For some years top secret Pentagon forward planning reports had pointed the way to the weaponry of the future; this soon became an inevitable reality. Apart from battlefield lasers to blind the enemy, armoured exoskeletons to enhance the killing power of an average grunt and military computer viruses to disable an entire country's communications network, there had been 'humane' mines.
Conventional mines represented bad public relations for any army. Long after any war had been fought mines would remain, maiming civilians, creating uninhabitable areas of no-mans land and costing a fortune to dispose of. The loss of life in minesweeper groups alone was deemed unacceptable.
Thus it was decided to develop mines which could be deactivated once their useful life was ended. In this manner minefields could be cleared in a matter of hours with no risk to any operatives. The simplest way to accomplish this was to fit each mine with a radio receiver, tuned to a specific encrypted signal which allowed complete, remote deactivation on command. However, these systems were prone to counter-espionage. The acquisition of the correct codes by unknown forces allowed the 1996 massacre of American troops in the Middle East, and it was after this that further research swung into action.
The logical alternative was to use a timer mechanism. When the mines were laid and armed, a timer was set to deactivate the mine after a specific time period, say one year. Any additional time periods could be set by use of a radio receiver. However it was physically impossible for the timer to be reversed. In other words the only two possibilities were for the timer to run down after a set period and the mine deactivated or for the timer to be advanced.
This method proved foolproof. During the American led defence of Hong Kong these so called Time-Mines were utilized to great effect. Urban Time-mines were used with timers initially set at one week. Whole areas of the crowded city would be mined to resist Chinese incursion; then one week after the Chinese forces had been flushed from an area it was possible to walk the street in complete safety. Any advances made by Chinese troops into previously safe areas resulted in the timers being reactivated for another week, thus turning whole areas into unpredictable deathtraps. It has been stated by General Tringam in his recently published memoirs that the use of Time-Mines was pivotal in the defence of Hong Kong and the subsequent collapse of communist China.
But as with any weapon, research into possible defences against the weapon continued. For example, the British research into anti nerve-gas agents carried out at Porton Down proved its worth in combating the accidental release of the nerve gas Clambutol over the South of England. So it was inevitable that research into combating and countering enemy Time-Mines was conducted by the American defence agencies.
Any premature deliberate detonation of such weapons was ruled out due to unintentional damage to surroundings and the possible loss of life of mine sweepers. Exactly the reason the Time-Mines had been developed.
Consequently, it was decided that research should be pursued into the possibility of somehow fooling the timers in the mine into thinking that the necessary time period had passed and that the mine should be de-activated. The on-board timers in the mines were mechanical, acting on electrical impulses received from a power pack with an operational lifetime of fifteen years. This use of mechanical devices prevented any electronic interference and made any conventional solution to the problem near impossible.
Thus it was that a near impossible solution was arrived at and this was how the American military were the first in the world to develop a time machine.
The reasoning was simplicity itself. The mine must either be made to believe that a certain time period had passed or be made to actually experience a given time period. The first solution was rendered impossible by the foolproof design, but who could have designed against the use of a time machine.
The creation of the time machine occupied the attention of a medium sized physics department with almost unlimited funds for five years; such was the importance attached to the project. The breakthrough came from a Professor Blair, the joint leader of the research group.
To accelerate time, he reasoned, you had to move in the fourth dimension. Normal motion in the three physical dimensions exists due to an action-reaction process. That is if you push an object forward, you are in fact simultaneously pushing yourself backwards. Therefore, to move an object more rapidly into the future you must also move something of a comparable age backwards through time.
Having worked out the theory of the problem it proved a fairly simple procedure to perform the act with the power of Projection Computation: Record an objects position down to an atomic scale while simultaneously projecting the exact time reversed field of its existence over top of it. This has the effect of reversing its personal time field. When linked to an un-projected object this would have the effect of accelerating the test object through time.
A working device was provided within a year of the breakthrough, although it required a supercomputer the size of a large truck to perform the necessary calculations. However, the advent of nano-technology proved the project's saviour. Computer power unimaginable in the past was now available in the palm of your hand.
Field tests of the Anti-Time-Mine, or ATM as it came to be known, were infallibly successful. Active Time-Mines experienced time shifts while remaining fixed in space. In some instances they were pushed so far that metal fatigue set in and destroyed them before the eyes of the observers.
It was soon realized that this countermeasure was in fact a powerful weapon. Enemy soldiers could be aged fifty years by the flick of a switch. With hardly any objections it was pressed into active offensive service.
Oil wars along the Antarctic margins resulted in an entire battalion of Australian soldiers being left as powdered dust, while Chilean Guerillas were aged three hundred years along with the forests in which they hid.
The US had conquered time itself and the All Time Murderer (as the ATM came to be called) went up in history.
