by Edward Aubry
Stopping him turned out to be a matter of identifying his sources of materials and shutting them down before the fact, one by one. With access to time travel, we were able to provide more hot leads to counter-terrorist organizations across the world than they had ever gotten before. That ended up doing damage of its own, as terrorists adapted their tactics, and internal security rose to paranoid proportions in the wake of all these valid tips.
The entire process took three weeks, start to finish. I was left with the awful feeling that—as much as he had once again snuffed out most of the life on the planet—his heart just wasn’t in it the way it used to be.
“Does this seem too easy to you?” I asked Athena when we returned to my house, just as I left it, and just as Helen had left me.
“Yes. Either he is losing interest in the game, or it’s about to get worse,” she said.
“I don’t know if I can handle worse.”
My exhaustion was mirrored in Athena’s eyes. This was going to be our lot for as long as Carlton found it amusing, and it was breaking us. It had already broken Helen.
Athena took my hand.
“It ends now,” she said.
The world flashed.
t first I had no idea where we were. At her words of finality, I assumed this was the day we finally went to that park and murdered a baby in cold blood. I can’t say I was looking forward to it, but then it wouldn’t be me doing it. And then it would be over.
But that’s not where she took us. We appeared in an office of some sort. The only other person in the room was a man sitting behind a desk looking at a vid screen. I had not expected to see adult Carlton, and so for a moment I didn’t recognize him. I had a fraction of a second to panic before I realized he had no idea we were there. The cognitive dissonance of our arrival had rendered us temporarily invisible to him. He didn’t expect to see us, so he didn’t.
He was talking to the vid screen. Had it been facing us instead of him, the person on the other end would have seen us instantly. But it wasn’t, so she didn’t.
“I understand,” he said to the screen. “Truly. I know these last few years have been hard on you, and I am so, so sorry for that.”
“No,” said Helen. “Don’t be sorry. This can’t be easy for you either. It’s not something you did to me. It’s… just something that happened. Don’t be sorry.”
“I hope you will let me stay in touch? I would hate to part on a note of permanence. You know I care about you, no matter where our separate paths take us.”
“I care about you, too, Carlton,” said the love of my life. This conversation had happened more than two years previously, from my frame of reference. In those two years, I had never asked her what they said. I had never wanted to know. Hearing it now, hearing her tell this unspeakable beast, this genocidal maniac, that she cared about him, while in my own time she had just left me without those words, was almost more unbearable than the five years of my life I had lost to undoing this man’s carnage.
“But I need time right now,” she continued. “Maybe someday we can reconnect, but please let me have some space for now.”
He nodded, and I thought there was a real chance he might start crying.
“I do understand,” he said. Then he reached forward and placed his fingertips on the screen. I could not see if she reciprocated. I did not ever want to know. “Please be happy. You will always mean the world to me.”
After a second, I heard her say, “Thank you.”
And that was it. He sighed heavily, leaned back in his seat, and said, “Bitch.”
“Watch how you talk about my mother,” snarled Athena. Whatever pseudo-invisibility we enjoyed was shattered with that utterance. Carlton jumped, then leapt from his chair and rushed us, a menacing look on his face.
“Who—” was all he had a chance to say before Athena produced a handgun, pressed it against his chest and pulled the trigger. I don’t know how long he stood there with that look of surprise on his face, and most of his torso splashed across the desk behind him, but it couldn’t have been as long as it felt.
“Aaaaaand, we’re done,” said Athena. She took my hand, and we jumped.
e reappeared in my workroom. “Were you authorized to do that?” I asked, self-consciously inspecting myself for signs of blood.
“Nope.” She was still holding the gun, and she holstered it inside her jacket.
In five years of hell, repairing the damage Carlton did to the world, over and over and over again, I had repeatedly asked her if killing him was the solution. She had always said no. The thought that she would have done this without permission was more than disturbing; it smacked of an irresponsibility not much more easily justified than Carlton’s horrors.
“So, what happens now?” I asked.
“Anyone’s guess. I need to get back to my home time, so the Project can condemn me for this. I’ll probably be back soon if they’re not happy. And we’ll probably have to fix what I did.” She laughed quietly. “That will be a first. Meanwhile, enjoy the breather. Helen is probably upstairs.”
That shook me out of my fear of whatever consequences came next.
“What? How?”
“From her perspective, her ex-boyfriend was murdered the day she broke up with him. I’m sure she took it hard at the time, but she had already fallen for you at that point, so she would have had plenty of support. For her, these last three years had nothing to do with your crazy missions, so she had no reason to leave you. Um…”
“Yes?” I asked nervously.
“She may or may not notice how much you’ve aged. Good luck with that.”
Without further advice, Athena flashed out.
I did some math. The day Helen broke up with Carlton was well before the day he came to my home and pirated my time travel technology. It was always difficult to predict what a change in the past would do to the present, especially if a traveler was involved, but it might actually be possible that with Carlton eliminated that early, none of his unhappenings would have come to pass at all. Could it really be that easy? Experience told me no, but I had to believe it was possible. The alternative was living my life in fear.
Cautiously, I made my way upstairs. Helen was working at the dining room table, apparently a print works curator once more.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” She did not look up right away, but when she did, her eyes bugged. “Whoa. You’ve been out, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” I said neutrally.
“Looks like weeks,” she said. “Everything okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah, weeks. How long have we known each other?”
She got up, came across the room, and hugged me.
“Stingrays,” she said. “Did something unhappen?”
“Probably not,” I lied. “Just checking in.” Everything was all right, at least on the surface. But she knew that word. Unhappen.
This was not over.
spent weeks waiting for the axe to fall. It didn’t. No sudden dystopias, no apocalypses, no zombies. I had gone longer stretches than this without crisis before, but something about this period of calm gave me a glimmer of hope.
Helen and I set a wedding date of May 2149. Her mother came to visit twice immediately after we announced that. I knew her, of course, but in this revised timeline, we were apparently a lot closer than in my own memories. This boded extremely well for me. For all of us.
Mary Sue got out and came back pregnant. I was a little bit alarmed to learn that we had never gotten her spayed, but Helen made a fuss about “unnecessary surgery,” and it was too late to worry about it anyway, so we started lining up homes for the little runts in advance of their arrival.
My work with the jump field standing wave gained some ground. I was able to generate the wave without engaging more than one device, and I could generate both a backward and forward version of it. This was extraordinarily exciting to me, despite my repeated inability to answer any of the times Helen asked, “What doe
s it do?” It was, which was enough. Someday it would do.
In January, I made an offhand comment to Helen about wedding invitations, wondering if it was getting close enough to start sending them out. “I think ten months in advance is a little bit enthusiastic, even for me,” she quipped. I laughed. When I checked my calendar, our date had been moved to November, or more likely had always been.
Mary Sue stopped being pregnant two weeks before she was due. Out of curiosity, I floated a joke about her getting knocked up.
Helen responded with, “You mean the cat who had the elective hysterectomy? That cat? Oh wait, it wasn’t elective, I forgot. It was medically necessary.” Again, I laughed.
Thankfully, my relationship with my future mother-in-law seemed to remain stable and positive. It was difficult to see any of the obvious unhappenings as attacks against me or Helen, so I did not bring them to her attention. And even if I had, I very much doubt things would have turned out differently.
here do you want take our honeymoon?” I asked, apparently spontaneously, one February morning.
“Mmmmm,” said Helen, not quite awake. “Paris.”
That answer threw me for a bit of a loop, until I remembered that she still attached fond memories to her time in France, and did not share my association of that country with the horror the world had, hopefully, averted.
“Okay,” I said without offering an alternative. “When do you want to take our honeymoon?”
“Affer the wedding,” she said to her pillow. “Soopid.”
“That’s not what I meant.” I let that hang in the air for as long as it took to sink in, which was at least a quarter of a minute. Then she rolled over, with a smile of delight.
“Why, Mister Doctor Walden, are you offering to take me through time?”
“Yes I am, Missus Doctor Walden.”
“Missus Doctor Clay, thank you very much.” She sat up. “I thought you didn’t want me to do that.”
Apparently we had some version of that conversation in this timeline, and it hadn’t ended quite as badly. I shrugged.
“I don’t. But you do,” I guessed. “And it is your day.”
“Hmm,” she said. “I’ll have to think on it. We kind of talked this through already. Is there a reason you’re bringing this up again?”
Yes, I thought. I wanted an escape plan for if things got bad again. I wanted to take Helen up on her offer—an offer she now would not remember—of a life a thousand years in the past, away from the threats posed to us here.
“Not particularly. I just wanted to give you another chance. It shouldn’t be entirely up to me.”
“That’s for damn sure. But you made some pretty good points last time. Besides…”
I waited. “Yes?”
She hesitated. “I know you find those unhappenings annoying, but I think they’re really cute. It’s like a game for me to figure out where our lives are the same.” She pouted. “Are you mad?”
I laughed. If my unhappenings were merely annoying, all of this concern might be for nothing. On the other hand, it might not. “Of course not. How long have we known each other?”
“I know that one! Stingrays! See? We won’t have that anymore if I become a traveler, right? I’d be like you.”
“You would,” I said. “Well, think about it. If you come up with a really great idea for time you want to see, let’s talk it out again.”
“Okay,” she said, and flopped back down on her pillow.
And while she sleepily contemplated times she wanted to visit, I started contemplating times where we could live.
discovered early on this revised Helen was well aware of Athena’s existence, and the fact she was our daughter. Beyond that, she didn’t volunteer much in casual conversation, and I knew better than to ask too many questions. I learned everything I needed to know in March of 2149, when Athena came to visit.
“Oh my God!” said Helen when Athena flashed into our kitchen. She ran and hugged her daughter, no evidence of fear in the embrace. It made me happier to see than anything I can remember. “Look at you! How old are you now?”
“Forty-two, Mom.”
“She’s forty-two and she calls me Mom,” said Helen, beaming. “I love that. Should I love that?”
“You can love that,” I said.
“You’re not taking him anywhere,” said Helen. “Tell me you’re not taking him anywhere. Because I won’t stand for it.”
Athena smiled. I had forgotten how beautiful her smile was.
“I’m not taking him anywhere.”
“Good! How long are you staying?”
“As long as you’ll have me,” said Athena. “I’m on a break right now.” She kissed Helen on the cheek. “Can Dad and I talk shop for a bit? I promise we’ll stay in the house.”
“You have to promise you’ll stay on this date.”
Athena laughed. “Done.” She gestured to the basement stairs.
Helen whispered to me, “Ask her the thing.” Then she shoved me toward my daughter, and went down the hall, no doubt to tidy up the guest room.
“It’s been a while since I saw you turn her into that person,” I said. “God, I missed that.”
“Me too,” said Athena. “What’s the thing?”
“Ugh. Um… I have no idea how to even broach this, so I’m just going to say it. She wants you to be her maid of honor. I told her I had no idea if that was appropriate, or weird, or cosmically impossible, or whatever, but I said I’d ask.”
“Ooooh,” said Athena, looking uncomfortable.
“Yeah. It’s okay. I’ll tell her you really wanted—”
“Of course I will,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Really? Wow. That’s great! I just… You looked a little weirded out there.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. Tell her I’ll do it. Actually don’t. I want to tell her.” My daughter, nearly ten years my senior, had a girlishly innocent look to her at that moment. I would never see it again.
“Some things have unhappened,” I said. “Little stuff. Cat stuff, wedding stuff. Is that normal?”
“Normal is probably the wrong word,” she said. “But I have no idea if it’s a problem. That’s what I wanted to tell you as well. You know I haven’t seen you for more than five years.”
“It’s only been a few months for me.”
“I know. I didn’t want to make you wait too long to see me again. I was told to stay away from you. And I did. For five years. But you don’t have to put up with that.”
“Did you get in trouble?” I reflected on how most fathers would ask most daughters that question, and the vastly different contexts under which they would. My daughter assassinated a future dictator in cold blood as a young man, without a kill order. Most fathers my age might have to contend with a hair-pulling incident at school.
“No,” she said. “I got a commendation. And a restraining order. Which I honored for five years before resigning.”
“You quit?” I said. “Can you even do that?”
“Apparently. I guess they could have tried to stop me, but I don’t see how.”
“Why?” I asked, sitting down. This was my guardian angel, and she was now off the clock for good. I wanted to care more about her welfare than mine, but the ramifications were still daunting.
“Because they want to pretend this is all over. I killed the bad guy. Ding dong, the asshole is dead. But it’s not over. Things are still unhappening. And it’s not me doing it, and it’s not you, so there is some version of him still out there.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “Pathetic Old Me said there was another traveler. A pilot who disappeared. Maybe it’s him. The things that unhappen to you, are they big deals?”
“No,” she said.
“Me either. So maybe they aren’t attacks. Maybe they are just side effects of a neutral traveler.”
“Maybe,” she conceded. “But they won’t even talk about it. They are tracking the unhappenings. They know it�
�s real, and they’re claiming it’s just a series of aftershocks.”
“They can track them?” This was news.
“Yeah. The unhappening detector was the only good thing that ever came out of your standing wave research.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, by the way.”
My heart sank.
“No, it’s okay. I always knew that was a long shot.”
“We need to get back upstairs,” she said. “I need to tell Mom I’ll be her maid of honor.”
Athena stayed for two days. She and Helen bonded over the wedding, although more than once she suggested that we push the date back to the following spring. The sight of them happy made me push aside any thoughts of threats on the horizon. My rogue traveler theory felt sound. I even liked the aftershock possibility, despite Athena’s dismissal.
Finally, on the third day, Athena abruptly announced she had to leave. There was no crisis, and no fear in her voice, but she was insistent in a way I found curious.
When she flashed out, Helen said, “That was odd.” After a pause, she asked, “When is that girl’s birthday?”
“No idea,” I said. “I guessed 2150 once, and she said that was close enough.”
“She wants me to push the wedding back,” said Helen. We both let that hang in the air for a bit.
“You don’t think…” I began.
Helen grabbed me by the collar and kissed me. “What I think is that you and I have work to do, mister.”
he next morning, I woke up in an alley, on a pile of loose trash, covered in a worn coat and a hat with earflaps. My neck felt scratchy, and I confirmed by touch the presence of a very full beard.