by MK Alexander
“So it’s not really time travel at all.” I sat back and took a sip of coffee.
“No, I am a space traveler, as you commented only a few days ago.”
“You’re avoiding my question,” I said. “Really, what’s it like?”
“It is rather fun for the most part.” Fynn leaned back against his tree.
“That’s it? That’s all you can say?”
The inspector glanced over at me. It was clear that answer was not going to satisfy. “As I’ve said, only the present moment matters. This is my life.”
“That’s no answer.”
“Very well then, my life revolves around two things—”
“Don’t say the past and the present.”
“No, I will say hard jumps and soft jumps.”
“Why those?”
“Each is a distinctly different experience and this has shaped my life more than anything. Traveling back to an old place is rather easy, things are familiar. A hard jump however is often disorientating, to say the least.”
“Soft jumps to the past and hard jumps to the future, searing pain and all?”
“Searing pain and hard landings.” Fynn paused. He gave me an almost weary glance. “You may understand that I have lived much of my time on the edge of society, on its fringes.”
“Why is that?”
“But you must see the trouble, why I live on the margins. Imagine it is the twelfth century and you suddenly find yourself on the outskirts of a tiny village. You have no money, you do not speak the local language, and more often that not, your clothes are highly inappropriate, outlandish even. Most people would not take kindly to such a stranger. You have no friends or family, no means of support… so yes, some journeys can be quite difficult.”
“I never really thought of that.” I paused. “Have things changed?”
“Such a question.”
“I guess I mean is it harder now, or easier, in this present?”
“I see… Well, the modern era grows ever more complex. For example, in the old days it was quite easy to secure a new identity; now, not so much… passports, credit checks, mobile phones, email addresses... ” Fynn took a slurp of his enhanced coffee. “Of course over time, I’ve adjusted and taken a few practical steps to minimize the trauma. For example, I try to carry with me twenty gold sovereigns. Currency, gold currency I have learned, crosses the boundary of every culture and even time itself.” Fynn reached into his pocket and took something out. “Heads or tails?” he asked.
“What?”
“I have a small gift for you. I hope you will accept it.”
“I won’t, no gifts please.”
“Are you not even curious?”
“I didn’t say that… I just can’t accept any gifts.”
“And why not?”
“We’re friends.”
“As you say, and as your friend, I have a small token, something I think you might appreciate. I would be insulted if you turn me down.”
I looked at Fynn. He promised never to lie to me. Maybe he would be insulted. I guess it was some kind of old world thing.
“It’s not at all like a thank you gift. It’s more by the way of a memento.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“You can never be sure.” Fynn smiled.
“Okay. What kind of gift?”
“Something small, something you may need in the future.”
“The future, eh?”
“Yes. Whenever I travel, I always bring a few of these with me.” Fynn quite unexpectedly took my hand, turned it palm up and placed a heavy coin there. I looked at it carefully... not like any coin I’d seen before. It seemed to be hand forged; it was gold, a bit larger than a quarter and much thicker and heavier. On the front was a man’s face in profile. On the back was a seated goddess. She was holding a staff. There were letters on the side, but in a language I didn’t recognize, probably Greek.
“What’s this?”
“A coin from long ago… from the days of Alexander the Great.”
“You… you…” I stammered.
Fynn winked at me. “No, I purchased it from an antiquities dealer some years ago in Prague.”
“Wow, it’s beautiful.”
“And quite rare. I’m glad you like it.”
“I can’t possibly take this.”
“Please…” He closed my hand around the coin. “I have found it makes suitable currency no matter where I travel.”
“Well thank you, Fynn.”
He sat back and smiled. “Sometimes I find a place that I like and I’ll stay for fifty years or so; other times, I am not at all pleased with where I’ve arrived, and I jump out almost immediately.”
“Why is that?”
“They are dreadful places and I leave as soon as I’m able.”
“How many lives have you lived?”
“Impossible to say really, hundreds if not more. Though far fewer of them are complete ones. You might say all my lives are only partially lived. It’s less of a progression and more of a pastiche.” Fynn gave off an audible sigh.
“Sounds kind of lonely.”
“Ah, I suppose it is. Over the course of things, I have sought stability. Recall that my third law of travel is stay as long as you can. This is solely to maintain my own sanity, a sense of continuity.” Fynn took a slurp of spiked coffee. “Basically, I try to live in a fairly normal fashion. I stay in one place, choose a career, sometimes have a family… I grow old… and then at some point, when I am near to the end, I slip back to a younger self. From there, I jump to a new place entirely and begin again, so to speak.”
“What was your life before this one?”
“When do you mean?”
“Right before this life as Inspector Fynn. Who were you?”
“A policeman in Hong Kong. A lowly detective constable… it was part of the Commonwealth at the time.”
“What time?”
“During the war mostly.”
“Before that?”
“I was living in Ontario, around the turn of the century… the one before this.”
“What did you do?”
“I was a policeman of course.”
“Are you always a policeman?”
“By no means… Have you always been a reporter?”
“Well no, but I’ve never worked in an ancient copper mine either.”
“As far as you are aware,” the inspector said and grinned.
“You remember them all?”
“Of course not. Do you recall every detail of your own life? Certain memories stick out more than others, but much of it passes like a dream.”
“How can you keep track of it all?”
“I cannot. It is impossible.”
“What about all these other lives? The ones you leave or just partially live? Are they in limbo, do they just stop? Are they just stuck in a closet or something?”
“Ha, the closet of time. Close the door and forget about them.”
“Until you need a new pair of shoes or something.” I smiled.
“I like the way you think, Patrick.”
“But where do these lives go when you’re not living through them? Is that really you living in that life? It can’t be, if you’re here... I just can’t wrap my head around it.”
“It’s very difficult for you to understand, I’m sure. To you, all these lives are in the past, most of them, the very distant past. For me they are concurrent. They are simultaneous.”
“That just seems impossible.”
“Understand that my awareness, my consciousness can only unfold in one place. It can only be in one present, in the flux of the now… but where that now exists, can span the centuries. So, in a very real sense, these lives are concurrent.”
“Doesn’t that get confusing?”
“It can be at times. And it’s true what you say. I often wonder if it is really me living these lives. It’s a bit of a curse, I suppose… When I revisit the places of the past I br
ing so much with me, so many memories of the present and the future. I am in a large respect a completely different person.”
“If you go back and live for fifty years and then return to the present, how much time passes?”
“None at all, at least from your point of reference. For me, fifty years have passed.”
“And when you travel back, I mean, back here, everything gets reset?”
“Yes. I’ve learned to alter the timeline as little as possible, below the quantum threshold as it were. Each jump fractures the timeline in a very real sense. This is my second law: Tread Lightly. Again, this serves my well-being. To jump to a future that bears no resemblance to my past can be most disconcerting.”
“You mean like the road signs… the ones you can’t read?”
“Exactly this.” Fynn laughed. “I may jump ahead to find things have changed quite drastically... or with a bit of luck, not at all.”
“What is it like slipping back to someone you’ve been before?”
“You mean physically?”
“Yeah.”
“Rather like waking from a dream. It begins and ends with deja vu, though more sustained and intense. ‘Ah, I have the strangest feeling I’ve been here before…’” Fynn laughed again. “And it is quite true. A curious phenomenon, yet I’ve grown accustomed to it. I find one self merging with another, though the most present self is dominant by far. These memories are the freshest in some way. Gradually I adjust to my previous life. I recall the routines, the situations, the people, the surroundings. It all seems quite normal after a few days.”
“A few days?”
“Sometimes less, sometimes more… I suppose it depends on how far I’ve traveled. Some things I recall better than others. Sometimes I am rudely reminded.”
“Can you do this consciously?”
“I have developed some skill in this regard. In the early days, I will say, things were very different.”
“How so?”
“Every jump was random and every jump was a hard one.”
“A hard one?”
“Always a new me. No soft back-jumps as it were.”
“Why not?”
“Ah, there was simply nowhere to go. No previous lives to revisit.”
“So, just to the future?”
“No, entirely random as I’ve said.” Fynn stretched his arms. “Every jump took me by complete surprise. I would have to scratch my head and ask myself: ‘Have I been here before? I don’t remember that…’”
“It must be confusing.”
“As I’ve said, in the early days I was like a skipping stone.”
“A what, a skipping stone?”
“Yes. Just as you throw a stone across the pond. It skims the water and hops, sometimes many times.”
“Oh sure…”
“Completely unpredictable— a terrible period in my life. I would never know where I’d end up. Half way across the world, in a foreign place or time, to a wholly unfamiliar culture, a place where I did not know the language or the local customs. Quite upsetting.” Fynn paused, his face had a pained expression.
“A different language? Is that a timeline thing?”
“No, it’s a geography thing.” Fynn smiled. “I will say I have developed a facility for language though, I learn very quickly. Out of necessity more than anything.”
“How many languages do you speak?”
“Dozens.”
“Like?”
“English,” he said, “most every other language on the continent, from Dutch to Greek.”
“That’s it?”
“My Russian is passable, Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin… others too… But I know them less well.”
“And you don’t forget them? Like if you travel back or forward?”
“Not at all.”
“Wow.”
“When I first learned that I could back-jump, that I could return to a place where I had been before, well, this changed everything. This was momentous.”
“How did that happen?”
“Sheer luck, I suppose. I just happened to be facing in the right direction when I fell and went to the past, to a previous self: my first soft jump, my first return. And from that moment, I knew I was on to something. No longer did I just skip about randomly. I had some tiny measure of control and some measure of awareness. It was then I discovered there are two modes of travel.” Fynn chuckled to himself. “What I didn’t understand at the time was how even back-jumps were fraught with danger…”
“What kind of danger?”
“Such a question… I will say, my very first jump was different from all the rest, and that I was extremely fortunate.”
“Getting caught by Roman soldiers and sold into slavery?”
“Things could have gone far worse...”
“You’re an optimist. How could things be worse?”
“I may have jumped and landed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That would be far worse.”
“Has that kind of thing ever happened?”
“Of course. This is why I am rather cautious nowadays.”
“Well, what was so lucky about that first jump?’
“That I survived the moment of searing pain is a miracle unto itself…”
“Right.”
“And consider how everything could have ended very badly in the following situation: I am eight, I jump to a new future. It is quite a shock, I can tell you… My only desire is to return home. So… let’s say I attempt to back-jump as soon as I’m able. However, I do not make it all the way back. Instead, I land in a previous self who has, well, let’s say, a somewhat limited awareness of the situation. It would be entirely possible that I would wake up one morning and find myself in the body of an old man, in a previous self, and yet, I would now have the memories and mentality of an eight year old boy.” Fynn sat upright. “Surely this could lead to madness. It would be very upsetting to say the least... I consider myself very lucky that this did not happen to me.”
“What did happen?”
“Eh?”
“Do you remember your second jump?”
“I do.”
“And?”
“It was completely by accident that I was pushed overboard from a ship…” Fynn paused again. “Ah, but something you must realize, in the early days, my understanding was extremely limited. I had no inkling as to what was happening to me. An impossible situation really.”
“This I’m not getting.” I gave off a frustrated face.
“My awareness is subtractive yet my experience is cumulative. When I leave a place, that life, that self, is gone. But the time I lived through, is a place to which I can always return.”
“That’s a little clearer.”
“There is also a ripple effect… and this can be fantastically complicated.”
“How so?”
“It mainly has to do with the gaps in my concurrency.”
“Can you explain?”
“Of course... Take my very first jump from classical age Hellas to the Roman Empire, some three hundred years, yes?”
I nodded.
“I lived in either one of those times, but in the time in between, I am not there... So, that leaves a yawning gap.”
“And?”
“And it was quite possible to hard jump into this gap … to shake Socrates hand, or ride along side Alexander the Great.”
“But that might change the…”
“Yes, such an action might cause a ripple. I might try to revisit myself in the ancient copper mine and find myself gone…” Fynn paused. “Or not… it could be that I am still slaving away in the bowels of the earth.”
“I’m definitely not getting this.”
“As I said, fantastically complicated.”
I expected Fynn to say more but he fell silent. “And the ripple?”
“There have been times when I thought to return somewhere familiar, only to find that life obliterated. And on other occasions, the opposite.”
&nbs
p; “But you said, the past always changes the future.”
“Indeed, the real question is, how much?”
“The quantum of change thing?”
“Yes. Remember of course, I can usually return to a life and finish it off, or correct it, if it is lacking.”
“Fix things? Like you did here?”
“Yes, exactly so.”
“Is that something you do a lot?”
“Yes, very much like a rehearsal for a stage show, I might say.”
“A kind of do-over thing?”
“I have found it far easier to remedy my mistakes afterwards, not as a do-over. Time travel never has to enter into it.” Fynn gave me a smile. “Though, I have used this technique to stabilize my life as it were.”
“What technique?”
“Revisiting a single life several times. Yet this approach is also fraught with danger.”
“Why? It sounds like a dream come true.”
“I suppose… but it could just as easily go wrong. You might spend your entire existence ping ponging back in forth until you got everything perfect. Yet, is there such a thing? A perfect life? You would have wasted this gift.”
“I think it’s a dream come true for most people.”
“Why is that?”
“Just what you described. Say, I could go back to being fourteen, but with all the experiences and wisdom of my thirty year old self. Being so young while knowing what I know now.”
“And what is so good about that?”
“I could fix a lot of things. Make better decisions. Date this girl or not, take this job or not. Pursue another path. Find my lost keys... I’m guessing that I’d be brimming with self confidence.”
“Your thinking is very small,” Fynn admonished. “Though I do see your point, and... well, I was not immune to these kinds of thoughts. But tell me, do you have so many regrets? So many things to fix in your past? You are far too young for such ideas.”
“I guess...”
“Most of all though, you are failing to see the dark side of this.”
“What dark side?”
“Might it not be a burden for a young boy to know what a thirty year old does? Surely, something is lost, an innocence… And what replaces it? A deep abiding cynicism? Not healthy for a fourteen year old.” Fynn paused. “There was a time when I thought I could arrange any life to my liking. Yes, by slipping back with knowledge, with advance warning, with knowing the future for certain… I believed I could potentially make my life very sweet. Yet it was not the case.”
