by Edward Aubry
I had the strange feeling that I lost her there, somehow, and I tried to nudge her back.
“Why can’t you what?”
Ignoring my question, she put her hand on my shoulder. “If you and this Helen are meant to be, you’re just going to have to spin the wheel, and hope it doesn’t land on double zero. I wish I had a better answer for you.”
I felt ill. While I didn’t expect to hear anything optimistic, I had hoped for some kind of unexpected escape clause. No such luck.
“It’s okay,” I said. “That’s kind of what I figured. Do you think you could have broken that to me without invoking Hitler, though?”
She looked over her shoulder.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think I could.”
I tracked her gaze across the park to the bench where the couple with the stroller were sitting, but by that time, they had already gone home.
or three days, I buried myself in my work, stayed late, and fled straight home in the evening. Lunch hour visits to the library ended. Athena’s comment about spinning the wheel sealed for me that I had no business perpetuating this pseudo-relationship with Helen.
Those three days were awful.
That Friday, about an hour past when I normally would have gone home, I was paged in the lab. Checking the screen, I saw Helen gesturing for me to come down to the lobby. For project security, the link was one-way so that the contents of the lab would never be visible outside it. Even knowing that, the very serious look on her face made me feel scrutinized. I sent a text to the security desk to have the monitor tell her I would be down in five minutes.
By this point, I no longer had a read on Helen’s feelings. It seemed obvious at first that she was attracted to me, but as our friendship progressed with no advances in that direction, it became difficult to tell what she really wanted. I had gone three days with no communication. If she was now offended, that might be the answer.
When I got there, she did not smile.
“Where have you been all week?” she asked. There was no anger in her voice.
I shrugged. “Working. I’m in the middle of some pretty complicated stuff,” I lied. “I haven’t had much opportunity to break away. How are you doing?”
“Is your lab locked?”
“Yeah.” This was not at all what I had prepared for. I expected some sort of confrontation, which I would parlay into us both walking away. My biggest concern had been how difficult she would make that, simply by being my magnet.
“Good,” she said. “Because we’re leaving.”
“Oh,” I said. “Um, do I have time—”
“No.” With that, she turned on her heel and walked to the door. After a fraction of a second of hesitation, I trotted to keep up with her.
“Where are we going?” We had only gotten a dozen meters or so from the building.
She stopped and gave me a scolding look.
“Really?” she said. “Really. Where are we going.” She tapped my chin with her finger. “Where… is your sense of adventure?”
At that simple touch, I could feel myself blushing. I hoped it was dark enough not to be obvious. I also hoped it was just a tiny bit obvious.
“I honestly have no idea.”
“See, this is your problem. Trust me, okay?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
She walked me to her car. It took us about twenty minutes to get to our destination, a high school campus across town. As she hunted for a parking space on the lawn, I took in the lights, and the music, and the Ferris wheel and tried to remember the last time I had gone to a carnival. Then I tried to remember the last time I really let go and just had fun, and came up blank.
“I had no idea this was here,” I said.
“Well, I’ve known about it for a few days, but a certain Mister Busy Pants never came by to hear about it.”
I winced. “Mister Busy Pants?”
She frowned. “Yeah, that’s no good. I meant to say something super witty about you being too busy for me. It sounded funnier in my head. Come on.” She got out of the car and ran for the entrance. I caught up to her just in time to see her scan her card at the gate and watch it spit out a string of dozens of paper tickets. “The rides are on me. You can buy the food. And you better win me something!”
I silently vowed to do just that.
y first order of business was apparently to buy Helen a wad of cotton candy several times the size of her head, which she subsequently explained she had no intent to share. I made multiple attempts to win her a stuffed animal, all but one of which ended in failure. I was tempted to submit myself to the carnie who was offering prizes to any mark whose weight, birth month, or age he was unable to guess within three relevant units. For simple irony, I wanted to ask him to guess my age (correct answer: seventy-eight), but that internal joke would have fallen flat as soon as I produced my extremely genuine-looking fake ID.
We partook of the haunted house, which made Helen laugh so hard her face was covered in tears before we were halfway through. We rode side by side on alternately oscillating horses on the carousel, on which I dated myself somewhat by asking about the brass ring (memo to self: those no longer existed, even as legend, by 2145). I was reluctant to try any of the more thrilling rides, but Helen refused to go on the Ferris wheel with me until I had gone with her on the Zipper, which turned out to be every bit as bad as it looked on the outside.
Her need for imaginary danger satisfied, Helen agreed to go up on the wheel. It was quite a bit taller than what I would have expected to be portable. As much as the apparatus aesthetic of carnivals had remained constant for many, many years, evidently the technology had covertly improved. We waited ten minutes to get to the front of the line, and another ten as we experienced the start and stop of other riders boarding. At one point in this process we were held in place at the very top for several minutes. From there, we had an excellent view of not only the carnival itself, but also the entire surrounding town. Looking over my shoulder, I was able to make out the lab complex, several kilometers away, just barely. It was after dark at that point, and the lights from countless edifices and vehicles decorated the landscape in a way that was both mesmerizing and exhilarating.
I turned back to tell Helen something about some aspect of the view, and with her in sight, everything else disappeared. She wasn’t looking at me; something in the distance had captured her eye, and in her appreciation of it, she smiled unselfconsciously. Nothing of note from that vista could compete with the visage of that tiny expression of joy in her face. For all its simplicity, it may have been the most perfect moment I had ever experienced. Her eyes turned to mine. That smile expanded, just enough to communicate that the moment was a shared one, and then she went back to whatever she had been watching, ever so slightly but significantly happier about it.
I would carry on with my polite and timid denial that we had nothing beyond a friendship, but from this point on it would only be for show. Like it, love it, or fear it, this was a date.
And the danger that presented to her was anything but imaginary.
y immunity to unhappenings in my own future turned out to be an illusion. It took more than a year before I started seeing things change in ways I could actually detect, but those changes were real. Most likely, trivial things had been unhappening all around me that whole time, and I simply hadn’t caught on yet.
The weekend after Helen took me to the carnival, several observations put me on my guard. Saturday morning, I found four leftover slices of pizza in my fridge, and was unable to recall when I might have put them there. Hardly damning evidence, to be sure, but noteworthy. I threw them out. On Sunday I noticed that a coffee shop I used to frequent had moved. Again, I could not recall how long it had been since I last went there, but it didn’t seem like it had been that long ago.
Monday clinched it. First thing in the morning, I saw an unfamiliar face behind the security desk. Wendy usually worked Monday mornings, but not always. As I passed the youth,
I asked him, “Wendy off today?”
“Who’s Wendy?” he asked in response.
I had become adept enough at wrangling out of awkward situations like that. One smooth expression of confusion, and I went straight upstairs.
It took me two hours to establish that Wendy was still alive. In fact, she had at one point worked in this building, but quit about three months prior. That would mean she was working here during the stretch of time that we almost dated. Most likely, every significant interaction we had was still part of our history. I would have to ask her to be sure, but I couldn’t see myself doing that.
Regardless of the details, it was clear that whatever force governed the retroactive revisions of my life operated in this time frame just as it had in my own. The fact that I had coasted for so long in the apparent absence of this phenomenon only meant I had been blessed with a very fortunate year. Now, all bets were off.
I had allowed myself to believe Helen and I were on our way to some sort of relationship, which would have been the first for me in my adult life. That belief had now been shattered. Whatever stirred there for now would have to be ignored or extinguished. Worse than that, the timing of this new spate of unhappenings—even as mild as they were—made it impossible to outright reject the notion of my curse.
I had considered the possibility of happiness, and the universe had punished me for it.
o I threw myself back into my work, for whatever that was worth. After many weeks of no progress whatsoever, accompanied by the nagging suspicion that lack of progress was exactly what was expected of me, I did something irresponsible.
The reality was that I did not have the background to understand the theory I was supposed to be applying, nor did I have the engineering savvy to design, construct, or reverse engineer a time travel module. This all remained true even after I managed to crack Ainsley’s notes. I suppose “crack” is an undeserved credit; Ainsley’s notes, in translated form, had already been included in the materials I was given upon my transfer. I discovered that weeks after traveling into the past to steal them.
The quantity of materials I had been given to study was ponderously large and bafflingly indexed, and buried deep in them was Ainsley’s life work. By 2145 they were historical documents, and although still closely guarded secrets, the person guarding them was Future Me. It turned out that Ainsley had correctly grasped enough of the basic principles of time manipulation that he was able to construct a rudimentary jump field generator. Unfortunately, all it did was generate the field. It was not of sufficient power or specificity to apply the field mechanically to any physical object. However, the space-time distortions it created were quite measurable, and it was a huge leap toward what would eventually become functional time travel.
I also learned that palladium-nickel alloys were the most efficient jump field conductors yet discovered, after nearly one hundred different materials were tested. Ainsley had been working with pure palladium, hence the ingots in the case. In 2092, the amount I stole held a value that represented a significant proportion of his operating budget. Apparently the theft—never solved—set the project back several years. Oops.
Having learned that I hadn’t learned enough, and in an act of dire frustration at both my inability to advance the time travel project and my inability to resolve my feelings for Helen, I fell back on the one resource I knew I had. It was time to begin experimenting with the module in my arm.
I knew it had capabilities beyond the simpler modules Future Me used to bring me here. I also knew that unlike those modules, the one in my arm still worked. So, step one of my experiment was to ascertain how precisely I could use it to travel. I honestly had no clue what I would learn from this that would be of any value, but it was the only thing over which I had any semblance of control, so I ran with it.
Thus, one afternoon, alone in my lab, I said out loud, “Take me back five minutes.” My surroundings flashed, and then I was standing in my lab. Everything looked exactly as it had before I spoke, with one exception: the lab included another instance of me.
“Wow,” he said. “I guess it works.”
“Traveling back five minutes?” I asked. He nodded. “You were about to try that?” He nodded again.
“I… This is much weirder than talking to the old guy,” he said.
I couldn’t argue with that.
“In five minutes you won’t have to worry about that.” I looked around the lab, then back at him. “I have no memory of this,” I said to myself, and by “myself,” I do not mean him. He wasn’t able to make that distinction.
“What do you mean?”
“This event,” I said. “I have no memory of myself appearing in this lab from five minutes in the future.” I stared at him. “I have no memory of being you.”
After a beat, we both said simultaneously, “What does that mean?” He laughed, but it was obviously nervous laughter.
“I think it means we just learned something about the nature of paradox. Or alternate timelines. Or any of a dozen other aspects of time travel we haven’t sorted out yet.” I looked at the clock. “You have about two minutes before you need to take a trip five minutes into your past.”
“To become you?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said, very quietly. “I guess you’ll find out.”
Two minutes later, he spoke the same magic words I had, and vanished. This episode had given me a great deal to think about. For the first time since I started on this research more than a year prior, I felt like I was gathering useful information. However, seeing him literally vanish before my eyes made me realize there was an aspect of time travel that in six years had never occurred to me to question. Why didn’t anyone ever notice when I spontaneously appeared somewhere, or blinked out of existence? Athena was usually as subtle as she could be, but I know there were times when we traveled to and from crowded areas in broad daylight. How on Earth had we been getting away with that?
Finally, I had something to study for real. With luck, I might even be able to let it supplant Helen as the foremost thing on my mind every waking second of my life.
ell me about paradoxes,” I requested.
Athena’s visits had come to be welcome respites from the stress of my work with time travel, and the stress of my pseudo-relationship with Helen. My impression was that she also saw them as a respite from the stress of her own job, which I imagined put my own troubles to shame. She came around about two or three times a month, we did lunch, or went for a walk, and then she would go home. We had fallen into a routine of pleasant socializing, and conversations about Baby Hitler or time travel curses had fallen by the wayside by tacit mutual consent. This day I broke that agreement.
“That’s new,” she said.
“Humor me.”
She thought for a moment.
“Zeno claimed that motion was impossible, because any traveler would have to traverse half the distance from her starting point to her destination, and then half the distance that remained, and then again, and again. As she would need to do this an infinite number of times to cover a finite distance, she would never arrive at her destination. There’s also a great paradox about a game of chance with finite payouts and an infinite expected value.”
“St. Petersburg,” I said impatiently. “I know that one. That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant,” she said with equal impatience. “Why are we talking about this?”
“Because I need to know.” I waited for a response, and got none. “I traveled back in time and met myself,” I added.
Her face dropped. “Why?”
“Because I was stuck. I have no idea how to do what Future Me is asking me to do. I had to do something to get myself jump-started, and it was the only thing I could think of.”
“How far back did you go?”
“Five minutes,” I said. She buried her face in her hands.
“And then you had a conversation with yourself,” I heard her say through her finger
s. “And now you only remember one half of it.” She looked up. “Am I right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Is that bad?”
She sighed. “Not necessarily,” she said without elaborating.
“If I am not supposed to be doing things like that, you’re going to need to give me some warning. I don’t understand what you can and cannot tell me.”
She laughed. “Oh, I can tell you anything I want. There are just a lot of things I don’t want to tell you.”
We stared at each other.
“Did I change the past, or create an alternate timeline?”
“Yes,” she said. “And no. There are no alternate timelines. There is just the one.”
“I don’t understand. If that’s part of my past now, why don’t I remember it?”
“Because you’re a traveler,” she said. “You exist in multiple frames of reference simultaneously. That’s why your life unhappens but no one else’s does. Actually, everyone’s life unhappens all the time, but they unhappen right along with it, so they don’t notice. You don’t get that luxury. If you had a mind to, you could travel those five minutes backward and murder yourself in cold blood. You could speak at your own funeral, then go on to live another eighty years.” She waited for a response, but I was too busy feeling the blood drain out of my face to say anything. “Aren’t you glad you asked?” she said finally.
“Not even a little bit,” I said.
“Well, you should be glad. Because that effect is exactly why your future self has no idea we are having this conversation.”
I pondered this in silence.
“Is there a reason we don’t want him to know about it?”
Athena’s eyes went a little wider, and she looked away.
“Don’t,” she said. “I know. I’m trying.” Unable to make sense of this jump shift, I had the sudden and chilling thought that she was no longer speaking to me, and not precisely speaking to herself either.
