Unhappenings

by Edward Aubry

  “Because in two hours I have a job interview, and you are going to spend that time rehearsing it with me.”

  I laughed again. “All right, I accept. Where?”

  “Here,” she said.

  “No, I mean where are you interviewing?”

  With a big nod, and much more slowly, she said, “Heeeeeeere.”

  “The library?”

  “The print collection. They’re hiring a curator.”

  “Oh!” I said. “So you’re my three o’clock.”

  Her jaw dropped, and immediately spread into a smile. She pointed at me. “That was good.”

  “Thanks,” I said with a grin, and almost certainly a blush.

  She picked up a black leather bag that matched her jacket perfectly and said, “All right, Nigel-Graham. Find me a decent cup of coffee, and let’s do this.”

  We spent the next two hours pretending to be a library board of trustees and a prospective curator. For much of that time, my background thoughts were of finding a way to use my knowledge of time travel to make those two hours last forever. But they didn’t. When she finally and warmly thanked me for my help and made her way back the library, I basked in her gratitude.

  For the rest of the day, I tried to imagine realistic scenarios that did not end with her disappearing forever.

  o matter what happened next, one of us was doomed. My doom would be figurative, of course. Helen’s would be quite literal.

  This was no tentative attraction, like what had almost happened with Wendy. Two hours with Helen, and I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. Horribly, the only pattern I had ever been able to establish with any consistency when it came to my unhappenings was that every relationship I ever had ended well before it started, sometimes fatally. For seven years, for that very reason, I had been excessively cautious about getting to know women. I might have talked myself into believing the unhappenings had stopped when I considered dating Wendy, but I quickly realized how reckless and irresponsible that was. I would never have forgiven myself if anything had unhappened to her. If I talked myself into believing that again in order to date Helen, she would die. It had to be that simple.

  That said, the thought of never seeing her again haunted me. It was as if the universe had put her in my path simply to taunt me. By all rights, I shouldn’t even have met her. In my true time, she wouldn’t be born for decades yet. This was a dream. A might-have-been from a parallel universe. I had no business even wanting to spend time with her. I would cherish those two hours, and spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if things had been entirely different.

  In truth, I don’t know if I ever would have had the strength to make that decision, one way or the other. I never got the opportunity to find out, because Helen made it for me.

  hree days after Helen’s job interview, our lab received a crate filled with thousands of identical black discs the approximate size of a bottle cap. Each one was a completely sealed and nearly indestructible clock, although there was no way anyone would ever know that from looking at them. They were smooth, unmarked and featureless. Using our newly upgraded time chamber, our task over the next several weeks was to send one of these objects exactly one gigasecond into the past, in five minute intervals, until they were all gone. Once that was done, a field team would go looking for them with scanners. Each recovered clock would be read, and the time discrepancy noted with respect to the target destination of one gigasecond. Very few were expected to travel exactly that amount of time. The prevailing conjecture was that they would follow a distribution skewed to the right with one gigasecond as the median. Presumably, many of them would be found by bystanders while they waited to catch up to the present, so they were specifically designed to be boring enough not to attract attention. Apparently the design was extremely successful, as the vast majority of the ones we were eventually able to locate were in landfills.

  The formal name for these devices was Trans-Chronal Displacement Distribution Markers. Oscar called them tracer pucks.

  I was given the scut work task of inventorying them, and scanning them in. Externally, they were all identical, but internally they all had unique ID tags to be confirmed, and extraction signals to be tested and activated. Doing that two thousand times took about as long as I expected it to, but I was glad to have something trivial on which to concentrate. The previous three days had been an exercise in distractibility for me, and Oscar and Andrea had both picked up on that.

  About an hour into that, we got a call from the front desk that I had a visitor. It was not unusual for Andrea or Oscar to get calls like that. No one was permitted in or near our lab but the three of us, so any time someone needed to speak to one of them, they had to be called down. It was, however, unprecedented for me to get a call like that. I briefly allowed myself to fantasize that Helen had tracked me down to tell me she had been thinking about me non-stop for three days. That fantasy lasted exactly as long as it took for me come to the screen and see Helen waving in it.

  I found her on a bench in the lobby.

  “Hey!” I said. “How did you find me?”

  “You gave me your full name, and we live in the twenty-second century, right?”

  I laughed. “So we do. How are you doing?”

  “Pretty great,” she said. “I got the job, so I’m here to buy you lunch. Is this a good time for you?”

  And just like that, I had gone from pining over the woman of my dreams to being asked on what I couldn’t help thinking of as a second date. Stupidly, I said, “Oh, you don’t have to do that.”

  With a somewhat disgusted look, she said, “Your line is: ‘Congratulations!’”

  “Congratulations!” I parroted.

  “Thank you!” She beamed. “Couldn’t have done it without you. Where shall we go to celebrate?” Her smile was infectious.

  “You really don’t have to buy me lunch,” I said, but we were already walking to the door at that point.

  “Psh,” she said. “Listen to you turn down food. If you don’t tell me where we’re going, I’m going to pick someplace very expensive so you can watch me spend a fortune thanking you. Don’t push me; I’ll do it.”

  I laughed. “I believe you will.”

  I left the building with Helen, in search of moderately priced food, conscious of the fact that I had not told Oscar I was leaving. If that cost me toady points, so be it. I had a day to seize, and no idea how long the universe would be gracious enough to let me have it.

  o. Plan B.

  Avoiding Helen was going to be out of the question. She had already seen to that. Pursuing a relationship with her was also not an option. I didn’t belong here, and at some point I was going to go home and never return. Even setting that aside, I truly believed her life would be in peril.

  That left me the one choice somewhere in between: friendship.

  That would be a juggling act, to be sure. Helen was clearly taking an interest, but with the right application of denial, I could choose to believe she wasn’t flirting with me. So far neither of us had made any overt passes. Given enough untaken opportunities, I should be able to communicate my lack of intentions. Unless she beat me to it. One step at a time.

  In theory, this should have played out essentially the same as it had with Wendy. There were two crucial differences, unfortunately. My feelings for Wendy never moved past potential; with Helen I was already quite a bit past that. More urgently, I was willing to limit my time with Wendy for the greater good. Every moment not spent with Helen was a moment forever squandered. Even time travel rationalizations could not dim that feeling.

  All of these thoughts began to come into focus as we embarked on our lunch adventure. Outing. Excursion.

  Not. Date.

  “Funny thing,” she said, her eyes on the menu. “It turns out there’s a Nigel Walden and a Graham Walden where you work.”

  “That is funny,” I said.

  She put down her menu with a mischievous smile. “
Which one are you, Nigel-Graham?”

  “Who says I’m only one of them?” I asked. My adrenal gland immediately reminded me to be more discreet.

  “You’re toying with me.” She was still smiling.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I think you already know the answer.”

  “You’re at least two levels ahead of me, aren’t you?” Her smile broadened.

  I laughed, probably more loudly than I should have.

  “You have no idea.”

  “I’m not used to that.”

  I laughed again, more quietly. “I don’t doubt it.”

  We spent a few seconds in a game of verbal chicken, before she caved.

  “Who’s Nigel?”

  “Uncle,” I said.

  “Who you sometimes pretend to be? Who you sometimes forget you aren’t?” She held up a hand to keep me from speaking. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  She returned to her menu.

  “Good. I like the thought of you carrying an air of mystery,” she said. “Let’s not spoil it with some mundane explanation, Nigel-Graham.”

  “You should really just call me Graham,” I said.

  “And yet I’m not going to.”

  Lunch lasted about an hour. Pulling myself away to get back to work was pain. It only occurred to me at the end of the day I probably should have offered to split the check.

  elen and I saw quite a bit of each other from that day forward. Some days she would drop by the lab building when she knew I had a break. Other days I would head over to the library to see how she was settling in. Occasionally we would do something like lunch, but never anything that could actually be construed as taking our relationship to the next level. I came to think of her as my best friend. My impression was that she felt the same way. Her flirtatious behavior from our first few meetings evened out as we became more comfortable around each other, to the point where I decided it had been my imagination in the first place.

  I tried not to dwell on the fact that every time I saw her, I fell a little deeper for her.

  Early in 2145, about two months after mistakenly thinking I had seen her in the print collection, I saw Athena again for real. When I got home from work one evening, she was waiting for me in my apartment, sitting at my kitchen table. It was a little unusual for her to do that, and a little disconcerting. She looked about the same age as the last time I saw her, and much less happy.

  “How long has it been since you saw me last?” she asked, before I had a chance to say hello.

  “About three months. Are you okay?”

  She waved away the question. “I’m fine. Three months. That’s good. I think that means we’re syncing in parallel frames.”

  I hung my coat up. “I’ll go ahead and pretend I know what that means. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No.” She sat still and looked away from me. “Yes. Can I have a glass of water?”

  I put the glass on the table in front of her. She didn’t touch it. I pulled up a chair. “The last time I saw you, you were about to start running fixes with the me from a few years ago. You asked me for advice. Did I give you anything helpful?”

  She sat in silence for a few seconds.

  “That’s the last time I saw you too.” She shook her head. “I mean, no, I saw you at MIT twice after that. That’s the last time I saw you in this time frame. That was about three months ago.”

  None of this explained her rattled state. I was not used to seeing her not in control. Even when I knew her as a kid, she was never this timid.

  “Is that what you mean by synced?”

  She nodded. “When I see you here, I think our meetings are going to happen in the same order for both of us. You’re not in your home time.”

  It seemed that was all she was going to share, and I thought I understood at least the basics, so I didn’t press. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

  “No,” she said. “Sort of.”

  “Did something unhappen?”

  “No. It’s not that. It’s just… I have a lot of responsibility now. It’s weighing me down.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s not your…” She shook her head. “It’s all right. I’ll be all right.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “I’m here to run an equipment test,” she said, standing. Do you have some time right now?”

  “Cute.” I smiled.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling feebly in return. She took my hand, and the world turned inside out. When it settled, we were on a beach, at what looked like sunrise.

  “When are we?” I asked.

  She pressed her right fingers against her left forearm.

  “Hang on.” I waited a few seconds, and then she said, “1972. Plus or minus seven years.”

  “Holy crap! I’ve never been back that far.”

  “Me either,” she said. “Don’t get used to it; we’re not staying.”

  “What are we testing?”

  “Tandem jumps from non-native time frames. It worked, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Um,” I said. “Good? What would have happened if it hadn’t worked?”

  She shrugged. “Anyone’s guess. Probably something extremely confusing.”

  I looked at the dawn clouds, in various oranges and yellows. There was no way for me to know where we were, although the sun was over the ocean, so it had to be the east coast of some continent. Unless I was looking at a sunset. I really had no way to tell the difference. “I met someone.”

  Athena gave me a puzzled look. “What?”

  “I met someone,” I repeated. “She works in the library a few kilometers from my lab.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “You’re the only friend I have who knows my true situation. I guess I thought you might be the only one who would know what I should do.”

  “Uh…” she said. “That’s really a talk you should have had with your parents a long time ago.”

  “You know about Carrie Wolfe.” I said, ignoring her crass joke.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Did I ever tell you that some variation of that happened to all my high school girlfriends? They didn’t all die, but they all unhappened one way or another. I think I’m cursed. I just figured you could tell me whether I’m looking at this the right way. I mean, if I’m right about that, I should stay away from her, right? And if it’s not a curse, I should keep away just because we’re from different times, and that’s bad, right?”

  I was annoyed by how difficult it was for me to articulate the questions, but reminded myself no one had ever had to answer anything of that nature before.

  She gave me a perfect deadpan.

  “I have no advice for you.”

  I was both disappointed and nervous to hear that.

  “Do you know something you’re not telling me?” I asked.

  Her deadpan curled into a sneer. “I know a lot of things I’m not telling you, but that’s not why I won’t give you advice. You need to do what you think is right.”

  With that, we both dropped it. What I somehow hoped would be a clarifying discussion left me feeling numb, and even less certain than before. She dropped me back in my apartment and told me she would see me again. With no answers from the one person I trusted to have them, I resolved that my friendship plan was best for everyone. And if that didn’t work, if it got to be too difficult, I would simply go home.

  ne Monday morning in March of 2145, I arrived at work to learn that I was being transferred out of my research cell.

  “It turns out we were grooming you, after all,” explained Oscar as he gave me my new assignment.

  “I don’t understand. Is everyone getting reassigned, or just me?”

  “Just you,” said Oscar. “Which is bad news for me, because now I have to train a new piss boy.”

  Andrea smacked him on the back of the head,
gave me a hug, and wished me luck. Neither of them had any idea where I was being sent. No one thought that was odd. With time travel research, especially backwards travel, which is what we did, research cells were strictly compartmentalized. If any teams knew what the other teams were doing, the conventional thinking was that it would run the risk of a paradox. The fear was that if someone found an object before it was sent, then the experimenters would be tempted not to send it. No cells were ever sent to retrieve their own sent objects, and no retrieval teams were told what they were looking for until after the objects were sent. Our own tracer pucks were retrieved by another cell, for example, and the choice of one gigasecond, or roughly thirty-one years, was designed to put them far enough in the past we would have no chance of stumbling across them by accident.

  So, in this spirit of universal secrecy, no one questioned the fact that I was assigned to a lab no one else had ever used, nor the fact that I was the only person in my cell. No one questioned those things because no one knew them.

  When I arrived in my new lab, I discovered it filled with examples of every type of time travel equipment that had yet been designed, and a cardboard box on the counter with a note taped to it. The box contained the wrist modules I had used to travel to 2144 with my older self, and nothing else.

  The note simply read: Reverse engineer this. Re-invent it. Make it perfect.

  or two weeks, my work consisted chiefly of staring at a wrist module, turning it on, turning it off, and staring at it some more. All I discovered in those two weeks was that the devices had been disabled, presumably to prevent me from escaping through time with them. Apart from the obvious problem that doing so made it exceptionally difficult for me to analyze them, it also alerted me to the fact that Future Me still had no idea about the module currently bonded to my spinal column. Surely that gave me the advantage.

  Unfortunately, I had no idea what to do with that advantage.

  Apart from a four-day weekend when she was out of town visiting family, I continued to see Helen nearly every day. Some days—most days—the anticipation of seeing her face was what got me through my funk. She learned early on not to ask about my work, but she did start to notice my mood had shifted and she asked me about it. As vaguely as I could, I told her it was work frustration.