Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel

by Michael Bunker

  “I know most of that, Sarah. I went back in time too, that day when you went back at the racetrack. I had something in my life that I had to try to redo, too. My dad died of lung cancer when I was twenty. I went back and took another shot at getting him to quit smoking. I had figured before I even went to the track in Phoenix that you were planning to do something like you did, and that you might negate the timeline and my invention of the device, so I already had my device set to the time and date I wanted to go to before I approached you. When I saw you push your button, I pushed mine.”

  Sarah lifted her face and looked at him. “So you have all your memories of our friendship, of me being your running partner, of the night I stole the device?”

  Paul’s full lips tilted up in a slight smile. “Yes, I do.”

  A crushing wave of hurt fury washed over her. “But you never gave me any acknowledgement in Portland! I was practically stalking you, and you acted like I was invisible. Why?”

  Paul rose and walked to the window. “That was pretty hard. But I felt I had to. First of all, you stole the device from me. If you had just asked me for it, and told me why you wanted it, I would probably have let you use it. So I was pretty hurt. And let’s face it Sarah, you were in Vegas trying to game the system. You didn’t tell me why. I didn’t know about Charlotte. When you came up to me last year, I thought you might be trying to get close to me again to steal the device a second time. And you always told me that you had wanted to get a university education and be beholden to no man. And there you were doing it. I didn’t want to stand in your way. It was just easier to pretend I didn’t know you.”

  Sarah sniffed out a sob. “I see.” She did, sort of. “And when Charlotte came to you—why didn’t you try to save her? You could have come back earlier and prevented her from jumping out of the car.”

  “Charlotte said that jumping out of the car and having to go to rehab made her get her head on straight. She cleaned up. But I don’t know how much you going to jail helped with that. There’s always a risk of redoing too much and changing the timeline completely. I didn’t want to do that.”

  “I see. Well, thank you for coming back today and helping me. I assume you’re going to go back to 2013 now.”

  Paul turned. “I’m not sure about that. Charlotte told me something else.”

  Sarah lifted her chin. “What was that?”

  Paul hesitated, staring at her with his brilliant blue eyes. Sarah stood up and risked approaching, skirting him like a skittish cat, her legs wobbly, a small ember of hope springing to life in her heart.

  “She said… she said you had feelings for me.”

  “Oh.”

  This was hopelessly inadequate, but Paul continued talking. “I had loved you for so long, all those years of training together. But you seemed so damaged, so impenetrable. I had given up hope.”

  “I was.”

  “And now?”

  Sarah sifted through her collection of memories. Redoing things couldn’t completely erase them. Charlotte’s death, her mother’s death—twice—and Jake’s murder all still threatened to drag her under. “I’m still damaged,” she said slowly. “But I’m not impenetrable.”

  They stood and looked at each other for a few seconds, not saying anything, the tips of their fingers touching.

  “Did you find that when you went back, your memories of the previous timeline faded?” he asked, finally.

  She nodded. “Just a bit though. It was like new memories were being written on top and my body was resetting to be my younger age. The memories just got a bit fuzzier and maybe less important, just like really old recollections of my childhood. I forgot details, but I don’t think I forgot any of the important things.”

  Paul pressed his lips together. “It was like that for me too. And for some strange reason, Madonna’s ‘Crazy for You’ became my favorite song this time around. My buddies had a good time with that one.” She saw the flash of his white teeth in the dim light, but then his face grew more serious. “Listen. I could go back to 2013. But I’m not sure if I want to.” He paused and took a slightly firmer hold on her hands. “I don’t know if you could come with me. For you, that would be traveling into the future—using the device I brought back from my ‘present.’ And even if you can travel to the future, we have no idea where you’ll be—or with whom—in 2013.” He paused. “I was thinking maybe we could stay here—together—and try to get this relationship right this time.”

  The fragment of possibility in her heart blossomed into a cathedral of hope. She risked taking a step closer to him until the edges of their clothing and bodies grazed each other. He pulled her the rest of the way to him, and the lips it seemed she had been waiting a lifetime for found hers.

  When he released her, she was breathless and shaking, and had no doubts about how she felt about him.

  “When you showed up in Phoenix, you said something,” she said. “You said you invented the device because of me. What did you mean by that?”

  Paul offered a faint smile. “It seems I invent the device in every timeline, so there must be a lot of factors that drive me to it. But in that timeline, it was all your talk of redoing races, that you always have a second chance. It got me thinking about second chances…” Paul trailed off, and he lowered his eyes to stare at the floor. “There’s something else I need to tell you.” She stiffened, but he didn’t let her go. “I don’t know what the physiological impact of living over again has on the body. If I stay, I’ll be living this period of my life again, and I’m…” His voice broke slightly. “I’m not sure how many times I’ve done this.”

  “What?” This admission threatened to sink her. Only the closeness of his body kept her from going under. Just. A small life preserver in a turbulent current.

  Paul lifted his eyes to hers again. “I’m not sure how many times I’ve gone back and relived my life. It’s possible I’ve done it maybe four, maybe five times, maybe more. The memories keep writing on top of each other, and my body keeps rejigging. It seems like I remember the most recent timeline—the one just before the one I’m living—fairly well, but even parts of it start to fade, and I only have a vague sense of the previous ones, or that the previous ones even exist. It becomes addictive, the opportunity to redo. Thank God I haven’t tried to change history, or who knows how much I would have bollixed things up.”

  “Oh.” This wasn’t what she had expected. Had he had countless other lovers, wives, children?

  He tightened his grip on her hands, and it sent shivers down her spine, but her head spun from his proximity and his words. “When I went back in time when we were both in Phoenix, I’m not even completely sure it was about my dad, although I told myself it was. It’s possible that I was more afraid that if you went back and changed the timeline—such that we never met and I never invented the device—I would lose all my memories. I think maybe I was hanging on to those jumbled memories like a junkie. So I jumped too. And then my device disappeared for the first time ever, so it seemed like the timeline had finally been changed such that I wouldn’t invent the device. And I swore I wasn’t going to. I was going to stop the cycle. So I didn’t pay attention to you, and eventually you stopped running with the group—I didn’t know it was because you were in jail—and then 2012 came and went, and I didn’t invent the device like I had before, and I thought I had stopped the cycle.” He took a deep breath. “But then Charlotte found me, and told me what happened to you, and… I had to. So it wasn’t that I hadn’t invented it, I just did it a year later—in 2013, which I think is why it disappeared when I made the jump from Phoenix in 2012 in the previous timeline.”

  “I see.” She let go of his hands, stepped a few feet away from him, folded her arms over her chest and shuddered.

  “Wait,” he said. “You don’t understand: the one constant, through all my timelines, has been wanting you. Each timeline has brought me closer to you. I thought we were finally going to be together the last time, and then you took off, and
I was stupid. But now we’re together… and maybe we can finally get it right. Please, let’s give this a chance. I’m going to throw the time device into the river and we can just be together.”

  He moved closer to her again, and she could feel the warmth of his body and see the glitter of his eyes. She wanted to wrap her arms back around him, but she didn’t let herself.

  She let out a whimper before she regained control of her voice. “But the fact that it’s still here, now, means that you will invent it in the future, right?”

  “I think so. Maybe. It’s confusing. I don’t want to, but…” He sighed. “Yes, I think that’s what it means.”

  She met his eyes. “If it’s so addictive, how do I know you won’t use it when we have an argument, or something goes wrong for you at work, or you just want a redo? What about when the magic of our relationship fades and you just want to experience the early days of it again, or when you meet someone else and want to go back and have a relationship with her while you’re young?”

  Paul tore his hands through his hair. “I love you. I have always loved you. I don’t want to redo anything. I just want you. I promise.”

  Sarah almost laughed, would have laughed, if she hadn’t been shaking so hard. Hadn’t countless hapless cowboys crooned those very words to mistreated wives and girlfriends? And they only had access to beer and other women, not time travel devices.

  “Go to the future and get me one then. Program them so they’re linked together. So if one of us goes back, or forward, we both go.”

  Paul frowned. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Consider it like mutually assured destruction.”

  “Oh, that’s a good way to start off a relationship.”

  “I don’t think we have any other choice.”

  Paul sat heavy on the bed. “I won’t be able to invent them until 2012 at the earliest. There are some breakthroughs in quantum physics and some developments in plastics that need to happen first. Why don’t we destroy this one and buy ourselves eight years to be together without worrying about it? Then we can revisit this conversation in 2012.”

  He looked up at her, his eyes earnest. Sarah stared at him, this man that she loved, and memories flicked through her mind, memories of her practicing medicine alone, of other men, of Charlotte and her mother, of being in this room before. She had had these moments previously. She had always thought they were just some strange imaginings or déjà vu… but perhaps it was multiple lives of redoing.

  “Wait. Have I…? Have I been doing this, too?”

  Sarah saw the flash of alarm in Paul’s eyes before he buried his face in his hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know. All I know is that we’re together right here, right now, and whatever happens in the future, I want to have this time, these eight years, and maybe forever. Please, please can we throw the goddamn device away?”

  “But what difference does it make, if you can invent the device in 2012, what’s to stop you from coming back and living this life again? I would never know. This could be the third or fourth time we’ve had this conversation. Our lives could be an endless loop of redos. We don’t have eight years.” Sarah’s voice had taken on a panicked edge.

  Paul crossed the space between them and took her hands in his. “No, no. Stop.” He took a deep gulp of air and seemed to steady himself. “You’re right. We don’t. But what relationship ever does? We have right now—that’s all anyone ever has. This very moment. I love you, and I want nothing more than to be with you, even if I do it a hundred times.” His voice cracked. “Please, please say yes.”

  She stood and stared into those beautiful blue eyes that she had looked into so many times, maybe more times than she even knew. Could she keep doing this? Should she?

  Slowly she let her forehead fall into the curve between his shoulder and his neck and breathed him in.

  “Did Gelana win the marathon in London?” she murmured into his sternum.

  She felt his body shudder in a slight sob and his arms snake around her. “You better believe it, and she broke the record.”

  * * *

  They tossed the device into the St. Mary a mile downstream from where Charlotte had drowned a timeline ago, or perhaps many timelines ago. Charlotte was safe in the hospital, recovering from her jump from the car, cleaning up. Her mother had agreed to leave Jake and come back and live with Sarah in Portland for a bit.

  Paul’s hand in hers felt absolutely right. Solid, like there was no chance of time travel. Like he would never leave her.

  Had it felt absolutely right before? She might never know.

  Perhaps they had both become cats chasing the mice of perfect lives.

  As the gunmetal waters rushed past, Sarah tried to quell the fear that moving water always wrought deep within her psyche. Memories, like water, had a way of seeping into fissures and breaking things down, dissolving the present with the floods of the past.

  Perhaps it was time to try to jettison all the memories and start fresh.

  The river of time had once seemed to her to be inexorable, but now it seemed filled with loops, eddies, and backwaters. Or perhaps it was more like the ocean: endless, with no clear navigable path.

  The time travel devices would resurface in their lives. Somehow. She knew it, and he knew it. But for now, having the ability to change pasts and futures somehow had made the present moment, and Paul’s body next to hers, seem all that more precious.

  A Word From Jennifer Ellis

  Although I tend to think in novel-length arcs, I do write short stories. Since I tend to frame everything in a skiing context, I liken writing novels to skiing big open bowls, where you have the luxury of taking long, beautiful, swooping turns. Writing a short story is more like skiing the trees, requiring tighter turns and more careful maneuvering. More thrilling perhaps, but riskier. And writing a short story about time travel throws a bunch of potential sinkholes and cliffs into the mix. Fortunately there is no shortage of those on which to train at my local ski hill.

  Being from Canada, and having done most of my informal training in the CanLit tradition, I have often worried that my short stories are not sufficiently gritty. My first experience writing a short story that had a happy ending was for a reading at a Christmas event, and the audience actually cheered when I finished. Of course I then turned around and immediately rewrote the same piece with a grimmer ending to submit to literary magazines. In the spirit of taking risks, I decided to go with a more positive conclusion for my piece in this collection.

  I have written about time travel before. My middle-grade series focuses on the question: What would you do if you could see your future? How would you live? The first novel in the series, A Pair of Docks, was released in 2013, and the second novel, A Quill Ladder, will be out in December 2014. I wanted “The River” to focus on the opposite question. What would you do if you could change your past? Just because you can travel in time, does that automatically mean you will? It seems that I spend a lot of time imagining both potential futures and pasts. My adult novel, In the Shadows of the Mosquito Constellation, set in a dystopic climate-changed future in the Canadian West, will be available in May 2014.

  Links to my novels, tips on indie publishing, and general musings on the writing life can be found on my website: www.jenniferellis.ca

  I am very grateful to David Gatewood for inviting me to be a part of this anthology. I am honored to be part of a collection with such amazing independent authors.

  A Word in Pompey’s Ear

  by Christopher G. Nuttall

  Being a woman in academia can be quite a chore.

  It’s not so bad if you want to take Women’s Studies or Cultural Relativity 101, but it’s really quite dispiriting if you wish to study Ancient History. Yet I’ve always been fascinated by the Roman Republic, thanks to a father who read Cicero and Caesar to me when I was a little girl, so studying it seemed a dream come true. Or it would have been, if it hadn’t been for some of the academics I had to
impress.

  “Julia, I read your paper with the greatest of interest,” Professor Rowe said. “But the idea that Pompey could have saved the Republic is mere wishful thinking.”

  Stung, I retaliated at once. “Pompey was the defender of the Republic during the Civil War, and he managed to impose a workable settlement over Asia,” I said. “Given the chance, he could have applied those skills to Rome.”

  “But he never had the chance,” the professor countered. “And the passage from republic to empire was pretty much inevitable.”

  He paused. “It was a very well-argued paper,” he added. “But not convincing.”

  I stood, collecting my papers as I rose. It had taken me nearly a month to write my proposal for a study of Pompey’s life and just how significant he was throughout the varied problems facing the Roman Republic. And the professor had taken less than an hour to read through it and then dismiss it with a handful of well-chosen words. I understood his point—Pompey had never had the chance to reshape the Roman Republic, not after Caesar chased him out of Italy—but how could he simply ignore the possibility? History’s lessons are about what might have happened as much as they are about what actually happened.

  And Pompey fascinated me, more than I cared to admit. He seemed like a character out of myth, almost the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. He’d built an army, fought for the dictator Sulla and then for the Roman Republic… and had then been forced into battle by the Senate he’d helped to flee from Rome. What would history have been like if Pompey had managed to get his way?

  I walked into the cafe, ordered a hot coffee, and sat down to think about my next move. My paper hadn’t been precisely rejected, but it was unlikely I would get any funding for a long-term research project. It wasn’t a sexy project, nor was it something the faculty would fear to deny funding to, out of concerns about accusations of racism or the like. I had a feeling that I’d have to go back into serving as a research assistant—or, more likely, find something else to do with my life. But there are few calls for an ancient historian outside the universities of the world.