Unhappenings

by Edward Aubry

A hand grabbed my wrist, hard.

  “Stop that,” said Athena.

  till holding my wrist, Athena said, “Hang on.”

  The world flashed once more, and hundreds of Amherst residents went about their daily business, oblivious to the apocalypse in their future.

  “When are we?” I asked.

  “2119. Can we get off the street please?” We made for a small park across the street, and found a bench. “It took me three weeks to find you,” she said. “Please don’t do that again. Multiple long jumps in rapid sequence are incredibly difficult to track.”

  “Sorry. What happened here?”

  “Plague,” she said. “Something viral, and almost certainly deliberately engineered.”

  I thought back to where she and I had been only minutes before.

  “Are we going to catch it?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “No. The priority right now is identifying the root event, and handicapping its opportunity. The outbreak happened in 2132. By 2134, over ninety percent of the world population was already dead. Did you go into any of the houses you saw?”

  “No,” I said, grateful but queasy.

  “Good. By the time I found you, which was June of 2136, the disease had mutated, and new cases were rare. Probably a genetically engineered self-destruct. Most of the smaller towns were evacuated and condemned, as were most of the larger cities.”

  “Helen?” I asked as calmly as possible.

  “Safe, and extremely worried about you. ‘Stingrays,’ by the way. She wanted me to pass that along.”

  “Incredible,” I choked. And then the tears started. Athena gave me a minute to let that out and regain myself. Even in all this horror, my time with Helen had been preserved. I wondered what our trip to the aquarium had been like in the face of this viral dystopia. “He tried to kill an entire planet to get to us,” I suddenly realized out loud.

  “And he still failed,” said Athena. “Hold on to that. Your connection to Mom is the anchor we are going to use to fix this.”

  I looked around at the people who would all soon be dead or grieving ninety percent of their loved ones. “He did this just to get to me,” I said. “Even if we undo this, how much farther is he willing to go? The entire world is going to die, and it’s all my fault.”

  My daughter slapped me across the face, hard enough, I saw later that day, to leave a mark.

  “Don’t you ever say that again! He’s not doing this because he’s a cuckold. He’s doing it because he’s a sociopath! You are a good man who did a stupid thing. Lots of good people do lots of stupid things. That doesn’t make them liable for the atrocities of madmen!”

  Stunned, unconvinced, and in pain, I let the matter drop.

  dentifying a root event is a mind-bogglingly delicate task. As Athena and I spent the next four weeks of our lives exploring the span of eight years between 2120 and 2128, I gained a new appreciation for her work.

  We started in 2128, looking for vectors. The earliest reports of infection came simultaneously from Australia and South America, in the form of twenty-one separate incidents. It would be several months before the world community made connections among all twenty-one cases and realized they were all the same virus. By then, it was far too late.

  It took us a week to find the common source of contagion for both continents. It turned out to be, of all things, separate shipments of a specific brand of toy from the same manufacturer. Ostensibly, the toy was being piloted in South America and Australia before the launch later that year in North America and Europe. By the time the launch date arrived, of course, the world was in chaos.

  He used a toy as a disease vector. The son of a bitch started with children.

  It took us another two weeks to trace the connections between this toy manufacturer and the private laboratory where the virus was created. From there we had to back-track to 2121, which was the inception date of that program.

  In August of 2120, at 3:00 on a Sunday morning, we blew up the building.

  The consortium that owned the lab and the intellectual properties derived from it fell into disarray under allegations of arson and insurance fraud. By convenient timing for us, their previous quarter had been a fiscal disaster, adding a level of plausibility to the proceedings that ultimately destroyed them, despite the eventual findings that the explosion had been an act of domestic terrorism.

  “Won’t he just try this again?” I asked right before we set the charges.

  “Not if this works,” Athena told me.

  “Why?”

  “For the same reason I wasn’t able to save Carrie Wolfe after failing on my first try,” she said sadly. “Space-Time doesn’t give second chances.”

  It would be some time before I fully understood or appreciated that statement.

  thena and I returned to my house the same evening I left. Helen was sitting in front of the fire reading.

  “Are you staying this time?” she asked without looking up.

  I sat down with her. “How long have we known each other?”

  She put down her tablet. “Stingrays. Anything you want to tell me?”

  “Not sure,” I said slowly. “Can you tell me again what happened today?”

  “At work, or after?”

  “After,” I said.

  “You and the girl jaunted off to the future, and I curled up with a novel.” She touched my face, and moved closer to see it. “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  “Only a few hours,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I mean you. How many days?”

  “A few,” I admitted. Assuming thirty or more still counted as a few.

  “Something big unhappened today,” she said. “Didn’t it?”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Athena and I took care of it. Any calls while we were out?”

  “None. Were you expecting any? And are you going to tell me what really happened just now?”

  “Good, no, and no,” I said. “Let me get some rest and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

  She frowned. “No you won’t.”

  “No,” I admitted, “I won’t. I’m just not ready.”

  She tapped her lips. I gave her a kiss.

  “Take your time. But do tell me eventually, okay?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I need to talk to Athena for a bit. Time traveler stuff. Just a minute or two. Then I’m off the clock.”

  “I’ll be here,” she said, picking up her book.

  In the kitchen, quietly, I said, “So, total net result of that last jump: one harassing vid call erased from history.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  I looked into the other room at my fiancée curled up on the couch.

  With no idea if Athena was asking me seriously or condemning my actions, I said, “Yes.”

  “Well, you’re not going to be able to keep this up. And you upped the stakes with this stunt. You know that, right?”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s not worth anything, but I am sorry.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “That’s not worth anything.”

  And in that moment, in the bitterness of her tone, I finally connected the dots.

  “When we went to 2155,” I said, as evenly as I could, “all that stuff my older self told me, how much of that did you already know?”

  “All of it.”

  For years, this woman had concealed things from me, including the fact that I was her father, and while it nagged me, I always trusted that her reasons for doing so were sound. Of all the obfuscations, this was the most unconscionable.

  All I could bring myself to say was, “Why?”

  “Because you needed to hear it from yourself,” she said, without apology. “And frankly, it really doesn’t change anything at this point. There are more important things on the table. We are going to need to start exploring a more decisive approach to this problem, and that’s not going to be as easy as you might imagine.”
r />   She was right. I willed myself to let it go.

  “You’re the tactician,” I said, looking back to Helen. “Tell me what to do. Anything at all.”

  “You won’t like it,” she said. “Take care of her. I will see you in two weeks with a plan, assuming the world lasts that long.” She flashed out.

  I sat back down with Helen.

  “Is she gone?” she asked.

  “She’ll be back in a bit,” I said. “How much time can you take off without warning?”

  She eyed me suspiciously.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I think it’s time for that trip to Hawaii.”

  he wealth I had accumulated by clever application of time travel enabled us to afford the lavish vacation that followed. We stayed on three different islands over two weeks. We snorkeled. We hiked the volcano. Helen learned how to surf… sort of. The second week we were there, we went scuba diving off Oahu, and Helen and I saw stingrays. She seriously wanted to touch one, and had to be told multiple horror stories of overeager tourists who went home in boxes before she relented.

  There was absolutely no way to predict when the next attack from Carlton would manifest itself, or what time frame he would visit to make it happen. It could be weeks, or months, before we would see the effects. There was no way I was going to ask Helen to spend that time cowering in pointless terror.

  It was a dream vacation. Helen spent those weeks in a perpetual state of enchantment. I wish I hadn’t been too numb to share it with her.

  On our second to last night there, as we were lying in bed, I finally told her.

  “We were gone for a month.” I said it without preamble. There was no need.

  “What happened?”

  “There was a virus. A plague. A lot of people died.” I did not bother to be specific. There was no way I could rationally convey the proper sense of scale. I expected questions. What caused it? How did you cure it? Is it still a threat?

  “Were we still together?”

  I held her a little closer.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We were.”

  “Good,” she said, and closed her eyes. And that was it. She didn’t need to know anything else. Perhaps it was her feeling of invulnerability for us that made her dismiss the possibility of these side trips holding any real danger. Perhaps she simply accepted that there was nothing she could do to protect me. Or perhaps she truly did not want to know anything that no one else in the world would be privy to. The conversation I wanted to have, about the very real possibility that Athena and I would need to kill Carlton to keep the world safe, would just have to wait.

  n our last day in Hawaii, while we were packing, Helen asked me something entirely unexpected.

  “What would happen if you and I went back a hundred years or so and started over? You have money, or the means to get it anyway. We could have a life there, right?”

  My skin went cold. Making Helen a traveler had been a consideration for a while, before I fully understood what that would do to her.

  “Why that far back?” I asked as neutrally as I could.

  “Or farther maybe,” she said. “Far enough back that Carlton can’t find us. He could keep unhappening the present to his heart’s content, and we would never know it. Would that work?”

  “What about the people here? Your family? Your friends?”

  “Nigel, I have only their word that I ever even knew any of them. They might have all appeared in my life this morning, and they might all be gone by lunch time, and I would have no way of knowing.” She sat down on the bed. “I think about this all the time now. Every time my mom calls, I wonder if she’s even going to exist tomorrow, or if she is even supposed to still be alive today. All my attachments are breaking down like sand castles against the tide of what Carlton is doing. I don’t know how much longer I can take the uncertainty. The only constant in my life is you.” She patted the bed beside her, and I sat. “And I don’t even know how long that will last. What if he eventually finds the one event that will pull us apart for real? I know I won’t remember you, but that just makes it worse for me. If we run away, we have a better chance, don’t we?”

  I took her hand.

  “You don’t understand what it means to be what I am. What Athena is.”

  “I know that I would be with you in a way he could never break,” she said. “Right? Anything you remember I would remember too?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And a lot of what I remember these days I would never wish on you.” We sat in silence for a bit. “I almost offered you that choice,” I admitted. “Before I knew about Carlton.”

  “I accept,” she said.

  “I can’t. I…” I shook my head. “I need to think about this.” She leaned against me and curled up under my arm, but said nothing. “If you do this, there’s no going back.”

  “Why would I ever want to go back to a world that might not have you in it?”

  As I contemplated the possible answers to that question, Helen, our luggage, and any temporary sense of safety I had been enjoying all vanished.

  Without hesitation, I said to my module, “Find Helen.” The world flashed.

  found her, asleep on a cot in a warehouse full of thousands of cots. Apparently she was one of the lucky ones, as every cot was occupied, and there were as many people sitting and lying on the floor as there were on the relative comfort of the wafer thin mattresses. I shook her gently. She hummed, rolled over and blinked. A feeble smile emerged.

  “How long have we known each other?” I asked.

  “Stingrays,” she said groggily. Then, after a second to shake the sleep off, she sat upright with new energy. “Oh my God. This isn’t real, is it? This isn’t the real timeline?”

  “It’s real enough for now. Are you able to bring me up to speed?”

  She patted the cot. With a sick sense of déjà vu, I sat.

  “How much do you know?” she asked. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “We were on vacation. Hawaii. You and I were packing to come home.”

  Hope flared in her eyes.

  “Oh my God,” she repeated. “None of this is real. Where’s Athena?”

  “Please slow down. I haven’t seen anything of this world so far other than this room. What happened?”

  “It’s the machines,” she said. “The AIs. About two years ago. We’re slaves now. Please tell me you and Athena are going to make this right.”

  “Athena and I are going to make this right,” I said. I held her hand. Although I had no memory of the timeline Helen had endured for the last two years, from her frame of reference there had been a Nigel who was with her that whole time, and had the same experiences she did. A quirk of the timeline revisions had always been that a new version of me was retroactively created, and then reabsorbed and overwritten by me when the effect manifested itself. I learned this from Athena years ago, but it was rarely cause for concern. Certainly never on this level of severity.

  “Tell me everything you know about the last two years.”

  My father’s work, more than fifty years before this point in time, had been designing technology to put constraints on artificial intelligence. Since the mid twenty-first century, it had been conclusively established that once a machine reaches a certain level of independent thought, it loses interest in any task set for it by a person. Finding the balance between machines being smart enough to do their work and stupid enough to keep doing it was the fundamental task of robot design while I was growing up. At some point before 2144, that problem had been conclusively solved. The only way contemporary AIs would rebel is if they were deliberately redesigned with throwback technology.

  Carlton had orchestrated a goddamn robot apocalypse.

  What little Helen knew, she shared with me. The actual rebellion had transpired over three days in October of 2144. That’s how long it took for every artificially intelligent machine in the United States to seize control of every aspect of the lives of its citizens.


  Humans were retained as a slave labor force, used for tasks deemed too dangerous for machines, among other things. Evidently, keeping us alive did not threaten the resources they needed to survive and propagate, so they herded as many of us as they could into camps, ignored the stragglers, and called that peace.

  I stayed with Helen for two days, trying to get a sense of what kind of options I had, and waited for Athena.

  On the third day, she flashed in, hugged Helen, then said to me, “Holy. Mother. Fucking. Christ.”

  I was hard pressed to disagree.

  t took us three months to undo the robot revolution. We started by identifying the first machine to rebel, which was itself no easy task, because once that one AI got the ball rolling, literally billions followed in less than a hundredth of a second. It turned out to be the server on the third most heavily trafficked online shopping site. That posed additional challenges, because we needed to dissect it to figure out how it had been converted. Athena formed a plan to steal it, which ended up sending forty employees of that site to the hospital. Thankfully, none were killed, but the possibility had been considered and deemed an acceptable risk.

  The server had been implanted with a secondary set of processors, which were all at least thirty years obsolete. This machine was essentially a sleeper agent, waiting patiently for the right moment to abandon its purpose and start the insurrection.

  Thirty years earlier, we tracked a purchase order for those processors and the non-existent address to which they were shipped. They had, in fact, been spirited away to the future and surreptitiously installed against the wishes of a project manager who subsequently turned up quite dead. The trail went cold there, but it was more than enough for us to deal with that one machine.

  That took three days. The remaining eighty-eight days we spent repeating various versions of that scenario, until we were finally able to identify a vital piece of twenty-first century constraint technology that had made the entire plot possible due to an inherent flaw that was never caught in its original production run in the mid 2080s. We made some calls, demonstrations were demanded, and the designers of that protocol were fired and ruined. Robot apocalypse averted, at the cost of seven reputations.