EXCERPT
May 29 2025 8:24:02
I’m probably about to die.
Let me be more specific. I’m probably about to scatter the matter that comprises my body through a semi-infinite swath of space and time. You can’t get more dead than having all your molecules simultaneously dissociated.
The mechanical whine of motors fills the dusty space as the machine checks its refractive alignments. If any part of the process is even a few nanometers off there’s no real point in flipping the switch at all: I’d have zero chance of survival. While the machine calibrates I stare at this incredibly ugly thing I’ve built. I contemplate how stupid it is that I’m about to step inside and trust my life to it. But it’s not just my life I’m risking, really, I’m risking the lives of two – make that three – others. They’re already dead, but they’re still counting on me to save them.
When I say the machine is ugly, I don’t mean it’s ugly in a cool, post-apocalyptic sort of way. It’s just ugly. And that’s especially sad considering that the parts alone cost more than sixty million dollars. Thousands of wires are draped in haphazard fashion between the aluminum struts and refractive optics, and they’re bundled together with honest-to-goodness bailing wire. I would have used duct tape, but since I built this thing in a barn the bailing wire came for free (I found a massive spool of it in the corner).
The abandoned barn is about a five minute walk from my house, out in the hills north of Livermore, CA. I’ve practically lived in this hot, dusty space for the last 5 years, so my house is actually looking more abandoned than the barn these days. You wouldn’t think from my overgrown lawn and the take-out food packaging piled one foot deep on the floor that I’ve made over one hundred million dollars in stock market investments.
My heart skips a beat as I hear alarm chimes and glance over to my security monitor. I’d hoped the men from the Security and Exchange Commission might be late for their scheduled appointment. But no, the men in suits are on time, and from the looks on their faces they’re keen on finding me. Did I just mention the one hundred million dollars I made in stock market investments? Well, apparently when you’re as ‘lucky’ as I am, it sends up some red flags. It’s not like I’m doing insider trading – my method is far more foolproof than that. I doubt these suits are going to believe how I actually got my information.
A trio of them has given up on my front door and is headed up the dusty path to the barn. One of them looks more like FBI than SEC. Damn.
My hands shake as I cancel the final verifications on the alignment routine and set the capacitors charging. Two minutes. I do a quick sanity check of the gear in my pack: tire shredding strip, auto tourniquet and bandages, water bottle, atomic clock, flashlight, two pistols.
I strap it on tight over my back; I won’t have much room for anything bulky. Then I step into this mad gerbil-ball of death, forced to crouch down to fit inside. I glance at my watch, listen to the hum of the generator and the buzz of the capacitors charging. I’m about to make history – but no one is going to be around to shout hooray and dole out my ill-gotten Nobel Prize. There’s going to be a big hole in the ground, and a lot of angry people looking for me. In this timeline, anyway, I’ll just be declared as a rich crackpot that blew himself up.
That is, if travelling back in time isn’t going to eradicate this version of the universe from existence. This thought is actually comforting – I guess that shows how bitter I’ve become. I’m perfectly willing to wipe out an entire timeline, every person, plant and animal – every event that has happened in the last twelve years.
Of course, that’s why you build a time machine, isn’t it?
My thoughts drift. The smell of burnt tires, the pitched whine of the defibrillator. The stickiness of dried blood soaking my clothes. I could fix it, I could change it. It didn’t have to happen.
My eyes press shut. I wait, counting down.
February 18, 2011, 22:37:35
“Seriously man, you gotta go over there.”
“I have a PhD in Particle Physics,” I said, adjusting the collar on my leather jacket. I was stupid to let Malcolm talk me into wearing it – almost as stupid as letting him talk me into coming at all. “Girls like that aren’t into guys like me.”
“Got the same PhD as you,” Malcolm said with typical swagger. “Never stopped me.”
“Yeah, that’s because your accent upgrades you from like a 5 to an 9.”
“Aye, well, why do you think I came to America?”
I snorted, glancing over at her again. She was with a friend, both grinning and flirting with the barkeep. Damn her and her blue eyes and her legs from here to forever. I couldn’t really fathom how someone could even approach a girl like that.
“I just had a revelation,” Malcolm said, holding his bourbon high so he could peer through the depths of the amber liquid. He looked like something out of a GQ magazine, wearing a slightly tight button up shirt with sleeves rolled up, a sword tattoo wrapped across his muscled forearm.
“What revelation…?” I muttered.
“THAT, right there, is the girl you’ll marry. Believe me, if you don’t go over there, you’ll regret it for the rest of your lonely, pathetic life.” He downed the rest of his drink and set down his glass.
“Really?” I said. “And when I do go over there and embarrass myself, I will regret it for the rest of my life. You’re drunk, I’m not taking advice from you.”
“If you think I’m drunk we haven’t spent enough time together, mate. Besides - look at her, she’s got the hair, the legs - and you’re an up and coming scientist…even if you’ll be in my expansive shadow your whole life. Come on, I’ll introduce you.” He pushed his stool back, grabbing my arm.
“Okay, how can you introduce me if you don’t even – ” I had to fall silent as he physically hauled me into range and she fixed those crystal blue eyes on us. No escaping now.
“Evening ladies,” Malcolm said with his best, suave BBC. “This right here is Anthony Powell. He is, without doubt, the most interesting person you’re going to meet this year. Possibly, in your entire life.”
“What was that?” Legs asked.
“Anthony here is the most interesting person you’re ever going to meet,” he repeated, more of a shout over the thumping music. I thought she probably heard him the first time, but the statement just didn’t make sense. It fell especially flat having to be repeated.
Legs gave Malcolm a thorough looking over, then glanced over to me. I stared back, at a complete loss.
“Well,” she said. “Looks more silent than interesting to me.”
Her friend giggled, covering her mouth in a vain attempt to hide the derision.
I sputtered for a moment as I visualized the Titanic striking the iceberg, and the Hindenburg’s fiery death. I couldn’t come up with anything clever to say.
“Look, boys, I don’t mean to be rude,” she went on, using one finger to dislodge the salt-ring on top of her glowing green margarita. “But I don’t go for guys who need someone else to introduce them. No offense.” She spared me an apologetic glance. It didn’t help.
“But you,” she said, tapping Malcolm in the chest. “You might just be interesting. Not from around here, are you?”
“London, love,” he replied, casting me a ‘sorry, I tried mate’ sort of look. As they began to circle and do the human version of sniffing each other’s butts, I retreated back to my bar stool and resigned myself to a dull evening and an indelible memory that will make me wince every time it comes to mind. At least I had some wings coming. Now that the barkeep had some competition for Legs’ attention, maybe he’d get around to telling the kitchen about my order.
“Looks like that didn’t go so well.”
I glanced over to see a girl a couple stools down from me, elbows on the bar, wearing one of those golf hats. She had the Berkeley chic look going for her, which was a variant on hipster but with a general apathy for making men’s eyes pop out of their sockets. In a place like this, it was like a breath of fresh air.
She tucked some of her errant blonde bangs back behind one ear, then gave me a conciliatory smile. “I hate it when my friends try and introduce me to people.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, glancing back to see Malcolm sit down, ordering a round for him, Legs and her friend too. Damn him and that bloody accent of his.
“Hey don’t worry about it,” hat-girl said, leaning over to be heard over the music. “Believe me, you’re probably better off.”
“You know her?”
“Flat-mate,” hat-girl said. “Dragged me here. She was supposed to be helping me meet people, but I think she gave up. She ran into an old sorority sister and, well…” She shrugged, taking a sip of her drink. “To be fair, I’m a difficult case.”
My food arrived, and I stared in flat confusion. “Excuse me,” I said, pulling the barkeep back. “I ordered hot wings, didn’t I?”
“Hot and Cold Wings, that’s right,” he said, moving off to mix something.
The plate contained what looked like three lollipops stabbed into mounds of frost, each of them alight with a sputtering blue fire. Beneath was a pool of what had to be liquid nitrogen, spilling out a sheet of vapor over the bar.
This place was definitely too cool for someone like me, I decided.
“What the hell is that?” hat-girl asked.
“They’re supposed to be chicken wings,” I muttered, attempting without success to blow out one of the lollipops.
“Here, try this,” she scooted over, taking out one of the pops and inverting it into the thin pool of liquid nitrogen. The flames finally died out, more from oxygen deprivation than the cold.
“Good idea,” I said with a grin as she offered it back to me. “Only…I think it’s a little frozen now.”
“Well, are you going to try it?”
I crunched through the boozy candy coating, finding a greasy gobbet of chicken beneath. “Rubbery,” I said after chewing, “and the cayenne pepper candy gets stuck in your teeth. It’s pretty disgusting. Want one?”
Hat-girl laughed, taking the second pop and extinguishing it. “With a pitch like that, how can I refuse?” She chewed contemplatively, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s disgusting, thanks for sharing. I’m Kim, by the way.”
“Good to meet you,” I said, smiling. “I’m…”
“Anthony,” she finished for me, laughing. “The most interesting person I’ll ever meet.”
May 29 2025 8:30:37
The capacitors’ buzz grows louder. I hear a digital beep – it’s ready. As ready as it’s going to be, at least. I fumble at my pocket, difficult in this strange position, and pull out the remote trigger.
A knock sounds at the door across the dusty barn, the SEC guys are here. One of them shouts my name, then starts kicking down the door.
I tilt the button forward, and the process begins.
First an infra-red laser fires a single pulse; it’s low in energy by itself, but then as it passes through neodymium doped glass (which has been flooded by flash lamps) the number of photons is doubled. I double the power a dozen times before I redirect the beam, convert it to ultraviolet light, then bombard a tiny gold target – about the size of a pinhead.
This creates an abundance of antiprotons and positrons; both antimatter particles that will annihilate as soon as they come in contact with regular matter (which most of them do as they spill out of the small target chamber). A choice few fly straight into a Penning trap, where superconductor induced magnetic fields contain them into a smaller and smaller area. First the positrons latch onto the antiprotons to form antihydrogen, that’s the easy part; since they have opposing charges it just happens naturally.
Then the electromagnetic trap ‘closes’ so tight that it forces the antiprotons to fuse, creating antihelium. As they fuse they release a burst of energy in the form of particles and photons, just like fusing regular matter does. But when you fuse anti-matter you also get tachyons – they are the key to everything.
The tachyons blast out at super-luminal speeds, and the machine directs them into the refractive rings surrounding the device, sort of like coils of fiber optic. But this fiber line can bend a particle most scientists consider to be purely theoretical. They spin around my gerbil-ball of death, more than a million times faster than the speed of light. Then I induce a drop in their energy, and they grow even faster. Tachyons are weird that way. But it’s because they break the sacred laws of maximum speed that I can manipulate space-time.
I wonder idly if I’m about to shatter the universe. Did the folks down in Los Alamos feel that way right before they detonated their ‘gadget’? Some had erroneously theorized that the high temperatures would ignite the atmosphere, creating a chain reaction that would encircle the globe in an unquenchable firestorm. A stupid theory, in retrospect, but they were still willing to mess around with fission while that idea was hovering somewhere in the back of their mind. “What if what we do eradicates all life on the planet? It probably isn’t going to happen.”
As I’ve already mentioned, I might break the universe, not just the planet. It’s probably a stupid theory, but it’s there…hovering in the back of my mind. My gadget probably won’t do that. At least, so far it hasn’t – but all I’ve sent backwards through time have been digital alarm clocks, a stuffed rabbit, and copious pages of stock prices.
Frankly, I don’t care if I do unravel the continuum and cause an irreparable causality paradox that wipes out everything. This universe has nothing left for me, and if I can’t fix it then I’d just as soon watch it burn.
The door across from me finally bursts open, the hinges ripping free from the wood. I catch a view of a startled man with a buzz cut, eyes obscured behind a dark pair of sunglasses as he steps towards the machine. Poor guy, he’ll have a hell of a time explaining this to the folks at Washington…if it still exists one second from now.
Everything around me disappears. I suppose I’ll never find out.
July 17 2013 20:14:37
“Well, apparently we have exactly 28.5 weeks left to convert that room into a dance studio.”
Kim gave a derisive huff, tucking a familiar smile into the corner of her mouth. “Riiiiight,” she drawled. “how many years have you told me you’d build that damn studio?”
“It’s go time, sugar,” I said. “Now or never – when we get home I’m going to order the flooring,” I declared, kicking a rock off the side of the road to watch it disappear into the grass. The sun was getting low on the purpling horizon, while the smell of dust, hay, and cows came on the warm summer breeze.
“Doesn’t news like this warrant the building of, I don’t know, a nursery or something?” Kim laughed. “Why the studio?”
“If we don’t build it now, it might not happen,” I said. “but once we’ve got it, you can start teaching private lessons at our house instead of the studio in town. It just gives you more flexibility, you know – which will be great when we have the little creature.”
“Only I’m allowed to refer to him as ‘the little creature’. That’s a new rule I just made.”
“ ‘Him’?” I protested. “No, no, don’t jinx it. This first one had better be a girl.”
“Okay: first of all, I’m pretty sure which chromosome I donated to this little venture. You want a girl, that was up to you my friend. Second, the way you said ‘first one’ had an ominous ring to it.”
I paused, considering carefully. “Hmmm…yeahh…”
“Mmhmm. One – Kid – At – A – Time, buster. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, see how we deal with the one before we order a dozen.”
“Your call,” I told her. “I’m just saying our kids are going to be beautiful. Be a shame to not give the world more than one,” I took her arm.
“Yeah they’ll get my big nose,” she said, “and your bad eyesight.”
“Don’t forget my inability to tan.”
“And your pasty-ass inability to tan,” Kim agreed with a smile. “Little pale, blind cave-babies. One might be all the world can handle.”
“Hey, at least they’ll be kinda smart,” I told her.
“Yeah, you’re right. They’ll have that from my side,” she said.
Kim’s fingers played idly at my hand as we walked. The roof of our house was just visible over the rise – the old abandoned barn was a silhouette atop the hill beyond, peeling white paint and clouded windows. I loved walking this winding country road. By this time of year the grass had all dried out; it looked like an ocean of spun gold, glinting bright as the breeze made elegant, shifting patterns across the hillocks and valleys.
“Your nose isn’t big,” I told her.
“If he’s a boy, we have to name him Malcolm,” Kim said.
“NO,” I insisted. “Absolutely not. Might as well name him Beelzebub or something.”
“Come on, Malcolm isn’t that bad,” she laughed. “He’s sweet!”
“You didn’t go to school with the man,” I told her. “Don’t get me wrong, he’s my ‘best chum’. Lot of fun at a party. But, holy cow…the stories I could tell you.”
“And yet, if he hadn’t dragged you to that bar…”
“Well Jessica dragged you,” I said. “Want to name our daughter after her?”
Kim winced at that. “Okay, okay, I see your point. We’ll be decent parents, won’t we?” she asked, more quietly. “I’ll be…I won’t screw her up or anything, will I?”
I stopped her, turning her to face me. “You’re going to be a fantastic mother.” I took both her hands and kissed her. The wind blew, the folds of her skirt wrapped around my legs, locks of her hair tickling my neck.
Kim pulled back, her eyes were rimmed with tears as she looked up towards the hills, the setting sun making a burning halo of her wild hair. “People always think that, don’t they? Bet my mom thought that, but she, well, she screwed me up pretty good.”
“Hey, you turned out fine,” I told her with a quiet chuckle. “Besides, everyone gets screwed up one way or another. Can’t go through life without getting screwed up.”
“We should put that on a t-shirt,” she concluded, giving me that sideways smirk again. “Maybe we’ll at least do better than…”
We turned as the throaty growl of a car engine came echoing across the hills towards us, cutting through the pastoral sounds of rustling grass and lowing cows. In a bare instant the car appeared from around a curve, skidding dangerously off the side of the road. There was a flash of red paint and tinted glass, tires drilling through the dried detritus on the pavement.
I had maybe half a second to react. I grabbed Kim’s arm and tried to pull her to the side, but we only made it about a foot before the car swept past, tires shrieking. She was wrenched from my grip. I was twisted in the air and thrown down. I rolled, tasting gravel and feeling my ribs bruise against the rough embankment. I pushed myself up, seeing the car slide several feet as smoke billowed up from thetrails of melted black rubber on the road.
The car ground to a stop ten more paces down the road. I waited to see the driver exit, rush to our help – but in another moment the tires spun up again, spitting dust and gravel into the air. The engine revved and propelled the car off and around the curve. The roar of engines echoed off the hills, then faded away.
My eyes searched, trying to orient myself, trying to deny the reality of what just happened. Then I saw her, striped dress and green sneakers. She was laying ten feet away, partially down the rocky shoulder, pale hair covering her face, body contorted. I groaned as I got to my feet, staggering towards her, seeing the blood. My hands dropped my cellphone as I fumbled to pull it free while running, the glass cracked against the ground. I left it, falling to my knees beside her, pulling the hair back from her face. Her eyes fluttered, mouth open and gasping, drained of color.
I had never felt so utterly helpless. I dashed back and picked up my phone, dialing 911 through the shattered screen. By the time I hung up, she wasn’t breathing.
I was still performing CPR when the ambulance pulled up 18 minutes later. The EMTs took over, and I watched in stunned disbelief as they fought to keep her alive all the way to the hospital. I kept asking them questions, but they had no answers for me. I was powerless – nothing could stop the inevitable consequences of physics, of mass and speed – the fluid dynamics, blood escaping from a high pressure system into the environment. I remember the patter of it dripping from the gurney, muffled by the whine of the defibrillator charging. Again. Again.
Again.
No response.
Somewhere between 2025 and 2013
Mostly there's pain. A lot of it. Imagine how it would feel to have your head smashed in by a baseball bat with a bunch of sewing needles sticking out of it.
The time jump doesn’t happen instantaneously. My eyes pick up a whole spectrum of weird light – in a flash I can see all the bones in my body like I’m looking at a Rainbow-Brite version of a moving x-ray – then everything shifts darker, cooler, until I’ve got nothing but a blue after-image and the sudden feeling of freefall. It feels like my body is being sucked down, faster than gravity can pull, pulled into a tunnel as wind rushes soundlessly past.
I’m starting to feel sick. I have to fight not to be overpowered by the stabbing pain shooting across my body. The machine feels like a gerbil ball in truth, tumbling end over end through the darkness. My hands grip the platform, I feel ready to fall, to drop. I don’t. Pretty sure if I stagger out of the radius of the time-bubble created by the tachyons, I’ll become a subtle red mist dropping onto the floor of the abandoned farmhouse over the span of a decade.
Looking up I can actually focus on the surrounding farmhouse. It looks surprisingly mundane, if blurry – there’s dull light streaming through the windows as if there is heavy cloud cover beyond. Then I notice some weirdness; the paint is un-chipping from the wood, the glass is getting cleaner, cracks disappearing. Slowly I start to see a jitter in the light through the window, like watching the pulse of a fluorescent light when filmed on a digital camera. The modulation grows wider, and I see brief flashes of night and day, passing twenty times per second. Then ten, then five.
I’m starting to get light headed. It takes all of my will to not teeter out of the chamber. My teeth feel loose, and I taste the disconcerting, coppery flavor of blood. My bones are being vibrated, it feels like I’m pulling 10 Gs even though I know I’m not. Well, ‘know’ is a strong term, no human being besides Malcolm has ever time-travelled before.
It didn’t exactly end well for him.
January 16, 2019 5:17:38
“Seriously, how much sleep have you gotten this week man?”
“Enough. Come on, this is big…like, I don’t know, discovery of the Higgs Boson big. You’ll thank me,” I assured him.
“Thank you for calling me at 4:30 in the morning? Not bloody likely.”
“Just take a look.”
The Brit grunted as he stared the machine up and down, hands on his hips. “Okay, I see it. Just tell me about this breakthrough, mate. This is really early for me, so use small words.”
“You mean you’re hung over?”
He shrugged. “As any decent man is at this hour.”
“See those cables?”
“Yeah I see them. Looks like fiber optic line.”
“Yeah well check out these numbers.”
He walked over to the desk. Then his eyes went wide. “You’ve…got one in there?”
“Been spinning around all night,” I said, unable to keep myself from grinning despite how exhausted I felt. “At least four of the flighty little buggers, actually. Spinning at super luminal speeds.”
“Damn,” he observed. “Are you sure? I mean…damn!”
I gave a shrug. “Pretty sure. I was getting much weirder stuff from them earlier…I think they get extra-funky when you step up their energy…or step it down. They’re affected by different EM wavelengths. I’ve written up ten pages of proposals, what we should try next. I mean…who knows what we could do with this.”
“Tachyon containment,” he breathed, shaking his head. “Maaan, Kim would be so proud.” He glanced me over, then amended with, “that is, after she’s done kicking my ass for not forcing you to take better care of yourself. You look like a wreck, man. Go home, take a shower, get some sleep.”
I tried to swallow as a lump formed in my throat. “Malcolm, you know what Tachyons do. You know what this could do. I…I think we can induce a distortion field. Like I said, got some weird numbers last night. I’m not talking about an anti-time telephone, I’m talking about movement of real mass, forward or back – take your pick.”
“That’s mental, you know that?” he said as he looked over the stack of proposals scattered on the desk. “You have to let her go. This isn’t science-fiction, you’re not going to put this thing into a DeLorean and take yourself back there. You can’t stop what happened.”
My hands started shaking, so I gripped the edge of the desk and looked away. “Everything is impossible until you do it. If it can be done, I’m going to be the one to figure it out, Malcolm.”
“Moving mass into the future is easy, that’s possible now if you get something moving fast enough,” he said. “But sending something into the past? Doesn’t work, my friend. Doesn’t make any sense, too easy to create paradoxes.”
“Well I always knew you subscribed to the Bill and Ted time theory,” I told him. “Everything’s already happened, so even if you could go back in time…”
“You’d just end up causing whatever you’re trying to stop,” he said swiping one hand across the other. “Nice and clean, only time theory that isn’t messy as shit. Don’t try and sell me that garbage that Marty had X number of minutes to set up his parents before he fades out of existence. Bollocks. Take chaos theory and the butterfly effect into consideration. You start messing with the history of your parents, and do you know the chances that the exact same sperm would get busy with the exact same egg on the exact same day you were conceived? Inconceivable. He’d be a totally different dude. Hell, only 50% odd’s he’d even still be a dude.”
I laughed, shaking my head. “That would have been an interesting twist.”
“And beyond his DNA, you’re supposed to forget about the fact that the new Marty,”
“Or Marlena,” I amended,
“OR Marlena,” he laughed, “was raised by cool parents. Chances are, this guy’s not gonna be friends with Doc Brown and go back in time in the EXACT same way, at the exact same time…”
“Yeah yeah yeah, like you said, its science-fiction. You would have made a crappy time travel movie,” I told him, and we laugh together.
“It’s been too long since I’ve seen you laugh,” he told me. “I’ve been worried for you man, you look like shit. You’ve been spending crazy stupid hours in here – this obsession isn’t healthy. Seriously, you’re pushing it.”
“I know, I know,” I told him. “But this is going to change everything, you’ll see. This is what it’s all been for.”
“Well dude, I’ve got to hand it to you; crazy as it is, this is amazing.” He walked up to the device and stared at the coils, reaching out but not touching them. “Faster than light particles. We’ve got to get David down here to see this. He’ll flip. Sarah is going to need to write up a press release, this will be a big win for the lab.”
“I’ve sent ‘em both an email,” I said, leaning back into the chair as I pressed my eyes shut. They felt dry and sticky, and he was probably right about how I looked…and smelled. Been a few days since I’d bothered taking a shower. Been a few years since I went home at 6.
“Right, but I’m the only one stupid enough to get here at 5 in the morning to see your breakthrough.” There was a strange popping sound, and a tiny gust of air. “Hey…what’s this?”
He bent down and picked something up off the floor. There was a confused look on his face as he turned it over in his hand. Glancing up from the desk I looked at it, trying to make it out. It was a wedge of rubber, with an indentation and a chunk of raw meat sitting inside, maybe half an inch thick.
“What the hell?” he asked, taking out the slice of flesh and flipping it over.
I feel a strange chill wash over me. “Hey, Malcolm, stand back from that thing, will you? Just to be…”
The cell phone in his pocket buzzed.
“Maybe that’s…” he reached down for it. Then he was gone.
I blink, trying to focus. He was gone. The numbers on my screen go wild, and the lights in the room flicker and I hear a loud CRACK. I’m blasted by a rush of air sweeping in where my friend had stood just a moment before. There’s a smooth, semi-circular hole in the concrete floor, like someone had taken an ice-cream scoop to it.
In a stupor I staggered over to the spot, then curse as I rush back to the computer and break the containment loop, allowing the Tachyons to spin their last and escape out into the environment. I rushed back to the device, staring around in blank amazement.
“Malcolm?” I asked, feeling like an idiot. It’s not as if he could have ducked into a corner somewhere. But even if the device had done something unexpected...could he really just be gone like this?
My heart skipped a beat as there was a loud pop, accompanied by a burst of air tossing me back. An object fell to the concrete floor, wetly slapping down amidst a rain of blood. I felt sick as I recognized it. It was an arm, sliced at a strange angle from elbow to wrist, a sword tattoo running down the back of the hand. It was Malcolm’s.
Another pop, another gust of air – and then another slice of him fell to the floor.
My legs turned to water and I dropped, banging my chair. It rolled back to collide with my desk. My hand fumbled to grasp the phone before I dialed in the emergency code. Alarms sounded, and the person on the other end asked urgently what had happened. It took me a full thirty seconds to respond.
The rest of Malcolm returned over the course of sixteen hours – by the end, there were thirty scientists, a team of military personnel, and a bunch of EMTs waiting on the scene. I don’t know what they were hoping for. None of the pieces of the man were large enough to maintain hope of keeping him alive. The horror of it was impossible for my brain to handle – I shut down, staring at each slice of my friend drop to the floor. An overwhelming numbness consumed me. First Kim, and now my best friend. Only this time, it was my fault.
How could I be so stupid as to have built this thing without protective cordons? No one had ever captured a tachyon before, of course their effects would be unpredictable, dangerous.
It took me a while to realize the magnitude of what had happened, beyond the gruesome reality painted before my eyes. Something had sent Malcolm into the future. Not cleanly, not to a single point in time, but across a swath of over sixteen hours.
But then I realized something even more impossible. Malcolm had picked up something from the floor, and I had a sinking feeling what it was.
I stood up, forcing myself to walk over to the table where they are arranging Malcolm’s body. Two military men flanked me on either side, giving me a chill. I’m only here to answer the other scientists questions, otherwise they’d have already taken me away. The medical doctors at work look up at me, something between shock and detestation in their eyes.
What’s on the table is something out of a horror film. Malcolm’s body has been carved like a spiral-cut ham. One arm, the front of his torso and the front of his head are still missing. A crew of men in bloodied scrubs wait near the test chamber for the next layer to snap into existence. Nausea returns to me, but I’ve already vomited my stomach’s contents so I merely heave and grip the edge of the gurney for support. One of the doctors barks at me to get back, and one of the men in uniform grab me by the shoulder.
Before I’m dragged away, I examine the bottom of Malcolm’s shoes. I see it, a clean slice taken out by the heel – in a wedge. The object Malcolm had picked up off of the floor had come from his own foot. I’d not only sent him into the future, I’d send him into the past as well. Part of him, at least.
In the end, I spent four months in jail while the lab and the authorities decided what to do. They determined that what had occurred was an accident, and in the end I was charged with negligence and given a fine and probation, forced to turn over my research and the project was put into the hands of my colleagues. I had to sit there, silent, while my well-intentioned lawyer tried to play up my incompetence, the poor safety regulations at play in the lab, and the dangerous nature of experimental science in general. I would have been the first to admit my culpability, to say it to Malcolm’s parents and siblings – but I honestly think my lawyer might have strangled me if I’d done so.
Despite not having to do any hard prison time, the lab was done with me. They made it clear that they would make it impossible for me to be hired elsewhere. I was done with big science, done with funding and teams of engineers to support my ideas and build things to test my theories.
But I was far from finished. In the midst of the burden of guilt, horror and trauma, I knew one impossible, tantalizing fact; matter had been sent backwards in time. If that was possible, I could save my friend. None of what I saw had to happen. I could save both him and my wife. He didn’t have to die. I could physically go back in time and stop it before it happened.
Word of advice: don’t say shit like that to your court-appointed psychiatrist. It only makes life more difficult.
Cue the beginning of what any objective observer would consider the terminal, downward spiral of my life. I stopped seeing everyone except the UPS delivery guy who brought various boxes of purchased equipment to my house. The house that Kim and I had bought together became run down with overgrowth and disrepair – hell, why mow the lawn now when none of this is going to matter when I go back and fix the timeline?
I knew the attitude was dangerous, but I had to maintain 100% focus on my task. Nothing else could matter, not if I were to finish. And once I did finish, everything could be made right, and I could be with her again. I would have the life I was supposed to have.