Unhappenings (25 page)

thena’s visits began to come more often. They were very unlike all the times she mysteriously appeared to me at MIT, always from a different point in her life, always business, and always a thrill ride. These days I saw her sequentially, so we were able to continue conversations from our previous meeting. My interactions with her began to take on a sort of continuity they had lacked before. Now her visits were not missions, they were social calls. The wildcat Penelope with whom I had gone on so many adventures in my youth was nowhere to be found. In her place was the more reserved Athena, friendly, but rarely a source of humor. As I got to know this side of her better, I realized that this was a more accurate presentation of who she was, and that all of the times she had spirited me away on our clandestine disruptions of history, she had been in character for me.

She still maintained a low profile in my presence. As had been true in college, apart from her one encounter with Wendy, none of my friends, colleagues or acquaintances had ever met her. She never visited me at work, and never happened to arrive at my apartment when anyone else was there. In fact, at that point, I’m not sure there was any compelling evidence that she was anything other than my imaginary friend.

On one such visit, I asked her, “Once something has unhappened, is there any way to use time travel to… I don’t know, re-happen it?”

“What are you thinking about changing?” she asked with complete deadpan. I had somehow imagined this question would be at least a little bit shocking. I guess not.

“I’m not. At least not yet. I just want to know… If Helen and I get close, and I really am cursed, and her life is erased because of that, I want to know that I can go back to some point before we meet and make it okay again.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she looked me closely in the eyes for a few seconds, then took my hand. The universe flashed as we tandem jumped. She had taken us to a park in the middle of a spring afternoon.

“I know this place,” I said, surveying my surroundings. Athena—Una then—had taken me here once. I thought I even recognized some of the people here. It was impossible to say if this was the same day, or just the same park with a cast of regulars.

“I come here to think sometimes.” She had said almost those exact words the last time she brought me here. That event was still quite a few years away in the subjective future of the Athena with me now. “Let me ask you a question: If you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you do it?”

As she said the words “Baby Hitler,” my eyes happened across a parked stroller sitting next to a couple sitting on a bench. They were laughing about something.

“Of course not,” I said. My gaze lingered on the happy family.

“Why not?” asked Athena, failing to convey any sort of authentic curiosity.

“Because that was two hundred years ago,” I said. “Killing that baby would save millions of twentieth century lives at the expense of hundreds of millions of twenty-first century people who would never be born under other circumstances.” I hoped my voice did not carry much of my irritation. I had asked her a question that was very important to me, and her response was to walk me through Cliché Thought Experiments 101.

“So, it’s math,” she said. “All right, what if I give you a twenty-second century target to minimize the damage. See that woman walking her dog?” Athena pointed to a fortyish woman being led through the park by a gray whippet on a leash. “She is patient zero of a plague that will wipe out two hundred thousand people. All you need to do is walk over there and strangle her, and it will never happen. Now what?”

My jaw dropped.

“Is she seriously?” I asked quietly.

“No,” said Athena. “Answer the question.”

I gave myself a moment to settle down from briefly believing Athena’s hypothetical was a real thing.

“No,” I said. “She is still a human being. Find another way.”

“There isn’t one. Besides which, she has a nine-year-old boy locked in her basement with no toilet, living off buckets of table scraps. Now can we kill her?”

“No,” I said. “We call the cops.”

“Nice work, hero. That nine-year-old is now going to grow up to be a dictator whose atrocities will put Hitler’s to shame.”

“Great,” I said, tired of the baiting. “Are we drifting in the direction of a point any time soon?”

“Oh, wait,” said Athena. “Did I say the woman was patient zero? I meant the skinny dog. Now what? Should we go over there and beat it to death right in front of her?”

Two obvious and completely contradictory responses immediately sprang to mind. Certain that this was a trick question, I rejected both of them.

“Maybe?”

“Aha,” she said slowly. “Welcome to my world.”

And suddenly, all those “fixes” we ran resolved themselves into the horrors they must surely have been for Athena.

“How do you decide which things to fix and which ones to leave alone?”

“Happily, that’s not my decision. I’m just the errand girl. To answer your question, no. Once something unhappens, it cannot be re-happened, as you so awkwardly put it. What I do is tweak potential and opportunity so that the cause of an unhappening never has a chance to materialize. It doesn’t always work. Even when it does, I can’t restore an old timeline. I just maximize the probability that the replacement timeline is as close an approximation of the original as can be achieved. Which, by the way, is usually not very close at all.” She paused there, looked away oddly, and muttered, “Why can’t I? Doesn’t he…? No. Of course.”

I had the strange feeling that I lost her there, somehow, and I tried to nudge her back.

“Why can’t you what?”

Ignoring my question, she put her hand on my shoulder. “If you and this Helen are meant to be, you’re just going to have to spin the wheel, and hope it doesn’t land on double zero. I wish I had a better answer for you.”

I felt ill. While I didn’t expect to hear anything optimistic, I had hoped for some kind of unexpected escape clause. No such luck.

“It’s okay,” I said. “That’s kind of what I figured. Do you think you could have broken that to me without invoking Hitler, though?”

She looked over her shoulder.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I could.”

I tracked her gaze across the park to the bench where the couple with the stroller were sitting, but by that time, they had already gone home.

or three days, I buried myself in my work, stayed late, and fled straight home in the evening. Lunch hour visits to the library ended. Athena’s comment about spinning the wheel sealed for me that I had no business perpetuating this pseudo-relationship with Helen.

Those three days were awful.

That Friday, about an hour past when I normally would have gone home, I was paged in the lab. Checking the screen, I saw Helen gesturing for me to come down to the lobby. For project security, the link was one-way so that the contents of the lab would never be visible outside it. Even knowing that, the very serious look on her face made me feel scrutinized. I sent a text to the security desk to have the monitor tell her I would be down in five minutes.

By this point, I no longer had a read on Helen’s feelings. It seemed obvious at first that she was attracted to me, but as our friendship progressed with no advances in that direction, it became difficult to tell what she really wanted. I had gone three days with no communication. If she was now offended, that might be the answer.

When I got there, she did not smile.

“Where have you been all week?” she asked. There was no anger in her voice.

I shrugged. “Working. I’m in the middle of some pretty complicated stuff,” I lied. “I haven’t had much opportunity to break away. How are you doing?”

“Is your lab locked?”

“Yeah.” This was not at all what I had prepared for. I expected some sort of confrontation, which I would parlay into us both walking away. My biggest concern had been how difficult she would make that, simply by being my magnet.

“Good,” she said. “Because we’re leaving.”

“Oh,” I said. “Um, do I have time—”

“No.” With that, she turned on her heel and walked to the door. After a fraction of a second of hesitation, I trotted to keep up with her.

“Where are we going?” We had only gotten a dozen meters or so from the building.