Unhappenings

by Edward Aubry

  “Find Helen” I whispered.

  I heard a vague whisper in my head in response. It wasn’t quite words, but it carried an idea, approximately equivalent to “unable to comply.” It responded similarly to requests of a jump back by one year, and a jump forward of five minutes. I was stranded in some unsavory revised timeline, without a functioning time machine. Not good.

  I wandered, attempting to be discreet. Given my appearance, I would have guessed that to be tricky, but a surprising number of people were milling about the city dressed in rags. The ones who weren’t in uniform, anyway.

  I spent my day trying to fit in, hoping I would figure out enough about my circumstances to survive them. And hoping even more that Athena would come to my rescue. But she was retired now. Without the resources of the Project, I wasn’t even sure she would be able to find me. And even if she did, my module didn’t work. I would still be trapped here, and perhaps she would as well.

  A few dozen people were arrested and beaten right in front of me over the course of the day. It was impossible to distinguish their behavior or status from the people standing right next to them who avoided arrest, including myself. I witnessed two summary executions, the bodies left in the streets for the crows and looters.

  At one point a dilapidated truck came through, and a few dozen people were pulled off the street and thrown in the back. There was no outward indication of the fate that awaited them, nor any reason to believe any of them cared one way or the other.

  And then I saw myself. On the side of a building. Ten stories high. To my confusion, this portrait was the most flattering image of me I had ever seen. I looked impeccably groomed, decked out in lavish finery, with an almost comically rakish smile. I would have thought this man was the local hero, if not for the word WANTED printed diagonally across the entire image.

  Despite every indication of horrible danger before me, I was unable to stifle a small laugh. Carlton had done this deliberately. I could walk through the city all day and all week without being recognized by this poster. He surely would know that. Like everything else, this was a taunt. A declaration that my freedom would be impossible, but my capture would never take place. Survival would be up to me.

  Those were my thoughts the moment I was seized from behind. Before I had a chance to struggle, I felt a tingle in my left arm, and the world flashed. Athena and I materialized on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, some day, some year, in the dead of night.

  “No one listens to me,” she said.

  hat was that?” I asked. “That world?”

  “That,” said Athena, “was l’Empire de la France Nouvelle. Vive l’Empereur!”

  “What year is it?”

  “Still 2149,” she said. “They’re a bit ahead of schedule, I’ll give you that. The financial meltdown wasn’t supposed to happen until two years from now. But, you know.” She shrugged. “Time travel. What are you gonna do, right?”

  “What happened to my module?” I asked. “I tried to use it and it couldn’t respond.”

  “Simple jamming,” she said. “That’s the first time he’s successfully interfered with you traveling, and he probably won’t stop now that he knows it’s possible. I uploaded a patch to your module’s OS when we jumped, so that particular attack won’t work again, but there will be others, I’m sure.”

  “Why was my poster in English?”

  “I’m pretty sure you already know why the poster was in English,” she said.

  “Because it wasn’t for anyone to see but me.”

  “Correct.” Athena sat down on the steps to the monument. “Do you want to get cleaned up first, or do you want to get this over with?”

  I looked down at my disgraceful appearance. It reminded me of how out of place I was.

  “Wait, where’s Helen?” I asked.

  “Probably worried sick that you aren’t where she left you. If she’s smart, she’s keeping her head down and not getting arrested.”

  “Or shot!” I cried. “Oh, God.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, you two were still together, even in the middle of that Orwellian nightmare.”

  It did make me feel better.

  “Oh. Wait…”

  “Yes, Father, in the interest of getting this out of the way, in this revised timeline, you two conceived me in that alley. I’m no happier about it than you are.”

  “Ugh,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Not talking about it is good, too,” she said. “So, cleaned up? Over with? Your call.”

  “Cleaned up,” I said. “It’s not like we’re in a hurry.”

  Athena and I checked into a hotel. I took a shower and shaved while she went out and got me a change of clothes. We ordered room service. Steak. Lobster. I took my time eating to pull myself together. We would have to kill Carlton again. And again, probably. And again and again and again, until we caught up with and exterminated every version of him still out there. He had obviously figured out how to use his multiple frames of reference to replicate himself, but we had no idea how many of them there were. This was about to become just like our adventures cleaning up Carlton’s apocalypses, but we would be on the offensive, for as long as it took. I wondered if I would ever see Helen again.

  “What about Baby Carlton?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “What if we kill him? Before any of this can happen? Will that end it?”

  Athena drew the gun from under her jacket and placed it on the table with a bold thud. It was bigger than I remembered it being, and I remembered it being pretty big.

  “Is that going to be you, then?” she asked. “Will you put the bullet in the baby while his parents watch? Did you see what this did to grownup Carlton? What do you think a slug from this thing will do to a soft little baby?”

  “If I have to,” I said. I could feel the lobster having second thoughts about being digested.

  “Well, you don’t.” She put the gun back in her holster. “Because, to answer your question, no. It wouldn’t end this. The versions of him still out there are still out there. He’s a traveler. You can’t undo a traveler that easily.”

  Setting aside her description of infanticide as “easy,” I asked, “Then what do we do today?”

  “Today we kill this version. Try to find a point in his history before he does any damage, and take him down. That’s what we do today.”

  I took her hand. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  The world flashed. We were back in Paris, but an earlier, less police state Paris. I could see Carlton across the street, talking to a boy of about ten. They were laughing. Carlton handed him something. An envelope, a package, hard to be sure at this distance.

  “We can’t do this in front of a child,” I said.

  “Wait for it,” said Athena.

  They laughed again, and Carlton patted him on the head, then walked away from him. The boy walked idly down the sidewalk, inspecting the object in his hands. Carlton was moving pretty quickly now, and we were still standing there.

  “Now?” I asked.

  “Soon.”

  I watched her keep a bead on Carlton for half a block. Then, Carlton was enveloped in an orange, crackly halo, and shrunk out of existence. Opportunity lost.

  “Now,” said Athena, a hair too late, but she was already moving.

  Toward the boy.

  “Carlton!” she shouted when she was about three meters behind him. He stopped and turned, giving her just enough time to put the gun against his head. I was still catching up when I heard the shot. And the screams.

  The boy was decapitated. Athena took the small packet from his dead hand. I felt her own hand on my wrist, slippery with the child’s blood, and we flashed out.

  e materialized on my back lawn. It was the middle of the day. Assuming Helen still worked, she would be out of the house, which was preferable because I didn’t want her to see her daughter covered in little boy head fragments. Athena tossed the package away in one direction, th
e gun in the other, fell down and wept. I sat next to her, doing what I did best: feeling helpless.

  When she finally pulled herself together, she asked for the package. I brought it to her, trying to get as little blood on me as possible. She tore it open with no such consideration.

  “Plans. Money. A recipe for dictatorship. I wonder how long he was grooming that little shit for his rise to power.” She handed the packet to me. “Trash.”

  We went inside. Athena took a bath while I laundered her clothes. She borrowed an outfit from Helen while they were drying.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “Now we spend the rest of our lives doing this job, or as long as it takes to clean up all the Carltons out there. Assuming we can do that faster than he can make more of them.”

  “I’m not getting married,” I asked. “Am I?”

  She shrugged. “That’s kind of up to you. To be honest, my primary interest in your relationship was for it to make as far as today.”

  I stared at her. “Are you really that mercenary?”

  She got up and hugged me. After all we had been through, after what she had just done, at her base she was still my little girl. She kissed my cheek.

  “No, Dad. I’m not that mercenary. I love you. That’s real. But my purpose in protecting you has always included protecting my birth. I can’t be undone. Not literally. But if you and mom hadn’t gotten this far, if I was never born… This me wouldn’t be the same. It’s hard to explain.”

  “Then don’t explain it,” I said. “You are my daughter. It’s my biological imperative to put your survival above my own. Also, I love you too.”

  “Thanks,” she said, but there was no gratitude in it, no love. Only exhaustion. “So, are you ready to end this?”

  I pictured a life of perpetual violence, taking my revenge against this man over and over, and in doing so protecting the world, and protecting Helen. But protecting her would mean losing her. We would never marry. She would raise our daughter alone, while I waged a war across time for years. And that daughter would become this woman of extraordinary strength, and terrible sadness. But they would survive. They both would. It would be worth it.

  “Let’s go.” The world flashed.

  e materialized in the park. It was that same day. Carlton’s parents were blissfully enjoying their time out with the baby.

  Athena turned on me.

  “Why are we here?” she demanded.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You brought us here! Why?”

  I held up my hands. “I was following you! I had no idea where we were going!”

  “We were going Carlton hunting! Not this!” She looked at her arm. “Did you do this? Did you? I should cut you out right now! Chop off my arm! I’d rather do without!” She paused. “You must have! How else?”

  I would say she had gone completely insane, but she had much better training with her implant than I ever did, and more time using it. Clearly, she had learned how to communicate with it, and it with her. They were arguing now, over whether it had brought us here against her will. I had no idea whose side to take, if any. It occurred to me I had seen some variation of this before, multiple times, when she appeared to be arguing with herself. Suddenly she looked up.

  “You!” she shouted. “You did this!”

  And now I was lost. Was she screaming at God? I found this alienating in more ways than I could describe, but more than anything I wanted my little girl to be all right. And she was not all right.

  “Athena?”

  “What?” she snapped at me.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening right now.” I also had a growing concern about the attention she was drawing, but that appeared to be none, so far.

  “Of course not,” she said. “How could you know?” Her tone instantly became kind, nurturing. “I never told you. All these years. I couldn’t.” She stroked my cheek. “Not that you would have believed me.”

  I tried to imagine anything even less believable than my life for the last twenty years, and came up blank.

  “Can you tell me now?” I lost her attention. She began ranting at the sky again.

  “Is this how we do things now? Is this how it ends? No second chances you said! No second chances! Give me my first chance at least! You owe me that much! After all I’ve been for you! The things I have done to heal you!” It was the phrase “no second chances” that clinched it for me.

  “Athena?” I asked carefully. “Are you talking to Time?”

  “Yes,” she hissed without taking her eyes off a point somewhere directly above us.

  This was territory so unfathomably new for me that I had no tools to manage my journey into it.

  “What is Time telling you?” I asked, desperately hoping it was something close to the right thing.

  “Nothing!” she shouted at me. “Not a Goddamn thing!” She looked up again, and repeated even more loudly, “Not a Goddamn thing!”

  There was no cognitive dissonance effect that would keep people from hearing this. And yet, they all went about their days as if nothing at all were happening. I was paralyzed with anxiety. Athena’s rage at Space-Time brought elements of our entire relationship over the course of both of our lives to light. I thought back on those moments when she broke away from me and spoke in fragments to herself. She had been talking to Time.

  She had been talking to the voices in her head.

  “Why do you think Time can hear you?” I asked.

  “She hears everything,” Athena said, a bit predictably. For a touch of originality, she then added, “Psycho bitch.”

  “Does she talk to you?”

  She brought her head down. The rage had drained out of it, replaced with her sadness, a quality I had grown to know far better than I ever wanted.

  “No,” she said. “Not anymore. Not like she used to.”

  “What did she say?” I asked. “When she used to talk to you?”

  “That I was her favorite. That I was special. Unique. That I was her little girl, and that I had big work to do for her.”

  At these words, my heart disintegrated. My daughter had spent her life believing she was on a holy mission from Space-Time itself. How many warning signs had I seen of this? How many cries for help? What could it have been like for her to carry out these assignments of urgency and violence, all the while certain she acted on behalf of an abstract entity only she could reach? How much damage did I help her do to her own abused psyche?

  “Did she tell you to steal the module?” I asked, bracing myself. “When you were fifteen?”

  She glared at me then.

  “I stole the module because I wanted to meet my father! I wanted to know that he was more than just the man who broke my mother’s heart! You left her so empty she never talked about you! But she didn’t have to. I heard enough from her friends. I spent my entire childhood hearing about the villain who tore the universe apart for the most selfish imaginable reason. Not for power. Not for heroism. He did it for lust! That’s all I knew about you, and I wanted it not to be true. I wanted to meet you, and know that you weren’t that man.” And then the tears started. “I wanted to know that the only thing Mother ever told me about you was true. I wanted to know you did it for love.”

  I was stunned. So much to absorb at once.

  And all I wanted was to hold my little girl and make it all better, but when I reached for her, she shrieked, “Don’t touch me!” and threw her hands in front of her.

  “I did do it for love,” I said, desperate to find the words that would diminish her pain.

  “That doesn’t make it right! Don’t you understand what you’ve done? Carlton West, for all his horrors, has nothing on you!”

  Athena was falling away from me at the speed of light now, and tearing me apart in the process. I fought past the pain to find my daughter again.

  “Something good came from all of this,” I offered. “We had you.”

  “You raped Time!” she scr
eamed, then began wailing, finally curling up into a ball on the lawn. “You raped Time,” she sobbed. “And I am Time’s baby.”

  I stumbled. Fell hard. Athena lay on the ground only a meter from me. It may as well have been the span of creation.

  “Please don’t mean that,” I begged.

  She crawled to me then. I sat still, unsure what to do, until she rested her head on my lap. I stroked her hair while the sobbing tapered out.

  “I don’t want to mean it,” she squeaked. “Oh Daddy, I’m so sorry. I don’t want to mean it.”

  “Shhh,” I said, with no idea which one of us I was trying to soothe. “If we’re not careful, someone’s going to call a cop.” I meant it as a joke. Something, anything to shatter the unbearable wall we were building between us now.

  “They can’t see us,” she said. “She’s protecting us. Like she always does.”

  The delusions went on. I tried to counter with science. “The cognitive dissonance—”

  “What do you think causes that?” she said. “That’s not a real thing. That’s her. What do you think lets you travel exactly when and where you want to go, when the technology can barely handle seven years? That’s her. It’s always been her. She protects you, because she needs you.”

  “For what?” I whispered.

  “To make me,” she said. “That’s what makes you different. That’s why you and Mom couldn’t unhappen. You made something unique, and the universe can’t abide the possibility of losing it. I’m the glue that holds you together. I’m the girl who shouldn’t be. I’m an anomaly. A cosmic curiosity.” Then the sobbing came back. “I am an abomination.”

  “No!” I said, holding her closer. But even as I protested, some of what she said rang true. Maybe there was something to the theory that our connection through this impossible child had protected us from shifting with the world around us. Not some cosmic entity pulling strings, but a consequence of our actions across a field of energy we still did not properly understand.