by Jason Ayres
Vanessa’s removal from history had not had the massive impact on the timeline that they had feared. Outside of Australia, the impact was imperceptible and even in her own country, most of the changes were largely cosmetic. The altered world simply carried on oblivious.
Only a few time travellers were aware of the changes, and they had made no difference to life in Oxford at all. In effect, everything had been restored to how it was before, in what was now the only universe in existence.
Over dinner in Brown’s, the night they arrived in Oxford, Henry and Harry, brightly dressed in their favourite attire, resurrected the idea that had brought them all together in the first place.
“So now that the delightful Vanessa’s out of the way and everything’s back to normal, what do you think about our original idea of sending people back into their past lives?” suggested Henry.
“Absolutely not,” exclaimed Alice, getting her protest in before Josh had a chance to give a positive response. “Don’t you think all this has caused enough trouble already?”
“That was all down to Vanessa, though, wasn’t it?” replied Josh. “We had no way of knowing she would turn out to be a total psycho,” said Josh.
“I don’t care,” said Alice. “This, and everything else that went on before we even met her, proves once and for all that time travel is dangerous. I’m sorry, Josh, but I’m putting my foot down over this.”
“What are you saying, exactly?” said Harry.
“I’m saying no more time travel – ever. It stops here and it stops now. Tomorrow morning we are going into the lab and we are going to shut it all down permanently – destroying it if necessary, including the tachyometers.”
“Are you serious?” asked Josh. “You would destroy decades of work, just like that?”
“That work just destroyed a whole world,” said Alice.
“But we undid that,” said Josh. “Everything worked out alright in the end.”
“Tell that to the people who used to be alive in the other universes,” replied Alice.
“She has a point,” said Henry. “Can I suggest a compromise, for the time being?”
“You may,” said Alice. “But I might not agree.”
“I don’t think you can risk destroying the equipment. Whilst Vanessa may no longer be a threat, we can’t rule out someone else discovering time travel and trying something similar in the future. If they do, who is going to stop them?”
“Not us if we’ve destroyed our equipment,” said Josh.
“Exactly,” said Harry, supporting his twin. “We would be foolish to destroy our only chance of foiling them if such a situation arose.”
“OK,” conceded Alice. “It’s a valid point. We’ll put everything into a high-security storage unit and I’m going to take charge of the key. I’ll have to have a very good reason to give it up. Are we agreed?”
“Agreed,” said the others in unison.
“We’ll sort it all tomorrow,” said Alice. “And let’s hope we never have reason to use those blasted tachyometers again. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to visit the little girls’ room.”
“Looks like our time travelling days are over,” remarked Henry, as Alice made her way to the ladies.
“For now,” said Josh. “To be honest, I wouldn’t mind a break from it all. These last few years of time-travelling have been pretty fraught at times.”
“What if that break turns out to be permanent?” asked Harry.
“I doubt it,” said Josh. “We don’t have an exclusive licence on time travel and there are a lot of clever people out there. I’ve got a feeling that, sooner or later, we’re going to need those tachyometers again.”
“In the meantime,” said Henry, “we’ve got something else going on you might like to get involved in. Do you remember Dani, my android from Canberra?”
“Of course.”
“Well, she doesn’t exist anymore – vanished along with most of my other research when the timeline changed, and the money taps were turned off. But it’s still all up here,” he said, and he tapped his head to emphasise his point.
“And up here,” said Harry, mimicking Henry’s gesture.
“Well, we had a feeling Alice was going to put the kybosh on our time travel reincarnation plan,” said Henry, “so we’ve come up with an alternative. We’ve got an idea that’s going to revolutionise android technology and make them practically human. Taste, touch, smell: you name it, they’ll have it.”
“Interested?” added Harry.
“Definitely,” replied Josh.
“If this all works out, we will be able to create a perfect replica body to live in,” said Henry. “It will be true immortality, and with the ability to enjoy all the pleasures of the flesh that we currently have, like eating steak, drinking wine and having sex. Let us tell you all about it.”
“Tell us all about what?” asked Alice, returning to the table.
“You’ll love this,” said Henry as he eagerly began to explain.
Josh listened, fascinated, as Henry and Harry outlined their plans, cracking jokes and playing off each other like some Hawaiian-clad comedy double act. It was so much nicer than having dinner with Henry and Vanessa.
As for time travel, Josh could live without that for a while, because it wasn’t over, that was for sure.
Someday a situation was bound to arise in which Alice would be only too happy to hand over that key.
THE END…for now. The next story in the series is Midlife Crisis.
Midlife Crisis
No Future
November 2018
Richard Kent was having a bad day.
This was nothing unusual. He had a lot of bad days. But this was an exceptionally dismal one, even by his standards. At forty-two years old he had just been dismissed from the only job he had ever known. After two decades in the police force, he had been unceremoniously booted out on his ear.
They had dressed it up and called it voluntary redundancy but he knew the sack when he saw it. He had been given an offer he couldn’t refuse: jump or be pushed. So he had jumped. And now here he was, contemplating another jump.
It was 4.30pm on a freezing cold November afternoon and he was standing on top of the multistorey car park that dominated the skyline of his home town. The building was relatively new, part of an unprecedented amount of local building going on in what was rapidly becoming just another bland London commuter town.
The sky was a huge red and gold expanse to the west where the sun had just set, a brilliant display of colour that complemented the many leaves blowing around in the autumn breeze. As far as Kent was concerned it may as well have been setting on his life.
He hadn’t just had a bad day; he’d had a bad decade. In fact, thinking back over his life in general, he would have to conclude that it had been all downhill since the Millennium.
There just did not seem to be any point in carrying on. Not only were the best days of his life seemingly behind him, but he also hated just about everything about the modern world. From the way it was treating him, apparently it hated him back. As for the future, that was a huge, increasingly alien landscape from which he would only become further and further disconnected.
Had there been anyone up on the roof with him, he could have ranted and raved for an hour about his woes. But even if there had been anyone there, would they have listened? He had vented his frustrations enough times in the pub and no one there took any notice. The core group of regulars in The Red Lion were in just as miserable a state as he was. Most of the others who came into the pub were people half his age and he had nothing in common with them. They were too busy being young, carefree and enjoying themselves. They were not remotely interested in anything he had to say.
It seemed like only yesterday that Kent had been just like them, having fun and ignoring the has-beens at the bar. He had never even contemplated the fact that one day he would become one of them.
If anyone had asked him there and then what
was wrong with his life he would have responded with: “Where do I start?” The list was endless. The security of his job had been ripped away from him, his teenage kids either ignored him or took the piss out of him, and his wife, Debs, nagged him continually. As for any sort of sex life, well, that had dwindled to the point where he could describe all the action he’d had in the past year on the back of a postage stamp.
He hated modern music, television and popular culture in general. The town he had grown up in was unrecognisable. Nearly all the great, old pubs had closed down or been modernised to such an extent that Kent considered them ruined, and all the decent shops had gone.
All of that would not have been so bad if he still had his health, but that was going to pieces as well. His once flowing locks of dark hair were rapidly thinning on top, he had ballooned in weight to eighteen stone, and his eyesight was rapidly declining. On top of all that he had suffered from attacks of gout and piles, and for the past five years had been taking a cocktail of pills every day to control his blood pressure. In short, not only was his mind a mess, his body was as well.
There was no point in moaning about it to Debs or anyone else: they never had any sympathy. She blamed all of his ills on the pub. All, that was, apart from the eyesight. This she had cruelly suggested was down to his own self-abuse after discovering a stack of hardcore pornographic DVDs that he had been hiding for years in the garden shed. His lame excuse that they had been confiscated in a police raid after being illegally smuggled into the country had not been believed.
Considering how unforthcoming she had been in the bedroom in recent years, Kent felt that she had been unduly harsh, but then she was about most things.
Other men in Kent’s situation had affairs, but this was not a road he had any intention of traversing. He had seen the mess it had got other people into and he could do without that aggravation. Besides, he was painfully aware that he couldn’t have an affair even if he wanted to. The sad truth was that women didn’t fancy him anymore.
In his youth, attractive, willing girls seemed to be everywhere. At the police Christmas parties back in the 1990s there were always plenty of WPCs who were keen for a snog and a grope in the stationery cupboard.
That sort of thing doubtless still went on but the girls doing it were twenty years younger than him now and there were a whole new breed of alpha males for them to play with. Kent had spent most of last year’s Christmas party standing at the bar doing more or less the same thing he did all year in his local pub – moaning.
The only woman who had made Kent any sort of offer in recent times was Kay, a drunken, middle-aged trollop in his local pub. He had known her since schooldays when she had been the brightest and prettiest girl in the class, but she had squandered her early promise on alcohol. These days she was well known as the pub’s local bike and Kent had steered a wide berth. No matter how bad things got, he swore he would never get that desperate. Besides, he had always maintained a strict policy of never sleeping with anyone with fewer teeth than he had.
Was that all he had to look forward to? A wife who had gone cold on him, a stack of porn in the shed and offers from toothless old crones?
As he stood on the roof with all these thoughts tumbling through his mind, all he could think about was how much better life had been in the past. As for the future, he certainly couldn’t imagine any scenario where things were going to improve. In fact he could only envisage things getting worse. Was it really worth sticking around to find out?
Why not just end it all, here and now?
Modern Life is Rubbish
November 2018
When he was young it had all been so different. Kent had really felt part of the world, embracing popular culture along with the rest of his generation. He had felt edgy, cool and at the forefront of everything that was happening.
He had been born in 1976 at the end of one of the longest and hottest summers the UK had even known. He knew this because he’d been told about it by his mother. She had complained many times about how uncomfortable it had been being heavily pregnant in the heat, sounding as if she blamed him. Kent felt this was a little harsh: he could hardly help when he was born. If anyone was to blame for the timing of the event it was his father.
He had popped out on the bank holiday Monday at the end of August, just as the heatwave broke and the heavens opened. He couldn’t remember anything about the 1970s but he did know that he had been born into a great time. It was the beginning of the glorious era of punk rock, just before the Sex Pistols were about to shock the establishment.
He had loved pop music when he was a kid. One of his earliest memories was seeing David Bowie performing “Ashes to Ashes” on Top of the Pops. Very soon after that he became obsessed with the charts. It started with listening to the weekly rundown on Sunday teatimes with his sister. A few years later, he insisted that he be allowed to come home for his lunches on Tuesdays in order to hear the brand new chart being revealed.
As the DJ read out the songs he used to try and write them down as quickly as possible in a Woolworths exercise book. Then he’d gain kudos from his classmates when he took the book back into school in the afternoon to announce the rundown all over again for them. He was only about nine or ten when he was doing this, and had bold aspirations at the time to become a Radio 1 DJ when he grew up.
By the time he was in his mid-teens he was helping out a DJ who ran mobile discos at various local youth clubs and social clubs, but that amounted mostly to fetching and carrying for a bit of extra pocket money. Rarely was he let loose on the decks and this was as far as his DJ’ing career ever went. Various other distractions such as girls and beer got in the way, so, like most of his youthful ambitions, it ultimately came to nothing.
As he became increasingly aware of the whole music scene in the early 1980s, he was thrilled at how vibrant and exciting it seemed. The highlight of the week was Thursday evening when Top of the Pops came on. Week after week, new and innovative acts filled the screen, alongside the more established artists.
He could remember so many watershed moments, such as the first time Culture Club appeared. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ was the hot topic of discussion at school the next day. Even at five or six years old all of the kids were into music in a big way. It wasn’t long until he went through a major rite of passage of every child in those halcyon days: the buying of his first single.
It was 1984 and he didn’t get a huge amount of pocket money at that time – 50p a week if he remembered rightly. Although 50p went a lot further in 1984 than it did in 2018, he still had to save up for two weeks to be able to afford to buy a record. It was very hard for him to resist spending the first week’s money on sweets, which was where his pocket money usually went, but he had put the money in his piggy bank and vowed not to touch it.
Nearly all music back then came on 7” vinyl singles. CD was in its infancy and cassette singles had not really caught on. They never did, as far as he could remember. His sister, who was three years older, already had a large collection of singles from the big stars of the day. It was she who had taken him down to Woolworths to buy that first single. How he remembered and cherished that moment! Life had seemed so simple back then and the world an exciting and amazing place, full of new experiences.
That world that he had grown up in was long gone. Even Woolworths, a shop that had been ever-present throughout his life and a monument to his childhood, had vanished, gone bankrupt during a recession which Kent blamed on reckless and greedy bankers. The reality was, it probably would have gone bust anyway sooner or later, a victim of changing times rather like Kent himself.
As he had grown up, the music scene had got ever more exciting. By the time the seemingly futuristic year of 1990 rolled round, Kent was a teenager and ready to fully embrace the whole Madchester music scene. The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Charlatans and many more provided the soundtrack to the first half of his teenage life.
As soon as he had turned thirteen he had g
ot himself a paper round. For this, he got the princely sum of £15 a week, most of which he spent on records. After much badgering, his parents had bought him a small hi-fi system for his fifteenth birthday which contained that most modern of things at the time, a CD player. He would spend many a happy hour up in his room, as well as a few melancholy ones, playing his CDs over and over again. Whatever his mood, he had the perfect album to accompany it. Other kids were into computer games or football, but Kent just loved his music.
That music just seemed to get better and better. By the time he’d reached his late-teens and started drinking in pubs, Britpop had arrived. In 1994 he’d lost his virginity in his bedroom to a girl called Mandy who worked in a Little Chef. This landmark moment in his life was played out to the backdrop of Blur’s Parklife, still his favourite album of all time. Life was exciting and full of promise. He nurtured dreams of becoming a rockstar himself. To that end, he decided to teach himself the guitar and then form a band.
Unfortunately, his attempts to play the guitar were appalling. It wasn’t for want of trying, but he had no natural ability in that area whatsoever. Just as with the DJ’ing, his interest in it fizzled out. He spent a year bumming around after leaving school, trying to decide what to do, before settling for the considerably more mundane life of a career in the police force instead.
And then, frustratingly, the music changed. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when he fell out of love with the music scene but he guessed it must have been some time around his 30th birthday.
He had been growing increasingly disillusioned with the proliferation of manufactured plastic pop in the charts in the early 2000s. Of course, boy bands and girl bands had always been there, but he hadn’t minded them so much in his younger years. Perhaps it was because a lot of them back then still had genuine talent, as well as writing a lot of their own material. But after the Millennium, there was a distinct change in the musical landscape.
