“Well, to be honest…at first it seemed to be pretty much one big anti-climax. You just fell to the ground. You banged your head and cut your hand. Perhaps, maybe you were unconscious for a moment. A few seconds maybe? Then Sarah fell down beside you, smothered you with her tears and kissed you, and well, then your eyes opened and you woke up!”
“I didn’t disappear?”
“On the contrary, my boy. You were very much still there!”
“But how? I don’t understand.”
“Well, neither did I. At first. And then it all made perfect sense. In the next few moments after that, I learned a lot. In that moment, I started being less stupid and more… more clever.”
“Professor! You’re not making sense. What happened to me? How can I have been there and still be here now? How can I have travelled eight years forward in time if I never left? You’re not making any sense!”
“James, you did leave. It worked, not exactly as we had intended. Perhaps. But this is maybe even more incredible. You are here now! And not the other James!”
“What? I DON’T UNDERSTAND! Where am I, no, where is the other James, if I am here now? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?”
The Professor walks over to me, stands in front of me - way too close to be safe from this pandemic thing – and for the first time that evening, begins to make sense.
“I realised it the moment you opened your mouth. You got up on your feet, pushed Sarah violently away, and shouted at me. You were vicious. Cruel. And very, very angry. You demanded to know from me what had happened! Why you were there? What was happening? Then suddenly you went quiet. You asked me what year it was? What time? Where we were. By this time, the train had pulled into the next station. The doors were opening. You turned to Sarah, you swore at her. You screamed at her. She reached for you. You pushed her away. Violently. I went to her, and when I turned round to you, you had stepped through the doorway and were running along the tube platform. And then you were gone!”
“Where did I go?” I ask, incredulous of what I am hearing.
“I found out later you had gone back to Jane. To your wife…to his wife. Sorry.”
And then it dawns on me, properly, for the first time, what had happened.
When I stepped through the doorway, through the portal, to the future, the James who had once occupied my body in this world, had returned.
I was gone, but James, Jane’s real husband had returned!
Chapter Fifteen
.
I sit there, my head lowered into my hands, trying to take it all in. There are so many questions to ask.
“Did he hurt Sarah… the other me?”
The Professor shook his head.
“Did he… know her? Did the other me know Sarah or recognise her?”
“It seemed so. I got the impression that he did.”
“How? How’s that possible? I only ever met Sarah in my world. He would never have got to know her on his timeline…”
“James, I don’t know exactly. But, I could possibly guess. I learned a lot from what happened on the underground, even if it wasn’t exactly what we expected. There’s a lot we need to discuss…”
“Where is Sarah now? Have you seen her again? Did you talk to her about what had happened after I - he - ran off?”
“Yes. She was very upset. At first she didn’t understand what had happened, and to be honest, neither did I. But then as soon as I realised who you were, sorry, who he was, I tried to explain to Sarah that he was not you. That she should not judge you by him. She listened to me. She asked me if I was the Professor – you must have told her about me – and when I said I was, she burst into tears, and I had no choice but to put my arms around her and comfort her.”
“She let you?”
“That she did, my boy. Then we packed up and went to a restaurant and got something to eat and drink. It was only then that I realised how excited but also shaken up I was by the whole experience! I can tell you, my boy, we both needed a stiff drink!”
“But Sarah’s pregnant!”
“She was, but one drink wouldn’t hurt her. And it didn’t. Your son is strong and healthy. And very handsome!”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Several times.” He nods, beaming. “The last time was just before lock-in.”
“Do you have a photograph? Do you have her address or mobile number?”
“All in good time, my boy. But the answer is yes. Although, you shouldn’t call her yet. We need to figure out what has happened, exactly, and what we can tell her.”
“The truth!” I immediately insist. “We tell her the truth!”
“Or a version of it, James. A version of it…”
I stand up and walk to one of the big windows and stare out across the valley towards the mountains at the other end. It’s so beautiful.
“I still don’t understand what’s going on. Explain it to me please. When I made the jump to here from there, how come another version of James suddenly appeared? Where did he come from?”
“Aha… and now we get to the nitty-gritty.” The Professor replies. “It’s probably my fault. I never thought enough about this before. If I had, I might have predicted what may have happened.”
“What happened…?”
“I’m talking about, when you first made the jump to this world, what happened to the other James who was here before you? Where did he go?” The Professor asked, voicing a question I’ve asked myself a million times before.
“I’ve always wondered that.” I shrug my shoulders. “But I don’t know.”
“And neither do I. Sadly. Your other you ran away before I got a chance to speak with him, and he’s refused to speak to me ever since. But he did go somewhere. And then when you stepped through the doorway, through the portal, he came back.” The Professor starts to walk up and down the room, speaking as he goes.
“When you stepped through the portal, your physical body stayed behind, just falling to the floor. Then the James from this world returned. When he opened his eyes, and stood up. That was the other James. You had gone.”
“Where did I go?”
“Presumably, unless you went somewhere that you can’t remember yet, you came straight here. You jumped forward in time until 2021.”
“So, what happened to the other James when I arrived?”
“He’s gone again. You bumped him from this world to somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Another parallel world.”
“Another one, or the same one I came from?”
“I don’t know. Only he does.”
“But you say, that he knew Sarah? So, that implies he initially went to my world when I came here. Maybe he went there again now?”
“Possibly. But there’s no guarantee that he originally went to your world. It could have been another parallel world where Sarah existed.”
“Maybe, but if it wasn’t my world, why would he establish any connection with Sarah? I met Sarah in my world. The James from this world wouldn’t have any reason to go looking for her, unless he was forced into a meeting with her through the connection I had with her. When he swapped places with me, he got my life, and got Sarah.”
“That’s all very possible.”
I’m worried now. He and Sarah obviously didn’t get on. From what the Professor had said, he was really angry with her.
“You said you found out later that he’d gone to Jane?”
“Yes,” the Professor nods, stopping his pacing for a moment to look at me. “Jane and I have talked several times since then. She called me. She’d obviously been told about me from James.”
“Which means that in another world, maybe mine, James had gone through a similar thought process as I had done, and decided to make contact with you.”
“Yes… but…” the Professor walks over to the sofa again and lowers himself into it. “But obviously he and I did not get on so well together.”
“It seems I’m a right bastard. I’
m glad I’m not me, if you know what I mean!” I hesitate for a second. “You don’t think I’m a bastard do you?”
The Professor laughs.
“Not. At least, not yet. You seem very much like your normal self.”
“What who and where is my normal self? None of this is normal to me!” I bang my hand against the wooden window frame.
“Are you hungry? Should we eat?” The Professor enquires.
I nod.
“When do I get to talk to Sarah?”
“That’s down to you. But I’m not so sure she wants to hear from you.”
My heart skips a beat.
“Why not?”
“She was very upset with you. It was all very confusing to her. She was angry with you for running off. I tried telling her it wasn’t you. I tried explaining it. But she was furious that you did the jump even though she tried her best to stop you.”
“I could tell her I didn’t hear her say she was pregnant? That it was too late to stop moving through the door – through the portal!”
“But did you? Did you hear her?”
I walk across the room and sit down opposite him.
“Yes,” I reply, at first quite quietly. Then again, more loudly. “Yes, I did.”
“But you still jumped?”
“Yes. I did. But …”, I shake my head. “It was all very confusing. I only had milliseconds to make the hardest decision of my life. To be honest, I don’t even know if I did make a decision. Maybe I just kept going. I just didn’t stop.” I look up at the ceiling. Shit, this is all such a mess.”
“If I’m going to be stuck here now, I could just tell her I couldn’t stop. That she got to me too late. That I was committed already. I heard her say the words, but by the time I realised what the words meant, I was already gone.”
“You need to think long and hard before you tell her anything. You really hurt her before.”
“All I do is hurt her. In this world or the other one. But I’ve got to see my son! I have to!”
“James, you haven’t talked to her in eight years. A few days more won’t make any difference. And you need time to prepare for what you’ll say to her. If you manage to find her and talk to her again, you might only have one chance.”
I nod.
The Professor is right.
I need to make a plan.
--------------------
An hour later we are sitting at a large brown mahogany table in another room in the cottage eating a fantastic dinner which the Professor cooked. After showing me to a room where the Professor says I can stay as long as I want, I shower, and change into some clothes the Professor has left on my bed which he had ordered this morning and were apparently delivered by a flying drone earlier that afternoon by a company called Amazon.
“That’s incredible!” I laugh, marvelling at the technology.
“The world has changed a lot in eight years, my boy. A lot. And the company you helped to brand – Scotia Telecom – is now one of the top SP companies in the world.”
“What’s an SP?” I ask, but already guessing the answer.
“It’s a Smart Phone, basically a powerful hand-held computer that also lets you make telephone calls. They’re nothing like the phones you helped Scotia launch in 2012. Nowadays, SPs can do anything. People download LTs on to their SPs, and depending upon the LTs you chose, they can do almost anything you want. There’s an LT for everything!”
“What’s an LT?” I ask, laughing. It’s becoming clear to me that I’ve a lot to catch up on.
“A Life Tool. They’re basically little software applications. They can do anything… honestly.”
“Such as?”
“Well, you can open up a book in Spanish, hover your SP above the book, select a Spanish LT, and when you look at the book through the camera on your phone, you see the words in English, not Spanish!”
“The phone translates the text automatically?”
“Completely.”
“And, during the pandemic, for example, you can have a map on the phone that tells you the locations of any other human beings near you who may have the virus. So you can avoid them. And if anyone who you have met before becomes ill within a week of meeting them, your PD LT will alert you, and tell you to self-hide for three weeks.”
“PD? Self-hide?”
“PD is ‘Pandemic’, and ‘Self-Hide’ is basically hide yourself away from all friends and relatives. No contact. No breathing anywhere near them.”
“I’ll get you your own SP, and your own laptop, James. You can search on Amazon and find the SP you want, or I can recommend one for you.”
“Probably best if you recommend one for me, for now. But I can’t pay you. I don’t have any money or a job.”
The Professor laughs.
“Don’t worry about that, my boy. Money is no longer an issue for me. Spending it is.”
“Lucky you. It seems that it’s all change. Eight years ago I was pretty rich, a big house, wife, great job. And you were an unknown university professor. Now you’re a global celebrity and Nobel Prize winner, and I’m a down-and-out, alcoholic tramp with nowhere to live and no friends.”
“But not for long, James. Not for long. You will rise again, like the Phoenix from the Ashes. It was the OTHER James that spiralled downwards, perhaps to where he belonged. You will rise again. You have an indomitable spirit. You’re destined for great things!”
I smile, and spend a few moments savouring the trout which the Professor had cooked for dinner, apparently caught by him fresh very early this morning in the River Etive.
“Talking of great things, how come you’re a celebrity nowadays, and what’s your Nobel Prize for? Should I be asking for your autograph?” I enquire, picking up a beautiful cut crystal glass from the table and sipping the red wine. “A shiraz?” I ask.
“Yes, you have a good taste, my boy.”
“It’s the first wine I’ve drunk in eight years! So…Celebrity? Autograph? Nobel Prize?”
“Aha…so, yes. Well,…” the Professor stutters, turning a light shade of red.
I might be mistaken, but I think the Professor is blushing!
“The ‘Celebrity’ thing is funny, James. It’s all very strange. But I must admit, I enjoy it! Just when I thought life was winding down, when I was getting too old for fun, I find I am having more fun than I ever did before! Before the latest lock-in, people even stopped me and asked me for my autograph in the street! Very funny. Very funny, but nice.”
“But why are you a celebrity? How come you’re famous?”
“Because of the Nobel Prize I won for Physics. One evening I was doing an interview on the TV and I said something funny, and everyone laughed. From that point on, people thought I was the funny, not-so-mad Professor, and everyone is asking me to appear on talk-shows. I talk about Physics, tell some jokes, and everyone seems to think it’s very entertaining!”
“Wow. Have you recorded any of your appearances? Can I see some?”
“No, sorry. But if you look on YouTube, perhaps you might find some there.”
“And what’s your Nobel Prize?” I ask.
“I know what you’re thinking, James. But no, it was not for anything as exciting as Time Travel. I’m afraid that the video I took of you on the underground looks rather uneventful. There’s no one disappearing into a puff of air, or vanishing through time and space. It just looks like you fell down, got up, shouted at us and then ran away at the next station.”
“So, what was it for then?”
“A breakthrough in trying to find a new source of energy for the world. Actually, to be truthful, it was through the work you inspired me to do to try and find a way to predict and describe your ability to jump from one parallel world to another that led to my breakthrough. The equations didn’t balance, so I tried to find a way to quantify the difference. Which led to an interest in what people call ‘Zero-Point Energy.’
“What’s that?” Although I studied Physics with the Professor
at university, I’ve never heard of this before.
“Okay. Let me try and explain it as simply as I can.”
The Professor pauses, frowns, and makes a few funny faces as he thinks for a moment. Then he has it.
“Okay, where do we get all our energy from at the moment?”
“Oil? Electricity?”
“Actually, recently it’s almost all electricity. The use of oil and carbon-fuels was banned in most countries in 2016. Everyone could see that unless we steered ourselves away from fossil fuels, mankind was heading towards extinction within eighty years. And once we’d started down a different path, economically, the falling price of electricity soon made fossil fuels too expensive. So, today, my boy, we get almost all our energy from electricity. Which comes indirectly from the sun, from splitting the atom, or hydro-electricity. But, it occurred to me that the human race’s dependency on electricity may be unnecessary. Ever since James Clerk Maxwell helped us discover how to generate electricity, the human race has assumed that this is the only real way to power our tools and factories. Even the energy generated by fossil fuels often ends up being converted to electricity. But what if there was another way? What if there was another form of energy that no one had discovered yet? What if that energy was free, abundant and endless? And what if it didn’t create pollution or destroy the world?”
I put down my knife and fork and study the Professor’s face. He’s excited, animated, and incredibly passionate about what he’s saying. But it all seems a little too much to believe.
“And you discovered this? You helped solve the biggest problem facing mankind today – assuming we get through this pandemic and enough of us survive it to have a world left?”
“Well, it wasn’t just me. The basic theory is based upon something that was originally proposed by another physicist, Brian Innes. I did my part though. And we’re not there yet. But we’re close. Very close.”
“How close?”
“A few years away. And when we have it, the world will be changed. For ever. Everything will be different.”
“So, explain it to me. What’s the basic idea?”
“It’s been called Zero-Point I-K Energy, or Zero-PIK energy, with the I-K standing for Innes-Kasparek. Innes was a young physicist in the eighties who apparently struggled with the idea that the ether didn’t exist. When he was taught physics, everyone was saying that the ether didn’t exist, that light and energy simply passes through a vacuum without any assistance from that vacuum, and that the vacuum has, by definition, nothing in it. Innes believed, in spite of being ridiculed by everyone else, that a vacuum was never truly a vacuum, that there was always something there that acted as a medium to transport energy, and which basically existed independent of anything else. If nothing else existed, the ether wouldn’t exist either, but the moment other matter exists, the ether exists around it and supports it, if you will.”
Am I Dead? Page 9