Unhappenings (23 page)

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “You’re the only friend I have who knows my true situation. I guess I thought you might be the only one who would know what I should do.”

“Uh…” she said. “That’s really a talk you should have had with your parents a long time ago.”

“You know about Carrie Wolfe.” I said, ignoring her crass joke.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Did I ever tell you that some variation of that happened to all my high school girlfriends? They didn’t all die, but they all unhappened one way or another. I think I’m cursed. I just figured you could tell me whether I’m looking at this the right way. I mean, if I’m right about that, I should stay away from her, right? And if it’s not a curse, I should keep away just because we’re from different times, and that’s bad, right?”

I was annoyed by how difficult it was for me to articulate the questions, but reminded myself no one had ever had to answer anything of that nature before.

She gave me a perfect deadpan.

“I have no advice for you.”

I was both disappointed and nervous to hear that.

“Do you know something you’re not telling me?” I asked.

Her deadpan curled into a sneer. “I know a lot of things I’m not telling you, but that’s not why I won’t give you advice. You need to do what you think is right.”

With that, we both dropped it. What I somehow hoped would be a clarifying discussion left me feeling numb, and even less certain than before. She dropped me back in my apartment and told me she would see me again. With no answers from the one person I trusted to have them, I resolved that my friendship plan was best for everyone. And if that didn’t work, if it got to be too difficult, I would simply go home.

ne Monday morning in March of 2145, I arrived at work to learn that I was being transferred out of my research cell.

“It turns out we were grooming you, after all,” explained Oscar as he gave me my new assignment.

“I don’t understand. Is everyone getting reassigned, or just me?”

“Just you,” said Oscar. “Which is bad news for me, because now I have to train a new piss boy.”

Andrea smacked him on the back of the head, gave me a hug, and wished me luck. Neither of them had any idea where I was being sent. No one thought that was odd. With time travel research, especially backwards travel, which is what we did, research cells were strictly compartmentalized. If any teams knew what the other teams were doing, the conventional thinking was that it would run the risk of a paradox. The fear was that if someone found an object before it was sent, then the experimenters would be tempted not to send it. No cells were ever sent to retrieve their own sent objects, and no retrieval teams were told what they were looking for until after the objects were sent. Our own tracer pucks were retrieved by another cell, for example, and the choice of one gigasecond, or roughly thirty-one years, was designed to put them far enough in the past we would have no chance of stumbling across them by accident.

So, in this spirit of universal secrecy, no one questioned the fact that I was assigned to a lab no one else had ever used, nor the fact that I was the only person in my cell. No one questioned those things because no one knew them.

When I arrived in my new lab, I discovered it filled with examples of every type of time travel equipment that had yet been designed, and a cardboard box on the counter with a note taped to it. The box contained the wrist modules I had used to travel to 2144 with my older self, and nothing else.

The note simply read:
Reverse engineer this. Re-invent it. Make it perfect.

or two weeks, my work consisted chiefly of staring at a wrist module, turning it on, turning it off, and staring at it some more. All I discovered in those two weeks was that the devices had been disabled, presumably to prevent me from escaping through time with them. Apart from the obvious problem that doing so made it exceptionally difficult for me to analyze them, it also alerted me to the fact that Future Me still had no idea about the module currently bonded to my spinal column. Surely that gave me the advantage.

Unfortunately, I had no idea what to do with that advantage.

Apart from a four-day weekend when she was out of town visiting family, I continued to see Helen nearly every day. Some days—most days—the anticipation of seeing her face was what got me through my funk. She learned early on not to ask about my work, but she did start to notice my mood had shifted and she asked me about it. As vaguely as I could, I told her it was work frustration.

And it was indeed frustrating. My assignment was impossible. I was to improve upon—perfect, actually—a device whose underlying principles I did not fully grasp. Even if I dared ask for help from anyone else on the project, I didn’t think anyone knew it existed, let alone how to make it work better.

What I really needed was a complete understanding of basic hyperphysics. If I could at least comprehend what properties of space-time I needed to violate, I might be able to work out how this gadget violated them. Hyperphysics was a branch of science with a lot of sophisticated theories and models in 2145, but I wasn’t from 2145. In 2092, the word had only just been coined. I barely had the vocabulary to keep up with Andrea and Oscar, let alone the background.

When Future Me first pitched this job to me, he told me he wanted to go back to formula on the project. I now realized he had pulled me from the wrong part of my life. He should have waited until after grad school. I would have at least been versed in the thinking of my own time.

And so, one aggravating afternoon, following a heated session of staring at the modules and complaining about them, I’d had enough.

“I need to see your prototype! Where are the designs? Show me the earliest notes on how you are supposed to work, so I can at least have somewhere to start!”

It had of course slipped my mind that my internal module was still following my verbal commands. It would be some time before I mastered using it by thought alone. Hearing a perceived instruction, it complied immediately.

The lab vanished. In its place stood another lab, one I recognized. I had never been in this room before, but even in the dark I knew an MIT physics lab when I saw one. It was sometime after nightfall, probably very late at night if no one was there. Judging from the equipment, it was from a point in time close to when I was a student there. I made the connection immediately. I thought back on waiting for Pete to record whatever data he was supposed to collect, and feeling the module in my arm tingle when he got back. As early as my senior year, Ainsley was running time travel experiments. This would be his lab, or a colleague’s, at some point after that when they had gotten a basic jump field generator up and running. I told the module to take me back to the prototype, and it had done just that. This was exactly what I needed. If I could copy Ainsley’s data, I would have everything I needed to start my self-education in hyperphysics. I even had a mobile device on me, with an app that would cut through twenty-first century encryption like a chainsaw through tissue paper. All I needed to do was find his terminal.

Which was no doubt in his locked office.

I pondered my options for about five minutes. Really, I just spent that time running a quick cost-benefit analysis and working up the courage to act on it. Then I kicked in the door. Painful, but surprisingly possible. After that, it took less than two minutes to find and harvest the data I needed. I looked at the damaged door jamb. There was no getting around the fact that he would know someone had been here. There would be no actual evidence of the data theft, but with no other obvious motive, he would have to know that’s what I was after. I took another minute to hack the lock on his desk safe and grab a small, shielded case out of it, and then I left it hanging open. Whoever found the scene first thing in the morning would assume the robbery was the true goal. This felt like cleverness at the time, but the reality was I did all of it in a blaze of adrenaline-fueled panic.

“Take me home.”

My module complied, and I found myself in my 2145 apartment. The fact that I now thought of it as ‘home’ hadn’t really registered yet; I was lucky it didn’t take me back to my parents’ house in 2092. I set the stolen case down on my kitchen table, and went to the bathroom to wash the crime off my hands. My hands trembled under the running water. In the mirror, I saw a ragged, shaking mess. I hadn’t shaved in more than a week; my hair was overdue for a cut, and stuck to my forehead with sweat. I looked like a wretch. For a fraction of a second, I caught myself being grateful no one had seen me, out of nothing more than vanity. Then I felt a lurch in my stomach as I realized that what I saw in that mirror would be approximately what the security cameras must have seen.