Unhappenings (8 page)

Her suggestion that I feign embarrassment was quite unnecessary. I looked around furtively, trying to imagine something I might want to buy, to lend some degree of authenticity to the proceedings. I managed to be looking in just the wrong direction when Penelope crashed into me.

“Nigel!” she shouted directly into my face. “Buy me an ice cream!”

I pushed her off of me. Remembering I was supposed to be buzzed, I shook my head and pretended to steady myself holding her shoulders. She started giggling again. The few people in the store were now all staring at us, some of them having moved to a better vantage point to do so.

“Oh!” shouted Penelope, slamming herself into the counter, and bumping into a man who was attempting to buy a pack of cigarettes. “Nigel! Nigel! Buy me a scratch ticket!”

I waited for the man ahead of us to flee with his smokes, then said, in my best attempt to appear like I was trying not to slur my speech, “One scratch ticket, please.”

“Which game?” asked the clerk with an expression somewhere between irritation, amusement, and nervousness.

“A big one!” said Penelope. One swipe of my card and fifty dollars later, she was furiously scratching away with her fingernail. “Oops!” she said, gouging a hole in the paper.

I turned around to see just how many people were watching this freak show, and locked eyes with another customer, still standing in the doorway.

“You!” he said. It took me a moment to place him, because he was out of uniform. It was the officer who nearly arrested me at the library. Then I realized that hadn’t happened yet. This was the scene he showed Dr. Ainsley on his tablet. My alibi. And yet, apparently, this still wasn’t the first time we met. How many such retroactive encounters still lay ahead of me?

He shook his head in disgust. “Show some better judgment for once, will you?”

That was the moment Penelope crashed to the floor, still giggling. I picked her up, and held her steady as I walked her to the door. We collectively staggered around the corner to the back of the store. Then we were in my dorm room again, an hour before noon, and ten months later.

“Nice work,” she said. “We just supplied you with an iron clad alibi for the break-in.”

“I know,” I said, trying not to give in to the sudden and profound queasiness. “I’ve already used it.”

“All right then. Take care.”

“Wait!” I held up my hands. “This is a lot to process. Can you… can you stick around? Can we talk? My whole world just changed. I’ve been waiting years for this. Please don’t go without telling me what this is all about.”

“I’m not ready,” she said, frowning. “I didn’t know this was going to be your first time. I should have seen it coming, but keeping track of this is harder than you can possibly know. Give me some time. I will be back. I promise. Soon enough you’ll know.” She paused. “And you’re not going to like it.”

I watched her stand there in a fragile state of indecision, and threw out the only question I thought she might answer. “Can you tell me about the break-in?”

She thought for a moment. “Ainsley’s lab. Two hundred grams of palladium and seven terabytes of data.”

“I stole that?”

“You will.” There was a flash of light, and she was gone.

ime travel paradox is a quaint, but hopelessly irrelevant concept. Every trip to the past changes it. The changes are instantaneous, retroactive by their very nature, and permanent. Any apparent contradiction is simply and elegantly overwritten by the new continuity. Time, it turns out, protects herself, much the way the earth will inflict quakes on the surface in order to relieve pressure deep below. Thought experiments like the grandfather paradox, once believed to be the cornerstone of time travel theory, have no power in time travel application. If a man travels back in time and murders his grandfather, thus preventing his own birth, the universe simply carries on with the grandfather dead, the time traveler forever unborn, and it does so without a care in the world as to how that murder was possible in the first place. No one will ever be aware that history has changed, and no one will ever be aware that he was supposed to have offspring, and grand-offspring. No one, that is, except the time traveler. That person, who should now never have existed, continues to exist anyway. And again, the universe just shrugs it off, insisting—and rightly so—that it owes no one any explanation for its conduct.

Mind you, the time traveler does experience consequences for his actions, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

It would be several days after that encounter with Penelope’s future self before I saw young Penelope again. During that time, I made my best attempt to carry on with life as usual. I was used to keeping secrets, after all. In that respect, it was easy enough for me to get through my daily routines without any noticeable change of behavior. But no amount of pretending otherwise could lessen the impact of that one event. I had traveled through time. For real. I would never see the world the same way again.

It took about a day for the initial rush to wear off, at which point I had become mired in questions. Whereas I imagine most people would find themselves in a philosophical or scientific crisis in my position, I found that my own reflections—and fears—ranged from the pragmatic to the mundane. I barely knew Penelope, even in her present day, youthful incarnation. She wouldn’t even tell me her true name. And yet, I trusted a future version of her, apparently without question.

As the reality of that began to take hold, I found myself increasingly wary. Worse, there was now some object, obviously of a technology not yet existent in my time, housed inside a bone in my arm. I could not feel it and I could barely even see the scar, but the knowledge that it was there spun into an escalating fear of it. The notion that time travel was somehow my destiny had at first allowed me to accept this implant with bizarre ease, but having had some time to reflect on that, I felt like a reckless fool. I had no idea what this device did, if indeed it did anything. Maybe it was a time machine, or maybe Penelope was the one doing all the time travel mechanics, and what she put inside me was a surveillance device. Or a bomb.

I spent two days in a distracted haze, scanning for a gray beret everywhere I went. My classes were a blur, when I even bothered to attend them. I had so effectively constructed my disability alibi that what little concern my friends voiced over this change in behavior were polite inquiries to see if I needed any help getting back on track.

On the third day, Penelope—young Penelope—found me. We had no set schedule for our meetings; three or four times a week she would simply appear at a generally convenient time, and give me a survival lesson, or just milk me for information about my life in the guise of a friendly chat. So, when she encountered me in the middle of day, on campus between classes, it was with a comfortable, bubbly wave. My greeting was a bit less enthusiastic.

“We need to talk.”

Her smile dropped, and for a fraction of second, she became that future version of herself. It was the same expression she wore when she planted that bead in my arm.

“Am I in trouble?” Not exactly a question I had anticipated.

“Probably not,” I said. Then I corrected, “Probably not yet.”

She furrowed her brow. “What is this about?”

Whatever statement I had been rehearsing for two days disappeared from my head. Planning to tell her everything, perhaps even to confront her on how much she already knew, suddenly seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. I chose one detail and ran with it. “I had a visit a few days ago, from a future version of you.”

Until that moment, Penelope and I had successfully avoided any direct mention of time travel, theoretical or otherwise. In my heart, I had known for years—ever since I first heard of the Slinky Probe accident—that my situation had to be the result of someone or something repeatedly traveling to my past and changing it. Knowing it and trusting another person to believe it, even someone who clearly shared my exceedingly rare experiences, were two very different things. It seemed to take Penelope a moment to absorb the full meaning of my words. When she did, her expression softened to something between awe and fear. In that instant, the teenager reemerged in her eyes.

“Me?” she said quietly. Then, almost a whisper, and with a touch of a squeak, “From the future?”

I nodded.

She was silent then, and looked away. Up. At her shoes. Anywhere but my eyes. I watched her work through her complicated emotional cascade, and for the first time realized this was brand new territory for her. I had somehow imagined that she had already had a similar experience. My own future self had visited me once, after all, but seeing her grapple like this clarified for me that she was indeed essentially a child, quite out of her frame of reference. I tried to imagine how it would have felt if I had been confronted with this at eighteen, or sixteen, or however old this girl was, and seeing that mental image, I found myself regretting having been so blunt. As I tried to formulate a hopelessly inadequate apology, she finally screwed up the courage to look me in the eye.

“What’s…” she said, and the fear came back, almost destroying the moment. She took a deep breath and pushed through it.

“What’s she like?”