by Edward Aubry
What the hell did he need me for?
ver the course of the next two days, the dull ache in my arm became a burning pain that spread up my arm and over to a spot directly between my shoulder blades. It was frightening. Doubly so, because not only did I not know what was happening to me, but I also had no idea who to turn to for help. When the pain did finally stop, I still had no idea what was going on, so I really didn’t have any reason to stop being afraid. It was several weeks before I was able to trust that the pain was temporary and might not return. I never did make the connection between that event and what happened shortly after. Una had to explain that to me herself.
One beneficial effect of that scare was that it took my mind off the troubling discovery of the additional layers of my older self’s duplicity. On some level, I had believed that whatever his secret agenda might be, he really was using me for my time travel insights, however crude he might expect them to be. And I wanted to continue believing that. I continued showing up for work, asking good questions, and trying to make myself useful. But watching those two go through motions that were already, I suspected, obsolete, made me progressively skeptical that the work we were doing had any meaning at all. Worse, they at least knew what they were doing, even if they didn’t realize it was futile. I began to understand that my opportunity to make a profound contribution to the research was not going to present itself.
I did a lot of sulking through that stretch of time. Oscar had very little patience for my moping, and had no problem sharing that with me. Andrea came to me privately and told me she was worried I was showing signs of depression, and wanted to know if I needed any help. I told her I was fine, which she called out as a transparent lie. She also said the work we were doing was too important to compromise it with a mental health crisis, which was a fair point. She wanted me to get professional help. I balked at that. As a compromise, we agreed I would take a couple of days off, and get away from my stressors. If that didn’t help, I was going to have to follow up with a doctor.
I spent two days holed up in my apartment, reading, sleeping, gaming, and generally wallowing. After two days of that, I was much worse, having added to my sense of uselessness a deep regret for having rushed so blindly into a situation that was well beyond my coping skills. In a childish moment, I actually wished aloud that I had never left that room in the library.
And just like that, I was back there.
ere’s what I learned, much later: The module was not giving me bone cancer. It was sending out filaments. When Una first implanted it, five subjective years earlier, it was slaved to the one in her own arm. That’s why I was never able to travel without her in contact with me. When I traveled to 2144, and then didn’t go home for months, the module concluded that I had been permanently separated from the user of the master module, and executed a failsafe protocol to make it independently operable. The process involved extending thousands of microscopically thin filaments into my spine, via the nerves in my arm. Once anchored there, they initiated a neuro-electrical interface that would allow me to control the module mentally.
At the time, I knew none of this. All I knew was: Ow.
My immediate reaction to finding myself back in the print collection was that either my return was a dream, or my trip to 2144 had been. It then took me a fraction of a second to berate myself for thinking something that stupid. I had spent the better part of a year in my own future. That was real. I was now back home. That was also real. Cautiously, I did venture out of that room, just long enough to confirm with a calendar that I was back in 2092, which I was.
I wanted to go back to my house, find my parents, and tell them everything. That gave me a minor anxiety attack. The prospect of their reaction didn’t worry me so much. They would understand, or they wouldn’t, and we would all get past it. What did worry me was the prospect that I might still have an unhappening immunity here. I still wasn’t sure if it was real after the missing key incident, but I desperately wanted to believe it, and back in my own time, it would probably wear off. I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. Unfortunately, I didn’t even know how I had fallen back through time, let alone how to undo that event. I longed for Una to appear miraculously, take my hand, and spirit me back to 2144. I would even have settled for grouchy, crazy Future Me to do the trick. Either way, I couldn’t remain where and when I was.
In an attempt to focus my thinking and calm myself down, I whispered, “I will find a way to get back.”
And just like that, I was.
I still hadn’t made the connection to the pain from earlier, but it was immediately clear to me that my situation had drastically changed. For reasons still unknown to me, I was now able to travel through time at will.
Well, perhaps “will” is not the most precise term.
Over the next few days, I made several more test flights. In the interest of personal safety, I did not go traipsing around time like some super-powered tourist, but instead stuck to that room and that day. The last thing I needed was to get lost.
My third jump went wild. All things considered, I was lucky it wasn’t worse. The phrase “seven year margin of error” was never far from my thoughts, but after bull’s-eyes on my first two trips, I got a little cocky. Third time was not the charm. I missed the room and the day by forty kilometers and six years. Expecting to find myself in a comfortable reading room, I was instead thrown into a dark, cold alley, where I promptly hit my head. I managed to pull myself up and get to the sidewalk, but that was about as far as I got before sitting down at the base of a building. I was disoriented, but I seem to recall rambling to myself, probably quite loudly. During the five minutes in which I tried to find ways not to panic about the fact that I couldn’t focus enough to get myself home yet, which might not even be possible given that I had no idea what year this was, someone evidently called a cop.
“You all right, son?” said Officer Friendly. When I looked up to find him, I recognized him immediately. I had seen this officer twice before. He, in turn, had never met me.
“Yeah,” I said, hoping it sounded bold, and in control.
“Are you intoxicated?”
“No,” I said, honestly, but apparently not convincingly. “I hit my head.”
“I can see that. You’ve got a nasty scratch there.”
I felt my forehead. Warm, tacky. Great. I managed to stand.
“What’s your name?”
“Graham,” I said. It was a reflex, and I almost corrected myself. Then I remembered how surprised he was that day he came to arrest me, to see that I was Nigel Walden. We talked for about two minutes, long enough for him to see that I was not in any danger, or presenting any to others. I dropped a few details about being an MIT student, hoping that in the half-light of the street lamps it would be less obvious that I was twenty-five, not nineteen. He let me go with some sort of cliché fatherly advice.
I found a coffee shop and considered ordering something hot until I remembered I had no access to my 2092 money anymore, and my 2144 money probably wouldn’t read. Instead, I went to the bathroom, cleaned myself up, calmed myself down, and said, “I would like to go back to my apartment now.” That time it worked.
t took nearly a year, but Una finally caught up with me.
“Hey, stranger.” I found her waiting for me in the lobby of my building, at the end of the day. She had evidently been chatting with Wendy.
“Hey, yourself. What took you so long?”
“Is this a friend of yours?” asked Wendy.
Una smirked. “Something like that.” The taunt had a predictably melancholic effect on Wendy, with whom I still felt unresolved.
“Cousins,” I amended.
“Oh!” said Wendy, in a respite from her little funk. I wondered how long this was going to be an issue. “Have fun!” she added cheerfully as we walked out.
“Where are we going?” A lot had happened to me since the last time I had seen Una at any stage of her life, and I wasn’t entirely sure I was up for a new adventure.
“Anywhere we can get a sandwich,” she said. “I’m famished. Also: cousins?”
I sighed. “Don’t ask.”
Una gave me a wide-eyed, curious look, and glanced back over her shoulder. “Security desk girl? Seriously?”
I didn’t care for that. “What’s wrong with security desk girl?’
I thought it a simple question, but Una pondered it. “Oh. Yeah. Well, nothing technically, I guess.”
“Whatever the hell that means. It’s moot anyway. I called it off before it went anywhere. Can we not talk about it?”
“Sure,” she said. We walked in silence for a bit before she asked, “How long has it been since you saw me?”
“Close to a year. You?”
“Four years.”
I tried to assess her age. She seemed early twenties. “That was the time I named you Una.”
She nodded. “I kind of grew up since then. We have a lot to talk about.”
We stopped at a bagel shop. I ordered coffee, Una ordered a sandwich, and we found a booth.
“How did you even find me?” I asked. “I thought this far in the future I might have dropped off your radar.”
“It’s still my past,” she said.
“Point taken. Hey, I figured out how to make the thing in my arm work.”
“I know. Actually, it figured that out, but I guess it amounts to the same thing. Jumping here severed the link between our modules, so it grew itself a nervous system and latched onto your spine. I should probably remember to warn you about that when I finally give it to you.”
“You won’t remember,” I said. “Can I assume that’s what the God-awful pain in my arm was?”
She winced. “Yeah. That’s supposed to be done under an anesthetic. Sorry.”
I shrugged. “I survived. Are you here to take me back?”
“What? No. No, where and when you go is up to you now.”
“So, you’re just here to visit?”
She thought for a moment. “Yeah, I guess so. Sort of. I just… I got my assignment.” She stopped there.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. I had gotten used to reminding her when she told me something she thought I already knew. Living out of sync with her was like that. Evidently at this age, she wasn’t quite as used to it herself.
“Really? Two years of jumps and fixes and I never once told you why?”
“Nope. Are you going to tell me now?”
“Oh, wow,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah.” She took a bite of her sandwich, and I gave her time to collect her thoughts. “My job is to fix things in the time stream that have been changed. I think I can tell you that much.”
“That much I already worked out. I take it you haven’t started yet?”
She gave me a sheepish look. “No. My first jump is today. I’m supposed to be on it right now.”
“But you came here instead? Why?”
“Because I’m nervous. You and I were friends, and then we kind of weren’t. I knew a lot of things I couldn’t tell you, and there was this other version of me taking you on time trips, and she knew things even I didn’t know, and she scared me, and now I’m her, and I know those things, and it makes me feel like the jumps I made to you when I was a kid were a horrible idea, and now I have to go back there, and I can’t say any of this stuff to you when I get there and it’s already making me crazy.” She stopped there, and fidgeted.
“You’re here for advice. You want my help with this.”
She nodded.
“Oh, my,” I said. “This is new.” I leaned across the table and took her hand. “Listen, every time you jumped in and whisked me away somewhere was a total adventure for me. You should know I puked the first few times, but once I got past that, it was just a ride. I was always delighted to see you, and we always got along.”
She nodded again, but she was biting her lip.
“All right, there’s also this: I have met a lot of versions of you at a lot of different points in your life, and I know there’s something dark coming. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know how much you know about it right now, but I do know that it’s not going to be a thing for me during those two years. I’m sure there will come a time when things are not going to be as pretty as they are right now between us, but that’s in both of our futures, and hopefully a long way off.”
After a beat, she said softly, “I don’t know what it is either. Not yet. But I know it’s coming.”
“Well, it doesn’t come when I’m at MIT, so go have fun with this.”
“Thank you.” She smiled, and squeezed my hand.
“You’re welcome, Athena. Now quit playing hooky and go do your job.”
Her smile faded, and she slowly pulled her hand back.
“I thought I was still Una. Am I Athena now?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you didn’t like Una.”
“I didn’t. Why Athena?”
“Because it turns out time travel is my baby. That’s why I’m here. This is my big project, even though I don’t understand it yet. And you were my first visitor from the future, using a technology I made happen. It was like you sprang fully armored—”
“Right out of your head,” she finished. Hearing her say it out loud, it suddenly seemed like an incredibly insensitive and egocentric joke. I was better off calling her Susan.
“If you don’t like it—”
“No,” she interrupted. “It’s good. It’s a good name. Better than Una, anyway. You can call me that for now.”
She got up, hugged me, walked out, and blipped into my past. I wondered which of our trips was this first one she was about to take. She never seemed new at this. Then I reflected on this conversation and wondered how much of that bravado was a result of the talk we just had. It felt entertainingly recursive. But that was well before I learned not to be entertained by causality loops.
n December, nearly a year after I first arrived, I finally ventured out to the local public library. I was curious what library science looked like in the future. Like most of my experiences, it turned out to be more like my home time than unlike it. The terminals in the main stacks were arranged differently, presumably to satisfy whatever ergonomic sensibilities were the norm at that time, and every screen was embedded in the polished wood tables and lecterns I had come to find so pleasing to the eye. Apart from screen placement and aesthetic concerns, there was nothing to set this experience apart from what I would have seen in 2092. If anything, the most striking thing about it was how different it was from every other 2144 environment I had been in so far; being a library, none of the terminals were voice activated. Seeing all those fingers brushing against all that glass in near silence was ironically nostalgic.
Contrary to the predictions of every futurist for the last hundred years, books were also still around. They were of course oddities, and as with my library back home, secreted away in an obscure and rarely visited chamber. Nevertheless, I was amused to discover this print collection to be even larger than the one I used to frequent in 2092 when I needed quiet time. I was also delighted to discover Athena there waiting for me. It had been three weeks since I sent her off to my college-aged self with plans to escort him on time travel errands. When I came in the room, her back was to me, and her blonde hair was draped down the back of a black leather biker jacket, quite a change of pace from the usual denim. She appeared engrossed in a book. I walked up and tapped her on the shoulder.
“Leather is not exactly your speed, is it?” I asked.
She turned around, and her eyes hit me like a dopamine dart gun.
I had never seen this woman before. Given that I had spent much of my adult life training myself not to be surprised by unfamiliar faces, this sudden case of mistaken identity should not have fazed me. Yet, in that moment, I forgot all of my tricks for not making a fool of myself. She gazed at me, curiously.
“I know. I’m trying to reinvent myself, but I don’t think it’s taking.” She clo
sed her book and set it down, then did a casual pirouette to model the jacket for me. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think? Am I working this?”
She was indeed.
“I’m… so sorry,” I said, attempting to recover. “I thought you were someone I knew.” The woman before me did not have Athena’s mannerisms or build. Her face was rounder, her eyes bluer, and her voice richer. Even her hair, which was the feature I had clumsily used to identify her, was shorter, darker, and lusher.
Her arms, which were outstretched to show off the jacket, slowly moved down to her hips.
“Really,” she said. “That’s your story. Someone you knew.”
“That’s my story,” I said, desperately hoping to sound both in control and terribly witty. “And I’m sticking to it.”
She touched her chin, pensively. “Needs polish,” she said. “But I guess it’s a classic for a reason. And you are?”
“Nigel,” I said. Then I heard myself saying it. “Graham!” I corrected, too obviously and far too late. The sudden adrenaline dump served to highlight the fact that my heart was already racing, and was now being pushed to its limit.
She stared for a moment, perhaps waiting for me to finish remembering my name, and her look went from pensive to downright devious.
“You intrigue me, Nigel-Graham. How many last names do you have?”
I laughed, afraid that it would sound fake, even though it was real.
“Just the one. Walden. And please call me Graham.”
She clucked her tongue. “Perhaps,” she said, “but I don’t think so, Nigel-Graham. Not yet. Helen. Helen Clay. Well, Helena, really, but I have never been able to get the hang of that third syllable.”
“Helen,” I said, mostly just to hear myself say it.
Her eyes narrowed. “So, you know me after all. Where’s your story now, bitch?” Then her face lit up. “Hey! What are you doing for the next two hours?”
“I… don’t know?”
“Perfect!”
“Why?” I asked.
