Faces in Time (32 page)

He’d be after her even if she hadn’t testified against him. She’d be a piece of his property that he’d snatch back from the authorities that put him away. It’d be more symbolic than sentimental. Grabbing her away from the rest of society would be his way of hording what he deemed to be his property. Of that she’s sure.

Having been close enough to be hit with beer and blood, she witnessed Edmund split a man’s head open with a half-empty glass bottle from which the stranger had erroneously taken a sip. Edmund may not have treated her much better, but she knows she ranks higher than a sip of beer. And more than that, bottled up anger bubbling in hot intensity is already flying toward her head.

She can feel him getting closer.

When she was approached to testify, her eye was still discolored from their last altercation, and she still hadn’t scrounged up enough money to move out of their apartment. The remaining food was spoiling in the refrigerator; her makeup was gone, having been thrown into the toilet when he was feeling suspicious days before his arrest; and the electricity was going to be turned off in three days.

All of her money was tied up in the gun, car, and bulletproof vest he purchased without her knowledge for the armed bank robbery. He had told her he loaned the cash to a friend and they’d get paid back triple the amount in two weeks time. Within a week, he was arrested, and she was waiting on her next paycheck to sustain herself, which wouldn’t be coming for a few weeks.

Disgusted and hopeless, she didn’t care what happened to her; it was good enough that someone was taking a shot at Edmund—consequences don’t seem real when eviction could come faster than payday. So, she wasn’t worried about Edmund’s vengeance when she agreed to testify. Without anything enticing on her horizon, she wasn’t worried about what would happen to her at all.

Eleven months of therapy later, now she does care what happens to her.

She can hear him coming for her with every squirm in her stomach. Feet trudging through a swamp. Beer swir bottle. Blood hitting face.

Fear sounds like sloshing.

“If you go back in time, the future that you came from is no longer there. It could be written over again in a way so similar that you wouldn’t notice anything has changed at all, except that there’d be another version of yourself wandering around, but it could also be something that has zero connection to anything that you remember. It’s a slate that’s been wiped out, and it can be rewritten in an infinite number of ways.

“It’s a directional hazard in time travel to the past. What you considered to be your past is now the present, and where you came from no longer exists. In a way, it’s no different than everyday life. You find yourself existing today, and the world’s slightly different for you being here. What you did yesterday is behind you, and the world will never be the same again. No matter what you do, you could never recreate yesterday today. The weather will never be exactly the same; someone will have died; someone will be born; someone’s chemical balance will be different, altering their moods and thoughts along with countless other changes. The innumerable variables that make up our existence will never be exactly the same again. It’s the same for traveling to the past. The future can never be exactly the same because your added existence to the past has already made things different.

“The future that you came from is built on years of building blocks that are made up of an incalculable number of events going on around you, but none of them included you going back in time. Even if you just sat there in the past and breathed, things would be slightly different; you would consume food, throw off heat, and create carbon-dioxide, changing the environmental conditions that were there the first time around. Anyone that you talk to will be different from having interacted with you—if nothing else, the time that it takes for them to listen to you will change their daily schedule. Imagine if you met your wife standing behind her in line at the grocery. Now, imagine the time traveler standing in line between the two of you on the same day and you never meet because of it. No marriage, no kids, no grandkids. The existence of the time traveler in the timeline can make even the smallest action, like buying groceries, result in huge changes to what would have been.

“Your timeline as a time traveler—the track of your life goes ninterrupted. Everything is consistent in relation to you. The world around you is your environment, and it’s pliable. Your relative timeline is entirely independent of the type of environment, or specifically the time of your environment, as long as it is one that can sustain your life. For example, if you went back to the Ice Age, you’ll likely freeze or starve to death. The Middle Ages or the Wild West would be much more suitable for sustaining your life.

“The irony of time travel is that you have the capability of redoing everyone else’s life path, removing and replacing their experiences, but you can’t do it to your own. The time traveler carries all of his life experiences and their consequences around inside of him. Going back in time means going back with all of the bad memories and experiences, all of your unwanted baggage, while you have the ability to take away the bad experiences of others by preventing them from ever happening.”

Watching Chester take in a deep breath following his lengthy explanation, Omar asks, “You think that people are going to be able to understand all this in a half hour TV show?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“How are we going to get this information to the viewer? It won’t fit in a theme song,” followed by awkward laughter.

David interrupts, “I don’t think we need to have it said; the situation of the show will reveal to the audience how the rules of our time travel universe will work. But, the issue that’s bugging me is most theoretical physicists don’t seem to agree with your rules.”

Chester responds, “Well, the quantum space-time foam is proven, and most agree with being able to find a wormhole in there. I think our rules are logical, and if they’re logical they’ll stand, at least for a work of fiction. Not many scientists agreed with H. G. Wells that time travel was possible when he wrote
The Time Machine
back in the 1890s, but time has proven him to be more right than them. We don’t need to be that brilliant or fortunate; just logical.”

“Okay, okay,” concedes Omar, stroking his thickly-bearded chin, “How is the actual time travel going to work?”

David looks to Chester anxiously waiting for his answer.

“It’ll happen through a handheld electrical device that is barely small enough to fit inside a large pants’ pocket.”

David looks worried.

Continuing, “It’ll have the functions of a full-sized computer that will allow our main character to bring a library of information back with him, but its main purpose will be as a control unit for the time travel.”

“How will it work?” asks David less excited than a moment before.

“We can describe it as being able to open, stretch, and stabilize a wormhole in the space-time foam from a collision in a particle accelerator.”

Omar’s eyes scrunch, and David’s enthusiasm starts to return with the acknowledgment of some theories known to him and discussed at MIT. Time travel is an obsession among nearly all involved in science, but for an unknown reason, it is an absolute fixation among every computer science student David’s ever known. David has theorized it to be the result of numerous computer science students having spent too many hours behind a computer screen and longing to reuse them.

Looking to Omar, Chester continues, “But I think it best to leave the device’s inner functions to the imagination or at least to be vague. Newer discoveries could prove it to not be able to work in the way that we describe. We need some headroom to account for discoveries that might happen in the near future.”

Laughing, Omar says, “Well, we’ll have to get it past its first year on the air for any of that to matter anyway. Who’s our lead, and why do we care about them?”

“I was thinking we could have a former TV comedy writer who spends his later years working as a technical writer for theoretical physicists. In the course of his years of technical writing, he discovers a method for making time travel possible, which sends him back after a lost love. When he gets there, he resumes his work as a TV writer, which would let us throw in a lot of meta jokes about writing a show while we’re writing the show—kind of make the audience aware that it’s writers making jokes about writing a show. And, it could be a little bit of behind the scenes satire of working in television.”

David can no longer hold back his grin.

“Who is the girl?” asks Omar.

“Should she be a movie star?” poses David smiling broadly.

Panic floods over Chester, but he says casually, “Well, it is L.A.”

“Not everybody in L.A. is as lucky as you, you closet geek-stud,” David says smacking Chester on the shoulder, “but maybe our hero could be. Makes a good story: nerd with the movie star.”

Cster glances over his body.

David adds, “Oh, no offense, Chaz. I’m easily the nerd you are to the third power; I just think the unlikely meager writer character would be a great person to pair with the movie star.”

Omar interrupts with words flying at speed, “Imagine him at a premiere! Surrounded by her and the beautiful cast. Security could constantly be trying to escort him away. He could make a joke that no one else gets but him and the audience, or at least some of our audience—you know, David, the kind of joke that you pitch and only Kenny and Chaz laugh at it.”

David snickers.

Omar continues, “And we could make the stars behave like actors we’ve worked with. Tantrums, working while sick, ridiculous contract demands, not getting along with other stars, supporting charity, coffee breath and kissing scenes, taking a socially awkward role to push prejudices—we could mix it all together, the good and the bad, but laughing at the phony and the funny in all of them.”

Chester smiles as he can see the thoughts spinning in their eyes. The chance to make fun of asinine executives, inconsistent censors, and the daily eccentricities of Hollywood has hooked them.

The science has double hooked David, and Chester knows he needs David to help him run the show. Where else is he going to find a hilarious comedy writer with a master’s in science and nearly a doctorate in computer science?

Omar will have to sell the show to the network. Neither David nor himself has the clout to sell a time travel satire to a network, but Omar could sell them a three-hour-long game show involving a clumsy kangaroo, blind-folded three-year-olds riding chimpanzees, a man reading the dictionary backwards aloud, a gassy nanny, and a mime with Tourette’s—as long as Omar J. Sobelsk’s name is on it, they would buy it. Three decades of hit television will do that for someone, and thankfully for Chester, it will allow Omar to sell his show, providing a chance to make an honest living using his own new idea and avoiding the abuse of his knowledge of every popular entertainment work for the next twenty years.

It would be easy to pitch every hit show before the original creators had their chance, but stealing their ideas, even before they’ve developed them, is something Chester can’t stomach.

Despite his relief and ease of conscience in not having to gamble anymore, Chester feels panic wiggling in his chest. David stares at him with admiration for having pitched a show that he is thrilled to run, but there is something else in the stare. Chester sees a glimmer of discovery, and he hopes for all the happiness he’s found that David hasn’t figured out the pitch is more than fantasy.