Continuum: Time Rep

by Peter Ward

  “Oh, Jennifer Adams…Jennifer Adams…” Tim said, walking back across the lounge and sitting in the armchair opposite Geoff.

  “Yes, Jennifer Adams,” Geoff said impatiently. “Don’t just walk around repeating her name. Who is she?”

  “Jennifer is many things,” Tim said. “She has a brilliant mind, she’s a keen businesswoman, and she’s absolutely ruthless.”

  “You sound like you know a lot about her,” Geoff said.

  “I should do,” Tim said. “She used to work for Time Tours. It was a bit before my time, but everyone in the company knows who Jennifer Adams is. She’s a legend at the company.”

  “She worked for Time Tours?” Geoff said. “Doing what?”

  “She’s the one who designed our supercomputer.”

  “Oh, right,” Geoff said, taking a moment to digest what Tim had just told him. “Wait a minute—I thought Eric designed it?”

  “No, Eric was the one who wrote the algorithm it uses to predict causality. Jennifer was the one who was able to invent a computer with the level of storage and processing power he required to run it.”

  “How long ago was that?” Geoff said.

  “About twenty years, just as Eric was finishing his algorithm. He needed a computer capable of crunching some serious numbers very quickly, and Jennifer was the one who gave it to him. Apparently it was she who came up with the idea of using a lattice of artificial micro-black holes to store that much data. And it was she who worked out how to read information back through Hawking radiation. She’s a goddamn genius.”

  “Funny,” Geoff said, “I had no idea. From speaking to Eric, you’d think he was the one who thought up the whole thing.”

  “Yes, and that was Jennifer’s problem too. She thought he took all the credit for their work. She respected him for getting his first Nobel Prize years before they met, when he suggested the initial theory behind his algorithm in a bar, but when he got his second prize the day the facility opened, she was furious. She believed that without her computer, Eric’s algorithm would have been nothing more than a nice theory, and she couldn’t believe he didn’t give her any recognition for her work. Back then, she’d only been out of university for a few years, and the Nobel Prize board questioned how someone so young could have had so much influence on a project already managed by a past winner. Right or wrong, they chose not to award her, and although the decision was down to them, she always blamed Eric for not standing up for her, for not refusing his prize unless she was recognized as well.”

  Geoff knew how she must have felt, to play such a huge role in something only to have everyone just take her achievement for granted. When he had saved the entire planet from annihilation two years ago, everyone around him pretty much just shrugged their shoulders and got back to watching Britain’s Got Talent.

  “So what happened to her?” Geoff said.

  “Not long after the incident with Eric, she left Time Tours,” Tim said. “Many think she resigned out of pride—that she couldn’t bear to work for a man she didn’t respect anymore. But there are others who believe she resigned for a different reason: Some believe that back then, Time Tours was actually working on an advanced time-manipulation device, and that the real reason Jennifer resigned was because she was able to convince the key scientist developing the tech to leave and help her set up Continuum.”

  “What do you think?” Geoff asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tim replied. “As far as I can tell, there is no record of Time Tours ever working on any such technology. But regardless of which side of the fence you sit, there is one thing everyone agrees on.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Her last words to Eric as she walked out the door.”

  “Why, what did she say?”

  “It was a vow. A vow that one day she would put Time Tours out of business for good.”

  “Well, it looks like she might be succeeding,” Geoff said, giving Tim a smug grin. “You see what happens when you don’t give someone the recognition they deserve?”

  “You know, I’m beginning to wonder if it might be me that shoots you tomorrow,” Tim said.

  Three

  Geoff and Tim agreed that the most logical course of action would be for Geoff to just behave as normal for the next twenty-four hours, despite his knowledge of future events. It took a long time for them to reach this agreement—after all, on the one hand, if Geoff changed his behavior, it might have been the very thing that led to his attempted murder. On the other hand, though, not changing his behavior might also have led to him getting a bullet in the back. Since there was no way of knowing how the outcome would be affected by the way Geoff chose to behave, in the end they thought it would be best for Geoff to just carry on with his life as per normal. Geoff tried to argue that this meant he could stay in bed playing his Nintendo 3DS under the duvet for the next twenty-four hours, only emerging from his room to make tea and go to the toilet. This was kind of normal for him, he’d argued, so what was the problem?

  The problem was that the following day he was scheduled to go and meet a class of thirty schoolchildren and their teacher to show them around London’s financial district, Canary Wharf. Apparently the kids were doing a project on twenty-first-century architecture, looking at why every building commissioned at this time was a glass skyscraper of some description. Their working hypothesis was that during this period, all the world’s architects had suffered from a case of collective amnesia and forgotten that the last thing they built also happened to be a glass skyscraper. (“Good job with that glass skyscraper, guys! What shall we build next? Why, how about a glass skyscraper?”)

  The teacher had told him that she wanted to meet at ten o’clock in the morning outside Pret A Manger. Unfortunately, at Canary Wharf, like most areas of London, there were at least sixty-five Pret A Mangers within a mile of each other and Geoff wasn’t quite sure which one she’d meant. In fact, the only way she could have suggested a less specific meeting place would have been if she’d just said “outside.” He was pretty confident he’d be able to figure out where they were eventually, though. After all, he’d played enough role playing games that neglected to give you a waypoint marker on a ten-square-kilometer map to tell you where your next objective was, so finding thirty kids and their teacher would be a piece of cake in comparison.

  When he left the house to walk to the station, Zoë was only about four doors down, slotting the usual mail through people’s letter boxes—bills, bank statements, and leaflets for a new pizza meal deal. She had her headphones on, her head bopping away to music, and he only had to lay eyes on her for a split second before he felt a soft warmth wash over him, as though he were stepping out of a shadow into the sunlight. It was then that he realized he had actually just stepped out of a shadow into the sunlight, but he still decided to give her some credit for the way he felt anyway.

  In terms of how she looked, there was nothing particularly exceptional to say about Zoë today—as usual, her long dark hair was tied back into a ponytail, she didn’t appear to have much makeup on (if any), and she was wearing her regular postal uniform that fit loosely around her small frame. When she wasn’t working she often wore clothes that disguised her figure—square-cut jeans, long baggy t-shirts, big jumpers. She had very simple tastes in fashion. In fact, if she ever committed a crime and a witness were asked to identify her, her only distinguishing features were the four piercings in her left ear and the tattoo of an owl on her back that was rarely on show. If you didn’t know her, you would think that this was a girl who didn’t like attention.

  However, all that changed whenever she was on stage.

  When Zoë wasn’t posting letters she played in a band. The band wasn’t particularly well known—just a group of girls who got together every week and played down the local pub. Geoff went to watch them most weeks. Zoë was their lead guitarist, and when she was on stage it was like she was a different person—her normally straight hair would be frizzy and flying all over t
he place (while still attached to her head, of course), her pale skin would be streaked with flashes of pink and blue makeup, and her high cheekbones would be dusted with a dark blush, making her face look thin and gaunt. To him, it was hard to believe that this normally timid-looking girl was capable of adopting such a different persona when it came to her music, but then again, that was nothing compared to what Zoë would think if she ever found out about Geoff’s double life as a time-traveling tour guide who’d once saved the planet from total destruction. It would have been like finding out the cat secretly sneaked off every night to thrill audiences by playing a repertoire of Beethoven’s classics on the piano.

  “Morning, Geoff!” she called out, taking her headphones out of her ears as she saw him.

  “Morning,” he replied, giving her a wave.

  “You off out somewhere?” she said, stepping over a flowerbed as a shortcut into the neighboring garden, one house closer to him.

  “Yeah, I thought I’d go and trample through some people’s flowerbeds,” he said, looking down at her feet.

  “Very funny.” She rolled her eyes and dug into her shoulder bag to sift through a few envelopes. “Where are you really going?”

  “I’m just meeting some tourists in a little while, showing them around Canary Wharf. Some kids on a school trip, actually.”

  Zoë laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Geoff said.

  “Nothing—it’s just…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m just picturing you wandering around, surrounded by all those big banks, and the people in suits, and the expensive bars. You’re, like, the last person I would expect to find showing a bunch of schoolkids around that place,” Zoë said.

  She was right—he wasn’t particularly familiar with the area. It was like asking a horse to show you around the north pole.

  “So what are these kids working on?” Zoë said. “Some kind of economics project?” This time there was a fence in between Zoë and the next house, but that didn’t stop her. She grabbed the top of it with both hands and vaulted over in one smooth movement, straightening her jacket as she landed.

  “Ancient history, apparently,” Geoff said, only realizing after he’d spoken how strange that sounded if you didn’t know when these kids had traveled from. He quickly inhaled a lungful of air in the hope that he could somehow suck the sound back in again.

  “Ancient history? But isn’t Canary Wharf pretty new compared to the rest of London? Why would you go there for a history project, of all places?”

  “Did I say ancient history?” Geoff said, trying not to let his eyes look side to side (a classic sign that he was hiding something) as his eyes looked side to side. “I meant business studies. That’s it—they’re doing business studies.”

  “Well, that makes more sense,” Zoë said, not appearing to notice Geoff flustering. She posted a couple of letters through his neighbor’s door and headed up the garden path to the road. “Which way are you going now, then?”

  “Down to the station,” Geoff replied, taking a few deep breaths. That was close.

  “Great—fancy walking with me while I do the rest of this street?”

  “Sure,” Geoff said. After all, it was the only reason he’d chosen to leave the house an hour and a half earlier than he needed to, but she didn’t need to know that.

  “So, how have you been?” Zoë asked, lifting a small package out of her bag. It was addressed to the house three doors down. “Anything new happening in your life?”

  Let’s see, Geoff thought. I’ve just learned that in less than a day, someone is going to try and kill me. I’ve also learned that I’m going to lose my memory, that I get sent back in time for no explicable reason, and that I will have less comprehension about my predicament than a cabbage that’s just been entered into a best cabbage competition. Other than that, everything’s pretty normal.

  “No, nothing new with me,” Geoff lied. “You?”

  “Oh, just working on a couple of new songs with the girls, but that’s about it. Other than that, things are pretty much the same…”

  The last time they’d spoken, a few days ago, Zoë had told Geoff that they’d sent off a couple of demo tracks to a music label, just to see if there was any interest. He assumed the band hadn’t heard back, seeing as how she hadn’t mentioned anything, but he decided to ask anyway.

  “Did anyone get back to you from that record company?” he said.

  “What? Oh…no. No, it’s only been a few days, so I doubt we’ll hear anything yet, if we ever hear anything at all. I’m sure these people get hundreds of CDs through the door all the time.”

  Zoë looked down at the package she was holding again, opened the gate of the house it was addressed to, and walked toward the front door.

  “Well, you never know,” Geoff said.

  “I just hope we’re not wasting our time with all this,” Zoë said, posting the package through the letter box and turning back toward the street. “My boss thinks I’m mad, spending so much of my free time with the band. He’s worried that all those late nights in the pub might affect my work one day, and that I might as well give up and focus on my career, since we’ll probably never make it anyway…”

  “You’re not wasting your time,” Geoff reassured her. “And you shouldn’t let other people tell you what you can and can’t do. After all, whether you succeed in making it or not, if you don’t try now, you’ll always look back on your life thinking, ‘What if?’ At least this way, when you’re older you won’t have any regrets about not trying.”

  Zoë smiled, closing the front gate and moving on to the next house.

  “Don’t listen to your boss at the post office,” Geoff said. “He’s not your real boss anyway—you are.”

  “You’re right, Geoff. Sometimes I just wish I could see into the future, see if this is all just a silly dream. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I love playing in the band and I’ll keep doing it regardless of whether we make it big, but it would be nice to know whether it’s worth getting our hopes up or not. What if I’m making a mistake dedicating so much time to the music? What if I should really be doing something else with my life?”

  Geoff didn’t say anything. There were so many times when he’d been tempted to use the technology at Time Tours to find out what happened to Zoë in the future—not only to see whether her dreams of making it as a musician came true, but to find out other things as well. Who would she meet in the future? Would she ever get married? Did she end up having any children? Did she lead a long and happy life? He had the opportunity to find out the answers to all of these questions and more, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Part of his reason for not finding out about Zoë’s future was just out of respect. He didn’t see what right he had to know about her destiny, and any attempt to do so felt a bit creepy, as though he were nothing more than a technologically advanced stalker. The other part that stopped him was fear. Fear of what he’d find out. What if she ended up with a total loser? Someone who didn’t treat her right? Or what if something bad happened to her? What if she had an accident or suffered from a disease? Time Tours would never let him intervene in any way, so if there was a problem with Zoë’s future and he wasn’t allowed to do anything about it, he wasn’t sure he would be able to live with that.

  In the end, he’d decided it was better not to know anything. If he didn’t know what was going to happen, there was always the possibility that everything would turn out fine. This was the same reason he refused to watch the final episode of the Battlestar Galactica reboot—if he didn’t see it, he could always believe that the writers were somehow able to tie up all the ridiculous loose ends and plot holes in a satisfying way and that they didn’t just leave it up to the viewer’s imagination to resolve everything that made no sense. Like everything to do with Starbuck from season four onward.

  It wasn’t long before Zoë and Geoff reached the end of the street. Zoë needed to double back and do the ot
her side of the road, while Geoff needed to cross over and carry on for another mile or so before he got to the station. Since he had the time, for a moment he considered accompanying her on the rest of her round before heading to Canary Wharf, but he thought this might look a little strange and decided to leave her to it. So they said their goodbyes and went their separate ways.

  Had he turned around for one last look at Zoë, he would have noticed a very familiar face waiting for her on the other side of the street: a man smiling nervously in a smart suit, with a clean-shaven face and a new haircut.

  But Geoff didn’t turn around for one last look at Zoë, so he saw nothing.

  • • •

  By the time Geoff arrived at Canary Wharf, it had only just gone half past eight in the morning, meaning there was still an hour and a half to go before he needed to begin his grand tour of all the Pret A Mangers in the local area to try to find the class of schoolchildren he was supposed to be meeting. And if the events of yesterday were to be believed, it was less than seven hours before he would leave Time Tours, have a shave, get his hair cut, borrow Tim’s suit, join Continuum, get shot in the back, and materialize on Tower Bridge yesterday. How on Earth was he going to do all that in seven hours? He had enough trouble doing the washing up in seven hours, so the thought that he was supposedly about to experience all these events seemed so impossible it was almost reassuring.

  As it was quite a pleasant morning, Geoff decided to sit outside a coffee shop to pass the time, sipping on an enormous cup of frothy milk with a faintly bitter aftertaste, or a “grande latte,” as it was described on the menu. At this time of day, the streets were bustling with various commuters making their way to work. Many were tapping things into their mobile phones, others were trying to read the newspaper as they walked, and the rest were trying not to be bumped into by the people not looking where they were going.

  Zoë was right—Geoff had never really been to Canary Wharf before, and he was struggling to think of what interesting facts he could tell these schoolchildren about the place. When he showed tourists around a particular location, he usually had some historical anecdotes up his sleeve to entertain the crowd—a list of famous people who had once lived there, important events that had taken place on the same spot, that sort of thing. With Canary Wharf, though, the place was so new there wasn’t much to say, apart from the fact that there was quite a nice Waitrose and the underground station was the only one in London where commuters politely queued to get on the train, rather than adopting the “huddle around the doors and fight your way onto the carriage” technique that seemed popular everywhere else. He knew the area was one of London’s major business districts and everyone gave you a strange look if you went into a bar and ordered a drink that cost anything less than a small fortune, but that was where his knowledge ended.