Unhappenings

by Edward Aubry

  I had given myself all the resources I would need to finally learn how to operate the working time machine in my arm.

  s the months passed by, my focus gradually shifted from finding a way to get back to that exact point in time to concocting a plausible explanation for what I was sure would be a noticeable change in my appearance when I got back. I knew I hadn’t aged enough to shock anyone, but I realized that I had no idea how long my hair was that day, or how much I weighed, or any of a dozen other tiny variables to which I had given no thought. Whatever I looked like then, I certainly wouldn’t look like that on my return.

  More than once, I considered the possibility of staying here. In five months, I had experienced no unhappenings at all. I was starting to believe traveling into the future had somehow made me immune to them, or that I had finally outrun them. If I went home, my life would fall right back into the hot mess of uncertainty that had pushed me to the brink of insanity. On the other hand, I would never see my parents again. They would never know what happened to me. By 2144, they were surely dead, although I had managed to resist the powerful temptation to find out how and when they passed on. Resisted it so far, anyway. But I found that as much as I loved them, as much as I already missed them and would surely continue to miss them, my potential regrets over not returning to them were far more about their sadness to see me go than my own homesickness. I wished they could know what life here was like for me. I wished they could understand how much I needed it.

  Of course it did occur to me that my staying in the future could cause a paradox. I assumed at some point I would need to return home, to eventually grow old and become the version of me that brought me here in the first place, but I wanted there to be a way I could stay here. Having gotten no indications to the contrary from my older self, I started to let myself believe it might just be possible. By that point, I had grown so addicted to a life where things that happened stayed happened, I was simply not able to embrace giving it up, or invite reasons why I would have to.

  Even more addictive was the fact that my new friendships were stable, comprehensible, and in no way based on me perpetuating a lie about why I always seemed confused. Well, unless one were to count the implicit lie that I was somehow from that time. Compared to pretending I had a disorder, that really didn’t feel significant.

  At first, my only interactions were with Andrea and Oscar. I would go to work, enjoy my time with them, and then retreat to my apartment to finish out the rest of my day in solitude. Eventually though, I started meeting people. It was not by design. I assumed from the start that the amount of contact I had with future people should be as restricted as possible. But that was never explicitly spelled out for me, and it began to seem less and less urgent. At first it was just casual awareness of people who had the same routines I had. People who ate at the same times and places. They did not have names, but we came to recognize each other and small talk became a progressively comfortable experience. From there I would occasionally see one of them out of context, and conversation was inevitable. Eventually, some of them started introducing themselves.

  No one ever stopped knowing who I was. No one ever disappeared. No one ever suddenly had a completely different relationship with me. No one ever retroactively died. It was absolutely intoxicating.

  I never lost sight of my true goal, and every opportunity I got to covertly study my implant, I did so. But while that was happening, without fully realizing it, I had begun to think of myself as Graham.

  mong the people I was starting to get to know socially was Wendy, an undergrad who worked part time at the security desk to my building. At first, I saw her three days a week, for about thirty seconds at a time. I don’t think we exchanged a single word the first two months I was there, but I definitely noticed her. Her curly brown hair and petite build reminded me of Leslie, one of my three erased high school romances, and she had the most delightful smile. Eventually we got to a place of polite hellos. As I became more comfortable with my social interactions, we progressed to small talk. At one point, I asked her what she was reading. It turned out to be The Catcher in the Rye. I had never read it, so I downloaded it out of curiosity. That turned into brief but frequent discussions of that book, and eventually two others.

  When the spring semester ended, and most students departed for the summer, Wendy stayed on and went full time. As I was now seeing her every day, our conversations began to last beyond a few seconds in passing. In longer doses, it turned out she had an extremely sharp wit. I started to linger at the end of the day for five or ten minutes, chatting with her, and watching her find new ways to make me laugh.

  One day, I stayed for nearly twenty minutes, talking about a book. Several people came and went during that time, and I became concerned I was distracting her from her job, so, I asked what I somehow imagined was an innocent question.

  “What time do you get off work? Do you want to get a cup of coffee or something?”

  She smiled at me mischievously and said, “Are you asking me out?”

  It was impossible to tell if she was joking. I countered with, “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” which was the right response, because she laughed. We did indeed have coffee when her shift ended, and spent about an hour deciding what we would read next, among other topics.

  I had grown so accustomed to the notion I would never date again, I somehow convinced myself the rest of the world understood that too. Evidently, I had left Wendy out of the loop. If I had been paying any sort of attention, I would have seen this coming from very far off. Having been confronted with it now, it was easy enough to replay the past few weeks and identify signals I had missed.

  My first reflex was to shut her out of my life from that moment on. That was so obviously impossible given our work situation I revised that position to an elaborate system for keeping her at arm’s length. But the longer I spent concocting ways to phase our conversations out to nothing, the more I began to question the point. I had by then spent half a year in a new life that never unhappened. I had every reason to believe being in my future had finally cured me of the affliction that had haunted me since adolescence. My reasons for pushing women away no longer seemed to apply. Wendy and I had a lot in common. She was cute, she made me laugh, and she was taking an interest. Maybe it wasn’t such a terrible idea to consider.

  That I was literally fifty-six years older than she was somehow never entered into my thinking. Nor did it cross my mind that I had no business experimenting with romance across the time stream.

  And so, perhaps recklessly, I dipped my toe in that ocean. Wendy and I began to have coffee at the end of the day two or three times a week. She did not repeat her joke about me asking her out, because it became clear pretty quickly that we were both trying to figure that out.

  And then one day I lost my keys.

  For an hour, I tore my apartment asunder trying to find a small metal ring with three other tiny pieces of metal attached to it. One of them opened my mailbox, one opened a locker in the lab complex, and one was entirely for show. I could quite easily have lived without any of them. The problem was that I always, always put them in a dish on my kitchen counter when I got home. This day they were not there. An hour later, when they turned up behind my toilet, the third key, the one that was just for show, was gone.

  I can think of eight plausible reasons off the top of my head for how that key could have gone missing. Anyone not me who had this experience would consider it a nuisance at worse. A completely insignificant irritation. That key served no purpose, and had clearly fallen off somewhere, anywhere, never to be seen again.

  Or that key unhappened.

  I started making excuses to avoid our coffee dates. My chats with her dwindled. It took about two weeks for my relationship with Wendy to revert to the level we had established before the summer break. With visions of a key that perhaps never was, and the memory of my year of bliss with Carrie cut short six years before the fact, I had no choice but distance myself f
rom Wendy for her own safety. We continued to be friendly, but her smile settled into something small and sad.

  he longer I worked with Oscar and Andrea, the more I discovered just how little anyone on this project knew about actual time travel. In a way, it was exciting to be on the cusp of what I knew was going to play out to be a spectacularly successful technological breakthrough. In another way, it was frustrating as hell. I already knew where this was going, and I wanted to get there already.

  One thing I learned was that separate from the mechanics, the consequences of time travel were one hundred percent unknown. A huge part of the purpose of our research cell was to determine (if it would even be possible to determine) what sending all those particles back to God knows when was actually doing to our history. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the aspect of time travel that my older self was so concerned about. Since I was forbidden to have any contact with him, and since I didn’t dare tell anyone else to ask him for me, I kept on wondering. However, if the uncertainty over whether or not time travel caused damage was his crisis, it didn’t seem especially prudent to pluck me out of time to solve it.

  There were three competing theories as to what backwards time travel would do to the universe. We were expected to scrutinize our work for any sign of any of them.

  The first theory was the simplest. Travel to the past can have no effect on history. What has happened is etched in stone. Anyone who arrives in the past is simply catching up to events that already happened at that point in time. Apart from my personal knowledge that this quaint idea was very, very wrong, it presented the problem that if it were true, we wouldn’t need to find evidence for it. We could simply choose to confirm or refute it by perfecting time travel, going back to some historically significant event and jumping up and down in front of a camera. I refer to this as a problem because there existed a non-trivial faction of the project that was seriously proposing we do just that. Evidently all time periods include some proportion of totally irresponsible whack jobs. That being the case, evidence of time travel should already be abundant.

  The second theory was that every trip through time created a parallel universe, distinct from the universe of origin. One could jump up and down in front of as many historical cameras as one wished, and those photos would still never become part of the history of that person’s home time. Confirming or refuting that one would be tricky, because it also included the possibility that travel back to the universe of origin would be, by definition, impossible. All we would ever see was time traveler after time traveler disappearing forever with no sign of their presence in the past. Cheery. Also obviously not true, but only obvious to me.

  The third theory was that any travel into the past causes changes to history, ranging from undetectable to catastrophic. The problem with this theory is that any change that led to a history that did not lead to the time travel itself would be impossible. It’s all very well and good to speculate on a crushed prehistoric butterfly altering the geo-political landscape millions of years later, but any variation of that idea is just an example of the grandfather paradox all over again. Even if the universe would somehow allow for the now-impossible trip to the past, history would change all around us, and none of us would have any way of knowing what the original timeline looked like.

  So, we were essentially charged with detecting any one of three undetectable phenomena. Perhaps ironically, the only object in the universe able to settle the matter was already a member of the team, and sworn to secrecy.

  ne morning I woke up with a dull but pronounced ache in my left forearm. It felt similar to the experience of having the module burrow its way into my bone marrow. Not being a doctor or a time travel technician, I did not feel qualified to diagnose the cause of my distress, but the prospect that it was jump-field induced bone cancer was a prominent candidate on my short list of guesses.

  There was nothing I could do about it directly without blowing my cover, but there was no way I was just going to ignore it. That morning, as nonchalantly as I could manage, I broached a disguised version of the subject with Oscar. It took me nearly an hour to find a point in conversation where I could insert the question without suspicion. My opportunity arose when Andrea made a comment about the materials used in the chamber shield.

  “Why does it need a shield?” I asked.

  Oscar laughed at me, because Oscar always laughed at me.

  “Asked Madame Curie,” was all he said.

  Perhaps noticing how pale I must have turned at that joke, Andrea smacked him on the back of the head. “It’s just a precaution,” she said. “We might not need it at all.”

  “You go right on thinking that,” said Oscar. “Some of us don’t want time travel poisoning to be listed as cause of death. Am I right?” That last part was directed at me, and he was most certainly right.

  “Is that a thing?” I asked Andrea.

  “No,” she said, glaring daggers at the back of Oscar’s head. “Not that anyone has recorded. The reason for the shield is that we are trying to observe the effects the jump field has on local space, and by ‘local’ we are hoping to mean the space contained inside the chamber. The truth is we have no idea how far the field extends beyond its observable operating limit. The shield is basically a cocktail of materials that block a wide spectrum of effects we do know about, and we’re hoping it blocks ones we don’t know about too. But no, the field itself has been a topic of laboratory experiments since 2088. If someone were going to get sick from being around the chamber, we’d know it by now.”

  Mildly reassuring. And yet, my arm. “What are the biological effects of actual time travel?” I asked. “Not just being exposed to the field?”

  Oscar spun around in his chair and fixed his eyes on me through those perfectly circular lenses. “What exactly are you asking?”

  My heart rate picked up. I didn’t see how that question could possibly have exposed my true purpose there, or my true identity, but there was so much I still did not know. I chose to forge ahead.

  “I mean, when someone actually travels. Are there any health risks, or long term effects?”

  Oscar looked at Andrea, who was already giving him a look of concern that was impossible for me to read precisely.

  After a beat, she asked, “How much do you know?”

  Not good. “Nothing,” I said. “About that, anyway. That’s why I asked.” After a pretty awkward pause, I stupidly added, “I was just curious.”

  Andrea stared at me with cold eyes. I had never seen her unhappy with me before. It wasn’t something I enjoyed at that moment.

  “I need to know right now if I am competing with you.”

  “Competing?” I sputtered.

  Oscar was rubbing his chin, a sinister smile growing on his face. “Oh, man. I think we’ve been grooming him. This is exactly the kind of stunt Walden would pull.”

  “Is that what this is?” Andrea’s tone was sharp.

  “No!” I said, having absolutely no idea what question I was answering. “I mean, I don’t think so. What are we talking about?”

  “Time Girl here is on the short list,” said Oscar, obviously and horribly enjoying whatever that meant. “Now she thinks she may be farther from the top than anyone has let on.”

  “Short list?”

  Andrea’s eyes narrowed. “The human trials short list. You tell me, right now, that you know nothing about that, and say it like you mean it, or I swear to God I won’t care whose nephew you are when I unleash the hurt you are about to feel.”

  “Whoa! No!” I threw my hands up, finally able to say something I knew was true. “I don’t know anything about that. I swear! I didn’t know you were on that list. I’m definitely not on it!”

  She stared. “You swear.”

  I nodded. “I swear.”

  Andrea closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and fell right back into character as my mentor. “No one has observed any health effects on the live subjects that have traveled so far. That inclu
des fourteen mice and one dog. The mice were subjected to five seconds of future travel each, spread out over several months, and have been under observation for over a year, including two that have since been euthanized and dissected. The dog was sent sixty seconds into the future last month, and has been under twenty-four hour observation every moment since then. Every animal appears to be healthy in every way that we can measure. There have been no live subjects used for backwards travel yet, and there won’t be until we can work out a reliable way of tracking their destinations and retrieving them.”

  I gulped. “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem,” said Andrea. “Sorry about earlier,” she added.

  “No, no, that’s fine. I had no idea. Of course you would be concerned.” Looking for a way to comfortably end this discussion so that I could find somewhere private to scream, I added, “I hope you get picked.”

  She smiled warmly, and we both dropped it. I excused myself and went to the roof to hyperventilate.

  Human trials hadn’t started yet. Except they had. Dr. Nigel Walden was in possession of at least two working modules and had used them on himself at least three times. And no one knew. The research he insisted was not bringing acceptable results was in fact more successful than anyone but he was aware. With human trials still ostensibly a ways off, and a working system already in place, he was probably already years ahead of schedule.