The Time Lock

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Dr. Angela Rae was head of Space Folding Research at The Periphery, a Top Secret remote Federation research facility located on the surface of a small moon at the outer fringe of the Kalix system. She and her 20-something-sized team of researchers were working as fast as they possibly could. A single thought racing through everyone’s mind - “How did they find us?”.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Up there, orbiting at a chill 26,000 miles, was death. Having covertly decelerated in the radar shadow of a nearby moon, the tiny Rebel space ship suddenly emerged less than an hour ago, catching every living soul on this outer-rim secret research facility by surprise, spreading fear among its few inhabitants. Wasting no time, the rebels immediately communicated their terms: stand down all defences, halt all interstellar communication, and prepare to be boarded.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ With the hostile rebellion force in orbit, and a likely extermination of all Federation members of this facility, Dr. Rae and her team were frantically gathering all the key discoveries of advanced Space Folding technology that she and the team had made over the last decade. Realizing the danger of having ground-breaking space-faring technology end up in enemy hands, Angela Rae decided to initiate Facility End Of Life Protocol 2B: “Time-Lock Puzzle”. The protocol instructed Angela to encrypt all research findings into a time capsule located in the underground vault below the facility.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ How did they find us? The thought was stabbing at the back of Angela’s mind, while she frantically navigatated authorization steps of top secret subprocesses. This moon isn’t even registered in the Federation Naval Charts - it doesn’t exist. Do we have a spy on our team?
Allowing the terrifying thought to linger in her mind, Angela faced the group of researchers gathered around her in the Periphery’s Command Central - a grandiose name for a small room littered with computers.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ “Everyone, listen up! There is zero chance that Federation forces will reach us in time - we’re on our own. None of us expected this, and I have as many questions as you do. I accordance with Federation Regulation, I have decided to initiate the creation of a Timed-Release Cryptographic Capsule. We need to hurry and prime its payload with all essential blueprints, the Ingegard algorithm, and confirming test data. If we don’t get the capsule ready and locked within the next hour then everything we’ve worked for risk falling into the wrong hands. That could mean the end of the Federation as we know it. I understand this isn’t the way any of us expected things to end. I want to extend my sincere gratitude to each and every one of you.”
Angela hesitated for a moment, but then decided to follow dictum, and with a straight face exclaimed.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"The Federation thanks you for your sacrifice.".
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The research compute room fell silent, its heavenly-white focus-friendly interior decoration creating a mockery of the grim situation the team was facing. The faint sound of busy compute-hardware carelessly whirring in the background sent chills through Angela’s spine. Her last statement clearly drove home the message, no one in this room will be alive in a couple of hours.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The team’s predicament, Angela realised, was the delicate challenge of keeping top secret research out of Rebel hands, until Federation forces return on their scheduled re-supply mission. On the flip side, locking the research away for an indefinite time would place it too far out of Federation scientist’s reach, in a war that the Federation is currently losing.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ What was needed, which some Federation geniuses on Earth had realised upon building the the station, was technology to lock away invaluable research secrets for just enough time until Federation forces would return and retake control of the facility.
What was needed, was to send a message into the future.

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The Time Lock