[2013] Life II Read online

October 27, 2013 at 12:45 p.m.

  Wait, pause, time out, I don’t understand, Max’s rattled mind imploded. He stood with his mouth set, unable to speak. Did I hear her correctly?

  The woman who’d called herself Dr. Time looked over at him. “Is this the first time you’ve met Dr. Time?”

  Max stared at her, his face twisted into a grimace, as if she’d punched him in the gut. I have to lie down, he said to himself. Lying down will help me immensely. I have to get away, right now, before I lose my mind. Maybe Abby is right, I need to talk with a shrink. He noticed his legs were shaking, but not from weariness. Get ahold of yourself, bro, he told himself, and grinned at the woman starkly, his eyes determined and bleak, trying hard not to reflect his confusion.

  “You mean,” he gulped and finally answered, “is this the first time I’ve met you?”

  “Yes, either me or another Dr. Time,” the woman responded. Max raised an eyebrow. The woman caught this and forced a smile. “I’ll explain later.”

  Another Dr. Time? Max was beyond confused now. How many Dr. Times were there?

  His eyes shifted from the woman to the name M. Tempus nailed on the door, and back to the woman. “Yes,” he answered, feeling stupid, “this is the first time I’ve met you, or any other Dr. Time.” Wait a minute, he thought, why is she asking me if I’ve met her before? Wouldn’t she know?

  Dr. Time smiled a beautiful and warm smile, showing perfect white teeth. “I’m glad we got that cleared up. I just had to know. You’ll see why.” She beckoned to him, “Come on in.”

  Max hesitated, then walked in, his eyes darting around. The space was huge; gargantuan enough for it to be subdivided into ten rooms. There was a gleaming ivory marble floor, and shining plaster walls. To the right, he saw an office with a computer, and a dark brown doorway—to where it led, he did not know.

  “I’m thrilled to see you,” Dr. Time said. “Do you have the book?”

  The book.

  Max shuddered. I’m just in the door, and already she’s asking about the book. Would she snatch it away, dashing his hopes of getting the treasure? He buzzed with insatiable curiosity. Besides, she obviously knew the answers to the mystery, didn’t she?

  Max reached into his backpack and handed the book to her.

  “Oh good,” Dr. Time murmured, “the 1958 edition. So you’ve solved the mystery. Congratulations.”

  Max scrunched up his brows, not feeling that he’d solved anything at all. Inside, he was more confused than ever. “What mystery did I solve exactly?”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “Um. Yeah.”

  “Then you know the answer.”

  There was dead silence for a moment.

  “The answer,” Max repeated.

  “The answer is all in the book,” the woman said, and handed it back to him.

  Max’s brain felt clogged. He stared at her, waiting. “You mean the address here?”

  “No.”

  “But that’s all I found.”

  “That’s it?”

  Max nodded. The woman sighed audibly.

  “You mean you didn’t come here to unravel the mystery of time travel?”

  Max could feel his head about ready to burst.

  Seeing this, Dr. Time nodded approvingly. “Oh well. I should have known. These facts are way ahead of your race, at this point in time. It hasn’t yet been discovered by humans.”

  My race? Humans?? Max stared at her, frozen. Uneasiness slammed him in the gut. He took a deep breath, and tried to focus his eyes on the book. He felt his sense of reality starting to slip.

  “Let’s get something straight,” said the woman. “I didn’t write the book. A previous Dr. Time did. I’m his protégé. But we all know the theory.”

  We? Max frowned. “Who’s we?” he said aloud. By now he wanted to rip all of the pages out of the book, and gnaw on them.

  Dr. Time’s eyes sparkled with excitement. “Let’s get a few things out of the way first,” she answered. “First, what’s your name?”

  Max made no answer. His breathing was deep and irregular.

  “Max,” he said hoarsely. “Max Thorning.”

  “Not Maximus Thorning? Or Maxwell Thorning? I’ve heard the English and the Americans like to shorten their names.”

  “I’m not English,” Max interrupted. “Or American. I’m Canadian. And yeah, it’s Max, just Max, that’s my birth name.”

  Dr. Time plucked a notepad out of her lab coat, and started scribbling.

  “Date of birth?”

  Max hesitated. “Why do you need to know that?”

  She paused and held the pen high. “We record the name and date of birth for all our visitors. For identification purposes.”

  Max thought it over. He looked at her miserably, saw that she was still smiling, her head cocked with gentle curiosity. He sighed. “July fifth.”

  “Year?”

  Max stood there in a trance of indecision. “Nineteen-seventy-one.”

  She scribbled this down. Then she offered Max her hand. “All right, Max Thorning, born July fifth, 1971, nice to meet you.”

  Max took her hand and gave a firm handshake. He almost withdrew his hand suddenly. Dr. Time’s skin had a texture that was... strange. It made his palms itch, he thought. He felt as if he were grasping a glove full of sand.

  Dr. Time noted his discomfort.

  “To answer your question, Max Thorning,” she explained, “I—we—are aliens.”

  “Aliens.” Did she just say… ?

  “Yes, Max, aliens,” she replied. “This is not our planet.”

  Max’s mouth opened to speak, but nothing came out.

  Dr. Time noted the look of confusion on his face. She chuckled. “Max, don’t worry. We’re perfectly friendly, non-interfering aliens. We have zero interest in invading your planet, unlike the typical storyline of your books and movies. In fact, there’s only one alien on Earth, as you call your planet. And that’s me.”

  Max stared at her. He put a hand to his stomach, feeling nauseous. No, his mind blurted out. Not this. This isn’t what I wanted to hear.

  Dr. Time looked at Max. “You don’t believe me, do you, Max?”

  Max blinked at her. He clutched his stomach harder. He could feel her reading his face like it was a front-page headline. Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head, thinking to himself, This is insane This lady is batshit-crazy. “Look. I’d like to believe you,” he answered, his throat dry. “Seriously. I mean, I love science fiction. But, um… you don’t look like an alien.”

  “Alien is such a harsh word,” Dr. Time answered. She grinned as she said the word. “I prefer to think of myself as a traveler.”

  “A traveler.”

  “Someone who isn’t from here.”

  “Um…”

  “A visitor.”

  “Ummm…?”

  “I’m no more an alien than you are, Max.”

  The blood pounding in Max’s head was deafening now. He wanted to giggle, at the ridiculousness of it. But nothing felt funny.

  “It’s true that I look human,” she continued. “This was by design. We studied the human deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA, you call it—and combined it with our own, although ours is not really DNA, but built of the same atoms and particles as yours—these are universal. Our race is far superior to your own, as we have existed longer as a species—38,321 years.” She added, “I mean Earth years.”

  She smiled at him. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

  Chapter Six

  October 27, 2013 at 1:06 p.m.

  Dr. Time walked across the room, over to the mysterious brown door. As she clutched the knob Max felt a stab of terror. What was on the other side? Then she opened it—

  The room was empty. The only thing inside was a gleaming silver cube, sitting on a shelf.

  “Come here,” she said to Max.

  Max creased his brow. Slowly he walked into the huge next room. He watched Dr. Time take the silver cube down off t
he shelf. Max noticed a small, outlined square imprinted on the floor where Dr. Time then carefully placed the cube.

  “Come.” She took Max’s hand and they walked away from the cube. In a loud, clear voice, she stated: “Dr. Time, two thousand zero hundred and thirteen, ten, twenty-seven, thirteen, zero, five, thirty-one...”

  As Max stared, the cube started to glow with blue light.

  Max felt his body begin to shake. He swallowed hard and held tightly to her hand.

  The illusion inside the cube quickly expanded into three dimensions, spreading outward as it grew. It stopped just inches away from Max and Dr. Time. It was very much like a hologram, and reached as high as the ceiling, about two hundred feet wide and deep.

  Max blinked hard, trying to focus. He noticed he could see through to the other side of the hologram. He expected his brain to fry from the bright light radiating out of the cube.

  “Don’t worry, Max,” Dr. Time said. “It won’t hurt you.” But Max wasn’t worried, or frightened. Not one bit. He felt his lips moving, but no words came out. His gaze went to Dr. Time, trying to read the smile on her face, then back to the cube.

  It was like looking at a slice of a clear blue sky, right inside the room.

  Dr. Time stepped up to the blue “wall,” where the hologram hovered. She reached out her arm and touched the edge of the hologram. As soon as her finger made contact, a control panel appeared with a dizzying array of gleaming graphics.

  “Okay, Max,’ the woman said, watching his face. “Let me explain something. You’re here because we wish to do experiments on time travel. Using you. A human.”

  Max stared at the blue hologram. Using me? He raised his hand to touch the hologram, just to make sure it was real.

  “The book,” he said, staring inside the hologram. “So you wrote the book, knowing that I’d—“

  “As I started to explain...” —she paused—“I didn’t write the book. A previous Dr. Time wrote it.”

  “So Dr. Time is what? Just a title?”

  “Yes. Using your time schema, I touched Earth on August 3, 2005, at 10:15:44 Greenwich Time, to resume the work done by the previous Dr. Time.”

  Max fell silent. He watched impassively as the hologram changed continually before his eyes, and then he spoke up. “How do you do this?”

  “It’s all about atoms. As I mentioned, the atom is the basic building block of the universe. You have discovered many of the properties of the atom. However, you haven’t yet discovered that one of these properties measures time, and in fact, acts as a mirror to history.”

  She noticed Max had stopped breathing now, and was just staring at her.

  “Look, Max. It’s simple. Every time an atom pulsates, it generates a wave that we call the Time Wave. This machine over there—” she pointed to the cube— “this is a Time Weaver. It picks up the Time Waves and deciphers them. Each Time Wave picks up light, sound, and motion and preserves this information forever. We set the coordinates in the Time Weaver. We’ve developed a system where we can find a precise moment in time. Let me show you.”

  Dr. Time walked over to the hologram. She reached inside, moving her fingers rapidly around to manipulate the controls. In response to her touch the hologram lit up and throbbed with pulsing rays. Suddenly a scene in what looked like an ancient Roman Forum zoomed in, so that Max could see one particular Roman woman very close-up. He could see her eyes and observe every wrinkle in her dusty clothing. All at once the woman smiled, and Max was astonished at the poor quality of her crooked teeth.

  Dr. Time manipulated more commands on the hologram. The scene inside zoomed out, so that Max was looking at an entire Roman city from the air.

  From an aerial view, he observed the grid system the Romans had originated. The castra, or fort, was located in the middle of the city. Positioned in front of the castra were The Forum, Basilica, amphitheater, and several arches. On the outskirts of the town were multi-level apartments, known as the insulae, used for large-scale accommodation.

  Max marveled at what he was seeing, realizing he could be a visitor to any era in Earth’s history. If he wanted, he could view the crowning of Cleopatra. He could follow Livingstone as he observed Victoria Falls, in what is now modern-day Zimbabwe, without suffering from any of the black flies and excessive humidity. He could watch Napoleon Bonaparte command his troops to victory. He could even watch cavemen hunt for wild boar.

  Max’s head was about to spin out of control. Suddenly his brain was assaulted with the horrible truth, and he glanced at the woman.

  “It looks like you’re spying on us,” he uttered.

  “No,” Dr. Time countered. “We had a debate on this thousands of years ago, when we discovered your planet. But we felt it was essential to let your planet develop as it should, and study your race, without interference.”

  “You’re interfering now,” Max pointed out. “By using me.”

  She flattened her lips as if to think about it. “The question is of degree. We’re not perfect. We don’t have all the answers. But the research on your history and the mechanics of Time has been very invaluable to us, on our worlds. For example, our study of human aggressiveness and curiosity has helped us avoid war and crime in our own society, and saved billions of lives. Don’t you think that’s worth studying?”

  A thought popped up in Max’s head. “Can you show me the future?”

  Dr. Time shook her head. “Traveling to the future is impossible. The Time Wave for the future hasn’t yet been generated. Therefore, it’s impossible to plot any coordinates. Time is absolute. Either it has happened, or it hasn’t happened. If it hasn’t happened, that’s the same thing as saying it doesn’t exist.”

  Max scratched his head. “Okay,” he blurted, “I understand the Time Weaver, and what you mean by time travel. But what am I supposed to do with this knowledge? You’re not going to pass this on to everybody on Earth, are you? You just said you have a policy of non-interference…”

  “Max…”

  “And anyway,” Max continued, “this isn’t really time travel. Not the way they do it in the movies. It’s just the observation of time, in history. With real time travel, you could drop somebody in and kill Caesar, if you wanted to.”

  Dr. Time held her hands up in front of her.

  “Max, look. I realize this is probably upsetting for you. It must be quite a shock to learn of all this. But time travel is indeed possible. I mean, yes, you go back in time, and you can be aware you’re from the future, and yes, you can interact with whoever was in your past. Just like in your movies.”

  “Really? And you want me to go—you know—back in time?”

  Dr. Time nodded.

  “But it can only be during your own life span,” she said. “Actually, probably only during the last twenty years, since that’s when your memories are still fresh.”

  Disappointment covered Max. “Wait. Pause. Time-out, Doc…Only in my life span?”

  “Correct.”

  “How come?”

  Dr. Time turned back to the hologram. “As I’ll show you, you’ll need to enter the Time Weaver during a time when you vividly remember the details. You’ll synchronize with your brain waves during that period. Then your younger self will carry the memory of everything you did up to this time.”

  Max blinked. “My memories…” His voice trailed off, thinking this through. “So it’s still not really time travel. My body isn’t really there in the previous time. I’m just watching my younger self.”

  “No, Max. It’s impossible for your soul to be in two places at once.”

  “Okay. But—”

  “You must avoid the major time travel paradoxes. For example, the grandfather paradox. You can’t go back in time far enough to prevent your own father from being born. You can’t meet your younger self, which would violate another principle of time travel. For all purposes, you are one and the same person. Wherever your body’s been in the past, you simply take its place.” Her eyes sparkled.r />
  “So you’re offering me a chance to go back into my past?”

  “You can pick any memory that’s vivid for you. Something you can hold in your head and dwell on. That usually creates the best response.”

  Max considered this. “That means I can live my life over again?”

  “The part of it that occurs after the point you go back to.”

  Max let this information seep into his brain. He saw his dream of a new life, spreading out like a vast canvas before him “I always wanted to be a doctor instead of an accountant. And I’m not happy with my marriage. Now I can marry the girl I always had a crush on in high school, but was too shy to even talk to!”

  Dr. Time waved a hand in front of his face, snapping him out of his trance.

  “You have kids, Max?” she gently asked.

  Kids? Max thought. He looked at her blankly, his shoulders drooping. “Yes,” he sighed, “two wonderful ones, Brandon and Angela.” The realization knocked him back to reality. “What would happen to them?”

  Dr. Time considered this question a moment. “Well, if you go back to high school and change your school courses, you can arrive to your future where you’ll be a doctor, like you always wanted. You can still meet your wife and have your children. It won’t get rid of any bad marriage problems you might have, granted. But you’ll have the career you always wanted.”

  “So basically, I could still marry Abby, and Angela and Brandon would be born just like before?” He would never want to do anything that would upset the balance of life that brought his loving children into the world. Sure, he and Abby had their problems and he had no idea what their future together held, but he would always treasure, adore, and support his kids. Why not take a stab at this?

  “So Brandon and Angela,” he started, and suddenly frowned. He gazed back at the hologram. “Brandon and Angela…” Max said again, as their faces rushed forward in his mind and he thought this through. “Wait. How do I return to my future?”

  “You mean the present, as it is now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “Once you’ve made the decision, there’s no way to go back to the exact place you left, not as you left it. There are, of course, some things you can do to arrive in the future of your choosing, knowing what led you there in the first place. But, as I’ve explained, time travel to the future is impossible.”