Unhappenings (18 page)

I can think of eight plausible reasons off the top of my head for how that key could have gone missing. Anyone not me who had this experience would consider it a nuisance at worse. A completely insignificant irritation. That key served no purpose, and had clearly fallen off somewhere, anywhere, never to be seen again.

Or that key unhappened.

I started making excuses to avoid our coffee dates. My chats with her dwindled. It took about two weeks for my relationship with Wendy to revert to the level we had established before the summer break. With visions of a key that perhaps never was, and the memory of my year of bliss with Carrie cut short six years before the fact, I had no choice but distance myself from Wendy for her own safety. We continued to be friendly, but her smile settled into something small and sad.

he longer I worked with Oscar and Andrea, the more I discovered just how little anyone on this project knew about actual time travel. In a way, it was exciting to be on the cusp of what I knew was going to play out to be a spectacularly successful technological breakthrough. In another way, it was frustrating as hell. I already knew where this was going, and I wanted to get there already.

One thing I learned was that separate from the mechanics, the consequences of time travel were one hundred percent unknown. A huge part of the purpose of our research cell was to determine (if it would even be possible to determine) what sending all those particles back to God knows when was actually doing to our history. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the aspect of time travel that my older self was so concerned about. Since I was forbidden to have any contact with him, and since I didn’t dare tell anyone else to ask him for me, I kept on wondering. However, if the uncertainty over whether or not time travel caused damage was his crisis, it didn’t seem especially prudent to pluck me out of time to solve it.

There were three competing theories as to what backwards time travel would do to the universe. We were expected to scrutinize our work for any sign of any of them.

The first theory was the simplest. Travel to the past can have no effect on history. What has happened is etched in stone. Anyone who arrives in the past is simply catching up to events that already happened at that point in time. Apart from my personal knowledge that this quaint idea was very, very wrong, it presented the problem that if it were true, we wouldn’t need to find evidence for it. We could simply choose to confirm or refute it by perfecting time travel, going back to some historically significant event and jumping up and down in front of a camera. I refer to this as a problem because there existed a non-trivial faction of the project that was seriously proposing we do just that. Evidently all time periods include some proportion of totally irresponsible whack jobs. That being the case, evidence of time travel should already be abundant.

The second theory was that every trip through time created a parallel universe, distinct from the universe of origin. One could jump up and down in front of as many historical cameras as one wished, and those photos would still never become part of the history of that person’s home time. Confirming or refuting that one would be tricky, because it also included the possibility that travel back to the universe of origin would be, by definition, impossible. All we would ever see was time traveler after time traveler disappearing forever with no sign of their presence in the past. Cheery. Also obviously not true, but only obvious to me.

The third theory was that any travel into the past causes changes to history, ranging from undetectable to catastrophic. The problem with this theory is that any change that led to a history that did not lead to the time travel itself would be impossible. It’s all very well and good to speculate on a crushed prehistoric butterfly altering the geo-political landscape millions of years later, but any variation of that idea is just an example of the grandfather paradox all over again. Even if the universe would somehow allow for the now-impossible trip to the past, history would change all around us, and none of us would have any way of knowing what the original timeline looked like.

So, we were essentially charged with detecting any one of three undetectable phenomena. Perhaps ironically, the only object in the universe able to settle the matter was already a member of the team, and sworn to secrecy.

ne morning I woke up with a dull but pronounced ache in my left forearm. It felt similar to the experience of having the module burrow its way into my bone marrow. Not being a doctor or a time travel technician, I did not feel qualified to diagnose the cause of my distress, but the prospect that it was jump-field induced bone cancer was a prominent candidate on my short list of guesses.

There was nothing I could do about it directly without blowing my cover, but there was no way I was just going to ignore it. That morning, as nonchalantly as I could manage, I broached a disguised version of the subject with Oscar. It took me nearly an hour to find a point in conversation where I could insert the question without suspicion. My opportunity arose when Andrea made a comment about the materials used in the chamber shield.

“Why does it need a shield?” I asked.

Oscar laughed at me, because Oscar always laughed at me.

“Asked Madame Curie,” was all he said.

Perhaps noticing how pale I must have turned at that joke, Andrea smacked him on the back of the head. “It’s just a precaution,” she said. “We might not need it at all.”

“You go right on thinking that,” said Oscar. “Some of us don’t want time travel poisoning to be listed as cause of death. Am I right?” That last part was directed at me, and he was most certainly right.

“Is that a thing?” I asked Andrea.

“No,” she said, glaring daggers at the back of Oscar’s head. “Not that anyone has recorded. The reason for the shield is that we are trying to observe the effects the jump field has on local space, and by ‘local’ we are hoping to mean the space contained inside the chamber. The truth is we have no idea how far the field extends beyond its observable operating limit. The shield is basically a cocktail of materials that block a wide spectrum of effects we do know about, and we’re hoping it blocks ones we don’t know about too. But no, the field itself has been a topic of laboratory experiments since 2088. If someone were going to get sick from being around the chamber, we’d know it by now.”

Mildly reassuring. And yet, my arm. “What are the biological effects of actual time travel?” I asked. “Not just being exposed to the field?”

Oscar spun around in his chair and fixed his eyes on me through those perfectly circular lenses. “What exactly are you asking?”

My heart rate picked up. I didn’t see how that question could possibly have exposed my true purpose there, or my true identity, but there was so much I still did not know. I chose to forge ahead.

“I mean, when someone actually travels. Are there any health risks, or long term effects?”

Oscar looked at Andrea, who was already giving him a look of concern that was impossible for me to read precisely.

After a beat, she asked, “How much do you know?”

Not good. “Nothing,” I said. “About that, anyway. That’s why I asked.” After a pretty awkward pause, I stupidly added, “I was just curious.”

Andrea stared at me with cold eyes. I had never seen her unhappy with me before. It wasn’t something I enjoyed at that moment.

“I need to know right now if I am competing with you.”

“Competing?” I sputtered.

Oscar was rubbing his chin, a sinister smile growing on his face. “Oh, man. I think we’ve been grooming him. This is exactly the kind of stunt Walden would pull.”

“Is that what this is?” Andrea’s tone was sharp.

“No!” I said, having absolutely no idea what question I was answering. “I mean, I don’t think so. What are we talking about?”

“Time Girl here is on the short list,” said Oscar, obviously and horribly enjoying whatever that meant. “Now she thinks she may be farther from the top than anyone has let on.”

“Short list?”

Andrea’s eyes narrowed. “The human trials short list. You tell me, right now, that you know nothing about that, and say it like you mean it, or I swear to God I won’t care whose nephew you are when I unleash the hurt you are about to feel.”