It was finally over. The war that had been raging for nearly 23 years had reached its end. It should have been a day of celebration for victory over the Axis, but alas, there was no chance of anyone wanting to rejoice. The war had ended with a cost, the detonation of hundreds upon hundreds of nuclear warheads around the globe. While there were some who were able to reach a fallout shelter, they didn't all survive. Many succumbed to radiation poisoning, and many more died due to faulty shelters. In the end, the number of survivors barely reached 5% of the population.
April 11, 1981
My name’s Lee Abbot and I am, or at least I was, a lead researcher in experimental technologies for the U.S. Army. At the time of the nuclear holocaust, I was attending a meeting with other teams at the Pentagon. If I hadn’t been at that meeting, I wouldn’t have been able to reach a shelter in time. While I’m grateful to god for how lucky I was, I wish I could trade my life for family’s and allow them to live instead. I had a son and a wife ripped away from me by those awful bombs and I wasn’t there for them. However, I know my wife would want me to live and that's the only thought that's kept motivated in this god forsaken shelter.
Before the bombs dropped, my research division had been working on a highly experimental piece of technology for the government titled Project Annulment. To annul is to make void or obliterate. In the case of Project Annulment, its use was to obliterate the future by making events in the past void. In other words, we were being funded to build a time machine. The project was seen as something that had a very high chance of just being a waste of money. However, in 1959, we uncovered a breakthrough which not only told us that time travel was possible, it also told us that we could achieve it very soon.
After learning this fact, my team worked tirelessly to create the time machine. We would rapidly create new prototypes, but time and time again they would fail. That was until July of 1962, when we were able to send a mouse a minute back in time. The mouse may have combusted on arrival, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that we achieved something that seemed to be impossible. That August, I was bringing updated blueprints to the Pentagon to show to the board. The new prototype, while much more expensive, would fix all the problems with the previous prototype, allowing for humans to travel to the past. Unfortunately, disaster had to strike. The bombs had killed the rest of my team and all of our research. All that remained of Project Annulment were the blueprints I carried.
At first I wanted to end my suffering. I was grieving for the loss of my family and was wracked with guilt . I believed if we had just finished the time machine soone, we may have been able to completely change the course of history, allowing for the war to end before it could escalate to nuclear war. But as I was searching through the rooms of the shelter, I found the holy grail. It was a room filled with scraps from old experiments conducted by the government containing nearly everything that I needed to build the prototype. For the next 18 ½ years, I scavenged everything I could. There were many parts missing which took me months, and even years to find replacements for, but I pushed through. When I finally finished the machine, I stepped back to admire what I had done. It resembled a car with no wheels, just a cylinder with doors and a window. On the inside there were knobs for adjusting the precise date and location one wants to travel too. Unfortunately, the amount of power it required would fry all the electronics in the shelter. If I chose to do this and it didn’t work, I would be condemning everyone in the shelter to death. However, the amount of lives it will save if it worked are far greater. More importantly to me, I had the chance to give my wife another shot at life, and I would take that shot, even if I couldn’t be there for her.
Set on my plan, I jumped into the machine and strapped myself in, I set the time and date to when I had the best shot of fixing things, June 22 1941, and prepared myself. I knew I only had one shot to change the outcome of the invasion of Great Britain and I wasn’t even sure if I could. No one knew what messing with time entails. I then took one last breath and flipped the switch.
The machine started to whir and the lights flipped on. I could feel the heat of the machine as It powered up. All of a sudden, the light shut off from lack of power. The machine was running quickly out of power, but it was so close. I pushed the machine further trying to get it to the point where I could travel, but it was no use. The machine started to sputter and then it finally came to a stop, bringing my dreams of a better future down with it.
So now here I sit, writing to someone I will never meet. If this is ever found, then I can only hope that it gets better. I had failed what I spent 18 years preparing for and brought down all of the other people in the shelter with me. We are slowly running out of supplies, and without electricity, many of the facilities in the bunker are unusable. My time is coming to a close so all I can do now is hope that the human race succeeds even if I failed.
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