Time Thief

by Greg Krojac

  He ran his finger down the table of contents until it arrived at the germane chapter: Coming of Age.

  Arriving at page forty-seven, his eyes clicked into gear and scanned the content line by line, accelerating through the words until something caught his attention. This was another instance when his cell phone proved its use. He didn’t like compromising his principles but taking photos was a much quicker and more efficient way to record details and he would have a much more accurate record to work with.

  Some sixth sense caused him to move his focus to the bottom of the page. Where there had once been words there was now a blank space. His eyes moved up the page to the three paragraphs that he had just read and he blinked incredulously as he watched the sentences evaporate before his very eyes, one letter at a time. Soon, there was nothing left but a blank page. He quickly flipped through the pages towards the back of the book but the rest of the book was completely blank. He returned to the front of the book just in time to take a quick photo of a table with the doctor’s personal details – birth name, date of birth, place of birth, profession, articles of note and achievements, parentage, spouse and children – before the text of the contents page, the dedication, the copyright notice, and the title page completely disappeared. A second later, he was left looking at his empty hand, no trace left of the book that he’d just been reading. He spoke out loud as if he wished to confirm with his own ears that he wasn’t dreaming.

  “This cannot be happening.”

  09:02, Friday 24 March 2073

  Aristotle’s home, Ealing, London W5

  Back home, he was worried about what would happen when the library staff discovered that the book was no longer there. Would they think that he had stolen it? Surely not – he was a regular and respected customer. He knew he hadn’t stolen anything but still felt uncomfortable that he was the last person to touch the book, unable to shake off the completely irrational sense of guilt.

  He walked over to the candlestick phone and dialled the number of the library. A voice at the other end of the line spoke in a cheerful tone.

  “The British Library. Susan speaking. How may I help you?”

  Ari was relieved that it was she who had answered the phone.

  “Hello, Susan. It is Aristotle. Aristotle Dunn.”

  Susan’s cheery voice continued.

  “Hello, Mr Dunn. How can I help you?”

  Ari cleared his throat unnecessarily.

  “It is about the book Doctor William Spencer: A Biography.”

  Susan interrupted, albeit politely.

  “I don’t think I’ve heard of that book. Or a Doctor William Spencer.”

  Ari’s brow furrowed.

  “But you must have. I was in earlier and you looked it up on the library’s computer system for me. You gave me the coordinates and I found it on the shelves myself.”

  “I think you must be mistaken, Mr Dunn. We haven’t seen you at the library for over three weeks. I’m sure I’d have remembered if you’d come in today. Not wishing to be disrespectful but you do have a very distinct sense of fashion. You’re not easily forgettable.”

  “But you must remember.”

  “Perhaps it’s a new publication. I’ll go and check the system for you.”

  In the minute or so while Susan checked the system, Ari tried to make sense of the phone call, to no avail. He heard Susan pick up the phone at her end.

  “Sorry, Mr Dunn. There’s nothing in the system about that book. Nothing about a Doctor William Spencer either. I did find some works about a Doctor Wallis Spencer though. A botanist. Could that be the person you’re looking for?”

  Ari was even more confused now.

  “No. Thank you. I am sorry to have troubled you, Susan. Perhaps I dozed off and dreamt about the book.”

  “Not at all, Mr Dunn. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “No thanks. Nothing.”

  “Very well. Goodbye Mr Dunn. I hope you come and visit us soon.”

  “I will. I will. Goodbye Susan.”

  Ari put the receiver back on its cradle, stared at the phone for a few seconds and lifted the device to his ear again. He dialled the only number that he knew by heart. Tom Hind’s voice appeared at the other end of the line.

  “Hello, Ari. What can I do for you?”

  Ari took a deep breath.

  “It is about the case you gave me earlier on. The Spencer case.”

  Ari could sense that his agent was confused

  “Spencer case? I’m sorry, Ari, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have anything new for you until tomorrow. I’m just waiting for confirmation of the contract.”

  “You do know what I am talking about, Tom. The Spencer case. Mrs Spencer believes her husband, Doctor William Spencer, is cheating on her.

  “Sorry, Ari. I’ve never heard of him. Is he a surgeon or something?”

  Ari couldn’t believe his ears. Anybody who was involved with time travel knew who Doctor Spencer was. Tom should certainly know of him.

  “He is a lead researcher for the team responsible for discovering how to manipulate time and space. He is a major reason why we have our jobs, this business. You do know who he is.”

  “Sorry, Ari. Never heard of the guy.”

  Ari’s shoulders dropped. This was ridiculous.

  “Tom. Can you look him up on the internet? You know, google him?”

  Tom laughed.

  “You do know your cell phone has a web browser you can use. You can look it up yourself.”

  Ari shook his head.

  “I do not know how it works.”

  “It’s not difficult, Ari.”

  “It will be quicker if you look it up. Please?”

  Tom acquiesced.

  “Give me a minute.”

  Ari drummed his fingers on his writing-desk whilst he waited. After what seemed like an age but had only been fifty-seven seconds, Tom returned to the call.

  “No sign of a Doctor William Spencer, Ari.”

  “Thank you, Tom. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No problem. Sorry I couldn’t have been of more help.”

  Ari felt deflated as he returned the telephone receiver to its cradle. He knew that Dr Spencer existed. He’d found the book containing his biography. He’d held it. He’d been reading it. Dr Spencer was a world-renowned scientist. He and all records of him couldn’t have just disappeared into thin air.

  Could they?

  06:15, Saturday 25 March 2073

  Aristotle’s home, Ealing, London W5

  Ari woke up the following morning having had a restless night. He couldn’t get the events of the previous day out of his mind and it was pure luck that he managed to finally drop off and get a couple of hours sleep. His mind had been buzzing. Now, in the clear light of day, the memory was still with him.

  He shuffled into the kitchen – his body hadn’t caught up to his mind yet – and over to his c.1880 Doulton ‘Improved Bread Pan’ breadbin that sat on the worktop next to his cooker. He lifted off the tin lid and took out two slices of wholemeal bread.

  His cooker was quite simple, a black cast-iron box with an oven, a grill, and a hot plate and looked more like a safe than something people would use to cook their meals. But, it was appropriate to Ari’s décor and so it served its purpose well.

  He would have liked it to have run on gas, as it would have done back in the 1800s, but everything was directly or indirectly solar-powered in the 2070s and he’d had no choice but to accept the paradigm. He’d steampunked his home as best as he could but he still lived in the late twenty-first century and it was impossible to adhere solely to the Victorian era’s technological constraints. Not everything in his home was as it looked.

  He popped the two slices of bread onto the grill and watched them turn brown.

  A sudden thought interrupted him. If Doctor William Spencer didn’t exist, how come he could remember him?

  That was the thing that bothered him.
He’d studied the paradoxes of time travel when applying for his time travel licence – the Predestination Paradox, the Bootstrap Paradox, the Grandfather Paradox, the Hitler paradox, and even Polchinski’s Paradox – but that didn’t explain why the existence of Doctor Spencer hadn’t been wiped from his mind too. Something must have happened in the past to cause Dr Spencer and all evidence of his life to be extinguished – which explained why neither Susan nor Tom had heard of him – but Ari appeared to have been excluded from the erasure process. That was bizarre.

  However, he didn’t have time to worry about the mental gymnastics of time-travel paradoxes. He had an appointment with Tom about a new case. His unusual lifestyle wouldn’t pay for itself.

  08:00, Saturday, 25 March 2073

  Tom’s Office, St John’s Wood, London NW8

  Tom Hind’s office was contemporary, meaning that it was decorated minimally and tastefully in fashionable colours and furnished with state-of-the-art equipment. It was spacious with large picture windows offering an exceptional view over the city and was discreetly air-conditioned. Tom’s desk was integrated with the latest model TeleSense suite – a hologram projection unit coupled with a hologram transmitter – so he could hold face-to-face meetings as if he and the other person were actually in the same room together. A digital photo frame showed pictures of his wife and family on a loop. In the old days, there would have been a computer, but nobody used a computer these days. Cell phones did everything that a computer could. There was, however, an old wireless fax machine, a concession to Ari’s lifestyle.

  The doorbell buzzed and Tom pressed a button under his desk to release the door catch and allow his visitor to enter. He knew it was Ari – the man was not only eccentric but painfully punctual. If you organised a meeting for 09:47, Ari would arrive at precisely 09:47. However, Tom did concede that punctuality was probably a good characteristic for a time traveller to have.

  Ari entered the office and waited until he was offered a seat before sitting down on a tubular steel-framed chair with black faux leather cushioning. Ari looked around the room, wondering how anyone could work in such a sterile setting. He much preferred the fusion of Victorian industrialism and elegance with its pastel colours and brass and copper accessories that characterized his home environment.

  Tom spoke first.

  “Did you sleep well, Ari?”

  “Off and on, Tom.”

  “Troubled by this phantom William Spencer character?”

  Of course, Tom thought Ari had dreamt the man up. Everybody involved in time travel knew the names of those who had been involved in Project Clockwise – and Dr William Spencer wasn’t one of them.

  “Tom. What are the names of the time travel discovery team?”

  It was a simple question. Tom reeled off the list.

  “Rosalie Pinheiro, Brian Downing, Anita Bowen, Simon Quelch, Michelle Lavigne, and Katerina Nowaková. All doctors. All astrophysicists. The team was led by Professor Ryan Chandler.”

  Ari shook his head.

  “There are two missing.”

  Tom sighed.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me that one of them is this Doctor Spencer you were talking about yesterday.”

  “Yes. And you forgot Isabella Hardacre too.”

  “I’ve never heard of her.”

  “I did not think you would have.”

  There was no use in arguing with Tom. He had his reality, which he experienced and Ari had another that included Dr Spencer and Isabella Hardacre. Isabella must have been wiped from existence just as Dr Spencer had. There could be no other reason why Tom wouldn’t have included her in his list.

  Tom shook his head and sighed.

  “I was going to offer you another case today but I think perhaps you need a break. Maybe these illusions are your brain trying to tell you to take a vacation.”

  Ari’s instinct was to refuse the suggestion but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to relax until he discovered what was going on with the timeline.

  “Perhaps you are correct. It has been a while since I have had any time off. Perhaps I need to recharge my batteries.”

  “Really? You’re actually agreeing with me? That’s not like you, Ari. Do you realise how difficult it is to get you to take any time off?”

  “I like working.”

  “Take a couple of weeks off – longer if you need. Go travelling. It’ll do you the world of good.”

  “Okay, Tom. I will travel.”

  08:38, Saturday 25 March 2073

  Aristotle’s home, Ealing, London W5

  Back home, Ari flicked through the recent photos that he’d taken with his cell phone, both amazed and grateful that the wiping of Dr Spencer’s existence hadn’t affected the phone’s photo gallery; proof that he wasn’t going crazy. The photos he’d taken of the pages of Doctor William Spencer: A Biography were still there.

  He went straight to the photo of the doctor’s personal details. Something must have happened in the past to remove the man from the current timeline and Ari knew that it couldn’t have been Doctor Spencer’s own death. If that were the case, he would still show up in records, albeit with a date of death. The only possible explanation was that a parental ancestor had been removed from the doctor’s timeline before he was conceived.

  Ari spent the next half hour or so making a hard copy of everything that he’d photographed in the library. Then he began to make plans for his trip. There were still seven remaining members of the project team that needed to be saved.

  He had a crazy thought. What if he went back in time and prevented Dr Spencer’s ancestor’s death? Perhaps he could save the whole team and everything would go back to normal. It was a long shot but surely worth a try. But genealogical trees go back centuries. How could he know which ancestor had been killed or manipulated?

  He couldn’t spend his life travelling through time checking up on Dr Spencer’s family tree so he decided to focus on the doctor’s parents. It would involve less time travel, plus he didn’t even know if he could travel back far enough to make a difference. He knew the authorised limits of his TPI licence but had no idea if travelling further back than a year was possible.

  Doctor Spencer had been fifty-one years old and was born on 15 January 2022. That meant he must have been conceived nine months earlier, in May 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ari wasn’t worried about the risk of infection, having had his vaccinations against COVID, a one-shot immunisation that covered COVIDs -19, -32, -47 and the most recent strain, COVID -64 but he’d still take a mask with him so that he wouldn’t stand out.

  He needed more information. Normally, he’d ask Tom for help but it was obvious that that was out of the question. Tom would try to dissuade him from his quest. He might even obtain a Temporal Injunction against Ari, who was licensed to travel into the past to observe and record only. To do anything more would probably result in the revocation of his licence, a fine, and a potential jail sentence.

  He looked at his cell phone menu page. Just as Tom had said, there was a web browser. He felt torn. He’d fought all his life against using the technology of the day – especially digital technology – but to go to the British Library and search for the information he needed would take up too much valuable time. He gritted his teeth and pressed the Google icon. A web browser opened up immediately.

  He frowned. The browser was open but there was a message stating that he wasn’t connected to a network. He returned to the phone’s homepage and scoured the icons for something that might help him, settling on an icon that simply said connect. He clicked on the icon and a message displayed advising him that he was now connected to the National Internet Server. He opened the browser again; this time it showed a search page.

  Ari entered the name of Doctor Spencer’s mother. He didn’t realise that there were so many Gillian Spencers in the world and found the number of results overwhelming. He decided on a different approach and entered Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths. That was bett
er. There were still hundreds of thousands of results but the first entry was access to a public database. That was a stroke of luck.

  He had the details necessary to home in on the correct Gillian Spencer by cross-querying the database with Professor Spencer’s father’s details and was soon rewarded.

  Gillian Spencer (née Barnes)

  Born: 07 October 1997

  Married: Anthony Spencer 20 July 2019

  Died: 04 July 2021

  Cause of Death: COVID-19

  Place of Death: Charing Cross Hospital, London

  Ari was confused. If Gillian had died of COVID-19 – which she hadn’t in his original timeline – then how did she contract it? He concluded that she must have been deliberately exposed to the virus; she must have contracted it in the new alternative timeline by design.

  As a licensed TPI, Ari had access to restricted personal records so he went back to Google and found a private database named simply The Registry. He found it quite quickly. A pop-up window requested his name and TPI Licence Code. He entered the required details. Another pop-up appeared asking him to press his thumb against the screen within the boundaries of a rectangular box. Ari did so and was immediately granted access to the database. He soon found Gillian’s records.

  There was a wealth of information available to him from medical records to financial records to last known and previous address. All Ari needed to know was where she was living just prior to her death.

  Rosaline Road, Fulham.

  That was quite close to Charing Cross Hospital, where she died. Ari didn’t live too far away either, in Ealing. It was about nine kilometres from where Gillian had lived.

  He had all the information he needed for now so he turned his attention to other things. He’d need some money. Not a lot, but he’d need real money – notes and coins. In 2073, nobody used physical money and Ari was certain that his currency card wouldn’t work in 2020, so he went to his ornate Victorian-style safe and pressed his thumb against the glass panel on the side. It would have been nice to use a safe that worked with an old-fashioned key, but a biometric lock was more secure. The safe recognised his thumbprint and the door flew open rather more quickly than Ari would have liked, causing him to step back. He pulled out a metal box and opened it. This was where he kept his collection of vintage currency. He wondered how much he should take with him and decided it was better to take too much than too little. He took the box to his table and counted out one hundred pounds in notes and coins. He probably wouldn’t even need that much but it was better to be safe than sorry. It’s not as if he could go to an ATM and withdraw cash as and when he needed it.