by Edward Aubry
And it was indeed frustrating. My assignment was impossible. I was to improve upon—perfect, actually—a device whose underlying principles I did not fully grasp. Even if I dared ask for help from anyone else on the project, I didn’t think anyone knew it existed, let alone how to make it work better.
What I really needed was a complete understanding of basic hyperphysics. If I could at least comprehend what properties of space-time I needed to violate, I might be able to work out how this gadget violated them. Hyperphysics was a branch of science with a lot of sophisticated theories and models in 2145, but I wasn’t from 2145. In 2092, the word had only just been coined. I barely had the vocabulary to keep up with Andrea and Oscar, let alone the background.
When Future Me first pitched this job to me, he told me he wanted to go back to formula on the project. I now realized he had pulled me from the wrong part of my life. He should have waited until after grad school. I would have at least been versed in the thinking of my own time.
And so, one aggravating afternoon, following a heated session of staring at the modules and complaining about them, I’d had enough.
“I need to see your prototype! Where are the designs? Show me the earliest notes on how you are supposed to work, so I can at least have somewhere to start!”
It had of course slipped my mind that my internal module was still following my verbal commands. It would be some time before I mastered using it by thought alone. Hearing a perceived instruction, it complied immediately.
The lab vanished. In its place stood another lab, one I recognized. I had never been in this room before, but even in the dark I knew an MIT physics lab when I saw one. It was sometime after nightfall, probably very late at night if no one was there. Judging from the equipment, it was from a point in time close to when I was a student there. I made the connection immediately. I thought back on waiting for Pete to record whatever data he was supposed to collect, and feeling the module in my arm tingle when he got back. As early as my senior year, Ainsley was running time travel experiments. This would be his lab, or a colleague’s, at some point after that when they had gotten a basic jump field generator up and running. I told the module to take me back to the prototype, and it had done just that. This was exactly what I needed. If I could copy Ainsley’s data, I would have everything I needed to start my self-education in hyperphysics. I even had a mobile device on me, with an app that would cut through twenty-first century encryption like a chainsaw through tissue paper. All I needed to do was find his terminal.
Which was no doubt in his locked office.
I pondered my options for about five minutes. Really, I just spent that time running a quick cost-benefit analysis and working up the courage to act on it. Then I kicked in the door. Painful, but surprisingly possible. After that, it took less than two minutes to find and harvest the data I needed. I looked at the damaged door jamb. There was no getting around the fact that he would know someone had been here. There would be no actual evidence of the data theft, but with no other obvious motive, he would have to know that’s what I was after. I took another minute to hack the lock on his desk safe and grab a small, shielded case out of it, and then I left it hanging open. Whoever found the scene first thing in the morning would assume the robbery was the true goal. This felt like cleverness at the time, but the reality was I did all of it in a blaze of adrenaline-fueled panic.
“Take me home.”
My module complied, and I found myself in my 2145 apartment. The fact that I now thought of it as ‘home’ hadn’t really registered yet; I was lucky it didn’t take me back to my parents’ house in 2092. I set the stolen case down on my kitchen table, and went to the bathroom to wash the crime off my hands. My hands trembled under the running water. In the mirror, I saw a ragged, shaking mess. I hadn’t shaved in more than a week; my hair was overdue for a cut, and stuck to my forehead with sweat. I looked like a wretch. For a fraction of a second, I caught myself being grateful no one had seen me, out of nothing more than vanity. Then I felt a lurch in my stomach as I realized that what I saw in that mirror would be approximately what the security cameras must have seen.
The lab buildings were not exactly high security facilities, but they were monitored, if only to manage student mischief. There would be a record of this break-in. Worse, I would be recognized.
And then, my head finally clearing out, I remembered that I had been recognized. By Ainsley. Who called the police. Who almost arrested me, but for the fact that I was conclusively somewhere else at that exact moment. No doubt the review of the security vid that followed would have included the observation that the intruder did look like Nigel Walden, but the hair was all wrong and he had a beard, and besides, he was clearly quite a bit older. Ainsley’s mistake would be taken as reasonable, but a mistake nonetheless. The crime would go unsolved.
A great wave of relief washed over me, as I realized this event had come to pass. I had dreaded it, on and off, for years. It turned out to be very unlike the cunning master crime I had envisioned, with weeks of preparation and elaborate tools of thievery. Instead, it was a clumsy, frightened, painful botch job.
With that out of the way, two important, troubling things became immediately apparent. One was that Ainsley’s experiments were happening as early as my sophomore year, less than two years after the Slinky Probe accident. The other was that my module, on command, had taken me to exactly the point in time I needed it to go. Given the limitations of time travel technology, even the advanced modules from Athena’s time, I should have missed the mark by several years.
My older self had charged me with perfecting time travel. Apparently the secret to that perfection was already bonded to my nervous system.
s Athena had predicted years earlier, the stolen case contained several small ingots of palladium. A cursory scan of the wrist module also revealed a palladium-copper alloy frame. The same alloy, in a slightly different configuration, accounted for nearly eleven percent of the mass of the module in my arm. I was finally getting somewhere, although I had no idea yet where that might be.
Ainsley’s data had been easy to steal, but apart from including several complete textbooks on the principles of hyperphysics, it turned out to be nearly impossible to read. The actual electronic encryption had been child’s play to defeat. However, many of his notes had been further encrypted with a personal cipher. It harkened back to Galileo’s practice of writing out entire sentences using only the first letter of each word. This went on for literally hundreds of thousands of characters. I had some rudimentary decoding software that wasn’t able to break whatever it was he wrote, and there was no way I was going to bring a cryptologist in, so the theft was a bit of a bust. About the only thing I was able to determine from what little data made any sense was that the first artificially created jump field was generated only three months after the Slinky Probe time travel event. The rudiments of time travel had already been known and achievable for sixty years by 2145, and we were still no closer to practical manned time travel. I had to assume that whatever the wrist module did was not stable enough to be considered safe for use, or Future Me would not have kept it a secret from his own research teams.
So, my research turned toward finding ways to reverse engineer the module in my arm. I had access to much more sophisticated equipment than my father’s processor scanner, so I was able to make a little bit more headway there, but not much. More than once I seriously considered the possibility that the module was sending false information about itself to avoid being analyzed. It was, after all, “too smart.”
What I really needed was one of those silver beads. There was no way I could dig the one out of my arm, and I thought it extremely unlikely that Athena would give me another one. The entire experience was maddening, and my future self must surely have known that. More and more, I felt that he had transferred me from a cell performing an unnecessary task to an isolated lab where I would spin my wheels in an impossible assignment. There had to be more to this.
My hopes of finding a magic blueprint shortcut to designing functional time travel equipment thus dashed, I resigned myself to reading the textbooks included in Ainsley’s data. It took me about two days to realize it would take me months to even begin to understand the basic theory behind what I was being asked to do. Still, there was no way I was going to surrender.
Effectively, even possessing the ability to flee to any time and place by simply saying it out loud, because of my intellectual need, I had become a prisoner.
Which was, of course, my intent all along.
fter nearly a month of dutifully attempting to perfect a technology I had no hope of understanding, one Tuesday morning I had a completely unrelated epiphany. I was literally my own boss. If I skipped a day of work, there would be absolutely no consequence. I had been laboring under a kind of work ethic inertia for more than a year, and I needed out. This project was making me crazy. I had to get away from the lab and clear my head, ideally to give myself an opportunity to look at the problem from another angle, or give myself a chance to work in a less distracting environment.
Naturally, that environment turned out to be Helen’s office.
Her expression on seeing me at eight in the morning was a mixture of confusion, surprise and delight.
“What are you doing here?”
In addition to her own desk, her office was furnished with a long table. That morning, there were about twenty books spread out on it. I pushed them into a neat cluster and dropped my notebook and tablet in the new empty space.
“I could ask you the same question,” I said, pulling up a chair.
“I work here,” she pointed out.
“So do I, at least for today.”
“Hmm,” she said with a mischievous smile. “Is this hooky?”
I feigned offense. “Nothing of the sort! I am a researcher. This is field work.”
“Tell me you’re not studying me.”
“Don’t be absurd,” I said. “Of course I’m studying you. I also happen to be working on a completely unrelated project for the university, which is my actual job. And it’s driving me insane with frustration right now, so I’m taking a little break from the lab. If I’m going to be in your way here…”
“No, that’s fine.” She went back to whatever work she was doing. I opened one of Ainsley’s textbooks on my tablet, and started reading.
“So, what are you working on?” Helen asked after a few minutes.
I looked up. Her eyes were on her own screen, not on me.
“You know I can’t answer that.”
Still not looking up, she said, “You know this isn’t a monitored room.” After a pause, she added, “I’m just putting that out there.”
I sighed. “Believe me, I’d love to tell you,” I said, and it was true.
I wanted to tell her everything, to share my whole life story with her, admit that I didn’t belong here, and that I was bound to an insane quest to invent something for which I had no expertise that had already been invented by a more advanced version of myself. I wanted to let it all out. The crushing frustration at being placed in this position, the horrible suspicion that everything I had been told about why I was needed was a complete lie, fed to me to serve some larger, possibly sinister purpose. That I dreaded the glimpse of myself I had already seen, and deeply feared he was already my destiny.
The oppressive anxiety that all of these riddles led back to the probability that I would someday do something horribly, horribly wrong, that would cost me the friendship of the only confidant I had ever had, for at least eight years, and God only knew what else. The foreknowledge that whatever I did next, my best path would only ever be the lesser of two profound regrets. And that the only reason I was staying here instead of abandoning all of it to go back to my parents, and my own time, to face my future one day at a time like I should, and take my chances on steering myself toward becoming a person I could live with, was that the thought of leaving Helen, of never seeing her again, was more than my fractured soul could stand.
“Are you okay?”
Helen gazed on me with perfect, sympathetic blue eyes. I suddenly realized I had been staring at her, and that I was clutching the sides of my head. I shook myself out of it.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m fine. I was just thinking.”
thena’s visits began to come more often. They were very unlike all the times she mysteriously appeared to me at MIT, always from a different point in her life, always business, and always a thrill ride. These days I saw her sequentially, so we were able to continue conversations from our previous meeting. My interactions with her began to take on a sort of continuity they had lacked before. Now her visits were not missions, they were social calls. The wildcat Penelope with whom I had gone on so many adventures in my youth was nowhere to be found. In her place was the more reserved Athena, friendly, but rarely a source of humor. As I got to know this side of her better, I realized that this was a more accurate presentation of who she was, and that all of the times she had spirited me away on our clandestine disruptions of history, she had been in character for me.
She still maintained a low profile in my presence. As had been true in college, apart from her one encounter with Wendy, none of my friends, colleagues or acquaintances had ever met her. She never visited me at work, and never happened to arrive at my apartment when anyone else was there. In fact, at that point, I’m not sure there was any compelling evidence that she was anything other than my imaginary friend.
On one such visit, I asked her, “Once something has unhappened, is there any way to use time travel to… I don’t know, re-happen it?”
“What are you thinking about changing?” she asked with complete deadpan. I had somehow imagined this question would be at least a little bit shocking. I guess not.
“I’m not. At least not yet. I just want to know… If Helen and I get close, and I really am cursed, and her life is erased because of that, I want to know that I can go back to some point before we meet and make it okay again.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she looked me closely in the eyes for a few seconds, then took my hand. The universe flashed as we tandem jumped. She had taken us to a park in the middle of a spring afternoon.
“I know this place,” I said, surveying my surroundings. Athena—Una then—had taken me here once. I thought I even recognized some of the people here. It was impossible to say if this was the same day, or just the same park with a cast of regulars.
“I come here to think sometimes.” She had said almost those exact words the last time she brought me here. That event was still quite a few years away in the subjective future of the Athena with me now. “Let me ask you a question: If you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you do it?”
As she said the words “Baby Hitler,” my eyes happened across a parked stroller sitting next to a couple sitting on a bench. They were laughing about something.
“Of course not,” I said. My gaze lingered on the happy family.
“Why not?” asked Athena, failing to convey any sort of authentic curiosity.
“Because that was two hundred years ago,” I said. “Killing that baby would save millions of twentieth century lives at the expense of hundreds of millions of twenty-first century people who would never be born under other circumstances.” I hoped my voice did not carry much of my irritation. I had asked her a question that was very important to me, and her response was to walk me through Cliché Thought Experiments 101.
“So, it’s math,” she said. “All right, what if I give you a twenty-second century target to minimize the damage. See that woman walking her dog?” Athena pointed to a fortyish woman being led through the park by a gray whippet on a leash. “She is patient zero of a plague that will wipe out two hundred thousand people. All you need to do is walk over there and strangle her, and it will never happen. Now what?”
My jaw dropped.
“Is she seriously?” I asked quietly.
&nb
sp; “No,” said Athena. “Answer the question.”
I gave myself a moment to settle down from briefly believing Athena’s hypothetical was a real thing.
“No,” I said. “She is still a human being. Find another way.”
“There isn’t one. Besides which, she has a nine-year-old boy locked in her basement with no toilet, living off buckets of table scraps. Now can we kill her?”
“No,” I said. “We call the cops.”
“Nice work, hero. That nine-year-old is now going to grow up to be a dictator whose atrocities will put Hitler’s to shame.”
“Great,” I said, tired of the baiting. “Are we drifting in the direction of a point any time soon?”
“Oh, wait,” said Athena. “Did I say the woman was patient zero? I meant the skinny dog. Now what? Should we go over there and beat it to death right in front of her?”
Two obvious and completely contradictory responses immediately sprang to mind. Certain that this was a trick question, I rejected both of them.
“Maybe?”
“Aha,” she said slowly. “Welcome to my world.”
And suddenly, all those “fixes” we ran resolved themselves into the horrors they must surely have been for Athena.
“How do you decide which things to fix and which ones to leave alone?”
“Happily, that’s not my decision. I’m just the errand girl. To answer your question, no. Once something unhappens, it cannot be re-happened, as you so awkwardly put it. What I do is tweak potential and opportunity so that the cause of an unhappening never has a chance to materialize. It doesn’t always work. Even when it does, I can’t restore an old timeline. I just maximize the probability that the replacement timeline is as close an approximation of the original as can be achieved. Which, by the way, is usually not very close at all.” She paused there, looked away oddly, and muttered, “Why can’t I? Doesn’t he…? No. Of course.”