacie suggested they hold a party.

“Yeah, let’s invite Professors Elliman and Seim and all the stiff-necked department heads,” Jon Karl sniggled, jokingly. “Sure, they’d get a bang out of this.”

“Haha, and we’ll call it ‘An End of the World As We Know It Party,’” Roman teased.

They all laughed.

“I know what I’d wear,” said Jon Karl and he had a strange gleam in his eyes.

“What’s that?” asked Stacie.

“I’ll wear a pendant with a lock of Alexander the Great’s hair in it.”

Stacie and Roman looked at each other.

“A wha--”

“Yeaaah, how odd,” Stacie said.

Repeating what he told them about the legend of Alexander’s search for the Fountain of Youth but finding the River of Time, “Or rather, it found him,” Jon Karl said. “So, wouldn’t it be awesome to have something of his represented at the occasion?”

“Really?”

“Sure, legend says after Alexander came in contact with the river, he was anointed for success—and that the power of the river could be seen in his hair. It glowed so brightly it looked white, like a halo.”

“Uhmmmm!”

“Remember Moses’ hair glowing when he came down from the mountain?”

“It was his face.”

“Same thing.”

“And you think maybe that’s what we’ve found?” Roman asked, still not convinced. He chuckled to himself. “You think this is—Alexander’s river?”

Jon Karl nodded in agreement. “Yessss! Sure it is! Look at us! We’re practically gods in our own right, with such power as this in our hands! . . . Why, we can go back in time, to anyplace, to any time we damn well please—and nobody—NOBODY-- can stop us!” The light in Jon Karl’s eyes was frightening. Both Stacie and Roman could tell he was way too hyped up over this.

Of course, nothing more was said about the party, or the pendant, but for some strange reason, Stacie couldn’t get the idea of Alexander’s hair out of her mind. She thought about it night and day for weeks.

She did her math. Worked out the equations. Saw that it could be done. She could go back to a certain day and steal a lock of Alexander’s hair--and history provided a clue to the best appropriate day to do it: the day of his death.

So she went.

At the hour of his death, Alexander lay behind a shroud of thick curtains. They didn't want prying eyes seeing their god-king humbled by disease. Stacie knew she'd only have a small window of time, so she hid until he was left alone.

Weak and frail, Alexander looks up. There stood a girl strangely dressed, soaking wet, holding a pair of scissors .

"Forgive me," she says, rushing forward and slicing off a golden braid.

Just then, curtains fling open as two men in white, walking in, see the strange girl standing over the bed. But in a flash of light and a splash of water, she vanishes.

The men think they'd seen an angel.

Not soon after Stacie's return to the present, strange things began happening. Geological anomalies across the globe fascinate everyone. The first thing people thought was global warming. But soon it was obvious something far worse was happening--oceans swelling produced deadly tsunamis, latent volcanoes in various places, rumbled, caused massive earthquakes, spewed lava and ash high into the atmosphere. An earthquake at the North Pole sent enormous chunks of glacier ice crashing into the ocean--and every strange weather pattern imaginable began to happen. Snow in the Sahara Desert, tornados in China and the Philippines. Temperatures in Melbourne, Australia dipping into low triple digits. The Colosseum in Rome, in a single day, crumbling to powder, and without an apparent explanation, the canals of Venice dried up. There were trains falling out of the sky, swept up by tornados and tossed hundreds of miles, crashing into buildings and highways. The International Space Station lost its orbit and fell on Tokyo. And the earth’s crust was baffling scientists. It seemed earth’s gravity was starting to increase. People in lower altitude cities were experiencing blood clots and headaches and shortness of breath. Hundreds of thousands died daily.

And with the shortages of food, people were so hungry, they traveled in packs, hunting other people.

Seeing the devastation taking place after her return, Stacie refused to take the blame. In her diary one day she penned: “Am I my brother’s keeper? I saw a pack of homeless kids today attack an elderly man, and carry him off. People are eating people. Surely, I’m not to blame for this.”

But things continued getting worse.

Well, maybe I am the cause, she gradually began to think after a while.

So, over the course of several months, Stacie splashed back, not really wanting to give up the stolen lock of hair--the amulet itself having a strange power over her--but she was hoping somehow to undo the damage she might have caused. But each time she splashed back, she landed at a different period in Alexander’s life. And she discovered something about him she didn’t already know: he was a most sensual man. Maybe it was the lure of the river’s magic on him, but she found him completely fascinating, irresistible—his animal magnetism bringing her back to his bedside more than a few times—to watch as the famed conqueror took his many sexual conquests.

“Baby, why did you take the lock of hair?” Roman asked, not unkindly, when Stacie revealed to him and Jon Karl what she had done. She smiled to herself, “In that movie, Oliver Stone didn’t know the half of it.”

“What’s that?” Roman asked.

“Oh, nothing, dear,” Stacie answered, brushing both questions aside; but Roman didn’t see the very next instant the small, well absorbed smile easing across Stacie’s lips, nor the gentle hand raised, momentarily, to her stomach. But Jon Karl was relentless, needling her for weeks afterwards, asking if she’d let him have the amulet and asking whether she’d seen any magic yet.

“No, not a whiff.”

So the three of them set out to discuss a plan to right the wrong—a possible way to return the braid and maybe reverse the events of the past several months.

Of course, Stacie, being the self-willed girl that she was, returned many times secretly on her own and would lurk in the shadows, watching Alexander take conquest of his many lovers…women and men. He had an insatiable appetite for sex—and people knew it--

Then one night in Istanbul, called Byzantium back then, Stacie revealed herself to Alexander while he bathed in a heated pool alone. She’d come unnoticed into the room, got undressed and presented herself to him. . .

It was her secret alone.

It was weeks later, Roman looked intensely at Stacie, those blue eyes of his burrowing a hole clean through to her soul. He loved her and she knew it. She loved him too. He was only trying to help get things back to the way they used to be—with them and with the world. “All the trouble we’re seeing is obvious,” he said. “What we’re seeing is spacetime trying to correct itself. Sweetheart, you’ve got to give up the pendant. Throw it into the river. That’s the only way.”

Then one day something tragic happened. Jon Karl was working with his tablet on an advanced quantum computing algorithm to cancel the time rift, when suddenly a strange blue swirl of light opened and swallowed him whole.

"It's--Its in the amulet—the locket!” Jon Karl said with panic while the void was closing. He hadn’t set a return window, which meant no one could say just exactly where he was going or if he would be forever trapped in the void of space—in a wormhole. "The lock of hair,” he was saying, “Alexander's hair--it's what’s causing the time rift! . . . Find a way to get rid of it! Return it back to the river,” and then he was gone.

After that, while they were still mourning the loss of Joh Karl, Roman confronted Stacie about her behavior there recently. “A woman has her secrets,” she told him. “A girl doesn’t have to tell everything.”

“But the world is at steak here,” he said. “All of us. If there’s anything else you need to tell me, please do it now.”

True, the world had changed. So too had Stacie, but she wasn’t bound to tell him her deepest darkest secret.

Latitude 39.055: Beijing

The river seemed more fierce than ever before. Like a storm.

And although Stacie was all awash by the torrent, yet she was unmoving, still being held in the flood by the tree limb.

Roman worked against the current to reach her. He was a good swimmer. At the tree, Stacie’s sweater was just about to slip from the branch when Roman reached and caught her. He saw she still held the locket in hand, its chain wrapped around her wrist. Somehow, they needed to get to safety. Roman threw an arm around Stacie and was guiding her away when the river suddenly changed direction. With no warning, it threw them both back toward the Great Wall. They landed together between the rail and ad brick wall, and Roman, grabbing Stacie, held her tightly against himself as he penned his back to the wall, with the force of the river beating upon them.

“Got you!” he yelled, holding her in his embrace, and then his eyes saw the locket. A tiny spark of daylight made it glow like a thousand suns. In the fast-flowing current, Roman snatched the ornament from Stacie’s hand and held it up to his face. He needed to throw it away, but for a strange moment, he couldn’t. Just as its magic held control over Stacie, the amulet’s mesmerizing effect now held Roman completely spellbound.

“Return it to the river!” he could hear Jon Karl’s voice pled.

Roman stared deeply at the locket; then, in a moment of hast, he shut his eyes and raised an arm to throw it.

“NO!” It was Stacie’s voice in his ears. “Don’t! I love it!”

Roman, looking at her, shook his head—and against his own will, he threw it—flung the damn locket as far away from them as he possibly could.

It fell on the surface of the water and floated somewhat ominously for a moment. It just sat there, floating. But the next second it was gone.

Roman glanced down at Stacie. Even soaking wet she was beautiful, and he could see there were tears in her eyes. “We did it!” he smiled and held her tightly, waiting. Battered by the waves, they waited to see what happens next. But nothing changed. The water raged on, the roaring was still loud and fierce.

“I don’t understand . . . Something’s wrong.” For a moment, Roman seemed confused, the deluge swelling around them, crashing.

Panic was in his eyes then. “It supposed to have cancelled out the storm. To change things back.” But, looking on, a dreadful, sinking feeling sunk in. He knew things hadn’t changed.

He turned to Stacie, was about to speak when a huge wave slammed down on them and sent them both in opposite directions. She found herself back in a clutter of tree branches, the water pushing at her, small limbs tugging the other way.

Suddenly Roman called out to her.

He was a small ways from her on a slab of wood, large enough to support both of them.

“Baby!” he yelled, holding out a hand. “C’mon, girl! I can save you!”

She was hugging a branch tightly with both arms and legs. Something in her started to reach for him, but a sudden flash of Alexander’s hands on her body came to mind, then. She saw his face over hers, his mouth coming down to cover hers. She could almost feel her body being crushed beneath the weight of his powerful thrusting—and she didn’t let go . . . she didn’t have to pretend either when, in his arms, the moans escaping her lips, came automatically, the shortness of breath, the dizzying ecstasy of his scent; and the joy—Oh, she felt the joy of his personhood the very moment he exploded inside her with a passion she’d never known before--

“Good! It's soooooo freakin’ good! It’s—"

But Stacie held on to the branch as another big wave came in. Within seconds, both she and Roman were completely underwater, Stacie’s arms not letting go of the branch. And she was holding on firmly, even as she watched Roman struggling in the water.

The water was too much for him. The last time she saw Roman, he was reaching upwards while a massive swirl of water and lights sucked him under.

In a few minutes, the river subsided, and Stacie crawled out of the water to a grassy hill and collapsed with exhaustion. She was cold, soaked, and was crying. Roman was gone. Jon Karl was gone. Nothing had changed. The world was still dying. But in her sorrow, Stacie lay clutching her stomach with a trembling hand.

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