Unhappenings (44 page)

“Is this dinner?” she asked.

“Dinner is waiting at the establishment of Madame’s pleasure,” I said. “We have a lot to celebrate today. Maybe.”

“One thing at a time,” she said. “But talk to me while I change.”

“You don’t want to hear about this first?”

“Must multitask,” she said. “Fiancé says I need to pick a restaurant. So much to do…” She walked as she spoke, leaving a trail of clothes behind her.

After taking a moment to love the sound of the word
fiancé
, I followed her into the bedroom. She was throwing dresses onto the bed.

“I think I found a way to stop things from unhappening to me.”

Helen emerged from the closet in nothing but her underwear and a look of shock.

“Talk to me,” she said.

“The details are pretty complicated.”

“Tell me the parts I will understand,” she said, slipping into something black. “And do remember that I am smarter than you.”

“Noted. I was fiddling with the wrist modules today, and I accidentally figured out how to get them to generate a jump field of huge magnitude and zero effect, manifesting in a standing wave.”

“Oh my! That sounds…” She stopped herself. “I totally want to pretend I get how significant that is. What would I say if that were true?”

“You would talk about how that might be an indicator that it is possible to negate the unhappening effect, by applying the attributes of that standing wave to a traveler.”

“Yes!” she declared. “Pretend I said that! Zip me.”

“We do need to talk about what this means,” I said to her back as I pulled her zipper into place.

“Which we can do over Thai food. Just tell me two things right now.”

“Go,” I said.

“One: will this in any way threaten my immunity to your bugaboo?”

“I can’t see how it would,” I said. “What I’m hoping is that I can fix myself, sort of ground myself to time, so that whenever the timeline changes, you and I will see the same thing, and neither of us will notice it. That shouldn’t affect your immunity at all. If anything, it might make it stronger. We will ride it together, never aware of whatever it was that changed.”

“Good. Then two: what do we do to make this happen, and how soon can we do it?” The levity in her voice finally collapsed. This was Helen’s Holy Grail. Both of ours. If I was right, if we could make this happen, we had a real shot at happily ever after.

I took a moment to collect myself before answering that one. No part of this was going to be simple, or easy, and I needed her to know that up front. Our Thai restaurant conversation was about to be laden with plans, details, caveats and hopes, but what she needed to hear right now was that the first hurdle was going to be huge.

“If I am going to make this work,” I said, “there is no way I can do all the research alone. It’s time for me to finally have a long sit down with Dr. Nigel Walden.”

or three years, my employer had provided me with the most advanced equipment available, a private lab, a home, a car, and a stipend that surely put to shame the salaries of every tenured professor at the university. His only two requirements of me were that I work entirely in secret, and that I never, under any circumstances, contact him directly. I violated the former two years into the assignment when I sent Helen’s tablet one minute into the future. Today was the day I would violate the latter. Either I would find the answer to my life’s quest, or get fired.

For three years, I had successfully dodged this person. That alone was fairly striking, considering we worked in relatively close proximity and I had gotten to know a number of the other professors and staff on sight from casual interactions. Add to that the fact that I was technically one of his research assistants, and he was responsible for oversight of the entire project, and it was an impressive elusiveness. Yes, we were operating in strictly isolated cells, with complicated rules of communication that kept us all at least three degrees away from each other, and yes, he was also invested in avoiding me. However, the law of large numbers virtually guaranteed that given enough random interactions, one of them was bound to be with him. And yet, never.

I made an appointment with him through the physics department secretary, who asked me why I didn’t simply visit during his office hours. I explained that the matter was of a classified nature. Given the structure of the Time Travel Project, this explanation apparently held enough water to get me a time slot.

Helen and I went there together. I made her promise to wait outside while I spoke with him. She agreed, under protest. She found herself a nice chair in the department lounge, wished me luck, and dove into a book.

Dr. Nigel Walden’s office was at the end of the hall, and the long walk made the experience of meeting with him seem more ominous than was apropos. I tried to remember this person was essentially me, but all I could think of was the shattered husk of a man who had whisked me away on false pretenses to set me on a fool’s errand he most likely didn’t even understand. This was not going to go well, no matter what happened next.

I rapped on the frosted glass pane on his door.

“Come in!” I heard myself say.

He sat at his desk, which was a motley display of tablets, books and yellowed printouts.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, and we both froze.

Here’s what we each saw:

Behind this messy desk sat a man easily fifteen kilos heavier than the version of me who had come back in time to recruit me three times in one day over six years. The battered, weathered look of age was far less pronounced on him than what I had seen in that man’s face. Unlike the craggy, unshaven look I expected to see, this man had a full beard, quite gray and well on its way to becoming a Santa Clause affectation.

Across from that desk stood a man of twenty-seven, who bore a resemblance to this man’s youth so strong, only one explanation was possible. To his shock, he was looking at his own person, surely having traveled through time from the past to this point.

Most upsettingly, to me, was the realization that I had not succeeded in avoiding myself as well as I thought. In point of fact, I recognized this man, and had probably seen him at a distance at least a dozen times in the past year alone. And yet, on this close inspection, there was no denying that this was a version of me.

But absolutely not the version I had been working for.

y God,” he said softly, then whispered, “Close the door!” He rose from his desk and came right up to my face, grinning. “Oh! Look at you! My God! This is incredible!” His hands came up, and for a second I thought he was going to grab my shoulders, but he thought better of it. “Tell me everything!”

I had no idea how to respond to any of this.

“You know who I am?” I said, attempting to at least establish a baseline.

“Of course,” he said. “You’re me. I think. You are me?”

“I am you,” I confirmed.

He clapped and giggled, overcome with giddiness. “It works! It absolutely works! Oh, my boy, this is the best moment of my life.”

This man, who was clearly an older version of myself, bore so little resemblance to the last time I had seen him, that for the first time, I felt a nagging doubt that the other version was actually me. But no, that one was also obviously an elderly mirror, just with a different set of emphasized characteristics. The phrase “evil twin” sprang unfortunately to mind, and I pushed it aside. But more than just their physical appearances diverged. The other old me was a broken man, a shadow of this one. Here was a man who delighted in wonder, with the courage to embrace the unknown, and a joy at discovering it. And all I could think of as I watched him and listened to him was that this was who I could have been if I hadn’t chosen the path of isolated detachment. This is who I could have become if my life had never unhappened. And as I saw that in his eyes, I sadly realized that of the two future versions of myself, the one more like me by far was the other one. The broken one.

“When?” he asked.

“2092 version, although more like 2095 by now,” I said, shaking myself out of my ruminations. “I’ve been living here for three years, working on the Time Travel Project. Do you remember recruiting me?”

“Recruiting you?” he said, frowning. “No, I didn’t recruit you. Why would I recruit you?
How
would I recruit you?”