Interlude #26: Foiled By Emperor Fred
Transcript of Thande Institute Zoom meeting with TimeLine L Field Team Delta with Director Stephen Rogers
Time: 02:00 hours (GMT)
Date: 06/11/2020
TimeLine L Location: Fredericksburg (West Ward), Confderation of Old Virginia, Empire of North America
Analogous location of Portal receivers in Our TimeLine: McCarthys Corner, Stafford County, Virginia, United States of America
Director Rogers’ location: Cambridge, United Kingdom
DIRECTOR STEPHEN ROGERS (SR): Hello? (sotto voce) Are you sure this is right? It doesn’t make any sens-
CAPTAIN BEN MACCAULEY (BMcC): Hi – Director Rogers – hang on, trying to boost the signal… (sotto voce) Boost the signal!
ENSIGN BOB MUMBY (BM): Yes, sir. (sotto voce) Boost the signal!
ENSIGN CHARLTON CUSSANS (CC): I can’t hold this aerial any higher!
SERGEANT DOMINIC ELLIS (DE): Stand on one leg!
CC: But then I might fall off this chair.
DE: Don’t worry, you’ll land on something soft and squishy.
DR BRUNO LOMBARDI (BL): That is a very personal att-
DE: I was talking about your lunch.
BL: That’s worse!
CC: Ugh…how’s that?
SR: Hello – I – yes, that’s it! Hold it there!
CC: …oh dear…
BMcC: Yes, receiving you loud and clear, sir! Well, sort of.
SR: Okay. Now can you explain to me what the hell is going on?
BMcC: Well, in some ways it’s very simple, and at the same time, rather complicated.
BL: You see, after we left Waccamaw Strand back in August-
(SOUND OF EXPLOSION)
SR: What – what was that?!
DE: Sorry, sir. See, it’s the night of the Fifth of November in our time zone, so the locals are celebrating Bonfire Night.
SR: Huh. Yeah, the fireworks are still going off here as well. Damn kids. I keep forgetting that in that version of America…
DE: It catches us offguard still as well.
(MORE EXPLOSIONS)
BMcC: Anyway, sir, you’ll remember that our original plan was to find somewhere out of the way in Virginia and then contact you, and only go to the capital later. But, well…
LIEUTENANT TOM BLACK (TB): Events eventuated.
SR: I want a full report later…but that would explain why you never showed up when we brought the receivers to, where was it, Virginia Beach?
BMcC: Yeah, turns out that the military bases have swamped the area in this timeline and there was no way we could get in.
SR: It was quite embarrassing in front of Governor Oldenfolk when there was no signal. But we got your Morse message you were heading to Fredericksburg instead – why has it taken over a month to set this up?
DE: Can I answer this, Captain?
BMcC: Go ahead.
DE: So, the basic problem is that it’s hard to relate locations here to ones back home. When we were in London, even though there had been a big fire in the 1800s and there wasn’t a Blitz, there was still some, what’s the word…
TB: Commonality, yeah. You could just about figure out analogous locations with an A to Z, some old map scans and an offline copy of Google Earth.
(SOUND OF EXPLOSION)
SR: And it’s different there?
BL: We underestimated just how different, sir. You remember before we set off for Myrtle Beach, we did take a day trip to our timeline’s version of Fredericksburg.
BM: Small place. Good food, though.
TB: Yeah, we didn’t realise just how much smaller. Fredericksburg in this timeline is what, ten, twenty times the size of the OTL version?
DE: We kind of knew it would be huge because it’s the national capital, but, well, history changed here almost immediately after it founded, and it was at the, what’s the word…
TB: Epicentre. At the epicentre of the changes. So there’s literally almost no parallels between our Fredericksburg and this one.
BM: And it’s amazing, sir! The buildings, the monuments, the museums…
DE: And so natural landmarks are covered up. Even the river’s got controlled differently here. The version in OTL got devastated by the, uh, the US Civil War wasn’t it?
BMcC: Yeah. Took years and years to recover.
BL: Also, we couldn’t afford to live in the central districts where the government and all the fashionable stuff is, anyway. So we ended up in the suburbs, areas which aren’t part of OTL’s Fredericksburg.
BMcC: This one has sprawled to the point that Woodbridge, VA has almost been swallowed up. It almost stretches to Alexandria, which isn’t as big a place – there’s only medium-sized towns where DC should be.
SR: Not sure what you mean without a map, but OK. So we wrote down you were in the West Ward – but you’re east of the city centre now! In a place where there’s sod-all in our timeline, so my agents with the receivers tell me. They’re practically in the middle of a field.
BM: Uh, yes, sorry about that, sir.
BL: Turns out that West Ward is named after a former colonial Governor called Francis West. Apparently that confuses a lot of tourists.
SR: I – you – (indecipherable)
(SOUND OF EXPLOSION)
BMcC (brightly): But we’re all here now and back in touch! And we’ve not been letting time go to waste.
BL: No. Captain Nuttall’s out scouting with Dr Wostyn right now. What a team they make.
SR: Um, OK. So you’ve been looking for more books and so on?
BL: Yes and no. There’s certainly a lot to choose from – this is the capital, after all. But it’s also home to several universities…
TB: Imperial College is one of the biggest, and all last month they’ve had a festival of public talks and lectures on a number of subjects, including history.
SR: I see…
BL: Transcribing lectures makes a change from digitising books, at least.
CC (quietly): I think my knees are going numb…
TB (ignoring this): And we lucked out – some of the lectures are on the period of history we need to cover next.
SR: All right. I can’t tell you when you can return, but between you and me, there have been some promising signs on a vaccine lately…
BL: Excellent news!
SR: So it may be sooner than you think. In the meantime, I guess you’d better start sending these transcrip-
(SOUND OF EXPLOSION, FOLLOWED BY SOUND OF BODY HITTING FLOOR, FOLLOWED BY SOUND OF PAINED GROAN)
DE: Dammit Charlie, now we’ve lost the signal!