by Peter Ward
“Wait!” Zoë said, holding her arms out. “Now, hang on a second.”
William gave a quiet sniff and continued to look down the sights of his gun at Zoë.
“Geoff?” she said, looking over at him.
“Wait!” Geoff said, running forward. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing! Don’t you have any more serum to give her?”
“I’m sorry, Geoff,” William said, not taking his eyes off Zoë.
“Well, can’t she have mine?” Geoff said, looking down at the unopened bottle in his hand.
William lowered his weapon. “Yours?” he said. “You would give her your serum?”
“Yes,” Geoff said. “Yes, I would.”
“But if you did that, you know I’d have to kill you, right?” William’s eyes looked up at the sky again, as if he were matching the gaze of someone looking down on them. “No one stays.”
“I know,” Geoff said.
“Geoff,” Zoë said. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes I do,” Geoff said.
But just as he was about to hold out the serum for her to take from him, he remembered the one piece of advice his future self had given him on the phone earlier that day: “When the time comes, don’t save Zoë.”
He thought about those words for a moment.
Was this a mistake?
Then it hit him—he was still connected to his Sat-Nav, meaning any injuries he sustained to his body wouldn’t undo themselves. Zoë, on the other hand, would be fine. With her body disconnected, if she died, she would come right back to life when time was sent into reverse.
Now he understood what his future self had meant: he didn’t need to save Zoë, because if her idea of swapping the Sat-Navs worked, she would have already saved both of them herself.
He retracted his hand and held the serum close to his chest.
“Geoff?” Zoë said, looking at him in shock.
Geoff didn’t say anything. He desperately wanted to tell her that everything would be okay, but he couldn’t. Instead, he just raised his eyebrows slightly and tilted his head toward the Sat-Nav on the bench. Zoë narrowed her eyes and gave a slow nod. She probably didn’t fully understand what he was trying to tell her, but she seemed to realize that he wanted her to trust him.
Now all he needed to do was pretend to betray her.
This wasn’t going to be easy.
“I’m sorry, Zoë,” Geoff said uncomfortably, looking down at the serum. “But you can’t have this. I don’t want to die.”
And with that, he took the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and poured the liquid down his throat. He hoped that drinking this new serum didn’t cancel the effects of the first one—he needed to still be linked to his own Sat-Nav, and if he wasn’t, Zoë’s plan would fail.
Now it was Zoë’s turn to put on a performance for William. If this whole charade was to be convincing, she needed to appear angry at what Geoff had just done. And terrified.
Then again, she was probably already terrified.
Zoë yelled, “What have you done?”
William raised his weapon again, pointed it toward Zoë, and sighed. “Sometimes I wish I was a Time Rep again,” he said. “Things were so much simpler.”
Zoë turned to run, but it was too late. William looked down the sights of his weapon and pulled the trigger. Geoff was expecting the whole park to echo with the piercing sound of a gunshot, but instead, the gun made a strange noise like a burst of static.
And that wasn’t the only thing unusual about the gun. As the bullet hit Zoë square in the back of her head, he had only a brief moment to witness the fatal wound it inflicted on her as she immediately vanished into the ether.
William quickly turned to point his gun at Geoff. “I’m sorry,” he said, picking up the swapped Sat-Nav from the park bench. Geoff sucked in his cheeks and straightened himself up. At this point, he didn’t know how he should be behaving. He knew he should be acting distraught, but at the same time he knew that if this worked, Zoë would be fine.
“What happened to her just then?” Geoff said, looking at the spot where Zoë had been standing before she disappeared. “Where did she go?”
William sighed. “I shot her with a temporal bullet.”
“A temporal bullet?”
“It sends the target to any point in time on impact.”
“So where did she go?”
“That’s none of your concern,” William said, looking down at the screen of Geoff’s Sat-Nav in his hand. He didn’t appear to have noticed the swap, but that was only half the trick. If the device didn’t immediately activate without needing some sort of extra verification, this would all be over.
“I think it’s time for you and me to leave,” William said, looking at Geoff. “Are you ready?”
“Ready,” Geoff said.
“Good,” William said. “If it’s any consolation, it won’t be so bad for you back at the Continuum facility.”
“And why’s that?” Geoff said, his heart pounding inside his chest with anticipation as he waited for William to press the EXECUTE button.
William raised a hand up to the scar on his face and looked Geoff in the eyes. “At least you won’t remember any of it.”
And with that, William pressed EXECUTE.
Geoff hoped to God this was going to work.
Fourteen
What happened next was probably one of the most bizarre things Geoff had ever experienced in his life—even more bizarre than the time he’d coincidentally picked up the phone to ring Tim at the exact same moment that Tim had decided to ring him. For a moment he couldn’t understand how this was possible. Had his phone developed its own artificial intelligence with psychic powers? And how had the universe conspired to put Tim at the other end of the line at the exact point he’d chosen to ring him? This freaked him out for about twenty-five seconds until he realized the whole thing was a coincidence, and about ten minutes later he’d forgotten the incident had even occurred.
At the time, though, it was pretty strange.
But this was in a different league.
The first thing that happened as time went into reverse was that William unpressed the EXECUTE button, and Geoff’s heart rate began to calm down again. After a few snippets of reverse conversation, William took his gun out of its holster and aimed it at thin air. In front of him, Zoë appeared out of nowhere, and Geoff was suddenly overcome with a huge feeling of joy as he watched her being unmurdered, the bullet that had hit her in the back of the head shooting back out of her healed skull and returning to the gun it had been fired from like a homing pigeon returning back to its coop.
After that, Geoff lifted the empty bottle to his lips, and undrank the serum. However, just as Geoff had observed when William had injected him, the serum didn’t actually come back out of his mouth again. It appeared this serum was equally immune to the time-manipulation effects of the Sat-Nav, and the same was true of the serum in the bottle Zoë had stamped on—when she unstamped on it, the liquid didn’t emerge from the earth again and go back inside the bottle.
And so, time continued to reverse itself.
William left them, time reversed itself back to the present day, and before he knew it, he was back in space again with Zoë, looking out of the window at the moment Geoff killed Tringrall’s ancestors, allowing all the damage to Earth’s battle fleet to be undone.
But this was where things got really weird, because going through all this backward meant he and Zoë were actually watching time reverse itself in reverse.
And this was difficult enough to say, let alone understand.
What it meant was that instead of watching Earth’s battle fleet put itself back together, the ships that had previously been undestroying themselves and unexploding everywhere were now doing the opposite; they were destroying themselves and exploding everywhere. Almost the entire fleet was completely decimated in a matter of seconds, and the void of space was suddenly littered with the floating dead bodies of servi
cemen and women, and charred spacecraft debris.
Seeing backward time running forward at this moment was like watching a massacre, and there was nothing Geoff could do about it. And given that his body was forced to behave in the exact way it had behaved when time was running forward, only in reverse, he couldn’t even close his eyes.
And he was smiling the whole time.
He was smiling as the Concordia unrammed the ship with Tringrall’s ancestors on board. He was smiling as the ship they were on drifted back into the flagship’s path. He was smiling as the Concordia ground to a halt in the middle of space, its engine wash fading to nothing. In front of him, his greatest achievement was quickly undoing itself, and all he could do was stand there and smile.
Soon afterward, he was back at 23 Woodview Gardens, then he was in the street again, surprising Zoë. Then he was in the restaurant, uneating his cheeseburger. It felt a bit unhygienic to rewrap a burger in its paper after removing it from his mouth and then handing it back to the cashier to put back with the other burgers from the kitchen, but it was probably no worse than what they did at the kebab van down the local high street. Probably.
Next there came the tutorial, backward, and before he knew it he rematerialized in the small, underground room at Continuum where he’d first drunk the serum.
The end of his journey brought him face to face with Jennifer Adams again, who was smiling at him the same way she had done just before he’d left.
He knew time was about to start flowing forward at any second.
And he knew this meant he was probably about to get shot.
Maybe if he could disguise the fact that he was back, he might be able to change his future. If they didn’t know he’d discovered the truth about Continuum, he might be able to get away unharmed, right?
As he thought about how he might try and pretend nothing had happened, Geoff performed his final reverse act before time started to flow forward again: he breathed in slowly, and lifted his finger off of the Sat-Nav’s screen to reveal the button that said BEGIN.
And begin it did.
Eight
“From now on,” Jennifer said, “the fate of the world is in your hands. All you need to do is ask yourself one question: What will you change?”
She smiled, just as she had done before.
As far as Geoff could tell, she looked completely unaware that Geoff had already been and come back.
Geoff rested the Sat-Nav down on the table, took a step back, and sneaked a look at his watch.
Three twenty.
Ten minutes until his back had an appointment with that bullet, unless there was any way to change things.
Jennifer tilted her head to one side. “Something the matter?”
“What’s that?” Geoff said, looking up. He knew he had to appear relaxed, so he adopted what he called the “Xbox avatar pose,” which basically meant putting all his weight on one leg and leaning to one side. “No, nothing’s the matter. I’m fine.”
Jennifer’s eyes looked to the left, then to the right, then directly at him.
“Really,” he insisted. “I’m fine.”
“Did you change your mind?”
“No, not at all,” Geoff said. “I wonder if I might use the loo first.”
Jennifer blinked. “The loo?”
“Yeah. It’s a bit embarrassing, but I really need to go. Dodgy cheeseburger I ate earlier, I think.”
Jennifer narrowed her eyes at him. “A dodgy cheeseburger.”
“Yeah. I think it’s repeating on me.”
“No problem,” she said. “The bathroom is just down the hallway and on the right.”
“Thanks,” Geoff said, turning to leave the room. He tried not to move too quickly, so as not to arouse suspicion.
“Oh, before you go,” Jennifer said, “do you mind leaving that spare serum I gave you here?”
“The spare serum?”
“Yes. We don’t like people carrying it around with them outside of the Continuum experience. I know your friends at Time Tours have already stolen a couple of bottles to analyze, along with a Sat-Nav or two, and I wouldn’t want them getting hold of any more. You understand, right?”
“Sure,” Geoff said, taking the bottle out of his pocket and putting it on the table. “Here you go.”
“I knew it,” she said.
“You knew what?”
Jennifer picked up the bottle and showed it to Geoff. “This bottle is empty.”
Geoff swallowed. He’d forgotten that the serum wouldn’t have returned to the bottle when Zoë undrank it. This was a bit of a giveaway that he’d already returned from his journey, unless he could think of a clever excuse.
“So it is,” he said.
“When I gave it to you a moment ago, it was full.”
“Was it?”
“Yes, it was.” She put the bottle down again. “Care to explain?”
“Are you sure it was full?” Geoff said. “Maybe you gave me an empty one by mistake?”
“What?”
“You know like when you buy a game in the shop and the cashier forgets to put the disc in the case? That happened to me once—I got home with a new game, and the bloody disc was missing. Couldn’t believe it. Maybe it was something like that?”
“Maybe,” Jennifer said, taking a step toward him, “Or maybe you’ve already been into your Continuum experience and come back out of it again. Maybe you’ve just reversed your way right back to the beginning and you thought I wouldn’t notice.”
Geoff nodded.
Then he nodded a bit more.
Now he was nodding too much.
He stopped nodding.
“Yes,” he said, taking a step back. “Yes, that is another possibility. But that’s not what’s happened here.”
Jennifer didn’t look convinced. “So why are you trying to leave all of a sudden?” she said. “Did you see something while you were gone, perhaps? Something that maybe you shouldn’t have?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Geoff said, taking another step back toward the door. “I just need the loo.”
“Nonsense! Out with it! What did you see?”
Geoff thought about carrying on with his “I really need the loo” charade—in fact, he even considered wetting himself to really complete the illusion. In the end, though, he thought he might try and appeal to Jennifer’s better nature, not least because he didn’t want to walk around in wet trousers for the rest of the day. And besides, if the future success of Continuum really was responsible for bringing about the end of humanity, surely she would want to stop that from happening, right?
“Okay, okay,” Geoff said, holding his hands up. “You’re right. I’ve already been and come back.”
“That’s better,” Jennifer said. She appeared to calm down a little now that she felt Geoff was being honest with her. “And what did you do?”
Geoff sighed. “First of all, I went to see Zoë—you know, the girl we talked about? I showed her the moment I defeated the Varsarians. I didn’t quite manage to tell her how I really felt about her, but at least it was something.”
“I’m very happy for you.” Jennifer’s voice was flat and emotionless. “Then what happened?”
“Next we traveled to the future,” Geoff said, “Only, I think we traveled forward in time a bit too far.”
“How far forward did you go?”
“Far enough to see what Continuum eventually does to the planet.” Geoff took a step forward and looked Jennifer right in the eyes. “You remember how your supercomputer predicted that humanity would one day set off to explore other galaxies, leaving the Earth to turn back into a beautiful garden world? Well, thanks to your company, that doesn’t happen anymore. Humanity doesn’t set off to explore the universe—instead, everyone becomes addicted to Continuum and disappears into their own alternate timelines. Isn’t that horrible?”
Jennifer laughed. “Oh dear.” She shook her head. “Tell me—that story about humanity l
eaving the Earth to explore other galaxies…”
“Yes?” Geoff said. “What about it?”
“Who told that to you?”
Geoff thought about this for a moment. “I think it was Eric,” he replied. “Why?”
“Because it’s not true,” Jennifer answered. “Never was.”
“What do you mean it’s not true?” Geoff said.
“I mean it’s made up. A lie. A fabrication. That’s what people mean when they say something’s not true.”
“I don’t believe you,” Geoff said. “How do you know that?”
“Because I’m the one who made it up in the first place,” Jennifer replied. “I’m the one who first told that story to Eric, seventeen years ago.”
“What?”
“You know the future you saw with all the crumbling buildings? The future where the city is deserted? Well, that isn’t some sort of alternate reality caused by the success of Continuum. What you saw has always been destined to happen. My supercomputer back at Time Tours predicted this years ago, only Eric never knew, because he was too lazy to get his hands dirty running all the initial predictions. That idiot left everything completely up to me. I was the one who had to write up all the reports on why the Earth appeared deserted at the end of the 100,000-year prediction cycle, so when it showed me that I would one day set up the most successful company in history and put Time Tours out of business, obviously I covered it up. I’ve always known the real reason for Earth being deserted in the future; I’ve always known it was because of the popularity of Continuum. I couldn’t let Time Tours know that, though, so I fabricated a story about humanity leaving the universe to explore other galaxies.”
“But why in good conscience would you want any of this happen?” Geoff said. “You’ve seen the impact that Continuum eventually has on the world—it brings about the end of all mankind!”
“Does it?” Jennifer said. “That’s one way of looking at it, but I prefer to see it as freeing all mankind. Thanks to Continuum, humanity is finally able to break free from the shackles of existence, and spend the rest of its days roaming through time, changing things however it pleases. Don’t you see? Once everyone is inside Continuum, no one makes another mistake ever again. Continuum doesn’t just give power back to the people. It makes them like gods. Isn’t that wonderful?”