Sep 23, 2020 (Duncan turns 21 in two days)

Three days ago he had finally succeeded in sending a probe through the time portal and retrieving it.  That meant he was finally ready to make a journey through time.  And he had a means to return not that returning was truly an option - not for much longer anyways.  But when he had gone to his new girlfriend he had realized that he a choice to make - whether take her or leave her behind.  If he took her, she would have to leave everyone and everything she knew behind as well.

He had considered taking his parents.  He had considered handing the project over to the government.  Only there really wasn’t time.  The world as he knew it would be gone by Jan 20, 2021 … the day the next president would take office.  Over the course of the past 3 days he had narrowed down the timeframe for WW III to  Jan 4, 2021, a Monday.

The time portal filled up about half of a 1 million square foot warehouse.  A large part of that space was occupied by portable fusion powerplants, negative energy collectors, tachyon condensation projectors.  And they would all be gone in a little over 3 months.  Even now he was trying to make sure they could survive a nuclear holocaust.  But truthfully, he needed a place deep underground - a bunker - in which to hide them.  And there simply wasn’t time to create one, move the equipment, then reassemble and recalibrate it.  The complexity of anchoring the portal to the local gravity of Earth, the shape and changing geography with the movement of any specific point on the planet  through space had been a nightmare.  He had finally found a way to do this through the application of a gravitic anchor and begun a topological mapping of the Earth’s surface for the past billion years and developed a coordinate mapping system similar to latitude and longitude as well as a chronologically localized calendar to allow for changes to the Earth’s rotation. 

There was still more work to do before they could travel through safely.  One thing he had to do was choose a time and calibrate carefully - unless he wanted to come out of the portal in the past over a ravine or a mile underwater or the vacuum of space.  Heck, it was possible to use the same portal to reach the Moon or Mars.  At least he was pretty sure it was.  And once he had created the Membrane to make sure he wouldn’t allow biocontaminants to pass through - or toxic gasses - he had actually locked on to the Moon and measured pressure differentials.

His first trip had been to 1881.  It had still been Albuquerque, NM.  He made a show of buying up land that would one day be owned by an energy firm, then Albuquerque Academy.  For a year he worked hard to make a showing of running a 1600 acre ranch.  At least that was what the public saw.  Behind the scenes he had debated altering technology so that WW III would never happen.  But he couldn’t think of a way.  So he concentrated on gearing his research to stopping the war directly.  In 1883 he moved his research to a tropical island and mothballed it before jumping a little further forward in time, leaving certain automated process going.  Moving and getting restarted had use up another 6 months.

He had jumped forward, to 1917, the end of WW I.  For the past 3.5 years he had been rebuilding his estate home, and a lab capable of nanotechnology.  He had built an underground base that was home to his submarine, patterned after the Nautilus.  His Nautilus was far superior to the one Nemo had built.  He named it Nautilus III.  Nautilus II had to be decommissioned while only half complete.  He had to get supplies not available on the island at some point one way or another.

June 1921.  
The storm season had officially started in May.  Duncan monitored the weather and even listened for Mayday’s.  A rather nasty weather system had come through.  It hadn’t been the usual storm, but two storms that had merged.  The captain of the passenger liner had probably been experienced enough to avoid the worst of one.  But without modern Doppler Radar he couldn’t have foreseen the second storm until it was too late.

Isla Nublar, as he had named his island, was located not far from the Cocos Island, along the coast of Costa Rica.  Unlike Cocos, Isla Nublar had never been discovered, despite being larger.  Oh, it had been discovered by pirates and even used as a secret hideout, made famous by the fact that it was so hard to find.  Duncan had shrouded the island in 1400 AD.  It had only been discovered by accident.

And now another accident had brought the chance that survivors would find their way to his island.  Duncan did NOT want uninvited guests.  They would be a distraction from his work.  With any luck they would all perish at sea and no longer be his problem.  He simply wasn’t equipped or trained for sea rescue work.  Well, he had TRIED to warn the Captain to alter course.  But the crappy radios the ship had carried hadn’t had the strength to receive him over the power of the storm.

Duncan had begun to accept that death was something he might be powerless to prevent.

It wasn’t until mid morning the next day that he received a perimeter alarm coming from the beach.  That was not good.  Whoever was there might see the ancient wreckage of a pirate ship that dated back to the 1700’s that was submerged in the bay.  It could only be seen from above.  That would require a climb.  But it was the only way one could be sure they were on the real treasure island.  

A pack of six raptors were sent to respond.  If the intruders were armed and dangerous the raptors were quite capable of doing anything a real raptor could do.  But these were, in fact, merely a highly advanced form of animatronics.  They were so advanced that you couldn’t really tell them from a living creature.  If the intruders proved unarmed and simply ran, the raptors would herd them away from anything important and toward the means to evade being eaten by way of a small cave or something similar.