by Peter Ward
On either side of the corridor there stood a number of doors, each one spaced apart from the last by a few meters.
He knew Jennifer’s office was the last door on the right, and sure enough, at the end of the hallway he could see a door that was slightly ajar, with light shining out onto the corridor from the inside. He headed toward it, his footsteps dragging on the carpet as though someone had coated the soles of his shoes with glue.
Despite knowing what was about to happen, he was a little hesitant.
He was nervous.
He had another nose whistle.
He got rid of the nose whistle again and kept walking.
As he got closer, he noticed a small plaque next to the doorway. It read:
Jennifer Adams BSc, BTPh, PPQHSc.
Senior Specialist Supercomputer Supervisor
That was a lot of S’s, like a snake.
Geoff tilted his head around the doorway and looked inside. Sure enough, Jennifer Adams was sitting at her desk, scribbling something down on a piece of paper in front of her. Despite having already seen what Jennifer looked like when she was younger, it was still fascinating to look at her now. With her hair in a different style and those glasses, she really looked very different. He had to keep reminding himself that this was the Jennifer Adams from seventeen years ago, and people can change a lot in seventeen years. Geoff was living proof of this—fifteen years ago he was halfway through puberty, and looked like a cross between a teenage boy and one of those limited-edition pizza box meal deals, only far less appetizing.
Geoff knocked on the door twice.
Jennifer threw her pen across the room in fright and leapt out of her chair.
“Goodness me!” she said, holding a hand to her chest. “You scared the living daylights out of me!”
“Sorry,” Geoff said.
“That’s all right,” Jennifer said, straightening her glasses and moving over to meet him. “Please—come in.”
Geoff stepped inside the office and looked around. Much like the office of her future self, this place was quite a mess, with papers spilling out of filing cabinets, notice boards bulging with notes pinned to them, and various pieces of old electrical equipment in boxes stacked up to the ceiling. In one corner of the room he could see a mini fridge, with a box of tea bags, a couple of mugs, and a kettle on top. Jennifer hadn’t been lying when she’d told him earlier how this job had made her accustomed to being cooped up—the woman didn’t even have to leave the room to make a cup of tea.
“Are you Jennifer Adams?” Geoff asked. He knew she was, but he had to keep up the pretense of not knowing who she was, just as he had done in the simulation. In fact, he knew exactly what he needed to say to make her hand over the Sat-Nav so he could break it.
“That’s right,” Jennifer replied. “Were you looking for me?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Do you work here?” Jennifer said.
“Yes, I do,” Geoff said. He supposed it was kind of true, even if his timing was a little off. By over a decade.
“Good to meet you,” she said, extending a hand for him to shake.
“Likewise,” Geoff said. Her handshake was a little less firm than before—she must have developed a stronger grip over the years.
“So, you appear to have me at a disadvantage,” Jennifer said. “Who are you?”
“Oh, sorry,” Geoff said, quickly trying to think of a false name. Had he thought about it, he would have realized he didn’t really need to use one, but being put on the spot made him panic. “My name is Jean-Luc Picard.”
“Jean-Luc Picard?” Jennifer said, raising her eyebrows. “What’s that? French?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Well, Jean-Luc,” Jennifer said, walking back around to the other side of her desk and sitting down, “what can I do for you? And how come you’re here so late? Aren’t you supposed to be out with the others?”
“The others?”
“Yeah—tonight’s the big night! The night Eric gets awarded his second Nobel Prize! I thought everyone was going to the ceremony with him to celebrate?”
“Not me,” Geoff said, trying to think quickly. “If you ask me, you should be up there too, collecting that award with him.”
Jennifer leaned back in her chair and smiled.
“I like you, Jean-Luc,” she said, wheeling herself in her chair over to the kettle in the corner of the room. “Can I offer you a drink? A cup of tea, perhaps? I’ve just boiled the water.”
“That would be lovely,” Geoff said, watching as Jennifer plopped two tea bags into a couple of mugs and added the boiling water.
“How do you take it?” she said, removing the milk from the fridge.
“Milk and two sugars, please,” Geoff said. “But not too much milk.”
Jennifer added the milk, removed the tea bags, and stirred in two sugars. While her back was turned, Geoff sneaked a look at what she had been writing as he’d come in.
It was the beginnings of a letter of resignation, though he noticed a number of screwed-up pieces of paper to the side.
“There we go,” she said, handing Geoff his tea and placing her own mug on the desk in front of her. “Now, what can I do for you?”
Here we go, Geoff thought, taking a quick slurp of his tea.
This is it.
“I understand you are working on something off the books,” he said.
Jennifer picked up her tea, wrapping her hands around the mug and blowing on the surface. “What do you mean, ‘off the books’?” she said.
“I know you are working on a device that would allow tourists to go back in time and change whatever they like, without disrupting the space-time continuum.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jennifer said.
“Yes, you do,” Geoff said, taking another gulp of his tea. “It’s a black tablet device, small enough to fit in your pocket. You’re thinking of calling it the Space and Time Navigator, or the ‘Sat-Nav,’ for short.”
Jennifer continued to warm her hands around her mug. “What did you say you did for Time Tours again?” she said.
“I didn’t,” Geoff said.
But then Geoff had an idea, taking inspiration from the rumors Tim had told him. Perhaps if he pretended that he was the scientist working on the serum, he could convince her to show him the prototype Sat-Nav. Then, once it was in his hands, he could destroy it, just as he’d seen in the simulation,
“Huh. Well, Jean-Luc, I don’t know what to say. But if I was working on such a device, why would I want to talk to you about it?”
“Because I can help,” Geoff said. “I know about the problems you are having with it. I know the device is complete, but you can’t get it to synchronize with the user properly.”
Jennifer narrowed her eyes.
“Go on.”
“What if I told you I had access to a substance you could use to connect people to this device? A base serum you could make infinite variations of to link different people to different devices? Would that be worth something to you?”
“This is a joke, right?” Jennifer said. “Did Eric put you up to this? Because if he did, it isn’t very funny.”
“This is no joke,” Geoff said. “I’m being serious. You have the Sat-Nav, I have the serum. Together, we could leave Time Tours and beat them at their own game. Wouldn’t you like that?”
Jennifer looked at Geoff for a few seconds before taking a sip of her tea. She put the mug down, took a small key out of her breast pocket, and unlocked the desk drawer to her right.
“I don’t know how you know what you know,” she said, taking a Sat-Nav out and placing it on the desk in front of her. “But your intelligence is very good. This is my prototype. The only one in existence.”
“May I see it?” Geoff said, reaching over to pick it up.
“Be my guest,” Jennifer said, giving it to him.
The moment Geoff had the Sat-Nav in his hands, he leapt out of his cha
ir and threw it down on the floor as hard as he could, smashing the device to pieces.
“Ha!” he said, grinning at Jennifer. “I got you!”
He shut his eyes and waited for the space-time continuum to sort itself out.
He had done it.
Any minute now, he would disappear and exist in a world without Continuum.
But nothing happened.
Back when he’d been watching the simulation, it appeared as though things had changed immediately, but for some reason that wasn’t happening now.
He kept his eyes closed a bit longer. Maybe the space-time continuum was experiencing a lot of changes at the moment and needed a few minutes to sort things out, a bit like when you ring a call center at lunchtime and they put you on hold. He imagined what the message might have been if he had been on hold: “The paradox you have created is very important to us. Please continue to hold while we sort out the mess you have made.”
But still nothing happened.
He opened his eyes and looked down at the Sat-Nav. Maybe it wasn’t broken enough. He twisted his foot into the broken circuitry, hoping that that would do the trick.
Still nothing.
He looked up at Jennifer and gave her a sheepish grin.
“I don’t understand,” he said, sitting down in his seat again and taking another sip of his tea. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Jennifer leaned forward on her elbows across her desk and smiled.
“Yes it was, Geoff,” she said. “Yes, it was.”
Eighteen
“W-what did you say?” he said. “How do you know my name?”
“I know everything, Geoffrey Stamp,” Jennifer said.
“Everything?” Geoff said.
“Yes, everything,” Jennifer said. “I know about Continuum, I know about your little encounter with my older self on Tower Bridge, and I even know about your plot to come back here and destroy the prototype Sat-Nav. You cannot get anything past me.”
“But how?” Geoff said, taking his hands off her desk. “How do you know all this?”
Jennifer laughed. “How?” she said. “How? Geoff, for the last three years I have been building and testing the most advanced supercomputer in the world, running every possible simulation of the future that there is to simulate. While you and your friends have been running around trying to work out what’s been happening in your time, I’ve been watching it all transpire on a computer screen back here, right from the comfort of this chair.”
“But I don’t understand,” Geoff said. “When I watched the simulation before I came back, it showed—”
“—it showed you destroying the Sat-Nav and changing the timeline,” Jennifer said, finishing his sentence. “I know. Like I said—I’ve had unlimited access to this computer since the day I built it. I knew you were going to watch that simulation—in fact, it was me who programmed the computer to cut it off at the right point to make you think you’d succeeded in changing history. But you didn’t. You think that thing you broke is the only Sat-Nav I’ve got? Think again. And those rumors about how I’d invented the Sat-Nav and convinced a rogue scientist to leave Time Tours with me to set up Continuum? Who do you think started those?”
Geoff had heard that one of the cleaning ladies was a bit of a gossip, but in this case there was another name that sprang to mind.
“I’m guessing that might have been you,” he said.
“Correct. Without those rumors, you might not have tried to come back here and stop it from happening, so I made sure everyone was whispering about the circumstances of my resignation, knowing one day the stories would find their way to you. So you see, this whole scenario was a massive setup with one purpose in mind—to get you to come back here.”
“Balls,” Geoff said, slumping back down in his seat.
“Balls, indeed,” Jennifer said.
“But… what has all this got to do with me anyway?”
Jennifer laughed.
“Oh, you have no idea how important you are to the Continuum project,” she said. “Without you, none of it will ever exist.”
“Are you sure?” Geoff said. He didn’t feel particularly important, but then he’d learnt from past experiences never to underestimate himself. “How does that work then?”
“Creating the Sat-Nav was no problem for me—electronics are my speciality, after all,” Jennifer said. “But you said it yourself—the serum is proving to be a little more tricky. I’m having real problems synthesizing a substance that’s immune to the way time is manipulated, while being able to link a user to the device.”
“That does sound pretty hard,” Geoff said. He had enough trouble making hot chocolate, let alone that sort of concoction.
“Fortunately for me, though,” Jennifer said, “that’s where you come in.”
“Me?” Geoff said. “How can I possibly help you create the serum? I didn’t bring any back with me.”
“Yes you did,” Jennifer said. “It’s in your blood.”
“My blood?” Geoff said, holding a hand to his throat.
“That’s right. Over the past twenty-four hours, you have been injected with it, and you’ve drunk it twice. Your body is riddled with the stuff—enough for me to create a base formula from which I can make as many unique variations as I need to supply every man, woman, and child on this planet.”
“I don’t believe this,” Geoff said. “You mean to tell me that I’m the reason you were able to set up Continuum in the first place? All those people that end up disappearing into their own timelines in the future—all that happens because of me?”
“Bingo,” Jennifer said. “That’s why without you, Continuum would never have existed. You should have listened to your friend. He was right about why my older self just let you go without a fight on Tower Bridge. She let you go because she knew she needed you to come back here and give me your blood. And as for your plan to have your friend watch over this moment from the future to make sure everything goes to plan, I’ve taken care of that as well. Right now, he’s watching a fabricated scenario of you entering your Continuum-free world, wondering why his own reality hasn’t been altered. He won’t figure out what I’ve done until it’s too late.”
Geoff looked down into his half-drunk mug of tea and sighed. After all that talk of not doing what people told him to do, of not allowing his life to follow the path laid out for it by others, everything he had done had actually been working against him.
His actions had created the very thing he was trying to stop.
What an idiot.
That was why the paradox scan had turned green before he came back here—traveling back in time hadn’t changed history; it had kept it things running exactly as they had been all along.
“I don’t understand,” Geoff said, his body completely deflated like a soufflé someone had forgotten to eat. “If you’ve known about this all along, how come there were times when you were acting all surprised about what was happening? Like when I first came back from my Continuum experience and you discovered I’d already used the serum?”
“It was all an act,” Jennifer said, flicking a few strands of hair back. “I played my part in a course of events I knew would eventually motivate you to come back here.”
“But if your plan all along was for me to come back here, why go to all that trouble of erasing my memory? And nearly getting me killed?”
“Think of it in terms of cause and effect. Cause: You lost your memory and got sent back in time with a bullet in your back. Effect: You came to Continuum to investigate what had happened to you. I had to let all that happen, because if it didn’t, I never would have triggered the chain of events that brought you here tonight.”
“But doesn’t this whole situation create one almighty paradox?” Geoff said. “The only reason I lost my memory and got shot was because I came to Continuum to find out why I lost my memory and got shot! And more than that: if the only reason Continuum ever existed was because you were able to syn
thesize a serum from my blood that I wouldn’t have in my body had I not come back in time, that means no one ever actually created the serum, right?”
“That’s right,” Jennifer said.
“So…how does that work, then?” Geoff said. “Isn’t that a paradox? Why hasn’t this situation resulted in the space-time continuum losing its temper and writing a very stern letter of complaint to both of us?”
“Because all the situations you have just described are not paradoxes, Geoff,” Jennifer explained. “They are what are known in the scientific community as causal loops.”
“Causal loops?”
“Yes,” Jennifer said. “Basically, it’s where the lines between cause and effect become a little blurred. It’s the same principle behind how you knew the directions to my office, which only happened because you watched the way you walked in the simulation before traveling back in time. While you cannot pinpoint where your knowledge of those directions has actually come from, neither did you create a paradox, since the laws of physics have not been violated. Exactly the same thing has happened here—I am about to use your blood to synthesize a serum that wouldn’t exist had you not traveled back in time with it inside you.”
“There’s just one problem,” Geoff said, standing up and posing in as menacing a way as he could while still holding a cup of tea. “I may not be much of a fighter, but I’m bigger than you, and although I don’t normally hit women, if you try anything, I’m happy to make an exception.”
He had actually hit a woman before, when he was holding an umbrella over Zoë and a sudden gust of wind had made him accidentally punch her in the face. But that was an accident.
And she’d hit him back, so they were even.
“What are you saying?” Jennifer said.
“I’m saying, how exactly do you plan on getting a sample of my blood?” Geoff said, taking a gulp of his tea.
“Oh, I don’t just need a single sample,” Jennifer said. “I need access to your body for years and years before I have enough blood to go into mass production.”
“What?”
“Every bottle of serum has some of your blood in it, Geoff,” Jennifer said. “Why else do you think the liquid is red and tastes metallic? Oh, no—I need you alive and well fed to keep producing the stuff for me.”