by E. M. Brown
He recalled something Digby had said… or would say, years later, when he himself had had time to look back and reflect: That an indication of the maturity of a writer was his ability to accept criticism.
“I got up early this morning, Annabelle. I couldn’t sleep. For a long time I just stood in the doorway, watching you as you slept. And I realised something.” He took her hand. “I realised how much you mean to me.”
She said, very softly, “Thank you.”
They talked about the play for a while, and Richie told her how he hoped to rewrite it, and make James a more sympathetic character. Their conversation brought back memories of their time together, when he’d told her all about his ideas for plays, his hopes and dreams.
At eight-fifteen, she looked up at the clock and pulled a face. “Gosh. Look at the time. I must fly!”
“No!” He reached across the table and grabbed her hand, almost in panic. “No. I’ll drive you this morning.”
“But…”
“I need to go into town. It’s on my way. And later… I’ll pick you up and we’ll go for a meal, okay? Just the two of us, in celebration.”
“Celebration?” She laughed.
“I want to thank you for all your work on the play. You don’t know how much it means to me.”
Moved almost to tears, she took his hand and kissed his knuckles.
He drove her into the West End, avoiding Victoria Park Road, even though it was well before eight-forty when he made the detour. She chatted about the meetings she had arranged this morning, and a forthcoming exhibition, and Richie lost himself in the sound of her voice.
He dropped her outside the gallery and watched her cross the pavement and turn at the door, smiling at him and waving. He drove on into central London, exulting. Tonight he would pick her up and take her to a restaurant of her choice, and then they would return to the house and make love with the bedroom window open and the lace curtains blowing in the summer breeze.
He spent the day in London, like a tourist in this strange, earlier age… He bought a paper and found a quiet pub, had lunch and a pint and read all about a world he recalled but dimly. He found, as he read, that he was hardly taking in the news reports; the events would not touch him, anyway. He was a traveller, passing through. He had done his duty to Annabelle, and saved her life. Tomorrow, or whenever, he would be whisked away to another time, and then another… until, what?
He hardly cared. He wondered if this was what this had been about: saving Annabelle. Inthat he had succeeded, and his fate hardly mattered now, even to himself.
Or was he fooling himself? Was this no more than an hallucination, brought about by his terrible guilt, and was his saving of Annabelle his subconscious mind’s way of assuaging that guilt?
No, he told himself. This was all too real to be the product of his guilt-stricken conscience. He really was here, in 1983, and he really had saved Annabelle’s life.
He wondered how their relationship might continue when he was taken from this time. He would soon relinquish this body to the immature, egotistical Ed Richie, leaving Annabelle with the inferior version of himself. He regretted that – she deserved better – but consoled himself with the fact that she was alive now, with all her future before her. She could always leave him, he thought, and find someone who might truly appreciate her…
That evening he took her to a Cypriot restaurant in Greek Street, and they ate moussaka and drank retsina. She told him all about her day, the meetings and her plans for the exhibition, and Richie listened in wonder, drunk on the simple fact of the woman before him.
They took a taxi home, a little tipsy, and in the bedroom with the window open and the warm breeze lapping at the curtains, he undressed her slowly and he made love to her as if for the very last time.
From Ed Richie’s journal, 3rd May, 2023
I’VE BEEN THINKING about Annabelle a lot of late: it goes in cycles, like pain, or like grief… Sometimes it seems bearable, while at others the very thought of her pitches me into the blackest despair.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
January, 2030
ELLA STOOD BESIDE Mackendrick as they descended in the lift.
The door slid open and he led her down a short, carpeted corridor to a polished timber door. He entered a code into the security lock, then eased the door open and waved her through.
The lab was a long, white-tiled room illuminated by fluorescent strips. At the far end of the chamber stood two cylindrical tanks, each as long as a family car.
At their entry, a tall man turned from a computer screen on a desk to their right.
“Allow me to introduce Ralph Dennison,” Mackendrick said, “Ralph, this is Ella Shaw.”
The scientist reached out a hand and took hers in a firm grip. He was thin, in his seventies, with a benign expression and snow-white hair. His thin lips curved into what might have been an ironic smile.
Ella said, “It’s good to meet you… at last.”
His smile intensified. “I’ve heard so much about you,” he said, “these past few days. Welcome to my lab.”
She looked around the chamber, her gaze fixing on the cyclinders; they appeared to be filled with swirling grey gas.
I can tell you what happened to Edward Richie…
Mackendrick said, “The march of science is not so much a steady advance, Ms Shaw, as a staggering dance. We take two steps forward, and then several back, and often several to the side. How many discoveries have been made by scientists looking for something entirely different from what they eventually happened upon?”
She looked from Mackendrick to Dennison. “And you’re telling me that this was the case here?” She stared across the lab at the smokycylinders, suddenly aware of the chill in the air.
“I lured Ralph from Omega-Tec, thirty years ago, with promises of his own lab, the best technicians, and unlimited funds. The irony is that all his work, all his research, might have come to nothing – or who knows, might have alighted on a different discovery entirely – had it not been for a chance meeting with other research scientists in my employ.”
Ella looked at Dennison. “You were researching faster than light travel?”
“The theory of FTL travel,” Dennison replied. “Tachyon vectors, and the activity of sub-atomic particles, and dark matter…”
“And at an informal get-together in this very establishment,” Mackendrick went on, “Ralph fell into conversation with Obi Ozaki and Gina Ventura.”
“Whose specialisms were…?” she asked.
“Ozaki specialised in neurone-mapping,” Mackendrick said, “that is, creating means by which the content of the human brain could be downloaded into mimetic gelware.”
“And Ventura?”
“She is a specialist in quantum string theory, the study of what may lie beneath the sub-atomic reality of our universe.”
Ella smiled. “Heady stuff.”
“I recall the very instant,” Ralph Dennison said, “after we’d been chatting for an hour, when something clicked. It occurred to Gina and Oz almost at the same instant: that there was a link between our theories, that I might apply my research into the behaviour of tachyon vectors to Gina’s theory of the nature of ‘reality,’ and to Oz’s work on mind-body duality and the possibility of downloading the human consciousness.” His thin lips described a beautiful smile. “Ms Shaw, that moment was indescribable, perhaps the most intellectually thrilling moment of my life. What followed, as we put our theories to the test, was even more amazing.”
“Which is no exaggeration,” Mackendrick put in, “considering what Ralph, Gina and Oz accomplished.”
Ella swallowed, bracing herself. “Which was?”
Smiling, Dennison glanced at Mackendrick, who gestured towards the far cylinders. “This way, please.”
Feeling a little dizzy, Ella accompanied the men across the tiled floor towards the cylinders.
“To explain,” Mackendrick said as they walked, “I shall have to resort to meta
phor. Now, think of the universe, of reality, as made up of countless tiny grains, like sand – with every grain connected to every other grain by invisible matter, so what you have is a vast – so far as we can tell, limitless – interconnected nexus of pulsating matter. This matter exists even below the sub-atomic level, below even the ‘strings’ that we thought underlay the universe. This matter – we call it Dennison-Ventura-Ozaki space – is the medium through which reality flows… and also through which flows the passage of time.”
She stared at him. “Time?”
They came to the cylinders and stood between them; the temperature in the chamber seemed to drop even further as they did so. Ella peered into the cylinder on her right, but made out only a depthless, swirling grey medium. At the end of each cylinder, until now concealed, was a seated technician monitoring softscreens and touchpads, intent on their tasks and oblivious of Ella and the men.
Dennison said, “Working with Oz, we effectively developed a means of unshackling the mind from its temporal prison.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, Ms Shaw, that we developed a form of time-travel.”
Ella looked from Dennison to Mackendrick, who was smiling at her reaction. She felt a little dizzy, and leaned against the stainless steel plinth on which the nearest cylinder rested.
She repeated, “Time-travel?”
Mackendrick spoke to one of the technicians, who nodded and ran a hand across a touchpad. The smoky haze in the cylinder before Ella swirled, and through the wisps she made out the prostrate form of a naked man. He appeared to be suspended in the cylinder, his shaven head trailing a mass of leads and wires. His long, drawn face was serene. Even without his characteristic shoulder-length hair, Ella recognised the old man as Ed Richie.
She felt dizzy again. She raised a hand towards the tank. “What…?”
“You see before you the man you have been seeking,” Mackendrick said. “Ed Richie is travelling in time.”
She shook his head. “But… but he’s still there…”
Mackendrick went on, “Recall the metaphor: the universe, made up of countless interconnected grains – the very substance of space and time. Just as we in our corporeal forms travel one way through time, Ralph and his colleagues realised that it would be possible to send the mind of a subject in the reverse direction. But it was Oz and Gina who developed the means of downloading human consciousness into Dennison-Ventura-Ozaki space and shunting it back through time.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry…?”
Dennison said, “Stated simply, we made a copy of Edward Richie’s consciousness and sent it back through the reality nexus to… augment the consciousness of his earlier self.”
“Augment?”
“We theorised long and hard about what happened to the ‘original’ mind of the person whose mind was supplanted by that of the subject,” Dennison said. “Were we, in effect, committing some kind of… of murder… in doing what we were doing? However, we discovered that the mind of the host, if you like, is subsumed into the consciousness of the subject. The subject’s memories are overlaid on the host’s, augmenting the mind, for want of a better word.”
Ella stared at the scientist. She was struggling. “You’ve sent him back…?”
Mackendrick said, “The idea was to send him to a certain point in the early ’eighties, and stabilise him there. However, we suffered a certain dysfunction in the transference mechanism – a glitch that we have since rectified. The dysfunction resulted in Richie’s consciousness being shunted arbitrarily back through time, so that he inhabited ‘himself’ at various random periods over the course of the past thirty odd years, beginning in 2017. In the January of that year he suffered a comatose episode and was hospitalised– this was his ‘arrival,’ if you like, in his ‘past’ self.”
She struggled to get her head around what Mackendrick was telling her. “So he found himself in his old body…?”
“For periods lasting a day or a little longer, before being shunted back to another equally arbitrary time. From the year 2017 he was shunted to 2016, and then to 2013, then 2008, 2002, 1995, 1988, and finally 1983.”
“It must have been terrifying,” she said.
“All the more so, Ms Shaw, as Richie had no idea what was happening to him.”
She stared at Mackendrick. “How can you be certain of that?”
“Because we were able to visually monitor, routing through the temporal nexus, what Richie was seeing, and view his reality on our screens, though we were unable to establish an aural link. In 2016 Richie met with his friend Digby Lincoln and explained what was happening to him, and we were able to analyse Lincoln’s responses – through the agency of a lip-reader – and have our fears confirmed: Ed Richie didn’t know what was happening to him. Although he’d entered into the project in full knowledge of what he was undergoing, in the process of transference he lost all memory of his life from 2017 onwards. Oz worked out that it was the same dysfunction in the transference system that had affected the memory of Richie’s ‘copy.’”
She struggled to take this in. “Okay… I see. But… but why Ed Richie? I mean, he seems a strange subject to select as the first…” She gestured to the body in the tank.
Dennison said, “He wasn’t the first, Ms Shaw. Six other men and women went before him, beginning in 2015. The first three – they were all volunteers, by the way, who knew the risks – died in the process of the shunt. Our fourth subject was successfully shunted to ‘inhabit’ himself at the age of thirty, in 1980, but in the process all temporal telemetry was lost, so we had no means of monitoring his progress. Our fifth subject was successful, and this time the telemetry lasted for a week before the connection was lost. We were dealing with situations entirely new to us, and the complexity of the theory and the reality of what we were doing was staggeringly difficult to comprehend.
“We transferred our fifth subject over a decade ago, and then waited another five years – working to refine the system and iron out the glitches, before looking for someone who would consent to be our sixth subject.” Mackendrick gestured to his colleague. “Ralph had known Ed personally, and suggested him as a possible subject. He made overtures, assessing Richie’s suitability. When Ralph made the proposal, and Richie agreed, we arranged his disappearance in 2025. Richie wanted to contact his old friend, Digby Lincoln, to explain the situation, but of course we could not allow it. Richie understood, and consented, though not without a certain regret – the lure of being sent back to inhabit his younger self was too great.”
“When we became aware that Ed Richie had suffered memory loss through the transfer,” Dennison said, “and had no notion of why he was undergoing the phenomenon, we attempted to rectify it. We feared that Richie might suffer an irreparable mental breakdown – madness – as a result of what was happening to him. We tried everything within our temporal-technological means to do so, without success. There was only one thing we could do: send another subject back to inform him of what was happening. Last year, having perfected the transference technique, we approached the seventh subject.”
Ella nodded, suddenly understanding. “Emmi Takala.”
“It was Ed Richie himself who suggested her as a possible candidate as a future subject,” Mackendrick said. “They’d had an affair, many years earlier, and I think Ed Richie saw it as a way of giving something to the woman, the gift of renewed life… As it happened, four years ago she lost her husband. It was Ralph’s idea that I approach her to purchase one of her paintings – which I later donated to Ralph’s old college – and apprise her of the situation regarding Ed Richie.” He murmured to the technician working at the second cylinder, and the mist cleared to reveal the floating form of a pale, slight woman in her fifties, her head a Medusa-mass of leads.
“She agreed to the process, and we transferred her to the time of her liaison with Richie in 2008, to tell him about the project and his part in it.”
“And?” she asked. “It was suc
cessful?”
Mackendrick shook his head. “Before Takala could tell him, he was shunted back from 2008 to 2002.”
“And you couldn’t send Takala back to the same time?”
“We looked into it,” Dennison said, “but, you see, we had set the limit of Takala’s transference to 2008 – expressly to prevent the possibility that she would suffer the same arbitrary dysfunction as Richie.”
She stared at the floating, prostrate bodies in the tank. “And now? They’re still alive? Why don’t you decant them, allow them to continue…?”
Mackendrick interrupted. “They are, technically, brain-dead. The reason we keep them tanked is that they are acting as, for want ofa better word, transponders for the temporal signals coming up-line; without them we would have no visual link to what is happening to Richie and Takala.”
She looked from the naked, emaciated forms to the scientist, and formulated her next question. “And… and the reason you’re doing this; is it merely to push back the boundaries of scientific understanding, or” – she looked from Dennison to Mackendrick – “or there’s another reason, right? You” – her thoughts swirled at the possibilities. – “you want to change the past? Perhaps, by altering events back then, to change the present?”
“Why are we doing this?” Dennison asked. “Well… one answer is that we did it because we could do it. Another, because we wished to test a theory, or a number of theories. What would happen when we sent a subject back to the past? Would their actions cause changes in the present? So the answer to your question is, we sent a subject back in time simply to find out what might happen.”
“And,” she said, “did you find out?”
“Indeed we did,” Dennison said. “What we discovered proved a theory that I and one of my colleagues had formulated. We found that reality consists of a limitless number of parallel timelines, and that when we sent a subject back, we then had no control over the timeline they were entering. The realities that Ed Richie found himself in often differed, to varying degrees, from the timeline he recalled. We also discovered that by sending back a subject to a certain point in time, we created an entirely new timeline in the reality of the universe; a branching in history, if you like. A subject going back to a certain time doesn’t change this timeline, the here and now, as that would be an impossibility, a paradox – but it does create another future, elsewhere.”