Unhappenings (16 page)

In a flash, we were gone.

 

144 was surprisingly not all that different from 2092. Clothing styles had changed, but not in a way I could readily articulate, nor in a way that was any more out of sync with my own appearance than I was used to. Cars still didn’t fly. There was no evidence of a robot insurrection, or an epidemic of cyborg implants. No devastating world wars, no zombie apocalypse. The most dramatic differences were the invisible ones. Peak oil production had come and gone, and the world had adapted to other energy sources that did the same work and filled the coffers of the same companies. Medical advancements had extended life expectancy beyond a hundred years (making my own predicted lifespan less remarkable), which contributed to the global population climbing to eighteen billion people. Cities were getting taller, and in some cases merging into megalopolises, but the human race was still sustaining itself.

The most immediate change from my end was that computers were all voice command now. That technology was already eighty years old in my time, but it took another thirty years for it to dominate the culture, and the market. Plenty of people still used touch screens as a matter of privacy, but for the most part, the world had gone hands free. In a curious aesthetic development, perhaps as a conscious rebellion against the urbanization of the globe, most computer hardware was now built into cases of polished wood.

So, my comfort level in the environment of a world fifty-two years into my own future was greater than predicted. My personal situation was another matter entirely. Memo to self: if a person is obviously lying about something, it is a good idea to consider the possibility that he is lying about everything.

‘Not long’ turned out to be very long. I imagined we were talking about a trip of several hours, or perhaps even several days. My surprise at discovering I had an apartment, a fake university ID, and a detailed document outlining my elaborate back-story cannot be overstated. I got to learn all about my alleged past entirely from that file. My future self spent no more than ten seconds in my company when we arrived at our target space-time, which was exactly long enough to remove the module from my wrist without comment, and disappear.

I had kidnapped myself.

My new identity was that of one Graham Walden, grandnephew of distinguished hyperphysicist Dr. Nigel Walden. How very clever of him to explain away what would be an obvious resemblance between us. The explanation would be quite necessary, as I was now a research assistant on the Time Travel Project, Dr. Walden’s brainchild, and there was a reasonable expectation that many people who became acquainted with me were already well acquainted with him. According to my bio, it was relatively common knowledge that I came into this job entirely through nepotism, and that I had no particular talent for the subject matter. I would be surrounded by scientists with low expectations of my intellect. It was not at all clear why this was an integral part of my story. Its authenticity was sure to be shattered once I started to let slip the occasional brilliant idea. I was bound to have them, after all, since this was all my work to begin with. For whatever reason, I was instructed to conceal any new insights I might have, and surreptitiously record them for Dr. Walden to examine—and presumably take credit for—personally.

Under no circumstances was I to have any direct contact with the project leader.

Given my relative lack of culture shock, and the fact that everyone there already knew as much about “Graham Walden” as I did, my first day at work was strikingly ordinary. I got to meet two members of the research team, and as predicted, they treated me like a gofer.

The first day turned into my first week. That in turn drew out to my first month. At no time did I accept this as a permanent situation, reasoning that as long as I didn’t stay here so long that I noticeably aged, at some point I would need only return to that day in the library and resume my actual life. And while that thought kept me motivated to crack the secrets of the silver bead in my arm bone, an aspect of my new life gradually began to take hold and make itself known, to the extent that I started to ask myself serious questions about what it was I really needed.

For the first ten weeks of my life in 2144, the longest stretch I could remember since I was a child, nothing unhappened.

he only working piece of time travel equipment in my lab was an enclosed chamber, designed, in theory, to transport a single object placed inside it into the past. Being an entirely experimental device, intended to test the effects of time travel on matter, and measure the influences (if any) that the jump field had on local space, but not intended for any practical applications, this chamber was the departure point of a one-way trip. For the first two months of my participation in the experiment, the largest single object we were authorized to transport out was a neutron. That was a pretty big day.

I knew there were other teams working on different aspects of the problem, and that at the direction of the project leader, we were not to communicate with them. I wished I had been placed on a team that had a working version of the wrist module that brought me here, but it wasn’t exactly mysterious why Dr. Walden would want to keep one of those out of my reach.

Early on, I asked why our chamber only sent objects backward through time. “What if we wanted to send something into the future? Just from an exploration standpoint, isn’t that a more important problem?”

“Oh sure,” said Oscar, our team leader. “But that problem’s already been solved. We have all the equipment we would need right here to send any object of your choosing into the future. The only limitation we have hit so far is that every object travels at a rate of exactly one second per second.”

“That joke just never gets old.”

The only other member of our team was a woman named Andrea. Oscar was an adjunct professor, about ten years older than I, and carried himself like a man who still lived in his mother’s basement. Overweight, pasty complexion, unflattering goatee, tiny, almost useless, round glasses, usually dressed in something comfortable but loud. Andrea was a grad student working on her hyperphysics PhD. She was closer to my age, and certainly more my speed. Her attire was always entirely professional, even under the lab coat she wore, despite Oscar’s insistence that she didn’t need it. Her olive skin and thick, wavy, black hair gave her a look I found striking, especially by contrast to our surroundings.

“It only seems like it’s not getting old,” said Oscar. “That’s a dilation effect of the jump field.”

Andrea rolled her eyes. “There are other cells working on forward time travel. It’s much less closely related to backward travel than you might think. We could probably construct a chamber that would do both, but at this stage of development it would have to be two completely distinct machines occupying the same box.”

Andrea always spoke to me in a way that conveyed her belief I had no idea what I was doing, but she never treated me with impatience over my assumed ignorance. The reality was I was an extremely quick study, and as much as I was able to hide that fact from Oscar, Andrea was clearly on to me. I wondered how long I would be able to maintain my awkward nephew charade before she figured out why I was really there. Hopefully, I would figure it out before she did.