Oliver had spent the afternoon of the seventh day, a Sunday, tidying up his flat and carefully ordering the research study he now regarded as becoming his own. He was in awe at Dyer’s discovery but felt he could progress the knowledge far beyond that which Dyer had achieved. He had convinced himself that if Dyer were still alive he would waver his warning in exchange for his daughter’s stabilised health. Oliver was also already computing the different ways in which Tempus Genesis could be exploited.
He made five pizza calzones for his friends who would arrive at two pm. He made the dough himself and filled each with a tomato base, shaves of gorgonzola, mozzarella, red onion and chestnut mushrooms. He folded each into a pasty shape and baked in the oven for thirty minutes. He prepared a tomato, garlic, basil and paprika sauce which he spooned over the pizzas and dusted with parmesan. This was his way of saying sorry for being incommunicado for the last week. Mary had remained questioning of his intent with this unregulated study. Minnie was just glad to have his friends back home.
“So what the fuck have you been up to Ol?” asked Minnie as he cut into his pizza and sipped on a glass of red wine. Minnie had spent lunchtime in the pub and was quite merry.
Oliver laughed, “This and that Minnie, this and that. What the fuck have you been up to?”
“Watching my neighbours with binoculars, seeing as you ask.”
Mary interjected, “I’ve told you to stop that.”
“I can’t help myself, I’ve never seen a fifty year old woman naked, well except for the internet and the solicitor across the road is really fit. For fifty.” Minnie sipped his wine as if he was discussing the current state of the property market.
“Pizza is fabulous,” Jenny commented.
“Really nice,” Jamie and Mary said in tandem.
Minnie agreed, “Fucking tops Ol mate. My dilemma is, see, do I wank or do I watch. You can’t do both because it shakes the binoculars, blurs you’re view.”
“Minnie, do you mind,” Jenny said.
“Watch then wank, has to be that way round,” Jamie said considerately.
“Yeah, that’s pretty much the way I approach it, and a woman around nineteen, twenty, I’ve caught her having sex with these half turned blinds, she thinks they’re closed but they’re not from my angle, I can see everything blowjobs, positions the lot.”
“How on earth do you catch them Minnie?” Mary asked.
“You have to put a shift in Mary, you can’t just idle across these things. Yesterday I stood at the window for around four hours on and off,” Minnie ate the last piece of pizza, whereas the others were barely halfway through.
“It is an invasion of privacy and what if you got caught?” Jenny asked.
“No chance of that, you see I love that Springwatch and Autumnwatch with Bill Oddie and that fit bird, well he showed you how to make a hide for bird-watching in your own home, using a reflective film you stick to the outside of your glass. It makes a mirror so you can look out and the birds can’t see you so they don’t fly away. It’s excellent, except I use it for masturbation,” Minnie finished his wine, whilst Jamie tried to stifle his sniggers.
Minnie looked back to Oliver, “Anyway enough of me, what have you been doing genius?”
“I’ve completely reviewed Dyers work and established how to replicate it, advance it even.”
“His work?” Jenny asked, having previously been unable to extract more than one word answers from Oliver.
“Vast body of knowledge, over several years, experiments, formulae, some key missing pieces so I’ve constructed a framework to hold it all together.”
“No disrespect to Jenny here,” Mary said, “but are you sure it isn’t like some fake science he cooked up, you’re not actually suggesting he discovered some science behind what Jenny describes.”
Jamie stepped in, “It’s definitely real, having seen it for myself, so I’d figure there must be a science to explain it.”
“I agree,” Minnie slurred.
Oliver continued, “There is a science behind it and if I can deploy it and establish how to turn on the regression experience, then I should be able to learn how to switch it off. You have to study the poison before you can create an antidote, if you get my drift.”
“Deploy it, you mean use it? What is it and how would you deploy it?” Mary asked.
“Well on me I was thinking, test it on me, it’s a serum, a synthetic agent,” Oliver replied.
“But isn’t that dangerous? You don’t want to end up like me,” there was concern in Jenny’s voice, she also felt exposed by Oliver openly discussing his quest to seek a cure for her. She felt he should be consulting with her in private, this was her business.
“Can we join in?” Minnie asked.
“I wasn’t planning to involve you,” Oliver replied.
Minnie poured a large glass of red wine, he was swaying slightly, “Though I don’t want to end up a cabbage in a vegetable patch, with a rice pudding brain.”
“End up?” Jamie offered as an observation.
“Ha fucking ha Jamie,” Minnie said and gulped more wine.
Mary quizzed Oliver more, “I don’t get it Oliver, what’s the premise? Is it dangerous? What happened in Dyer’s trials? What will the college make of this?”
Oliver squeezed Jenny’s hand under the table and spoke directly to her, “I’m sorry this discussions taking off, are you okay with me talking a little bit more? I know we need to have a separate discussion.”
Acknowledgement was enough and Jenny nodded and gave Oliver a delicate kiss on his cheek.
“Get a room,” Minnie said in slurredese.
“This isn’t the colleges business as far as I’m concerned. Look,” Oliver stood, he walked to the television and camcorder and switched on the TV and pressed play on the camcorder. The image of Dyer speaking came on. All his friends watched the film of Dyer. Oliver watched Jenny.
Dyer spoke to the camera, “…and it is without doubt now, introducing the agent unlocks the passage back through memories. But with a clarity that is a reality, there is an energy exchange. This is indeed time travel. Initially you travel down your own gene strand, but like a motorway, the further you go the more roads to take there are. In evolution everything is linked, you can travel back almost anywhere you wish to.”
Oliver stopped the tape before Dyer would reveal he had experimented upon himself, to avoid Jenny making a clumsy unplanned and unmanaged connection. Oliver stood in front of his friends. He went to his desk where the research was organised and ordered. He took a syringe driver, IV infusion line, a sheet with printed formulae, surgical tape and placed them on the dining table in front of his friends.
Oliver spoke to his friends, “This was Dyers answer to time travel and I think I can recreate it, advance it even.”
A moment’s silence, then Jamie was the first to speak, “So this is your time machine? I don’t see the anti-matter generators, or the wormhole proton engine.”
Minnie joined in, “Time machine, time machine? It’s a bit small isn’t it? You’re going to sit on that? HG Wells had a big fuck off comfy chair and a large whirry thing behind his head that fired him backwards and forwards.”
Oliver set out his premise for regression as a form of time travel, “Very droll Minnie. That’s the beauty of it you see. All this time science has been looking out, with theoretical hyperbole around wormholes and relative time-space across four dimensions. Time Travel that would require the power of three suns. Well it’s bollocks and the answer is in here,” Oliver tapped his temple and then pointed to the page of formulae.
He continued, “And here. Dyer discovered links, and when he moved on to experiments he discovered a science.”
Mary said, “That time travel is in our heads?”
“Exactly, waiting to be unlocked. We all carry the history of the human race encoded on our genes, just as our DNA carries the building blocks of our limbs, heart and skin, it carries traits such as anger, aggression, and fear. So why not memory
? Not just the DNA for the process, but the DNA with detail on. My fathers’ memories encoded, downloaded and passed to me, and that of a thousand fathers before me. Why not? With the encrypted memory of war, love, race, religion, the actual events, that inform the fabric of humanity.” Oliver sat down and sipped his wine.
There was silence in the room.
Minnie broke the silence, “That’s fucking mental, I’m in, what do you need me to do?”
“Record the experiments, log the research, note down results, help me build this into a viable proposition, make it a technology not a possibility. Help me find the key to help Jenny,” Oliver moved his hand under the table and once more squeezed Jenny’s hand. She softly squeezed back.
Mary surprised Oliver the most, “Minnie you’re drunk. Oliver of course we will help, but if we do this then we do it the right way and it is trials, careful trials and I need to know more about Dyer’s work, where it went well, where it did not.”
“Okay,” but Oliver knew he would carefully edit what his friends would learn or hear or see.
25.