And has there ever been any consequence? thought Laura. Was an alternative timeline created? Did the entire space-time continuum crumble to pieces? Did a gigantic black hole open up and consume the whole of existence? No. And if the damn thing is really so dangerous, why didn’t the ministry destroy the chamber? Why is it okay for them to still use it, as long as they just hide this thing away and pretend it doesn’t exist?
One single object, brought forwards through time. A tiny, insignificant lump of matter that had no consequence on existence whatsoever.
Just like blood. A tiny amount of blood, taken from a human body. The body it was taken from wouldn’t even notice. How could there be any consequence to such a tiny act? The answer was that there could not. Not for the past. Not for the person she took it from. But a massive consequence for her, here, in the present. Because one single drop of blood is all that she would need to cure her of her illness for the rest of her life.
One tiny drop of blood. And then no more injections. No more pain. The ability to live a full and active life.
Laura resealed the vault. She went back to her office and pretended to debate with herself for the thousandth time whether she was really prepared to go through with it. But deep down she knew. Deep down she had decided a long time ago.
It was nearly midnight when Laura returned to the Project T operations room.
When the computer log records were checked tomorrow, they would know what she had done. The ministry would have no choice but to sack her. She didn’t care. She had made her choice. The blood would give her life. Real life.
Laura opened the door to the chamber.
She stripped out of her overalls and put on the smallest of the black suits hanging on the wall. The suits were just one of the many precautions the time operatives had to take. If their presence were ever detected by the occupants of a time echo, they would be observed as a formless black figure. In the dark they probably would not be seen at all. Whenever possible, every time experiment took place at night.
On one side of the metal-walled room, the quasi-optic laser was housed inside its plastic casing. Laura stood at the terminal, her fingers shaking so much she could barely type in the coordinates.
She had thought this out a thousand times, agonising over every detail, every possibility, and she knew that in order to give herself the surest chance of success she had to go back thirty-two years. This was almost certainly farther back than anyone had ever gone before. Laura’s father had lived at Ashcroft House until he was nineteen years old, when Laura’s grandfather had finally been forced to sell the house to property developers. That had been thirty-two years ago. If she focused the T-ray imager on the site where Ashcroft House had once stood and projected herself back thirty-two years, there would be at least three of her direct ancestors living in the house: her father, her grandfather, and her grandmother.
She knew that when going this far back, the imager could not pinpoint an exact day, but it could almost certainly take her back to a precise year. If she had to, she could make several attempts, until she was inside the house at night. Then all she would have to do was approach a sleeping person and take a drop of their blood. She had rehearsed this on herself countless times, and she knew she could do it so gently that a soundly sleeping person would never wake up. Laura would be nothing more than a shadow, completely invisible in the dark.
Laura finally picked up the tiny syringe she had brought with her, still sealed inside its plastic wrapping. She put it into a pouch in the suit, then she checked, and rechecked, the map coordinates. Finally she entered the destination year.
2026.
Laura stepped into the middle of the room, the helmet gripped in her hands. Her heart was racing. As she stood trembling, the walls seemed to shiver. A wave of weakness swept over her.
No. Please no.
She clenched her fists, and the feeling passed. It was just excitement. She had boosted herself less than twelve hours ago; she should be fine for hours yet. She looked down at the helmet, hesitating once more as she glimpsed her own face, a pale, trembling reflection in the plastic visor.
There had been over one thousand time experiments. Nothing had ever gone wrong. If there was the slightest problem, she would immediately abort.
Laura put on the helmet.
“Activate,” she said into the tiny microphone by her mouth.
Even from inside the helmet, she could hear the hum of the quasi-optic laser as it fed its rays along the pathways leading up to the top of the building, creating an invisible wave that shot into space, bounced off a satellite, and sped back downwards to a spot more than three hundred kilometers away, in Cornwall. The four walls of the chamber began to flash, her surroundings disappearing, then reforming into a new three-dimensional image. She saw the banisters of a staircase, leading along a long hallway. A carpeted floor marked with bright patches of sunlight.
It was daytime!
“Abort,” she said instantly, her heart pounding.
The metal walls of the chamber reappeared. Laura waited several seconds.
“Activate,” she said again. The chamber melted away, replaced by the same surroundings as before, only now the banisters were drenched in shadow, moonlight glinting brightly off the polished wood.
It was night.
Laura looked breathlessly around her, the visibility device contained in the visor of her helmet helping her to see in the darkness. She saw the long hallway stretching out on both sides of her, the outlines of closed doors etched in the wall opposite the banisters. Slowly, she reached out a trembling gloved hand and pressed it against the wall.
It was solid! She could feel it! Oh god, god, she was actually here!
She was upstairs, where the bedrooms were. Exactly where she wanted to be.
She saw no movement on the landing, or downstairs below the banisters. It was clearly late at night. Everybody must be asleep. She turned around, studying the closed doorways. Her father might actually be here. He might be lying asleep in one of these very rooms. Could she see him? Just for a moment, could she watch the sleeping face of the father she had never known? Could she touch him?
Laura began to walk along the landing, passing each of the closed doors. In one sense of reality, she was still standing in the middle of the quasi-optic chamber, her feet moving over the conveyer panel, the T-ray imager automatically adjusting the three-dimensional image around her as she moved. The illusion worked, as long as she walked slowly and made no sudden movements. She reached the end of the banister. Here the landing opened outwards into a square, with walls on all four sides. In the wall before her, there was a large window with the curtains drawn back. Moonlight shone through the glass. A long patch of sheer white light created a shining slit on the carpet, glinting off the wood of another doorway behind her.
Laura turned slowly around. So far she had only walked in a straight line. Now she moved sideways, remembering how to accomplish the movement from the time trips she had taken years ago. As she moved, a peculiar thing happened. The image of the doorway in front of her expanded, then divided itself in two. Laura stared. There were now two identical doorways, next to each other. There was something wrong with the time image.