The Time Bubble Box Set 2

by Jason Ayres

  “I’m still struggling to get my head around this a bit. Does this mean that I wasn’t really back in the past at all, because it certainly felt like I was? Did I really do all the things I thought I did or was it just some sort of hallucination?”

  “Well, you did, and you didn’t,” replied the angel, cryptically.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Kent. “Can’t you just give me a straight answer?”

  “OK, put it this way,” said the angel. “I’ll try and explain it in terms even you can understand. Now, you know when you save a file on your computer?”

  “Of course,” replied Kent.

  “Well, you know if you hit ‘save as’ rather than ‘save’, you can create a second copy of the file under another name? So that you have a backup copy, in case you lose the original?”

  “Yes,” said Kent. “I do know how to use a computer, you know.” He was annoyed enough with the current situation as it was and the angel was not helping matters by talking to him as if he was technologically illiterate.

  “Well, it’s a bit like that,” continued the angel. “When I send you back in time, I create a copy of the universe. Let’s call it Universe 2.0. Then I let you play in it to your heart’s content for the whole day you are there. Afterwards, when you come back to Universe 1.0, I just delete the copy – job done.”

  “Wow,” replied Kent, feeling genuinely impressed. “You can really do stuff like that?”

  “It’s my universe,” replied the angel, with a hint of arrogance. “I can do whatever I want with it.”

  Kent felt quite overawed and more than a little scared. What was he getting himself into here? Who exactly was this angel? Was that even an appropriate moniker for him? He was clearly all-knowing and all-powerful. If he really did own the Universe, then what was to stop him destroying it completely if he got bored with it?

  He tried to put these fears aside as more questions cascaded through his mind.

  “So time travel isn’t possible, then?” he asked. “All that stuff you mentioned about Hitler and JFK, it’s all fixed?”

  “Oh, it’s certainly possible,” replied the angel. “In fact, this town is a hotbed for time travel. You would be surprised at some of the things that have been going on around here recently. But it’s not for everyone. Travelling into the past is permissible for only a few special individuals and they have to spend the best part of a lifetime learning the rules.”

  “And you teach them?” asked Kent, wondering who these individuals were.

  “Oh no, they teach themselves. But it’s a long process. By the time they are able to make trips back in time they have been preparing for it for decades. By then they have had more than enough time to fully appreciate the implications of what they are getting into.”

  “And you allow them to change things?” asked Kent.

  “Not the big stuff, like Hitler and JFK,” replied the angel. “But occasionally I allow small, local anomalies and injustices to be corrected. As long as they don’t impact in a big way on long-term global events, then a few minor ripples in a very large pond don’t do any harm.”

  “But you can’t do that for me?” asked Kent.

  “Sorry, I’m afraid not,” replied the angel. “It’s not like you’ve really suffered any major injustice, is it? A lot of your problems are of your own making.”

  “That’s a bit harsh,” said Kent. “It wasn’t my fault I lost my job, was it? I just had a lot of bad luck. I can’t see what harm me foiling that robbery could have done to the timeline. I might not have lost my job if that had been for real.”

  “Losing your job is not the end of the world. In the long term, leaving the police might turn out to be the best thing you ever did.”

  He was echoing what Debs had said. Then he thought about the drinkers in the pub and what they had said.

  “If you allow some injustices to be corrected, how do you decide who qualifies as a deserving cause? What about Andy from the pub? Do you know who I mean?”

  “Of course,” said the angel. “I know everyone and everything that happens – past, present and future.”

  “So would you let him go back and let him correct his mistake? The one we were talking about in the pub last night?”

  The angel had no hesitation in responding, “No, because it wouldn’t do him any good in the long run.”

  “In what way?” asked Kent.

  “I just ran another timeline in my mind of what would have happened if he had won the competition,” said the angel. “He became a huge star but at a massive cost. He became not only an even bigger alcoholic than he is now, but also a drug addict to boot. He died of a heroin overdose in 2007.”

  “Oh,” was all Kent could think of to say.

  “Exactly – oh,” said the angel. “And that is why I can’t allow people to go around changing the past if they don’t know what they are doing, even if they think it’s for the best. At least in this timeline Andy’s still alive.”

  He took a final draw on his cigarette and chucked it onto the ground.

  “It’s a good job I’m not still on the force,” commented Kent. “I could have given you an £80 spot fine for that.”

  “Well, you’d have to give it to yourself, then,” retorted the angel. “The younger version of you I’ve taken my shape from used to enjoy a smoke on a night out. From what I’ve seen, he wasn’t too choosy about where he dropped his dog-ends. Besides, you wouldn’t be able to give me a fine. This is private supermarket property, so nothing to do with the police. What’s the worst that can happen? They dock me some Nectar points?”

  Kent had almost forgotten that he used to smoke and it was true, he hadn’t been too conscientious about where he disposed of his cigarette butts. He had stopped smoking not long after he had met Debs; she had made sure of that. Perhaps it was just as well, he was in bad enough physical shape as it was. A lifetime of smoking on top of the rest of his unhealthy habits would probably have seen him off by now.

  He was getting distracted by this silly conversation about cigarette ends. It was his own fault, he had started it. He needed to steer the conversation back to the topic of what he was here for. But what exactly was he here for?

  “Look, I’m not being funny, right, but if I can’t change history, what is the point of all this? What sort of game are you playing with me, is this how you get your kicks?”

  Kent was being rather bold, bearing in mind he was dealing with some all-powerful entity, but he was reasonably sure it didn’t mean to do him any harm. But he was getting flustered by the conversation. His ruddy boozer’s complexion was flushing an even deeper shade of red than usual as he struggled to get the answers he sought.

  “Relax,” replied the angel. “You’ll give yourself a heart attack. Look, there’s nothing suspicious or untoward about any of this. Everything is as I said it was at the start. I’m giving you the chance to visit any six days of your life and live those days in full. I’m trying to help you come to terms with your life in the present so you can move on into the future.”

  “Well, we haven’t done very well so far, have we?” said Kent, gloomily.

  “Admittedly, no, but you understand the rules now, so maybe you can make some better choices from now on.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me the rules at the start?” said Kent. “We needn’t have wasted yesterday’s trip on a fruitless exercise.”

  “But was it wasted?” questioned the angel. “Did you enjoy it?”

  Kent had to admit that he had. “Yes, I did.”

  “Of course you did,” said the angel. “It was a pretty good feeling, wasn’t it? Knowing you had the power to foil the robbery and to be a hero? Seeing the admiration in the faces of your family and colleagues must have given you a massive ego boost. You even had that reporter gushing all over you and she’s a notoriously tough cookie.”

  “It’s true, it was an amazing day,” said Kent. “Even though it didn’t make any difference in the long run,
it did feel great at the time.”

  The angel had presented a very solid case. What other satisfaction could he derive from playing around in the past, especially now he knew how this all worked? Perhaps it was time to look at this a different way.

  “So, if you really are going to open up a Universe 2.0 for me every time I go back, does this mean I can do whatever I want back there with no consequences?”

  “That is what it means, yes,” replied the angel.

  “Anything at all? What about if I killed someone?”

  “You don’t really want to do that, do you?” asked the angel.

  Kent thought back. There was no shortage of people he wouldn’t have wished dead at some point in his life. Did that make him a bad person, or did everyone have similar dark thoughts in their private moments?

  What about that horrible, career-driven bitch who had got him trounced out of the Met on a trumped-up sexual harassment charge? What about his so-called best mate, Glen, the snake who had ruined at least two past relationships and those were just the ones that he knew about? And worst of all, what about Gideon bloody Summerfield, the man who had just kicked him out of his job? He could certainly do with being taken down a peg or two.

  Shamefully, he even had to admit that he had fantasised about doing away with Debs on the odd occasion when she had really been making his life a misery. Of course he would never do such a thing in the real world; they were fleeting flights of fancy, nothing more.

  Universe 2.0 was not the real world but even carrying that get-out-of-jail-free card, could he in all seriousness bring himself to kill any of them? It would make a mockery of his entire career for a start. Despite Kent’s jaded middle-aged perspective, he had originally joined the police for the right reasons. He had believed in law and order and had genuinely wanted to fight crime.

  Deep down, he still held those principles and believed in right and wrong, even if life had dealt him some bad hands. Even if he did have a licence to kill in Universe 2.0 it wasn’t as if any of these people had done any devastating harm to him. They had made his life a misery, true, but it wasn’t as if they had committed some foul atrocity upon him or a member of his family.

  Under those circumstances, he might have taken up the opportunity for revenge, but then would it really be worth it? They would still be alive in his own world when he came back. The only scenario he could imagine where it might be useful would be if the perpetrator had never been unmasked. Then he could travel back to discover their identity in order to return to the present to deal with them. But thankfully, Kent’s past was free of any such trauma.

  No, there was no one he truly wanted to kill. But some of the humiliations of the past still rankled with him. Perhaps he should use this opportunity to take a less severe form of revenge on those who had slighted him. With the benefit of hindsight, he could go back and play some days out differently, purely for his own satisfaction.

  He had already made plans to visit Kay in the past, which would also give him the chance to reacquaint himself with the errant Glen. There was, however, a much more recent travesty Kent wanted to deal with first. He smiled as the seeds of an audacious plan began to form in his head.

  “Well?” asked the angel, impatiently, interrupting Kent’s train of thought.

  “Yes, don’t worry,” said Kent. “I’m not going to kill anyone. There are a few old scores I’d like to settle, though. One in particular springs to mind.”

  The angel was clearly reaching into his mind again, responding, “So I see. Are you sure that’s how you want to spend your time in the past? Wouldn’t you derive more satisfaction from living some happy moments over again?”

  “Look, there’s plenty of time for that,” replied Kent. “Just let me go back and do this one thing, and then I’ll do something nice next time to keep you happy.”

  “As you wish,” replied the angel.

  “Just one thing, before I go,” said Kent. “You’re absolutely sure there won’t be any consequences to this? I’m not going to get back here and you’re going to tell me that you accidentally deleted Universe 1.0 instead and kept the copy?”

  “Of course not,” replied the angel. “I know what I’m doing. It’s easy enough to put it right if anything goes wrong anyway. If anything like that happens, we’ll just get Universe 1.0 back out of the recycle bin.”

  “I hope so,” replied Kent, not entirely filled with confidence. What he was planning to do would certainly get him kicked out of the police force at the bare minimum. Since he was going to get made redundant anyway, that didn’t matter, but in Universe 2.0 he could find himself in serious trouble. There was a fair chance he would end the day in a prison cell, but as long as there were no consequences it wouldn’t matter. It would only be for one night and it would be worth it just to wipe the smirk off that smug bastard’s face.

  He was sick of the man and his stupid policies. He could shove them up his arse.

  “Take me back to July 2018, the second day of training in the New Forest,” said Kent.

  Gideon Summerfield was in for a surprise.

  Avenging Angels

  July 2018

  When Kent awoke on the morning of Friday 13th July 2018, his surroundings no longer came as a shock to him. He was getting used to the business of waking up in his own past and this time he knew what to expect.

  He was in a single bed in a timber-framed log cabin. It was one of several that constituted the on-site accommodation of the Greenland’s Training Centre in the heart of the New Forest. It was a twin-bedded room but thankfully the other bed was unoccupied. Most of his colleagues were sharing but Kent had managed to bag a room on his own.

  The room was very basic, designed for sleeping in and little else. It did have its own en suite bathroom, after a fashion. This amounted to little more than a panelled-off area with a tiny shower and sink, plus a toilet that Kent had to practically wedge himself into in order to sit down. As for the beds, they were little more than standard Army issue.

  It was all highly unsatisfactory as far as Kent was concerned. He had stayed in such accommodation when he had been sent on training courses in his younger days in the force, but at his level he expected better. In recent years he had attended conferences where he’d stayed in some very plush hotels, all expenses paid, including the minibar.

  Kent had enjoyed these annual events. They had amounted to little more than a back-slapping exercise for him and his colleagues, followed by the best piss-up of the year. The room he was in now was a significant comedown. It was all down to the cost-cutting that was scything through the force, courtesy of his nemesis, Gideon Summerfield.

  Summerfield had cancelled this year’s conference and informed him that, in its place, he would be sent to this godforsaken place for a two-day training event under the title of “Embracing Change”.

  Kent knew he was going to hate it, and he was right. Set in the middle of nowhere, he and all the other D.I.s from the local area had spent the whole of the first day out in the woods on a variety of team-building exercises. This was a waste of time as far as Kent was concerned. He hardly ever saw the D.I.s from the other towns so why did he need to bond with them in this way? They could have done that just as well at the bar at the conference. But Gideon wasn’t having any of that. At the start of the first day he had told them that they needed to “step out of their comfort zone”.

  He had read the brochure for the place which claimed to offer “team-building in a mature and beautiful woodland setting”. For Kent, this translated to “having a miserable time in a horrible muddy mess”. He spent the whole day wheezing and groaning as his body struggled to cope with having muscles called upon that hadn’t been utilised in years. Being strapped in a harness and hauled up to the top of a hundred-foot-tall, 300-year-old oak tree hadn’t been his idea of fun. On top of that it had pissed down with rain all day.

  The evening had not been so bad. After his exertions in the forest Kent was relieved to discover a fully stock
ed bar in the large, wooden cabin that formed the centrepiece of the centre. There was also a restaurant which was a lot better than he had been expecting. The accommodation had led him to speculate that they might be eating in some sort of mess hall but it turned out to be very impressive. Apparently the training centre also doubled as a wedding venue which explained the round tables they were seated at.

  The dinner was excellent and the alcohol had flowed freely. There were about forty delegates at the training event, most of whom Kent knew from past events. Apart from around half a dozen women, the rest were men and the majority were around Kent’s age, with very few below the age of thirty-five.

  Knowing of Summerfield’s fierce reputation, Kent was not happy when he plonked himself down at his table, right next to him. Kent had not had a huge amount of dealing with the commissioner prior to this event and had come with preconceived thoughts that he was a monster.

  However, as the evening wore on, Summerfield had come across as easygoing, friendly and funny. He was not only constantly topping up Kent’s glass with red wine, but also eagerly engaging him in conversation, asking about his family and hobbies.

  With a large amount of drink sloshing around inside him, Kent had increasingly let his guard down during the meal. In his inebriated state he felt as if they were getting on famously. Perhaps he had been wrong about Summerfield. When the commissioner joked to him about how much money he was making on the side through his expenses, Kent had foolishly let slip a few fiddles of his own.

  “You know they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” he remembered himself saying. “Well, that’s not strictly true. As long as we are more than ten miles away from the office we are allowed to claim up to £10 a day for lunch expenses. It comes in very handy, that. Every Friday we go on traffic duty on the A34 and stop off at a Harvester near Oxford for the early bird special. It’s exactly eleven miles from the station.”

  “That’s very interesting, Richard,” Summerfield had replied, without a hint of disapproval. “I’ll have to remember that.”