Unhappenings

by Edward Aubry

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  he first time my life unhappened was Beth Richmond. I was fourteen. She was fifteen. There was a kiss involved. It wasn’t a particularly noteworthy kiss, just one of those high school kisses that are more about learning how to feel than actually feeling. I doubt it would have led to anything like a relationship, even the ephemeral kind so common to that age. Still, a kiss is a kiss, and it was memorable enough.

  She didn’t show up for school the next day. I was either too nervous—or too immature—to call her. It wouldn’t have mattered. She didn’t show the day after that either. As casually as I could, I asked around to see if she was sick.

  No one had any idea who she was.

  Understand, this wasn’t a girl who showed up one day and then disappeared. I had known Beth since sixth grade. Most of my friends knew her too, so I was troubled by how they reacted to my inquiries. They began with polite confusion, and then rapidly degenerated to cruel jokes about my imaginary girlfriend. Over the next few days, I learned that none of my teachers had ever heard of her, and there was no record of her ever having been enrolled at my school. While the fruity taste of her lip gloss was still fresh in my mind, not a single other person had any memory of her at all. Torn between my need to understand what had happened, and my need not to be seen as insane, I quietly let it drop.

  I think that was the first time my life unhappened. In truth, it’s only the earliest example of which I am certain. It may have unhappened any number of times before that, in ways too subtle for me to perceive, or at times when I would have been too young to understand. Of the two people who would be able to tell me about earlier examples I may have missed, one has retroactively ceased to exist, and the other has yet to be born. That’s not to say I don’t see them from time to time anyway, but neither of them are speaking to me lately.

  I want to say what happened to Beth Richmond was the first step on my path to becoming an applied hyperphysicist, and that it inspired my work with time travel, but that probably represents a causality loop. Regardless, that was the day I first became aware of the non-deterministic nature of the universe, and that the past is every bit as flexible as the future.

  More to the point, that was the day I realized no one was aware of it but me.

  ver the next few years, my life was a series of minor unhappenings. Most had no serious impact on me. I had a red bicycle that one day suddenly became—and had always been—blue. A TV show I had enjoyed for years was never produced. My cat one day was always a dog, with the same name. I found I could train myself to ignore these sudden and bizarre discrepancies, and thus simulate being a normal teen.

  These events were usually spread out, separated most times by stretches of several months. Sometimes they came rapid fire. I went through four cars the week after I got my license. They were all gifts from my parents, or rather, they were all the same gift. I was the only one who noticed it varying.

  Similarly, I went through four physics teachers my senior year of high school. One would disappear, leaving no legacy or memory in the community, to be replaced by a brand new one everyone had seemingly known for years. Every time it happened, my grade took a sudden, retroactive, and sharp decline. It would take me weeks to pull it back up to anything close to an A, only to have it snatched away again. Unlike most other unhappenings, this was no mere inconvenience. That fall, I had been accepted through early decision to MIT for physics.

  I persevered. What choice did I have? Still, the underlying frustration was often difficult to endure. Each successive teacher had a progressively diminished opinion of me, at a time in my life when I was most in need of a sympathetic mentor. It was during this period that I began to cultivate a deliberately detached personality, my only available defense against the constant barrage of rugs being pulled out from under me. I look back on those days now and see them as the phase of my life when I taught myself how not to feel joy, and convinced myself that the world was devoid of wonder. Delight and adventure would be for other people, never for me. Sometimes I reflect on how things would have played out if I had not willingly dropped my emotions into that abyss, but drop them I did. At every shift in reality, I became a colder student, turning further inward, driven to succeed against ever-increasing obstacles.

  On the third teacher, those obstacles became insurmountable.

  In early March, the class was assigned to write a 3,000 word paper analyzing any historically significant development in theoretical physics. I chose string theory, which was a bit of a gamble. Two months earlier, an experimental probe orbiting Pluto, whose purpose in part was to observe and measure an as yet unproven aspect of string theory, was accidentally destroyed in its test flight. An international team of scientists was still sifting through the debris, and very little information regarding their findings had yet made its way back to Earth. Depending on how soon that information was released, any observations or conjectures in my paper could immediately prove insightful or preposterous. I chose to explore a minority view, linking string theory to technologically attainable time travel.

  Two weeks after the due date, Mr. Lewis, physics teacher number three, returned graded papers to everyone but me. As everyone else was scrolling through his comments on their tablets, I vainly attempted to find the file.

  He walked to my desk and said quietly, “Nigel, can you stick around for a few minutes after class?” After a moment of awkward silence, he added, “It’s nothing bad.”

  I nodded, and the bell rang. My classmates filed out. I approached Mr. Lewis at his desk. Even seated, he was absurdly tall, and I was instinctually intimidated by him. The previous teacher, Ms. Oswald, had been significantly less physically imposing. My paper lay in front of him, open on his tablet, no markups on it.

  “Pull up a chair,” he said.

  Apprehensively, I did so.

  “Nigel, I think we should publish this.”

  It took me a moment to compose a response to that statement. In the little amount of time he had been my teacher, he never seemed even remotely impressed with my work.

  “What do you mean?” I finally asked.

  “It’s not perfect,” he said. “It’s solid high school writing, and I still need you to polish it, but your take on this topic is absolutely brand new. I have never seen this level of insight in a high school paper before. I took the liberty of running it by two other physicists, and they agree that it’s worth exploring.”

  He paused there. I didn’t know what he expected me to say.

  “It was a guess,” I admitted.

  He grinned, in a way that straddled the border between delightful and sinister. “I know, but it’s an amazing guess. We have a win-win situation here. If we submit this to a peer reviewed journal, we have nothing. I propose that we shop it to the non-academic science sites. If your guess is a dead end, we still have an entertaining article. If your guess has merit, we have a lock on it. No one will ever be able to explore it without citing this paper.”

  His repeated use
of the word ‘we’ did not thrill me, but there was no denying that this represented an opportunity I had not conceived of before this moment. Cautiously, I asked, “How do we do that?”

  His smile became friendlier. “Let’s do this right. I know some people, so I’ll make a few calls. I’d also like to have a conference with your parents before we move on this. We should do this soon, though. The quicker we get it out there, the better.”

  I nodded. The hugeness of it began to set in. I was about to become a published theoretical physicist at age seventeen. The rest of my day was spectacular. Mr. Lewis called my father at work and we all went out to dinner that evening. Plans were solidified. I barely slept that night.

  Then it unhappened.

  The very next day, physics began with Mr. Lewis sending back papers. They were the same papers I had seen him returning to students just the day before. Once again, everyone received a file but me. A troubling déjà vu set in, cemented by Mr. Lewis quietly telling me, “Nigel, I need to see you after class.” This time it was not a request, and it did not include a reassurance.

  A bell rang. The rest of the class filed out. Mr. Lewis sat at his desk, my paper open on the tablet in front of him. He did not offer me a chair.

  “Mostly,” he began, “I am insulted by this.”

  Any other student in my position would have been confused by that, but I was so used to having the rug pulled out from under me, all I could do was wait for it with a sick feeling of inevitability in the pit of my stomach.

  “Do you think I’m stupid?” he asked. “Did you think I wouldn’t recognize this?”

  I said nothing. I looked down at the paper in front of him. It was mine. Next to it lay a hard-copy printout of the same exact paper, dated two years earlier, authored by someone else. I was numb. Not stunned, simply heartbroken. I stood there and listened to Mr. Lewis pass judgment on me, describe disciplinary actions to be taken, and detail phone calls he had already made to MIT and my parents. I stood there and took it. I had no choice. When he finally dismissed me, I left his classroom silently broken, throat tight, eyes moist.

  A woman sitting on a bench in the hall frowned at me as I passed through the door. I had never seen her before. She appeared to be in her twenties, and I thought for a moment she must have been another new teacher, but she wore a denim jacket that was both unprofessional and hopelessly out of style. Her long, straight, blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and for a moment it seemed remarkably familiar to me, like I should know her. Then her frown softened. She put her finger to her lips, and shooed me away with a flip of her head. Still sullen, I walked away, but looked back just in time to see her quietly enter Mr. Lewis’s room and shut the door behind her.

  The day after that, I came to school expecting to be called before the principal. That did not happen. With dread, I went to physics. A short man wearing a bow tie announced that he had finally graded our papers and transmitted them. As I sat, reading a file that had finally been sent to my own tablet, he walked by my desk. “Nice work,” he said crisply.

  The paper was identical to the one I had now seen twice in this very room, in two totally different lights. I now saw it in a third. Above the header on the cover page was the number 92, bold and red. No publication, no punishment.

  After school, as I waited outside for my ride, I saw a woman across the street with long blonde hair, wearing a denim jacket. She smiled at me, put her finger to her lips, and briskly walked away.

  s with so many dramatic advances in human history, time travel was discovered by accident.

  On January 4, 2085, a probe orbiting Pluto was briefly accelerated to approximately three hundredths the speed of light. It had been fitted with an experimental engine, which in turn was powered by an experimental fusion reactor. The name of the probe was Hermes 4, but not many people called it that anymore. In addition to testing the equipment itself, the purpose of the test flight was to measure the effects of propelling an object to fractionally relativistic speeds. Time dilation was a well-established principle, and the general expectation was that the measurable results would perfectly comply with predictions. A trend in physics at that time was the conjecture that great enough acceleration might serve—even if only for a tiny fraction of a second—to partially uncoil some or all of the elusive hidden extra dimensions on which string theory still hinged. A variety of methods were proposed to measure this effect, all of which were implemented on the day of the test flight. Because this aspect of the test most appealed to the media, and because of the eventual result of the experiment, the probe forever came to be known by the nickname, “Slinky.” The probe itself was not expected to survive the acceleration it was meant to undergo. It did not, but for reasons distinctly other than predicted.

  While the engine was still spinning up, and 2.7 seconds before it was fired, an object blipped into existence literally from nowhere, collided with one of the radiator fins mounted to the engine, and rebounded at an angle that ultimately brought it to rest on the surface of Charon. There was insufficient time to abort the flight. With one radiator fin damaged, waste heat accumulated in the probe at an unanticipated rate. 9.1 seconds into the test flight, and approximately 11 seconds short of the most conservative prediction of its life expectancy, the probe broke apart. The fusion generator detached and traveled a considerable distance into the Kuiper belt before exploding.

  A large fragment of the probe was thrown backward in the direction of its original orbital position. Then, in front of thousands of real time observers, and recorded on hundreds of cameras, it blipped out of existence.

  In the wake of the accident, a search was conducted for the object that collided with the probe. It was recovered from its crater on Charon, and went on to become the single most studied object in the history of science, and the most puzzling. By every possible method of scrutiny, it was determined to be the same fragment of the probe that had vanished in front of countless witnesses and cameras.

  In short, a piece of the probe traveled back through time, and caused an accident that resulted in the piece of the probe traveling back through time to cause the accident.

  That was the day hyperphysics was born.

  As I said, this happened during my senior year in high school. It would be a full year before the realization of time travel became public. As information began to trickle in about the experiment, the accident, and its world-changing implications, and while everyone else was scrambling to make sense of it, I had the opposite reaction. My life had finally begun to make sense.

  n the fall of my tenth grade year, I met Mindy Decker. We were in the same calculus class. I didn’t really get to know her until about November. We had gotten together with several other kids to study for an exam. There was some obvious chemistry. After that, I started contriving reasons to spend time with her. So did she. We dated for about two weeks, just long enough for me to fall for her, hard.

  One day she was missing from calculus. I briefly panicked, flashing back to Beth Richmond, until I saw Mindy in the cafeteria at lunch. I sat with her, as always, and asked her where she had been.

  She had no idea who I was.

  To call that a horrible moment would downplay its effect on me. I attempted to pass the whole thing off as a case of mistaken identity, and pretended to be embarrassed, to mask my pain. After fleeing, I considered starting over with her. Partly from a grim recognition that recovering from that first impression would be challenging, and partly from cowardice, I decided against.

  When I was in eleventh grade, and she was in ninth, Leslie Dietrich joined the math team. She had one of the keenest minds I have ever seen in action, and with the added edge she brought to competitions, we made it to the state championship that year. She also had a crush on me that everyone but me on the team found very amusing.

  At first, I kept her at arm’s length, making it clear I really only wanted to be friends. I felt our age difference left anything else out of the question. She was also a bit smal
l for her age, and I was already taller than most of my peers. The longer I got to know her, however, the less it seemed to matter. She had an outspoken maturity that belied her youth, and she was easily my intellectual superior. Just as I was about to relent, and had worked up the nerve to ask her out, she beat me to it.

  Over the next two months we were inseparable. My friends all adored her. I got to know her brother, who was a year older than I, and we became close friends. More than one of my teachers referred to us as a cute couple within my earshot. It was one of the most joyous periods of my adolescence.

  One day, in a van on a way to an important meet, Leslie was sitting between me and Stan Rosen, one of my best friends. I wish I could remember what we were talking about. All I do remember is at some point I made a joke to Leslie that was overtly flirtatious. She got uncomfortable. Stan accused me of hitting on his girlfriend. I tried—and failed—to laugh it off.

  My entire relationship with Leslie unhappened to me, and happened to Stan, all in one, smooth, agonizing motion. It cost me my friendship with him, not out of some kind of jealous confrontation, but simply out of my depression over it. I withdrew from my entire social circle after hearing them ask me what had gotten into me one too many times. Ultimately, I quit the team without explanation. Neither Leslie nor Stan expressed any misgiving over that decision.

  At the end of that school year, at a time in my life when I felt more alone than I could ever recall, Carrie Wolfe spontaneously kissed me. We had been friends, on and off, for years. I had no idea she ever had feelings for me, and she admitted she hadn’t realized it either. We had both had difficult years, for different reasons, and we sort of stumbled upon each other in our times of need.

  Carrie was my first summer romance. As far as she—or anyone else—knew, she was also my first girlfriend. It got very serious, very quickly. We started planning a future together, applying to all the same colleges as a precaution against becoming separated when high school ended. Our parents had all known each other since we were children, and were all pleased with this turn of events.