by Edward Aubry
“When?” he asked.
“2092 version, although more like 2095 by now,” I said, shaking myself out of my ruminations. “I’ve been living here for three years, working on the Time Travel Project. Do you remember recruiting me?”
“Recruiting you?” he said, frowning. “No, I didn’t recruit you. Why would I recruit you? How would I recruit you?”
“You came to see me three times,” I said. “Once when I was at MIT, and twice about two years after I graduated. You brought me here with a wrist module, and asked me to help you perfect it, because there was some flaw you couldn’t isolate.”
“Slow down,” he said. He gestured to a table in the back of his office. “Sit.” We both sat.
“None of that happened,” I said. “Did it?”
“Not to me,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Did this future me look my age? Older?”
“Older,” I said. It was now obvious that the version of me who recruited me was from further in the future than he had planted me. I could think of a few reasons that might be the case, but no reasonable explanation for why he wouldn’t tell me that, or include this version of us in the plan. Worse, it meant that at some point in this Dr. Walden’s near future, something would wreck him and make him into that pathetic creature. The gee-whiz qualities in him I already found so endearing would fade. He would become more like me.
“What’s a wrist module?” he asked. I had brought one with me in a messenger bag, and produced it for him to see. He gently turned it in his hands, looking it over with awe and glee. “Please tell me this is a time machine.”
“You’ve never seen one of these?”
He shook his head.
“We are at least five years off from this technology. I have a plucky young woman slated to be our first traveler when it’s ready to roll out.”
“Andrea?” I asked.
He nodded, still enraptured by the device.
“Don’t tell her. It’s still a secret.”
“Mum’s the word.” I pulled out my tablet, and sent Helen a single word of text. “Listen, I think we’ve both been played by a future version of us, and I really think we need to find out why. I don’t mean to alarm you, but I’m not sure he was quite all there. If there’s something down the road for you that makes you a little unstable and prone to bizarre time travel behavior, we need to avert that.”
“Agreed,” he said. “The first thing we need to do is establish what it was he really wanted you to do here.”
“He said he wanted me to perfect the module.”
“That’s nonsense,” said this future me. “If it worked well enough for me to use it, it’s already safe and accurate. My risk-taking days are well behind me.” He shook his head and smiled. “I’m not you anymore.”
“Ugh. Well, if he didn’t really need me working on this project, what the hell am I here for?”
There was a tap at the door. Helen opened it cautiously.
“Hey,” she said. “I got your text. I’m here. Wow,” she added, seeing my future self. “I’m… It’s really a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Walden.”
“Come in,” I said. “Sorry about this,” I said to my future self. “This is Helen, she knows all about the situation. We’re… Well, that’s a long story.” He stared at her. It was awkward, and confusing. “Hey,” I said, snapping my fingers in front of his eyes.
He looked at me, and whispered, “Oh, no.”
I was going to ask him what he was suddenly afraid of, and then recognized the look in his eyes. It wasn’t fear. It was the look of a man who had just been hit with a dopamine dart. It was love at first sight.
My reason for being planted in this time, at this place, had never been about time travel. It had always been about Helen.
y seventy-nine year old doppelganger was already falling for my fiancée. Setting aside the fact that it was a mild struggle to convince myself this was no logical cause for jealousy, it gave me some unexpected insight into my relationship with her. Apparently, Helen’s effect on me—any version of me—was quite magical.
“Snap out of it,” I reminded him.
He looked at me plaintively.
“Would I really do that? Could I really be that person?”
“I wish I knew,” I said.
“But surely this would never even work. Don’t you still need to return to your home time, and eventually become me?”
“We operate in multiple frames of reference simultaneously,” I said. “I can lay it out for you when we get a free moment, but the short answer to your question is no, I don’t.”
“What’s going on, guys?” Helen’s smile was warm, but nervous. Just being in our combined presence must have been difficult to absorb. It was about to become more so.
“Please sit,” I said. My older self stood while Helen came to the table, and sat when she did. Memo to self: eventually learn some courtesy. “I think,” I began, and then looked to my older self for confirmation. “We think?”
He nodded.
“We think I may have been brought here, to this time, just to meet you.”
Helen stared at me, then stared at Older Me, then slumped back into her seat, mute with shock. I had no idea what to say to her, and hoped this was not about to be the day I finally lost everything.
Finally, she said, “I like it. It’s psychotic, but irresistibly romantic.”
“Is she kidding?” Older Me asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
She looked me in the eyes. “You crossed half a century just to be with me? How is this not a fairy tale?”
How it was not a fairy tale would be spelled out in eight hundred and twenty million corpses. While I knew she sincerely loved the notion that we were so meant to be even space-time itself could not keep us apart, she would not find the consequent global sacrifice quite as enchanting.
“But…” she began slowly, “why would you do that? How would you know?”
“At some point we must have met,” said Older Me, “and I must have had feelings for you. Honestly, I’ve known you for two minutes and I already have a crush.”
“Steady,” I said.
He ignored me. “But look at me,” he said, spreading his arms. “I’m an old man. What are you, twenty-five?”
“Twenty-seven,” Helen and I said in unison.
“That’s fifty-two years,” he said. “I could never woo a woman fifty-two years my junior. We must have been friends, and it must have driven me mad to know you without being with you.”
“You say this like you don’t know,” she said. “Didn’t you bring my Nigel to this time?”
My heart tripped at the phrase “my Nigel.” I think his did as well.
“No,” I said. “The Future Me I met before was older than… Dr. Walden. Five, maybe even ten years. And much less with it. Whatever happened, hasn’t happened yet.”
“But why would I take the risk?” he asked. “How could I even know it would work?”
Helen took my hand. “Maybe it was my idea,” she said. “Maybe I fell for you, too, and we decided together it was the only way we could be happy?”
I couldn’t let this continue.
“It wasn’t your idea,” I said. “It couldn’t have been.”
“Why not?”
I closed my eyes, dreading the next minute of my life. “Because in the original timeline, Future Me didn’t meet you until much later than this. And by then… you were already married.” My self-imposed darkness was matched with a room full of silence. When I finally dared open my eyes, Helen’s were right in front of them.
“This was all to keep me away from my husband.”
“Apparently,” I admitted weakly.
Helen stood. I feared she was about to walk out again, but she moved around the table to Dr, Walden, and for an instant, I thought she might slap him. Instead, she kissed him full on the mouth. Watching him try to figure out what to do with his hands was unexpectedly hilarious.
“Thank you
,” she said when she was finished, “for saving me from that.”
“You are quite welcome,” he sputtered, “I assure you.”
“Don’t thank us yet.” I said.
“Why?” they both asked.
After a heavy, trepid sigh, I said, “Because we still have a war to prevent.”
I never got to finish that thought, because that was the moment I had my very first real-time unhappening.
r. Walden’s office transformed into a concrete cell. There was no warning, and no sense of transition. I looked down to see myself garbed in a safety orange jumpsuit. It is a bit telling that my first reaction to this sudden and terrifying shift in reality was not horror and desperation, but a disappointment that whatever advances had been made in the law-abiding world of 2146 evidently did not apply to prisons.
I whispered to my left forearm, “Tell me you’re still there.” It tingled. The module implant was still in place. As long as I had that, I was free to go any time I wanted. But, without knowing why I was here, and what the new timeline entailed, escape might hold even greater dangers for me. I chose patience.
My greatest concern, obviously, was Helen. The immunity our relationship held to these unhappenings would protect her, I hoped, but without knowing why I was here, and where she was, it was difficult for me to imagine her being safe.
I only had to endure two hours of fear and misery before I was told I had a visitor. Specifically, my “sister.” As expected, this turned out to be Athena.
“What kept you?” I asked as flippantly as I could. It was a struggle.
“Don’t,” she said. “It took us three days to find you. This is bad, and you need to listen carefully. Got it?” I nodded. “Good. You are presently awaiting execution for a homicide. That is scheduled to happen in two days, so you need to be out of here by then.”
“Who?” I asked. It was the only piece of this that mattered.
“Wendy,” she said. “I am so sorry, Nigel. Please don’t ask me anything else about the crime until we get this sorted out.”
I felt faint. “Did I do it? Can you tell me that much?”
“You did not,” she said. “Please don’t ask any more questions. I have instructions, and I need you to follow them.”
“Okay,” I said numbly.
My arm tingled. “I am sending a jump course to your module right now,” she said. “It will activate thirty minutes after lights out tonight. I will bring you up to speed on everything at the rendezvous.”
“Understood,” I said. “Is there anything I should do until then?”
Her eyes bored into mine. “Don’t. Get. Killed.”
I didn’t get killed. Thirty minutes after lights out, and very much awake, I flashed out of my cell. I was on the roof of an unknown building, in the middle of the day. Athena handed me a bundle of clothing, and I stripped out of the jumpsuit.
“Can you save her?” was all I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “And you should know right now that saving her isn’t the assignment. My task is to provide you with an alibi. I am exceptionally good at that, so this will be over for you very soon.” She kissed me, and added, “I will try. I promise you I will try.”
For just over an hour, I waited for Athena’s return. When she did reappear, her forehead was bleeding, but not enough to explain the quantity of blood on her clothes.
“Find Helen,” she said. “By now you’ve been missing for two days. Do not travel back those two days. Just go home.”
“My God,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“No.” I reached for her. “Don’t touch me!” she shrieked. “I don’t have another change of clothes for you!”
I wanted so badly to comfort her, and her only allowable priority was not covering me in suspicious blood. As badly as I did not want to ask this, I had to.
“Wendy?”
Athena looked away. “I was able to save her from being murdered,” she said. “But not from being raped.”
With that, she vanished.
ow long have we known each other?”
“Oh! God!” said Helen. “Stingrays! Get in here!” She pulled me in the door to our house, and held me. “Where have you been? Athena said she had to get you out of prison? What happened? Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so. Better than some, anyway.” Helen did not ask me to elaborate, and I did not volunteer. What happened to Wendy was now on my conscience, but as far as Helen was concerned, it was already part of the timeline. Old news. I did not want to admit to her that in the proper timeline, it had never happened.
“You’re safe now,” she said. “Can I get you something to eat? Do you want to take a bath? What can I do?”
“Those both sound good,” I said, but mostly for her benefit. She made me a grilled cheese sandwich.
If I couldn’t negate the unhappening effect, this was how our life was going to go from now on. I would have some crisis Helen would never see, other than that I would be slightly more broken.
Unhappen. Fix. Repeat.
I saw the flash of Athena’s arrival. Helen had a hushed conversation with her, which I did not attempt to hear. Athena sat down next to me.
“He’s getting more creative,” she said.
“I noticed. Are you okay?”
She hesitated. “That was ten weeks ago for me,” she said. “But no, not really.”
“Did you…” I wasn’t sure how to ask. “…do something that caused someone to die?”
“Yes,” she said. “Specifically, I stabbed him. Many times.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” She took my hand. “I’ll always know. You won’t ever have to say it.”
“But I will.”
She nodded. “Yes, you will.”
“We need a better strategy than damage control,” I said.
“Believe me, we are working on that. The trick is not to make things even worse, and we don’t have the best track record on that count. Right now, it looks like your work with the standing wave jump field might be our best bet.”
More weight.
“I’ll try not to let you down.”
“You need to take care of yourself right now,” said Helen.
“Of course,” said Athena. After a pause, she added, “Mom told me your theory about the older version of you bringing you back here just to meet her. I may ask you to come with me when I follow that lead.”
“Lead?” I said.
“We’re still trying to get a bead on his home time, but I’m going to try to find the version of you that recruited you in the first place.”
“Yes,” I said. “I would like to speak with him, I think.” I thought about this man, whom I had not seen in three years, and the damage he had wrought on an entire planet with his selfishness. And I thought about how if I had it to do over, I’m not sure I would make the right choice.
elen and I did our best to maintain our normal routines during that time. For me, that meant spending my days in the basement workroom trying to solve the problem of the standing jump field wave. With the contemporary Dr. Walden still several years behind where I thought he was, his insights turned out to be no more useful than my own. So, my routine was research. For Helen, it meant going to work in the library.
Around noon, I heard the door chime. “Identify,” I said without looking up from my work.
“New visitor,” said my home computer. “Checking facial recognition database. Match confirmed. Identity: Carlton Ivan West. Shall I admit?” At this surreal news, I dropped my work and bolted upstairs. “Shall I admit?” the computer repeated.
“No,” I said. I had no idea what he could possibly be doing here, but there was no way I wanted him strolling into my house on the authority of a machine. “I’ll get it myself.”
The words seemed extremely courageous coming out of my mouth. Standing now in front of the door they seemed idiotic. Carlton West was a madman, a mass murderer,
and my fiancée’s ex-boyfriend. None of that could possibly bode well for me.
I opened the door, and there stood the man I had seen in Helen’s photograph, nearly a year earlier. He looked shorter in real life, but no less striking.
“Hello,” he said. “You must be Dr. Walden. You’re younger than I expected.” He held his hand out. I took it, more from social training than desire.
“It’s not Doctor,” I said. “You must be thinking of my uncle Nigel. My name is Graham.”
“Indeed.” He frowned. “I was certain she said Nigel. Either way, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” He poked his head in the door. “Is Helen in?” He spoke in a very slight, and obviously affected, French accent.
“I’m afraid she’s not.”
He offered another frown, ornamented with just the right kind of insincerity.
“Most unfortunate. May I come in?”
“I don’t mean to be impolite, Mr. West, but why are you here?” This was a lot of spine for me. I hoped I would be able to brag about it later.
“I see I’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” he said. “Mr. Walden. Graham? Do you know what power is?” I did know what power was, but he didn’t wait for a reply. “This is a lovely house. If I made two calls right now, in twenty minutes this house and everything in it would be my property. So please understand when I say, ‘May I come in,’ it is really only a courtesy.”
That’s not what power was. Power was the ability to strangle this man as an infant, thirty years before this conversation took place. I had that. He had nothing. Unfortunately, for all that I had that power, there was no way I was going to wield it. I let him in.
My conversation with Carlton West was nowhere near as monumental or even interesting as I expected. We began with small talk, and shortly moved on to the topic of Helen’s happiness. For a moment, I thought he was going to declare his intent to win her back, but that never manifested. At one point, he did make the moderately threatening statement that if he ever heard I had been unkind to her, I would have to deal with him, to which I made an unfunny and severely ill-advised joke.