Day 322 - Perfectly Executed. - Chapter 6 (1,080 Words)

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PERFECTLY EXECUTED

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 5.2

“Jane?” Edward was having trouble standing, the legs that had been working so well for his life up until now suddenly paralysed and unwilling to comply with his intention to stand upright.

This was impossible, no it was improbable. He knew it was not impossible, because that was the entire premise of his exercise; to make the previously thought impossible, probable and what’s more, likely. To see Jane was paralyzing and shocking, even though he had been building up to this very moment he had planned on it being on the other side of the ‘impossible’ problem.

“Edward” Jane smiled but it did not feel warm or welcoming at all, like she saw him differently.

“How?” He finally asked as he sat down into a chair that one of the other Board members pushed behind his legs.

“You know how, it’s your idea. It’s just that your ahead of yourself, or you were once, twice and more. Oh. It’s not as easy as it looks is it?” Jane stumbled from sentence to thought and back again before staring at the man that she had shared some point of the time stream with.

“I know how to travel in time, I do, that’s my… how do you know and how did you get here? You’re older than you should be? When did you travel? Why did you travel?” Edwards mind was working overtime, it was all possible of course but he could not conceive of how this scenario had been arrived at. This was a potential side effect and consequence of doubling back on your own time line; of course he had figured this into his calculations for himself, but not other people.

This had happened before, this much was deducible, and the consequences of the previous trips such as they were meant that somehow things were bad enough to leave him with the loss of his wife and child. How could that be a better outcome? That was the question, what was so bad that he would consciously choose to allow his wife and child to die this way?

“What was the other choice?”  he asked Jane his eyes never leaving hers as he spoke, the other people in the room barely registering.

“There was no other choice Edward. He did not know that it would lead to the path that you have ended up on, if anything we though we had finally fixed the problem, but we had not. The loss of… watching myself and my children die in that way, that was traumatic and unexpected.”

“My daughter?” Her had to ask, was she going to appear from nowhere and present herself to him now?

“Your sons, actually.” Jane said and nodded to the men around the table. Boxing them in.

“I don’t have a son, I have… had a daughter.” Edward looked about the room and he was seeing some similarities in the group of men about the table. They were not versions of him, they were genetic copies, in the natural sense, these were his offspring? “Where is she?”

“Messing with the time stream can have catastrophic consequences, we have proven this over and over again Edward.” Jane looked at the table and not at him directly. “We also know there is no stopping you and no way to control the outcome, all we can do is try and not repeat our past mistakes, and try not ruin the future anymore than we have already.”

“Tell me.” He said quietly, firmly and still determined to fix the past and recover the woman who had died, because this was not the same woman. She looked the same and sounded the same, at least in her voice if not her exact personality. There had been differences in their experiences, this was expected if you thought about it, but something else must be different too.

“The time of conception?”

“Yes, the first time you went back things started to change but only you knew about it, so you worked with Francis to find a way to change the past again, you looked into the cause and effect. Your first son, George, he never came back, not in the way that you knew, and the same happened to Francis. You both lost people and it affected you in different ways. You strove for an answer and Francis, he looked for meaning where there was no meaning, and it took it’s … toll I guess.” Jane looked at the man who had lead him into the room, now recognizable as a relative of himself, apparently one of his many, many sons, since the time had been changed so distinctly.

“I don’t know who you are talking about?” Edward did not recall any other members of the team named Francis, and the name made no recollections any easier.

“You recall Francis Reid?” Jane was speaking to him and once again avoiding eye contact.

“From University? He was a lab partner and a research colleague, sure but that was twenty years ago.

“He was the first amendment, you took him out of your life early on, and there was trouble emanating from that point. He did not handle the transition to the time long past very well. He was instituionalised and forgotten about, and we carried on with our experiments, allowing you to develop on your own, feeding you inspiration and information when you needed it and correction when you thought you didn’t.

“How badly?” Edward had a chilling thought.

“He had a psychotic break and found what he thought was the road to his god, but we didn’t know that he was not alone. He saw your exile of him as a betrayal of a kind and in one sense he was right. He was still mad and still untrustworthy, but we put him out of harms way we thought.”

“And then he taught his son? The Samuel that took everything from me? It was a petty act of vengeance?’ Dr Edward Thompson, time traveller and meddler extraordinaire.

“We lost track of him, we were perfecting the process, refining science with versions of you that were coming in clean, minds open and ready to work on the problem when presented with the truth.