by Jason Ayres
“Are you absolutely sure that he’s not going to be any danger to anybody?” asked Evelyn. “Because, he’ll be your responsibility – if anything goes wrong, remember that he will have been released under your recommendation.”
“I’m happy to take the risk,” replied Amelia. Secretly, she was fascinated by Dan’s story, more than any other case she had undertaken in her twenty-year career. She wanted to find out more.
“OK then, I’ll authorise it,” replied Evelyn. “But I will have to pass the full report on to the police. If they want to go ahead and prosecute him, we can’t stand in their way.”
“Agreed,” replied Amelia.
Chapter Seventeen
April 2064
Four weeks later, Amelia was helping Dan to move into his new flat in a sheltered accommodation block just off the Abingdon Road area of Oxford.
The low, brick building contained a number of single-occupancy units with a warden on-site at all times. These so-called halfway houses had become more and more popular as the century had developed, as part of the increasing move towards care within the community.
It didn’t take a great deal of time to move Dan in, as he had relatively few possessions. He had come into the world of 2063 with more or less only the clothes he was wearing. He didn’t even have them anymore after his raid on the washing line the day of his return. He still had the yellow and black rugby shirt, though. If that crime had ever been reported, it had never been traced back to him. He’d been wearing it the day he’d been taken into the psychiatric unit, and he was wearing it again now on the day he walked out.
In the unit they had fed him, clothed him, and provided him with reading material in the form of old-fashioned paperback books. What they hadn’t allowed him was access to the wider world via the internet, something he was hoping to catch up on now that he was being released. Internet access was as standard as running water and electricity by this time, and the hostel was no exception.
He had been advised that all activity from his flat would be monitored, but that didn’t bother him. He would be able to find out the things that he needed to know without doing anything that might be construed as dodgy.
Dan’s attitude to life had changed considerably during his incarceration. Initially angry and hostile to all attempts at communication, the long periods he had spent alone had given him time to reflect at length on his situation.
He hadn’t liked Amelia at all at first. He was resentful of her intrusion into his life, convinced that she, too, was part of the conspiracy against him. His attitude towards her had softened as time had gone on, and he had found himself actually starting to enjoy the time he spent talking to her. Liking people was a trait that the old Dan hadn’t really had.
Over time he’d come to realise that anger and frustration were not going to get him anywhere and he’d made a conscious effort to modify his behaviour as a result. His one unswerving goal was still to find a way back to the past, and he wasn’t going to have any chance of doing that while he was locked up in the unit.
Over time, without consciously realising it, the need to modify his behaviour became less and less. He had actually begun to enjoy his new, more agreeable persona. All of the things that had made him so angry and frustrated before no longer seemed to matter that much.
Being confined in the unit was possibly the best thing that could ever have happened to him. Over the six months he had been there, he had attended counselling sessions, got involved in group activities, and begun to read books. That was something he hadn’t done since he’d left school. The fact that he wasn’t allowed an e-reader did not bother him. The unit had a library full of old paperbacks which he found quite nostalgic and comforting, given his circumstances.
It was just as well that he had decided to avail himself of the library, because one wet Wednesday afternoon, one book in particular caught his eye. It was a faded paperback that had clearly been there for a long time, neglected and unread. It was the name of the author on the spine, Charlie Adams, which had first caught his attention.
He had picked up the book and examined it more closely: “The Time Tunnel” by Charlie Adams. It couldn’t be the same Charlie, could it? A brief look inside had confirmed that it was. A perusal of the synopsis on the back confirmed that it was a novel about time travel.
“How very interesting,” Dan had remarked at the time. He had taken the book back to his room and read it from cover to cover that night.
He read all about the tale of the two teenage boys who’d discovered a time portal in the tunnel that transported people forward in time. It was quite evident to Dan that the two boys in the story, Jacob and Max, were based on Charlie and Josh.
It was also blatantly obvious that their fat, obnoxious, schoolboy friend called Dylan was based on himself.
The time portal described in the story was located in a tunnel, no doubt the very one where Dan had taken his trip forward in time. The book explained how it doubled in length with each trip. There was no point in him trying to track Peter down, then. If it indeed worked as described in the book, he wouldn’t be reappearing for another forty-six years.
It was impossible to tell how much of the story was true, because the book ended with the resolution of the portal being deactivated by Max in the mid-2020s so that no one could ever be trapped in it again.
Clearly that hadn’t happened in real life, because the real one had still been there in 2041 when Dan had entered it. It was difficult to know which bits were true and which bits Charlie had changed when he wrote the book. There were all sorts of similarities, but with names and places changed. For example, it wasn’t set in Oxfordshire, but in a town near Cambridge.
What Dan did find very interesting was the summary of what happened to the characters at the end of the book. Jacob married his childhood sweetheart, Kacey, whom he assumed to be Kaylee, and Max became a time travel expert at the University of Cambridge, capable of travelling through time at will.
It was this last bit that interested Dan the most. Although he hadn’t kept in touch with Charlie and Josh much after school, he knew that Josh had gone on to great things at the University of Oxford.
Could it be that this part of the book was true? Had Josh really discovered the secret of time travel, just like Max had in the book?
If so, Josh had just become Dan’s best hope of getting a one-way ticket back to his own time. But this time, he had to play things very carefully.
Storming around like a bull in a china shop was not going to get him anywhere other than back inside the unit, or worse still, prison. He wasn’t like he was when he’d first arrived in 2063, confused, panicked and desperate. Now he had time to plan things carefully and wait for the right moment. He had no reason to hurry. In fact he was quite enjoying life at the moment.
It took him all of five minutes to move into his new flat. He had a small suitcase full of clothes that he had acquired in the psychiatric unit, and a cardboard box filled with a few books and toiletries. This was currently the sum total of his life’s possessions.
Placing the box on the floor, he had a good look round his new home. The front door opened into a small hallway in the right-hand corner of the flat. Turning left on entering, the hallway opened out into the main area of the open-plan flat.
Half of the space was given over to a kitchen area, and the other half to a small lounge. The area between the two was divided by a breakfast bar. A sofa ran along the partition below the breakfast bar, facing the far corner of the flat which contained a screen built into the wall. He was pleased to see that the breakfast bar also contained a built-in interactive screen. This would come in very useful for the research he had planned.
On the right-hand wall of the flat were two doors. He walked over to one to find a small bedroom containing a single bed. Dumping his suitcase on the floor, he walked back into the flat, just as Amelia walked in carrying two supermarket carrier bags. These were filled up with a few essentials they’d picked u
p on their way over.
“Fancy a cup of tea?” she asked, as she plonked the bags down on top of the breakfast bar.
“I’d love one,” he replied. He was very grateful to Amelia for all the help she had given him, and was glad she was still going to be around helping him.
Amelia pulled a box of tea bags, a pint of milk and some sugar out of one of the bags. She then grabbed the silver stainless steel kettle from the breakfast bar and filled it up with water.
While she was doing that, Dan checked out the other door which contained, unsurprisingly, the bathroom. He closed the door to use the toilet, and then went back into the kitchen, from where he could hear the comforting sound of a teaspoon being stirred in a cup.
“I got some Viennese Whirls to go with these,” said Amelia.
“Fantastic,” replied Dan. “I love them.”
They sat on the sofa, drank their tea and chatted. Amelia was so easy to talk to and it wasn’t just because she was a trained psychologist. He just liked talking to her.
After the tea and whirls, it was time for Amelia to get back to work.
“Are you sure you’re going to be OK?” she asked. “I’ll come back and see you tomorrow. Remember that if you want to go off site for anything, you need to clear it with the warden first.”
“I’ll be fine,” he replied. “Don’t worry. I’m not planning on going anywhere tonight.”
She bid him farewell, giving him a chance to have a proper poke around the flat to see what mod cons he’d been provided with.
He was more than happy with his new place. It had everything he needed. Although he had very little in the way of resources, his flat was fully furnished and he wasn’t required to pay any rent, so he had no financial worries. As a patient who was still under supervision from the Mental Health Act, he would also be paid a small but adequate sum of benefits each week that would be more than enough to live on.
This would give him ample time to decide what he was going to do for the long term. Part of him wondered whether he even wanted to go back to the past. Was that really what he wanted? The old Dan hadn’t been a very nice person, he could see that now. But if he did find a way back to 2041 he didn’t have to go back to being that person. Perhaps he could turn over a new leaf?
But what about all those people back there who hated him? What about Lauren and what he’d done? Perhaps he needed to go back further in time. Could he undo what he had done to her?
“If only I could turn back the clock,” he said to himself.
If there was a way, he was determined to find it.
Chapter Eighteen
June 2064
After his traumatic experience witnessing Lauren’s death, Josh had been true to his word and had stopped making journeys back into time.
There was nothing else that he was obliged to do in the past. All appearances of his future self in his past timeline were accounted for. The experiment he’d carried out with Alice’s crisps had been proof enough that events could be altered. That alone was reason enough not to go tinkering about in the past.
One thing he was adamant about was that he wasn’t about to destroy the technology. All of his notes, equipment and the two tachyometers were safely locked away, ready to be brought out again if required. He now liked to think of himself as Earth’s own personal guardian of time, protecting the secrets he had discovered. He would be ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice if the need arose to stamp out anyone else’s unlicensed time travel.
He continued to lecture in mathematics at the university, but began to spend a lot less time in the lab than before. He and Alice both felt that they needed to strike a better work/life balance. They vowed to restrict their time at the university to term-time, and started to make the most of the lengthy breaks in-between to take holidays.
They travelled all over the world, including a three-month sabbatical in the mid-2050s when they visited Charlie and Kaylee in Australia.
Kaylee had indeed decided to take up the Australians on their offer to head up their climate management project, so for most of the 2050s she and Charlie lived in Uluru City.
By the end of the decade the project was complete, and the Australians had complete control over their climate. They could make it rain when and where they wanted to. Uluru City had become a shining example to the rest of the world of a potential utopian future.
Despite the opportunity to stay on in the fabulous, futuristic city when the project was completed, Charlie and Kaylee decided to come home. She agreed to stay on remotely, as an advisor, but they were nearing retirement age now and missed their old home and their children.
Pete and Sophie had been at university when their parents headed down under. By the time they returned, they’d formed highly successful careers of their own and settled into stable relationships. When Sophie called her mother to tell her she was pregnant a couple of months before the end of the project, Kaylee knew for sure that she wanted to go home.
They had been renting their old home out through an agent whilst they had been in Australia, but fortunately the most recent tenants had decided to move on shortly before Kaylee and Charlie were ready to come home.
By Christmas 2059 they were back in their own house enjoying the festive season with their family all around them, including a heavily pregnant Sophie.
With Charlie and Kaylee settled back in the UK, the aging members of the team were back together once more. They regularly got together socially as the 2060s dawned, but a dark cloud lay on the horizon.
In the autumn of 2060, Hannah discovered that she had advanced bowel cancer. Cruelly, she had experienced no symptoms until it was way too late for any treatment, even by the medical standards of 2060.
Cancer treatments and screenings had advanced tremendously by this time. Early diagnosis had made survival rates virtually 100% for many types. Unfortunately, two of the most deadly, lung and bowel cancer, continued to claim millions of lives worldwide every year, particularly in less developed countries where healthcare facilities still lagged behind those of the wealthier nations.
The news had come as a complete shock to Hannah, who had lived a healthy life. She was devastated when the doctors gave her just three months to live. Breaking the news to Peter, he suggested speaking to Josh. Mindful of how he had once been cured of leukaemia using the time bubble, they asked Josh if he could use the tachyometer to jump forward in time to look for a cure.
Josh was more than happy to bring the tachyometer out of retirement for such a worthy cause, but his quest yielded no joy. He travelled forward to the limits of the tachyometer’s ability, right into the 23rd century, but it was all to no avail.
He discovered that no cure had ever been discovered for cancer in the advanced state that Hannah found herself in. Medical attention in the future had become focused on prevention rather than cure.
Incredibly advanced full body screening for all illnesses had been developed. Such screenings were routinely carried out for everyone every three months, and were as much a part of daily life as a check-up at the dentist was back in Josh’s century.
The technology instantly detected any cancerous growths and destroyed them using advanced nanotechnology while they were still microscopic, long before they could cause the body any harm.
So there was nothing that could be done for someone in Hannah’s condition, because no one ever got that ill in the future.
Sadly, Josh was forced to return home and break the bad news to Hannah, Peter and Jess.
Hannah died in the spring of 2061. With the time rapidly approaching for Dan to return from the time bubble, the surviving members of the team had got together again after the funeral to discuss how to handle his emergence.
The best suggestion at the time had been to push him back in, but it wasn’t solving the long-term problem. None of them would be around in another forty-odd years, and they still felt morally obliged to ensure that no innocent passer-by should fall into the tunnel in the futu
re and disappear.
With no obvious solution in mind, Josh had once again resumed his time travel experiments. He had returned to the tunnel to measure the bubble in every way possible. His plan was to try and find a way to disable it so that it would no longer be a danger to the public.
In laboratory conditions he had successfully managed to achieve this with a small bubble. He had managed to create a bubble in the maze and then freeze it in time in such a way that anything passing through it would be unaffected. He then tried it out on Milly the mouse.
Milly was Maisie’s great-great-granddaughter, the latest in the long-running dynasty of time-travelling mice.
This had worked perfectly. However, experiments with larger, human-sized bubbles had not been so successful. He couldn’t generate enough energy to create the same effect with any degree of stability.
In the end, his experiments proved unnecessary. Peter took the problem out of his hands with his shock revelation that his own cancer had returned and his subsequent plan to journey to the end of time.
It had solved the immediate problem, but Josh was still determined to finish the project. He hated leaving any problem once he’d started working on it until he’d found the solution. He had come this far and there was no way he was going to admit defeat.
Eventually, in the summer following Peter’s departure to the future, he made the breakthrough he needed. He could now create and disable a full-sized bubble in the lab. Once he’d succeeded in doing this, it was a relatively simple task to do the process in reverse. He could also reactivate a bubble after it had previous been disabled.
Now he had achieved his goal in laboratory conditions, he just needed to find out if he could do the same to the original time bubble.
