by Amy Kinzer
Chapter Seventeen
Matt
“We’re all time travelers.”
Dr. Thompson stands in front of the room with the wall black behind him. He presses a button on his controller and the screen lights up with a picture of the universe. Spiral and elliptical galaxies glow against the night sky. Millions of stars dust the sky with their light. I look at the empty spaces in front of me and imagine black holes. The universe is full of them. I can’t believe how many galaxies exist in the universe. If you think about it too hard, it will make feel like a speck of dust.
A speck of dust on a speck of dust.
“Just think about it. You’re always moving forward. You are traveling in time at every moment. What has been a mystery until now is how you can escape the time continuum and go to another place. Marvin Winn has been funding the Slider for the last fifteen years. Last year, after thousands of hours of painstaking research the device was able to locate the vortexes that exist all around us.”
Our desks light up with today’s lesson.
The Past is All Around Us.
“Think about it,” Dr. Thompson starts. “Think about light. Light travels in time. What you don’t think about is that when you look into the sky, you’re looking into the past. What Marvin has been funding the research for is how you can go backwards on the space-time continuum. How we can go from where we are now to a point in time that’s already happened.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see Shannon with her hand in the air. Shannon always has a question. It’s like asking a question is the only way she knows she exists.
“Where is time happening? Is it far away?”
Dr. Thompson claps his hands together. The guy loves getting questions from eager students. “Great question. Time is everywhere. It’s finding the open wrinkles that will allow you to travel to a different place that makes the Slider necessary. Time is all around you. You just can’t see it because of where we lie on the plane of time. Your entire life is repeating itself on the time continuum. Getting to where you want to go is the reason you are here. This summer we will be testing the Slider and it will give you the opportunity to go to a different place.”
I think about what Dr. Thompson said. Time is all around us. All my life is happening someplace, somewhere, in every little moment. Somewhere Violet is dying again. Somewhere she is still alive. She’s buried six feet underground. She’s starring in her pre-school’s first play. We’re at prom. We’re kissing for the first time under the bleachers.
She deserved so much more than an ending before her high school graduation. And the Slider is what’s going to allow me to give her another chance.
And I could care less if I ever come back.
“With the Slider you can go back and visit a period of your life in the past. You’ll be there, experiencing that moment of time just as it occurred. But you can only make changes to events on the list Lisa gave to each of you. Anything more will cause a wrinkle in the time continuum. A wrinkle in time is a very bad thing. You need to be very careful in the past.”
Marcus has his hand in the air this time. “Yes, Marcus?”
“What happens if you go outside the list?”
Dr. Thompson looks at the ground before he speaks. “Remember Norris Chen? Last year he was the student chosen to travel. Last year we wanted to be where we are now with the research. We wanted to send all the students of the first year at IYD into the past. We’ve done a lot of work on the Slider since last year after the incident. We still don’t know what went wrong. He stepped into the vortex and didn’t come back. After he disappeared, we were not able to find any record of his existence. It was like he wasn’t born.”
“How is that possible?” Marcus is sitting on the edge of his seat. He’s not the only one hanging on every word.
“Another good question. Right now, it’s a mystery. We have our theories on what occurred, but we can’t be sure. We weren’t expecting to have a student completely disappear from existence. It’s why we need each of you to follow the instructions for the travel and using the Slider. We can’t have any more accidents. It’s important to the Party that the Slider works just as planned. Marvin Winn has dedicated his financial fortune to time travel. We need to have a successful summer to ensure the project is able to go forward.”
“So nobody knows what happened to Norris Chen?”
Dr. Thompson shakes his head. “Nobody has any idea what happened to Norris. He was scrubbed from the plain of existence. The only reason we know he ever existed is because his time here is well documented.”
The room is silent.
The reality of what we’re doing sinks in.
Norris Chen scrubbed himself from existence. Maybe he tried to change something. Maybe he got lost.
Either way, he didn’t come back.
My decision has sealed my fate.
***
We eat lunch in the IYD cafeteria. Voices buzz around my head while I stare at the lunch buffet. Anything you could imagine is available. I stare at a plate of stew. Rick comes up behind me with a tray brimming with pasta and bread.
I have no idea how he stays so skinny.
“You going to eat or are you just going to stare at it?” He nods his head to the stew I’m standing in front of.
“I’m going to eat.”
“Then load up. We only have an hour and then it’s back to class.”
“Good point.” I scoop spoonfuls of stew onto my plate and grab a roll plus a carton of milk. I know it’s boring, like a school kid’s cafeteria lunch when I have so many options, but I’m not here to eat.
I follow Rick to a table. Everyone else is split across two long tables, but Rick walks past our classmates towards the back of the room and sits down. We’re far away from the rest of the group. And it looks weird.
“What? You got cooties or something? What are we doing all the way back here?”
Rick takes a bite of his sandwich and waves his hand in the air. I decide to dig into my stew. Even if it’s something that could be ordered anywhere, the taste is amazing.
Rick finishes chewing and takes a drink of the soda in front of him. “Do you really think it’s going to work?”
“What?”
He looks around the cafeteria, his eyes resting on the security guards at the door before he turns his attention back to me. “The Slider. Do you think it’s going to work or am I going to end up like Norris Chen?”
“I thought you wanted to go first. Why did you volunteer if you weren’t sure?”
“I am sure, I’m just … I don’t know. What happened to that guy? How is it possible he doesn’t even exist anymore?”
I shrug. I’m not scared to go back in time or what will happen to me. What I’m scared of is not being able to save Violet. It’s never seemed like an option. “They said they’ve been working on it; fine-tuning the Slider.”
“Yeah, but they haven’t sent anyone back yet. I’ll be the first. What if I end up in some kind of time warp and I can’t get out? What will I do?”
“You’ll follow the instructions in the booklet that Dr. Thompson provided. You’ll be able to access directions to anything that goes wrong from the Slider’s menu. Don’t be scared, Rick: it will be fine. The Party has been pumping millions of dollars into research.” I say it as much to convince him as to convince myself. It has to work.
It has to.
He exhales, like he’s been holding his breathe the entire time we’ve been speaking. “Okay, I’m sorry. I just needed some reassurance. It’s getting closer. It won’t be much longer until I visit my past.”
I nod my head. In the distance I see Farrah and Casey get up and put their trays away. Lunch is wrapping up and it’s time to head back to learn more about the theory that will change everything that’s wrong in my life.
***
“You must understand that changing past events alters history.”
Dr. Thompson stands in front of the room in a crisp white coat. It
’s like IYD has a wardrobe of white coats for Dr. Thompson. He regards each of us with the intensity of a person sharing something of life or death importance.
And maybe it is. Maybe the travel isn’t as safe as IYD would like us to believe. Maybe Rick’s onto something. Maybe his lunchtime panic attack wasn’t just a call for reassurance.
We’re nothing but human guinea pigs. They always choose the young ones to experiment on. It’s why the minimum age to join the military service is eighteen. Not because they’re young and fit. It’s because they need to find people crazy enough to risk their lives for their country.
It’s all a big conspiracy.
Shannon has her hand in the air. Shannon is the girl with many questions. “If it alters the future, will we still be here?”
Dr. Thompson’s face turns serious. I’ve gone from barely awake to fully alert. I need to know what I’m getting myself into.
“Any change you make will reverberate through the space-time continuum. It could have a dramatic affect on history and the present. World altering. We will tell you what we want you to change before you go back. We don’t want you to change anything else. If you do, you may not be able to return. If you don’t return you won’t be able to become a member of the Party. You’ll remain an outsider.”
The words sink in, but I’m undeterred. I’m going back in time to try to turn off the reel of that night and give Violet another chance. I’ll find a way around the laws of nature to make it happen.
I don’t give a crap about the Party.
“Will we die if we don’t come back?” It’s Shannon again. Her expression had gone from eager to concerned.
“Not necessarily, although it is possible. Most likely you’ll just be stuck in the past.”
Stuck in the past. Big deal. If it brings Violet back then I’ll gladly stay behind.
The Party wasn’t as big back then anyway. It might be better to be stuck there, in a different time.
Then the conversation moves forward. Dr. Thompson has our full attention. He spends the class discussing the laws of nature behind Winn Theory. I’m listening, grasping some of the laws, letting the others pass over my head like a breeze in the wind.
Rick is furiously taking notes on his desk. The writing from his electronic pencil glows, lighting up the space behind him. He’s not going to miss anything. He’s writing like his life depends on it – and maybe it does. Marcus is doing the same. I pick up my pencil and start writing. I need to at least pretend like I care.
Casey has her hand in the air this time. “So are people in the future traveling back here? How do we know we’re not surrounded by time travelers? How do we know that there aren’t travelers working in the government that are threatening our existence? What if members of the opposition are here to take us down?”
Rick sits up straighter. This detour in the conversation is right up his alley. According to Rick there are time travelers everywhere.
And danger.
“Good question, Casey. The Party is always looking for threats to our future. There may be travelers around us, but for now they remain undetected.”
“So are there time travelers here? Are they all around us?”
Dr. Thompson shakes his head. “As far as we know, there have been no documented time travelers. Is it a possibility? Yes. But we’ve carefully combed through history records and have not been able to uncover any proof of their existence. It’s why your summer here at IYD is so important. This is the first documented time anyone has been able to travel in time. And you are the people making history.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see Rick shake his head. Dr. Thompson is looking the other way and doesn’t notice. Rick believes it’s already happened. Rick believes a lot of things that may or may not be true.
“But,” Shannon continues, “theoretically, if time is happening all around us, shouldn’t we be able to see other moments in time? Wouldn’t there be people we would come across that were living in a different place on a time continuum?”
“Another good question. Let’s not forget the expansion of the universe here. As the universe expands outward, so too expands the location of everything in it. We’re all moving; it’s just not something most people think about. While time is happening, every moment happens in a new place. That’s why we need the Slider. We need to travel through vortexes in time to get to the other place.”
Shannon nods her head like it makes perfect sense. Like all the theories Dr. Thompson comes up with are easy to understand. Not that it matters anyway. I’m pretty sure that we’re all just guinea pigs, people to test out the hypothesis on.
I can’t help but ask, because I have to know. “So what happens after you change your past?”
Dr. Thompson walks down the aisle to where I’m sitting. It feels like a threat. Like he can read my mind and is on to me.
I wonder if mind reading is something they’re working on at IYD. If they can develop a device that can locate vortexes to travel back in time, then I doubt reading my mind is an impossibility.
“You need to carefully follow the directions we provide you before you go back. Doing anything more could be disastrous.” He pauses dramatically, looking at each of us in turn, so that the gravity of what he says sink in. “Have you ever heard of the Butterfly Effect?”
Shannon nods her head. “Yeah, a butterfly flapping its wings can affect something hundreds of miles of way.”
Dr. Thompson returns to the front of the room. “That’s the layman’s version. The Butterfly Effect is based on chaos theory and comes from the work of Edward Lorenz. Essentially, a minor change can have a significant impact on events.” He begins to pace. “For instance, let’s say you go back in time and decide to play in a baseball game you sat out of in the past. Seems pretty minor, right?” I look around the room and everyone is nodding their heads. “Imagine if you hit the ball out of the field and it breaks the windshield of a car in left field. Then let’s say the owner of the car tries to drive home with the broken windshield and some glass flies into his eye and he gets into an accident. The victim in the other car dies. The problem is, the victim is a foreign diplomat on his way to deliver important, top-secret news to his country. Only he can’t deliver it now, sending the country into war. It might sound far-fetched, but it’s not. It’s why you have to follow our directions when you go back.”
I hear what Dr. Thompson is saying, and I don’t care. Violet is the reason I’m here, the only reason I’m pretending to have any interest in the Party. As long as I can make Violet okay again then nothing else matters.
The wheels are already in motion for me.
I need a chance to make a change.
Chapter Eighteen
Matt
Last year the Slider didn’t work and one of the students was lost. The rumors about Norris Chen have been circulating through IYD all summer. It’s what has Rick so freaked out. He knows Norris didn’t come back and he’s worried he’ll be next.
It was a big deal and the feds threatened to shut down IYD for testing a device that wasn’t safe on the general public. Lawyers for IYD argued that the students signed a waiver, releasing the Center from liability, and that everyone that comes to IYD knows the risks associated with the program. Now the Party has too much clout and government officials are joining up.
The lost student’s name was Norris Chen. The loss was really hush-hush. I read a small blurb online about the accident. But then everything about Norris Chen was erased. Like he never existed.
Today’s the day we find out the truth about what really happened to the lost student.
The room is quiet. The normal morning buzz is nonexistent. It’s one thing to be excited about traveling to another time. It’s quite another to find out that one of the prior travelers didn’t return.
At 9:30 Dr. Thompson walks to the front of the room. Today he’s wearing – as usual – a white lab coat. His expression is stoic and the look matches the mood in the room.
&nbs
p; He picks up the remote and the screen lifts up. We’re looking at last year’s students. Norris Chen is standing in front of us.
We’re about to see what happened.
“Class,” Dr. Thompson starts. The figures from last year move around on the screen behind him, but there’s no sound. They are just bodies moving and nothing else. “It’s time to talk about the most important aspect of the Slider.” He motions back to the screen behind him. “Rule number 2: You can only change what’s listed on your instruction manual. Beware of the Butterfly Effect.” He looks around the room, giving each of us a hard stare. “It is imperative that you don’t do anything outside the guidelines. Last year we lost a student. We still don’t know for sure what happened, but it almost ended up shutting down the entire program. We can’t have anything like that happen again. Marvin Winn has put million of dollars into this program and we need to make sure everything goes exactly as planned. We’ve gone back over the tape more than a hundred times. We have a shortened video of that day. It’s an example of what not to do during the Slide. Let’s take a look.”
Dr. Thompson lifts the remote and points it at the screen. Last year’s students start to move. They’re out in an open field, holding what appears to be an older version of the Slider. Norris Chen was a senior at Bellevue High School in Washington State, a kid whose dad worked at NASA and had a full ride at MIT. He was the exact kind of guy who would be perfect for a summer at IYD testing one of the biggest breakthroughs in science ever.
Only he slid into the past and didn’t come back.
“What you are about to see is our missing student locate a vortex. He programs his destination and disappears. This is the last time anyone saw Norris Chen. We have no idea what happened to him after stepping into the past. We’ve done research to see if it’s possible he’s shown up somewhere else, and nothing. This cannot happen again. It’s imperative that everyone we send into the slide comes back. If we have anymore unexplainable accidents, the program will be shut down.”