Suddenly I experienced the most real, the most beautiful sound and pictures I had ever experienced. I was mesmerised by the sensation – it took my breath away. It was one of the latest movies, Mike told me, and I have to say it was as real as real life itself. My entire vision was filled with the pictures, and my mind swam with sound and light.
“If you normally wear glasses, you don’t need them to watch this,” he added. “Even if you’re blind, you can still see the pictures.” But I was hardly listening – I was so much absorbed in this experience. “The thing they’re working on now is utilising the device as a recorder – so that you can download whatever you see and play it back. No need for video cameras anymore! Instant replay – with zoom, freeze–frame, and whatever else you do with video. Just think of the uses!”
Meanwhile, Niki was also totally absorbed in her experience with Yoyo’s device. She was equally stunned by it.
“Any chance of keeping it?” Niki asked.
“Well… sorry, no. Call it a benefit of old age – you’ll get your own one day.” Yoyo replied.
Whilst Niki was enjoying Yoyo’s device, Mike and I discussed Kim Jong-un’s visit to China. The fact that the meeting was planned extremely secretly would work in our favour: the only media present would be the government’s own, and security might not be so tight.
Mike told us that the Korean leader would arrive by private jet with a small staff on Saturday, 2nd August. From the airfield, the President would be driven directly to the government offices in Beijing.
“You do know it’s Chinese Valentine’s Day, don’t you?” Niki said. “You want us to kill a man on Valentine’s Day?”
“It will demonstrate your love for the World,” Mike replied.
Whilst Mike was filling us in on Kim’s visit to China, the reality of assassinating a president gradually became real. I still had no clear idea how we should do the deed, but I knew we should use Mike and Yoyo’s knowledge of events to make this happen.
***
Eighteen
The next day, things took on a very different complexion.
Niki awoke around 6am in a troubled frame of mind. Whilst I was still half–asleep, the first thing she said to me was, “Joe – I’ve been thinking about yesterday.” Her tone of voice reminded me of countless previous occasions she’d drop a bombshell. It always meant that I had to be flexible in my thinking – and prepared to change my best–laid plans. I was suddenly fully awake.
“Yesss… and?”
“Who’s going to pull the trigger?”
I couldn’t resist replying, “Well, I thought you would…” even though I could guess her reaction. And anyway, if there was a trigger to be pulled, it would have my finger on it – no question (but I wouldn’t mind her loading the bullets).
“It’s just that I don’t think either of us has to,” she replied.
“You mean Mike or Yoyo could do it?”
“No.”
“O-kay,” I said slowly. “Well, as we said yesterday, there’s always poison – or we could start a fire… or maybe we could leave a gun in his room with the message, ‘Please point gun to head and fire’…”
“Joe!”
“Sorry baby – what’s your idea?”
“F**k off!”
It was very rare for Niki to swear, but when she did I knew I’d really crossed the line – badly. In China, sarcasm doesn’t really work, and nobody seems to do it. So I try not to use it with Niki, even though she’s lived in the UK for so long now. But every now and then, it slips out.
“I’m sorry, that was wrong. Please tell me your idea.” Her face told me she was not going to grant me that favour – I would have to beg for it. She got out of bed quickly and started to dress.
“Pleasssse baby… I really want to know…”
She stopped dressing and looked me in the eye.
“We don’t have to kill Kim at all – no–one has to.”
This was the bombshell. Okay I thought, be flexible – be open to other options (something I have to say I am not really good at – unless those alternative ideas originate from my particular anatomy).
“Okay, go on.”
“Think about it: Mike and Yoyo have returned to our time, where there are no World Wars – and won’t be for another forty years. If they want to, they can live very comfortably here. How old do you think they are now?”
“Well, Mike must be over seventy – my age plus forty–two years.”
“Right – and Yoyo will be in her late sixties. So even if they live to be a hundred, they’re not going to live through this new Korean War – if they stay here, in our time.” I suddenly knew exactly where Niki was going with this. “We can choose to live in any time period we want,” she continued, “so why not choose a comfortable one, where there are no big conflicts, no nuclear wars, and we can enjoy life?”
I thought about it. From a personal perspective, you had to say she was right – absolutely spot–on. But how could we step away, knowing what we know now, with this amazing power in our hands.
“You’re right Niki, it makes so much sense – it really does…”
“I can hear a ‘but’ coming.”
I grimaced and let out a deep sigh. “You know what I’m going to say.”
“What about helping people, right? What about stopping suffering all round the World – preventing wars, stopping genocides, eliminating World hunger… what about making the World a more comfortable place for everyone – not just us?”
“Exactly… we can’t just turn a blind eye to all that.”
“But we can, and we have to when we can’t do anything about it.”
“But we can do something!”
“No we can’t! We think we can, we have all these big ideas – like stopping the Nazis, or saving Steve’s life… but if it’s meant to be, then we’re powerless.”
“I stopped nine–eleven…” I said weakly.
“Yes – I really believe you did Joe – even though I have no recollection whatsoever of the event – I do believe you. But look at the consequences: you manage to kill my mother and two World leaders – and who knows how many others died because of your meddling.”
“Meddling!”
“I’ve had enough Joe – I don’t want to risk my life seeing off a dictator that hasn’t done anything wrong to me. North Korea’s an ally of China – don’t forget that. You can keep your time–travel assassination game – I want no part of it.”
Niki stormed out of the room and slammed the door. There was an empty quiet.
A few minutes later, there was a gentle knock on the door: it was Mike.
“Everything all right?” he said.
“Yeah, great.” I sighed. “Sorry, we must have disturbed you.”
“It’s okay, we weren’t sleeping – we were just talking.”
“Did you hear us?” I asked.
“It was difficult not to.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
For a moment, I’d forgotten that I was talking to me, Mike, who’d lived through more or less exactly what I had, and experienced the same things. Being with Mike was so much like being with my father.
“Well, I guess that you and Yoyo got through all of this shit. I mean, you’re still together, still time–travelling, right?”
“Sometimes, it’s better that you don’t know the future Joe.” I looked at him closely for a moment. There were a lot of things he wasn’t telling me, but I knew it was no good asking.
“Yeah, well that’s exactly what Niki would say,” I said.
“Perhaps she’s right. Once you know the future, it’s difficult to turn back. Changing the past is very different from affecting the future. You have to be careful meddling with the past because you don’t know how it will affect your present. But there are countless possible futures, and we choose the ones that will become our own realities every day, every minute, every
second. There’s nothing at all wrong in affecting the future – particularly affecting it for the better. Niki knows this.”
“Your Niki or mine?”
“Both. One knows it now, and the other will realise it soon.”
I sighed deeply. “Okay, but here’s the thing: how do we square what you said yesterday with what Niki wants? Yesterday you asked us to kill Kim Jong-un. Now she doesn’t want that.”
“I never said that both you and Niki should be involved in it, Joe. You have to remember that we’re from the future – we know what has happened, and what will happen if nothing is done. We jumped forward just six months, and went to Hampstead Heath and looked across the City of London: it was all gone. It was just like the pictures of Hiroshima after the bomb. We couldn’t breathe the air and had to jump back quickly. And that’s just one city. We’re not talking about a big war – we’re talking about the end of this civilisation. The planet will become unliveable.
“Why don’t you stay here – in our time period – like Niki said? Then we don’t have to change anything.”
“If you’d seen what we’ve seen, you’d know that we can’t do that. We can’t make the future any worse by eliminating Kim Jong-un – trust me. And if you don’t trust me, come and see it for yourself – come to the future. But we can’t stay long.”
*
I felt that I was in the middle of a big dilemma. I had to agree with Mike, but I also understood Niki’s perspective only too well. We really didn’t know what would happen if we assassinated the Korean leader. Mike said we couldn’t make things worse, how did he know? And another thing: Niki and I always agreed to never go it alone, but now Mike was suggesting I went solo.
When we started to use this time–travelling ability, I’d thought we could change history for the better – no question. Now, I could see that this was not always the case. Apart from changing nine–eleven, the only other success I’d still clung on to was stopping Niki’s ex–boyfriend topping himself. But as we discovered, he ended up being killed in a car crash a few years later. So what had we achieved? We’d added a few years to his life – during which he couldn’t be with the girl he loved. All this challenged the core of my beliefs, and I had to ask myself the question: can we, in our limited view of the World, really say what is for the best? How can we differentiate between doing good and interfering?
I recalled an incident when I was a student in London. I was waiting at a bus stop when a man ran across the main road from a pub on the other side. He was closely followed by a second, older man who dodged the traffic and caught up with the younger man – just as he reached the bus stop. The second man then gave the first a severe beating – and I mean severe. People at the stop either looked on in amazement, as I did, or hurried away. It was like watching a movie. The older guy then adjusted his shirt, shrugged and walked calmly back across the road – job done. Meanwhile, the young man was lying against the bus stop with blood on his white shirt. I didn’t want to move him – we’re always told we shouldn’t in these situations – but I thought I must do something. So I called the emergency services. They said they’d send an ambulance, and asked me to wait at the scene. I did as they instructed and stood at the bus stop, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. But moments later, the younger man came to, staggered to his feet, and ran off!
The next thing I knew I could hear the familiar wail of an ambulance in the distance, so I scarpered! Well, I didn’t want to be around when questions were asked about which joker had called the emergency services on false pretences, wasting taxpayers’ money.
Later on, after I’d married Niki, I relayed this story to her, and she said, “Why do you think this happened? I mean, why did the second man beat the first?” I had to admit that I really had no idea – but it looked like the young man had been attacked for no reason. It seemed totally out of order, and perhaps the older man should be arrested. “But what if the young man had just tried to rob the guy’s bar? Or maybe he tried to rape the owner’s wife. How would you feel if someone did this to you?” I had to admit that is someone had tried to rape Niki, I wouldn’t just call the police – I’d kick the shit out of him first.
This incident went over and over in my mind for a long time. I thought about things that happen in the World, and our limited view on the reasons they happen. Niki comes from a Buddhist background, though she doesn’t have strong religious leanings now. But what she still has is a karmic way of looking at life. I’m not saying that I totally believe all the things she’s told me, but I do think there is a reason for everything, and that ‘what goes around, comes around.’ There’s all the obvious sort of paybacks in life: a man robs a bank, gets caught and goes to prison. A man kills another man, and gets life. You hit your sister, and your dad hits you back. It’s normal – everyone knows this. But what about the unseen links that we miss? If we only see the payback and not the cause, how can we make sense of life without some sort of karmic ideology? And how can we have the right attitude to events – or any real understanding of them?
What if there really is system of Universal Justice which balances every action and every thought in life – in such a way that over a period of a life, or even several lifetimes, nothing is unjust? Perhaps sometimes we’re working against this Universal Justice system, and doing more harm than good. And it could be the same with trying to change history.
***
Nineteen
Later on that day, Niki suggested a walk to the local coffee bar. I really felt I needed some air to clear my head, so the walk and coffee sounded like a good idea. Nik said she’d had a long talk with Yoyo, and wanted to share this with Mike and me. So we sat with our coffees and listened to what they had to say.
After chatting with Yoyo, Nik had realised how bad things had become in Yoyo and Mike’s time zone, and how the future looked as black as black can be. Not only that, but her idea of Yoyo and Mike living with us (or with any other versions of us in other time–zones), was not really on. Apparently, they’d tried it a couple of times, but it didn’t work. It was impossible to have duel identities, with two Joe Coopers and two Niki Lings wandering around. In the end, it meant creating totally new identities, with new passports, new bank accounts – new everything. It was highly problematic, and they always felt like criminals. Yoyo was always worried that the authorities would track them down one day and check their DNA or something. On top of that, it was difficult to leave the children, who really didn’t want to go and live in a previous time period, now that they’d built lives for themselves in their own time.
So Mike and Yoyo had come to an agreement: no meddling in the past, but we can determine our own future – if needed. And in this case, averting a cataclysmic war was very much needed. The only problem that remained was how exactly to avoid this forthcoming war – what to do to prevent it happening? The four of us appreciated that assassinating Kim Jong-un was just one possibility. What else could be done?
“Well, as you can imagine, Yoyo and I spent quite some time thinking this through,” Mike began. Yoyo nodded. “I think we all agree that whatever we do should involve minimal risk to ourselves.”
We were silent for a moment, and then Niki said, “As I understand it, Kim Jong-un is not the danger – it’s his future son, Kim Jong-hui. And one way to avert a war is to prevent him ever existing – which could be done by assassinating his father…”
“Or his mother,” Yoyo added.
“Yes. But as Mike said yesterday, killing the mother does not necessarily stop Kim remarrying, and passing on his genes.”
‘Do we know the exact location of the meeting with the Chinese?” I asked Mike.
“It was in the government office in Xizhimen South Street in Beijing,” Mike replied.
“I love how you say ‘was’!” I said. “Okay, so if we were to assassinate Kim, we would somehow have to get into that building. I imagine that we couldn’t just walk in?”
“No way,” said Yoyo. “I think we’ve
got to use our greatest asset...”
“Time–travel,” Niki said.
“Yes. And also use the fact that Niki and I are Chinese. You guys… no chance.” We had to admit she was right. “So we enter the building the previous day, and then make a jump forward.”
“Or the day after and jump backwards,” I added.
“The day after?” Niki queried.
“Yes. After the event, there will be much less security than before,” I said.
“Joe’s right,” said Mike. “That has my vote.”
“Ok, we’re getting somewhere. So Niki and I will jump to one day after the meeting…” said Yoyo.
“Wait a minute! I thought you said you were too old for this?” I said.
“What! No no – Mike said we are too old – I never said that!” The two girls smiled.
“I’ve got it!” Niki suddenly shrieked.
“You have?” Mike said.
“We don’t have to kill anybody… we simply kidnap Kim!”
Mike and I exchanged puzzled looks. Then I said, “Okay, but supposing you do that, how long are you going to keep him for? Until he promises to never father a child? And where are you going to keep him?”
“In a place where no–one will ever find him!” said Niki.
“Ah, yes!” Yoyo smiled.
“Okay you two, what’s the joke?” asked Mike.
“The future!” Niki beamed.
“Yes,” Yoyo added, “we take him to a future time period – and leave him there!”
We all laughed. It was a brilliant idea – but Mike wasn’t so sure.
“It’s a great idea, but the future – our future – is dangerous. If anything happens to you Niki, then that affects Yoyo too – don’t forget that. It’s better if I go alone.”
“No Mike!” said Yoyo. “I’m going with you. If anything happens, I don’t want to be left on my own. And remember our agreement?” Yoyo was, of course, referring to the pact I’d make with Niki to always make jumps together.
We were all quiet again. Then I said, “All right… Mike and Yoyo will take Kim to the future. Let him see the result of his future son’s actions. Then they either leave him there – or just kill him. Staying in that atmosphere is pretty much a death sentence anyway.” We were all more serious now.