Well, Professor Ilyes was still willing to see me – I can see that she believes at least part of my story. The first thing she did was to put me into a full-body scanner. While she was waiting for the results to come through, she told me some of the ideas she’s come up with.

I’m no scientist, so I can’t properly explain this, but if I understand what she was telling me (and I think she was explaining in very basic language) then her main points go something like this:

I remember one of the team telling me that when we were sent we would travel instantaneously from the transmitter to the receiver. There would be no sensation of movement, or anything else, because no time would pass. He said that’s what had happened with the inanimate objects they had sent before – as far as could be ascertained (and they had very accurate measuring devices) sending was an instantaneous process.

That’s where the professor thinks the problem lies. She isn’t sure, because she hasn’t reached the level of the team – she can’t transmit matter herself yet. She does, though, understand basic physics. As I understand what she was saying, if something travels from one place to another in no time at all – or even in a tiny fraction of time, then it is going to get very close to (or if it really is instantaneous, exceed) the speed of light.

That, I said to Professor Ilyes, I understood to be impossible. She says that that theoretically it’s not impossible (but here she started to talk about Einstein, and general relativity, and she really lost me; I think though that what she was trying to explain is that travel at that sort of speed affects time too).

So, if things appeared to be moving instantaneously, they couldn’t be. Time is being affected somehow, or somewhere. Now, an inanimate object, or even a live guinea pig, can’t tell the researchers what happened to it during the sending. They just disappear, and re-appear. But a human being, well, that’s different.

She speculates that the sending is what caused me to move back in time.

I questioned this – surely a guinea pig would have aged significantly – or died – over the course of several years. She explained something I didn’t really get, about mass and acceleration. Perhaps a small animal would only travel back in time a short period – perhaps only minutes. It’s only someone big – like a human being (and there were three of us in the first test, all big, bulky soldiers, with all our kit) – well, something that big might be moved back by a period of years.

We’d about reached that point in her lecture (with me understanding about one word in three – so what I have just said is a gross over-simplification, and probably totally inaccurate) and I was about to ask why I haven’t just moved back in time, but am in a different, albeit nearly parallel world, when we were interrupted, as a technician brought in the result of my scan.

She told me that I have a micro-chip, and some wiring, near the base of my spine. I do know that we had a full medical, which included a period under general anaesthetic, before the test started. We were told that they were examining us completely for defects which might affect the test. It seems that perhaps they were also inserting this thing into our bodies.

The professor has no idea what it might be. It could, she speculated, be some form of receiver (it doesn’t appear to be a transmitter) or aerial, used in the sending process. Perhaps this is the link across the dimensions, which is keeping me in touch with the Hermes transmitter?

She didn’t have any more time for me today. I’m left, I must say, with more questions than answers.