by Greg Krojac
Ari was reluctantly forced to write off Simon as a lost cause.
The next on the list was Michelle Lavigne. The Registry said that she still lived with her parents in Southsea. That wasn’t too far away. He could probably get there in under two hour by hyper-train if he went via Reading. He double-checked where they had lived when Michelle was probably conceived. The maths wasn’t difficult. The scientist was born on 26 July 2032, so Ari needed to go back to October 2031. He wished that birth date predictions and conception date calculations could be more precise.
The Temporal Agents had said that they thought the time thief was from the future. Ari wondered if they had more accurate technology in the future and could pinpoint exactly when something had happened. Like conception, for example. The best that he could do was to take the average length of human pregnancy as 280 days and use that as a measure to decide his destination date. That would give Michelle’s conception date as around 20 October 2031 so he needed to go back before then. He chose the day before – Michelle hadn’t disappeared from his own timeline yet so, providing she didn’t get wiped from the timeline during his train journey, he should be okay. Whoever was manipulating the timeline still had to get to Brisbane, Australia – and back – to deal with Simon Quelch’s parents and, even in 2073, the technology didn’t exist to cut that journey down to less than fourteen hours. He just hoped that, if Agent Wolfe was correct and he or she was from the future, they hadn’t invented teleportation yet. He reckoned – and hoped – that he had about thirty hours grace before his nemesis might show up.
He went to the ticket office and bought a rail ticket to Portsmouth.
The hyper-train arrived at Portsmouth and Southsea Station Portsmouth ninety minutes later but the station was quite busy so Ari decided to find somewhere a little more discreet to time-jump from and walked the short distance to Guildhall Square, which was less crowded and he wouldn’t attract much attention when he disappeared from 2073. Finding an almost hidden corner he jumped back to 2031.
15:47, Friday 17 October 2031
Guildhall Square, Portsmouth, Hampshire
Ari looked up and could see blue teasing its way back to the sky as a light drizzle was preparing to stop. A brown signpost informed him that it was a short walk from the Guildhall to Southsea so he didn’t bother to catch a cab.
His steampunk attire drew a few odd looks but he ignored them – he was focussed on saving Michelle’s parents. He didn’t care how strange he looked to other people.
Ari had been to neither Portsmouth nor Southsea before and promised himself that he’d visit the city again once all this was over and he was safely back in 2073. It looked like a nice place, especially the part that he was walking through. As he was nearing John Pounds Church he saw a funeral taking place and an inner voice told him to stop. An elderly woman was sitting outside the church, smoking a cigarette. Ari removed his hat and approached her.
“Excuse me. Who is the funeral for? Who has passed away?”
The woman looked inside the church and then at Ari.
“That’s Albert Lavigne in the box, though he used to pronounce his name Albare. French, you see. Died last Friday. Hit an’ run, it was. Shame really, he was a good sort. Not been married long. I feel sorry for ‘is wife, Anna.”
This was just the break Ari was looking for.
“Do you know any details about the accident?”
“Friend of yours, was he? Though, I imagine not. Otherwise, you’d have known about him kickin’ the bucket.”
The old woman’s cigarette went out.
“’Ere, mister. You got a light? Me ciggy’s gone out.”
Ari shook his head. Hardly anyone smoked tobacco in 2073.
“I am sorry, I do not smoke.”
“Never mind. I should give up, anyway. Though, at my age, it ain’t gonna make much difference.”
“So, do you know any more details?”
The woman fumbled in her bag and pulled out a cell phone.
“Just a minute.”
She pressed a few buttons and showed the website of the Portsmouth News to Ari.
“There you go. Hit by a car at 7.33 pm two days ago. Wednesday 15 October. In front of South Parade Pier.”
Ari thanked the woman and she made her way back inside the church to look for someone who might have a light for her cigarette. Once he was sure that nobody was watching, Ari time-jumped to 15 October.
18:00, Wednesday 15 October 2031
Portsmouth, Hampshire
Ari arrived by the church on the previous Wednesday and headed straight for the seafront. Albert wasn’t due to die for another hour and a half, so he walked to South Parade Pier, keeping the sea on his right, enjoying the seaside experience. He’d never been to the beach before and loved the freshness of the air and the sea breeze. He still arrived at South Parade Pier far too early so he decided to take a little stroll. He found Canoe Lake nearby – although it was more of a pond really – and sat on a bench to take in his surroundings, a past-time enjoyed by many but especially pleasurable for Ari as Portsmouth and Southsea were of historical significance and boasted several examples of Victorian architecture.
At 19:32, a man whom Ari thought he recognised walked past the lake. He checked his photo gallery and confirmed his suspicions. It was Albert Lavigne. He stood up and followed the man to the main road. Just as Albert started to cross the road, a car accelerated away from the kerb and drove straight at Michelle’s soon to be father.
Albert froze like a rabbit in headlights but then felt himself lifted off his feet, away from the oncoming vehicle. As he lay on the ground, confused, he looked up to see a man dressed in Victorian fancy-dress standing over him. The Frenchman caught his breath.
“You saved my life. Merci, monsieur.”
Ari helped Albert to his feet.
“Do not worry about it. I am just glad that I was here.”
Albert thanked Ari again and set off home, while Ari made his way back to 2073, via 17 October 2031, feeling very pleased with himself.
15:30, Saturday 25 March 2073
Portsmouth, Hampshire
As soon as Ari arrived back in 2073, he checked the Registry on his phone. What he saw made him feel sick to the stomach. Michelle had still been wiped from existence. He slumped down on the Guildhall steps and navigated to Albert’s record. Ari had saved Michelle’s father on that Wednesday night, only for him to be killed in a hit and run accident on the following night.
Was this latest failure due to the Predestination Paradox? Ari had stopped Albert from being killed and fate, feeling cheated, had simply moved Michelle’s father’s death to the next day. But surely, if that were the case, then fate wouldn’t have allowed Albert to die because, in Ari’s timeline, he fathered Michelle. Ari hated paradoxes – they were like a hall of mirrors and could send you in all directions chasing ghosts.
Ari had been approaching the problem from the wrong angle. He’d been concentrating on locating the victims’ parents and trying to ensure that they still had the opportunity to conceive their time travel scientist child. He now realised that he needed to target the person who was the root cause of all these timeline extinctions instead – the killer.
Time was running out. There were only two Project Clockwise team members left. Whoever had eliminated the others was getting very close to achieving their goal. He had to find out all that he could about Doctor Katerina Nowaková. She’d be the next target.
17:05, Saturday 25 March 2073
Bromley South Railway Station, Bromley, Kent
Armed with information about Kateriná and her parents, Ari stood on one of the platforms of Bromley South Railway Station, a station like many other stations, refurbishment after refurbishment stripping away the original edifice until it was almost unrecognisable from the original construction of 1858. Once a herald of the age of railway locomotion it was now a mixture of rectangular brickwork and concrete façades punctuated by posters, digital ticketing machines and
timetables, any character sucked out of it with the passing years.
He would be travelling that day, but not on any MagLev train. He turned the winder on his pocket watch and wished that he would arrive at what he imagined was a more genteel time, a more simple time, a time of elegant contraptions, architecture, and people, not just forty-four years earlier.
10:37, Saturday 05 May 2029
Bromley South Railway Station, Bromley, Kent
Ari arrived in 2029 to see few changes, if any, in his surroundings. The station looked, for all intents and purposes, the same place that he had just left. The only main differences that he could see were that the ticketing machines were no longer digital and printed out paper tickets, and that the timetable and route-planner were two-dimensional visual infographics, not a holographic image suspended in mid-air.
About three dozen or so people were milling around on the platform, waiting for the next train. Ari imagined that most were probably shoppers heading to the West End but he knew that one of them, Danuska Stepánková, was waiting to meet someone off the incoming train. Whiling away his time on the journey from Portsmouth to Bromley, Ari had taken the plunge and had discovered the existence of social media.
According to Danuska’s Facebook timeline for that day in 2029, she was looking forward to seeing her live-in boyfriend, Petr Nowaková, for the first time in three months. Apparently, he’d been away working in their native Czech Republic but now he would be home for the foreseeable future and they could make plans together, maybe even try for a baby. Danuska wrote that she would love to have a child and believed that Petr felt the same way. A baby would make their family complete. She would be meeting Petr off the train that would arrive at 10:40.
A train approached, its electric motor humming and its wheels clickety-clacking as they rumbled over the track joints, accompanied by a light screeching of brakes. Books were put away into bags and earpods adjusted as people prepared to board the train as soon as it stopped.
Ari scanned the group of people on the platform and saw a blonde woman dressed in jeans with a loose-fitting light grey sweater with a deep peach coloured horizontal band on it move behind Danuska. She looked familiar.
The train continued to approach.
Danuska moved forwards, wanting to embrace Petr the second he alighted from the train.
The blonde woman moved forwards.
Ari moved forwards too.
The train continued to approach.
In her excitement, Danuska inadvertently crossed the yellow line that was painted on the platform.
Ari and the blonde woman moved closer still.
The train continued to approach.
The front of the train was almost level with Danuska.
The blonde woman was right behind Danuska.
Ari ran at the blonde woman, knocking her away from Danuska and causing her to lose her balance, falling towards the tracks.
The train wasn’t able to stop in time.
People on the platform shouted and screamed and rushed forwards, expecting to see a tangled mass of flesh and bones where the train wheels had crushed her.
But there was nothing.
Ari reached into his waistcoat pocket and stared at his pocket watch. The tracker had registered a time-jump. Not just a few minutes into the past, not a few hours, nor a few days. The woman he thought he had pushed to her death had jumped back one hundred and sixty-three years.
He had the exact time and date. He had the authorisation to travel back in time up to one hundred years. Did that mean that it was impossible to travel back any farther or just that he didn’t have permission? He had no choice. There was only one way to find out. He set his watch to take him to the same point in time that the woman had jumped to.
10:14, Friday 21 September 1866
Bromley Railway Station, Bromley, Kent
Ari bent over and threw up spectacularly on the railway tracks at Bromley railway station. The furthest he had previously travelled backwards in time was fifty-three years (which had made him feel queasy) but the one hundred and sixty-three years that he had just time-jumped played havoc with his stomach. He stood with his hands resting on his thighs whilst he heaved until he was sure that there wasn’t a drop more of vomit left to eject. Recovered sufficiently to take in his surrounding, he looked around. It looked nothing like the place that he had just left.
Far from the modern station at Bromley South that he’d left behind, he saw a newish two-storey-high building with a hipped roof. Across the double-track – Bromley South had had four lines – was a small waiting shelter. The footbridge so passengers could cross the tracks to get from one platform to another had disappeared. The smell of steam locomotives hung in the air. But, as much as he would have liked to stay at the station, indulging himself in the smells and sounds of the Victorian station, Ari didn’t have time to waste. He had to find the mystery woman and save his timeline.
A woman selling late-blooming lavender pointed him in the direction of the High Street. It seemed the obvious place to go. It would be too easy to get lost if he strayed off the main street, although if he couldn’t catch sight of the woman on the High street, he might have to wander off the beaten track.
The Victorian age was turning out to be nothing like Ari had expected it to be. In his mind he imagined it to be a graceful and elegant time but reality didn’t fit that description. He was sure that such places probably existed – in Mayfair or Belgravia, no doubt –but he wouldn’t find them in Bromley. Not in 1866.
He strolled along what was more of a mud-track than a road, through a narrow section of the High Street, past a row of poorly-built houses. One of them, number 47, was fronted by a shop containing china, glassware, and cricket equipment. He was surprised when he heard the cries of a new-born baby from within, announcing its arrival into the world.
A cacophony of pig, sheep, and cattle calls filled the air behind a butcher’s shop to the left of number 47 as they waited for slaughter, a stark contrast to the near silence emanating from the haberdasher’s to the right.
Carriages were dragged up and down the street by horses as men and women took their lives in their hands dashing across the road. Dressed in his steampunk costume, Ari didn’t feel out of place at all. Although his clothes weren’t exactly de rigueur for the day, they weren’t so radical that he would stand out in a crowd, even when wearing his smoked goggles. He just looked like a fashionista debuting the latest fashion trend.
Most women were dressed in long skirts paired with blouses. Their hair was parted in the middle and smoothly combed back. Some had small curls above the ears and those who were most fashion-conscious had curls or braids left loose at the back. Hairnets were common, as were bonnets.
The men wore loosely-cut thigh-length jackets and rather shapeless tubular trousers or more formal wear.
In the distance, Ari could see a blonde-haired woman wearing denim jeans and a loose-fitting light grey sweater. She stood out far more against the backdrop of Victoriana than Ari did. At this distance, she could probably look straight at him and he would be lost in the crowd but the same couldn’t be said of her. He quickened his pace, not wanting to lose her in the crowd. If she escaped, he would have no idea where to start looking for her. And that was only if she stayed in 1866 – if she time-jumped back to 2029, Ari could be left looking for a needle that wasn’t even in the haystack. Or perhaps she’d travel even further back in time.
The woman turned into an alleyway on the right and, once he was certain she wouldn’t see him, Ari broke into a trot. He entered the alley and found himself lifted off his feet. The woman was much stronger than she looked.
She glared at Ari.
“Why are you following me?”
Ari’s immediate instinct was to deny the fact.
“I am not following you. I live down here.”
The woman broke off her stare long enough to check out the alley.
“No, you don’t.”
She mainta
ined her grip on Ari whilst she rubbed the material of his waistcoat between her finger and thumb.
“And this isn’t of this time.”
Ari would have liked to point out that she too was hardly dressed appropriately but he didn’t want to make a bad situation worse.
The woman tightened her grip.
This was getting dangerous now. He couldn’t repair the timeline if he was dead.
The woman looked him over.
“I recognise you. I saw you on the platform at Bromley South. It was probably you who pushed me in front of that train. You could’ve killed me if my reactions had been any slower.”
Ari tried to look menacing but didn’t pull it off. He squeezed out four words.
“That was the plan.”
“Why? I haven’t done anything to harm you.”
Her fingers loosened a little so that Ari could speak. He coughed as his windpipe was suddenly free to take in air again.
“You are changing history.”
The woman tutted.
“What if I am? What’s it to you?”
“If you stop time-travel being discovered, I have no job.”
The woman laughed.
“Is that all? Get another job then.”