She gave me that motherly look again.
I threw up my hands. “It belongs to a drug addict. He’s in jail right now.”
“And exactly how do you know this guy?”
“I just—”
“Don’t say you just do.” She wiped off the cushion of the loveseat with her hand. She sat, clasping her hands and resting them on her knees. I hadn’t had the chance to get a good look at her earlier. She wore black stockings and high heels. Her dress came down about mid-thigh, and she wore a dark coat. She was wearing makeup, even though it was early morning, and she must’ve had a late night. She had probably dressed up to meet fans at the airport. She’d been in two car accidents, but she seemed clear headed. I didn’t see any bruising or cuts. She was lucky. Hopefully, that luck would hold.
She stared at the cigarette-stuffed beer bottles on the couch for a moment. “You asked me to trust you, and I do. Now trust me. Where do you come from?”
I held up my watch. I still had some time. She stared at the three-dimensional display. I think that gave her the final clue. She wrapped her arms around her waist. Nothing like my watch existed in her time, and only a few people in mine were allowed to have such technology. I could almost see her putting it together: the watch, the fact that I wore the same clothes year after year.
Finally, she tore her gaze away from the display and looked up at me. “So it’s true. You’re a time traveler.”
I nodded.
Her breathing quickened. “It explains everything. Your clothes, your shoes… it’s unreal.”
I didn’t know what to say. Time travel was new to me, too.
“When do you—” she started then shook her head. “How long can you stay?”
I held up my watch. “I have about an hour and a half.”
“And then you go back?”
I nodded.
“To where?” She tilted her head to the side. “Or should I ask when?”
I sat on the dirty sofa across from her, resting my elbows on my knees. “About ten years from now.”
She leaned back and crossed her legs, heedless of whatever grime was on the loveseat. She bit her bottom lip and stared at the floor. “I nearly drowned in the ocean, but you saved me. You laid me in the sand and stood over me. I remember you asking if I was okay. You left just as my parents arrived.”
“I didn’t want to transition back in front of them.”
“Transition?” she asked, but then she nodded. “No one ever found you. Only a few other people saw you. They said you wore a coat and tie.” She gestured at me. “Like the ones you’re wearing now. It was as if you just disappeared.”
“I did.”
“And then you came back. Five years later.” She indicated my clothes again. “You wore the same suit, the same shirt, and the same shoes as you do now.” She inhaled sharply. “Your hair was wet, and you smelled like the ocean.”
I only nodded. “I returned right after I pulled you from the ocean.”
“It was five years later.”
“For me, it was five minutes.”
She pressed her hand to her chest. “You pushed me and Tara out of the way. That truck would have crushed us both if it weren’t for you.” She drew in her breath slowly. “And you disappeared then, too. You went around a corner, and you were gone. And now, you’re here.”
“Yes.” I looked at my watch again. “For a little while, anyway.”
“Tell me. Tell me everything.”
I glanced at the window, resisting the urge to look out again. “It’s a long story.”
“We appear to have the time.” She smiled wryly. “Unless you think they’ll find us here.”
I shook my head. “If they knew we were here, they would’ve been here when we arrived.”
“Why would they be here?” Her eyes went back and forth for a second, and then she pointed at me. “Because if they knew where we were, they would travel back to this point.”
“Exactly.” I gestured at the grungy apartment. “It’s not the Hilton, but you should be safe here for now.”
She shrugged. “I’ve stayed in worse. I could tell you horror stories about my first tour.” She rested her hands in her lap. “But I’d rather hear your story.”
“I worked for the government. Like everyone else does. They acquired me to work on a special project.”
“Acquired? Did you have a choice?”
“No. Choice isn’t really in anyone’s vocabulary in the future.”
She shook her head. “What do you mean?”
I waved my hand around. “Everything here is going to change in the next few years. It’ll start slowly then spiral out of control, at least out of the control of everyday people. You ever read 1984?”
She nodded.
“That’s where people in your day are heading. People can speak, but not hateful things. Their movements are tracked, their careers decided for them… you get the idea.”
“Why?”
“Perfection. No one wants to leave people to their own devices. They might make the wrong decisions.” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. Think of any tyranny, and that’s what happens. It’s all the same in the end.”
She wrapped her arms around her waist.
“A few rebelled. They went into hiding, using old smartphones to communicate. The government had access to all cell towers, but those can be hacked. My job was to stop that, to stop the Haters from talking to each other.”
“Haters?”
“People who opposed the perfecting of humanity,” I said. “The word is they hate humanity because they refuse to allow people to be perfected.”
“It sounds horrible.”
I nodded. “There’s a team trying to track the phones accessing the cell towers, but they aren’t having much success. They don’t teach computer skills anymore. The government doesn’t want people knowing things like that. The rebels have no compunction about learning to hack, though, so they’re all one step ahead. So the government brought me in.”
“What did you do?”
“My job was to create a machine to find the rebels, but not through the cell towers. That was too obvious. So I had to build a machine that used the electrical grid to find old smartphones and similar devices. They give off signals when in use. The theory is that the power grid, through outlets in the wall of a home, would detect anything sending out a wireless signal. If someone turned on a phone, the outlets and electrical systems in the surrounding area would be used to track the device in question. Then the police would arrest the person using it.”
I snorted. “Talk about a lousy idea. I’m good, but I’m not that good. Still, you don’t tell these people they’re wrong. They can’t imagine such a thing. So I went along with it, hoping to gain access to any kind of useful information to pass on to the underground.”
“You were a… Hater?”
I smiled. “That’s what they call us.”
“So they asked you to build a spy machine, and instead, you built a time machine.”
“Not on purpose.” I tried to think of how to explain. “I had to build something to show them for the sake of appearances. I created a series of coils, a good thirty yards of the stuff, that looked a lot like a bowl of spaghetti. It created an electromagnetic field that would theoretically travel through the power grid, but it never did anything like that. I found an interesting side effect, though.”
I chuckled. “One day, I walked toward the lab door and nearly got knocked in the head by a hammer. It had come flying out of the lab, but the door was closed. No one nearby could have thrown it. I picked it up and took it into the lab. The hammer was identical to another one I had sitting on my desk. They even had the same scuffmarks. It was as if someone had made a copy of it somehow. I didn’t figure out where it came from until the next day.”
I rubbed my hands together, remembering. “I was working in the lab when I set down a stack of books on what I thought was my desk. I wasn’t paying attention and miss
ed the desk completely. The books dropped to the floor, but before they did, they caught the edge of a hammer. It flipped over and onto the copper spaghetti ball. The metal hammer hitting the bare electrical coils would’ve caused my whole rig to explode. For a split second, I thought I was a dead man. But instead, the hammer just… disappeared.”
I leaned back. “Poof. No smoke, no electrical fire—the thing simply vaporized. I looked everywhere for it, but it hadn’t fallen anywhere. I even shut off the machine and looked inside it to be sure. The only sign that hammer ever existed was the copy that had flown down the hall the day before, the copy that was still sitting on a shelf.”
She looked as excited as I had felt that day. “It was the same hammer, wasn’t it?
I nodded. “The device I created, the core of the machine, produced a field. This field has, well, unusual properties.” I stood and started pacing. “I decided that the next day I would do an experiment. I wrote down my name on a piece of paper and laid it on my desk. The plan was to throw it into the machine at ten in the morning the next day.
“I kept the lab door open, and at two minutes after four, I saw a piece of paper flutter to the floor just outside of the lab. My name was on it, in my handwriting. The paper looked identical to the one I had just laid on my desk, with one exception. It had a grease smudge on the corner.”
I took another peek out the window. “Just before ten the next day, I turned on the machine and was ready to toss in the piece of paper. I started to pick it up, but I ended up knocking it to the floor—right into a pile of grease I had accidentally spilled earlier that morning. It left a smudge, like the one on the paper that had appeared in the hallway the day before. I dropped it over the machine, and it disappeared. And that’s when it started.”
“Your escapades through time?”
Her smile captivated me. Every part of her captivated me. “Sort of. I rearranged the coils and directed the field into a corner of my lab. Anything there would go back when the machine was activated. I did a test by sending a small object back about a year, and I was able to view it.”
“View it?”
“I haven’t been able to study the system fully, but I think it opens an Einstein-Rosen bridge to a point outside the brane—that’s a hyper-dimensional membrane upon which our universe theoretically exists. The bridge allows us to leave space-time and re-enter at another point.”
She blinked, giving me a half smile.
“Well, anyway, I managed to rig the lab computer to follow the path of a tunnel created by the machine. I could change the size of the tunnel. By making it a pinhole, it used less energy, just enough to let light through. I could view that light through my equipment. It was like a camera I could point to anywhere at any place in time.”
She raised an eyebrow. “In a way, that’s what your boss wanted, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I suppose it is.” I frowned at the thought before continuing. “Even better, I could make the tunnel bigger, big enough for a person to go through.” I started pacing again, gesturing with my hands. “It’s like being attached to a tether. After a set amount of time, the machine starts to shut down. As it does, it pulls you back in.”
“What happens if the machine was turned off early, before you were… pulled back?”
I shrugged. “I haven’t thought about it. I…” I snapped my fingers. “The guy who attacked us in the alley. He was from my time. He said something about not being able to return. Maybe that’s what happened to him.”
“Someone turned off the machine too soon, and now he’s stranded.” She raised an eyebrow. “Did you…?”
I shook my head. “No. I didn’t strand him, but I have a pretty good idea who did.”
She still seemed calm and relaxed, in spite of the fact she almost died earlier and was sitting there talking to a time traveler. “So you focused your… viewer back in time. Is that how you saw me drowning?”
“Well…” I looked at her sheepishly. “I actually just wanted to go to the beach.”
“The beach?”
“Yeah, I’d never been before. So I decided when I tested the machine I’d hit the sand.”
She smiled. “And that’s when you saw me.”
I stood in the middle of the room, watching her as she watched me. “I’d pinpointed a place in space and time. I set the machine to spin down after ten minutes. That’d give me ten minutes at the beach, and hopefully, no one would walk into the lab and see me gone during that time.”
“So, when you’re here for ten minutes, you return ten minutes after you left?”
“Yes, exactly.” I shrugged. “I didn’t have time to stick around after I pulled you out of the water.”
She uncrossed her legs and pulled them up under her. “What about the truck?”
I knitted my fingers together as I spoke. “When I went back, I wondered what happened to you after the beach. I managed to lock on to you and roll the view forward several years. You were in a wheelchair.”
“A wheelchair?” She ran her hands across her knees. “What happened?”
“You were hit by a truck. It killed your friend instantly, and you were paralyzed from the waist down.”
Her eyes welled up. “Tara died?”
“It was only a possibility.” I sat on the arm of the dirty sofa. “But I changed it.”
“But you saw that happen through your time machine?”
“Yeah, sort of.” I ran my hand over my mouth. “I saw two timelines. In the one with the accident, you were in the hospital playing guitar and singing to children. I used the viewer to look at your records. From what I could tell, you had your spleen removed due to the accident.” I hesitated. “Later, you died from an infection.”
She wrapped her arms around her knees, rocking back and forth for a moment in the loveseat. “But that didn’t happen.”
“No, it didn’t. In the other timeline, you stood on a street corner, talking to the police about the whole thing.”
“So they both happened? I mean, if it was in the past, your past, how could they both be true?”
“I’m not sure exactly. My theory is that they’re merely possibilities. I call them dualities. Two possible timelines. It’s as if the universe hasn’t quite decided what to do. Or maybe it was waiting for me to decide. I think those possibilities existed because of the machine. Because I can change things, the past is divided in places. If I go back and change things, then only one possibility remains, depending on what I’ve done.”
“Why only two?” she asked. “I mean why not a dozen, or a hundred?”
I furrowed my brow. That was a very good question. “Maybe I can only see the two most obvious choices due to the limitations of my machine.” I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not even sure how the machine works exactly.” I stood and checked the window again. “The next day, I skipped forward and saw the junkie.”
She gestured at the mess around us. “The proud owner of this?”
I smiled. “Right. See, he was desperate to get a fix, so he went for a drive. He crashed right into your SUV.” I sat down on the sofa again. “The same thing happened as before. You were in a wheelchair. You had your spleen taken out. Again, you sang to children in the hospital. And again, you died.”
I ran my fingers through my hair. “You obviously were in pain, but you still sang to them. When you finished, you hugged each of them.” I closed my eyes for a moment. “You put their welfare ahead of your own.”
“What else could I do?”
It was such a simple statement. No other possibility existed for her. She released her knees and put her feet on the floor again.
She straightened her back and looked directly at me. “Why did you do it? Why did you save me? I mean, there must be thousands of people more worthy of saving. So why me?”
I held up my hands. “Would you rather I hadn’t?”
“Don’t treat me like that.” Her nostrils flared. “Did you just like my singing that much? Is that why y
ou keep going back and saving my life?” She stood up, gesturing at the window. “And who are these people? Why do they want me dead?”
“It’s my boss. He wants you dead.”
“Why? What have I done?”
I shrugged. “I only know the guy I work for insists you have to be dead.”
“And what happens if I live?”
“Then my world will never be,” I said. “The horror of my present, your future, won’t happen. Without you, the world goes to hell.”
She shook her head. “I… I haven’t done anything.”
“You will.”
“But what?” She paced frantically. “I’m a singer. I write songs and sing them. How could someone like me change the world?”
You’ve changed my world.
She wrung her hands. “You’re part of this resistance.”
“The Haters.”
“What an ugly name.” She stopped pacing and wrapped her arms around her body. “This resistance told you to come back and save me, right?”
“They don’t even know the machine exists.”
She opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it again. Her eyes darted back and forth for a moment. “Then why are you here?”
“You have to live,” I said. “Whatever you do will change the world, at least that’s what the people trying to kill you think.”
“You knew this when you saved me from drowning? When you pushed me and Tara out of the way of that truck?”
I started to respond then stopped. I knew the answer. I just didn’t want to say.
“And what about this drug addict? The one who also nearly killed me. Did you know then?”
I shuffled my feet a little and avoided looking at her.
“I didn’t think so.” She walked over to the couch and sat next to me.
I could feel her there, inches away. I didn’t dare look at her. I didn’t want her to know what I was thinking.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It does to me.”
I felt her eyes on me, but I could only think of excuses. She’s too young for me. She’s a movie star, a pop star, an idol to millions. She has more money and fame than I’ll ever have. She has her choice of men and she’s certainly not going to want anything to do with a thirty-something engineer who lacks even the tiniest creative fiber.
“Look at me.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “Look at me.”