“This is Duname Peprom with an official communiqué from Time Patrol Headquarters approved by Director Yönetmen. Entity Minus tampered with TCoreAI, which controls time travel. Entity Minus gained access to Dr. Hamilton’s archives through a human proxy and used that information to reprogram TMY Prototype Alpha, the original time machine stored alongside the archives at the Hamilton Institute & Museum. Given the unbridled power of the TMY Prototype, which was created by Dr. Hamilton, dates to the early part of the 21st century, and does not feature the safeguards subsequently installed on TCoreAI by chronotechnicians, its activation caused a severe disruption in the Time Scripts, i.e., a Prime Event whose extent and ramifications are under investigation. Time travel is hereby halted in both directions and will not resume until the Prime Event is identified and corrected and TCoreAI is back online. TMY Prototype Beta has been commissioned for emergency use and is now available to medical personnel and for emergency returns. That is all.”

In the waning years of the 20th Century, the world continued to grapple with the recurring challenges of the human race. None were new and none were in the least different, except for one. The inventiveness and some may say the sheer genius of one man had introduced a new, more destructive, and yet more fascinating challenge. Some said later that this man had destroyed time, and this was an exaggeration. Others said he had destroyed the past, and this came close to being true in its literal sense.

Tommy Hamilton, a recent graduate of Georgia Tech, could hardly call himself a physicist. A master tinkerer was a more appropriate description for his way of putting things together in a manner that seemed to follow a twisting internal unfathomable logic of its own. It was in this manner that he, after gutting an Amana refrigerator and filling it with hardware from Radio Shack and True Value, came to invent a working time machine. It was a contraption that should not have worked and, when examined more closely by technicians form the 24th Century, revealed itself as having functioned more by fortuity than by design.

The first man to time jump was a Naval Academy graduate, a former naval officer, and an executive at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington, DC. Dr. Jack Arduino was a man with an agenda, a compelling personal one. Throwing all caution to the wind, as they say, Jack jumped to 1941. To save his father, he told his sick sister, from being shot and gravely wounded by the partisans of Marshal Tito. He jumped to Dalmatia, an area that would become part of Yugoslavia at the end of World War Two. His girlfriend at the time, with whom he would elope to the Poconos and marry in a mountain cabin, jumped after him “to save him from himself,” as she put it. Daria Gannaway only made it to 1941 Bermuda, where she was arrested by the British Army, who turned her over to the Americans.