Unhappenings (45 page)

“You came to see me three times,” I said. “Once when I was at MIT, and twice about two years after I graduated. You brought me here with a wrist module, and asked me to help you perfect it, because there was some flaw you couldn’t isolate.”

“Slow down,” he said. He gestured to a table in the back of his office. “Sit.” We both sat.

“None of that happened,” I said. “Did it?”

“Not to me,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Did this future me look my age? Older?”

“Older,” I said. It was now obvious that the version of me who recruited me was from further in the future than he had planted me. I could think of a few reasons that might be the case, but no reasonable explanation for why he wouldn’t tell me that, or include this version of us in the plan. Worse, it meant that at some point in this Dr. Walden’s near future, something would wreck him and make him into that pathetic creature. The gee-whiz qualities in him I already found so endearing would fade. He would become more like me.

“What’s a wrist module?” he asked. I had brought one with me in a messenger bag, and produced it for him to see. He gently turned it in his hands, looking it over with awe and glee. “Please tell me this is a time machine.”

“You’ve never seen one of these?”

He shook his head.

“We are at least five years off from this technology. I have a plucky young woman slated to be our first traveler when it’s ready to roll out.”

“Andrea?” I asked.

He nodded, still enraptured by the device.

“Don’t tell her. It’s still a secret.”

“Mum’s the word.” I pulled out my tablet, and sent Helen a single word of text. “Listen, I think we’ve both been played by a future version of us, and I really think we need to find out why. I don’t mean to alarm you, but I’m not sure he was quite all there. If there’s something down the road for you that makes you a little unstable and prone to bizarre time travel behavior, we need to avert that.”

“Agreed,” he said. “The first thing we need to do is establish what it was he really wanted you to do here.”

“He said he wanted me to perfect the module.”

“That’s nonsense,” said this future me. “If it worked well enough for me to use it, it’s already safe and accurate. My risk-taking days are well behind me.” He shook his head and smiled. “I’m not you anymore.”

“Ugh. Well, if he didn’t really need me working on this project, what the hell am I here for?”

There was a tap at the door. Helen opened it cautiously.

“Hey,” she said. “I got your text. I’m here. Wow,” she added, seeing my future self. “I’m… It’s really a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Walden.”

“Come in,” I said. “Sorry about this,” I said to my future self. “This is Helen, she knows all about the situation. We’re… Well, that’s a long story.” He stared at her. It was awkward, and confusing. “Hey,” I said, snapping my fingers in front of his eyes.

He looked at me, and whispered, “Oh, no.”

I was going to ask him what he was suddenly afraid of, and then recognized the look in his eyes. It wasn’t fear. It was the look of a man who had just been hit with a dopamine dart. It was love at first sight.

My reason for being planted in this time, at this place, had never been about time travel. It had always been about Helen.

 

y seventy-nine year old doppelganger was already falling for my fiancée. Setting aside the fact that it was a mild struggle to convince myself this was no logical cause for jealousy, it gave me some unexpected insight into my relationship with her. Apparently, Helen’s effect on me—any version of me—was quite magical.

“Snap out of it,” I reminded him.

He looked at me plaintively.

“Would I really do that? Could I really be that person?”

“I wish I knew,” I said.

“But surely this would never even work. Don’t you still need to return to your home time, and eventually become me?”

“We operate in multiple frames of reference simultaneously,” I said. “I can lay it out for you when we get a free moment, but the short answer to your question is no, I don’t.”

“What’s going on, guys?” Helen’s smile was warm, but nervous. Just being in our combined presence must have been difficult to absorb. It was about to become more so.

“Please sit,” I said. My older self stood while Helen came to the table, and sat when she did. Memo to self: eventually learn some courtesy. “I think,” I began, and then looked to my older self for confirmation. “We think?”

He nodded.

“We think I may have been brought here, to this time, just to meet you.”

Helen stared at me, then stared at Older Me, then slumped back into her seat, mute with shock. I had no idea what to say to her, and hoped this was not about to be the day I finally lost everything.

Finally, she said, “I like it. It’s psychotic, but irresistibly romantic.”

“Is she kidding?” Older Me asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

She looked me in the eyes. “You crossed half a century just to be with me? How is this not a fairy tale?”

How it was not a fairy tale would be spelled out in eight hundred and twenty million corpses. While I knew she sincerely loved the notion that we were so meant to be even space-time itself could not keep us apart, she would not find the consequent global sacrifice quite as enchanting.

“But…” she began slowly, “why would you do that? How would you know?”

“At some point we must have met,” said Older Me, “and I must have had feelings for you. Honestly, I’ve known you for two minutes and I already have a crush.”

“Steady,” I said.

He ignored me. “But look at me,” he said, spreading his arms. “I’m an old man. What are you, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-seven,” Helen and I said in unison.

“That’s fifty-two years,” he said. “I could never woo a woman fifty-two years my junior. We must have been friends, and it must have driven me mad to know you without being with you.”

“You say this like you don’t know,” she said. “Didn’t you bring my Nigel to this time?”

My heart tripped at the phrase “my Nigel.” I think his did as well.

“No,” I said. “The Future Me I met before was older than… Dr. Walden. Five, maybe even ten years. And much less with it. Whatever happened, hasn’t happened yet.”

“But why would I take the risk?” he asked. “How could I even know it would work?”

Helen took my hand. “Maybe it was my idea,” she said. “Maybe I fell for you, too, and we decided together it was the only way we could be happy?”

I couldn’t let this continue.

“It wasn’t your idea,” I said. “It couldn’t have been.”

“Why not?”

I closed my eyes, dreading the next minute of my life. “Because in the original timeline, Future Me didn’t meet you until much later than this. And by then… you were already married.” My self-imposed darkness was matched with a room full of silence. When I finally dared open my eyes, Helen’s were right in front of them.

“This was all to keep me away from my husband.”

“Apparently,” I admitted weakly.

Helen stood. I feared she was about to walk out again, but she moved around the table to Dr, Walden, and for an instant, I thought she might slap him. Instead, she kissed him full on the mouth. Watching him try to figure out what to do with his hands was unexpectedly hilarious.

“Thank you,” she said when she was finished, “for saving me from that.”

“You are quite welcome,” he sputtered, “I assure you.”

“Don’t thank us yet.” I said.

“Why?” they both asked.

After a heavy, trepid sigh, I said, “Because we still have a war to prevent.”

I never got to finish that thought, because that was the moment I had my very first real-time unhappening.

r. Walden’s office transformed into a concrete cell. There was no warning, and no sense of transition. I looked down to see myself garbed in a safety orange jumpsuit. It is a bit telling that my first reaction to this sudden and terrifying shift in reality was not horror and desperation, but a disappointment that whatever advances had been made in the law-abiding world of 2146 evidently did not apply to prisons.