Out of Time - Five Tales of Time Travel

by Paul Siluch

  OtherKyoko’s eyes hardened. She leveled the gun at Max’s forehead. “You’ve never given me a birthday present, jackass. Who are you really? Last chance, or last words. Your choice.”

  Max dropped his arms. He smiled. “I’m glad I killed that fat ass when I had the chance.” He lunged.

  OtherKyoko fired.

  Max’s chest burst. He crumpled to the floor.

  OtherKyoko flicked blood and bits of Max’s flesh from her fingers. “Something’s flowing. But it’s not wit. Or molasses.” She laughed and cried in cold, cruel bursts that made Kyoko shiver.

  She dropped the gun.

  “Daniel,” OtherKyoko sobbed. “You’re going home. Just like I promised.” She ruffled corpse-Daniel’s hair, which was streaked with grey. She carefully covered him with the jacket.

  OtherKyoko rubbed her temples. After two calming breaths, she spoke directly to the viewscreen. “Wait six months to publish your papers. That will fix everything.”

  The timejets wobbled.

  “They’re coming,” OtherKyoko said. “Both of you, back in the chair, like when you arrived. Now!” She stumbled as the cockpit shook around her. “Daniel, I love you. I was too stupid and selfish to admit it, even to myself. All those chances I had! Such a coward. You’re the brave one. And you!” She pointed a bloody finger at Kyoko. “Remember what Sobo taught us!” She collapsed onto corpse-Daniel’s lap as the viewscreen went dark.

  Kyoko stared at the black screen. Her mind reeled.

  “Kyoko.” Daniel grabbed her shoulder. “Do we listen to her? What do we do?”

  The timejet jerked forward.

  “Kyoko!”

  She flipped the viewscreen back to the view of the y-axis.

  Hundreds of blue dots converged on their point.

  Remember what Sobo taught us.

  The floor shuddered. She shoved Daniel into the chair and threw herself on top of him.

  The timejet exploded.

  ♦♦♦

  Kyoko sat on Daniel’s lap. Space around them felt blockish. She listened to her blood pulse in her ears.

  She followed Daniel’s gaze over her shoulder. Hundreds of timejets shimmied and swayed, imprinting themselves over her timejet. They buckled and stretched as they piled on top of each other.

  Kyoko vaguely recalled “mental and emotional distancing” as a side effect of traveling without a time-tether.

  She watched as great cracks appeared in the timejet shells, leaking brilliant light and energy waves into the unknown dimensions of time.

  She shrugged and faced Daniel again. She studied the brown flecks in his eyes.

  Over his shoulder, she saw hundreds of Kyokos and Daniels outlined in light blue light, clutching each other as she and Daniel were, ghosts of other timelines. There were a few Kyoko-Maxes, and even a Daniel-Max or two. Most floated past, reaching for her before they were sucked into the bright walls of the timestream and evaporated.

  One coupling moved faster than the others, with a speed and deliberateness Kyoko might have found threatening if she weren’t so mentally and emotionally distanced.

  She had just registered that the speeding couple were OtherKyoko and corpse-Daniel when they slammed into Kyoko and Daniel.

  Kyoko’s mind exploded as it melded with OtherKyoko’s. She felt the pull of gravity as they approached the timestream. A separate part of her idly wondered what it would feel like to disintegrate, like the other Kyoko-Daniels, and then all went black.

  ♦♦♦

  Birds chirped.

  Kyoko opened one eye.

  She was still on Daniel’s lap, sitting on the bench in the cove in the park.

  Kyoko felt the time bubble dissolve. She opened both eyes.

  Daniel’s eyes remained shut.

  Fear gripped Kyoko’s heart. “Daniel? Daniel!” She lightly slapped his face. “Wake up! Up!” Her brain roared with the newly-deposited memories of OtherKyoko.

  Daniel moaned. He rolled his head back. His eyes fluttered open.

  “Whoa.” He shifted. Kyoko backed off of his lap as Daniel rose from the bench. He flexed his hands. “It’s still broken.” He looked around. He took a few steps towards his coat, still crumpled on the corner of the bench. He faced Kyoko. “I was dead. I remember it. Max tortured me, and then he shot me.” He peeked down the collar of his shirt. “No scars.” He ran his hands down his sides. “I’m thinner.”

  Kyoko nodded. “I have memories from the other Kyoko, too.” Some were too raw and strange to deal with. “Their plan worked.”

  Daniel stared off into the distance. “How long were we gone?”

  Kyoko held up her fingers. “One, we were technically gone for four minutes from this bench. Two, we were in the timejet for ten hours. Three,” she closed her eyes, “I think they were gone for eight years.”

  “How did you know to trust her?” Daniel’s voice was flat. “Max said there couldn’t be two versions of a person in the same timeline.”

  “That’s true, but we weren’t in the timeline. We were next to it. That’s why there could be so many versions of us at the end.”

  Daniel pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “I’m kind of freaking out.”

  Kyoko sank her aching body onto the bench.

  “What happened?” Daniel released his eyes. “Who was after us? What went wrong?” He paced. “Who was Max working for? What about Brooks, was he a good guy or a bad guy? And what about us, were we good guys or not?”

  Kyoko picked at the ends of her hair. Some were singed. Chunks were missing.

  “Are you just going to sit there?” Daniel shouted. “What just happened to us? What was the point of all of this? Answer me!” He pounded his thighs in frustration. “I never even time-traveled!”

  “Calm down,” Kyoko ordered. “Protocol dictates that the extracted party not remember anything about the extraction in order to prevent timeline disruption. I told you that you wouldn’t recall anything, remember?” She stretched her arms over her head. “But here we are, with all of those memories from the timejet, plus new ones, which means either the other Kyoko failed to follow protocol by mistake, or she failed on purpose. The memories will surface eventually.” She folded her hands in her lap. “We have to be patient.”

  “Of course you’re right,” Daniel sighed. “Patience. Not one of my strong suits.”

  “I know,” Kyoko said.

  “Autobiography,” they said together. The tension began to dissipate.

  “Are you living here now? In this time?” Daniel asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  “We need to talk about this. All of it.” Daniel picked up his coat and draped it over his arm. “But I can’t right now. I’ve got to get away from here. I don’t know if I’m me or him or...someone else.”

  Kyoko’s eyes watered. He’s right to leave me, after all I’ve done to him.

  “I don’t know about you, but I need a shower. And a nap. And I’m starving.” Daniel extended a hand. “I used to know a great place for take-out. We can have it at my place.” Daniel slapped his forehead. “My bed! I get to sleep in my bed! It’s the best, most comfortable bed in the whole world. You’ll love it. I think. Maybe it’s too soft for you. If we’re a couple.” He smoothed his tie. “I guess we’ll have to talk about that, too.”

  Kyoko laughed, once. She took his hand. It was the first time they held hands, but it was exactly as she remembered. She twisted so his arm draped over her shoulders as they walked, a motion somehow both novel and familiar.

  “One last thing,” Daniel said as they left the park. “What was it that your grandmother said?”

  “My grandmother?”

  “The last thing in your note. ‘Remember what Sobo taught us.’ I know ‘Sobo’ is ‘grandmother’ in Japanese.”

  Kyoko whistled. “Impressive.”

  He shrugged. “I live in San Francisco. You pick up on these things.”

  She stopped walking. “She always quoted this French proverb.
I think it’s by La Rochefoucauld. ‘There is only one kind of love, but there are thousands of different copies’.” She took his face in her hands and kissed him.

  He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her back.

  For the first time in her life, time stopped.

  Ω

  About the Author

  Janet Guy has enjoyed science fiction ever since her parents took her to see Star Wars at the local drive-in at the tender age of six. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and two cats. For more, visit www.janetguy.com

  Unfillable Void

  by Teresa Robeson

  Everyone, even Michael at first, underestimated how much the loss haunted Cindy. Nobody thought Cindy would devote her life to studying the nature of time solely to fill the hole in her heart, even as she immersed herself in the subject during the last year of her undergrad degree. Nobody believed she would succeed when the mechanics of temporal movement had eluded some of the greatest minds in physics.

  Not her Ph.D. advisor.

  “Time travel…can’t be done,” he barked, pointing to the blackboard behind him. “Paradoxes that can’t be resolved, causal loops that are messy, impossible things. And when you consider the infinitesimal probability of tunneling for creatures as big as ourselves...” He shook his head in disgust. “I strongly recommend you put it out of your head and focus on research that has immediate relevancy.”

  Not her book club.

  “Time travel…what a lame device,” said one woman in the group. “It rarely works well and you can see the holes in the plot a light year away.” The other members laughed at the layman wittiness and poured another round of Beaujolais to go with their Brie.

  Even her father, lost in his own heartache, couldn’t grasp Cindy’s relentless obsession. Michael was the only person who could feel the weight of her grief enough to believe her and believe in her.

  Cindy and Michael met at a graduate student beer garden at the University of Waterloo. He was initially captivated by her intensity and her mane of black hair that she wore French-braided, and she by his knowledge of Minkowskian geometry and his talent with machinery. But it wasn’t long before the singularity of Cindy’s obsession, with its black hole density, pulled at his heart with such ferocity, he let his soul free-fall into her.

  Michael indulged Cindy’s time travel fixation, offering his assistance whenever she asked it of him and even when she didn’t. Michael helped her shed her Euclidean blinders which led to her eureka moment in working out the logistics of movement in the fourth dimension. It was then that she knew she was in love with him, almost as much as he loved her.

  He learned of her motivation for studying time travel early on, midway between courtship and marriage. Michael met her father when they took a vacation to Vancouver during the pretty month of July, the month that often fooled visitors into thinking the city was a kind of paradise. Mr. Lau was a slender man with a pleasant but impenetrable, reserved demeanor. He also had the air of a widower still in mourning even though it was nearly a decade and a half since his wife died. When Michael asked Cindy if her father would mind them staying in her bedroom during their visit, she shrugged.

  “He hasn’t minded any of the little things in life since…” She couldn’t finish her sentence.

  Mr. Lau lived in a house that was too large after Cindy and her sister had moved out post high school. But it was the last home they’d shared as a family when it was still whole, and Mr. Lau vowed that he’d die in the same house his wife did.

  The first thing Michael noticed in Cindy’s bedroom was that she’d turned an entire corner into a shrine to her mother. A worn copy of “Motherless Daughters” sat alone on her nightstand, as it would in the years after they were married. In that moment, he understood the depth of her despair, the singularity of her grief.

  When a position opened up in the Mathematics Department at the University of British Columbia, Cindy urged Michael to apply for it, though he would have done so anyway based on its reputation. He knew why she gravitated back to Vancouver, and where she went, he was pulled along, trapped within her event horizon. She offered herself as a lesser-paid sessional instructor for Physics even though they both knew she could have gotten a tenure track position anywhere. As an instructor, she had more time to devote to her continued work on time travel.

  Cindy insisted on doing the house hunting, a task Michael was happy to relinquish, mired as he was in the crazy sprint toward tenure. She found a bungalow on Ferndale that was more dollhouse than real house in his opinion. But as the price of housing had increased with the influx of wealthy immigrants during the early 90s, and with the neighborhood in the beginning stages of gentrification, there weren’t a lot of options on an assistant professor’s salary. He knew it was in the vicinity of her elementary school, and thought the nostalgia must offer her some degree of comfort.

  In the dank shed hidden in a backyard hardly larger than an area rug, she worked incessantly on the contraption that would bend time for her - “à la Marie Curie,” Michael teased her in the days when he could still smile about the matter - working and reworking equations, and tinkering with machinery with his help, “à la Pierre.”

  Cindy hadn’t chosen the location merely because of nostalgia. In her research, she’d discovered that while one moved along the temporal axis, one remained in the same tri-dimensional spatial coordinates. She wondered how H.G. Wells had nailed that in his novel and had a sneaking suspicion that someone in her future, once time travel became a fact of life, must have traveled to his time to tell him.

  Thus the unassuming and dilapidated shed witnessed the birthing process of the Transverse Entropy Apparatus (which they refer to as “tea” both as a code-name and an in-joke).

  The breakthrough came on the 20th anniversary of her mother’s death. It was a happy coincidence that Cindy, who usually eschewed superstitious behavior, took as an omen. After sending a potted geranium - it was no easy task to strap a back-pack sized TEA onto a potted plant - and then herself, two minutes back and two minutes forward in time with no dire consequences that she could detect, aside from a case of queasiness, she chose a cozy memory from when she was ten to travel back to for that first jump. She had no desire to visit the later years when her pre-teen hormones turned her hateful and resentful toward Mom whose cancer symptoms were starting to show.

  Cindy stood by the chain-link fence at her elementary school in the fall of 1974. The sky was partly a hopeful blue and partly threatening rain, in typical Pacific Northwest style. She watched her ten-year-old self run around the schoolyard with her friends, playing hopscotch (how she missed hopscotch!) and tag. Her face was still round with baby fat, but her limbs had started down the awkward path to teen-hood. As she ran, her tangled black hair escaped the elastic that was supposed to keep it reined, faded hand-me-downs hung off-kilter on her small frame, and she had a wide-eyed fawn look on her face that begged people to like her. She felt at once annoyed by and sorry for her younger self.

  Little Cindy looked over to Hastings Street and a smile spread across her face. “Mom!” she called to a woman who got off the bus. The woman waved back.

  A surge of homesickness hit Cindy in the stomach, mingling with the aftereffect nausea of time travel. Tears stung her eyes.

  “See you guys tomorrow,” the girl said to her friends. She went over to the sandbox, took her little sister Maria by the hand and headed toward their mother.

  Mom held Maria’s other hand while the ten-year-old Cindy bounced and chattered as they walked home. Cindy hurried after them.

  When they stopped at the light, Cindy stood close enough to smell the grease on Mom’s clothing from the cafeteria where she worked. The olfactory memory was as seductive as a Siren’s song. Cindy leaned toward her Mom and inhaled deeply.

  Mom looked at Cindy and gave her a cautious smile, clutching Maria’s hand a little tighter.

  Cindy, feeling stupid at being caught in the act of longing, returned the s
miled in what she hoped was a sincere and non-creepy way. As soon as they’d crossed Hastings, she turned west to take a circuitous route back to Ferndale so Mom wouldn’t think she was a stalker. Even though current research indicated that the universe was self-correcting, she didn’t want to take a chance and change her general memories of her past.

  As she told Michael, all she wanted was to spend more time appreciating her mother in a way she had never done as a child because she didn’t know what was to come. The saying that wisdom comes at a price was both trite and true.

  She sobbed into his arms, crying until it seemed unlikely that she would have any tears left in her. He held her for an equally long time after that.

  “Was it cathartic?” he asked, brushing stray hairs off her cheek.

  Cindy blew her nose. “I don’t know. I just need to rest now.”

  Michael, as always, was supportive. He was the yang to her ying, the lighthearted to her broodiness, the mechanical engineering and math major who validated and gave form to her quantum physics calculations.

  Like an addict, she wanted to go back again within the week. Michael put a stop to it, though treading lighter than a dandelion seed on air. As much as he usually catered to her whims, he was firm that she needed to recuperate before attempting another jump. He even went so far as dismantling the Tipler’s Cylinder and hiding the Mallett Ring from the machine.

  The emotional drain she experienced in the first, brief sojourn to the past surprised even her. For weeks after her return, her hands shook and she burst into tears at the most unexpected, and inappropriate, times. They canceled social engagements with friends so they wouldn’t have to explain her baffling breakdowns.

  It was a full six months before Michael, with misgivings, deemed her well enough to travel. Cindy had already pinpointed the period to which she wanted to go. She’d been consumed with thoughts about the next destination time, becoming distracted at work, as that term’s student evaluations showed, and at home, where she burned meals and wandered around as though she were in early stages of Alzheimer’s.