Unhappenings (15 page)

“I’m calling you Una now,” I informed her.

“I’m still Una? I thought we were past that one.”

It was a Saturday, early Spring. Una found me alone at the park. “Maybe you are,” I said, “but it’s still novel for me. I only just named you that a couple months ago. You seemed annoyed with it at the time.”

“I got over it. Take my hand.”

I took her hand. My left arm tingled. The world flashed, and when my eyes readjusted, and my gag reflex obeyed my mental command to settle down, we were still in a park, but clearly not the same park. There were maybe a dozen other people there—children playing on the swings, a young woman walking a dog, a couple with a stroller—but no one appeared to notice our arrival.

“What year is this?” I asked.

“2115.”

She said this without looking at me. She was staring at something, but I couldn’t tell what. Given that this was my first ever trip into my own future, I was a little put off by the anti-climactic nature of the revelation.

“Do you know why I’m here?” she asked.

I didn’t. The last time I had seen her at this approximate stage was the time she let slip that her year of origin was many decades into my future. “Do you mean here in 2115? Are we running a fix? It’s been a long time. I miss that.”

“I don’t mean the year. Sometimes I come here when I need to think, that’s all. And sorry, no, not a fix. When I need you for a fix, I pick you up from college. You were a lot more susceptible to suggestion at that age. Any time I need a sidekick, I set the destination for September of your senior year. Plus or minus one year lands me in your last two years at MIT, and away we go. I’m sure I’ll have more reasons to do that down the road. How many fixes did you run with me, total?”

I counted mentally. “Fifteen? I’m not sure.”

“I’ve only done nine of those. So yeah, I’ll see you there again, but from your frame of reference, that job is over.”

“Wait, I thought the margin of error for a jump was seven years, not one.”

She perked up a bit at that. “It’s different when it’s you,” she said. “The longer you travel, the easier it is to find you. You’re already at the point where I can catch up to you to within days. But even back then, you’re right, the error was a lot smaller than it would be for a standard jump. How did you know about the seven years?”

“An older you. Sometimes you tell me things. Usually not so much. You’re being uncharacteristically honest today,” I said.

She shrugged. “Not at all. I’m plenty honest with you most times. It’s just easier for both of us if you don’t know anything when you’re that young. Anyway, no, that’s not why I’m here.”

I looked away from her. “This is about Future Me. His offer.”

She nodded. “You have a few days yet, am I right?”

“A week,” I said. “Are you here to give me advice this time? Because my most recent conversation with you about this ended with you panicking and begging to stay out of it.”

“Advice, no,” she said. “I can’t be part of this decision.”

“Why not? How is this different from anything else you’ve had me do?”

“It’s bigger,” she said. “And I’m too closely tied to it. Influencing you would be… I don’t know. ‘Unethical’ is nowhere near severe enough a word for it, but that’s as close as I can get.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Here’s some of that honesty you’re not used to hearing from me yet: whatever you decide, you’re going to regret it. I’m so sorry. I can’t advise you because your choice is going to affect me even more than it will affect you.”

“Oh, good lord,” I said. “Did you really come back to this point in time just to make this harder on me?”

“No. I came back here to make sure your decision is as informed as possible. I want you to ask me questions. I want you to have as much information as you can possibly get. Because when you finally regret what you do…” She paused here, perhaps looking for the right words. “I want you to be able to forgive yourself.”

“Great.” I rolled that all around in my head, while Una watched me, for probably a full minute. “Future Me said a lot of people are going to die if I don’t help him,” I said. “Was he telling me the truth?”

Una took a moment to compose her answer before speaking it. “No,” she said. “He was not telling the truth, but he wasn’t wrong either. People are going to die.” As she said this, her gaze drifted away from me again.

I thought about this for a moment, wondering if she meant people would die either way. It seemed like a pretty important detail for her to be vague about it. “He visited me once before,” I said. “When I was a sophomore. Said I was too young or something. What can you tell me about that?”

This got her attention in a way I hadn’t expected. “I don’t know,” she said carefully. “Was… Are you absolutely certain it was him?”

“Yes. He and I even talked about that briefly this time.”

She frowned. “I don’t know anything about that. I’m not even sure I know what to do with that information.”

“Really? We talked about this right after it happened.”

“Not yet we haven’t,” she said, and then it gelled for me that she was younger now than she was when she first made me a traveler. She probably had the silver bead in her pocket right now, still waiting for the day she would plant it in my arm.

“Sorry,” I said. “That’s my past, your future. So, you don’t know why he would have considered asking for my help that early?”

“No,” she said. For a moment it looked like she was going to speculate, but then she chose silence. I wasn’t going to get anything else from that angle of inquiry, but it wasn’t my priority right then anyway. I made a mental note to come back to that discussion at some point, and chose to ask her a much more important question.

“If I make the wrong choice, are you going to die?”

That brought her back. She gave me a very sad smile. “No. I won’t die.”

“Then I don’t think I want to know anything else,” I said.

Her smile faded into a look of worry. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “I get how big this is. And I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but I don’t think it’s going to make a difference. Knowing that I’m going to regret this either way is strangely liberating, so thank you for that. At this point I just want to hear what Future Me has to say about a couple of things, but I think I already know what I’m going to do.”

With that, Una took me home. Expecting to regret my choice made it easier to make, if not more wisely. But I definitely missed the point of her visit that day, because what I didn’t expect was how much I would regret not asking her at least one more question.

arly in the morning, two months to the day after Future Nigel made his offer, I went back to the print collection room again and waited. He hadn’t specified that he would meet me there, but it seemed the logical place to wait for him. At about one in the afternoon, he poked his head in the door.

“I wasn’t sure you would come back here,” he said. “I was about to try your parents’ house.”

“Really? I’m sorry I missed that, then. What were you planning to tell them? I’m sure Mom’s reaction would have been something for the record books.”

He stared at me, that same distant look in his eyes I had seen now twice before. The last time I saw him, I suspected it was the same day for him as our first encounter five years before that. This time I was sure. His clothing was exactly the same, and his hair was still damp from five year old rain. “I guess I didn’t really think that one through,” he admitted.

“Not a problem,” I said. “I wouldn’t have been home anyway. You happened to catch me during a week that I have an actual job. Playing hooky today, of course. Probably getting fired. Not that any of that matters.”

None of that seemed to penetrate. “Have you considered my request?” he asked.

“You wanted me to ask you questions,” I reminded him. “Are you ready for them?”

“Of course.”

“Okay then,” I said, and felt my heart begin to race. “Here’s the only question I have: What is this really about?”

“Um,” he said. “I told you—”

“Something that’s obviously not true. You said time travel doesn’t work properly. Then you said you’d be back in two months. It’s two months later, here you are, and you never even left the building. You jumped two months forward with negligible error. My best theoretical estimates of jump error should be plus or minus seven years, and you brushed that off like it was nothing.” The seven years comment clearly hit him hard. He had no way of knowing it was inside information, but if he wanted to think I was that smart, let him. “So I want to know, since you’ve obviously mastered the thing you say doesn’t work, what is it you really want from me?”

Future Me came fully into the room, sat down, and put his hands flat on the table in front of me. Even braced, they were clearly shaking. “I need you to help me, and the best way for you to do that is to help with the time travel research.”

I stared into his eyes, looking for some sort of tell. “Even though you clearly don’t really need my physics insights.”

“That’s not…” he began to say, but evidently remembered whom he was trying to deceive. “Yes,” he said. “Even though that.”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

His look of surprise was expected. “Why?”

“Because you are a train wreck,” I said. “You are an absolute disaster. I’ve only talked to you for ten minutes total, and I already know you are a mess that has no idea how to clean itself up.” I leaned in closer, and he recoiled slightly. Whether this was in fear of me or whatever had already brought him to this state was impossible to tell. “I will do this because there is no way I will ever let myself become you.”

At those words, he closed his eyes, and slowly smiled.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“Don’t thank me yet. Thank me if it works. Show me everything you have, and I will get started on whatever it is I am supposed to do. Do you have any of it with you?” He did not appear to have brought any equipment with him, and any data storage he might be carrying would surely not be compatible with contemporary machines, so I expected him to leave at that point, and return shortly with materials and notes for me to peruse. Instead, a look of confusion retook his face.

“No,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”

I ran those words over in my head a few times. “Wait, what? I can’t do that! You never said anything about coming with you!”

“I’m sure I did,” he said. The general note of desperation was creeping back into his voice. I had not anticipated this, but now it suddenly held great appeal. A short jaunt into the future, perhaps several jaunts. If I played this right, it would be an adventure beyond my already remarkable experiences.

“For how long?”

“Not long,” he said.

“And you can bring me right back here when I’m done?”

“Yes.”

“I mean right here. This room. This moment.”

“Yes.”

As every scrap of common sense and wisdom in my soul bellowed at me to abandon this idea, he pulled a device out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. It was roughly bar-shaped, about twenty centimeters long, and covered in buckles. “Strap this onto your arm.” I stared at it. Its descendant already lived in a bone in my left arm. I weighed the pros and cons of revealing this, and ultimately hoped they simply wouldn’t interfere with each other.