Unhappenings (24 page)

The lab buildings were not exactly high security facilities, but they were monitored, if only to manage student mischief. There would be a record of this break-in. Worse, I would be recognized.

And then, my head finally clearing out, I remembered that I had been recognized. By Ainsley. Who called the police. Who almost arrested me, but for the fact that I was conclusively somewhere else at that exact moment. No doubt the review of the security vid that followed would have included the observation that the intruder did look like Nigel Walden, but the hair was all wrong and he had a beard, and besides, he was clearly quite a bit older. Ainsley’s mistake would be taken as reasonable, but a mistake nonetheless. The crime would go unsolved.

A great wave of relief washed over me, as I realized this event had come to pass. I had dreaded it, on and off, for years. It turned out to be very unlike the cunning master crime I had envisioned, with weeks of preparation and elaborate tools of thievery. Instead, it was a clumsy, frightened, painful botch job.

With that out of the way, two important, troubling things became immediately apparent. One was that Ainsley’s experiments were happening as early as my sophomore year, less than two years after the Slinky Probe accident. The other was that my module, on command, had taken me to exactly the point in time I needed it to go. Given the limitations of time travel technology, even the advanced modules from Athena’s time, I should have missed the mark by several years.

My older self had charged me with perfecting time travel. Apparently the secret to that perfection was already bonded to my nervous system.

s Athena had predicted years earlier, the stolen case contained several small ingots of palladium. A cursory scan of the wrist module also revealed a palladium-copper alloy frame. The same alloy, in a slightly different configuration, accounted for nearly eleven percent of the mass of the module in my arm. I was finally getting somewhere, although I had no idea yet where that might be.

Ainsley’s data had been easy to steal, but apart from including several complete textbooks on the principles of hyperphysics, it turned out to be nearly impossible to read. The actual electronic encryption had been child’s play to defeat. However, many of his notes had been further encrypted with a personal cipher. It harkened back to Galileo’s practice of writing out entire sentences using only the first letter of each word. This went on for literally hundreds of thousands of characters. I had some rudimentary decoding software that wasn’t able to break whatever it was he wrote, and there was no way I was going to bring a cryptologist in, so the theft was a bit of a bust. About the only thing I was able to determine from what little data made any sense was that the first artificially created jump field was generated only three months after the Slinky Probe time travel event. The rudiments of time travel had already been known and achievable for sixty years by 2145, and we were still no closer to practical manned time travel. I had to assume that whatever the wrist module did was not stable enough to be considered safe for use, or Future Me would not have kept it a secret from his own research teams.

So, my research turned toward finding ways to reverse engineer the module in my arm. I had access to much more sophisticated equipment than my father’s processor scanner, so I was able to make a little bit more headway there, but not much. More than once I seriously considered the possibility that the module was sending false information about itself to avoid being analyzed. It was, after all, “too smart.”

What I really needed was one of those silver beads. There was no way I could dig the one out of my arm, and I thought it extremely unlikely that Athena would give me another one. The entire experience was maddening, and my future self must surely have known that. More and more, I felt that he had transferred me from a cell performing an unnecessary task to an isolated lab where I would spin my wheels in an impossible assignment. There had to be more to this.

My hopes of finding a magic blueprint shortcut to designing functional time travel equipment thus dashed, I resigned myself to reading the textbooks included in Ainsley’s data. It took me about two days to realize it would take me months to even begin to understand the basic theory behind what I was being asked to do. Still, there was no way I was going to surrender.

Effectively, even possessing the ability to flee to any time and place by simply saying it out loud, because of my intellectual need, I had become a prisoner.

Which was, of course, my intent all along.

fter nearly a month of dutifully attempting to perfect a technology I had no hope of understanding, one Tuesday morning I had a completely unrelated epiphany. I was literally my own boss. If I skipped a day of work, there would be absolutely no consequence. I had been laboring under a kind of work ethic inertia for more than a year, and I needed out. This project was making me crazy. I had to get away from the lab and clear my head, ideally to give myself an opportunity to look at the problem from another angle, or give myself a chance to work in a less distracting environment.

Naturally, that environment turned out to be Helen’s office.

Her expression on seeing me at eight in the morning was a mixture of confusion, surprise and delight.

“What are you doing here?”

In addition to her own desk, her office was furnished with a long table. That morning, there were about twenty books spread out on it. I pushed them into a neat cluster and dropped my notebook and tablet in the new empty space.

“I could ask you the same question,” I said, pulling up a chair.

“I work here,” she pointed out.

“So do I, at least for today.”

“Hmm,” she said with a mischievous smile. “Is this hooky?”

I feigned offense. “Nothing of the sort! I am a researcher. This is field work.”

“Tell me you’re not studying me.”

“Don’t be absurd,” I said. “Of course I’m studying you. I also happen to be working on a completely unrelated project for the university, which is my actual job. And it’s driving me insane with frustration right now, so I’m taking a little break from the lab. If I’m going to be in your way here…”

“No, that’s fine.” She went back to whatever work she was doing. I opened one of Ainsley’s textbooks on my tablet, and started reading.

“So, what are you working on?” Helen asked after a few minutes.

I looked up. Her eyes were on her own screen, not on me.

“You know I can’t answer that.”

Still not looking up, she said, “You know this isn’t a monitored room.” After a pause, she added, “I’m just putting that out there.”

I sighed. “Believe me, I’d love to tell you,” I said, and it was true.

I wanted to tell her everything, to share my whole life story with her, admit that I didn’t belong here, and that I was bound to an insane quest to invent something for which I had no expertise that had already been invented by a more advanced version of myself. I wanted to let it all out. The crushing frustration at being placed in this position, the horrible suspicion that everything I had been told about why I was needed was a complete lie, fed to me to serve some larger, possibly sinister purpose. That I dreaded the glimpse of myself I had already seen, and deeply feared he was already my destiny.

The oppressive anxiety that all of these riddles led back to the probability that I would someday do something horribly, horribly wrong, that would cost me the friendship of the only confidant I had ever had, for at least eight years, and God only knew what else. The foreknowledge that whatever I did next, my best path would only ever be the lesser of two profound regrets. And that the only reason I was staying here instead of abandoning all of it to go back to my parents, and my own time, to face my future one day at a time like I should, and take my chances on steering myself toward becoming a person I could live with, was that the thought of leaving Helen, of never seeing her again, was more than my fractured soul could stand.

“Are you okay?”

Helen gazed on me with perfect, sympathetic blue eyes. I suddenly realized I had been staring at her, and that I was clutching the sides of my head. I shook myself out of it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m fine. I was just thinking.”