Unhappenings (54 page)

“Is this supposed to happen?” asked Helen quietly, as we sat huddled in the lobby with hundreds of other tourists in front of a bank of screens.

“No,” I said. “The real Korea is much smaller than that.”

Athena flashed in that evening.

“Have you had any time to rest?” I asked.

“Two days,” she said bitterly. Two days more than I got, but I didn’t dare point that out, considering this was all still arguably my fault.

hat one took eleven months to fix, and it cost a great deal more than the careers of a few AI engineers. Giant Korea was the dead giveaway, and we started with their history over the previous half century. A politically and economically weakened Russia had ceded several of its westernmost oblasts and krais to North Korea over the course of twenty years and five wars, leaving the peninsular territory an exclave of the newly expanded nation. An alliance was formed with Mongolia, chiefly preemptive on their part.

Shortly thereafter, a conveniently timed, absurdly successful Chinese revolution was launched. Rather than replace the previous oppressive regime with a democracy, as had been the hope of the rest of the developed world for centuries, the new government merged with North Korea, having received substantial aid from them during the civil war. When they finally rolled unopposed into South Korea, it was almost entirely symbolic.

Athena and I infiltrated five governments, with a mixture of conventional lobbying and shameless bribery. Over the course of eighteen years for everyone else, we slowly gathered hundreds of politicians and put them in our pockets. Meanwhile, we were also staging various insurrections and border wars with two separate mercenary armies. At one point we even had them fighting each other.

And of course, we staged the assassinations of four consecutive North Korean heads of state.

The net result of all of this was that by 2143, the entire Korean peninsula was a fully integrated part of The Peoples Republic of China. Not an ideal solution for anyone in the world, but given a choice between an Asia that was a unified isolationist dictatorship, or an unspeakably powerful mad dog, we chose the lesser, by far, of the two evils.

We saved billions of lives, and ended hundreds of thousands.

When I returned to the hotel once more, after nearly a subjective year, I collapsed into Helen’s arms, and sobbed into her shoulder for what must have been hours.

For much of that time, I heard her softly saying, “Shhhh. Stingrays.”

e made it home from our amazing vacation, quite unrested. Helen returned to work, but only stayed for one more week before resigning without notice. I did not ask her reasons for doing so, and it was never a conversation.

My work on the standing wave became obsessive. At any moment, I could be yanked away from it for months, so every minute advance was a monumental victory. Helen stayed home with me most days, and tried to get me out of the house at least four times a week. Sometimes she succeeded, most times she did not.

This went on for all of 2147, and into 2148. During that time, Athena and I were confronted with—and successfully corrected—three more horrific end-of-world scenarios. Each one was as bleak as the one before, and each one took a very long time to restore. Over the course of that year of Helen’s life, I aged four.

Every time I disappeared from the house to save the world, I returned that same day. Helen had only my word and rapidly changing appearance to verify that I had been gone as long as I had. And every time, her world went from being pleasantly domestic to some slightly altered version of pleasantly domestic, while I dealt with crisis after crisis.

One evening over dinner, she finally broached a topic that came as no real surprise to me.

“I think you should consider seeing someone for your depression.”

“I am seeing someone for that,” I said. “I’m seeing you.”

She returned my weak smile. “You know what I mean.”

“I tried that once,” I said. “When I was in college. It didn’t work out so well.”

“What happened?”

I shrugged, had another bite of potato.

“What do you think? I tried to talk about what was really happening, and the next time I showed up for an appointment, I had never been a patient there. Probably just as well. I think if I ever had the chance to fully open up to a shrink, I’d end up committed as delusional.”

I waited for a response, either supportive or flippant. And waited some more.

“You think I’m crazy,” I said calmly.

“I didn’t say that.” She was looking at her food.

“How long have we known each other?”

That made her look at me.

“Stingrays,” she said solidly. “Nigel, I believe you really are a time traveler, and that you really do go away for days, sometimes months when it’s only been minutes for me.” She paused.

“Am I waiting for a ‘but’?” I asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever had to do that before. You are the straightest shooter I’ve ever known, Helen. Don’t sugarcoat this.”

“It’s hard,” she said.

“It must be pretty bad, then.”

She gripped the edge of the table with both hands to steady herself.

“Where do you go?” she asked.

That was unexpected. “What do you mean?”

“When you disappear. Where do you go?”

I scratched my head.

“It varies. I go wherever I need to, and whenever I need to, to make things right. Some of the details would bore you. Some of them would upset you. Do you really want to know?”

She looked down. Said nothing.

“Oh,” I said. “Wow. You think I’m not really saving the world. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Still looking down, she shrugged.

I came around to her side of the table and crouched down next to her.

“Hey. It’s okay. We can talk about this.”

She looked away.

“I don’t know how.”

“Let me help, then. You’re afraid that when I time travel, I come back with stories that aren’t really true. That maybe I’m just making them up to seem dangerous and exciting, or maybe I’m actually crazy and think I’m fighting monsters, when I’m really just at the zoo or something. Am I close?”

“Kind of,” she admitted. “It’s just hard. You go from having lunch to looking like you’ve been through hell in the blink of an eye, with these stories about the zombie apocalypse or whatever, and I have to nod and support you, and I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, or just enabling an illness.”

“It’s never been zombies,” I said softly.

She whirled on me, covered in tears.

“Oh, God, Nigel!” Then she started heaving with sobs. I tried to hold her, but she lurched away from me and tore into the next room, where she collapsed on the couch. I followed her, and sat on the floor beside her.

“I love you so much,” she sobbed into her elbow. I put my hand on her arm, and she did not flinch away.

“Shhh,” I said, as helpfully as I could manage. She sniffed a little, then sat up, her eyes a bloodshot mess.

“I’m okay,” she whispered.

Cautiously, I asked, “Do you think Athena is crazy, too?”

This seemed a logical avenue to reassurance. She loved Athena, and Athena always corroborated my tales. It did not have the desired effect. Helen’s lip began to tremble, and she was barely able to squeak, “She scares me,” before burying her face in a throw pillow for another round of sobbing.

I sat with her like that for a very long time, speechless. The sobbing eventually stopped, and I stroked her back until I realized she had exhausted herself to sleep.