Chapter One
It seemed so real while Jack thought he had slept, and yet.... No, it couldn't be. But he had felt the rocks, tasted the dust and knew he was in a tin mine. There are no tin mines in Maine.
The previous day Jack had banged his head when he stood too quickly under a fallen pine tree. He could still feel a small bump under his unruly mop of hair and a lesion. Both had been dealt with by a large dose of antiseptic and a band aid where the cut extended below his hairline.
A six foot two inches Jack was a large presence in any company. Muscular and fit he cut a pretty imposing figure. He wasn't all brawn though, as he boasted a degree from MIT in some esoteric area of technology. Consequently, his IT skills were second to none.
On leaving MIT he had set up his own company and made an enormous success of it, eventually selling out in exchange for a nine figure sum to one of the large technology corporations. Now in his mid thirties and divorced, after a brief and obviously unsuccessful marriage, he had bought this place in Maine near the Great North Woods to escape to, to have as a bolt hole. It wasn't that he was a recluse, far from it, but after a pretty hectic life up until the last year or so, he needed some space. There was plenty of it where he was.
The fact that he knew the taste in his mouth was dust from a tin mine puzzled Jack. It continued to puzzle him for several days to come. Then, on a whim, he picked up a book that the previous owner of his home had left behind. It was non fiction and among the subjects it covered was something called recursion. Jack's education told him that word came from an old French word recurrere meaning to 'run back' or go back.
He started reading. There were references to multiple timelines in the Universe which led to the possibility of of multiple lives. Further on and deeper in the book, the author postulated that what happened in one timeline or parallel life, affected the others. By way of an example he used the death of a person to demonstrate that if that person dies then any bloodline that might have ensued from him disappears as well. This seemed to assume that timelines might be altered.
After two plus hours Jack had enough of it and went back outside to breath some fresh air and carry out some work. While he walked to his barn his nostrils detected the smell of that tin mine again. Jack worked away at the log he was going to use for a table he was building As he did he recalled reading something that Karl Vonnegut wrote about time:
"When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past... All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
The part that hit him was that all moments past, present and future have always existed and always will exist. It sort of gelled with what was slowly invading his mind since the bang on the head. That he had lived another life, maybe lives. One of which was his memory of working in a tin mine in Cornwall, England.
That night, while he lay in his bed listening to the wind blow softly through the trees and the hooting of a distant owl, he began to drift off, until he suddenly he was wide awake. Not in his home in Maine, but in a cold stone building in England, five hundred years earlier.
Thus it began for Jack...
