The Time Travel Chronicles (40 page)

“You’re not making any sense.”

She shakes her head again, but it’s a sharp, unfocused movement. She’s losing it. “You don’t need to understand. That’s not why you’re here.”

“Where are we going?”

“Somewhere safe.”

“Safe from what?”

She hesitates, as though recalling something that still hurts. “There was a fire in the lab,” she says, and her eyes narrow. “They said it was an accident, but it couldn’t have been. We built failsafes. State of the art protective systems. All gone now. It couldn’t have been an accident.”

Her hands are trembling.

“How did you find me?”

“The apartment. We maintain the apartment.”

“And my son?”

She pauses. Swallows. She won’t look at me when she says, “He doesn’t exist here. I’m sorry.”

“But the media profile—”

“Deliberately placed to lead you to the apartment. We didn’t know when you would come. So we left markers. There are more, but the simulations suggested you would look for your son.”

The car is speeding northwest, out of an almost unrecognizable Harlem, past what was once Englewood and then Hackensack. She doesn’t say any more, shakes her head at my questions. She’s barely lucid now. I can see forested hills in the distance—maybe Ramapo or Ringwood. That’s where she’s going. To hide out there from whoever pursues us.

But we don’t get that far. Something heavy begins to hammer against the interior of the engine behind me. At first it’s just a noise, a hollow thudding, but it grows until I can feel it though my seat. I smell smoke; great wisps of it are now swirling around the interior of the car.

She screams something I don’t understand and suddenly the car begins to buck and pitch.

“Land,” I shout, feverishly looking from her to the engine behind me, where an orange glow flickers against the bodywork. I grab her. “We’re on fire, for Christ’s sake, you need to land.”

It’s too late. She’s lost control of the car.

I turn away from the window, tuck my head down in my arms and close my eyes.

We hit hard. At first I hear something that might be the car hammering through trees, then it feels like the force of the crash kicks my spine into my throat.

I black out for a while. I don’t know how long. I wake up to find her roughly shaking me with one outstretched hand.

When I look across at her, I know it’s over. There’s a tree branch impaling her through the stomach. Shattered glass is everywhere. Her head is lolling to one side and her hooded eyes are getting milky. She hands me something.

“Take this,” she whispers, a thin river of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth. “I wanted to explain once you’d seen it. I wanted to say sorry.”

“I don’t understand. What did you do?”

“They know about you.” She coughs more blood. “They’re coming for you. You need to be ready to make your choice.”

“What choice?”

She doesn’t reply. Her eyes are dull now. They soak up the light instead of reflecting it. I shake her, but I know she’s gone.

I stare at the device she has given me. It’s small and flat. It looks like the holographic projectors I saw back in the city. It lights up at my touch, and within seconds, a three-dimensional image appears above it.

The face is instantly recognizable as my own. Much older—it’s hard to give it an exact age—but I’m certain the frozen ghost of my own face stares back at me. The image is crystal clear, as though it had been recorded yesterday. Perhaps, in one sense, it had. I stagger out of the car and over to the fallen trunk of a long-dead tree. I’m dimly aware that I should be running, but I can’t bring myself to. How could I, this close to the answers that lie in my hand? I sag to the ground, my back against the trunk, and hit play.

“Well, hello.” The voice that fills the cool night air is my own. The face from which the sound emanates is mine, only it is not me. This is a stranger who has the appearance of me, but isn’t me. From what he says next, I guess he’d agree with that.

“I thought for hours about what I might say to you, to myself, so you would understand what we have done and why. If you’re seeing this, then I imagine you’ve led a confusing, difficult life. For that I’m truly sorry. We are the same, you and I, but also different. I’ve not had your life’s experiences, and therefore, in truth, we are different people.

“The experiment you have unknowingly been a part of is critical to the future of the human race. Does that sound grandiose? Saying that seems terrifically arrogant to me now, hearing it like that. But in reality it’s true. My research will soon be sequestered and retained by the multinational conglomerate that has funded it. What they will do with it, God alone knows. There are questions we have not answered and I feel should be answered before this...” He falters here. He does not know what to call it, but I do. I know exactly.
A curse
.

He shakes his head and continues. “Whatever it is, we must know precisely what we’re dealing with before we press ahead. We need to know what the possible effects are. We needed someone we could watch, someone we could track. We needed someone to whom we had complete access. Naturally, I made the obvious choice. The only choice. I chose myself.”

No, you didn’t,
I think bitterly.
You asshole. You chose me. You ruined my fucking life and you haven’t the least idea what you’ve done to me.

“There isn’t a great deal more I can say. There are those working for me who will answer your questions. For reasons they will explain, I cannot. I will not be there to greet you. This is one paradox we do understand. I’ve lived a long life, but I won’t be able to see its final legacy.” He nods. “Perhaps you may think that is a fitting judgment for what I have visited upon you. But please, understand my motives were to consider many billions of lives beyond yours and mine. Perhaps that was not my choice to make, but I felt there was no other.”

The recording ends there. I want to hurl the device away, but push down my rage. There’s every chance I might need it.

I get up to walk, but I don’t get far. T-Bone’s girl slips out from the shadows among the trees. She’s all pristine calm as she walks towards me, pistol in hand. She’s been waiting for me. She knew I’d be here. She’s always known.

I can see her better now. Her slender, curved body. Her unblemished skin, her elegant and perfect features. Airbrushed Hollywood looks. She’s almost too beautiful. Maybe where she comes from, you’re not stuck with your own face. Maybe she isn’t even human.

There is a thin spire of smoke curling up beyond the trees. In the distance, I can hear sirens. In that instant, I remember the book.

“Piper had it right,” I whisper. “Maybe not the details, but the essence of it. He knew about you.”

She doesn’t answer.

“You shot Zee,” I say.

She hesitates, then nods. “Yes.”

“Why? If you’re going to kill me now?”

She smiles, but it never quite reaches her eyes. “I’m not going to kill you. You’re too important for that. We need to know how you do it.”

I hesitate. Then I say, “There’s a note in a book. A message they left for me. They knew I’d go to the apartment.”

“Where’s the book?”

“Just here. Inside the car. I can reach it—” Before she can say anything, I’m moving towards the car to get it. Psychology. Misdirection. Sleight of hand. Call it what you want, it’s all about playing to people’s preconceptions. She’s got the gun, I’m injured. She’s in the stronger position. What can I possibly do to her?

I find what I’m looking for and glance back to her. I need a little space, so shuffle only slightly out, leaving one hand in the footwell of the car. I take the book and show it to her. I raise it up in the air so she can see it. Her eyes follow the book—it’s only natural to be attracted to the movement.

It leaves me free to angle what’s in my other hand towards her, using the shadows of the car. I’m part of the Xbox generation. I’ve shot a thousand different types of guns on-screen, all with a plastic controller shaped like a pistol. I’ve shot from the hip, in a Weaver-stance, even gangsta-style. Thousands of wasted hours playing games.

Suddenly not wasted.

But nothing prepares me for the sound of the real thing, or the kick of its recoil. The acrid stench of cordite. I’m resting my hand on the seat, which has the effect of dampening the recoil enough that I can get two shots off.

One hits her in the chest. The other is wild.

Shock washes over her face. She raises her own pistol, but I scramble back into the cover of the forest. Shots splinter sapwood around me, I can’t say how many. I don’t know if she’s dead.

I run through the wet forest, the rain still tumbling through the canopy above me.

But I’m not running away anymore. That woman and her kind have been watching me my whole life. They can step between universes at will. In that moment, I’m led to one inexorable conclusion—if they can, so can I. No, I’m not running away anymore.

Now I’m going to find my son.

A Word from Lucas Bale

I doubt there is a single science fiction author who has not, at one time or another, toyed with the idea of writing a time travel story. Time travel captures our imagination in a way only rivalled by the vast expanse of the stars above us and its own endless possibilities. Time travel is perhaps the only other medium to offer such limitless potential for exploration of the unknown.

Yet almost every time travel story I have ever read, or film I have ever seen, has a neat paradoxical loop that closes tightly at the end, and always so very cleverly. As though the central theme of the time travel story must always be an exploration of paradox. I read a very interesting article recently which suggested time travel stories ought to be far more messy—more like real life. In truth, the seeds of those thoughts had been sewn a long time ago, but that article sparked the idea for a story that would have no neat paradoxical bow tied around it. I prefer to write hard science fiction and, although time travel might not be said to properly fit within that category given the currently conflicted state of scientific hypothesis in the area, the idea of it being messy (and therefore more like real life) appealed to me. I wanted to explore what travelling in time would do to the emotional stability of a human being, forced to live a life with no roots, no friends, no past or certain future. What would a person forced to live that life be like? How would they react?

Also, I have always rather loved the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Grandfather Paradox has always seemed insurmountable to me. In this story, were Will’s future self (if he can properly be called that) to go back in time to study himself, thereby interacting with himself and inherently changing his own past, circularity might, on one hypothesis, become an issue. This leaves two options: either his own past was always influenced by his future self, and he’s perpetuating an eternal cycle, or this is the ‘first
’
time he is making the trip, to alter the timeline to something altogether differen
t
– a historical divergence. I really aspire to that second hypothesis, if time travel is at all possible, and I commend Michio Kaku’s
Parallel Words
to anyone interested in the area. Additionally, as part of my research for this story, I stumbled upo
n 
Paratime
, by H. Beam Piper and found in his stories a mirror of events already unfolding in my own. A concept often hinted at by others, but never really explored in detail, as Piper had done. Perhaps
Shades
might be the start of a new series for me, lending a modern slant to Piper's story.

My thanks to Samuel Peralta, both for curating this innovative and powerful series of anthologies,
The Future Chronicles
, and for inviting me to contribute to this instalment of it. If you would like to know more about my speculative fiction, pay me a visit at
www.lucasbale.com
or find me on twitter using the imaginative handle @balespen.

by Tracy Banghart

J
UNIPER YOUNG HATED THE DAYS when the sea air smelled like rotting bodies.

The outgoing tide sucked at the muddy, pebbled beach, leaving corpses of starfish and crimson jellies to swell and bake and nearly burst in the hot midday sun. But that wasn’t the source of the smell. She didn’t know where it came from.

In some parts of the world, flowers grew that gave off the scent of rotting flesh, but those were tropical places, exotic, far from her quiet corner of coastal Maine.

She raised a hand to cover her nose, inhaling instead the faint memory of lavender from her mother’s favorite hand cream. She savored it. She didn’t have much of the lotion left, and she couldn’t stomach the thought of buying more. It wouldn’t be her mother’s. A new bottle would be bare of her mother’s fingerprints, of the remembering.