What about us?

by Jacqui Henderson

  The temporal reality that I was in was linked to the time before Grace died and I hoped that the records I needed would therefore exist in a way that they wouldn’t after the event of her death in 2000. If nothing else, this journey of mine was opening my mind to new possibilities; ones which I found very interesting indeed and I looked forward to re-examining them later, when my current investigation was concluded and I had more time.

  After a brief search I found the information I required and downloaded it straight into my implants, so that I could settle down in comfort and examine what it could tell me. The two strands of Charlie’s descendants, the Greens and the Grundys, had continued separately for generations, changing names and professions as they went. I was pleased to discover that Vicki had done well for herself and that her children had too. Both Sal and Henry would have been proud. One of her great grandchildren became a very important environmentalist and generations later another descendant, along with others, pioneered what was to become the HG Unit, of which I had been so proud to be a member.

  The Greens took a different path and for a long time there was nothing of any note. Then at the end of the twenty-second century they became part of a long succession of freedom fighters and political activists, but not always on the same side, which made me smile. In the year 2830 the two strands of Sal’s descendants, the Greens and the Grundys, came together and produced a female child called Rachel. My other self had been familiar with this name but I was not. She didn’t exist in my timeline, because neither Sal nor Charlie had survived the winter of 1888 and I surmised that the other two people who had ceased to exist on the 5th of May 2000 were descendents of Charlie and Elsa.

  Rachel intrigued me, because Javier had met her granddaughter Virginia. My other self had clear knowledge of this famous meeting and although he had not been present, he knew what happened as a result of it. Yet in my memories, Javier had been dead for over a decade at that point in time, so the meeting never happened. At some point, time had shifted and I was beginning to think I knew exactly when that was.

  It was the knowledge of this meeting that my other self had had that had fired me up in the first place. All events after it were different to what had happened in my reality. He had enjoyed his old age in a time of peace, while mine was in a time of constant conflict; sometimes deadly and always futile. Together, Javier and Sal’s descendant Virginia had brought about this peace; something they could only do if they were alive at the same point in time. In my world, Virginia could not exist and Javier had already died.

  I now had all the pieces, but in my mind the picture was still difficult to see. I tried shuffling them about, letting them fall randomly. I tried holding the conflicting sets of memories separately, placing all the facts in date order. I tried comparative lines, but of course they spun off into different realities. The only point where they could meet was Grace.

  We had no proof of parallel universes, they were only a theory, nothing more than a fanciful idea that those who wished to, endlessly explored. Yet at that very moment I was living proof of two very separate but linked realities. But which would have been the correct one, if no meddling had ever taken place? That was the fundamental question. However, this then led me to another equally important question. If mine was the wrong reality, should we meddle further in an attempt to correct the situation?

  I realised that I should not answer this alone. I had neither the experience, nor the required authority. My thoughts turned to home, back at the base. But who could I share this with? When I left, an attack had been in progress. I didn’t know what damage would have been inflicted, or if the communications systems would still be intact. In order to be certain of being heard in full, I would need to actually be with those that I needed to speak to.

  I shook my head. The protocols would prevent me being able to arrive on any ship or base where our leaders or members of the Board were. For their safety and the safety of our people, the shields would prevent me locking onto their coordinates. I could of course choose an earlier point in time to arrive at and request a full Board hearing, but I shied away from the idea; I was not at all sure that their minds would appreciate the complexities of this dilemma. The more I thought about it, the less certain I became.

  They had the authority to make a choice such as the one I was facing, but I doubted their ability to remain completely objective about it. Shuffling through his memories and mine, I realised that not all of the leaders and Board members were the same in both timelines. Could they be trusted to remain completely impartial? This led me to a more worrying question. Could I even trust myself? I decided that too much was at stake to take needless risks.

  There was only one person who I really trusted, but discussing these questions with him would involve him being able to see a future that he had no place in. However, knowing him as I did, I knew he would appreciate the irony of it and would not let it detract him from the business in hand. But first, I would have to return to my own time, to re-establish myself in my own reality. The one in which Grace had died in a car accident centuries earlier. The one in which Javier no longer lived.

  Seconds after I arrived, the base suffered another direct hit, telling me that I had successfully returned to my own reality. I quickly set the coordinates for there at the base, but two days before Javier’s death. I hadn’t been with him at that time, so there was no danger of breaking the Golden Rule, but I felt sure I was about to break some other fairly important ones, even if they hadn’t been written yet. I also had the distinct impression that I was about to saw off the branch that I was sitting on.

  I found myself pondering the idea of parallels in time. I knew how the world turned out after Grace had been killed at the age of nineteen. During her brief life she had made it a better place for those she worked with, but had not really accomplished anything more than that. I also knew the life Jack had had without her; after all, it was my life. What I couldn’t know, was how the world would have turned out if she had not died in the accident and had not met Jack. Would there have been someone else for her, someone from her own time? His memories and mine told me there had never been anyone else for us. He had always known this, but I was only just beginning to realise it. As I stood outside Javier’s door I instinctively knew the answer.

  She knew me. I knew her too and not just from the borrowed memories. If I were to be completely honest, there was something deep within me that responded to her in a way I had never responded to another human being. This was the reason I had never really been willing to make an effort with the women I had admired, but had never been able to love. I knew that if she had lived but had not met Jack, she would always have been searching for him and would never have settled for less.

  I pushed the unwanted thought away. It had no place in my mind and there was nothing that could be done; the time for me to make that choice had passed centuries before. Even if she had lived, she would have been long dead by now. The relationship between us was never meant to happen. In the natural course of things we would never have met and to believe otherwise was pure foolishness. Yet there was a sense of rightness about it that could not be explained rationally, which in itself irked me. I pushed the frustration aside and with an unpleasant jolt, realised what I should have seen much earlier.

  I was becoming the man he had been; I had fallen in love with Grace. This realisation clearly demonstrated that I needed the assistance of a sharper mind to help me with the decision, one that would not be led astray by emotions.

  Chapter twenty-one

  I announced myself on the intercom, clearly waking my friend and mentor.

  “Jack! It’s the middle of the night, what brings you here now?” he said, as he opened the door.

  He took one look at me, nodded, then held out his arm to encourage me in.

  “So, I see you come from the future to talk to me. This will be interesting. Allow me a few moments to change and wake up properly. I take it that it’s not possible to talk me in y
our own time?” He threw the question over his shoulder as he headed into one of the other rooms.

  “You are not there to ask.” I told him simply. He didn’t reply or ask further questions.

  When he returned, we went to the far corner of his apartment and sat down in comfortable chairs in the part of the main room that he rather quaintly referred to as his study. There was a window that looked down onto the dark planet surface, a sight that always focused the mind beautifully.

  “Tell me what you can.” he said, looking carefully at my features. The me he was used to dealing with was only forty-two.

  With him I could be honest; there was never any need to prevaricate. “I think I have meddled.” I said softly.

  “That is not new. It was not you anyway, at least not the you that you’ve become, so it is not enough to bring you here from the future. Give me something else Jack.” he said, with a hint of sharpness in his voice.

  “No Javier, believe me, it is new and it’s more than enough to bring me here. I didn’t make the choice lightly. I have worked hard to achieve all that I have and it has not been easy, so more worth the having. But I’m beginning to see that this is possibly the hardest thing I have ever done.”

  I put my head in my hands; such was the burden that I felt at that moment.

  “Tell me.” he urged again.

  “I think that when the Golden Rule was broken, I didn’t do what I should have done; I didn’t repeat an event that was actually fixed in time. It was me. I meddled, not him.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “I think you had better start from the beginning.”

  I transferred all the information I had gathered to thought pods; they would take less time and be more accurate than simply talking to him. He would be aware of the echoes of my other self, as well as hearing the voices of all those I had interviewed.

  He let the information run through his mind, pausing sometimes, only to ask a question. At the same time, I ran it all through my own mind again, hoping to find a vital fact that I had either missed or attached too much or too little importance to.

  Of course he would also become aware of his impending demise, but I had shielded the precise details, because although he could be trusted with information he had not earned, there are some things no one should know. Knowing that he had no part to play in a future that his life’s work had been dedicated to improving would be hard enough.

  He spent several hours going through the information that the pods contained, listening to them over and over again. But I knew him well; there would be nothing gained in hurrying him. The pods spoke for themselves, but he also had the library records and my own thoughts and ideas. In fact, he now knew what I knew and I waited to hear what he made of it all.

  Eventually he sat back. “There is another echo trying to be heard Jack, a distant one. It is not one you have paid any attention to, because I do not see your thoughts turning to it at all. It is one of his memories; a faint one. It makes only a tiny ripple, but it is there. It’s from before the accident where he saves this woman Grace. From what you have given me, I do not see his mind going back to it once he recovered his memories. It is most unusual; most unusual indeed.”

  I looked up, confused. Had I missed something and was it important?

  “Should I try to access it, focus on it?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I think not Jack. Let us leave it where it is for now, we have more than enough to mull over without it.”

  He began pacing about. He was, I knew, deep in thought, turning everything over as I had done before and was still doing.

  “This is all... well... it is very interesting.” he said, smiling at me. “Thank you Jack for bringing it to me. It would be a great intellectual gift at any time, but to be given it now when I have so little time left... well, thank you. But we do have a problem; therefore we must find the solution.”

  He continued pacing, then he stopped, stood still and looked at me sideways. “I’m curious Jack. Why do you think that this is the wrong reality?”

  “Because his happened first,” I said slowly. “He returned from the future to try and change the past, which culminated in him breaking the Golden Rule. Selfishly as it happens, because all he wanted was his own happy ending. However, he had already taken Grace back to the past; she had already meddled in Sal Grundy’s life, so the two separate families that were Sal’s descendents were already established by the date of the accident in the year 2000. Both lines ceased to exist at that point because I did not meddle.”

  I paused for a moment and looked at him, but his face gave nothing away so I continued to share my own thoughts. “The question then becomes: why didn’t time wrap itself around Sal and her son and give them a different death after Grace and the other Jack had left Napier Street? And then; if Sal and Charlie were meant to die, why didn’t you meet a similar, but different person to help you negotiate peace?”

  I let the question hang there before concluding.

  “The realities are fundamentally different, but they shouldn’t be. There could be small differences, but in all the important aspects they should be the same. They are not. Certain events do not appear to be fixed, regardless of the individual people involved, yet from history’s point of view there is no flux; events have to be fixed in their right time. All of which brings me back to the inescapable fact that his reality came first.”

  I paused for a moment. I needed to be sure that my next words were a truth for me. “You have also seen for yourself that his world is a better world than ours. His should be the right one.”

  Javier sucked his cheeks in. “First, second. Right, wrong. Better, worse. These are just words. We know time is not linear, we also know that the future is unshaped and yet... and yet... here we have an interesting puzzle. I am honoured that you trust me with it. As you yourself believed, there are not many that could remain objective with this information. But I think we can Jack. Yes, I think we can.”

  He sat down again, watching me closely as he spoke. “If we assume for a moment that you are right and that this reality is not the fixed one, then if we go a step further and assume for a moment that we are able to return things to the way they should have been, then you will not necessarily have the life that you currently have. You will be that old man that you despised when you met him, when the Golden Rule was broken. How does that sit with you, hmm?”

  He had seen that meeting from the pod, so he knew my feelings and he also knew how the other me had felt. Javier had probably spent more time on the thoughts and feelings of my other self than I had. I still found it hard to believe we could be the same person. As a result I had always dismissed his feelings as being irrelevant. After all, it was difficult for me to be objective on this point.

  I sat for a long time, thinking about his question. I, as I knew myself to be and this reality would cease to exist, but at the same time the world would not be engaged in a futile, destructive war. Sal’s descendant, along with the man in front of me would secure peace. More than that; they would unite us once more and enable us to work side by side to regenerate our home, the Earth. Was that not a great enough achievement to be part of? Was that not big enough to forego all the others? I wondered.

  ‘But no one will know...’ said a mean spirited voice at the back of my mind. I couldn’t ignore it and had to ask myself the question; would it be enough for my act of selflessness to go completely unnoticed?

  Unable to answer the question, I turned to the life the other me had had, where all the achievements that this me enjoyed and valued would be accompanied by a deep sense of loss, for I would not be with Grace. I forced myself to think of her by name. I would always be looking for a way back to her, not only to save her from the mess I’d put her in, but to be with her. The brief time that I would have with her, would that not compensate? For those memories to be my own and not inherited, for those times to be real for me and not echoes, would that not be compensation too? It was then that the barely
perceptible ripple Javier had spoken of floated into my mind; unashamed and smug.

  Javier was clever, which was why I had sought his counsel. He knew that if I’d attempted to focus on it, it would have eluded me. And if he had told me what it contained, I would not have believed him. But I recognised this lost fragment of a memory for myself; I saw it when I wasn’t looking. I also knew I could not ignore it.

  “Ah... I see.” I said slowly, looking up at him.

  He just smiled. “Yes, it repeats itself over and over again, not just once but many times and each cycle links to the next. You see that now, don’t you?” His voice was insistent as he asked and, his eyes bright with the sheer wonderment of it, the impossibility of it.

  “So many possible Jacks, all trying to be with Grace. There was a letter from another, different you; that was what propelled the other you to race out of that cafe and save her and who knows how many others came before him. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. You know in all the years we have known each other, I have never thought of you as a man led by his heart, but it seems you are Jack. It seems you are...” He finished thoughtfully.

  I nodded. Hard as it was to see myself that way, there was no possibility of ignoring the truth in his words.

  “Because of the strange circumstances in which I have lived my life, I have sometimes thought of myself in plural, he was Jack one, I am Jack two, but to think that I may be Jack three, or Jack one hundred and twenty...”

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  “... A chain of events... And I broke it because of youthful arrogance.” I croaked, my voice hoarse with the enormity of what I had done. The list of safe houses in the trunk should have alerted me to this cycle much earlier. The inherited memories told me quite clearly that he had not known he was a time traveller during his time in Napier Street, so he’d not known about them. Yet the list was real, I had held it in my hands. Its very existence meant that there was more than one timeline; more than one relationship with Grace. He had known that once and now I knew it too. The last words of that other me came into my mind with some force. He’d been right; I had come to regret that day.