Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (16 page)

“
Because you have no idea what kind of changes you will cause. The destruction, it’s unimaginable. You see, if you actually go through with this…”

Five feet to Reggie’s right, a light flashed and another Reggie stepped out from it. “No!” the new Reggie (Reggie-C?) said to Reggie-B. “You can’t do this!”

“
You’re me?” Reggie-B said. Reggie looked from Reggie-B to Reggie-C, trying to understand this.

“
You from three days in your future,” Reggie-C said. “I’ve come to stop you from stopping you.”

“
But why would I try…” Reggie-B began, but Reggie-C stopped him with a groan.

“
Really,” Reggie-C said, “I don’t have time for this.” He shoved Reggie-B backward, and the light flashed again, swallowing Reggie-B back up into the time stream.

“
I did it,” Reggie-C said unbelievingly. “I stopped myself from stopping myself. That means…whoops, I’m about to cease to exist.” And he did just that, vanishing immediately into thin air.

Reggie blinked at the quiet street, trying to wrap his head around what he’d just seen. Cautiously, he took another step in the direction of the
gasthof
.

There was another flash of light in front of him. “Really?” Reggie said. “You again? Or, I mean, me again?”

“
No,” the new Reggie, just as dirty and beat up as before, said to him. “I’m not the one you’re thinking of as Reggie-B. I’m you from two weeks in the future, but not the same two weeks. An alternate possible two weeks.”

“
Reggie-B2?” Reggie asked.

“
Basically. Now listen, you can’t do this. You’ve set something in motion…”

Two more flashes, two more Reggies. These two looked exactly like the ones who had disappeared earlier.

“
What the hell are you doing back?” Reggie-C asked Reggie-B.

“
When you stopped me from stopping me,” Reggie-B said, “you ceased to exist because I never became you. But if I never became you then you never existed to stop me from stopping me.”

“
Well I’m here to stop all of you,” Reggie-B2 said. Both B and C looked like they were ready to attack B2, but they were stopped by another flash as a version of Reggie ten years older than all the others stepped into the street.

“
I did it,” the new one said. “I got out of the whole mess. I’m…” He looked at all the other Reggies and screamed. “No! No, I can’t be back here! I’ve become Reggie-T63! This can’t be!” He ran screaming down the street and disappeared in another flash.

There were more flashes all the way up and down the street. What had been a quiet road minutes earlier was now loud with arguing Reggies, each one trying to stop another from doing something at some point in Reggie’s personal timeline. Reggie, the original Reggie, backed away from the growing crowd. When he was far enough away from all the bickering, he finally heard the old woman laughing. Reggie turned to her and saw her watching the whole scene, cackling softly to herself.

“
This is what you get,” the old woman said. “This is what you get for trying to mess with time travel.”

“
What do you know about time travel?” Reggie asked.

“
I’ve got about fifty years of experience time traveling under my belt,” the old woman said. “Don’t you recognize me yet?”

Reggie leaned closer. She really did look familiar, but there was no way…

“
No. You can’t be,” he said.

“
Yes I can. You can think of me as Reggie-XXQ78 to the fourth power. The ‘fourth power’ thing may not make sense to you yet, but it will. Give it, oh, thirty-three years by your time.”

“
But you’re a woman.”

“
That one you’ll understand in time, too. Fifteen years and a multi-parallel world continuity crossover crisis will give you the answer to that one.”

“
But why are you here?” Reggie asked. “You’re not trying to change or fix anything like any of the others.”

“
Because it can’t be done. I’m just here because I’m finally at a point where I can laugh at the whole sorry state of things. I can finally laugh at how stupid and egotistical I was. You are. Whatever. Sometimes it all still confuses me.”

“
No, I can still change it,” Reggie said. “I can avoid all of this if I just do it right.”

“
And you’ll continue to believe that for far too long. It won’t be until you become me that you’ll understand: time is far too powerful and complicated to be at the whim of anyone as unimportant as you.”

“
You’re wrong,” Reggie said, turning away from her and running for the
gasthof
to complete his mission. He could do this without complications. It really wasn’t that hard.

The old woman chuckled. “Kids,” she said, and went about watching all the other Reggies try to make sense of it all.

by Eric Ian Steele

It was Matheson’s thirteenth jump, the longest by far. He wasn’t even sure if the pod would make it. The metal egg threatened to shake itself apart in the tumultuous maelstrom of the timestream. He was more than just relieved when the spinning orb finally stopped revolving around him. Gravity reclaimed his chair, and it met with the titanium base of the otherwise featureless sphere with a hollow bang.

He took a few moments to adjust—the violent motion always made him dizzy. This time he felt sick to his stomach.

He removed his restraints. The chair’s metal base completed the circuit with the bottom of the craft. Ambient lighting flared around him. He depressed the control mechanism on the arm of the chair to open the outer door, and waited to see what lay beyond with baited breathe.

Cocooned within his sphere, it was only the barely perceptible purple aura of the ship’s unified field that prevented him from entering the timestream himself. It persistently occupied his thoughts during jumps. If he or any other object were to penetrate the field surrounding his chair, it would decay instantly. He had never seen the results with a human being, but during test flights he had seen a pocket watch suspended by a chain from the pod’s hull rust into nothing in seconds.

The pod’s oculus dilated without a sound to create an exit. When his chair had connected with the floor, the ship’s computers had automatically scanned the environment using tiny sensors on the machine’s outer skin. The readout on the screen attached to his chair informed him that the air outside was breathable, the conditions for an expedition optimum.

Even so, he grew nervous each time he left the pod – ever since that encounter with the Fascist Government of Greater Britannia in the twenty-second century. Not to mention the alligator population that plagued London after the Great Flood in the twenty-third. That had caught him completely unawares.

He chided himself. He had put his faith in machines enough to travel thousands, even millions of years into the future, yet he could not put his trust in a simple door.

The computer spoke to him. It revealed that his location had shifted as the planet orbited through space. He was now in downtown Chicago. But he knew better than to rely solely on that. The ship was as precise as it could be. It avoided rematerializing in space and would wait until the planet occupied the same location again. Sometimes this meant a gap in his voyages of several hundred years. Often it meant that when he did land, things were not in exactly the right spot.

He had found this out to his cost when visiting New York in the newly-named Mathesonian Period (approximately 3,500 A.D.). The city had fallen into the sea long before then. Humankind had been curiously absent. Fortunately the pod’s computer had warned him. He had been forced to jump forward a few more minutes (three hundred years in fact), by which time the planet had trundled onward. Had it been wrong, he would have found himself submerged at a depth of several hundred feet.

A much more unfortunate series of events had occurred on his last jump, when he travelled forward a few hundred thousand years. The exact date was somewhere around fifty thousand A.D. The air had been breathable then. But the ship hadn’t been able to detect the presence of enormous, intelligent arachnids that had taken over the world since mankind’s extinction. These carnivorous spiders had evolved to camouflage their body temperature from predators. Hence they were invisible to the pod’s heat sensors. He had been out of the pod only a few minutes before they attacked. He had barely escaped evisceration by the skin of his teeth.

Trying to put all this to the back of his mind, he stepped toward the oculus. On the lookout for more spiders, he descended the mechanically unfolding ramp, and found himself in an equally bare metal room.

He scanned his surroundings, wishing he had some kind of further protection. But this trip had been for academic study only. He had never dreamed he could get this far. Unwilling to take the chance that the pod would work twice, he had simply kept travelling further forward into the future before heading back for home.

The chamber was devoid of any kind of instrumentation. Only a giant viewing screen occupied one wall. It depicted an area of space replete with various stars and astronomical bodies. He watched the swirling arm of a spiral galaxy spin lazily through oblivion.

Then he saw it. Against the blackness of the screen, a solitary figure. His back was turned to Matheson—a long dark cloak draped over its body - while its head was topped by a polished jet skull cap. Fear gripped Matheson’s stomach.

The figure did not move. It gazed fixedly at the screen. Matheson now observed that the image in the monitor was advancing toward the viewer with a subtle forward motion. He grew convinced that he was on some kind of ship.

But if that was so, then where was Earth?

The oculus closed behind Matheson; a safety mechanism to ensure he brought no unwanted guests back with him.

At the slight metallic grating, the figure turned. It appeared to be human. It watched Matheson with bored interest, as if this was not the first time-traveler who had been here. And who was to say he was? He realized he had come so very far this time it was almost certainly probable. He had crossed millions, even billions of years. Indeed, the sphere was no longer capable of measuring the distance travelled. He had simply told it to go to the end of the line.

The figure took a step toward him. A faint glow from within the room’s semi-transparent walls illuminated the man. He was approximately six feet three tall. His skin radiated an intense paleness beneath his polished black skullcap. His age was indeterminable. He could have been very young or very old. His long, black cloak disguised the form underneath.

“
Welcome,” it said, though its lips did not move.

“
Hello,” he ventured. His words echoed in the vessel.

“
You have travelled here in that?”

Matheson nodded.

“
Through time?”

He nodded again.

“
You must be one of the ancestors. They invented time travel. We never bothered with it. Far too dangerous to tamper with the timestream. And who wants to know what fate will eventually befall him?”

Matheson felt crestfallen. It was almost as though the man was accusing him of something.

“
So you have come to witness the end of everything?” the man asked. “The end of time?”

The man took a step toward him. Matheson didn’t react. He noticed how fluid the man was. His movements graceful beyond compare. He glanced down two tunnels that lead off in opposite directions from each end of the chamber. Both were featureless.

“
You haven’t seen any spiders, have you?” he asked.

“
When they returned from the stars they wiped out the spiders,” the man replied. He turned back to the view on the screen. The galaxy was huge, bigger than any Matheson had ever seen, and it rotated with staggering swiftness.

“
This is the end of it all,” he said.

Matheson found it peculiar the man could understand him - after all, he spoke what would now surely be a most ancient dialect of English.

“
Telepathy transcends all barriers,” the man explained to the unasked question. “We are conversing in concepts and emotions. A much more civilized method of communication.”

Matheson regarded his host with newfound respect, and wariness. Obviously he was no match physically for this man. He was short and pudgy compared to the future man’s almost balletic athleticism. He studied the future man’s physiology. Two eyes with black corneas, a long, hooked nose, a narrow mouth, a prominent forehead. Large hands with long fingers. He noticed that the future man had four joints to each finger instead of three. He was puzzled. He had expected there would be more changes by now. Perhaps, like sharks, they had reached the perfect state of evolution. The man smiled, and the comparison made Matheson uneasy.

As the man watched him silently, he speculated upon the puzzle. Why hadn’t this man evolved further, if he was indeed one of the last vestiges of humanity? Why wasn’t he so much different from Matheson himself? Surely billions of years should have wreaked many more changes on the human body.

“
You have many questions. I will attempt to answer them,” the future man thought to him.

“
Can you read my entire mind?” Matheson asked. “Even my memories?”

“
Indeed. I know all about you,” said the man. “And not just from your own rather interesting experiences. You are Matheson. I have read of you in the histories. You are the pioneer of time travel from the twenty-first century Anno Domini as you measure it. On your first experimental journey in the time capsule, you visited various stages of humanity throughout the ages. It was your discovery of the means to generate the Unified Field that made this possible. Your breakthrough led to the destruction of several major superpowers and the creation of the global state twenty-nine years later. Your indisputable proof of the many wars, plagues, and disasters that would wipe out much of human civilization made many commonplace theosophical doctrines and political regimes redundant.”