by Jason Ayres
He stepped forward and vanished.
Chapter Five
September 2063
Less than an hour after he’d entered his former home, Dan found himself sitting in an interrogation room at the police station. He was face-to-face with the stern demeanour of D.I. David Jones, the local head of police.
Things had gone from bad to worse over the past hour. The officers who had turned up in response to the call had not believed his claim that it was his house. It hadn’t helped that he hadn’t had any form of identification on him. He had left his wallet at home when he’d gone out to Jess’s party the previous evening.
In contrast, the young couple were able to produce full documentation identifying themselves as George and Laura Bailey, as well as a rental agreement for the house with their names on it.
The final nail in the coffin was when various nosy neighbours, attracted by the police sirens, came out to see what all the fuss was about. They confirmed not only that the couple did indeed live there, but also that they had never seen Dan before in their lives.
That was true enough. As far as Dan was concerned, he’d never seen any of them before either. So that was another mystery to add to the ever-growing list – the disappearance of his former neighbours.
After all that, his arrest was a mere formality and he soon found himself being driven the mile or so to the police station. Sitting in the back of the car, he had plenty of time to look around him. Familiar landmarks all around were the same, yet different.
He saw what looked like some sort of single-seat helicopter taking off from the site of what used to be a petrol station. The road was still where it had always been, but many of the older properties alongside it were gone, replaced by futuristic new constructions, made out of glass and metal rather than traditional brick and stone.
He tried desperately to make sense of it all. Most people would have worked out by now that they had travelled into the future, even if they didn’t believe such a thing was possible. But in his exhausted physical and mental state, Dan just couldn’t work it out.
It was 10am now and he hadn’t slept for over 24 hours, which was taking its toll on his mind and his body. Technically, he hadn’t slept for over 22 years.
It didn’t look like he was going to be getting any sleep anytime soon either. D.I. Jones didn’t seem like a man to be trifled with and he was firing questions at Dan at a rapid rate of knots. The initial round of questions had gone badly, and now Jones was starting again.
“Look, just tell me your real name and date of birth,” said Jones.
“I’ve already told you my name,” replied Dan. “It’s Daniel Fisher and I was born on 3rd of January 2002.”
“Well, Dan,” replied Jones, adopting a sarcastic tone in his strong Welsh accent, “I must say, you look remarkably well-preserved for your age. You don’t look a day over forty.”
“I’m not a day over forty!” protested Dan. “I’m thirty-nine.”
“I think you’re having trouble adding up,” replied Jones. “Now, I didn’t become a detective inspector by being a mathematical genius, but I’m pretty sure, by my calculations, if you were born in 2002 that makes you 61 years old.”
At last the penny was beginning to drop. Dan said nothing for the moment, as Jones continued.
“And on the subject of being well-preserved, Daniel,” he began, placing particular emphasis on the word Daniel in order to make it clear that he didn’t believe that was his real name, “according to our records you died over twenty years ago. I must say you look in remarkably good health for a corpse.”
It looked to Dan as if Jones was enjoying all this immensely. Was that how he got his kicks, belittling the suspects?
There was really only one possible question that Dan could ask now. It was going to sound ridiculous and risked more sarcasm from Jones, but there was no other way of confirming his rapidly forming suspicions.
“What year is this?” he asked.
Jones laughed. “Oh that’s a good one. Of course, I can see it all now. You’re a time traveller.”
“Yes, that’s it,” replied Dan.
“Yes, it all makes sense now. You were travelling through time and you accidentally landed your time machine in Mr and Mrs Bailey’s house. It could have happened to anyone. Now if only you’d told us all this before, we needn’t have gone through all this rigmarole.”
“You believe me then?” asked Dan, incredulously. It was too good to be true, surely.
Jones’s demeanour changed from jovial to angry in a flash. “Of course I don’t believe you,” he said, thumping his fist on the table in frustration. “Now stop messing me around and tell me who you really are.”
“I’ll tell you who I really am, if you tell me the date. That’s all I want to know. It’s not confidential, is it?”
Jones decided to humour him. “Fair enough, it’s September 3rd 2063. Right, I’ve done my bit, so now it’s time for you to keep your side of the bargain. Tell me exactly who you are.”
Dan took a deep breath and began. “I am Daniel Fisher, I was born in 2002 and when I got up yesterday morning it was 2041. Somehow I’ve been transported through time, and that’s why I was in the house this morning. It was my house in 2041. I owned it. Look it up. It can’t be that difficult to find something like that out.”
Another thought occurred to him.
“And while you are about it, why don’t you check my DNA as well, you must have that on record. I’ve been hauled in here enough times before. Check that out, then you’ll see what I’m saying is true.”
“What you need is a psychological assessment. Time travel, for God’s sake, I’ve never heard anything like it.”
Jones wasn’t the sort of man to indulge such flights of fancy and was getting seriously irked.
Dan wasn’t getting anywhere with Jones, but there was someone else who might be able to help.
“Why don’t you get D.I. Benson in here? She’ll tell you who I am!”
“I don’t think she will,” replied Jones. “Superintendent Benson retired years ago. And anyway, she’s dead.”
He had heard enough for the time being. He got up from the table and stated, “Interview concluded at 10.39am. I’ll be back later, by which time I expect you to be ready to tell the truth. I don’t want to hear any more of this time travel bullshit.”
With that, he left the room in search of a strong cup of coffee, while Dan put his head in his hands and wondered how on earth he was going to talk his way out of this one.
There was no denying the truth of the situation. He had travelled forward over two decades in time. The question was how?
He thought back to the strange events in the tunnel and his encounters with Peter Grant and the others. They must have done this to him deliberately. Whatever they had done definitely must have happened in the tunnel: everything was normal before he went in.
He went back over all the events of the past day and slowly it began to make sense. He had been tricked: that was certain. That little tart Jess had stitched him up good and proper. She wasn’t interested in him. How could he have been so naïve to think that she could have been?
He hadn’t had sex for nearly two years. He couldn’t even pull the desperate old slappers that hung around in the town’s sole seedy little nightclub at 3am on a Friday night. The last chance saloon they called it. It was no chance saloon as far as he was concerned.
So what possible chance could he have had with a gorgeous, 21-year-old girl like Jess? None and he should have known it.
He had never understood why he was so unsuccessful with women. The truth was that it wasn’t Dan’s looks that turned women off. He wasn’t that bad-looking, even if he was packing a bit of extra weight, but his obnoxious personality was enough to put any woman off. It had been the same ever since he’d been a teenager.
Of course, he couldn’t see this and had consequently spent decades blaming the women. As he’d grown older, his frustration grew stron
ger year by year and his resentment towards women had grown increasingly bitter.
Even the fact that he’d been responsible for Lauren’s death hadn’t curbed it. And now his anger was directed towards Jess. “Bitch,” he muttered to himself. His attitude was always the same. It was the woman’s fault. If they didn’t want to sleep with him, he labelled them as bitches. That pretty much added up to 99.9% of the women in the town.
Jess hadn’t done this to him all by herself. They were all in it together. He remembered how smug he’d felt at the party, believing not only that he was going to get to shag Jess, but also with the added satisfaction of knowing she was D.I. Benson’s daughter.
Hannah had been a constant thorn in his side over the years and he really thought he’d got one over her this time. He had delighted in the moment when he’d taunted her at the party, telling her how he was going to shag her daughter. She had seemed remarkably cool about it and he’d wondered at the time why she hadn’t reacted.
Now he knew why. She had known it wasn’t going to happen because she was in on the plan. Well, at least he was getting some satisfaction out of the fact that she was dead now, so that would serve the silly bitch right. At least one good thing had come out of being cast into the future.
So who else was in on it? The teacher, obviously, though his role in all of this wasn’t clear. Dan hadn’t seen him since school, and now he’d seen him twice in one day.
He’d puzzled earlier over the fact that the first time he had seen him he had been looking middle-aged, and then the second time he was old. That all made sense now, it fitted in with the whole time travel theory, but what was he doing there in both time zones?
And then there were Charlie and Josh. What were their roles in all this? He knew they were friends with Hannah and her daughter, something that had pissed him off for years. Once, long ago, they had been his friends, back when they were all starting school together as four-year-olds. Somehow, over the course of growing up, they’d dropped him.
Why had they done that? He had only ever wanted to be friends with them. But they had rejected him and now they had gone and done this, pushed him over in the tunnel which must have been when he jumped forward in time. The same question kept replaying over and over in his mind: why?
Clearly the tunnel was the focus of all this. He would have to get back there and try and find his way back through time.
If he couldn’t, he’d track down Charlie and Josh and force them to help him get back. They knew what was going to happen in the tunnel, they must have done, and they’d set the whole thing up.
Yes, they knew the secret alright. He had to make finding them his priority.
But first he had to get out of the police station.
Chapter Six
August 2049
A few seconds after he’d vanished, Josh reappeared. “Pretty neat trick, huh?” he ventured.
If he was expecting gasps of awe and excitement, he was disappointed. But then, he was preaching to the converted. All of them apart from Alice had been through a time bubble before and it was no surprise to her. She had witnessed countless experiments with Maisie, not to mention Josh’s own first tentative jumps.
“It is pretty neat,” concurred Peter. “But it also raises a lot of questions. There are all manner of implications that I think we need to discuss. I think it’s time we had an official meeting of the TTBT.”
They had taken to referring to themselves as that, short for The Time Bubble Team.
“Well, there’s no time like the present, since we’re all here,” remarked Hannah. “And to be honest, that’s pretty much what we are doing already.”
“We’re not all here,” said Kaylee, a sombre look falling across a face that had been happy moments before. “There’s somebody missing.”
The others all knew what she meant. There was a moment’s silence before Josh uttered the name that was on all their lips. “Lauren. I did want to talk about her, actually. In fact there are a lot of things that happened in the past that I want to talk about.”
“Let’s get some more drinks first, then,” said Charlie. “And I also need to take a leak.”
Five minutes later, with glasses replenished and bladders emptied, the six of them sat back round the table to talk time travel.
“OK,” said Josh, taking control of the meeting. “The first thing I want to talk about is travelling to the past.”
“That’s the thing that really concerns me,” interrupted Peter. “We’ve never had the ability to do that before. It raises all sorts of issues. I’m sure I don’t have to lecture you about the dangers of changing history. You’ve seen enough films and TV shows on the subject. And Charlie, you’ve even written books about it.”
His statement prompted a flurry of questions.
“Do we know if changing history is even possible?” asked Hannah.
“Would we even notice if it was changed?” asked Alice. “Would reality just change around us to reflect whatever had changed? Would it become the new normality for us, our memories altering to reflect the new reality?”
“These are all good questions, and like Peter says, they’ve all been explored in countless time-travel movies,” said Charlie. “The truth is we just don’t know, unless Josh has already gone back and changed something.”
He looked at Josh. “You haven’t, have you?”
“No, I haven’t,” replied Josh. “Or maybe I have, but not yet. It all depends on how you look at it.”
“How do you mean?” asked Charlie. “Don’t start going all cryptic on us.”
“Well, we already know that I have travelled back in time. I have met my future self twice already. And on both of those occasions, you could argue that my future self changed history.”
The team all knew about his trips back to meet himself. Alice had been there during the first one, and the second one had been instrumental in their decision to cast Dan into the time bubble. Josh took the opportunity to remind them of this fact.
“You could say that I changed history when I came back to tell myself that it was Dan who killed Lauren. I know we had our suspicions, but if I hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have known for certain. We’d have believed it was Ryan who had killed her for evermore.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Hannah. “I said all along that I didn’t think Ryan was responsible.”
“But that’s not changing history, is it?” argued Kaylee. “That all already happened. I’m confused.”
“It only happened because I made it happen,” said Josh.
“Have you travelled back to tell yourself yet?” asked Peter.
“No, I’ve only done a few small trips, no more than a few hours,” replied Josh. “I wanted to talk it all over with the rest of you before I went any further. I’m as worried about the implications as you are.”
“Well, implications or not,” replied Peter, “I think you have no choice but to make those trips. As far as we are concerned, they have already happened, so they are set in stone.”
“You certainly do,” said Alice. “Because if you don’t, you won’t be able to come and rescue me and I’ll end up dying in the snow twenty years ago.”
“That’s not going to happen. I am going to be there,” replied Josh. “It’s going to take a bit of organising, though. It’s not as if I can fly a helicopter through a time bubble.”
“And it’s not like there were lots of spare helicopters just lying around twenty years ago for you to hop in at your leisure,” said Charlie.
“That’s not an issue,” said Josh. “I already know where the helicopter came from. Believe me, I’ve done nothing else but plan this in every last detail. You don’t have to worry about it.”
He paused as he knew what he was going to say next was going to be a sensitive subject.
“I’ll fill you in on some more of the details of what I’ve got planned for the helicopter trip later, but I really want to talk about what happened to Lauren first. I kn
ow it’s painful, but I am sure we will all feel a little better if we knew exactly what happened to her. When my future self came back to tell me, he didn’t go into much detail.”
“I don’t think I will feel better, regardless of what happened,” said Kaylee. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”
Josh continued, adding, “Since my future self didn’t give me a great deal to go on, I’ve had to do a fair bit of research and I’ve found out quite a lot.”
“Go on,” said Peter.
“Well, I thought the best thing to do was to track down Ryan and get his side of the story. He’s moved to Bristol now and is doing quite well for himself. He’s settled down with a guy who imports classic American cars for a living and they’ve got married. Anyway, I managed to find him and accidentally on purpose bumped into him in a pub. As you can imagine, he wasn’t best pleased to see me. He’s keen to put the past behind him.”
“That’s understandable: who wouldn’t, in his situation?” asked Peter.
“Well, eventually, after I’d bought him a few drinks and assured him I only wanted to extend the hand of friendship, he opened up. He told me pretty much not only where, but also almost exactly when Lauren died.”
“So that means you can go back and save her,” said Kaylee.
“No, it doesn’t,” replied Josh. “But it does mean I can go back to 2029 and see exactly what happened. Then I can travel forward to 2041 and tell myself about it, therefore setting in process the chain of events that led to us pushing Dan into the time bubble.”
“Wait a minute,” said Kaylee, sharply. “If you know the exact place and time and you’re going back to see what happened, then there’s no reason why you can’t stop Dan from killing her.”
“There’s every reason,” stated Peter, ever the voice of reason. “As far as we are all concerned, all of this has already happened. If Josh goes back and does as you suggest, then everything that’s happened since will be changed. We’ll be changed. And who’s going to take my place in the bubble: some poor sod just wandering through the tunnel? What about their friends and family?”
