Limited Wish

by Lawrence, Mark

  ‘I hope not.’ The man who might be Demus frowned and touched his head as if to check it was still covered. ‘But stop telling me this stuff. You may have already met me in your past, but that’s my future.’ He crossed to his car and opened the door. ‘Come on.’

  A shout came from back in the cab control room. ‘The lights are all out!’

  ‘They’re not going to be pleased.’ Demus went round to the driver’s door. ‘They replace Robotron with a fruit machine. I can tell you that for free. And you never find another one, though eventually there’s an emulator on the internet.’

  ‘A what on the what?’

  Demus shook his head. ‘Quick!’ he said over the BMW’s roof, and got in.

  I went to the open passenger door. ‘My bike . . . oh . . .’ On the seat there was a roll of ten pound notes two inches thick, held tight with a rubber band. ‘I guess I could buy a new one.’

  Demus drove about a mile, slowly and without speaking. The car’s lights pulsed and flared, the wipers went into a frenetic burst of activity and then froze, the engine sounded far from happy. Even the street lights brightened as we passed by, and the whole time ghosts, or time echoes as Demus liked to call them, streamed behind us like dirty smoke.

  By the time he pulled over in a street not far from my house, the weird effects were starting to lessen.

  ‘This is some crazy stuff, right?’ He stared through the windscreen at the fading ghosts, his face a mask of amazement.

  I said nothing. I knew that he could only say what he remembered himself saying when he was me. What he did here should have no bearing on the future he came from or the past he remembered. But somehow, the endless paradoxical loop of self-modifying conversations and action that should just throw us on to a new timeline had been frozen into this particular incarnation that he did remember. And if he played his part, then what he did here in his 1986 could change what happened next in his 2011. If Demus went off script, that would just start a new timeline and whatever changes he made would still affect a future, but not his future. And that would be a big waste of the sacrifice he made by coming back to die.

  ‘So,’ Demus said. ‘This is a bit of a disaster. I was supposed to arrive in January . . .’

  ‘What?’ I asked, aghast. ‘You don’t remember this?’

  ‘None of it.’ He shook his head. ‘Some kind of calculation error.’ He looked mortified. ‘This is terrible . . .’

  ‘Can’t you . . . just go back some more?’ I asked. ‘I could wipe this memory and everything is fixed. No harm, no foul.’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that, Nick. A lot more complicated.’ He still looked grim. ‘But yes, we could salvage something. Mia can still be saved. First, though, I have to understand what went wrong with my calculations.’

  ‘So.’ I frowned, trying to puzzle through it. ‘Why come to me at all? If you hadn’t sought me out then you wouldn’t have made any memories you didn’t have. We shouldn’t be talking at all!’

  ‘I didn’t come straight here. I’m not an idiot.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘There’s no point me trying to jump back to January until I understand what went wrong. I’ve set up a lab and worked on the problem. And the problem is you. Something to do with you. If I can find out what’s going on, and fix it, then I can aim myself at January for our first meeting.

  ‘Remember, I haven’t got there yet, so all I know about how things go down is what I remember from your side. And that means all I know is what you allowed yourself to remember. I don’t know the details of what happened in that microchip research lab, because you made yourself forget them. Though that fact, of course, lets me know that we got the chip that we needed to work the memory eraser.’ He still sounded worried.

  I looked at him, the older me. I hadn’t expected to see him again, at least not for another few decades as he slowly began to make himself known in the mirror every morning. I’d thought to see him looking back at me with that air of mild surprise and disappointment old men must get every time they see that the face they present to the world is no longer the one they think of as their own. He watched me back for a moment, perhaps remembering what I was thinking.

  ‘This thing with the lights blowing,’ he said. ‘All this stray energy floating around us, overloading circuits . . . it shouldn’t be happening. It’s not in the equations. It’s part of the problem.’

  ‘Well, it keeps happening. You must have got pretty close to us in Cambridge to have caused that big blow up at the Winston Lab.’

  Demus’s brows rose towards his hairline. He shook his head. ‘I’ve not left London.’

  ‘OK . . . but you must remember the reason for it. Either you remember the reason or we never solved it. I mean, you remember me a year from now, five years from now. However this situation resolves you know the outcome.’

  Again the shake of his head. ‘I’ve no memory of any of this. But that’s not necessarily a disaster. It could just mean that at some point, for some good reason, you erase your memory of it.’ He frowned. ‘Even if that good reason is just so this timeline doesn’t conflict with mine.’

  ‘That sounds a bit . . . contrived.’ I wanted the future that Demus offered, or at least I had thought I did. Guaranteed recovery from a particularly aggressive brand of leukaemia seemed like a bargain. The sacrificing myself for Mia part seemed less attractive, particularly as she was currently at a party with an irritating jerk, and probably snogging him right now. The longer I kept on this timeline the more secure my recovery was, and the rest of it might be up for debate years down the line; but the more this association between me and Demus became dependent on wiping this memory or that one, the more tenuous it became.

  ‘It’s not a very elegant solution,’ I said. Telling someone their solution is inelegant is the mathematical equivalent of insulting someone’s mother.

  ‘I know.’ Demus had yet to release the steering wheel and his grip turned from tense to throttling. ‘There’s more going on here than you think, though. Even back in 2011, something was off with the readings. It’s not the theory that’s wrong. I swear it. It’s that there’s something else happening, something the equations don’t consider.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Paradox.’ He rolled the word across his tongue, then wrinkled his mouth at the taste. ‘A paradox. Two timelines frozen into each other, when whatever allowed this conversation we’re having right now happened.’

  ‘Paradox?’ I knew what it was. I had no idea how to fold the concept into the formal mathematics I was working on. Apparently Demus didn’t have many better ideas himself. The mathematics of time travel was fiendishly complex without paradox in the mix. With paradox in there it became frankly scary.

  ‘So what can we do about it?’ I asked.

  Demus shook his head. ‘I don’t know. My calculations suggested that the paradox had existed for decades in 2011. It should be both stronger and easier to unravel closer to the occurrence that should have split the timelines. But I’ve not figured out a way to track it down.’

  ‘There are nearly five billion people alive right now and any one of them could be the source,’ I said. ‘It could be a shopkeeper in Japan, a railway worker in India . . .’

  ‘It’s you,’ he said.

  ‘The odds against it are astronomical . . . But I’m a statistical outlier!’ I paused, thinking. ‘If you weren’t near the Winston Lab yesterday, then . . . it must be the girl.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘Helen.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Helen! You know.’

  ‘I don’t remember a Helen . . .’

  ‘You must do. She saved me . . . us . . . when they were chasing me in that punt.’

  A glimmer of recognition flickered across his face. ‘Oh, right. She was called Helen? It’s been a while. I don’t think I ever saw her again though.’

  ‘Really?’ I felt a sharp and sudden disappointment. ‘I kinda thought we . . .’ I shook the feeling off. ‘Well, y
ou might not have seen her again but you certainly saw her before. I mean that first day with Halligan, just after that, walking to the station and she comes running along with all the ghosts of herself chasing her . . . and the tornado thing . . . And me collapsing. John thought I’d had a fit, remember?’

  Demus’s interest turned to a kind of frozen horror. ‘No,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘I don’t remember any of that. But I do remember walking back with John from the lecture theatre. So I didn’t wipe the memory.’

  ‘Maybe you wiped . . . I will wipe . . . just that part of the walk back.’

  Demus shook his head. ‘You know the control isn’t accurate enough to edit five minutes here, five minutes there. It can’t really do much less than two or three hours. And are you telling me you are going to edit out the memory of every subsequent mention of that incident, the girl, your fit?’

  ‘So does that mean . . . ?’

  ‘That I’m not you after all?’ He pursed his lips. I think his expression might have been the one I wore when they told me I had cancer. ‘I think it does, yes.’

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘Hope,’ said Demus, ‘is an essential tool in any torturer’s kit bag. Hope is the thing that we will torture ourselves with after he’s knocked off and gone home for the night. That, sadly, is one of the lessons standing between you and me.’

  ‘But there is still hope, though?’ I repeated.

  ‘Yes.’ A sigh. ‘There is still hope.’

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  ‘You are going to do what I remember myself. And what I remember is spending an evening with my mum and catching the train to Cambridge the next day to continue my studies. Also some nastiness with the people following you. And I am going to—’

  ‘Wait! There really are people following me?’

  ‘Of course. Didn’t you listen to anything Simon said?’

  ‘Well, I did a bit. But he’s . . . y’know . . . Simon.’

  ‘Start listening to him! He’s going to be prime minister in 2003.’

  My jaw dropped. ‘Simon? Prime minister?’

  ‘No, you idiot. I’m fucking with you. But he’s worth listening to. He keeps his eyes and ears open and he never forgets anything.’

  ‘Nastiness?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said “nastiness with the people following you”. What nastiness?’

  Demus rubbed his chin. ‘Best that I don’t tell you. I lived through it, so I’m sure you will.’ He raised a hand to forestall my objection. ‘As I was saying, I am going to drive up to Cambridge and check on this Helen girl. What college is she at again?’

  ‘Queens’.’

  ‘And her surname?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s on the third floor in the hall of residence, room 307, I think.’

  ‘That’ll do. It sounds as if she is something to do with the paradox. Something major. It’s possible we can do something about that and sort this mess out.’

  ‘How possible?’ I asked.

  Demus held his hand up and squeezed his thumb and forefinger together until almost no space remained between them. He eyed me through the gap. ‘There’s always hope, Nick. Always hope.’

  Demus left, both of us instinctively knowing that we should keep our interactions to a minimum. I thought that he might want to see Mother, maybe explain the whole thing to her, but he didn’t. Maybe the reason why was something that takes twenty-five years to learn. In any case, he didn’t want to talk about it, not even to himself.

  I walked back to my house deep in thought. It was hard enough wrestling with time inside equations, forcing it to obey, calculating ways of twisting it with the minimum of effort. I could see that work consuming all the years I had between now and when it was needed. But encoding for paradox too? I had no idea where to even begin on that one. Demus had told me that when the loop with me and him was frozen into our timeline, a paradox had been frozen in, too. It could be something equivalent to going back and killing your own father before you were born. If he died . . . then how were you there to kill him? Or maybe it was a case of having a choice between two options, and instead of one option being chosen, both were, and the two resultant timelines failed to separate properly. To capture that in my equations, to find viable solutions and understand their impact on the universe . . . That was going to take some special kind of genius, and frankly the problem intimidated the hell out of me.

  My mother failed to notice that I’d returned without my bike, which was good because I’d failed to hide the fact, or the large roll of tenners in my hand. I called out a lie about having already eaten and tromped upstairs to topple onto my bed without turning the light on. I lay there, miserable, staring at the dark ceiling. If I wasn’t Demus, then my cancer had an open door to return in line with the doctors’ poorly disguised expectations. If I wasn’t Demus, then Mia’s departure was probably exactly what it seemed: permanent. And, according to Demus, Helen with her impossibly giant, impossibly handsome boyfriend wasn’t going to be part of my life either.

  All in all it had been a pretty crappy day.

  Eventually I levered myself up to clean my teeth and get ready for bed. I flicked my light switch to no effect. Enough illumination made it up the stairs for me to see my way into the hall and I flicked the switch there. Also nothing.

  ‘Mother!’ The Cambridge lot thought I was practically working class, but the truth is that while I referred to Mother as ‘my mum’ to friends, I could never actually bring myself to call her anything but ‘Mother’ to her face. To take the edge off it I always tried to do it ironically. It didn’t really work though. ‘Mother! Did the fuse blow again?’

  ‘They all did!’ she called upstairs, ‘And the bulbs. Some kind of power surge, I think. I’m going to complain to the electricity board tomorrow.’

  ‘Did you replace the fuses?’ I hated doing that. It meant fiddling with bits of fuse wire in the cupboard under the stairs while spiders took the opportunity to drop on to your head.

  ‘Yes, but we didn’t have enough replacement bulbs so we’ve only got light downstairs. Also, the TV doesn’t work any more.’

  I paused. ‘When did this happen?’ I guessed that it could have been because of the paradox effects around me and Demus, even though we were two hundred yards away . . . But there surely hadn’t been time for Mother to rewire eight fuses and replace half a dozen bulbs.

  ‘A couple of hours ago. Around the time that girl came.’ Her turn to pause. ‘Oh, there was a girl here looking for you.’

  I went down the stairs two at a time, seized by a cold fear. The people who were following me hadn’t been chasing me on my bike. I’d been chasing myself while they were here in my house, letting me know they could reach me, reach my mother.

  ‘Did she give a name? What did she look like?’ I burst in on my mother, who had returned to the living room sofa with a book and a cup of tea. ‘Wait . . . a girl? Like, a little girl?’

  Mother put her book down and looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. ‘A young woman.’

  I tried to hold on to my anger. These people thought they could threaten me. And they could. I had no idea how to stop them. When they told me what they wanted they would be holding all the cards. ‘What did she look like?’

  Mother pursed her lips. ‘Well, clearly I’ve grown too old to keep track of fashions because she didn’t look like anyone I’ve seen. But,’ she put aside her disapproval and played up to her self-imposed fuddy-duddy role, ‘Eva was a very polite and very good-looking young lady.’

  ‘Eva?’

  ‘Eva Hayes.’ Mother nodded, then laughed. ‘No relation.’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘You know, she didn’t say. I had a funny turn as I opened the door to her . . .’ Mother frowned. ‘Anyway she helped me to the sitting room, got me some water and waited with me to make sure I was alright. She was very chatty—’

  ‘What sort of “funny turn”?’ I asked, concerned.r />
  ‘Oh, nothing to get worried about. I probably stood up too fast. Came over peculiar. Seeing lights and . . . shadows . . . like you do . . .’ She didn’t sound entirely convinced herself. ‘Anyway. We just got chatting. I asked her if she wanted some tea. Somehow we ended up talking about family. Your father, my parents . . . All sorts. We went into the kitchen to make the tea and that’s when I found the lights didn’t work. Or the kettle. She said she was sorry to have missed you and would call you later.’

  ‘Eva Hayes?’ I didn’t know any Evas.

  ‘I guess I’ll have to get used to pretty girls turning up and asking for Nick,’ Mother teased.

  ‘Ha, ha.’ I turn and started back towards the stairs. It all seemed very strange, less threatening than I had first imagined, but still with an undercurrent of threat. Were they trying to find all my relatives? Was the interest in my grandparents just so they had other choices for who to tighten the screws on if I wouldn’t play ball?

  I took the torch from the cupboard under the stairs and trudged up to my room, tired but with too much buzzing around in my skull for sleep. The sweeping torch beam immediately revealed that there was something wrong with the small desk by the window. It was tidy! I was about to holler down to Mother when I realised two important things. Firstly that my mother was only marginally more given to neatness than I was and had never ordered my desk. Secondly that in the middle of all that clean desktop, which I hadn’t had a clear view of in years, was a single book I didn’t recognise. Something to intimidate me? Something the girl had left? At least it wasn’t a horse’s head in the bed. Demus had said ‘nastiness’ but I guessed these guys were working for a corporation rather than for the Mafia. I tried to reel my imagination in. The girl must have done something to blow the fuse box and come back to sneak up to my room while Mother was busy in the cupboard among the dust and spiders trying to fix the damage.

  The hairs on the backs of my arms stood up as I approached. All of me tingled with electric anticipation. It seemed that even the torchlight itself began to pulse in time with my accelerating heartbeat. Without touching the intruding item I bent to read the title. Curiosa Mathematica by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Not someone I’d heard of. It looked ancient. Like the books Professor Halligan kept on the shelf behind his desk to help him play the role of serious mathematician. Of course, all work of real importance was in the tatty journals in his briefcase published monthly and with names like Finite Fields and Their Applications.