Everything about the island was a mystery, from what it was and who had created it, to its purpose and where, precisely, it was located. On earth, almost certainly, but did it exist in another dimension, or was it somehow out of step with the reality the travellers knew?

It certainly couldn’t appear on any map, and it was far too large to have been overlooked, especially once orbiting satellites had been invented and deployed. By Varian’s time, people were travelling through space to other worlds, earth colonies, and various space wheels and space stations, so if the island were visible, it would have been seen from space long before.

It couldn’t simply be invisible either, otherwise ships would keep crashing into it, and anyway, its presence would’ve been detectable by the way the ocean currents diverted around it. So it was both there and not, or perhaps only there occasionally, long enough for the vortex to capture unsuspecting boats and aircraft. It was also entirely possible that it… moved around? The boat Scott and Fred were on was sailing through the Bermuda Triangle when it was wrecked, while Willaway’s plane was flying over the Sea of Japan when he’d crashed, and Varian’s craft had been somewhere else entirely when the vortex brought it down.

And then there was the way the island was laid out in zones that seemed to overlap each other, in part or in whole, connected by gateways that transported people from one zone to another… It made Willaway almost giddy trying to figure out the science behind it all. However any of it worked, it was clearly centuries ahead of anything he’d ever heard of, and Varian, despite being from more than two-hundred years in the future, was just as mystified.

It was fascinating, though.


The End