Unhappenings (19 page)

“Whoa! No!” I threw my hands up, finally able to say something I knew was true. “I don’t know anything about that. I swear! I didn’t know you were on that list. I’m definitely not on it!”

She stared. “You swear.”

I nodded. “I swear.”

Andrea closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and fell right back into character as my mentor. “No one has observed any health effects on the live subjects that have traveled so far. That includes fourteen mice and one dog. The mice were subjected to five seconds of future travel each, spread out over several months, and have been under observation for over a year, including two that have since been euthanized and dissected. The dog was sent sixty seconds into the future last month, and has been under twenty-four hour observation every moment since then. Every animal appears to be healthy in every way that we can measure. There have been no live subjects used for backwards travel yet, and there won’t be until we can work out a reliable way of tracking their destinations and retrieving them.”

I gulped. “Thanks,” I said.

“No problem,” said Andrea. “Sorry about earlier,” she added.

“No, no, that’s fine. I had no idea. Of course you would be concerned.” Looking for a way to comfortably end this discussion so that I could find somewhere private to scream, I added, “I hope you get picked.”

She smiled warmly, and we both dropped it. I excused myself and went to the roof to hyperventilate.

Human trials hadn’t started yet. Except they had. Dr. Nigel Walden was in possession of at least two working modules and had used them on himself at least three times. And no one knew. The research he insisted was not bringing acceptable results was in fact more successful than anyone but he was aware. With human trials still ostensibly a ways off, and a working system already in place, he was probably already years ahead of schedule.

What the hell did he need me for?

ver the course of the next two days, the dull ache in my arm became a burning pain that spread up my arm and over to a spot directly between my shoulder blades. It was frightening. Doubly so, because not only did I not know what was happening to me, but I also had no idea who to turn to for help. When the pain did finally stop, I still had no idea what was going on, so I really didn’t have any reason to stop being afraid. It was several weeks before I was able to trust that the pain was temporary and might not return. I never did make the connection between that event and what happened shortly after. Una had to explain that to me herself.

One beneficial effect of that scare was that it took my mind off the troubling discovery of the additional layers of my older self’s duplicity. On some level, I had believed that whatever his secret agenda might be, he really was using me for my time travel insights, however crude he might expect them to be. And I wanted to continue believing that. I continued showing up for work, asking good questions, and trying to make myself useful. But watching those two go through motions that were already, I suspected, obsolete, made me progressively skeptical that the work we were doing had any meaning at all. Worse, they at least knew what they were doing, even if they didn’t realize it was futile. I began to understand that my opportunity to make a profound contribution to the research was not going to present itself.

I did a lot of sulking through that stretch of time. Oscar had very little patience for my moping, and had no problem sharing that with me. Andrea came to me privately and told me she was worried I was showing signs of depression, and wanted to know if I needed any help. I told her I was fine, which she called out as a transparent lie. She also said the work we were doing was too important to compromise it with a mental health crisis, which was a fair point. She wanted me to get professional help. I balked at that. As a compromise, we agreed I would take a couple of days off, and get away from my stressors. If that didn’t help, I was going to have to follow up with a doctor.

I spent two days holed up in my apartment, reading, sleeping, gaming, and generally wallowing. After two days of that, I was much worse, having added to my sense of uselessness a deep regret for having rushed so blindly into a situation that was well beyond my coping skills. In a childish moment, I actually wished aloud that I had never left that room in the library.

And just like that, I was back there.

ere’s what I learned, much later: The module was not giving me bone cancer. It was sending out filaments. When Una first implanted it, five subjective years earlier, it was slaved to the one in her own arm. That’s why I was never able to travel without her in contact with me. When I traveled to 2144, and then didn’t go home for months, the module concluded that I had been permanently separated from the user of the master module, and executed a failsafe protocol to make it independently operable. The process involved extending thousands of microscopically thin filaments into my spine, via the nerves in my arm. Once anchored there, they initiated a neuro-electrical interface that would allow me to control the module mentally.

At the time, I knew none of this. All I knew was: Ow.

My immediate reaction to finding myself back in the print collection was that either my return was a dream, or my trip to 2144 had been. It then took me a fraction of a second to berate myself for thinking something that stupid. I had spent the better part of a year in my own future. That was real. I was now back home. That was also real. Cautiously, I did venture out of that room, just long enough to confirm with a calendar that I was back in 2092, which I was.

I wanted to go back to my house, find my parents, and tell them everything. That gave me a minor anxiety attack. The prospect of their reaction didn’t worry me so much. They would understand, or they wouldn’t, and we would all get past it. What did worry me was the prospect that I might still have an unhappening immunity here. I still wasn’t sure if it was real after the missing key incident, but I desperately wanted to believe it, and back in my own time, it would probably wear off. I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. Unfortunately, I didn’t even know how I had fallen back through time, let alone how to undo that event. I longed for Una to appear miraculously, take my hand, and spirit me back to 2144. I would even have settled for grouchy, crazy Future Me to do the trick. Either way, I couldn’t remain where and when I was.

In an attempt to focus my thinking and calm myself down, I whispered, “I will find a way to get back.”

And just like that, I was.

I still hadn’t made the connection to the pain from earlier, but it was immediately clear to me that my situation had drastically changed. For reasons still unknown to me, I was now able to travel through time at will.

Well, perhaps “will” is not the most precise term.

Over the next few days, I made several more test flights. In the interest of personal safety, I did not go traipsing around time like some super-powered tourist, but instead stuck to that room and that day. The last thing I needed was to get lost.

My third jump went wild. All things considered, I was lucky it wasn’t worse. The phrase “seven year margin of error” was never far from my thoughts, but after bull’s-eyes on my first two trips, I got a little cocky. Third time was not the charm. I missed the room and the day by forty kilometers and six years. Expecting to find myself in a comfortable reading room, I was instead thrown into a dark, cold alley, where I promptly hit my head. I managed to pull myself up and get to the sidewalk, but that was about as far as I got before sitting down at the base of a building. I was disoriented, but I seem to recall rambling to myself, probably quite loudly. During the five minutes in which I tried to find ways not to panic about the fact that I couldn’t focus enough to get myself home yet, which might not even be possible given that I had no idea what year this was, someone evidently called a cop.

“You all right, son?” said Officer Friendly. When I looked up to find him, I recognized him immediately. I had seen this officer twice before. He, in turn, had never met me.

“Yeah,” I said, hoping it sounded bold, and in control.

“Are you intoxicated?”

“No,” I said, honestly, but apparently not convincingly. “I hit my head.”

“I can see that. You’ve got a nasty scratch there.”