“Warning. Do Not Enter! Deadly Force Authorized!”

That’s what the sign said, but if you’re a writer, you might be surprised at some of the doors you can stroll right on through. While my non-disclosure agreement prevents saying where you might find Time Expeditionary Unit One (TEU-1), once there, one of the first things you’ll notice is that the Marine detachment carries loaded weapons and 50,000-volt Tasers.

Our guide had to be twice my size. Broad shoulders. Shaggy hair. Trimmed beard. Eyes, even without the usual Special-Ops shades, reminiscent of thick, tinted glass. Though Commander Belfrage would not discuss his previous time missions, I found it all too easy to speculate as to how someone might rack up so many noticeable scars. 

Dinosaurs? Saber-toothed cats? 

With six months to deployment, the “resident” Time Wing is in what the Navy terms the “crawl, walk, run” phase of their training cycle. Last week’s urban sniper training had become orbital squadron, non-combatant evac procedures which had then rolled into their first attempt at Tactical Recovery of Spacecraft and Personnel (TRoSP). 

Maybe you saw one of the latest Space-X launches?

“How,” I asked, “do you keep your people motivated?”

“If you want to build a spacecraft, don’t drum people together to refine titanium or design flight avionics. Don’t assign them any tasks whatsoever, but rather teach them to yearn for the endless immensity of the universe.”

I asked Belfrage if he enjoyed his work.

“The work? I guess I like the … the sense of immersion. The Time Shear … is mercurial and requires constant attention. By its very nature, it’s unpredictable. On a good day, it’s like watching the weather shift and take on some new pattern. It’s quite elemental, and I suppose I’m very attracted to that. Fixing, I don’t know, even some minor glitch conveys a rush of purity. It scrubs the cobwebs from your brain. It shines up your soul.”

Because President Trump considers each Time Wing a “quick reaction force element” that has to be ready for any crisis, there was no need to slow down to clear the inner security vestibule. As with freeway scanners that collect tolls from passing traffic, designers had lined the service corridor with a profusion of biometric devices. With each stride, facial recognition gave way to retinal scans, heart rate comparators, and electroencephalogram sweeps capable of registering key mind states. Yeah, all that, along with each person’s cataloged neural oscillations and evoked potential “running stimulus-onset signature resonance.”

Sampling at rates above 20,000 Hz, one false spike or aberrant wave discharge, and the system would drop you in your tracks. As we hustled past gas nozzles and tracking dart bores meant to deliver fast-acting incapacitants or nerve agents, someone whispered, “Happy thoughts, everyone. Happy thoughts.”

Walking across the entry lobby’s floor felt like stepping inside a movie theater. However, this sticky texture didn’t come from gum or spilled cola. With every pace, the adhesive floor mats snatched away loose dirt from everyone’s shoe treads. As the forced-air shower erupted, dozens of pulsed air jets blew loose debris from our hair, skin, and clothing.

Entering the clean room’s gowning area, we donned sterile bodysuits, gloves, goggles, shoe covers, and a shower cap. Just as an operating room must be kept free of germs and particulates, so must the Time Shear. Despite the clean room’s robust ventilation, the air smells metallic — like a steelworker’s clean, fresh weld.

According to Belfrage, TEU-1’s primary Shear is built around a synthetic “Time Abyss.” Here, and servicing five Time Wings, the future and the past existed simultaneously in carefully matched slabs of ancient stone.

During Apollo 16, astronauts Young, Duke, and Mattingly returned with Lunar sample 67215, which had dated on the plus side of 4.46 billion years. Previous to that, a speck of terrestrial, blue zircon held the record of “oldest piece of rock on Earth” at 4.40 billion years old. 

In 2017, when the Japanese “Hayabusa 16” spacecraft (はやぶさ, “Peregrine Falcon”) caught up and rendezvoused with the extrasolar asteroid “Oumuamua” (Hawaiian for “scout”) it returned to Earth laden with more than thirty kilograms of highly-irradiated, red-black stone. Composed of neosilicates in a nickel-iron matrix, all samples returned bracketing dates consistent with forming an extraordinary 7.76 billion years ago. 

As TEU-1’s “low-end benchmark slabs” predate the formation of our solar system by more than three billion years, Belfrage was quick to quip that “qualified personnel” now “travel in its memories.” And yet, as impressive as that sounds, the heart of the Time Shear looks a lot like an ordinary slab of meteorite — green crystals in silver-gray metal — sandwiched in glass. 

Isolated from the floor by enormous blue columns and hydraulic actuators, the upstream and downstream portions of the Shear embraced a diagnostic bay at a right angle. Steel vacuum chambers and in-vacuum reference cavities stacked one atop the next like pressure cookers on steroids. Metal-framed standing wave cavities and beam tubes glistened. A tall orange ladder allowed ascent to a shelf of horizontal access modules. Isolated by a yellow-and-black striped warning boundary, the “Vacuum Equipment” area’s line of cryogenically cooled spherical antennas and superconducting Fibonacci oscillators glowed through a haze of layered nitrogen vapors. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. 

Careful to avoid tripping over an armored cable run, Belfrage scanned an instrument cluster before slotting his iPad in a waiting interface. He cleared an “entanglement swapping circuit,” and allowed us to look in on the stacked crystalline blades of the “primary drop vortex’s first-stage, parallel-processing flux-tap generator.” Nearby, ring lasers were generating a circulating light beam so that spacetime inside each column was twisting in a vortex as might a stirred cup of coffee. 

As I stepped closer, the low hum of active systems settled into a palpable presence, a vibration I could feel in my bones rather than hear. Inside the containment field, the primary Shear’s surface seemed at once inert and alive — motionless yet shifting, as if the calibration stones were breathing in epochs rather than seconds. Light bent strangely at its edges, a faint, wavering distortion like heat shimmers over asphalt.

A technician, clad in a static-dissipative bodysuit, leaned over a console adjusting parameters. Numbers scrolled in iridescent glyphs across a heads-up display mounted inside his visor, the values shifting faster than my eyes could track.

“This is where it gets tricky,” Belfrage murmured. He tapped a section of the readout, and the scrolling text halted. “You ever hear of the ‘chronon mass-dilation threshold’?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a measure of how much temporal inertia we have to compensate for when we link past and future states.” He gestured at the Shear. “Time isn’t a highway. It’s a river with unpredictable currents. You push too hard, you get dragged under.”

Another operator nearby adjusted a feedback stabilizer, and a low-frequency pulse rolled through the chamber. The Shear responded, its surface shimmering like disturbed water.

Belfrage stepped back. “That was a correction burn — nanoTesla-level adjustments to keep the flow steady. Imagine you’re threading a needle while standing on a ship in rough seas. That’s us, except the ship is history, and the needle is causality.”

A klaxon sounded twice, followed by a crisp, automated voice: “Standby for causal synchronization.”

The air around the Shear took on a charged stillness, like the seconds before a lightning strike. Technicians moved with precise efficiency, making final adjustments.

I turned to Belfrage. “What happens if something goes wrong?”

He exhaled through his nose, watching as another stabilization pulse rippled across the field. “Best-case scenario? The Shear collapses and resets itself.”

“And worst case?”

Belfrage’s gaze flicked to a hazard diagram on the monitor, a web of intersecting lines trailing off into the unknown. “Let’s just say … there’s a reason we don’t run this without an immediate-abort failsafe. Assuming the warping space is also warping time in a tight enough loop, the timeline’s index should —” 

The station’s general alarm cut through the air. 

“General Quarters!” called the duty bosun. “General Quarters! All hands man your battle stations! Set Condition Zebra! Secure all access points!” Reverberating with a pulse-pounding gong-gong-gong — twelve loud gongs in all — the urgent announcement repeated with a continued call to “General Quarters! General Quarters!”

When Belfrage’s iPad drew green, yellow, and red arcs against the backdrop of stars and our Moon, I knew our tour had ended. Yet, my curiosity would NOT let me set my feet in motion. “Wait! Can’t I stay? Some of my Facebook friends are waiting to hear more about time travel.”

“Get moving, or someone’s gonna have to carry you out of here.”

“But President Trump said I’d have an all-access pass. And Pete Hegseth said —”

“Move.”

“Make me.”

A Taser’s transmission darts struck my hip. I stiffened as with a full-body Charlie horse. Tumbling, paralyzed by the jolt but completely aware of what was happening, I collapsed against the Time Shear and slid to the deck, gasping, arms unable to check my fall. My bones were on fire while at the same time, someone was ripping apart every shred of muscle fiber with the tines of a meat carving fork!

Every thought I ever had in my life reoccurred all at once! 

Five seconds felt … like … an … eternity.

The instant the current flow ceased, so did the pain. Rolling on my spine, the last thing I recall is focussing all of my concentration on (please!) not screaming like a little girl.

… and that’s the last thing I remember before waking up in TEU-1’s infirmary.

Great tour! 

And I’d like to send a wave of special thanks to President Trump for arranging our visit, to Commander Belfrage, and to the extraordinary men and women of Time Expeditionary Unit One! An experience I’ll never forget! America’s Time Travel Forces — protecting history, securing the future!

If you want to know more about America's Time Travel Forces, check out my Time Wing Six series on Amazon!