The Theta Prophecy by Chris Dietzel

hole as it got further and into the earth, he settled on a simple method of using moving floors that would be controlled with ropes and pulleys and allow him to move up and down a certain amount of distance, to the next level. Panels of each floor could be removed to allow him to dig further down or to climb up to a previous level. Every ten feet, he would step onto a new wooden floor, like a prehistoric elevator, and descend another ten feet. He would still have to do years worth of digging by hand, but at least it gave him a way to get deep below ground level. For the massive amount of dirt he would be moving, he would use a second series of pulleys for raising and lowering the buckets he was alternately filling and then emptying. With this system and a complete set of tools, shovels, and buckets, he would be able to dig into the earth as far as time allowed. And the one thing he had too much of was time—the entire rest of his life—so he could easily dig as far as four tree lengths, assuming his patience lasted that long.
    But even once he settled on an approach, it wouldn’t be as easy as digging the hole. He would be all by himself, on a remote island, for long stretches of time; he needed to have all the resources for survival so he could live on his own. In addition to having to make all of his own tools, he would need a way to have a steady supply of drinking water and food as well as a sturdy shelter for when the winds and rain came. All of it would take time.
    Before he started, he spent an entire day sitting around the village and thinking about his family and the rest of the country and even the rest of the world, and how everyone was a victim of the Tyranny in one way or another. If he was going to go through with this, if he was going to devote the rest of his life, or at least the next few years, to digging a massive hole in the ground in hopes that the box at the bottom might one day be used to prevent the Tyranny, he needed to know he was thinking clearly.
    Without anyone he could talk to about his idea, all he could do was try to think what the other time travelers would do in his position. Each man had wanted nothing more than to prevent over a billion deaths around the world, stop millions of innocent people from being sent to prisons, keep everyone from living under the weight of thousands of laws meant to control every aspect of their lives.
    Every Thinker knew there were a few key ways they could prevent the Tyranny—stop the gathering at Jekyll Island, foil JFK’s assassination—and that outside of these primary objectives and a batch of secondary objectives, no time traveler should interfere with the course of history. He knew that. But here, amongst the Mi’kmaq, hundreds of years before the Tyranny, it wasn’t so easy to give up the mission he had been sent back in time for. He had left his wife and son, he had survived his reappearance, and for what? Just to live as a member of a tribe?
    At the end of his time reflecting on what he should do, he knew that simply living out his remaining years wasn’t enough. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life doing nothing. When it came time to eat that night’s supper with the rest of the tribe, he knew in his heart that he was doing the right thing, that the possible rewards outweighed the possible risks, that no matter what it took he would prevent Debbie and Carter and everyone else from being told where they could go and where they couldn’t, what they could say and what they couldn’t. He would keep the world from ever having to look up at the sky and see little cameras flying everywhere… or bombs dropping on their homes.
    “Big day tomorrow,” he said to Benio as they ate a bowl of soup in front of a fire.
    The elder did not say anything, only nodded and offered a faint smile.
    “I start my big project tomorrow,” Anderson tried again.
    The sides of Benio’s mouth curled upward and his eyebrows dropped into a frown. “Do what you