The date on the newspaper reads Saturday, September 25th, and the entire population of Sea Beach, New Jersey, wakes up with no recollection of what happened to Friday the 24th. Reporter Johnny Pappas is among the baffled residents, as is Chief of Police Roy Mulroney. It’s only when Johnny discovers the disappearance of high school quarterback David Robelle that the fog over this mystery begins to lift. It seems that the ransom note left by David’s kidnappers was written with no known technology. Actually, it wasn’t “written” at all. The note just appears in David’s room, hanging in midair, looking exactly the same from any angle, impervious to any attempts to change the words or cover them up. It’s the first indication that something very, very different is happening in Sea Beach.
Johnny and Roy piece together what little evidence there is, coming to the unfathomable conclusion that they’ve been visited by futuristic time travelers from the International Counter Terrorist Organization, or the ICTO, while others are from a terrorist group called the Red Diamond. Despite the names, it’s almost impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys, and it’s very clear that both groups are after the same objective. In the future, time travel becomes an overpowering geopolitical weapon, enabling those who control the technology to intervene in historical events so that historical outcomes fall to their favor. Both groups want to make sure they are the only ones to control this powerful capability, and both have come back to affect and control events toward this result. The influence extends all the way to the White House.
Unbelievably, the invention of time travel centers around David Robelle and the citizens of Sea Beach, although none of them know it yet. As an investigative reporter, it doesn’t take Johnny all that long to figure it out, and ultimately he becomes the pivotal figure in the struggle over who will control the technology and historical events as they originally occurred. Time travel, futuristic human clones called Synthetics, editions of newspapers that haven’t even been written yet, it’s all part of Lost Friday. Johnny has three objectives: cover the story as a reporter, win the romantic attention of fellow reporter Kelli Remington, and rescue David Robelle from the terrorists. Oh yeah, saving the world from futuristic terrorists might be all well and good, but he’d also like to win a Pulitzer.
