The Time Bubble Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  Whatever was going to happen up on level 6 was going to happen at around 3am by his calculations. He had plenty of time to get to where he was going. He had allowed himself plenty of time and had even remembered to take into account the time differences between summer and winter, for once.

  It was just as well that he had given himself an hour to spare because the hospital had been completely redesigned and refurbished in the intervening thirty years. Although the original building still stood in 2055, the interior had changed beyond recognition.

  This was also something he had prepared for. He had gone to look around the modern version a few days before, then compared it to an old floor plan of the earlier design he had found on the internet. Familiarising himself with the older arrangement, he knew he had quite a trek to get to where he was going, but that wasn’t an issue. It would give him time to relax and get a feel for the place. If he did get lost, he had a copy of the map in his backpack that he could refer to.

  The twin automatic glass doors in front of him slid open smoothly as he approached. Before he entered, he tucked the tachyometer safely away into his backpack. This was standard procedure when time-travelling. The last thing he wanted to do was attract attention that might risk having it stolen. Once that was done, he breezed confidently in through the doors, which swished closed again behind him.

  As his map had suggested, he found himself in a brightly lit reception area. Unsurprisingly, there were few people around; a young man slumped in a chair asleep, and a concerned-looking older couple sitting opposite him, talking in low voices.

  There were also a couple of beefy-looking security guards behind the desk, chatting away. They didn’t even acknowledge his presence as he walked past them. The very nature of hospitals meant that there would always be people wandering around at all times of day and night. As far as they were concerned, he was probably just another worried relative of someone who was sick or dying.

  It was a sobering thought, but one which provided a useful cover, nonetheless. If they weren’t going to question his presence, hopefully no one else would.

  Apart from the odd nurse he saw hardly anyone as he walked along the lengthy corridor that led to the lifts. It seemed to take forever to get there, but eventually he found himself alone in the lift, heading for level 6.

  Leaving the lift, he made his way along more deserted corridors. With no one around, he was able to take his time, glancing into the doors of some of the rooms that he passed.

  Looking through one, he discovered an unlocked cloakroom where he was able to acquire a white coat. He had been hoping he might find one as he wanted to try out a trick he had seen done in a couple of old television shows.

  Whenever characters were up to no good in hospitals, they always donned themselves a white coat as a cover. Then everyone they met assumed they were a doctor. Would this work in real life or was it just a TV trope? Now was as good a time as any to find out.

  Doctors didn’t wear white coats anymore in his time, and he wasn’t even sure that they still did in 2025. He certainly couldn’t recall seeing any on his rare hospital visits in his youth. Still, the coat was here and hung up on the peg for a reason so it must belong to someone.

  Leaving the cloakroom and walking along the narrow corridor in his white coat, he felt a sense of importance, as if he really was a doctor. Gaining confidence all the time, he felt comfortable enough to take out the tachyometer to help guide him to exactly where he needed to be.

  Yet another enhancement he had given it was the ability to work with the primitive GPS positioning system of this time period. The map had already given him a rough idea of where he needed to be, but the tachyometer would pinpoint the place.

  Turning a corner into a wider, more open area, he slowed his pace. According to the tachyometer, he was now less than thirty metres from his destination. In this area there were open wards to either side of him. As he passed them, he briefly glanced inside. There were beds inside, and at least one nurse in each ward, but none of them saw him.

  At the far end of the room were two doors which Josh knew from his study of the hospital map to be private rooms. According to the tachyometer, it was in one of these rooms that the event, whatever it was, was about to take place.

  As he walked towards the doors, one of them opened and a couple emerged, a young, blonde woman and a smartly dressed man in a suit. The man put his arm around the woman, clearly in need of comfort and they started walking directly towards him. Josh could see from the tachyometer that the room they had just left was the one where he needed to be.

  The woman looked up at him briefly as they passed and Josh could see from the puffy, red state of the skin around her eyes that she had been crying. He had the feeling he knew her from somewhere, or at least seen her before, but couldn’t place her. She certainly didn’t show any signs of recognising him, not giving either him or the tachyometer a second glance.

  Josh took this to mean that his involuntary disguise had been successful and she had assumed the tachyometer to be some piece of medical equipment.

  Self-centred as he so often was, he hadn’t considered the more likely possibility that she was too consumed by grief to care. Either way, it didn’t matter to Josh. If they were leaving, that was all well and good. It would hopefully leave the way to his destination clear.

  Pausing for a moment while he waited for the couple to disappear out of sight, he made a show of examining an old-fashioned noticeboard on the wall, to the right of the doors. It was full of the usual sort of stuff people posted on such boards. Feigning interest, he saw that there were rooms for rent, ads for Zumba classes and a flyer for the local panto starring someone Josh had never heard of called Timmy Mallett.

  Taking a surreptitious glance behind him, he saw the couple retreating into the distance. They were not showing any signs of looking or coming back. As soon as they turned the corner at the end of the corridor, he seized his chance.

  Moving quickly to the door of the room, he grasped the handle and opened it, wondering what he would find inside. What was there didn’t come as any great surprise, considering the girl’s tears. There was a body on the bed, with a sheet drawn over the face. This person, whoever he or she was, had clearly recently died.

  It could only be about five minutes until the event he had come to witness occurred. What could possibly be going to happen here that would shatter this universe, creating so many duplicates? Everything seemed so normal – a quiet room, a dead body on a bed? It was hardly some pivotal point in the time-space continuum. But then what had he expected to see?

  He had a brief look around the room. There wasn’t anything that looked out of place for a hospital room. The walls were pale and in need of a lick of paint. The bed was on the right-hand side of the room, with a small bedside table alongside.

  Upon the table was a glass vase full of fresh, red roses and a small clock with a black LCD display against a grey background. The lighting in the room was low, but he could just make out that the clock read 2.56am.

  There was tinsel draped across the window frame and a cheap-looking, plastic Christmas tree in the far left corner of the room. A large, gold star was perched slightly lopsided on top. It was all incredibly normal.

  Then Josh looked at the chart on the end of the bed, providing him with a major clue. He discovered that the recently deceased patient’s name was Thomas Scott. It was a name that had been ingrained on his mind for many, many years.

  Josh had encountered Thomas Scott in his youth, long before he had started experimenting with time travel. That meeting, in addition to the time bubble adventures, had been a major source of inspiration that had set Josh on the lifelong quest that had brought him here right now.

  The circumstances in which he had met Scott had been highly unusual. Josh, a young man in his early twenties at the time, had been on a family outing to Cheltenham Races in December 2021. On that landmark day, Scott had approached him and claimed he could see into the future.
When Josh had been sceptical, Scott had gone on to correctly predict the result of every horse race that afternoon.

  Josh’s father had dismissed him as a conman, but Josh knew that was unlikely. No conman could have pulled off such a remarkable feat and if they were that good at predicting results, why would they even need to?

  Scott had gone on to explain that he was living his life backwards through time. He said to Josh that if he ever discovered the secret of time travel, that he should come and meet him at a particular time and place in Oxford during the summer of 1990. Josh had duly obliged, making it one of the first trips he made once he had developed a fully working tachyometer. He was amazed when he found Scott there, just as he had claimed he would be.

  The mystery of how or why Scott’s backwards life had happened had never been resolved, but surely the fact that his fresh corpse was here now at this precipitous moment had to have something to do with it.

  Josh was shaken out of any further rumination by the door opening and a nurse coming in. She took one look at him and immediately challenged him.

  “Who are you?” she demanded in a strong Liverpool accent. “What are you doing in here?”

  Josh looked up at the nurse, caught flat-footed by her sudden arrival and needing to come up with an answer quickly. She was pretty and blonde, and looked to be around her mid-thirties. Clutching at straws, he looked to her chest for a name tag, clocking not only that her name was Amy, but also that she had been blessed with extremely ample breasts. Unfortunately his eyes lingered on her chest just a little too long.

  “I’m Doctor Gardner,” he bluffed, putting on the sort of cut-glass accent favoured by English actors playing upper-crust roles in stage shows and American films. Attempting to pour on the charm, he added, “I’m a specialist, visiting from Harley Street. I’m delighted to meet you, Amy.”

  “Don’t give me that,” she replied, “and stop staring at my tits. None of the doctors in this hospital or anywhere else wear white coats anymore. What they do wear is ID, so where’s yours?”

  “Ah yes, one of the chaps down on security printed it up for me this morning,” he ventured. “I must pop down and pick it up at some point.”

  It was quite clear from the look on her face that she didn’t believe a word of it. Conscious of the time, he glanced across at the clock again. It was 2.58am. He just needed to stall this woman for a couple of minutes.

  Deciding to try a different tack, and reverting to his normal voice, he said, “Look, I’ll come clean, I’m not a doctor, I’m a scientist attached to the university carrying out some research here. I just need a couple of minutes, that’s all. Then I’ll be out of your hair.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not good enough,” replied Amy. “People don’t go around hospitals in the middle of the night wearing dubious disguises unless they’re up to no good.”

  “What can I get up to in here?” protested Josh, gesturing towards the body on the bed. “It’s not as if I’ve come to bump him off, is it? It’s a bit late for that: the Grim Reaper’s already been and gone.”

  “I’m calling security,” replied Amy, moving towards a telephone attached to the wall.

  “No, don’t do that,” he protested, and began to move towards her.

  Sensing a threat, she backed away and hit a large red button on the wall close to the door. It began to flash, but there was no sound.

  Josh hadn’t expected this. “Since when have hospitals had panic buttons?” It wasn’t something he had ever been aware of.

  “Since last year when a patient assaulted a nurse in this very ward,” replied Amy. “Do you have any idea how much abuse we get from the drunks that get hauled in here every weekend? Now you’ve got less than two minutes until security arrive from downstairs to escort you from the premises – and that won’t be pleasant. They don’t take too kindly to women being threatened and can get quite heavy-handed. If I were you, I would scarper, now, while you still can.”

  She had well and truly got the measure of him. Perhaps he should simply abandon this attempt. There was nothing to stop him shifting back in time a day or two and sideways into a similar universe. He could then try again ensuring that the annoying Amy with her irritating Scouse accent was well out of the way this time.

  He decided against doing a runner as she suggested. He didn’t relish the thought of running down unfamiliar corridors being pursued by aggressive security guards. It would be far easier to get out of there right now.

  “Fine,” he said, “but I’ll be back and you won’t even know about it.”

  Pressing a couple of buttons on the tachyometer, he set it to take him back forty-eight hours, pointed it towards the window on the far side of the room, and activated it.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, unable to see anything. The tachyometer didn’t produce a glowing whirlpool-style vortex such as you would see in a science-fiction movie, just an invisible portal through which Josh was about to step.

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” he said as he prepared to step into the bubble. But before he could do so, something unexpected happened.

  On the other side of the room, not far from the window, another Josh, seemingly the same age as him appeared, also holding out a tachyometer in front of him. He was aiming his device into exactly the same place Josh was.

  Josh had never even considered the possible effects of creating two time bubbles in the same space before, but he couldn’t imagine that it was going to have a positive outcome.

  “No!” he shouted, but the other Josh seemed oblivious to his presence and was already pressing the button.

  The moment he did, things got decidedly weird. Suddenly he was facing what looked like an infinite regression of Joshes, stretching backwards in all directions from the point where the streams from the two tachyometers had merged. It was a similar effect to one he had once seen when attempting to negotiate a mirror maze at a theme park. The mirrors, all facing each other, had created a myriad of kaleidoscopic images retreating into infinity from all directions.

  “What’s happening?!” he heard Amy scream. His eyes were filled with multiple images of her, himself and the dead body on the bed. There were thousands of them all spinning around him like trailing images on a computer screen.

  He felt sick, dizzy and about to pass out. Just before he did there was some sort of explosion and he fell backwards towards the wall, as all the competing images in front of his eyes seemed to rush together to a single point. After that he remembered nothing.

  Chapter Nine

  December 2024

  Slowly Josh began to regain consciousness, feeling disorientated and confused. Momentarily, he could remember nothing. Where was he? What had happened?

  Opening his eyes, he tried to sit up. Despite feeling extremely groggy it didn’t take more than a second or two to realise that he was in a hospital.

  He was in a small ward of four beds, all occupied. Two of them had curtains drawn around them, but opposite he could see a man with a bandage over his right eye. He was a young man, mid-twenties and a tough-looking customer. His uncovered arms were muscular and covered in tattoos. With his one functioning eye, he was looking directly back at Josh with an unfriendly expression on his face.

  “What are you looking at?” said the man aggressively. As he spoke, even at this distance of several feet, Josh got a whiff of alcohol.

  It must be a weekend night, thought Josh, averting his gaze and looking towards the door where a nurse had just come in. It wasn’t Amy, but a shorter, older Hispanic woman.

  Of course, he thought. Amy! Seeing the nurse had triggered a flow of memories, flooding into his brain. What had happened to the pretty Scouse nurse who had caught him loitering where he had no right to be?

  His thoughts were more than a little scrambled. He was going to have to try and piece them back together but it would have to wait. The nurse who had just entered the room was making a beeline straight for him.

  “Ah, you’re awake t
hen,” she said, with just a hint of a Spanish accent. Her name was Carmen, according to her badge, which Josh allowed himself a swift peek at. Mindful of Amy’s accusations of leering, he quickly looked away again and answered her question.

  “It seems so,” said Josh. “What’s wrong with me?”

  He didn’t have any wires or machines attached to him, which was a relief, so hopefully she wasn’t going to give him any bad news.

  “As far as we can tell, nothing,” said the nurse, thankfully. “I’m guessing yet another case of festive overindulgence. We’ve had no shortage of them in here over the past couple of weeks. Every night’s a Friday night at this time of year.”

  “Oi, nurse,” growled the aggressive man in the bed opposite. “What does a bloke have to do to get some fucking breakfast around here?”

  Josh was disgusted by the man’s rudeness. How dare he swear at a nurse like that? No wonder they had installed panic buttons. He thought about saying something, but Carmen beat him to it. She was clearly used to dealing with this sort of thing. That didn’t make it right, though.

  “Absolutely nothing if you speak to me like that,” she responded firmly. “Perhaps if you hadn’t got drunk and provoked someone into wrapping a bottle around your head last night, you’d be at home getting your own breakfast.”

  The man remained silent, seemingly respectful of Carmen now she had stood up to him. Satisfied that she had shut him up for now, she turned her attention back to Josh. “So what’s your story, then? Drunk and passed out? Is that how you ended up here?”

  “I wasn’t drunk last night,” protested Josh.

  “I should hope not, at your age,” replied the Spanish woman. “That fellow over there’s young and impulsive, but a man of your years should know better. So, if you weren’t drunk, would you care to enlighten us on how you ended up unconscious on the floor of a private patient’s room on the oncology ward?”