by Jason Ayres
He wasn’t even sure he was going to be allowed in, being around thirty years older than the average attendee, but a few twenty-pound notes waved in the bouncer’s face soon sorted that out.
Maybe he was too old to appreciate the music but it just seemed like a lot of noise, though when Insanity by Oceanic came on and the crowd started going crazy, he did find himself joining in and getting into the moment.
The night was an experience but not one he had any desire to repeat. It was strange imagining that his parents used to do this. Josh preferred rock and indie music and often hung out in The Dolly. It was here where he bumped into Peter and Christina again one Saturday a few weeks before his parents’ wedding.
Christina saw Josh come in and walk up to the bar and encouraged Peter to talk to him. She said there was no point bearing a grudge and it was time the two of them made it up. Reluctantly Peter agreed, so the two of them fought their way through the crowds of goths and rockers to the bar.
Josh realised quite quickly from their body language that the two of them were now an item but decided against commenting on it, bearing in mind his past attempts to advise Peter on his love life.
He knew that if the timeline stayed on track that the relationship was ultimately doomed, but what was the point of telling Peter that? He had interfered in his life enough and now he had to leave things to run their natural course.
Josh still felt incredibly guilty over Rebecca but there was nothing he could do to change that. However, as they talked he discovered there was something good he could do to make some sort of amends. As they talked he asked Peter how Gran was, only to find out that she’d had a fall in the icy spring weather and was now awaiting a hip replacement on the NHS.
With his recently acquired wealth, Josh offered to pay to have the operation done privately. When Peter started on the old “we don’t need your money” speech that he had seen countless times on the television, Christina told him not to be so stupid, at which point he accepted.
After that night they tentatively resumed their friendship, meeting for drinks and talking time travel on a weekly basis. Things were a little awkward to begin with but gradually things returned to how they had been before.
When they met for the last time, the night before the wedding, Josh handed Peter a cheque for the princely sum of £10,000. This time, Peter was happy to accept. He had come out of university in plenty of debt and Josh wouldn’t need the money where he was going.
Josh could have given him a lot more than this, but figured if he gave him a life-changing sum he might change his mind about teaching for a living and do something else which wouldn’t help the timeline. He needed Peter to end up at the school as had originally happened.
That left only one piece of unfinished business – the matter of young Amy who had accosted him on his first day in 1992. There was nothing he could do for her at the moment. It would have to be a project for if or when he got home.
Getting home or not all hinged on what happened today at the wedding. Crashing it wasn’t a problem. He had been here before and no one had questioned him then. He had come to the conclusion that if you turned up to these things looking the part, then anyone who didn’t know you would naturally assume you were from the other side of the family.
With any luck he wouldn’t need to go into the church at all. His mission was purely to meet his other self. He was almost certain it wouldn’t be the same version of him that had visited this wedding before because of the nature of the multiverse but that didn’t matter. If this Josh had developed the technology to travel here through time, then he would be capable of traversing the multiverse, too.
Josh knew that his other self wouldn’t just beam into the church like someone out of Star Trek. When he had come here before, he had picked a quiet spot at the back of the graveyard, making sure he arrived half an hour before the wedding. Assuming this Josh would come to the same conclusion, Josh headed round to the back of the church in good time.
Sure enough, a slightly younger version of him burst into view at the exact time Josh had expected. He enjoyed the look of surprise on the new arrival’s face as he clocked who was standing directly in front of him.
“Bet you weren’t expecting to see me, were you?” exclaimed Josh.
“I certainly wasn’t,” asked his younger self, swiftly regaining his composure. “What’s up? You must be here for a reason.”
“Well, it’s pretty complicated,” said Josh. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”
“I’ve come to see Mum and Dad’s wedding,” said the younger version. “But I’m guessing you already know that, by the look of you. You’re older than me so I assume you’ve been here before.”
“Absolutely, and you aren’t missing much,” replied Josh loftily. “It was pretty much like any other wedding I’ve ever been to. What I’ve come to tell you is much more interesting, trust me. So what do you say we ditch the wedding and go up to The Bull for a pint?”
“Aren’t we a little overdressed for the pub?” asked the younger Josh. Both of them were resplendent in their morning dress.
“I’m sure we won’t be the first wedding guests who have popped in there for a quick one before a service,” said Josh. “Come on.”
They walked down the footpath that led to the entrance to the churchyard, exchanging polite hellos with the other wedding guests who were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the bride. Reaching the front gate, they turned right and began the walk to the pub in the centre of the village.
When they got there, they engaged in a little small talk with the landlord who asked them if they were brothers. Once they had their pints they headed out into the back garden to talk.
“Wow!” said the younger Josh, after listening to Josh’s long summary of his adventures. “I’ve been working on trying to get the tachyometer to travel between universes for quite a while, but I’m a long way from being able to actually do it. But I’m not sure if I even should not after all the trouble it’s got you into.”
“Well, you’re going to have to now otherwise I’m going to end up marooned here forever.”
“We can’t have that, can we?” said the younger Josh, grinning. “Not after all you’ve been through. Come on, then, what do I need to do to get this thing to travel between universes?”
Josh spent the next fifteen minutes briefly summarising the main steps, then he handed him some notes he had preprepared with some of the main steps, outlines and details of how to read the signatures of the different universes he had visited.
“Are you sure you’re going to be able to follow all of this?” he said when he had finished.
“I’m sure I’ll get there,” replied the younger Josh. “You managed it and you didn’t have any help. I suppose I had better head back and get started.”
“What about the wedding?” asked Josh.
“I can come back and see that another time,” said the younger Josh. “That’s the beauty of time travel.”
They left the pub, walking out of the village until they found a quiet field for the younger Josh to make the jump back to his time.
“Don’t forget to bring two tachyometers when you come back,” Josh reminded him, just before he leapt. “One for you and one for me.”
After an uncomfortable wait of about ten minutes, the younger Josh burst back into view, now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, triumphantly holding his tachyometer in front of him. He had also clearly come equipped, wearing the same style of backpack that Josh had been wearing when he first arrived in 1992.
“You took your time,” said Josh.
“Yeah, I know, that was just my little joke,” replied younger Josh. “I thought I’d make you sweat a bit.”
“I certainly am and it’s not just down to waiting for you,” said Josh. He was sweltering in his morning suit beneath the clear blue June sky. “Did you bring the spare tachyometer?” he asked.
“I certainly did,” said the younger Josh, taking off his backpack and takin
g out the spare. “You should consider yourself very privileged, you know. I don’t just hand these out to anyone.”
Josh examined the tachyometer. It was pretty true to his original design.
“You’ve done a good job,” he said.
“Don’t we always?” asked the younger Josh.
“We do. And hopefully you can do a better job than I did of using this. Just stay away from that hospital room in 2025, that’s where all the trouble started, then you can enjoy lots of trouble-free time-travelling in the years ahead!”
“What about you? Are you going to carry on developing this further?”
“Right now, I couldn’t care less if I never time-travelled again. However, there’s someone else I’ve left stuck in the past here who I need to try and rescue so I guess the story’s not over yet. But in the short term, I’m done with it. Alice has been bugging me to go on holiday for months and after all this, I think I need one.”
“I think you do,” replied the younger Josh. “Right, I’ve set this up with the signature of your original universe that you gave me before. All you need to do is enter is the date and time and you’re away.”
Josh took a final look around him. He was going to miss 1992. He took a last look around him, appreciating the beautiful summer sunshine, birds in full song, and the sound of the church bells in the distance, heralding that the happy couple, his parents, were now married.
Did he really want to leave all this for the technological, politically correct, sanitised future? The truth was, he didn’t, but he had made a promise to Amy and the only way he could keep it was to go back.
He entered the date into the tachyometer, created what he hoped would be the last bubble of this very long journey, and stepped through.
Chapter Twenty-five
Friday 6th August 2055
Josh swam up to the bar in the centre of the lagoon-like pool, ready for his first Tequila Sunrise of the day.
As he sat on a stool below a large, thatched umbrella, his lower half submerged between the water, he sipped on his drink, ice clinking in the glass, a welcome relief from the baking hot Middle Eastern sunshine.
He looked across the pool at where Alice was sunbathing, just in front of a row of pine trees, while a robot masseuse gave her a technically perfect massage. There was no expense spared at this hotel. It was Dubai’s latest futuristic seven-star offering.
When he had arrived back in his own time he had walked the two miles to the nearby town and caught a train back to Oxford, relieved to see that everything appeared normal. It seemed he was indeed finally home.
The train journey gave him plenty of time to think about what he was going to tell Alice on his way back to Oxford. In the end, he decided not to tell her the full story about his year away. She would undoubtedly go crazy and ban him from ever travelling anywhere ever again.
He had set the date of his actual return to the day after he had left so as far as she was concerned he would have been gone for only twenty-four hours from her perspective.
In addition to him being lost for a year there were things that had gone on in those other universes that he really didn’t want to have to talk about. He had resorted to some pretty desperate tactics at times to survive.
If he were to tell her about him being blackmailed into sex by an alternate version of his former lover, Lauren, it would probably spell at best divorce and at worst castration. Then there were the people who died. The burden of that would be with him until the end of his days and it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about to anyone.
In the end, he told Alice a heavily truncated version. He said that the tachyometer had been damaged in a time-travel accident, but that he had managed to get help from his other self in another universe.
He implied this had led to him being away a few days, rather than over a year, and she seemed happy with this. Fortunately his appearance hadn’t changed much in a year, though Josh was sure he probably had a few more grey hairs after all he had been through.
Once that discussion was over he immediately suggested they follow her earlier suggestion and take a year’s sabbatical to go travelling the world. Alice was delighted because it was something she had wanted to do for ages.
They would be able to travel in style, too. They had acquired considerable savings over the years due to working all the time and rarely travelling, plus other chunks that Josh had acquired through shrewd investments made with the help of time travel.
Dubai was just their first stop before a two-month-long tour of Australia. It wouldn’t take them long to get there. The latest hypersonic planes could make the trip from the Middle East to Sydney in less than two hours.
After much debate, they had decided not to take the tachyometers with them. They had considered using them to slip back in time at historical sites they visited on their journey, but ultimately dismissed this as too dangerous. Memories of Roman soldiers brandishing swords and rampaging T Rexes were a little too recent for comfort in Josh’s memory.
However, Josh did have one time travel-related activity planned for the trip, hence his decision to include the city of Canberra on their itinerary. Since Australia’s rise to become a major global power, in the aftermath of The Black Winter of 2029-2030, Canberra had become the twenty-first century’s equivalent of Silicon Valley.
Josh was particularly interested in research being carried out at the Australian National University. Josh had recently made contact with a team there that was working on the process of transferring human consciousness out of the body into the cloud where it could then be transferred into a new host, either organic or artificial.
One of the advantages of holding a senior scientific post at Oxford was that the prestige that it brought pretty much got Josh access to any other scientific project he wanted, anywhere in the world.
Transferring human thoughts into a machine was the stuff of pure science fiction just a few decades before but the rate of technological advance was accelerating to the point where all things now seemed possible.
Successful trials had already been run with a copy of a human brain already having been implanted into an android host at the centre in Canberra. All of this had been achieved with very little physical apparatus other than a chip in the original brain. The rest had been done with as much ease as transferring a file from one computer to another across a Wi-Fi network.
Immortality, the Holy Grail of human existence, was suddenly within its grasp but this raised wider issues. Despite the ever-growing Martian colonies, the world remained overcrowded. It was clear that a third planet would soon be needed and NASA was already working on that.
Josh’s interest in all this was directly related to his time adventures and in particular his promise to help Amy. If people’s minds could be transferred that easily, who was to say he couldn’t find a way of building that into his technology, allowing people’s consciousness to travel to different periods within their own lifetime.
What if he could scoop up the consciousness of six-year-old Amy in 1992 and place it back in her adult body where it belonged?
He could potentially create a new and safe form of time travel. Rather than risking life and limb travelling into potentially dangerous situations why not just send a projection of his, or anyone else’s, mind into a copy of the past?
In theory anyone could enjoy living any special moment of their life over again. They could also see what would happen if they were given a second shot at something and decided to do things differently. There were all sorts of possibilities.
Josh was an old hand when it came to time travel and rarely trusted anyone else with it, but here was a safe way to give other people a chance. What would people do if he showed up and offered them the chance to go back and live any day of their life of their choice again?
It was something that would be fascinating to explore, especially if he could observe. He was reminded of his dad’s old stack of Choose Your Own Adventure books he had read as a kid. Mayb
e now you really could explore every path for real.
Yes, he was certainly looking forward to seeing what they had been up to in Canberra and making some useful contacts there. Hopefully when he got back to Oxford in another six months he would be refreshed and ready to go on this new project. All he had to do then was persuade Alice it was something worth them spending their time on.
He finished his Tequila Sunrise and dived back into the pool, enjoying the feeling of the cool water on his skin. It really was baking hot in Dubai and he knew it wouldn’t take him long to dry off. He emerged from the pool just as the android masseuse finished working on his wife.
“It’s way too hot out here today,” remarked, Josh. “Fancy a siesta?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said, grinning, as she leapt up from the sunbed and took his hand.
In another month they would arrive in Canberra. Until then it was time for Josh to forget all about time travel and start enjoying his holiday.
Hand in hand they walked back around the pool towards the hotel.
THE END…for the moment…but you might like to know there are several spin-off novels available.
The story of how Amy ended up in 1992 is told in Happy New Year.
For more on Josh’s experiments with sending people into their own past, check out Midlife Crisis.
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