Years ago, Claire had been in this hangar for parties as a kid. It was a great space before it had been restored and recommissioned for the war. But now the walls were bleeding, oozing out a dark liquid.
Smarter people than her would figure this out. The only thing she had to do was collect the sample. Something supernatural was going on here. But Claire did her bit, holding the test tube to the liquid, letting the tube fill up with the mystery.
There was a sweet smell to it. Claire knew she shouldn’t touch it, let alone taste it. But she was wearing gloves. She let a little bit of the liquid spill onto her finger as she packed the sample properly. She sniffed the bit on her finger before peeling off her gloves. It smelled sweet, like…wine?
A proper analysis would be done at HQ. It would be beyond her pay grade after that. Claire was happy about it. Bleeding walls were not her strong point.
Claire had almost forgotten about it when she came into work the next day.
“It’s wine.” Alex said without looking up from his microscope.
“I thought it might be.” Claire blurted. Alex gave her a look.
“Did you?”
“Smelled like it.”
“You smelled it?” Alex took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “How am I going to make a proper forensic scientist out of you?”
“I’m just your assistant.”
“I’m old, Claire!”
“You’re fifty, Alex!”
“Whatever.” Alex sighed. “There was something strange about it.”
“What was strange?”
“I could bore you with scientific jargon, but this wine is in the neighborhood of three thousand years old.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“That’s what’s going in my report, and you’d better be ready to confirm or deny my findings.”
Claire set to work. She took her own slide and put it under the microscope. Yeah, the wine was old. But where was Alex getting three thousand from?
Then a headache like a hangover started up. She couldn’t concentrate, just stared at the sample. It started to move. Were those… words? Etched into the wine on the slide, Claire could make out three numbers. Five, three, nine. It was followed by some letters. B, C, and E.
Five, three, nine, B, C, E. What could that mean? Did it even matter? She was hallucinating. Area code? Claire googled 539.
Northeastern Oklahoma. Why would she be hallucinating northeastern Oklahoma area codes? 5:39 pm? No, that was stupid. Was it a prime number? Claire suspected it wasn’t.
It wasn’t.
Why not type in the whole thing?
539 BCE.
“I’m an idiot.” Claire muttered under her breath. “Of course it’s the year.” The current year was 2026, add 539 to that, it was 2,565. About four hundred years shy of three thousand. Years old. Wine.
But what happened in 539 BCE that was wine related? Or even, what happened in 539 BCE that wasn’t wine related? Claire googled the year.
“In 539 BCE, Cyrus of Persia diverted the waters of the river Euphrates, allowing his army to conquer Babylon.” Right. The Bible story. The hand writing on the wall, the gates were left open, and the party ended quick.
But what did this historical event have to do with anything? Was it a message? Or part of a message?
“Alex, we need to go back to that hangar.”
“The owner won’t like it.”
“We’re with the police, he can deal with it. It’s not like he can use the hangar while the walls are bleeding Babylonian wine!”
“Babylonian?” Alex cleaned his glasses and looked closer at her. “Where did you get that, specifically?”
“It’s a hunch.” Claire lied. “Bring a notepad.”
“A good scientist always does.” Alex reminded her. Claire rolled her eyes and packed her own notebook, too. She packed the portable digital microscope. These were going to be the weirdest pictures she ever took.

“We could probably submit pictures of this to a contest and win.” Alex said.
“And lose our jobs.” Claire added.
Claire took her pictures methodically, as if she were reading them strip by strip. She had no doubt that was what she would be doing. She already had a headache.
Alex stared at her.
“I’m glad you’re taking this case seriously.” He said. “But you look like you’re looking for something.”
“I am.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Hope that I’m hallucinating, and that this isn’t something serious.”
“Would you care to explain?”
“Not yet.” Claire snapped the last picture. She stood and plugged it into the laptop they brought. She selected the first picture she took.
“We are time travelers.” The first picture said. Claire groaned.
“What?” Alex stared at the picture.
“You don’t see it, do you?” Claire rubbed her eyes. No, the words were still there under the enhanced view. “The words are right there.”
“What words?”
Claire ignored him and went to the next picture and zoomed in.
“From your era.” The next picture said. Claire repeated the process.
“There is an EMP.” This just crossed over from joke to potentially serious consequences. She had to tell Alex the truth. She crossed her arms and faced him.
“Ever since I sniffed the wine, I get headaches right before I’m able to read words in the microscopic views of the wine.”
“Claire, that sounds—“
“Ridiculous, I know.”
“You’re telling me that you can see words in that picture of the wine?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to regret this.” Alex took his glasses off, polished them with his shirt, and stared at the image. He looked at Claire strangely. Like he wanted to believe her.
Alex went over to the wall, squinted, and licked. The wine. On the wall.
“Alex!” Claire screeched. “All this time you tell me to be careful!”
Alex held his head.
“Alex?”
“Headache.” He said.
Claire felt vindicated, and irritated that her colleague had done something so risky. Alex came back over to the laptop and stared at the screen.
“Please tell me that doesn’t say anything about an EMP.”
“Apparently they’re time travelers from our era, and that’s as far as I got.”
“Show me the next picture.”
“We tried to come home.”
“Next.” Said Alex.
“Got stranded in Babylon, 539 BCE.”
“Keep going?” Claire asked. Alex nodded.
“We can see the Persian army.”
“We’re not getting home.”
“But we could send the messages in wine.”
“We learned of the EMP.”
“It’s going to hit you soon.”
“We can’t be exact, sorry.”
“The EMP will make it nearly—“
“—impossible to communicate.”
“Linguists have been replaced.”
“They’ll be needed in negotiations.”
“The EMP does damage for months.”
“Many will die.”
“There will be war.”
“Worse than what you have now.”
“We can’t tell you when.”
“But we can tell you where.”
Alex took out his notebook and wrote down the address. But he was already frowning.
Claire opened a browser on her phone and typed in the address.
It was a military base.

MacDunn Air Force Base sat there, unaware of the danger hiding behind the chain link fence.
“We’re going to get arrested.” Alex turned to Claire. “You realize that, right?”
“We just have to fake like we know what we’re talking about until we get in front of someone with authority.”
“That sounds so much worse than getting arrested. Playing games with law enforcement?”
“You wish.” Claire folded her arms and stared at the gate from the car. “These guys are so much worse than law enforcement. And this is war. We could get locked away in a dungeon for years.”
“Once the EMP hits and our cell doors don’t open anymore.”
“Alex?” Claire saw the man at the gate on the phone. He was looking at them. “This is the right thing to do.”
“It’s one way to go, I suppose.”
“You are not going to die, Alex.”
The gate rolled back and two soldiers strode toward the car. Claire unbuckled her seat belt.
“Well, we’re off to a rocky start. They think they’ve caught us.”
“What?” Alex looked up from the steering wheel. “Do we get out?”
“Not until they tell us.” Claire said.
Apparently they violated some loitering law, so they were arrested. Claire and Alex were separated almost immediately after entering one of the buildings.
Claire waited patiently in the interrogation room. She knew they were trying to make her nervous by waiting to talk to her, but she didn’t particularly care.
When the door opened, Claire had just rested her head on her handcuffed hands. She sat up with the air of a disturbed cat. The soldier slapped a file folder on the table.
“You have a file on me? That was quick.” Claire didn’t know what to say, but she did realize she should not have tried to make a joke. The soldier was not amused.
“Do you realize that breaking into an Air Force base is a serious matter?”
“We were on the road across from the gate.” Claire was going to be accurate. Just like Alex.
“And what were you doing there?”
“Debating whether to drive up to the gate and confuse the guard with our story.”
“And why would you want to confuse the guard? Are you a distraction for someone else entering the base?”
“Whoa. I just thought it was likely the gate guard would be confused by our story because, frankly, I don’t understand it myself.”
“Perhaps you should have prepared better.” He narrowed his eyes at her.
Claire fought the urge to roll her eyes. This was going in circles and she wasn’t sure how much time they had.
“We came because we believed the matter was urgent and we knew you would just ignore us on the phone.”
“What ‘matter’?”
“We have reason to believe there is an EMP on the base.”
“Excuse me?” He shut the folder. “How would you know about our testing facility?”
“What testing facility?”
“Come with me.” He stood.
Great. They had stumbled upon an actual testing facility. That could only muddy the waters. Claire didn’t know anything about anything! She was here at the behest of time travelers! Maybe that’s where she had gone wrong?
Claire followed the soldier down the hallways that all looked the same. There was no table in the room where they stopped, just Alex sitting next to an empty chair.
“How badly did your interview go?” Alex asked.
“This is an actual EMP testing facility.”
“Sweet peas and carrots.” Alex mumbled. “This is bad.”
The door shut behind a tall man with his fists clenched. There were two metal things on each of his shoulders. Claire’s stomach dropped when she realized they were stars.
They had disturbed a two-star general’s workday. The soldier who interrogated Claire stayed, along with another one.
“I’m General Marks. Captains Krane and Carter here tell me you have inside knowledge about our EMP testing facility. I’m interested in how you found that out.”
“I’m Claire, this is Alex. We’re forensic scientists for the police department. Did you search our vehicle?”
“We did.” General Marks tried to look angrier.
“We have pictures on the laptop—”
“Of this base?”
“No.” Alex spoke up. “Of wine.”
The silence in the room was palpable. General Marks did his best to hide his confusion.
“Did you say wine?” He asked.
“It’s bleeding through the walls of a hangar at the airport.” Claire added.
“I’m none the wiser. Are you wasting my time?”
“I sniffed it, he licked it, and now we can both read messages from the future. Honestly.”
Marks blinked and looked at Alex. “You… licked it?”
“So I could read the messages like Claire could. The message was from time travelers who went to the future. They’re the ones who told us there’s an EMP hidden on this base that could devastate communications systems and plunge us even deeper into war.”
“We know what we have here.” Marks said.
“We didn’t. The time travelers were stranded and this was the message they chose to send to us.” Claire said.
“So you huffed it, he licked it, and now you can read wine?” Marks gave an exasperated sigh. “Can you see why I might find this hard to believe?”
“I wrote a transcript.” Alex volunteered. “If you searched our vehicle, you have it.”
“And…” Claire offered. “I brought a sample of the wine, if you want to test it out yourself.”
“Why would he want to drink the wine, Claire?” Alex sighed.
“I just told you, Alex. And I sniffed it. I didn’t huff it. I don’t even know how to huff.”
“All right.” Said Marks. “Say I believe you. Let’s start over from the beginning.”

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