by Jason Ayres
“Fair enough,” said Josh. “But before I open my new multiverse tourism agency to you two, let me take a few trips first, just to be sure.”
“Don’t worry, that was our intention – right, Charlie?”
“Absolutely,” replied Charlie. “He can be the guinea pig.”
“Good, well, that’s all settled, then,” said Josh. “Now then, whose round is it?”
Chapter Seven
July 2055
In the month following that evening in the pub, Josh began shifting sideways into other universes on a daily basis.
Just as on his previous forays through time, he kept a meticulous record of every journey, noting changes in the different universes as he went in a handwritten notebook. Although the tachyometer recorded all the technical details of each trip, he still wanted to keep a written record, just in case anything should go wrong.
In theory, the tachyometer ought to function wherever he should find himself, even if he ended up somewhere with no electricity. It drew its power from the kinetic energy of the rotation of the planet so it wasn’t as if he would have to plug it into a charger. But he knew he couldn’t become too complacent. Every time he jumped, he knew there was an element of risk.
So far, he had not encountered any problems. Each time he shifted into another universe, he was successfully able to return to his own, which he had named Earth One. He was easily able to navigate his way home using his universe’s signature. As he had described to Peter and Charlie, this was based on its age and number of atoms at his time of departure, allowing for his own body mass. This measure was as clear an identifier of a universe as DNA was to an individual human being.
He could also use the tachyometer to scan for the signature of different universes and analyse them, even without visiting them. As he continued to take measurements he began to be able to do all sorts of clever things with the information. He soon worked out how long the duplicate universes had been in existence. It seemed some had been around for only days, other for years, and some for centuries.
If all of these really had been created by him, then it posed some interesting questions. The furthest he personally had travelled back in time was 1974, yet there were universes that were thousands of years old. If he had created them, he either hadn’t done it yet, or they had been created by somebody else – possibly another Josh.
The idea of exploring further back in history fascinated him, but mindful of the increasing significance of changes made far back in time, he had held off, so far. It was a project for the future when he had more experience with what he was doing.
All of the universes he had visited so far were pretty similar to his own. He hadn’t found any radical differences, even in one he visited that was millions of years old. He hadn’t found anything like dinosaurs still roaming the Earth or that the whole planet had been taken over by aliens.
The latter would have been unlikely in any event. There was nothing he could envisage doing in the distant past that would somehow entice an alien invasion from a distant galaxy. Whatever changes he made to the universe were seemingly confined to events on Earth.
The first universe he investigated in detail was one that had apparently been in existence for only a couple of years. He couldn’t find any differences at all in this universe from the one he was currently living in. When he arrived there, another Alice was in the lab waiting for him, while apparently his counterpart from that universe had just left on exactly the same experiment.
Josh assumed the lack of changes must mean that it was a universe that he had created during one of his early experiments, such as going back a few minutes making little changes like swapping flavours of packets of crisps. These were hardly things that were going to affect the future destiny of the world.
After a few similarly uninspiring jaunts, he turned his attention to the matters that had begun all of this in the first place, namely Lauren and Alice’s dreams.
Identifying a universe that had come into being on Halloween 2029, the date of Lauren’s death, Josh stepped sideways into that time to find out if everything they had theorised about it was true.
When he arrived in the lab, there was another Josh and Alice already there. They didn’t seem particularly surprised to see him – this sort of thing was happening a lot, but when he explained he was from another universe, he soon got their attention.
It seemed that in this timeline, this Alice and Josh had concentrated their efforts purely on time travel, and had not even considered the possibility of travelling between universes. That was the first difference. Over the next hour, the three of them sat, drank coffee, and discussed in detail the different paths that events had followed in their respective worlds.
It turned out that this was indeed a world where Dan had killed Lauren back in 2029. Josh listened, fascinated, as his counterpart described how their timeline had deviated from his own since that time.
He and Alice described how they had dealt with the problem of what to do with the time bubble when Peter emerged in 2041. In their universe, Dan had wriggled out of taking the blame for killing Lauren, even though the team all knew he had done it. To punish him, they had hatched a plot to lure him into the time bubble and send him twenty-two years into the future.
In their world, after they had got rid of Dan, Josh and Alice had continued their time travel experiments, but with Lauren dead, the subject of her strange dreams was never brought up. Josh never developed an interest in the multiverse and concentrated his research on time travel alone. He finally unveiled his version of the tachyometer to the rest of the team during a barbecue at Charlie and Kaylee’s house in 2049.
After that, the Josh of their universe had begun his travels back into time, unaware that he was creating alternate timelines as he went. Later, after Dan emerged from the time bubble he had eventually figured out what Josh was doing. He had then attacked him and stole the means to travel back into time in an attempt to return to his own past. Ultimately this had culminated in him returning to the scene of Lauren’s demise, saving her, but causing his younger self’s death in the process. This was the timeline in which this Josh and the others currently resided.
Lauren’s survival was what Josh would consider a seismic change, one that he classified as a nine on his Gardner scale. There were all sorts of implications. Lauren hadn’t had children in his world, but what if she had? Children would be born into the world that weren’t born before.
The effect of that on the long-term timeline was potentially huge after a few generations of breeding from stock that simply didn’t exist in this world. It wasn’t difficult to see where the William the Conqueror theory had come from. It may not have happened in this universe, but presumably it would in the other universe Alice had dreamt about. There she had had children by another man.
Despite the changes in the timelines, there were still fixed points that were common to both universes. One was that meal at Mario’s in 2040. Another was the barbecue in 2049, which both Joshes remembered. There were differences between what happened at the barbecue, though. The most obvious was that Lauren was present at one but not the other. The other major change regarded the nature of the demonstration Josh gave.
In the universe where Lauren was alive, as well as demonstrating the time travel capabilities of the device, Josh also revealed that he was close to understanding the nature of the alternate universes and how to travel between them.
When Josh and his counterpart compared tachyometers, it was quickly clear that Josh’s, capable of shifting between universes, was a lot more advanced than his other self’s. Eager to learn its secrets, his counterpart pestered Josh for more information.
This became a little uncomfortable for Josh, who at one point thought the other Josh was going to try and take it off him, so persistent were his attempts to let him examine it. He found this quite unsettling. Could he trust his other selves to all have the same personality and values as his own? Up until now, he had assumed tha
t their behaviour would be consistent with his own, but could he always be certain of that?
What if he met a Josh who had suffered a bad life, nothing like his own? Would he be angry, bitter, and resentful? He tried to imagine what he would do in such a circumstance. Would he be capable of stealing his counterpart’s life, by seizing the tachyometer and using it to escape his miserable existence? What if he met a Josh who had had a completely different upbringing in a hostile world? What would come to the fore, his nature or nurture?
So far he hadn’t met anyone like that, but the more he travelled, the more universes he wanted to see. It was a seriously addictive pastime and soon the trips began to take over his whole life. He was away more than he was at home. As soon as he got back from one trip he was itching to go off on the next.
This didn’t go unnoticed by Alice, who confronted him over it one day in the lab, as he was eagerly explaining to her about plans for his next trip.
“I’ve been analysing all the stats I’ve got on the various universes I’ve been to,” he said, “and I’ve discovered something really interesting.”
“What’s that?” said Alice, barely attempting to feign interest. Once as excited as he was by all their work, she was feeling increasingly jaded at whiling away her life listening to Josh’s sole topic of conversation.
He didn’t notice the obvious boredom in her voice, but then he rarely did. He was so fond of talking nineteen to the dozen about his favourite subject that he was usually oblivious to her reaction. She had become a sounding board, someone to nod and ask questions in the right places. It gave him time to breathe during his many lengthy monologues.
Pausing only to take a sip from the glass water bottle in his right hand, he eagerly launched into telling her about his latest discovery.
“It’s more than interesting, fascinating in fact. I’ve spotted something really unusual that seems to have taken place in the past, causing multiple universes to be created from a single point in space and time. Allow me to elaborate.”
He loved nothing better than a demonstration, an analogy, or a combination of the two. Draining the last of the water from his glass bottle, he held it out in front of him and dropped it on the solid, wooden floor of the lab. Instantly it shattered, with a crashing sound that sent tiny shards of glass in every direction.
“What did you do that for?” said Alice, annoyed.
“It was all part of the presentation. Susie, can you clean that up please?”
The robot cat that sat in the corner of their lab and doubled as a cleaner meowed electronically in acknowledgement. Gliding swiftly and silently across the floor, it began scooping up the larger pieces of glass with its metallic tongue.
“Good girl,” said Josh, before continuing. “Now, at the precise moment when that bottle hit the floor, it split into thousands of tiny fragments, spreading outwards in a shock wave from the centre. Now what if something similar could happen with the universe?”
“What would you suggest dropping it on?” asked Alice slightly sarcastically.
“That was just an analogy,” replied Josh. “To illustrate that I’ve identified a single point in space/time where a similar sort of effect seems to have taken place, creating multiple universes. And what’s even more interesting is that about half of them seem to exist not only at the point of creation, but also solely in the past – almost as if they are stretching backwards in time from that point, not forwards.”
“And you want to find out how this happened, I suppose?” asked Alice.
“Of course,” he replied, enthusiastically. “That’s the whole point of a mystery. It’s there to be solved.”
A whirring sound began, akin to that of an automatic hand dryer, as Susie sucked in the remaining shards of glass using her futuristic hoovering skills. A few seconds later there was a ping sound and a hatch opened on the robot cat’s back.
“Clean up complete,” announced Susie in a feline voice. “Bottle reconstituted containing 99.89% of the original material.”
The reassembled bottle, looking as good as new, emerged from the hatch on Susie’s back. Recycling had come a long way by 2055 and this was just another piece of technological wizardry that was commonplace in these times.
“Thank you, Susie,” remarked Josh, and the cat purred its acknowledgement.
“Look, Josh,” said Alice. “I know how much you enjoy all this, but seriously, don’t you think it’s about time we started to take a back seat from it? We’re in our fifties, for goodness’ sake. We’ve been doing this now for three decades, and I, for one, could do with a break.”
“But there’s so much still to discover, and so many more worlds to explore,” protested Josh.
“That’s as may be,” replied Alice, “but quite frankly, I’d like to spend a little more time exploring this one and in this time. Can’t we knock all this on the head for a bit and go off on a long holiday somewhere? Maybe even travel around the world? I want to do it now, before we get too old.”
“There’s no need to worry about getting old anymore,” said Josh. “Not with the technology we’ve got now. I’m planning on living another hundred years at least. Possibly forever, if the technology to upload brains arrives in time.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. The average lifespan was already well over a hundred, and Buckingham Palace had recently had to employ extra staff to keep up with sending out all the cards. People were replacing their worn-out parts as easily as they changed spark plugs in a car. Nearly every vital organ could be replaced by organically grown replacements, incredibly advanced manufactured replicas, or hybrids of the two.
Only the brain could not be directly replaced, but the trials Josh was referring to about uploading a whole brain into a computer or robot body were at an advanced stage. Such were the incredible complexities of the body’s most vital organ there were still many hurdles to overcome, but the human race was rapidly reaching the point where immortality was becoming possible.
“Really?” asked Alice. “I’m not sure I want to live forever if it means sitting in this lab for all eternity tinkering with time travel. In fact, I’m not sure that everyone living forever is a great idea in any case. We’ve got ten billion people on the planet already. How are we going to feed them all?”
“People have been saying the world is overpopulated for over a century, but we’re managing alright, aren’t we?” said Josh. “There are a lot less starving people in the world than when I was a kid. I used to read dystopian sci-fi books when I was growing up which painted gloomy pictures of a futuristic world at war, fighting over basic resources like water. None of that has come true. Look at the advances we’ve made! You’ve only got to look at the Sahara Desert to see that.”
He was talking about the advanced terraforming techniques that were transforming places like the Sahara into lush, tropical paradises. They produced not only incredibly high yields of genetically modified crops, designed specifically for those environments, but new places to live, too. The Africa of starving millions that popstars had once banded together to raise money for was a distant memory.
“There’s only so much room,” said Alice. “We’re bound to run out of space eventually. It’s not just the people, it’s the robots, too: there will be as many of them as there are of us at the rate we’re going.”
“Why should we run out of space?” asked Josh. “Don’t forget about Mars, there are over a million people there already and that’s just the beginning. Why can’t we spread out across the galaxy? There’s room for all.”
“It takes weeks to get to Mars: how are we going to travel to other stars?” asked Alice.
“The technology will come,” replied Josh. “It always does. There are no limits to what we can achieve.”
There was no point arguing with him, decided Alice. He always had an answer for everything. But she refused to be outmanoeuvred.
“Grr, you always do this,” she protested.
“Do what?” he asked.
&n
bsp; “You try and side-track me with all your clever arguments. I don’t care whether we are going to live forever or not, I want a break from all of this. Like I said before, I want a holiday and a long one – six months at least and preferably a year. It’s not like we can’t afford it with the money Oxford have been paying us all these years. It’s about time we enjoyed spending some of it. We’ve no kids and no responsibilities. What’s to stop us?”
She had his full attention now that Josh could see she was serious.
“How soon were you thinking of us going on this trip?” he asked. He wasn’t feeling happy about this at all and it showed in his voice. Anything that took him away from his precious adventures with the tachyometer was to be avoided.
“As soon as possible,” said Alice. She decided to grab the bull by the horns. “In fact, how does next week grab you?”
“I can’t go next week,” said Josh, aghast at the thought of being dragged away from his work so soon.
“Why not?” she persisted, “It’s the end of the academic year and we are both due a sabbatical. There’s absolutely no reason we can’t go, other than your addiction to that thing.” She gestured towards the tachyometer, which lay on the desk.
“But…” began Josh.
“There are no buts,” said Alice firmly. “I’ve already made my mind up. I’m going, whether you join me or not. Now you need to make a decision: what’s more important, me, or this? If it’s the latter, then you had better stay here. But don’t be under any illusions. If you let me go alone I can’t guarantee I’ll come back.”
Shocked at her ultimatum, Josh realised he was going to have to come to a compromise. Maybe she was right. He knew how obsessive he had become. Perhaps he ought to have some time away from this. And there was nothing to stop him taking the tachyometer along with him. Maybe they could both take one and then if they did travel the world, he could suggest exploring the history of some of places they would visit, first-hand.
