Unhappenings

by Edward Aubry

  “Tell me everything.” The words were out before I could find a better way to ask.

  She screwed her mouth to the side. “No,” she said flatly. She took my hand again and traced my forearm. “I’ve gotten so used to not having to explain anything, I forgot there would eventually come a time when you didn’t know.” She reached into her jacket, and unzipped an inner pocket. “And I’ve been carrying this for so long, I forgot that someday I would have to give it to you.” She opened her palm. In it sat an oblong silver bead, about a centimeter long. There were lines etched into it, so fine they might have been drawn with a pin. She looked into her hand at this object, and for a moment she appeared frozen by it. Then she closed her hand around it. “Are you sure?” she asked quietly.

  “Sure about what?” I asked.

  Still looking at her closed hand, she put a finger to her lips and said, “Shhh.” I gave her a moment of silence, after which she said, “Okay. I know.”

  That was when I realized she was having some sort of discussion with herself. It was impossible to tell if that should make me uncomfortable. Then she looked at me and her entire demeanor changed. She gently pulled my arm forward, and pressed the silver bead into a spot on the invisible line she had drawn twice. Instead of looking there, she stared straight into my eyes. That was when I noticed how firm her grip had become.

  There was a pinch, then a burn. Then, with a searing stab, the bead disappeared into a centimeter long incision in my arm.

  “Ow!” I cried as she planted her other arm on my shoulder and threw her weight into it. I could feel the bead tunneling into my muscle. The agony was intense, but oddly brief. The spot surrounding the wound was already starting to numb. I looked at the hole in my arm, and saw a thin trail of clear liquid ooze out of it, pushing away the blood. The liquid hardened, and the edges of the incision pulled themselves tightly together. Deep inside my arm, I felt a dull, painless scratching. “What is it doing?” I managed to gasp.

  Still staring me in the eyes, she said, “Bonding itself to your ulna.” There was another stab of pain, and I cried out. At that she let me go, and I clamped my hand over the already sealed opening.

  “It’s well into the bone now,” she said. “The anesthetic will wear off in about thirty minutes. I’m sorry, but you’re going to be pretty sore for a few days.”

  “What did you just do to me?” I felt a tear escape my left eye and tried to ignore it.

  She covered her mouth with her hand and looked away for a moment. When she met my gaze again, she did so with a look of profound sadness.

  “I just made you a time traveler.”

  e were suddenly in an alley, standing in snow, well after dark. Penelope had given me just enough time to finish getting dressed before grabbing my arm without warning and turning the world inside out.

  “What…?” This was all I had time to say before the dry heaves began.

  “The nausea will pass,” she said. “After a few more trips, your body will adjust and you won’t feel it anymore.”

  This was little comfort as my stomach tried to empty itself of food I had not yet eaten. That’s how I thought of it at the time, mourning my lost opportunity for breakfast. I later learned that the nausea in early trips was literally that very thing; my body somehow understood that there was a significant chronological gap between my last meal and my current position in time, even though that gap was, in this case, well in reverse. It was reacting the only way it knew how, by assuming anything I hadn’t been able to digest in that span must be toxic. It would be quite a while before I learned all the nuanced physiological consequences of time travel.

  “Here,” said Penelope, handing me a hip flask. “Rinse and spit.”

  I took a swig without thinking, instantly replacing the taste of bile with that of whiskey. I spat. “Gah! That’s not helping!”

  “It isn’t meant to.” She took the flask and sipped from it. After swishing the alcohol in her mouth for a few seconds, she sprayed my shirt with it.

  I held my arms out, and looked down at myself, soaking wet and reeking.

  “Oh,” I said. “Fantastic.”

  I looked at Penelope. She tucked the flask into a pocket without making eye contact. I scanned my surroundings. Nothing was familiar. The absence of sunlight at what was—only seconds before—ten in the morning, could only mean we had jumped in time. Of course I knew it was possible, and of course I knew it would happen to me sooner or later. The only aspect of this event I found in any way shocking was the sheer anti-climactic nature of it.

  “Where are we?” I asked. “When are we?”

  Penelope looked, as if to get her bearings.

  “Still in Boston,” she said. “I hope. The spatial displacement component is rarely as precise as it should be. And about ten months prior to our point of departure.”

  So. My first step through time was backward, by a trivial amount. No jaunt through history, no extraordinary visit to the future. Back one year and around the block.

  Penelope pulled out a small tablet and drew her finger across it. “This is good. We’re within two clicks of the target, and thirty-five minutes early.” She pocketed the device, and met my eyes for the first time since the jump. “Listen, I know this a lot for you to take in. I will explain what I can as we go, but for now I need you to trust me and follow directions. Don’t ask a lot of questions. I promise I will bring you up to speed on the big picture, but I… I’m just not ready, okay?”

  I looked around myself, and considered my options. For the first time since meeting her younger version, I found myself questioning if I should trust her, and wondering why that hadn’t occurred to me before. Her demeanor had been so jaunty and carefree when she strolled into my room, and now her face was etched with a trouble I could not fathom. She had been caught off guard. That was all. She missed the detail of which moment in my life she was traveling to, and she wasn’t prepared for me not knowing the ropes. This was easy enough to accept, and yes, there was just something about her that made me want to believe her.

  “Okay,” I said.

  She nodded. It was humorless and businesslike. “There’s a mini-mart a short walk from here. We are going to go there, behave very conspicuously for about ten minutes, and leave. With me so far?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. I need you to act like you’ve been drinking. That’s why you smell like scotch. Sorry about that, by the way.” There was no sorrow in her voice.

  “No problem.”

  “When we get there, follow my lead. I’m your date, someone you just met, and a little bit too wild for you. You’re tipsy, and I’m flat out drunk.” She looked over her shoulder, then turned and started walking down the alley toward the street, gesturing me to follow. I did.

  “You’ll want to act a little bit impatient with me, and embarrassed by me. I’ll try to make that easy.”

  I nodded. “Are we? Dating?”

  I meant it partly as a joke, and partly as a probe. Younger Penelope still hadn’t told me any solid details about who she was. Maybe Older Penelope would. It didn’t seem likely we were a couple in any time, but I needed to start somewhere. I expected a reaction either way. A coy hint, perhaps, or a revolted denial? Instead, she didn’t even look at me.

  “No,” she said. “And please don’t go there again.”

  That left me with even less information than if I simply hadn’t asked at all, and I felt some level of indefinable awkwardness with no clue how to correct for it.

  “Sorry,” I said, in no way sure what I was sorry for.

  “Leave it alone,” she said.

  A few minutes later we arrived at a Cumberland Farms.

  “Follow my lead,” Penelope reiterated, then threw the door open, giggling maniacally. It was in no way clear what kind of lead that was, or how it should be appropriately followed. By the time I got inside, Penelope was already running up and down the tiny aisles, shouting, “Wheeeeeeee!”

  Her suggestion
that I feign embarrassment was quite unnecessary. I looked around furtively, trying to imagine something I might want to buy, to lend some degree of authenticity to the proceedings. I managed to be looking in just the wrong direction when Penelope crashed into me.

  “Nigel!” she shouted directly into my face. “Buy me an ice cream!”

  I pushed her off of me. Remembering I was supposed to be buzzed, I shook my head and pretended to steady myself holding her shoulders. She started giggling again. The few people in the store were now all staring at us, some of them having moved to a better vantage point to do so.

  “Oh!” shouted Penelope, slamming herself into the counter, and bumping into a man who was attempting to buy a pack of cigarettes. “Nigel! Nigel! Buy me a scratch ticket!”

  I waited for the man ahead of us to flee with his smokes, then said, in my best attempt to appear like I was trying not to slur my speech, “One scratch ticket, please.”

  “Which game?” asked the clerk with an expression somewhere between irritation, amusement, and nervousness.

  “A big one!” said Penelope. One swipe of my card and fifty dollars later, she was furiously scratching away with her fingernail. “Oops!” she said, gouging a hole in the paper.

  I turned around to see just how many people were watching this freak show, and locked eyes with another customer, still standing in the doorway.

  “You!” he said. It took me a moment to place him, because he was out of uniform. It was the officer who nearly arrested me at the library. Then I realized that hadn’t happened yet. This was the scene he showed Dr. Ainsley on his tablet. My alibi. And yet, apparently, this still wasn’t the first time we met. How many such retroactive encounters still lay ahead of me?

  He shook his head in disgust. “Show some better judgment for once, will you?”

  That was the moment Penelope crashed to the floor, still giggling. I picked her up, and held her steady as I walked her to the door. We collectively staggered around the corner to the back of the store. Then we were in my dorm room again, an hour before noon, and ten months later.

  “Nice work,” she said. “We just supplied you with an iron clad alibi for the break-in.”

  “I know,” I said, trying not to give in to the sudden and profound queasiness. “I’ve already used it.”

  “All right then. Take care.”

  “Wait!” I held up my hands. “This is a lot to process. Can you… can you stick around? Can we talk? My whole world just changed. I’ve been waiting years for this. Please don’t go without telling me what this is all about.”

  “I’m not ready,” she said, frowning. “I didn’t know this was going to be your first time. I should have seen it coming, but keeping track of this is harder than you can possibly know. Give me some time. I will be back. I promise. Soon enough you’ll know.” She paused. “And you’re not going to like it.”

  I watched her stand there in a fragile state of indecision, and threw out the only question I thought she might answer. “Can you tell me about the break-in?”

  She thought for a moment. “Ainsley’s lab. Two hundred grams of palladium and seven terabytes of data.”

  “I stole that?”

  “You will.” There was a flash of light, and she was gone.

  ime travel paradox is a quaint, but hopelessly irrelevant concept. Every trip to the past changes it. The changes are instantaneous, retroactive by their very nature, and permanent. Any apparent contradiction is simply and elegantly overwritten by the new continuity. Time, it turns out, protects herself, much the way the earth will inflict quakes on the surface in order to relieve pressure deep below. Thought experiments like the grandfather paradox, once believed to be the cornerstone of time travel theory, have no power in time travel application. If a man travels back in time and murders his grandfather, thus preventing his own birth, the universe simply carries on with the grandfather dead, the time traveler forever unborn, and it does so without a care in the world as to how that murder was possible in the first place. No one will ever be aware that history has changed, and no one will ever be aware that he was supposed to have offspring, and grand-offspring. No one, that is, except the time traveler. That person, who should now never have existed, continues to exist anyway. And again, the universe just shrugs it off, insisting—and rightly so—that it owes no one any explanation for its conduct.

  Mind you, the time traveler does experience consequences for his actions, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  It would be several days after that encounter with Penelope’s future self before I saw young Penelope again. During that time, I made my best attempt to carry on with life as usual. I was used to keeping secrets, after all. In that respect, it was easy enough for me to get through my daily routines without any noticeable change of behavior. But no amount of pretending otherwise could lessen the impact of that one event. I had traveled through time. For real. I would never see the world the same way again.

  It took about a day for the initial rush to wear off, at which point I had become mired in questions. Whereas I imagine most people would find themselves in a philosophical or scientific crisis in my position, I found that my own reflections—and fears—ranged from the pragmatic to the mundane. I barely knew Penelope, even in her present day, youthful incarnation. She wouldn’t even tell me her true name. And yet, I trusted a future version of her, apparently without question.

  As the reality of that began to take hold, I found myself increasingly wary. Worse, there was now some object, obviously of a technology not yet existent in my time, housed inside a bone in my arm. I could not feel it and I could barely even see the scar, but the knowledge that it was there spun into an escalating fear of it. The notion that time travel was somehow my destiny had at first allowed me to accept this implant with bizarre ease, but having had some time to reflect on that, I felt like a reckless fool. I had no idea what this device did, if indeed it did anything. Maybe it was a time machine, or maybe Penelope was the one doing all the time travel mechanics, and what she put inside me was a surveillance device. Or a bomb.

  I spent two days in a distracted haze, scanning for a gray beret everywhere I went. My classes were a blur, when I even bothered to attend them. I had so effectively constructed my disability alibi that what little concern my friends voiced over this change in behavior were polite inquiries to see if I needed any help getting back on track.

  On the third day, Penelope—young Penelope—found me. We had no set schedule for our meetings; three or four times a week she would simply appear at a generally convenient time, and give me a survival lesson, or just milk me for information about my life in the guise of a friendly chat. So, when she encountered me in the middle of day, on campus between classes, it was with a comfortable, bubbly wave. My greeting was a bit less enthusiastic.

  “We need to talk.”

  Her smile dropped, and for a fraction of second, she became that future version of herself. It was the same expression she wore when she planted that bead in my arm.

  “Am I in trouble?” Not exactly a question I had anticipated.

  “Probably not,” I said. Then I corrected, “Probably not yet.”

  She furrowed her brow. “What is this about?”

  Whatever statement I had been rehearsing for two days disappeared from my head. Planning to tell her everything, perhaps even to confront her on how much she already knew, suddenly seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. I chose one detail and ran with it. “I had a visit a few days ago, from a future version of you.”

  Until that moment, Penelope and I had successfully avoided any direct mention of time travel, theoretical or otherwise. In my heart, I had known for years—ever since I first heard of the Slinky Probe accident—that my situation had to be the result of someone or something repeatedly traveling to my past and changing it. Knowing it and trusting another person to believe it, even someone who clearly shared my exceedingly rare experiences, were two very different things. It seemed to take Penelope a mo
ment to absorb the full meaning of my words. When she did, her expression softened to something between awe and fear. In that instant, the teenager reemerged in her eyes.

  “Me?” she said quietly. Then, almost a whisper, and with a touch of a squeak, “From the future?”

  I nodded.

  She was silent then, and looked away. Up. At her shoes. Anywhere but my eyes. I watched her work through her complicated emotional cascade, and for the first time realized this was brand new territory for her. I had somehow imagined that she had already had a similar experience. My own future self had visited me once, after all, but seeing her grapple like this clarified for me that she was indeed essentially a child, quite out of her frame of reference. I tried to imagine how it would have felt if I had been confronted with this at eighteen, or sixteen, or however old this girl was, and seeing that mental image, I found myself regretting having been so blunt. As I tried to formulate a hopelessly inadequate apology, she finally screwed up the courage to look me in the eye.

  “What’s…” she said, and the fear came back, almost destroying the moment. She took a deep breath and pushed through it.

  “What’s she like?”

  fter learning that at some point in the future, her adult self was going to travel through time to see me, probably repeatedly, Penelope became curiously distant from me. She still met with me every few days, but it became less social, and more businesslike. It didn’t take much time—or advanced detective skills—to figure out the reason for the abrupt change in demeanor. Penelope was now living in fear of the possibility that her future version had told me things her present version did not want me to know.

  Obviously, Penelope had been keeping things from me (her refusal to give me her real name was strong supporting evidence of this). For the most part, I had chalked that up to her maturity level and a need to feel important. I humored it because she was already giving me so much beneficial information I hardly saw the advantage to pushing my luck there. Her new reticence around me did little to change that perception. Future Penelope had told me almost nothing of value. That was one of the first things I told Young Penelope, but clearly she was either not convinced or not taking any chances.