I study him for a moment: the twitch is back, taking up residence in his hands. Owen’s tall and lanky, with nervous-mouse eyes and a sprawl of prison tattoos up his pale arm. He’s not as heavily inked as some who come through my door, probably because his time has been mostly on the Row. He hunches over, shoulders caving forward. He’s protecting something—a secret—afraid I’ll discover it when I travel back through his memories and step into his life at the exact moment a dozen years ago when he brutally murdered his friend. Like many inmates on Death Row, Owen maintained his innocence from the start… right up until he qualified for the Shift in lieu of the needle.
It pains me to see him regress back into denial.
I unfold my legs and straighten in my chair, opening my own posture in hopes that he’ll mirror it. “Owen.” I wait for him to look me in the eyes. It takes him a long moment, but he gets there. “You’ve been a model prisoner from the day you walked through the doors at San Quentin. You’ve admitted to the murder already. Even over our three sessions, I’ve seen you make progress in owning your responsibility for it. I know you wish it never happened. I know you want to fix this. Patients like you are the reason I’m in Corrections.”
Which is only a half-truth: the full story is far more complicated and not something I would share with a patient. But it is true that traveling back in time to stop these murders is almost the only thing I live for. My earnestness in wanting this to work is entirely genuine. “You want this, Owen, I know you do. And I want it for you. It’s entirely normal to feel some last minute jitters, but we need you to set that aside in order for the procedure to work.”
He takes a calming breath, like I taught him in the first session, in preparation for this one. It’s a very good sign. “Okay, Dr. Webb.”
“Please, call me Ian. Dr. Webb makes me feel like my father.” It doesn’t—my father is dead, and I don’t feel like that, most of the time—but I’m hoping the familiarity and humor will help Owen relax.
“Ian, huh? What’s that, like Irish?” He scratches the back of his neck, a self-soothing motion that seems to work. His shoulders relax a little.
“Scottish. Means pain in the arse. My mother gave it to me.”
Owen snorts a laugh. His shoulders fall the rest of the way, and I allow myself an internal sigh of relief that wars a bit with the guilt that that particular lie raises up. Iain is a lovely name. Why would you want to change it? If it was good enough for your grandfather, it’s good enough for you. My mother’s voice rises from the grave to dig the knife of guilt a little deeper.
Owen’s face holds the humor only for a moment, then falls back into seriousness. “It’s just that… if you had a guy who was innocent… would that mess up the procedure? I mean, would that guy just… you know… disappear?”
Extinction. Not simply changing the man Owen was in the past, but erasing him altogether from that moment forward. It can happen: a possible price for traveling through time with the intent of changing its course. It’s what keeps inmates from signing up for travel unless their lives are at stake.
As for Corrections, they only approve the Shift for capital crimes where the probability of recidivism is low. Serial killers don’t qualify—they’ll just kill again, so it’s the needle for them. But even if they did qualify, they generally lack remorse, and it’s already hard enough to land in the right memory even when the patient cooperates. Forcing travel simply doesn’t work, no matter how much enhancer you pump through a murderer’s body.
I’ve been quiet too long. “Extinction can happen, and you know the stats. But to answer your question, I’ve never traveled with an innocent man before. I honestly can’t tell you what might happen, but I don’t think the odds of extinction would go down. It could be the opposite.”
Has Owen convinced himself he’s innocent? His defense of being unconscious during the crime is consistent with extreme denial of a heinous event. There’s even the possibility that he dissociated during the time of the murder, but I’ve seen no indication of dissociative tendencies during our sessions, and all of his workups have cleared him of any of the varieties of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Besides, those kinds of murderers usually get treatment. And don’t land in my office.
Owen frowned. “But what do you think, doc? Would this innocent guy still get the tag?”
I decide to humor this fantasy a little longer, if it will keep him calm and ready him for the procedure. “Tagging is the first thing I do, once I’m back to the time of crime, so yes. One of the reasons you qualify for the Shift, Owen, is because there’s a tattoo shop licensed for tag work near where your crime was committed. I’ll go there first. If anything in the Shift sticks and actually changes the timeline, you’ll have the tag.”
He nods, like he expects this, and I’m glad he’s accepting of at least this much. Even if we’re successful, even if we can warp the timeline just enough to prevent the murder, but not enough to snap him out of it and send him to wherever inmates go when they extinguish… even then, he’ll wear the seventeen-digit tag for the rest of his life. It will forever mark him as a would-be murderer: for society’s protection, and as a condition of living a relatively free life.
“That’s kind of a bum rap for that innocent guy,” Owen says, but there’s not too much grumble in his voice. “But life isn’t fair, is it, doc?”
No. Life isn’t even close to fair. Even though I spend all my time, energy, and a substantial risk to my mental health to nudge it just a little closer to fair each day.
But that’s my issue, not Owen’s.
“We can only play the cards we’re dealt.”
Owen nods, like this is some profound truth and not a platitude.
“How about we play the cards we have now?” I ask. “Are you ready to go back and fix the one thing you can actually change?” Technically, he won’t be going back at all. Both our bodies will remain in my office, inert while I mentally travel back through his memories to try to change reality. His mind will remain in the present, asleep, just like during our practice sessions.
Owen takes a deep breath and lets it out slow. “Yeah. I think I’m ready.”
I take a breath as well, calming my own jitters, a mixture of anxiety and that peculiar adrenaline surge that comes just before traveling through a murderer’s mind. The dose of enhancer is already approved and prepared—I don’t do that part, and that’s probably for the best. Only the tight regulatory controls, the severe penalties for misuse, and the extreme probability that I would be caught before I could finish traveling actually keep me from making off with Owen’s dose. The Department of Corrections does an extremely thorough job of screening psychologists who apply for the traveler program, but the temptation will always be there. Which is why a traveler never gets to touch the enhancer: a sort of check that keeps things in balance.
I tap on the datapad built into my chair to message the Corrections-trained nurse who has chain of custody over the enhancer. Owen and I are both quiet as the nurse steals into the room with quiet shoes and administers the injection. It takes several minutes for the enhancer to make Owen suggestible as well as pump up the reality-changing potential of his memories. It always strikes me as ironic that the drug was discovered during experiments to treat posttraumatic stress disorder. In that rogue scientist’s quest to tame the flashbacks—those intense re-experiences of the past—with mind-altering chemicals, she actually did the reverse and allowed others, therapists like myself, to travel back and relive them for real.
Once the nurse leaves, I get up and stroll over to Owen’s seat. He’s already leaning back, easing into the body-conforming cushions as the enhancer starts to relax him.
“How are you doing, Owen?” I ask as I reach past him to activate the neural-link hologram in the headrest of his chair.
“Yeah, I’m okay, doc.”
The blue spider-web hologram springs to life, surrounding Owen’s head with a neural net. It’s the final piece in the technology puzzle, the part
that allows me access to Owen’s mind, once he relaxes enough to let me in. The connection nodes buzz around in a constantly shifting pattern, matching up with the activity in his mind. I run a quick diagnostic using the control panel in the back of the seat, but all seems in order.
I return to my own chair, lean back, and activate my own neural net with the controller built into the armrest. Owen’s net is just a reader, but mine is the kind that links up to the implant in my brain. Getting the implant was the first step in joining the Department of Corrections as a traveler. The thousand tiny neural filaments are delicate and don’t always take—and even then, training the implant to work with the net to transmit the neural impulses of another person can be difficult. Not everyone makes it through the program, but people with high empathy factors and motivation, like me, have a higher success rate.
Owen has already closed his eyes. I take another calming breath, but it’s really pointless. I’m already swimming in his anxiety.
“Whenever you’re ready, Owen,” I say, because I know he’s waiting to hear it.
“Ready.” His voice has a looseness to it, like his mouth isn’t working quite right, and I can feel the relaxants taking hold.
“All right.” My own heart rate picks up and wars with the artificial calm in Owen’s. “We’re going back to before you came to the office today. Before you woke up this morning. It’s easy. Simple. A walk back through the days. Most of them are the same. Repetitious. We skip over those. We’re floating back, seeing all of them flip by, days on a calendar, months at a time… and now years…”
The script is the same as our practice session, only then we were half-dosage on the enhancer and traveling on a strictly look but don’t touch basis. Landing at a specific memory is a tricky business. It helps when the event stands out—like Owen’s first day in court, or the day of the conviction—but memories aren’t linear things, and pinning one down isn’t as simple as looking up the address or traveling backward through a film of your life. Memories are patterns imprinted in the recognition centers of the brain, and convincing the brain to cooperate in resurrecting those patterns is essential in evoking an exact time and place from the patient’s past.
Today we’re traveling to the event that changed Owen’s life. It’s heavily imprinted, but recalling it isn’t exactly a pleasant experience. I feel the resistance building as we get closer.
“We’re going back to that day, Owen. The one when the murder happened.” I use a passive construction to reduce his resistance. I’ll be fighting that the whole way, but it helps to ease into it.
His breathing slows as the enhancer kicks in, but his mind is flying with mine.
I close my eyes, letting go of the verbal directives and giving my own mind over to sync with Owen’s. My breathing evens out.
The day of the murder, I direct. We need to go there.
Resistance. Owen is still in control, still driving where we land.
I try a little misdirection. That day when someone knocked us out. Owen’s mind telescopes down. A single moment slams into my mind. Owen stands on a bare concrete floor, looking down on… no, the blood, no, no. His horror and mine commingle: his at reliving the event, mine from panicking that we’ve landed after the murder.
I hoist his mind away from that moment, but his resistance is even greater now than it was when we arrived. He’s transfixed. Look away! I command, even though that’s a dangerous thing to do. It could kick us out of the sync altogether, and we only get one shot at this: one bite at the apple, because traveling to the same spot twice distorts the timeline too much. It’s virtually a guarantee of extinction. But Owen wants to look away: suddenly we’re pulled back into a gray haze of timelessness. I scramble for some anchor to keep us close to the time of the murder. I grasp onto his fantasy and work with that. Earlier. Someone knocked us out before the murder. How did that happen? When?
That does it. Owen’s mind snaps us back into another memory. It’s crystal clear. Spring. Warm on our face. A background smell like ancient campfires. My sense of the chair, my office, the tiny whir of the neural net all fade. I open my eyes, and the glare of the hazed sun burns them. I squint against it, and the first thing I see is a giant, faded billboard for Harmony, the no-drowsy sleep aid. A faded image of a pill bottle sits next to a beautiful woman, blissfully curled up, asleep. A scroll of disclaimers slides by at the bottom of the ad, ending in a message with the time and date. We’re a couple of hours before the crime.
Okay, Owen. Close enough.
I take in the rest of the detritus of a decaying LA neighborhood all around me: pawn shops holding forgotten dreams behind bars, old men with nothing better to do than haunt porches of rotting wood, and street junkies teetering out into broad daylight to find their fix.
I’m taller in Owen’s body. Lankier. I look down at my long-fingered hand and an arm with only one tattoo: a skull wrapped in red ribbons, as if you can tie up death with a bow.
I’ve traveled.
Chapter Two
Time travel is a funny thing.
On the one hand, you’ve got your mind controlling someone else’s body. On the other, you’ve got someone else’s body dousing your mind with chemicals and sensations unique to their fairly horrific life experience. Not to mention that the murderer’s mind isn’t entirely detached: I might be driving the car, but it still has coke hidden in the glove compartment and a .38 caliber under the seat. A whole host of stressors ensures you’re basically simmering in a stew of rage hormones and bad situations. Keeping on track can be tricky.
So far, Owen’s ride is pretty even.
I hold my arm still as the tattoo artist burns in the tag. Owen’s body pumps anxiety and adrenaline through me, but my own memories and some steady breathing exercises keep the pain under control and my arm from twitching too much. Owen’s street-fashion-ready shirt, with its buttoned-down, overly long sleeves, would only trap the stress heat reaction to the tattoo, so I took it off.
Oddly enough, I’ve experienced more tattoos than Owen. Seventeen tags… although only fifteen have stuck. I filed the other two with Corrections anyway, even though no one would ever know I’d failed. After extinction, my patient simply becomes an unsolved missing person case, assuming anyone actually bothered to report them missing. Sometimes the murder will still occur, sometimes not. I had one of each. Either way, the only evidence of the travel is my own memories and the tag—and the tattoo disappears along with the patient. Technically, I could pretend it never happened, but I suppose it’s the principle of the thing. That, and I don’t want Corrections to flag me as a traveler with a too-perfect record.
The department can get paranoid about that sort of thing.
The tattoo artist is more nervous than I am. No one gets a Death Row tag for fun, so he knows I’m the real deal. He keeps peering over his wireless, fish-eye glasses to check a tiny digital clock propped on his cart. Thankfully, his hands are steadier than the intermittent tremble in his lips, but I understand the tension. Having a potential murderer sit in your chair isn’t the most comfortable experience. Some conversation might ease his anxiety.
“Business good?” I start.
He makes a noncommittal snort.
Or perhaps not.
He bends over my hand, closer than necessary to properly see the numbers. The needle buzzes. I take his body language cue and affect the tough exterior expected of someone like Owen. I casually sip the sugary drink I picked up before coming in.
Just doing the tattoo warps the timeline a little. I can feel it, like a second skin I wear on top of Owen’s. The contours of it stretch as I move through this time, each action pushing against that invisible boundary, like I’m an artifact that doesn’t belong. A warthog slowly stretching the snake as I pass through the digestive system of the universe. Time travel is tough to wrap your head around. Sometimes I think I’m the timeline—a thin stretch of consciousness between this past time and my current time, back in the office. Focusing on that tenuo
us connection to the future is how I’ll return when I’m done.
This sense of the timeline helps me follow Owen’s script as much as possible, right up to the murder. Landing too far out from the crime can cause a lot of problems—not least that the probability of extinction goes way up. The universe can tolerate a small change, a life here and there, but if anything deviates too much, the universe pushes back. Hard. Sometimes, it’s difficult to know which things will cause the universe to resist—a seemingly small change can have a big impact later on—but I can always feel it starting to happen. Making the wrong move at the wrong time can send me hurtling back into my own head and make my patient disappear like he was never there. All because I stretched that skin just a little too far, and it snapped.
It’s like walking through a field of time bombs.
The tattoo artist dabs at the snaking outline of the numbers with his gloved hands and a sterile cloth. At least I hope it’s sterile, for Owen’s sake. While the tattooist swaps his outline needle for the thicker shading needles, I go over the known details of the crime in my head.
Owen Henry Thompson murdered James Skeely on April tenth. Cause of death was a point-blank gunshot wound to the stomach, but the body was also mutilated in some pretty gruesome ways: disembowelment, facial disfigurement, severed genitalia. Basically, Owen hacked the shit out of his friend, and he didn’t much wait until James was dead. Autopsy showed most of the torture was inflicted post-gunshot, but before James had died. So he was tormented while he lay with a baseball-sized hole in his gut, because simply bleeding out wasn’t enough to satisfy the rage of his murderer. There was some post-mortem mutilation as well, so the rage must have continued for some time after death. And all of it was committed within the next few hours by the hand that just held a fizzy drink to my lips.
Revulsion wells up in me. I acknowledge it, just like I acknowledge the pain of the needles shoving ink under my skin. Understanding the grisly and brutal nature of the deaths I’m trying to prevent is the most difficult part of my work. Yet I don’t want, nor can I afford, to diminish my own empathy in the face of that. Having that empathy is essential to my ability to travel.
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel Page 4