by Jason Ayres
Josh considered this for a moment before replying.
“The insects may all look the same,” he said, “but everything has its place. What if that insect was going to be lunch for a larger insect that instead starved to death, depriving the next animal up the food chain of its next meal? Before you know it, some ancient human might have died of starvation because of the death of one single insect. That human could have been your distant ancestor, along with half the current human race. Suddenly you’ve altered the DNA of the entire species.”
“I think that’s a pretty fanciful scenario,” replied Alice. “Besides, you said yourself that you couldn’t go back more than about 200 years. So this is all academic, really.”
“I was just trying to illustrate a point,” replied Josh. “And the point is we are playing with fire. I do wonder if, after this latest mission is complete, we ought to restrict our travels to the future only. That’s a lot safer.”
“There must be some sort of controlled experiment we can do to find out if things really can be changed or not without bringing about the destruction of planet Earth as we know it,” remarked Alice, as she finished her sandwich. She reached over to the desk and picked up the packet of Smoky Bacon crisps that Josh had brought back from the shop for her.
As he watched her open the packet, he was suddenly struck with an idea.
“Maybe there is something we can do,” he said. “Wait here a minute.” He grabbed the tachyometer and headed for the door.
“What are you up to?” she asked.
“You’ll see,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Out in the corridor, there was no one about. He set the tachyometer for exactly one hour ago, created the vortex and stepped through.
Relieved to discover that there was still no one around at the other end, he made his way out of the building and across the road to the small supermarket where he’d bought lunch earlier. By his reckoning, he’d have about ten minutes to wait until his earlier self arrived.
He hadn’t remembered seeing himself earlier. Whether that was because it hadn’t happened yet, or because he’d managed to conceal himself, he couldn’t say. Either way, it was important that he stayed out of sight.
He walked into the store, picked up a basket and then followed the exact same route around the store as he had previously.
A large area near the front of the store was given over to sandwiches and snacks in order to attract the passing lunchtime trade. He went over to the section that held the crisps and picked out a packet of Ready Salted flavour. He then moved back out of sight, positioning himself so he could see the front of the store, but in a place where his other self would be unlikely to spot him. He was now at the end of the household goods aisle, somewhere he hadn’t gone anywhere near earlier.
He wasn’t sure if there was anyone watching the security cameras. Hopefully if anyone did clock that there were two of him in the store, they would just assume they were twins. It was unlikely that anyone watching would care anyway. He was pretty sure nobody had ever been detained in a supermarket for looking like someone else.
A few minutes later, he spotted his earlier self making his way into the shop. He’d been in a rush earlier, and had tripped slightly on his way through the front door.
“What an idiot,” Josh murmured, well aware of the irony that he was laughing at himself.
His earlier self had grabbed a basket and gone straight to the chiller cabinet to get the sandwiches. The supermarket was offering one of its ever-enduring meal deals – a sandwich, a packet of crisps and a drink for 8 euros.
He watched as his younger self tutted at a fat woman who was blocking his access to the crisps. That had been a bit harsh, he reflected. It probably wasn’t the woman’s fault she was overweight. She might have some sort of genetic condition. Then again, clocking the fact that she’d picked up three packets of crisps to add to the other junk food in her basket, perhaps not.
Josh waited until his other self had selected all his items and was heading towards the till. He then emerged from his covert position and prepared to make his move.
It was crowded in the shop, which made his plan just that little bit easier to carry out. There was a single queue for the automated checkouts, populated by a mix of Oxford undergraduates, office workers and parents with pushchairs.
Josh made sure that he got right in behind himself in the queue and then kept his fingers crossed he wouldn’t turn around. He was still clutching his packet of Ready Salted crisps. They were crucial to his plan.
Then he remembered something from earlier. When he had been in the queue, his attention had been drawn to a couple in front of one of the tills. They were having some sort of domestic and very public dispute over money.
“I thought you said you were paying,” said the young woman, who seemed to have come out dressed in her pyjamas.
“I told you, I don’t get my benefits until tomorrow,” replied the man, a rough-looking type who looked as hard as nails. He was the sort Josh certainly wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of.
They had done him a favour today, though. As his earlier self’s attention was temporarily drawn to the argument away to his left, his later persona deftly reached into the basket he was holding in his right hand and switched the two bags of crisps.
Not wanting to hang around for fear of being spotted, he instantly turned around and abandoned his spot in the queue. He replaced the packet of Smoky Bacon crisps he had swapped out of the basket back onto the shelves, and headed for the exit.
Once he was outside he looked back through the window to see that his earlier self was now right at the front of the queue. Now all he had to do was make his way back to the college and check out the results of his experiment.
Once he was back in the building, he headed for the toilets at the end of the corridor from where he’d made his original jump. Then he waited in the cubicle to allow time for events to play out as they had before.
He’d made careful note of the time he’d jumped and made sure that he emerged back into the corridor just afterwards. There was no one about as before, so he made his way back to the lab, eager to find out if his attempt to change history had been successful.
When he got there, Alice was sitting on her stool, just finishing off her crisps. Josh was delighted to see that the packet she was eating from was no longer maroon in colour, but a far lighter shade of red. It had worked!
“What happened?” she asked. “You were only gone a couple of minutes.”
He could see the difference, but would she? “I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said. “Did you enjoy your crisps?”
“They were OK,” she said. “I still wish you had got me Smoky Bacon, though, like I asked for.”
“Have they always been Ready Salted?” asked Josh. “Since I first came back?”
“What a peculiar question,” replied Alice. “What’s the obsession with my crisps all of a sudden?”
“Your crisps have just been the subject of a very interesting time travel experiment,” replied Josh. And he took her through the details of what he’d done.
By the time they had finished talking it over, they had reached some very interesting conclusions. As far as Alice was concerned, he had come back from the shop with the Ready Salted crisps. There had never been any Smoky Bacon in the room. To her, it seemed like nothing had changed. Yet Josh still clearly remembered the original timeline when he had brought the Smoky Bacon crisps back.
It seemed that Josh’s memory of the original timeline was somehow protected by his travelling through time and being the actual instrument of change. Alice, on the other hand, was now subject to the altered timeline.
They decided not to make any more trips until they had consulted the rest of the team. A few days later, Josh and Alice met up with Hannah, Peter, Charlie and Kaylee at Browns, one of Oxford’s longest established restaurants.
Josh was eager to discuss his experiment further, and as soon as
they’d placed their orders electronically through the interactive menus, he described in detail what he’d done.
When he’d finished, both Hannah and Peter were adamant that Josh needed to stop the time travel experiments, at least into the past.
“But it was only a packet of crisps,” was Josh’s answer to their arguments. “It’s hardly going to start World War 3, is it?”
“But the point is, we now have conclusive proof that things can be changed,” replied Peter. “Your intentions may be honourable, but one slip-up and the consequences could be catastrophic.”
“He’s right,” said Hannah. “We all want you to stop.”
“Even you, Alice?” enquired Josh, looking his long-term partner in the eye. She would support him, wouldn’t she?
“I’m sorry, I agree with the others,” replied Alice. “I know we’ve dedicated half of our lives to this, but isn’t the satisfaction of knowing we achieved what we set out to do reward enough?”
Reluctantly Josh conceded that they were right and backed down. In the end, they agreed that he wouldn’t destroy the technology, but he would put it into storage and use it sparingly for trips into the future only. Travel into the past could only be permitted in the event of an extreme emergency.
Quite what form such an emergency might take they were not entirely sure, but, as Josh pointed out, if they ever got wind that someone else was tampering with time, they might need to take action. At this point Peter questioned whether they would even know if someone else changed something. After all, Alice hadn’t.
Reluctantly, they did agree that it was time for Josh to take the one final trip he had been putting off for too long.
It was time to go back to the fateful night when Lauren had lost her life.
Chapter Fifteen
October 2029
Three weeks later, with all preparations made, Josh was ready to travel back in time to the Black Winter.
He wasn’t taking any chances with the weather. He would be travelling back to October 2029, almost twenty years ago to the day and he knew it was going to be nothing like the October he was leaving behind.
He remembered only too well from his trek across the snowy wastes of Cornwall how bitterly cold it was going to be. Just thinking about it brought a chill to his bones.
As he walked along St Giles’ the golden autumn sunshine shone clearly through the gaps in the trees left by the leaves that had already fallen. Crisp and brown, they rustled around him as he walked along, making a pleasing crunching sound underfoot. He was heading towards the train station, having decided that would be the best way to get to where he wanted to go.
The trains ran directly to the market town in the north of Oxfordshire where he had grown up. There was no point making the jump in Oxford: he would end up having to fight his way through fifteen miles of snowdrifts. He needed to get as close as possible to his destination before he activated the tachyometer.
Oxford railway station had undergone a recent refurbishment, and Josh was impressed at how clean and modern everything now looked. Some traditional elements had been maintained, however – you could still buy a paper ticket at the machine if you hadn’t got a railcard, which Josh hadn’t. It had been some time since he had been on a train.
The train itself was also a pleasant surprise. Making his way to platform 3, he boarded a very smart-looking, silver train with “Cambridge” displayed on the front. He would be getting off at his home town, the first stop on the line.
He remembered travelling up and down the line in his youth when his mother had taken him shopping in Oxford. Back then it only went to Oxford and back, chugging along at a leisurely speed in the antiquated trains of the era. Now the line had been upgraded to link all the way across to the east coast.
Not only were the new trains comfortable, they were also very fast. It seemed to Josh that he had barely settled into his extremely plush chair before the automated voice system was announcing their imminent arrival at his destination.
The train was crowded with foreign tourists, travelling up from London for the day to visit the large shopping village that bordered the town. They moved en masse along the platform, excitedly in search of bargains. Josh let them get on with it and held back. He wasn’t in any hurry.
At the exit to the station, the tourists headed in one direction, whilst Josh headed in the other. It was quieter now and he was relieved to be away from the crowds. His appearance had attracted a few looks since he’d set out from Oxford, especially on the train, which was hardly surprising. The solitary platform attendant at Oxford station had cheerily greeted him with: “Where are you off to then, mate? An Arctic expedition?”
If only he knew, thought Josh. It was true that he must have looked a little odd. He was dressed in gloves, scarf, several layers of clothing, and an incredibly thick, parka-style winter coat. The appearance was topped off with a rucksack which contained his survival kit. He wasn’t taking any chances going back to the Black Winter. He knew that energy supplies and food had been scarce for several months.
At the time, it hadn’t been a problem for him, as he’d escaped most of it inside the Cornish time bubble. But if anything went wrong, anything at all, the last thing he wanted was to be stranded in the middle of it with no food and no equipment.
Fortunately, it was getting quite late in the afternoon by now and decidedly chilly, which rendered his appearance slightly less conspicuous. Thank goodness he hadn’t decided to do this in the middle of summer, he reflected. Not only would that have looked extremely odd, he’d also probably have keeled over with heat exhaustion.
After about half a mile he crossed the ring road and headed onto the new housing estate that had been built on the site of the old Army base. Like almost all new property built in the past few decades, these were eco homes, with the now standard solar panels adorning the roofs.
He had already been up to the site the previous weekend to have a good scout round and find a suitable place to jump. He had managed to get hold of an old aerial photograph of the Army base, as well as the latest satellite views of the estate which were available in great detail on the internet.
Even so, it wasn’t the easiest task overlaying one onto the other, in the lack of any clearly obvious landmark to refer to on both maps. If there had been a river running through the middle of it, that would have been ideal, but there wasn’t.
Using his best judgement, with only the edge of the ring road to go on, he was pretty sure that he’d found a spot where it was reasonably safe to jump. There was still an element of risk, but he took that every time he made a jump.
Space was no longer at such a premium as it had been during housebuilding earlier in the century. Consequently, unlike some of the estates built then where the builders had crammed as many little boxes in as possible, the new estate had been designed with plenty of open spaces and decent-sized gardens.
Josh had worked out that the best place to jump from was the middle of the football pitch in the newly built primary school. All he had to do was get into the school.
It was nearly 5pm by the time he reached the gates, and he was pleased to see that they were still open. He was less pleased to see a football match in progress on the field. No matter, he would just have to conceal himself in the school grounds somewhere and wait for the match to finish and everyone to go home.
He would need a good hiding place. He knew CCTV cameras came as standard now in all schools, but hopefully no one would be looking at them at this time of day. He really didn’t want to get caught loitering on school grounds. He might be accused of being some sort of paedophile, and that didn’t bear thinking about.
As long as he stayed well clear of the pitch and the changing rooms, he ought to be safe. From the front gates, the sports field was to the right of the main building, so he headed to the left. There was a small, separate area of the playground on that side of the school which was gated off from the rest. It contained sandpits, small go-karts and a Wendy
house.
Josh guessed this must be the separate area allocated to the four-year-olds in reception class. The Wendy house was just what he was looking for. It would provide the perfect hiding place until everyone had left.
He made his way carefully inside, taking his rucksack off first so that he could squeeze through the door. He looked back towards the school for a sign that anyone had seen him, but it looked as if he was in the clear. This was just as well. It would look very bad indeed if he was caught in here.
He sat down against the back of the hut and waited. Dusk was approaching and it was starting to get quite cold, but that wasn’t a problem for Josh in his current attire. It was probably a good thing, in fact. It would help him acclimatise.
The cheering from the football pitch on the far side of the school stopped soon after Josh had settled in the Wendy house, signalling that the match must be over. He decided to stay where he was for the time being. It would take some time for the kids to get changed and their parents to collect them. He decided that it was best if he waited until it was completely dark.
When he thought he’d waited long enough and hadn’t heard the sound of any cars in the car park for at least a quarter of an hour, he checked his watch. He saw that it was almost exactly 6pm and the final light was draining rapidly from the autumn sky.
Emerging nervously from the hut, he looked left and right to check there was no one about. To the left, beyond the fence at the edge of the school, there was a faint, red glow lingering between some oak trees where the sun had recently set.
To the right, the moon, almost full, was rising in the clear, dark blue sky. There didn’t seem to be anyone about. Josh decided it would be safe enough now to make his way round to the football pitch.
Progressing cautiously at first, his confidence grew when he rounded the side of the building to see that not only was the car park devoid of cars, but also that the gates were securely bolted. That meant the caretaker had locked up and gone home. Technically, this meant that Josh was trapped, but that didn’t matter if you had a tachyometer to hand.
