by Edward Aubry
Athena laughed lightly. “Yes, Mother.”
“Splendid! I’ll put the kettle on.”
I took Athena’s hand.
“This is what you do to her,” I said.
“I like it,” she said, and then the world flashed.
We were in the park again. Carlton’s mother was giving him a bottle.
“Are you going to kill baby Carlton?” I asked bluntly.
“Not today,” she said with equal candor. “A narrow minority of our computer models show that executing him as a child results in no net improvement to history.”
I stared at her. “But you would. If those models said it would work.”
She nodded. “If that were the assignment.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?” I asked my baby girl.
“Not directly,” she said. “I have done things that caused people to die.”
“Oh,” I said. What else was there to say?
“You can’t go home,” she said suddenly. “2092. Or 2094 which is what it would be now relative to how much you have aged.”
“Wait, what?” This came as more than a surprise. I had stayed out of contact with the older version of me for more than two years, at his command, but all that time I had assumed I would somehow end up becoming him, and I would need to return to the late twenty-first century at some point to do that. I hadn’t planned quite that far ahead, but I had already started considering how I could minimize the effects of bringing Helen with me when I did. Now it sounded like that would be moot, and as much as I should have been in terror of losing my old life, I found my primary reaction was relief I would no longer need to concern myself with how to reconcile that life with Helen. Then the secondary concern of the impossibility of it all kicked in.
“Why?”
“Because there is already a version of you living that life in that time.”
As impossible as it seemed for my future self to exist without my return to my past, this development seemed even more so. “How?”
“Multiple frames of reference,” she said. “Remember? As a traveler, there are plenty of ways that could be accomplished.”
I shook my head, dazed. “I still don’t understand.”
“You saw that effect yourself when you went back five minutes. There were two of you. What do you think would have happened if you had convinced him not to travel back those five minutes himself?”
“Paradox?” I guessed.
She shook her head. “Not for us. Paradoxes are for the fixed. No such thing for a traveler. If you had stopped him, there would be two of you now.”
“Seriously?” She nodded. “Does that mean every time I travel I create another Nigel? How many of me are there?” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, but this new consequence of time travel was beyond my capacity for bravery. Why hadn’t she ever told me this before?
“Relax, Chief,” she said. “That’s not what it means. Yes, it is possible to create duplicates. We discovered that by experimenting with mice. But it’s not something that happens by accident. It has to be deliberately initiated. If it makes you feel any better, there aren’t any duplicates of me out there anywhere. It’s always been me. You calling me Una was more insightful than you knew.”
The moment of terror passed. “What about the older me? Dr. Walden? Is he another duplicate?”
“Probably not,” she said. “But maybe. We’re still looking into that, but we think he’s the same version of you that replaced you in 2092.”
“But still me, right?”
She nodded. “Very much so. A duplicate isn’t a second generation copy. You are both just as much Nigel Walden as the other.”
I thought on this for a moment. “You said if I had stopped myself that one time I went back five minutes, I would have made another duplicate, right?”
“That’s right.”
“But I didn’t stop him,” I said. “What happened to him?”
She shrugged. “Anyone’s guess. We still don’t know a lot about how it works, just that it does. If it makes you feel better, he probably just became you, with overwritten memories. You basically reabsorbed him. Or he reabsorbed you. Either way, he’s not out there anywhere.”
I caught my breath for a moment, pushing past the queasy feeling that I almost inadvertently cloned myself.
“But I didn’t do anything like that in 2092. There shouldn’t be any extra Nigels out there at all.”
“I know,” she said. “We’re still trying to determine exactly how this happened. The most likely explanation is that your future self somehow colluded with your past self, but we don’t know how he did that without you remembering it.” She put her hand on my knee. “The important part is that you can’t go back. There are too many ways you could injure the timeline.”
I took this in. All of it. Wrapped in this new and disturbing side effect to the technology that had become the driving force in my life was a spectacular silver lining. My parents wouldn’t need to lose me. A Nigel, a real Nigel, would continue to be their son. With any luck he would play out to be less of a disappointment. Perhaps not even be plagued by the same unhappenings. I would miss them, terribly, but they would still have a son, and that might be enough for me.
But even better, the last shackle holding me back from a life with Helen had just snapped in my mind. She was immune to my unhappenings, and now I was free to stay in her time. It was very easy to step back and take this in as the best news ever. And as I looked at my daughter, the daughter I now knew Helen and I could have without some dire peril to the universe, the other silver lining presented itself.
“I’m okay with that,” I said. “Not going back means I get to raise you.” I gave her my best happy father face. She smiled, but there was an odd hesitation to it.
“Yeah,” she said simply. Her gaze tracked back to the young father, burping his son, laughing.
“Yeah,” I said.
n a sunny weekend in June, I took Helen back to the aquarium. Our first time here had been an emergency vacation day, with me in terrible need of a distraction. This time it was simple recreation. There were no immediate or obvious crises on our doorstep, nothing had unhappened in a while, and I had recently learned that my stay in this future was to be permanent. Helen received that news with equal parts sympathy and self-interested relief. When I told her the sympathy was unnecessary, the relief overflowed.
We took our time meandering through the different sections. I got us tickets to the dolphin show, which we missed last time, and against her protests insisted that we sit well outside the splash zone. When we got to the ray tank, her eyes lit up again. The moment wasn’t entirely as magical as in our first trip here, but it still served quite nicely. After giving her a minute or so of quiet absorption with that look of wonder on her face that never got old for me, I loudly cleared my throat.
She turned to find me on my knee.
“Oh my God. Nigel, what are you doing?” She was blushing, a rarity for her, which I found entertaining in a way I would never, ever admit.
“Helena Clay,” I began, “from the moment I met you in your black biker jacket, I have known I wanted to spend my life with you. You have given me support when no one else could, even before you understood what it was for. I have learned more from you than I have from anyone or any experience in my life. No one in the world makes me laugh the way you do, and I am utterly, utterly in love with you.” I produced a small box from my pocket and opened it. “Helen, will you marry me?”
She was biting her knuckle, and it was entirely unclear whether she was holding back tears, laughter, or both. “Really?” she said finally. “The stingray tank?”
“It was this or the Ferris wheel, and the carnival isn’t in town.”
“Get up,” she said. I complied. She held her hand out. I gave her the box. She removed the ring, and looking at it, not me, she handed the box back. She held it up to her right eye, and watched the rays do their ballet through it.
; Then she slipped it on her finger, and threw her arms around me. Only when the applause began did I realize how many people had gathered to watch us.
n a Wednesday morning in early July, as had been the case with the Slinky Probe discovery, my time travel breakthrough happened entirely by accident. I had been experimenting with the wrist modules, specifically seeing how they responded to being sent into the future in the chamber, rather than under their own power. I had no idea what I expected to see from this, but any measurable difference between their state after a jump on their own and an externally induced jump might give me something to work with.
The accident happened when I got the two modules confused. After this incident, I marked one with an X in felt-tip. But at that moment, they were indistinguishable.
Stage one of the experiment was to send one of the modules one minute into the future on its own. I did so, and recorded every observable measurement of the effects on both the device and the character of the jump field. Stage two was to send that module one minute into the future by strapping it to the other one. Again, lots of measurements, negligible differences. Stage three was to send the module one minute into the future in the chamber. I meant to send the same module I had used in stage one and deactivated for stage two, but, as I said, I mixed them up.
The module which was still active and already set for a one minute forward jump was placed in the chamber, which was also set for a one minute forward jump. If I had been doing this deliberately, my best guess at a result would have been a single jump two minutes forward. I would have been wrong. When I activated the chamber, the module just sat there. There was no visual evidence that anything had happened at all. The jump field meters told a fantastically different story. The strength of the field was the square of what it would have been for a single one minute jump, and it was generating a standing wave in a form I had not yet observed, nor had anyone in the literature I spent the next two days combing through. I had discovered a means of creating a powerful jump field whose net influence was absolutely zero.
Which meant, I desperately hoped, I had found a means of cancelling the unhappening effect.
hen Helen came home that day, the modules were on our dining room table.
“Is this dinner?” she asked.
“Dinner is waiting at the establishment of Madame’s pleasure,” I said. “We have a lot to celebrate today. Maybe.”
“One thing at a time,” she said. “But talk to me while I change.”
“You don’t want to hear about this first?”
“Must multitask,” she said. “Fiancé says I need to pick a restaurant. So much to do…” She walked as she spoke, leaving a trail of clothes behind her.
After taking a moment to love the sound of the word fiancé, I followed her into the bedroom. She was throwing dresses onto the bed.
“I think I found a way to stop things from unhappening to me.”
Helen emerged from the closet in nothing but her underwear and a look of shock.
“Talk to me,” she said.
“The details are pretty complicated.”
“Tell me the parts I will understand,” she said, slipping into something black. “And do remember that I am smarter than you.”
“Noted. I was fiddling with the wrist modules today, and I accidentally figured out how to get them to generate a jump field of huge magnitude and zero effect, manifesting in a standing wave.”
“Oh my! That sounds…” She stopped herself. “I totally want to pretend I get how significant that is. What would I say if that were true?”
“You would talk about how that might be an indicator that it is possible to negate the unhappening effect, by applying the attributes of that standing wave to a traveler.”
“Yes!” she declared. “Pretend I said that! Zip me.”
“We do need to talk about what this means,” I said to her back as I pulled her zipper into place.
“Which we can do over Thai food. Just tell me two things right now.”
“Go,” I said.
“One: will this in any way threaten my immunity to your bugaboo?”
“I can’t see how it would,” I said. “What I’m hoping is that I can fix myself, sort of ground myself to time, so that whenever the timeline changes, you and I will see the same thing, and neither of us will notice it. That shouldn’t affect your immunity at all. If anything, it might make it stronger. We will ride it together, never aware of whatever it was that changed.”
“Good. Then two: what do we do to make this happen, and how soon can we do it?” The levity in her voice finally collapsed. This was Helen’s Holy Grail. Both of ours. If I was right, if we could make this happen, we had a real shot at happily ever after.
I took a moment to collect myself before answering that one. No part of this was going to be simple, or easy, and I needed her to know that up front. Our Thai restaurant conversation was about to be laden with plans, details, caveats and hopes, but what she needed to hear right now was that the first hurdle was going to be huge.
“If I am going to make this work,” I said, “there is no way I can do all the research alone. It’s time for me to finally have a long sit down with Dr. Nigel Walden.”
or three years, my employer had provided me with the most advanced equipment available, a private lab, a home, a car, and a stipend that surely put to shame the salaries of every tenured professor at the university. His only two requirements of me were that I work entirely in secret, and that I never, under any circumstances, contact him directly. I violated the former two years into the assignment when I sent Helen’s tablet one minute into the future. Today was the day I would violate the latter. Either I would find the answer to my life’s quest, or get fired.
For three years, I had successfully dodged this person. That alone was fairly striking, considering we worked in relatively close proximity and I had gotten to know a number of the other professors and staff on sight from casual interactions. Add to that the fact that I was technically one of his research assistants, and he was responsible for oversight of the entire project, and it was an impressive elusiveness. Yes, we were operating in strictly isolated cells, with complicated rules of communication that kept us all at least three degrees away from each other, and yes, he was also invested in avoiding me. However, the law of large numbers virtually guaranteed that given enough random interactions, one of them was bound to be with him. And yet, never.
I made an appointment with him through the physics department secretary, who asked me why I didn’t simply visit during his office hours. I explained that the matter was of a classified nature. Given the structure of the Time Travel Project, this explanation apparently held enough water to get me a time slot.
Helen and I went there together. I made her promise to wait outside while I spoke with him. She agreed, under protest. She found herself a nice chair in the department lounge, wished me luck, and dove into a book.
Dr. Nigel Walden’s office was at the end of the hall, and the long walk made the experience of meeting with him seem more ominous than was apropos. I tried to remember this person was essentially me, but all I could think of was the shattered husk of a man who had whisked me away on false pretenses to set me on a fool’s errand he most likely didn’t even understand. This was not going to go well, no matter what happened next.
I rapped on the frosted glass pane on his door.
“Come in!” I heard myself say.
He sat at his desk, which was a motley display of tablets, books and yellowed printouts.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, and we both froze.
Here’s what we each saw:
Behind this messy desk sat a man easily fifteen kilos heavier than the version of me who had come back in time to recruit me three times in one day over six years. The battered, weathered look of age was far less pronounced on him than what I had seen in that man’s face. Unlike the craggy, unshaven look I expected to see, this man had a full beard, quite gray and well on
its way to becoming a Santa Clause affectation.
Across from that desk stood a man of twenty-seven, who bore a resemblance to this man’s youth so strong, only one explanation was possible. To his shock, he was looking at his own person, surely having traveled through time from the past to this point.
Most upsettingly, to me, was the realization that I had not succeeded in avoiding myself as well as I thought. In point of fact, I recognized this man, and had probably seen him at a distance at least a dozen times in the past year alone. And yet, on this close inspection, there was no denying that this was a version of me.
But absolutely not the version I had been working for.
y God,” he said softly, then whispered, “Close the door!” He rose from his desk and came right up to my face, grinning. “Oh! Look at you! My God! This is incredible!” His hands came up, and for a second I thought he was going to grab my shoulders, but he thought better of it. “Tell me everything!”
I had no idea how to respond to any of this.
“You know who I am?” I said, attempting to at least establish a baseline.
“Of course,” he said. “You’re me. I think. You are me?”
“I am you,” I confirmed.
He clapped and giggled, overcome with giddiness. “It works! It absolutely works! Oh, my boy, this is the best moment of my life.”
This man, who was clearly an older version of myself, bore so little resemblance to the last time I had seen him, that for the first time, I felt a nagging doubt that the other version was actually me. But no, that one was also obviously an elderly mirror, just with a different set of emphasized characteristics. The phrase “evil twin” sprang unfortunately to mind, and I pushed it aside. But more than just their physical appearances diverged. The other old me was a broken man, a shadow of this one. Here was a man who delighted in wonder, with the courage to embrace the unknown, and a joy at discovering it. And all I could think of as I watched him and listened to him was that this was who I could have been if I hadn’t chosen the path of isolated detachment. This is who I could have become if my life had never unhappened. And as I saw that in his eyes, I sadly realized that of the two future versions of myself, the one more like me by far was the other one. The broken one.