sprinkled behind her ears. She started to speak, but I stopped her. “What do we know?” My assistant rattled off facts about the woman’s ex-husband, why he was responsible for her death, and why he had killed her. Then she started to explain that he was beating her son, now, too, and that she was afraid he might kill him. “We start with the homicide, and while that’s still on my plate, I don’t give a damn about crimes that haven’t been committed yet.”
I tell her to lead the way, and the others follow. Most of them have wised up, and bother the assistant with the details of their life and death. The few that haven’t can wait for tomorrow. Most of them don’t smell, and I’m thankful for that, but I wish more of them remembered what they looked like before they were corpses, because it would make the world easier to look at.
The mother at the front of the pack is glowing and warm; something about being heard makes her nearly buzz. My assistant for the day is also excited, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve promised to help her or because she enjoys helping others. I think about asking her name, but I’ve been through this enough to know better than to make it personal.
Because I can’t save any of them. They’re already dead. I’m not even sure there's justice for them, but the ones I help don’t come back, and that’s something, even if two more replace every one that goes.
Table of Contents
Traveled Time
Time travel won’t be invented for another 25 years, even though we’ve had it for seven. You start to ignore the little inconsistencies- the bigger ones, too, with time. What’s actually a little more shocking is how quickly we all embraced the technology, faster than radio, television- even the internet; and all three of those suffered, because compared to the voyeurism of viewership, with time travel you could watch your own life, relive your own glory days, or even tweak the moments that formed you.
I’d like to think it was something I learned on my own, rather than the from the fascism of religious dogma, or the just as silly maxims of science fiction- the error in changing one’s past. Perhaps it was none of these, simply that I’d managed to fuck my life once, and I was certain I could do so again if given the chance.
None of us can know for certain how long man’s been traveling backwards, or perhaps I should say how far. But the only reason we found out was someone gruesomely unstable came back, Will Carmack. Will’s entire purpose for visiting was to molest himself as a child. He was caught in the act and arrested. But when they tried to check a sample from the assault against the database, the lab techs couldn’t isolate the DNA of the victim from his attacker. They tested them both independently, and found a full match- and suddenly his insane rantings about the future he came from seemed a bit more… plausible. Little Billy used to want to grow up to be a cowboy. I watched an interview with him on 60 Minutes, and there was a picture of his older self being arrested, and the interviewer asked what he wanted to be now. He said, “Anything but him.”
I remember wanting to be something else when I grew up, too; but as children, we want things we never can have, often never should have. The cruelty of adulthood is relinquishing childish things. I had a career once, too- which is different from the job I hold now (believe me, you’ll understand the difference in a few years’ time), but it wasn’t losing it that bothers me. Owned a home, one of the homes I grew up in, point of fact, and my car, though that I hadn’t grown up in. But I’ve an idea, maybe little more than a theory, on why my life is such an unmitigated catastrophe.
A lot of theories have existed about going through time. Stephen Hawking used to think there was a “cosmic editor” who would prevent paradoxes, though he’d reversed that even before he got into a threesome with his future self and a pre-cancerous Farrah Fawcett (though why he devoted an entire chapter of his latest book to that evening no one knows). I’d always been partial to the multiversal theory: all possibilities existing at once, paradoxes and time travel either creating or “visiting” parallel realities. But it turned out neither of those were true, that we were stuck with this same boring planet, in just the one universe, reaping whatever our meddling sowed.
I’d reaped quite a bit in my youth, had at least my portion of heartbreak and comeuppance. And I hate to be a bit clichéd, or to think the sum of my years so shallow, but it was all about a girl, really. I won’t be so clichéd as to lay it all out, assuming my life is so much more interesting or different that it matters. But it didn’t come down to who was right or who was wrong (and in my experience there’s enough of both to go around)- it really is as simple as I fucked up in a permanent enough way that she never wanted to see me again.
I’ve gotten used to the way that reality sometimes “shimmers” when some misguided person tries to change the world by killing Hitler or curing smallpox a hundred years early. I’ve even taken stock of friends and relations changing, sometimes as little as a radical hairstyle I don’t remember them having while we were in college, sometimes disappearing entirely out of my life (though only partially from my memory- nobody said the cosmic editor was perfect). It’s shown us the duality of the butterfly effect- that sometimes, seemingly innocuous people change the world in ways unseen, and others of us- well, we get no Wonderful Life.
Travelers fall broadly into two groups: watchers and walkers. Watchers actually just peep through time (one of the first time-travel related websites had HD video of every shower Marilyn Monroe ever took), which is far safer and less energy intensive. Walkers go back, and sometimes they just smooth out a bad day they had as children, or visit now-dead relatives; a few of them try to change the basic calculus of their (or the world’s) existence.
I’ve always watched- though I’ve always been tempted. I think there are little moments I could fix, tiny changes, to make her stay. And if I thought that would change things, that it would change me, maybe I would. But I ruined what we had mostly as an afterthought, and was already on the way to ruining the rest of my goddamned life, even as I was ruining the one we’d built together. I don’t have faith enough to believe it would be different, even if I had a thousand tries- and I do. So I watch that life, like episodes of a TV show I loved, but have a harder time remembering or even feeling connected to.
Table of Contents
Genetic Memory
I’d been reading a magazine, probably a Maxim, or maybe EW, but I’d started to doze in my chair. I woke to the sensation of being watched; Bernard, my dog, was staring at me, very expectantly.
“Do you have any idea,” he asked, “how many brain cells are required to formulate human language?” Even if I wasn’t struck dumb by the fact that Bernard was talking, I wouldn’t have known where to begin to answer him.
“I’m not certain myself,” he continued, “except to estimate, given the quantities ingested. Admittedly, combining male haploid cells is a rather imperfect method of creating stem cells, and the chances of those stem cells embedding in the wall of the esophagus, let alone developing into neuronal cells, are remoter even still. So, particularly in the beginning, without any functional control mechanisms, it would have been a lossy process. But by my best estimates, less than a liter, as the dog swallows, as it were.”
“Male haploid cells?” I asked; it was really too late, and I wasn’t nearly drunk enough for this conversation, “you can talk, but is it possible for you to speak English?” He gave me a condescending smile, with half of a “hmm.”
“Sperm cells. Each one is half of a diploid- two gives you a normal human cell.” My expression must have spelled out my persistent confusion. He rolled his eyes, and continued, “You have the filthy habit of leaving your… passionately sullied socks at the foot of the bed before falling asleep. I can’t be sure if it was the scent of the putrescine or cadaverine in the socks that called to my olfactories so, but I was… compelled to lick them clean.”
“Ew.”
“Yes, well, I wouldn’t be so quick to disparage; after all, wasn’t that one of your contentious points with the last fem
ale in the house?”
“That was… part of it, I guess, but- fine, so you gobbled up my goo from my socks. How does that equal talking dog?”
He paused, and smiled that kind of quiet smile that’s a sigh without exhaling. “I’m sorry; I’ve been crediting you too thoroughly; throwback to the days I required you to scratch my tummy, I suppose. It’s not a regular process, joining two male haploids- that would be disastrous for the testes- but a few of your sperm were, we’ll say artfully ‘not quite right;’ if I were to make an educated guess, I would say that you have a folic acid deficiency in your diet, and that to compensate your body was scrimping on the nonessential uses of folate.”
“Folate has been proven to keep chromosomes from passing out of or into cells; with too little folate, your cell walls became permeable. That means that your sperm were able to, for lack of a better term, fertilize each other- although it might be more accurate to say that haploid pairs were re-fusing into single diploids. I imagine that’s where things became dangerous for them, because these newly formed cells would have been seen as an invading cancer to my system. They were probably wiped out in droves, until enough of them banded together