Unhappenings (27 page)

o I threw myself back into my work, for whatever that was worth. After many weeks of no progress whatsoever, accompanied by the nagging suspicion that lack of progress was exactly what was expected of me, I did something irresponsible.

The reality was that I did not have the background to understand the theory I was supposed to be applying, nor did I have the engineering savvy to design, construct, or reverse engineer a time travel module. This all remained true even after I managed to crack Ainsley’s notes. I suppose “crack” is an undeserved credit; Ainsley’s notes, in translated form, had already been included in the materials I was given upon my transfer. I discovered that weeks after traveling into the past to steal them.

The quantity of materials I had been given to study was ponderously large and bafflingly indexed, and buried deep in them was Ainsley’s life work. By 2145 they were historical documents, and although still closely guarded secrets, the person guarding them was Future Me. It turned out that Ainsley had correctly grasped enough of the basic principles of time manipulation that he was able to construct a rudimentary jump field generator. Unfortunately, all it did was generate the field. It was not of sufficient power or specificity to apply the field mechanically to any physical object. However, the space-time distortions it created were quite measurable, and it was a huge leap toward what would eventually become functional time travel.

I also learned that palladium-nickel alloys were the most efficient jump field conductors yet discovered, after nearly one hundred different materials were tested. Ainsley had been working with pure palladium, hence the ingots in the case. In 2092, the amount I stole held a value that represented a significant proportion of his operating budget. Apparently the theft—never solved—set the project back several years. Oops.

Having learned that I hadn’t learned enough, and in an act of dire frustration at both my inability to advance the time travel project and my inability to resolve my feelings for Helen, I fell back on the one resource I knew I had. It was time to begin experimenting with the module in my arm.

I knew it had capabilities beyond the simpler modules Future Me used to bring me here. I also knew that unlike those modules, the one in my arm still worked. So, step one of my experiment was to ascertain how precisely I could use it to travel. I honestly had no clue what I would learn from this that would be of any value, but it was the only thing over which I had any semblance of control, so I ran with it.

Thus, one afternoon, alone in my lab, I said out loud, “Take me back five minutes.” My surroundings flashed, and then I was standing in my lab. Everything looked exactly as it had before I spoke, with one exception: the lab included another instance of me.

“Wow,” he said. “I guess it works.”

“Traveling back five minutes?” I asked. He nodded. “You were about to try that?” He nodded again.

“I… This is much weirder than talking to the old guy,” he said.

I couldn’t argue with that.

“In five minutes you won’t have to worry about that.” I looked around the lab, then back at him. “I have no memory of this,” I said to myself, and by “myself,” I do not mean him. He wasn’t able to make that distinction.

“What do you mean?”

“This event,” I said. “I have no memory of myself appearing in this lab from five minutes in the future.” I stared at him. “I have no memory of being you.”

After a beat, we both said simultaneously, “What does that mean?” He laughed, but it was obviously nervous laughter.

“I think it means we just learned something about the nature of paradox. Or alternate timelines. Or any of a dozen other aspects of time travel we haven’t sorted out yet.” I looked at the clock. “You have about two minutes before you need to take a trip five minutes into your past.”

“To become you?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said, very quietly. “I guess you’ll find out.”

Two minutes later, he spoke the same magic words I had, and vanished. This episode had given me a great deal to think about. For the first time since I started on this research more than a year prior, I felt like I was gathering useful information. However, seeing him literally vanish before my eyes made me realize there was an aspect of time travel that in six years had never occurred to me to question. Why didn’t anyone ever notice when I spontaneously appeared somewhere, or blinked out of existence? Athena was usually as subtle as she could be, but I know there were times when we traveled to and from crowded areas in broad daylight. How on Earth had we been getting away with that?

Finally, I had something to study for real. With luck, I might even be able to let it supplant Helen as the foremost thing on my mind every waking second of my life.

ell me about paradoxes,” I requested.

Athena’s visits had come to be welcome respites from the stress of my work with time travel, and the stress of my pseudo-relationship with Helen. My impression was that she also saw them as a respite from the stress of her own job, which I imagined put my own troubles to shame. She came around about two or three times a month, we did lunch, or went for a walk, and then she would go home. We had fallen into a routine of pleasant socializing, and conversations about Baby Hitler or time travel curses had fallen by the wayside by tacit mutual consent. This day I broke that agreement.

“That’s new,” she said.

“Humor me.”

She thought for a moment.

“Zeno claimed that motion was impossible, because any traveler would have to traverse half the distance from her starting point to her destination, and then half the distance that remained, and then again, and again. As she would need to do this an infinite number of times to cover a finite distance, she would never arrive at her destination. There’s also a great paradox about a game of chance with finite payouts and an infinite expected value.”

“St. Petersburg,” I said impatiently. “I know that one. That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant,” she said with equal impatience. “Why are we talking about this?”

“Because I need to know.” I waited for a response, and got none. “I traveled back in time and met myself,” I added.

Her face dropped. “Why?”

“Because I was stuck. I have no idea how to do what Future Me is asking me to do. I had to do something to get myself jump-started, and it was the only thing I could think of.”

“How far back did you go?”

“Five minutes,” I said. She buried her face in her hands.

“And then you had a conversation with yourself,” I heard her say through her fingers. “And now you only remember one half of it.” She looked up. “Am I right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Is that bad?”

She sighed. “Not necessarily,” she said without elaborating.

“If I am not supposed to be doing things like that, you’re going to need to give me some warning. I don’t understand what you can and cannot tell me.”

She laughed. “Oh, I can tell you anything I want. There are just a lot of things I don’t want to tell you.”

We stared at each other.

“Did I change the past, or create an alternate timeline?”

“Yes,” she said. “And no. There are no alternate timelines. There is just the one.”

“I don’t understand. If that’s part of my past now, why don’t I remember it?”

“Because you’re a traveler,” she said. “You exist in multiple frames of reference simultaneously. That’s why your life unhappens but no one else’s does. Actually, everyone’s life unhappens all the time, but they unhappen right along with it, so they don’t notice. You don’t get that luxury. If you had a mind to, you could travel those five minutes backward and murder yourself in cold blood. You could speak at your own funeral, then go on to live another eighty years.” She waited for a response, but I was too busy feeling the blood drain out of my face to say anything. “Aren’t you glad you asked?” she said finally.

“Not even a little bit,” I said.

“Well, you should be glad. Because that effect is exactly why your future self has no idea we are having this conversation.”

I pondered this in silence.

“Is there a reason we don’t want him to know about it?”

Athena’s eyes went a little wider, and she looked away.

“Don’t,” she said. “I know. I’m trying.” Unable to make sense of this jump shift, I had the sudden and chilling thought that she was no longer speaking to me, and not precisely speaking to herself either.

“Athena?”

Then she did speak to me.

“I really have to go. I’ll see you in a few weeks.”

I reached toward her, held her arm, and said, “Athena. What do you know?”

She looked me dead in the eyes.

“I have to go.”

The physical sensation for someone in contact with the traveler at the moment she departs is surprisingly cold. It was a full five minutes before feeling returned to my hand.