by Jason Ayres
“You knew him?” asked the waitress.
“We worked with him at the university,” replied Josh. “Do you know how badly he was hurt?”
“I don’t know for sure, but it didn’t look good. He wasn’t moving,” replied the waitress. “They took him away in the ambulance.”
Josh put his arm around Alice who was now openly sobbing.
“Thank you, you’ve been most helpful,” he said to the waitress, as he led Alice away.
“How can this have happened?” sobbed Alice. “To Henry of all people. He didn’t deserve that.”
“No – he certainly didn’t, and nor do we. I think we need to get off the street right away. We could be in danger.”
“What do you mean?” asked Alice. Despite the tears running down her cheeks at learning of the likely death of their friend, Josh could see a noticeable shift as a look of fear appeared in her red, tear-stained eyes.
“I’m sure Henry’s death was no accident. Think about it. He tells us all about how he’s figured out how to merge universes, altering history. Then he and Vanessa have that huge row and she storms off, saying we haven’t heard the last of it. Then, within the hour he’s been erased from the evening’s events and we find out that he was the victim of a hit-and-run before he even got to the restaurant.”
“Vanessa must have done it,” said Alice. “I knew she was obsessive, but not psychotic. I had no idea she would go this far.”
“I’m more worried about how much further she might potentially go,” said Josh. “She’s somehow changed things in our universe that we can see, even though the waiter couldn’t. That means she must have used the exact method Henry was describing earlier, which we haven’t even seen yet.”
“If she’s got that ability then how can we ever be truly safe again?” asked Alice.
“With great difficulty,” replied Josh. “We can protect ourselves to some extent in the here and now, but what if she decides to go into the past and do something to us? It could be before we even met her. We wouldn’t be aware we were in any danger.”
“We’ve got to stop her,” said Alice.
“Without a doubt, but we don’t even know where she is at the moment,” said Josh. “That’s why I think it’s vital we get back to the lab right away and try and figure out exactly what she’s done. Henry must have left some notes about what he was doing, she couldn’t have figured it all out herself.”
“What about poor Henry?” said Alice. “We really ought to go up to the hospital and see if he’s OK.”
“You heard what the waitress said,” replied Josh. “He was in a bad way. I doubt if there’s anything we can do to help him.”
“If he’s still alive he might at least be able to shed some light on what happened,” said Alice.
“That’s a big if,” said Josh, immediately regretting it as he saw fresh tears forming. “Sorry, I know how much you liked Henry. I tell you what, let’s go to the lab first and see if we can find anything out, and then we’ll go and check on Henry afterwards.”
Together, they headed back towards the lab, but they would discover when they got there that they were already too late.
Vanessa had indeed done exactly what they had suspected. Filled with rage, she had gone directly to the lab after leaving the restaurant, taken Henry’s notes and the tachyometer with Henry’s latest upgrades, and taken them back to their hotel.
It didn’t take long to figure it all out. Then she transported herself back into her own body, several hours earlier in the middle of the afternoon.
One feature of Henry’s new upgrades meant that she had the option to transport the tachyometer into the past with her, even when she was only sending her mind back. This left no need for a return trip, and also removed the possible complication of having two Vanessas running around.
Her arrival in the past coincided with her arrival back from Australia, before she had gone to the hotel to meet Henry. This time she had no intention of going there so she rang him, explained she had been delayed, and suggested she went straight to the restaurant and met him there. An unsuspecting Henry had accepted this without question.
As soon as she got back to Oxford she went and hired a high-performance hybrid car, designed for maximum acceleration. In the 2050s era of self-drive, carbon-neutral vehicles, such cars were now a luxury item, taxed beyond the means of ordinary citizens by a government determined to meet its target of a 100% driverless network by 2060. For Vanessa, of course, finances were not a problem.
About half an hour before the restaurant booking, she parked up on St Giles’, ignoring the ever-present surveillance cameras that would issue her with a fine for stopping in a restricted zone.
The latest cameras were incredibly advanced. Long gone were the days of attempting to identify miscreants from grainy, washed-out CCTV. Vanessa knew that it would take the police a matter of seconds to identify her once they got into footage later, but that was of no concern to her whatsoever.
She had the tachyometer which was the perfect device for disposing of the evidence. She could travel back and give herself an alibi for the time of the murder. She could make the camera evidence disappear, as well as any paperwork to say she had ever hired the car. Or she could frame someone else for what she had done, Alice maybe. That would amuse her.
The possibilities were endless: as long as she stayed ahead of the law and had the tachyometer in tow, she had all the time in the world. As she sat in her car and waited for Henry to appear, she mulled over all the other things she could do.
The one thing she craved more than anything was Josh. It was infuriating that her feelings for him were not reciprocated. Why couldn’t he see that she was so much better for him than Alice?
Alice was an obstacle and so was Henry, but obstacles could be removed. If Josh didn’t love her in the current version of the world then she would mould it and shape it until he did. There was nothing Henry and Alice could do to stop her. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be a Henry anymore, and once he was out of the way, she would turn her attention to Alice.
Framing her for Henry’s murder would be satisfying but nowhere near as satisfying as killing her, and there were so many possible ways she could do it. The thought of hurting people didn’t faze her one bit. As far as she was concerned, they had asked for it – they should have known better than to get in her way.
No one was going to stop her getting what she wanted – no one. She had trampled over people all her life, but up until now she had been forced to keep at least one foot on the right side of the law, even with all the hush money at her disposal. Now, possession of the tachyometer had taken those restrictions away. She could do anything.
She smiled, an evil grin spreading across her face. She felt almost drunk on the power that the tachyometer was giving her, cackling away in her mind like some crazed, clichéd B movie villain screaming out, “Nothing’s going to stop me now!”
And now the time had come to carry out her first act of vengeance as she saw Henry walking up the road past the Lamb & Flag, wearing his stupid, blood-red Hawaiian sunset shirt.
It was an appropriate choice of outfit, she felt. It would complement the blood from his battered body that would soon be soaking into it.
She switched on the engine, knowing he would soon have to cross the wide expanse of St Giles’. She had already disabled all of the existing safety modes in the car, enabling it to avoid all collision detection and speed limiting.
She had also disengaged all location and tracking devices, effectively rendering the car off the grid. This was something the average person didn’t have any control over but for someone of Vanessa’s technical abilities it was a matter of relative simplicity.
She was parked about 200 yards behind Henry’s position, nicely poised for when he began to cross the road. As soon as he did so, she began to move forward slowly, waiting until he had reached the central reservation. He looked across to see her car trundling along a good hundred yards or more awa
y, and took the decision he had plenty of time to get across.
As soon as he was committed to crossing, she floored it. The acceleration was phenomenal, far beyond anything she had experienced the last time she had driven a car. The real beauty of it was that, even though she was using a petrol engine, modern technology had rendered it virtually silent. There was no squealing from the highly sophisticated smart tyres either.
Quite simply, he never heard her coming. The slick, black, sporty car accelerated to nearly 70mph in less than three seconds and hit Henry cleanly, right in the centre of the bonnet, sending his body tumbling up and over the car, as Vanessa instinctively ducked, but she managed to maintain control.
Looking up, she felt enormous satisfaction at seeing his shattered body rolling over and over in her rear-view mirror, broken arms and legs splayed out at impossible angles as the waitress serving drinks at the café on the corner let out a scream.
“Goodnight, sweetheart,” she murmured, relishing the kill. As his body came to rest, he disappeared from her mirror and her life, as she sped on up the Woodstock Road safely away from the scene of the crime.
She thought about torching the car which even with all the tracking devices disabled would still contain old-fashioned evidence like fingerprints and DNA, but then she thought, why bother? She could use the tachyometer to come back and clean up anytime. For now, the best place to go was into the past where her crime had not yet been committed.
She drove west to the village of Eynsham, about five miles west of Oxford, and parked it on an affluent-looking street where it wouldn’t look out of place. Then she transported herself, both mind and body, back in time by a week, and went to find accommodation for the night.
She was quite happy with a basic B&B she found on the High Street. It would be a good place to bed down and figure out her next move.
There was a rumbling in her stomach which reminded her she hadn’t eaten for hours, so she decided to wander out and see what the village had to offer.
She wound up at a traditional pub with a restaurant in the old part of the village, where she enjoyed the most delicious home-cooked food, as well as a few drinks and a chat with the locals. It was all nicely low-key and relaxing after what had been a rather dramatic day.
Her newfound friends she met in the pub found her delightful and charming, having no inkling whatsoever of the sort of person they were drinking with. This amused Vanessa no end. To think she could wipe out the lives of any one of these people anytime she wanted.
Right now, she had the power of life and death over every single person on the planet. Earth was her plaything and, in her eyes, that was good enough to make her a god.
After the pub closed for the night she made her way back to her accommodation, where she lay awake for an hour or two, dreaming up all the delicious ways in which she could erase her enemies from history.
When she wasn’t thinking about that she was focused on Josh and how she could manipulate time to change the way he felt about her. Eventually she slept, fitfully, with dreams in which she was a princess and Josh was her prince, and the two of them ruled over a medieval kingdom where anyone who stood in their way had their heads chopped off with a good, old-fashioned axe.
It was a most satisfying dream, but it ended in disappointment when she woke up. It had been interrupted just as she and Josh were about to consummate their passion in a large, four-poster bed in front of a roaring fire in the heart of the castle from which they ruled over the peasants.
The cheap double bed in the small room with the plastic tray full of sachets of cheap coffee and tea bags was a serious comedown, but no matter.
Soon she would rule the world just like in her dream, and Josh would be her consort.
Chapter Thirteen
May 2058
Rain was rattling on the bedroom windows as Alice awoke the following morning, but it couldn’t dampen her spirits any further. They were already as low as they could possible go.
She had been left in the depths of utter despair after the events of the previous evening. After she and Josh had left the crime scene, things had gone from bad to worse.
Back at the lab, they were horrified to discover that all of their equipment was gone. Not only was the tachyometer with Henry’s upgrades missing, but also all of the mind transference machinery that had been brought over from Canberra.
That meant there was no way that Josh could bring back the consciousness of his latest experiment. He would have to stay in an alternative 1988 for the time being. How he would cope, Josh had no idea. Sometimes he told his subjects he was sending them back in time, sometimes he didn’t. This was one of the latter.
Josh and Alice also discovered that every single scrap of information relating to the work they had been doing had been totally purged from the system, along with hard copies of all their research, from printouts to Josh’s handwritten diary. There was absolutely nothing left.
Worst of all, the hidden safe beneath the floor where Josh kept the spare tachyometers had also been emptied. He and Alice had never told anyone about that, so how Vanessa had found out about it they had no idea.
Realising there was nothing more that could be done at the lab they decided to travel up to the John Radcliffe Casualty Department to find out what had happened to Henry.
There they were dealt the not unexpected news that Henry had died, leaving Alice completely distraught. The two of them eventually got home after 1am, by which time she was exhausted by the sheer emotional stress of it all. Despite her fears about what might happen next, sleep had still come quickly.
She turned to discover her husband was no longer in bed, and she could hear coffee cups clinking downstairs. Alone with her thoughts for a while, she contemplated the future and what it might bring. She had worried for years that one day something like this might happen and it seemed those fears hadn’t been unfounded.
The bedroom door opened, and Josh came in carrying a tray containing a cafetière, two cups and various breakfast accompaniments. Bless him: at least he was trying to make her feel better.
“Coffee and croissants,” he announced. “Just like when we were in Paris.”
“Thank you,” she replied gratefully. “The condemned woman ate a healthy breakfast, eh?” she said.
“We’re not dead in the water yet,” said Josh with far more confidence than he was actually feeling. “I’ll find a way to stop Vanessa.”
“How exactly?” asked Alice. “We can’t follow her, she’s got the tachyometers. And there’s no knowing what she could have done by now. Look at the way that lab was stripped so quickly. She couldn’t have done that in a couple of hours. She must have been travelling back in time to do it.”
“She hasn’t got all of them,” replied Josh. “I wouldn’t be so stupid as to leave everything at the lab. I still have a MK IV version hidden away in my office here. I checked this morning and it’s still here. There’s also another I left with Peter in case of an emergency. I rang him first thing and he still has it.”
“But with the MK IV you can only go back in time to a duplicate universe,” said Alice. “You can’t go back in this one, which means you can’t stop Vanessa.”
“That’s true, but luckily he emailed me all the notes of what he was working on a couple of days ago. She clearly didn’t know about that so she’s not infallible. I can figure out what to do to upgrade this tachyometer from the email, given time.”
“How much time?” said Alice. “We may have very little to spare. Vanessa could be plotting something right now.”
“Probably not enough,” admitted Josh. “Right now, all we can hope is that her bloodlust stops at Henry and she doesn’t come after us.”
“You saw the look in her eyes, and what she said,” replied Alice. “She wants you and that makes me a target. I wouldn’t underestimate her. She’s got a reputation for being ruthless in business and you’ve already seen what she’s done to Henry. She would be dangerous enough even without t
he tachyometer. With it she’s potentially lethal. I don’t mind admitting, I’m scared.”
“It’s going to be OK,” said Josh, by way of reassurance, even though he knew it probably wouldn’t be. “Here, have a croissant. I got these from the bakery on the corner and they’re delicious.”
He picked up a knife from the tray and scooped up some jam to spread on her croissant. “Get this down you and then we’ll get on the phone and call an emergency meeting of the Time Bubble team.”
Getting everyone together at short notice wasn’t easy, but Josh insisted it was urgent enough for them all to shelve whatever they were doing to meet up later that day.
The only one out of town was Kaylee who was in a meeting down at the Met Office in Exeter, but, declaring a family emergency to her colleagues, she headed back at high speed on the Hyperloop.
They arranged to meet for lunch at the Turf Tavern, one of Oxford’s longest-established pubs that could trace its origins way back to the 16th century.
Kaylee’s Hyperloop journey took less than half an hour from Exeter. This new form of transport which fired occupants from city to city in sealed vacuum tubes could achieve speeds of up to 600mph. This meant that she completed her journey in less time than it took Lauren to travel in on the railway line from her town just fifteen miles to the north.
The pub was accessed by a small passage beside Oxford’s famous Bridge of Sighs, and as Kaylee approached the entrance, she spotted Lauren approaching from the other direction.
She waved and they rushed toward each other to share a huge hug, as they did every time they met. Then they turned down the narrow passage that led to the small courtyard where Hannah, Peter and Charlie were already waiting for them.
The morning rain had ceased, allowing them to enjoy the warm spring sunshine. Peter and Charlie had pints on the go already – they never needed any excuse for a drink, whilst the rather more reserved Hannah was sipping a glass of sparkling water.
