The Time Bubble Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  “Yeah, we’ve been wasting valuable drinking time,” piped up Lauren, tipsily.

  “Hardly,” remarked Future Josh, noting the collection of empty glasses in front of Lauren. “Sorry about being an hour late. I may be the king of time travel but I’m always forgetting to adjust for British Summer Time. Still, at least I got the right day. And I’m in the right universe. I think.”

  While he had been speaking, he had continued to look at Lauren, now adding, “Well, you’re here, for a start, so that’s a good thing.”

  “I’m not dead, you mean?” asked Lauren.

  “Precisely,” said Josh.

  Lauren wanted to know more. “So that other me, the one I keep dreaming about. The one Dan killed – did she really exist?”

  “Yes,” replied Future Josh. “But none of that can harm you here.”

  “And my dreams?” she asked.

  “Just as you figured out, they are subconscious thoughts, drifting through from the other universe. I’ve discovered how to map those neural pathways and how to transfer minds between the worlds now. It’s fantastic, almost supernatural what can be done. But there’s no need to worry about any of that. You’re perfectly safe here, and now you know that, you may sleep a little easier at night.”

  Mario returned, bringing Future Josh’s order, which he eagerly cut into the second it was in front of him. Raising his fork, he took a bite, making tiny rivulets of blood drip down his chin.

  “Yep, that’s how I like it,” he said, “practically mooing. Any chance of another bottle of red here, Mario?” he asked. He was already halfway through the first bottle Mario had brought him.

  This didn’t go unnoticed by Hannah who said, “I hope your future self is going to make a contribution to the bill,” to Josh.

  “Of course I am,” said Future Josh, reaching into the pocket of his jeans for his wallet. He opened it up, pulled out some unusual-looking currency and handed a couple of fluorescent notes to Hannah.

  “How much do you need? Probably not that much in this time, I would have thought, what with the inflation and all that?”

  “What’s this supposed to be?” asked Hannah, examining the strange, glowing currency which bore no resemblance at all to the polymer banknotes in her purse.

  “Oh yeah, these are virtual euros,” said Josh. “It saves on the printing costs. I forgot you don’t have them yet.”

  “We don’t have the euro either,” said Hannah. “When did that happen?”

  She looked at the face on the front of the note, which looked vaguely familiar. “And who’s President Ronaldo?”

  Josh chuckled. “Oh you’ve still got all that to look forward to – and to think, you were once worried about Trump.”

  “Well, I can’t give these to Mario, can I?” replied Hannah.

  “Can’t he just pay by card?” suggested Kaylee.

  “By card?” asked Future Josh, again chuckling. “How quaint! Cards went out with the ark. Even if I had one, it won’t be valid for another twenty-odd years. You could try asking Mario to scan my retina, but I doubt whether he’s got the equipment yet – if he ever does. This place is pretty old-fashioned, even by the standards of your time.”

  “We like it that way,” said Hannah.

  “I’m sure you do. Anyway, I shouldn’t have to pay,” said Future Josh. “I’m doing you all a huge favour coming here. And it’s not like any of you are on the breadline, is it?”

  “He’s got a point,” said Charlie. “He has saved us having to spend any more time stressing out over the time bubble.”

  “There you go then,” said Future Josh. “Get younger me here to cover it. He’s loaded. I should know. The university used to pay me a fortune to do three lectures a week and spend the rest of the time messing about in the lab. It’s a cushy little number, getting your feet under the table at Oxford, I can tell you.”

  “Yeah, I’ll pay, but you’ll have to earn it,” said younger Josh.

  “I thought I already had,” said Future Josh. “You’re paying with money I earned twenty-five years ago.”

  “I mean you can give me some more info about how you learned to control the time bubbles,” said Josh.

  “Like I said, I can’t tell you that, it’ll mess up this timeline,” said Future Josh. “Let’s just say you’ve got a lot of adventures ahead of you in the years to come. I’m quite envious really. I could quite happily do it all again – most of it anyway. But after this visit, my time-travelling days, in body at least, are over. Too many risks, as you’ll find out.”

  “You said it was dangerous,” replied Josh.

  “Don’t worry about it. I made it back – you will, too, if you’re careful. Just enjoy the ride and don’t forget about the cellar.”

  “What about the cellar?” asked Josh.

  “All will become clear in the fullness of time,” replied Future Josh, in a grandiose tone.

  With his steak polished off, he drained the last of his red wine and stood up, announcing, “I ought to be off. The longer I stay here the more chance I have of contaminating your timeline. To be honest, I’ve probably said too much already.”

  “Give me some clue, at least,” continued Josh. “Or at least tell me how long it will be until things start happening.”

  “It’s not going to happen overnight,” replied Future Josh. “You’re going to spend most of the 2040s with your head down figuring it all out. I’m afraid all work and no play will make Josh a rather dull boy for the next few years.”

  “Sounds great,” replied his younger self. “Not much to look forward to in the near future, then.”

  “Be patient,” replied Future Josh. “Come the 50s – well, that’s when it’s all going to happen. Life’s going to get very exciting then. But that’s all I’m telling you for now. It’s been lovely seeing you all again, but high time I was heading back to 2065.”

  Ignoring their protestations for him to stay longer, Future Josh stuck to his guns and left them to it, leaving the others to talk long into the night about the encounter they had just had.

  By the time they all fell out of the restaurant, way past midnight, they had every reason to be grateful for their driverless cars.

  Chapter Six

  June 2055

  Fifteen long years had passed since that night at the restaurant. During that time, the theories that had been discussed that landmark evening had turned out to be remarkably accurate.

  With Alice’s help, Josh had stepped up his work, determined to unlock the secrets that his future self already knew. There was now no doubt that the other realities that Alice and Lauren had dreamt of did indeed exist, along with countless others. He was determined to find a way to traverse them.

  By 2050 he had perfected the tachyometer, at least in terms of travelling in time, and was making regular trips. Whether or not he was the only time traveller in existence, he still did not know. What was certain was that he was creating alternate realities each time he travelled to the past.

  How different were these other universes to the original? It all depended where he went, what he did, and who he interacted with when he went back to the past. Measuring the changes was rather like measuring earthquakes.

  Any change he made in the past would have both an epicentre and a magnitude. The epicentre would be the exact location of whatever he was doing that might cause a change. The closer a person was to that, the more likely that they would be caught up in any changes in the timeline.

  The magnitude depended on the nature of what he was doing. Nipping back in time five minutes as an experiment in the lab would be barely noticeable, whereas something that was a matter of life and death could cause a seismic change with far-reaching consequences.

  To measure the magnitude, he had devised an equivalent to the Richter scale, which he had egotistically called the Gardner scale. This ranged from zero – no effect whatsoever, to twelve, which would be something like killing Hitler while he was young.

  He hadn’t
attempted anything major like that and wasn’t planning to anytime soon. Most of his time-travelling so far had focused around Oxford and the nearby town he grew up in. It was here that the epicentres were created and where he imagined that the most differences would be found between the various universes.

  How many universes were there altogether? It was impossible to say. He kept a diary of all his trips, so in theory he could keep count, but there was more to it than that, as he quickly realised.

  Early on in his experiments, he and Alice had realised that a new universe was created not only when Josh travelled back in time, but also when he returned to the future. In effect, each trip back and forth created three universes.

  How had they worked this out? Because when they had started experimenting, some strange things had happened.

  Josh had tried making short trips back in time, altering trivial things without Alice’s knowledge, then returning to the future to see what difference it had made to the timeline.

  One afternoon he went back in time to just before lunch, taking care to appear at an exact time when he would be unobserved. Without either Alice or his younger self seeing him, he swapped over a sandwich he had bought her for lunch. Originally he had got her cheese and salad, but now he substituted it for tuna instead.

  When he jumped back to the afternoon, he quizzed her about lunch. She had no recollection of the original cheese sandwich, recalling instead that she had eaten tuna. But his memories of her eating the cheese sandwich were intact.

  This was where it started to get complicated. If he had returned to the new universe, the one in which she had eaten the tuna, why didn’t he find another version of himself there? Had that Josh also travelled to the past, changing sandwiches over as well? Were there now thousands of universes, all with different Alices eating different sandwiches, with Josh repeating the same actions over and over again in an infinite loop?

  If that were true, the only way to have prevented this would have been not to conceal his presence the first time he went back in time. He should have told himself what he was doing and not to do it again later. But how would that work out? Would they end up with two versions of Josh in the same universe?

  The only way to find out was to carry out a further experiment. Discussing it with Alice, they worked out a plan. The next afternoon, in the lab, they decided that Josh would travel back exactly half an hour, from 2.30pm to 2.00pm, and that they would be waiting for him.

  2.00pm arrived and no Josh appeared from the future. If one was coming, he wasn’t coming into this timeline.

  At 2.30pm, Josh made his jump back to 2.00pm and found another Alice and another Josh waiting for him. He was expected. This seemed to suggest that this was indeed a different universe.

  Next, they eagerly waited to see what would happen at 2.30pm. There were two versions of Josh in the room during that half-hour, and the three of them spent the time discussing what might happen when the half-hour was up.

  At exactly 2.30pm, something unexpected happened. The Josh that had come back from the future stayed exactly where he was, but the version that had originally been there disappeared. This they just could not explain. Was some higher power at work, not allowing multiple versions of one person to exist in the same universe, or was it simply a case of physics that was beyond their comprehension?

  Even Josh and Alice, with all their experience in this field, struggled to get to grips with comprehending it all. Eventually, they concluded that the experiment meant that three different universes were now in existence:

  1) A universe where Josh had not travelled back in time at all.

  2) The universe Josh had travelled to, and stayed in, when his counterpart vanished.

  3) The universe Josh had originally travelled from, where the Josh who had vanished from universe 2 had ended up.

  There would therefore be an Alice and a Josh in all three universes, but not necessarily the ones they had originally started with. As Alice in the second universe observed over dinner that night, he technically was no longer the man she had married.

  They also theorised that the same thing happened when Josh returned to the future via the tachyometer after his trips further back in time.

  It was easy to get bogged down in these theories, but no one ever said time travel was simple. Josh had spent years reading every scrap of text he could find that had ever been written about grandfather paradoxes, causal loops and countless other problems related to the existence of time travel.

  No scientist, movie or novel had ever really resolved these things satisfactorily. Josh felt that he had got further than most of them, but he ought to have done. He had the benefit of real-life experience.

  Now he knew that the other universes existed, he wanted to find a way to navigate between them. What had happened in those worlds Alice and Lauren had been dreaming about? He was determined to find out how they had been created and how communication between them was possible.

  Were those dreams really subconscious thoughts, filtering their way through like coffee dripping through a percolator? How would that work? Science had made it a possibility in the current universe – people were already controlling cybernetic implants with their brains. If minds really could communicate between universes then the human brain was even more amazing than already thought.

  He was particularly interested in the timeline where Lauren had been killed by Dan in 2029. How much difference would that have made to the world since? How far out would the ripples from the epicentre of that event have spread by 2055?

  He had recently incorporated the time factor into his Gardner measurement scale. He theorised that the longer ago something happened, the greater the change. He remembered reading somewhere once that the vast majority of people in Britain were descended from William the Conqueror. If that were true, then what if he had died as a child? The world would be full of completely different people.

  The same could be said of anyone who had procreated, really. If you assumed an average of two descendants per person, then after a few hundred years you’d be in the realms of millions of potential descendants.

  Josh was unaware of the precise events surrounding Lauren’s demise in that other universe, but they had almost certainly happened. If he could find his way to that timeline he could meet up with the other members of the team. They would be able to fill him in on the details of how the timeline had changed after her death.

  With the time-travelling element of the tachyometer perfected, he turned his attention to trying to find a way to traverse the universes. It took a further five years to get to this point. During those five years he had taken hundreds of trips back through time, including his helicopter mission to come to Alice’s rescue in the snowy wastes of the Cornish coast.

  Now he was all set to make his first trial runs at travelling into a parallel world. He had already made a couple of very short sideways jumps under laboratory conditions, but now he wanted to try something more ambitious. He and Alice had discussed it in great detail, but he also wanted to run it by his friends.

  Thus, on a fine summer’s evening in 2055, he walked into The Eagle and Child, close to his laboratory in Oxford, to meet Charlie and Peter for a drink.

  Josh and Charlie had grabbed a table in the part of the pub known as The Rabbit Room. Here, literary greats of the past such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien had gathered more than a century ago. Charlie’s writing career was blossoming and he felt inspired being in a place where such esteemed writers had once drunk.

  Peter was returning from the bar with the drinks, lager for Josh and Charlie, bitter for him. Absent from that meal at Mario’s, on his return he had been fascinated to hear about Josh’s time travel research during his long absence. Now he enjoyed nothing more than meeting up at his favourite pub with his two former pupils to talk time travel.

  “The thing I love about this place,” said Peter, “is that it’s barely changed since Tolkien’s time. Perhaps we ought to travel back and
have a pint with him sometime. Speaking of which, it’s also one of the few places in Oxford where you can still get a decent pint of proper English beer.”

  “I’m surprised they even sell it,” said Josh. “Doesn’t everyone drink lager these days?”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Peter. “This isn’t one of your new robot bars down Park End Street. Look around you.”

  Glancing around the room, Charlie and Josh had to concede he was right. The pub was full of literary-looking types, the majority supping pints of traditional ale, and the bar was manned by a real barman, not a robot. There was something quite refreshing about being in such a place.

  “I went in one of those robot clubs last week,” said Josh. “It was one of the younger fellow’s leaving do and he insisted. There’s something pretty weird about watching those robogirls gyrating about on poles, knowing they aren’t real women. They are getting so realistic now you can hardly tell the difference.”

  “If I went somewhere like that, Kaylee would kill me,” said Charlie. “Not just because of me going there in the first place, but she’s totally against these robots being used as sex objects. Apparently one of her colleagues got caught shagging one of the cleaning bots in a stationery cupboard at work a couple of weeks ago. He was sacked for gross indecency.”

  “What about the robot?” asked Josh, “Did they sack that, too?”

  “It was just doing as it had been told,” replied Charlie. “Apparently this bloke had found a way around its firewall to get at the adult options.”

  “It’s a sign of the times,” said Peter. “Like you say, they are barely distinguishable from humans, so it’s bound to happen. The way things are going, I think it’s inevitable these robots are going to take over the world eventually.”

  “You mean rise up, kill all the humans and take over society?” asked Charlie. “Bit of a cliché, isn’t it? People have been predicting that since Asimov’s time.”

  “Nothing so dramatic,” said Peter. “But you can’t deny what’s happening all around us. These robots already have the equivalent processing power of a human brain. Within the next twenty years, they say we will have the capacity to upload our entire brains into one of their bodies, memories, consciousness and emotions, everything that makes us human. Can you imagine the implications of that?”