by Edward Aubry
“I need to you to help me correct the flaws in the process. Time travel was my brainchild. Every facet, every functional aspect of the theory, every path to application, was mine, and it doesn’t work.” He choked on that last word.
“But… You’re here.” Again, I withheld that I was an experienced traveler already.
He shook his head. “There are bugs. Bad bugs. It doesn’t work the way it is supposed to, and we are deep into it now. If we don’t find ways around the gaps and flaws in the process… A lot of people are going to die, Nigel.”
“Die? What are you talking about?”
“I can’t give you specifics. Not yet. I’m sorry, but I need your help before it’s too late.”
Setting aside what ‘too late’ could possibly mean in this context, none of this made any sense.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because you already have the background to begin forming the theory. I know you do, because this is when I started pulling it together. Right now, your insights are pure. They are not dulled by age, or cynicism, or politics. I need to go back to formula on this. I need to go back to you. Given the resources that I never had the first time around, and the benefit of my own mistakes…” He rocked his head, looking for the words. “You’re the only hope I have left.”
I was speechless. There was no way I could have this conversation extemporaneously. Evidently, he already understood that.
As he stood to leave, he said, “Don’t answer now. I am going to give you two months to think this over, and then I will be back. Think of questions for me during that time. Good questions. Lots of questions.” He walked to the door without further discussion. Just before he closed it behind himself, he looked back and said, “I know you can do this, Nigel. And I also know you want this, more than anything else in the world. Think about it.” Then he was gone.
So much weighed on me at that moment, but nothing as severely as the fact that I had just lied to myself, repeatedly. Nothing, that is, but the certainty that while I was lying to myself, myself had been lying to me.
rom there, I had two months to consider the most important question of my life. Of course, it wasn’t at all the question I was supposed to be considering. That question, as to whether I wanted to circumvent every scrap of common sense about how the universe was supposed to work and throw myself into time travel research to make possible something that I had already been doing for years, was easy. Oh my goodness, yes, I wanted to do that. The more pressing question I would need to consider was how I could possibly trust the man who had made me that offer, despite the fact, or especially because, that man was me.
Everything about his manner suggested that everything he told me was a clumsy fabrication. Unfortunately, I had no guess as to his true intentions. Perhaps I could play along just to get access to the research he was asking me to assist. Logically, there was no chance he could be planning to harm me in any way. That was comforting, apart from the abundance of evidence that time travel did not operate in any manner that could be remotely considered logically consistent. I would never be able to gauge the true danger I would be placing myself in. The only issue was the level of recklessness I was prepared to exercise.
I pondered all of this on my way home that afternoon. By the time I got to my parents’ house, I realized I had completely forgotten to prepare my fictional job search report. My hesitation to go inside and face them with nothing to show for my day lasted only as long as it took me to remember that in a few days, or weeks at the outside, none of this would have happened anyway. Lying about looking for work would be exactly as useless as actually looking for work. Work would find me soon enough. For today, I would feign depression about my circumstance to buy some sympathy. If that didn’t work, plan B was to simply not care what they thought, and patiently wait for them to never have thought it.
With that level of indifference, I entered my home, and found my mother talking to Penelope in the living room.
It is difficult to convey on just how many levels this sight caught me off guard. For starters, Penelope had consistently kept her own existence as secret as possible from everyone I knew. To see her casually chatting with my mother flew in the face of years of surreptitious behavior. I had only a split second before my mother greeted me and inevitably attempted to engage both Penelope and me in conversation, in which to determine (or wildly guess) exactly which version of Penelope this was. From the smile on her face, she clearly expected me to be happy to see her. I struggled to recall the last encounters I had with her, in various stages, and could not place one in which we had parted comfortably. From my frame of reference, working backward, I had seen her at fiftyish, deeply sad and apologetic; eighteen, furious and defensive; and early twenties, severely embarrassed. My best guess under pressure was that this was the eighteen version.
“Nigel!” said my mother. “You have a visitor.”
“I can see that,” I said, with my best attempt at a natural smile. “What have you two been talking about?”
“You, of course.”
I laughed politely. My mother gave me a look of serious intrigue. Unlike my father, she had never been particularly invested in my career choice. All she ever wanted was for me to be happy. If physics did that, then she supported my choice. But that’s where her interest in science began and ended. She was a medieval history professor, and had little use in her own life for any idea that was less than eight hundred years old. One such idea, of course, was that every human needed companionship. Like everyone else, she was oblivious to my failed high school romances. From her perspective, I had never shown an interest in—or at least any success with—girls. On more than one occasion, she asked me very frankly if I had any luck with boys. She needed me not to be lonely. The fact that this young woman suddenly materialized must have been nothing less than a long-awaited miracle to her.
There were so very many things that could go wrong in the next few moments. My top priority was to end the small talk and get Penelope out of there where we could talk without fear of dragging my parents into a world they had no idea existed. My father might have had some hope of understanding what my situation had really been all these years, but there were few people in the world less like me than my own mother. I didn’t even really look like her. She was all curly red hair and freckles, framing the roundest face in the world. My possible changeling status was a running gag in my family for longer than it could ever have actually been funny. If I hadn’t been such a perfect duplicate of my father’s sharper features, it might even have been cause for investigation. Honestly, this virtual stranger in my living room looked more like my mother than I did. Given that she and I were practically from different worlds, I couldn’t even hope to predict how she would react to the truth.
“You’ll have to help me out,” my mother went on. “This young lady says she won’t tell me her name until you introduce her.”
Good grief. Setting aside my irritation over the fact that Penelope had persuaded my mother to play that game—it would have been child’s play to take advantage of Mom’s need to have any sort of girl in my life whatsoever—that simply confused the issue for me further. I had no idea what her name was, of course, and without the clue of what name I was calling her at the moment, I had one fewer way to place her. In every encounter with her youngest version, I had always called her Penelope. In every other encounter, I had called her variations of “Hey You.” Our explicit agreement was that I not concern myself with her name, and that someday I would simply happen across it. It never quite made sense to me. Cornered now, I chose an alternative.
“Her name is Una.”
Una’s face held steady in an expression probably intended to convey glee, but was easy for me to see as surprise. I interpreted that to mean I had never called her this before. Given my immediate resolve to call her this for the foreseeable future, that would mean until this moment she had been Penelope. Eighteen then, or near enough. Like so many of my management tools, th
is was a complete guess.
Una got up and put her jacket on. “It was lovely meeting you, Mrs. Walden,” she said with a cheery grin. “Thank you for letting me wait here.”
My mother got up as well, and gave Una a hug. “It was my pleasure. When do you think you’ll be back?” It took me a second to realize that was directed at me, but Una caught it.
“I’ll try not to keep him out past curfew,” she said to my mother. Another round of polite laughter. Una took my hand and led me out of the house. My mother raised the eyebrow of we-have-much-to-discuss-young-man, and waved us both goodbye.
With the door closed behind us, and the two of us walking to I had no idea where, I asked, “What on Earth did you tell her?”
She countered with, “Me? What about you? What’s with Una?”
That made me laugh for real. “Can I assume I still haven’t found your name?”
“You have not. And I much prefer Penelope.”
“Well,” I said, “now you are Una. Unless you’d like to come clean with me.” Pause. “I thought not. Oh, and by the way, what are you doing here, and where the hell have you been for the last three years?”
“Three years?” She seemed genuinely surprised by this. “You haven’t seen me for three years? Not even some future version of me?”
“Not a sign. I was beginning to wonder if you had given up on me.”
“Never,” she said. We walked in silence for a bit.
“You could have told me you were from my future, you know. When you first met me.”
“I’m not sorry about that, if that’s where you’re going.”
“You will be,” I said.
She huffed. “You can’t possibly know that.”
“Actually, I know it for a fact.”
“Oh,” she said. Making the connection, she pouted. “Well, I’m not sorry now.”
“Fair enough. That’s not where I was going anyway. Are you going to tell me why you’re here?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t like the way we parted. I thought if maybe I gave you a while to cool off, we would be okay again.”
“Well, that much worked. We’re fine. How long ago was that for you?”
“Yesterday,” she said. “Why Una?”
“Yesterday? Wow. Yesterday.” I finally released my first impression of this girl as a contemporary of mine. Time travel was second nature to her already, and perhaps had been her whole life. “I’m calling you Una to remind myself that no matter how many versions of you I get to know, there’s really only one of you. Someday I’m going to reconcile all the different points of your life and figure out who you really are.”
She laughed. “Good luck with that.”
“Can I ask your advice on something?” I said.
“Me? Is that a thing you do? Ask my advice?”
The question sounded sarcastic to me at first, until I realized she was sincerely trying to get a feel for what her relationship with me was going to be as she got older. I almost never shared with her anything that her future selves did or said. “Sometimes,” I said. “I got a visit today from future me. He wants me to help him with some bugs he is having on the Time Travel Project.”
Una got very quiet.
“Am I asking the wrong thing? If I’m not supposed to know this stuff, I don’t want to put you in a bad position. But I figure if I’m not supposed to know it, I wouldn’t be traveling back in time to tell myself stuff. Mind you, I kind of have the sense that Future Me isn’t quite playing with a full deck. That’s troubling in a couple ways, and I’d rather not dwell on it, but I’m just trying to figure out how safe this is going to be.”
Una’s silence continued to stretch. Looking away from me, she said, “Don’t.”
This was turning very uncomfortable. “Don’t? Don’t help him?” Una seemed afraid. I tried to think of a way to backtrack.
“Don’t,” she repeated. “Don’t… Don’t ask me about this. You can’t ask me about this.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to compromise you, or whatever this would do. Forget I asked. I’ll figure it out on my own.”
She shook her head. “No, you won’t, but I can’t help you with this. It’s… I’m too close to it. You’ll understand some day. Just, please don’t make me choose.”
“Choose?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, I’m sorry.” Whatever Una knew, it was something vital, something I absolutely had to know, but I wasn’t going to get it out of her, and I was afraid if I tried I would lose her for another three years. Pathetically, I tried to change the subject. “How did you convince my mother to let you in without telling her your name? She’s not usually that trusting.”
Una smiled a bit at that. “Do you seriously think this is the first time I have met your parents?”
“Too much to hope you’ll explain that?”
“Not happening.” She smiled, but it was heavy, and masking a pain she clearly hadn’t expected to be confronted with today. “I should get going.” She surprised me by giving me a hug, something she had never done before. Or had done many times before. Impossible to know.
“Don’t be a stranger, okay?”
“I won’t,” she promised.
I never saw that version of Penelope again.
omewhere in my head was the secret to time travel. If Future Me was telling the truth about that much, at least, then my dream was no conceit after all. Part of me knew that would be exactly the sort of thing someone would tell me to lure me in. The rest of me told that part to kindly shut up.
Given the proper resources, I could make it work. I did not have those resources, at least not exactly. I did have one thing, though. I had a functioning example of the technology bonded to my left ulna.
The prospect of digging it out to inspect it did not appeal. But with only two months to go, I needed answers, and that was the only place I knew where to start. What I really needed was access to a medical scanner and a technician who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions. That was not going to happen. However, I did have access to something that might accomplish approximately the same purpose.
My father’s work was designing multi-processor industrial robots. Specifically, he was a Restrictable Intelligence engineer. His job was to traverse that narrow band between non-intelligent and artificially intelligent machines. Too dumb, and the robots can’t do their work. Too smart, and they won’t want to. Dad helped develop the Crawford-Walden Processor, which is meant to be both fully integrated and remotely reprogrammable. Part of that system incorporated a CWP scanner, which could both diagnose and reorient the robots’ multiple brains without the need to physically remove them, which was often a prohibitively complicated procedure. Presumably, whatever the device in my arm was, it had to have some sort of processor. A diagnostic scan might give me a starting point in figuring out what it was.
A proper CWP scan would have to be conducted at the manufacturing facility. Even if I could convince the dozen or so people who would need to authorize it—including my father—it would end up entailing every one of them knowing what I was looking at. My own reluctance to dig it out of my arm might not be shared by all of them.
However, Dad kept a couple of early prototypes from his lab. They were technically obsolete, useless for any application to current CWP models, and a form of technology that had already been cracked by dozens of other companies. Security being a non-issue, he was allowed to keep them in a trophy case in his office. He was also allowed to bring one of them home, to satisfy the curiosity of his son who had a sudden and renewed passion for science and wanted to study it. The prospect of getting me fired up to go back to school was more than enough incentive to bring me one, which he did the same day I asked for it.
It took me two days of tinkering with it in my room to figure out how to have it scan through soft tissue without risk of injury, something it was certainly never designed for. I got some fantastic images of the interior of the module, revealin
g a nanoscopically complex structure. I also got a plethora of data regarding its functionality, as the scanner attempted to guess how and why a CWP would behave the way this device did. Several treatment solutions were presented to correct what it saw as aberrations, and I of course rejected them all.
Unfortunately, the scanner was not equipped to tell me anything that I was able to connect to time travel theory. The only hard piece of analysis it was able to provide was both entirely foreseeable, and regrettably troubling.
Too Smart.
ith one week to go before I had to make my choice, I got another visit from Una. She looked about thirty this time.
“I’m calling you Una now,” I informed her.
“I’m still Una? I thought we were past that one.”
It was a Saturday, early Spring. Una found me alone at the park. “Maybe you are,” I said, “but it’s still novel for me. I only just named you that a couple months ago. You seemed annoyed with it at the time.”
“I got over it. Take my hand.”
I took her hand. My left arm tingled. The world flashed, and when my eyes readjusted, and my gag reflex obeyed my mental command to settle down, we were still in a park, but clearly not the same park. There were maybe a dozen other people there—children playing on the swings, a young woman walking a dog, a couple with a stroller—but no one appeared to notice our arrival.
“What year is this?” I asked.
“2115.”
She said this without looking at me. She was staring at something, but I couldn’t tell what. Given that this was my first ever trip into my own future, I was a little put off by the anti-climactic nature of the revelation.
