by Jason Ayres
“And you say you can control this?” asked Peter. “Because the biggest problem we had with the original bubble was that we had no power over it. All we knew was that it doubled in length each time someone went through.”
“Yes, it’s all to do with the amount of energy applied and the direction in which it is applied. I took detailed readings of the bubble in the tunnel and made my calculations using that. I wanted to measure the one in Cornwall, too, but it’s no longer accessible. The sea is eroding the coastline, and the cliffs have collapsed into the sea. There’s no way of getting anywhere near it now. Incidentally, on the subject of the paper analogy, I’ve got one of my own that explains the doubling.”
Josh grabbed a paper napkin from the table and folded it in half four or five times until it was too small to fold any further.
“Each time someone went into the bubble, it lost exactly half its energy. And it doubled in size like this.” He unfolded the napkin, then again, and again.
“Did you ever come to discover how it came to be there in the first place?” asked Peter.
“That remains a mystery, I’m afraid,” replied Josh, “and possibly one we will never solve. I’ve always assumed that the bubbles were naturally occurring phenomena. It is possible, however, that someone at some point either in the future or in the past discovered how to create the bubbles and for whatever reason left them where we found them.
“It could even have been you,” said Peter. “Now there is an interesting theory to conjure with. Could it have been that you went back and created the bubbles yourself? Perhaps so that you could discover them in your own past, therefore inspiring you to unlock the secrets of time travel in order to be able to go back and create them in the first place?”
Peter paused. “I think I’m going to have to stop there as I’m starting to go round in circles.”
“I know I’m confused,” interjected Kaylee.
“I guess it’s possible,” replied Josh. “However, the bubbles I am creating now don’t work in exactly the same way. They are temporary structures, useful for one trip only, so that sort of blows that theory out of the water. One thing is for certain: you wouldn’t want to get stranded anywhere in time without the tachyometer.”
“Much as everyone is no doubt enthralled by all this technical talk,” interrupted Alice, “I think what they’d all like to see is a demonstration.”
“Amen to that,” added Charlie.
“I was coming onto that,” said Josh. “You’d better put the patio lights on.” It had grown dark while they had been talking and the last vestiges of daylight were fading from the sky.
With the patio lit up, insects began to buzz around the yellow lights. The others watched as Josh took hold of the device and switched it on. The different coloured LEDs in the handle flashed and lit up. Fascinated, they gathered around to take a closer look.
“It’s pretty simple, really,” said Josh. “The device has a tiny, inbuilt timing mechanism as accurate as any atomic clock. All you need to do is type in the date and time you want to travel to and the device calculates how much to bend time and in which direction, forward or back.”
“It’s very clever,” said Alice. “Maisie’s had all sorts of adventures with it.”
“Who’s Maisie?” asked Hannah.
“Maisie is our time-travelling mouse,” replied Alice. “We conducted all our trials using her. I’m pleased to say that she’s alive and well and completely unaware that she’s the world’s first time-travelling mouse.”
“Have you travelled in time using it yet, Josh?” asked Charlie.
“I certainly have,” he replied. “And I’m going to show you how right now. He checked his watch. “It’s 8.58pm and 22 seconds. I am going to set it for exactly 9pm, here.” He typed the numbers into the keypad.
“Then I just point it in front of myself like this, and off I go,” he said. He held out the device in front of him, pressed the button and it beeped.
“Is that it?” said Charlie. “I was expecting something a little more spectacular.”
“You can’t see the time bubbles it creates any more than we could see the one in the tunnel. I’m sure if this was a Hollywood movie, there’d be some hugely impressive CGI vortex glowing in front of me now, but sadly not. It’s probably just as well, anyway. It would only draw unwarranted attention.”
“Fair point,” conceded Charlie.
“Here I go then, see you in about 40 seconds,” said Josh.
He stepped forward and vanished.
Chapter Five
September 2063
Less than an hour after he’d entered his former home, Dan found himself sitting in an interrogation room at the police station. He was face-to-face with the stern demeanour of D.I. David Jones, the local head of police.
Things had gone from bad to worse over the past hour. The officers who had turned up in response to the call had not believed his claim that it was his house. It hadn’t helped that he hadn’t had any form of identification on him. He had left his wallet at home when he’d gone out to Jess’s party the previous evening.
In contrast, the young couple were able to produce full documentation identifying themselves as George and Laura Bailey, as well as a rental agreement for the house with their names on it.
The final nail in the coffin was when various nosy neighbours, attracted by the police sirens, came out to see what all the fuss was about. They confirmed not only that the couple did indeed live there, but also that they had never seen Dan before in their lives.
That was true enough. As far as Dan was concerned, he’d never seen any of them before either. So that was another mystery to add to the ever-growing list – the disappearance of his former neighbours.
After all that, his arrest was a mere formality and he soon found himself being driven the mile or so to the police station. Sitting in the back of the car, he had plenty of time to look around him. Familiar landmarks all around were the same, yet different.
He saw what looked like some sort of single-seat helicopter taking off from the site of what used to be a petrol station. The road was still where it had always been, but many of the older properties alongside it were gone, replaced by futuristic new constructions, made out of glass and metal rather than traditional brick and stone.
He tried desperately to make sense of it all. Most people would have worked out by now that they had travelled into the future, even if they didn’t believe such a thing was possible. But in his exhausted physical and mental state, Dan just couldn’t work it out.
It was 10am now and he hadn’t slept for over 24 hours, which was taking its toll on his mind and his body. Technically, he hadn’t slept for over 22 years.
It didn’t look like he was going to be getting any sleep anytime soon either. D.I. Jones didn’t seem like a man to be trifled with and he was firing questions at Dan at a rapid rate of knots. The initial round of questions had gone badly, and now Jones was starting again.
“Look, just tell me your real name and date of birth,” said Jones.
“I’ve already told you my name,” replied Dan. “It’s Daniel Fisher and I was born on 3rd of January 2002.”
“Well, Dan,” replied Jones, adopting a sarcastic tone in his strong Welsh accent, “I must say, you look remarkably well-preserved for your age. You don’t look a day over forty.”
“I’m not a day over forty!” protested Dan. “I’m thirty-nine.”
“I think you’re having trouble adding up,” replied Jones. “Now, I didn’t become a detective inspector by being a mathematical genius, but I’m pretty sure, by my calculations, if you were born in 2002 that makes you 61 years old.”
At last the penny was beginning to drop. Dan said nothing for the moment, as Jones continued.
“And on the subject of being well-preserved, Daniel,” he began, placing particular emphasis on the word Daniel in order to make it clear that he didn’t believe that was his real name, “according to our records you died
over twenty years ago. I must say you look in remarkably good health for a corpse.”
It looked to Dan as if Jones was enjoying all this immensely. Was that how he got his kicks, belittling the suspects?
There was really only one possible question that Dan could ask now. It was going to sound ridiculous and risked more sarcasm from Jones, but there was no other way of confirming his rapidly forming suspicions.
“What year is this?” he asked.
Jones laughed. “Oh that’s a good one. Of course, I can see it all now. You’re a time traveller.”
“Yes, that’s it,” replied Dan.
“Yes, it all makes sense now. You were travelling through time and you accidentally landed your time machine in Mr and Mrs Bailey’s house. It could have happened to anyone. Now if only you’d told us all this before, we needn’t have gone through all this rigmarole.”
“You believe me then?” asked Dan, incredulously. It was too good to be true, surely.
Jones’s demeanour changed from jovial to angry in a flash. “Of course I don’t believe you,” he said, thumping his fist on the table in frustration. “Now stop messing me around and tell me who you really are.”
“I’ll tell you who I really am, if you tell me the date. That’s all I want to know. It’s not confidential, is it?”
Jones decided to humour him. “Fair enough, it’s September 3rd 2063. Right, I’ve done my bit, so now it’s time for you to keep your side of the bargain. Tell me exactly who you are.”
Dan took a deep breath and began. “I am Daniel Fisher, I was born in 2002 and when I got up yesterday morning it was 2041. Somehow I’ve been transported through time, and that’s why I was in the house this morning. It was my house in 2041. I owned it. Look it up. It can’t be that difficult to find something like that out.”
Another thought occurred to him.
“And while you are about it, why don’t you check my DNA as well, you must have that on record. I’ve been hauled in here enough times before. Check that out, then you’ll see what I’m saying is true.”
“What you need is a psychological assessment. Time travel, for God’s sake, I’ve never heard anything like it.”
Jones wasn’t the sort of man to indulge such flights of fancy and was getting seriously irked.
Dan wasn’t getting anywhere with Jones, but there was someone else who might be able to help.
“Why don’t you get D.I. Benson in here? She’ll tell you who I am!”
“I don’t think she will,” replied Jones. “Superintendent Benson retired years ago. And anyway, she’s dead.”
He had heard enough for the time being. He got up from the table and stated, “Interview concluded at 10.39am. I’ll be back later, by which time I expect you to be ready to tell the truth. I don’t want to hear any more of this time travel bullshit.”
With that, he left the room in search of a strong cup of coffee, while Dan put his head in his hands and wondered how on earth he was going to talk his way out of this one.
There was no denying the truth of the situation. He had travelled forward over two decades in time. The question was how?
He thought back to the strange events in the tunnel and his encounters with Peter Grant and the others. They must have done this to him deliberately. Whatever they had done definitely must have happened in the tunnel: everything was normal before he went in.
He went back over all the events of the past day and slowly it began to make sense. He had been tricked: that was certain. That little tart Jess had stitched him up good and proper. She wasn’t interested in him. How could he have been so naïve to think that she could have been?
He hadn’t had sex for nearly two years. He couldn’t even pull the desperate old slappers that hung around in the town’s sole seedy little nightclub at 3am on a Friday night. The last chance saloon they called it. It was no chance saloon as far as he was concerned.
So what possible chance could he have had with a gorgeous, 21-year-old girl like Jess? None and he should have known it.
He had never understood why he was so unsuccessful with women. The truth was that it wasn’t Dan’s looks that turned women off. He wasn’t that bad-looking, even if he was packing a bit of extra weight, but his obnoxious personality was enough to put any woman off. It had been the same ever since he’d been a teenager.
Of course, he couldn’t see this and had consequently spent decades blaming the women. As he’d grown older, his frustration grew stronger year by year and his resentment towards women had grown increasingly bitter.
Even the fact that he’d been responsible for Lauren’s death hadn’t curbed it. And now his anger was directed towards Jess. “Bitch,” he muttered to himself. His attitude was always the same. It was the woman’s fault. If they didn’t want to sleep with him, he labelled them as bitches. That pretty much added up to 99.9% of the women in the town.
Jess hadn’t done this to him all by herself. They were all in it together. He remembered how smug he’d felt at the party, believing not only that he was going to get to shag Jess, but also with the added satisfaction of knowing she was D.I. Benson’s daughter.
Hannah had been a constant thorn in his side over the years and he really thought he’d got one over her this time. He had delighted in the moment when he’d taunted her at the party, telling her how he was going to shag her daughter. She had seemed remarkably cool about it and he’d wondered at the time why she hadn’t reacted.
Now he knew why. She had known it wasn’t going to happen because she was in on the plan. Well, at least he was getting some satisfaction out of the fact that she was dead now, so that would serve the silly bitch right. At least one good thing had come out of being cast into the future.
So who else was in on it? The teacher, obviously, though his role in all of this wasn’t clear. Dan hadn’t seen him since school, and now he’d seen him twice in one day.
He’d puzzled earlier over the fact that the first time he had seen him he had been looking middle-aged, and then the second time he was old. That all made sense now, it fitted in with the whole time travel theory, but what was he doing there in both time zones?
And then there were Charlie and Josh. What were their roles in all this? He knew they were friends with Hannah and her daughter, something that had pissed him off for years. Once, long ago, they had been his friends, back when they were all starting school together as four-year-olds. Somehow, over the course of growing up, they’d dropped him.
Why had they done that? He had only ever wanted to be friends with them. But they had rejected him and now they had gone and done this, pushed him over in the tunnel which must have been when he jumped forward in time. The same question kept replaying over and over in his mind: why?
Clearly the tunnel was the focus of all this. He would have to get back there and try and find his way back through time.
If he couldn’t, he’d track down Charlie and Josh and force them to help him get back. They knew what was going to happen in the tunnel, they must have done, and they’d set the whole thing up.
Yes, they knew the secret alright. He had to make finding them his priority.
But first he had to get out of the police station.
Chapter Six
August 2049
A few seconds after he’d vanished, Josh reappeared. “Pretty neat trick, huh?” he ventured.
If he was expecting gasps of awe and excitement, he was disappointed. But then, he was preaching to the converted. All of them apart from Alice had been through a time bubble before and it was no surprise to her. She had witnessed countless experiments with Maisie, not to mention Josh’s own first tentative jumps.
“It is pretty neat,” concurred Peter. “But it also raises a lot of questions. There are all manner of implications that I think we need to discuss. I think it’s time we had an official meeting of the TTBT.”
They had taken to referring to themselves as that, short for The Time Bubble Team.
“Well, the
re’s no time like the present, since we’re all here,” remarked Hannah. “And to be honest, that’s pretty much what we are doing already.”
“We’re not all here,” said Kaylee, a sombre look falling across a face that had been happy moments before. “There’s somebody missing.”
The others all knew what she meant. There was a moment’s silence before Josh uttered the name that was on all their lips. “Lauren. I did want to talk about her, actually. In fact there are a lot of things that happened in the past that I want to talk about.”
“Let’s get some more drinks first, then,” said Charlie. “And I also need to take a leak.”
Five minutes later, with glasses replenished and bladders emptied, the six of them sat back round the table to talk time travel.
“OK,” said Josh, taking control of the meeting. “The first thing I want to talk about is travelling to the past.”
“That’s the thing that really concerns me,” interrupted Peter. “We’ve never had the ability to do that before. It raises all sorts of issues. I’m sure I don’t have to lecture you about the dangers of changing history. You’ve seen enough films and TV shows on the subject. And Charlie, you’ve even written books about it.”
His statement prompted a flurry of questions.
“Do we know if changing history is even possible?” asked Hannah.
“Would we even notice if it was changed?” asked Alice. “Would reality just change around us to reflect whatever had changed? Would it become the new normality for us, our memories altering to reflect the new reality?”
“These are all good questions, and like Peter says, they’ve all been explored in countless time-travel movies,” said Charlie. “The truth is we just don’t know, unless Josh has already gone back and changed something.”
He looked at Josh. “You haven’t, have you?”
“No, I haven’t,” replied Josh. “Or maybe I have, but not yet. It all depends on how you look at it.”