Peripheral Visions: The Moving Finger

They coalesce in the shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. Peripheral Visions: You won't see them coming... until it's too late.

The Moving Finger

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ / Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line / Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it." – Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

"Looks like the boss is drunk," Merv said.

Kirk looked up from his workbench. Professor Eli Morelock was weaving across the spacious lab, pausing to chat animatedly with members of the team along the way.

"Think he's heading our way?" Merv asked nervously.

Kirk sighed, watching the boss with wide, worried eyes. "Probably."

"Think he's gonna want us to change everything up again?"

Kirk looked back at the component he was building. "I hope not," he said, "I finally got the field density calibrations right. It'll be three weeks of work gone to waste if he wants to reconfigure the electron resistors again."

"I doubt that's what's on his mind," Merv muttered, still watching the boss. "I heard him talking to Wilma about subbing transphasic metal into the power core."

Kirk's busy hands paused as he considered the ramifications of that. Then he resumed the delicate business of assembling the component.

"What do you think? Is that what he's got in mind?"

"How would I know?" Kirk said impatiently. Then: "Probably not. Transphasic crystals, either silicate or metallic, are amazing for data processing, but when it comes to energy efficiency... well, they can boost the output of optical weaponry exponentially, but they can't generate power on their own, and in a machine like ours they wouldn't improve performance. If he wants to use transphasic materials it would be to rebuild the quantum processors in the computer."

"See, that's what I thought," Merv said, finally returning his attention to his own task.

Kirk sighed. Merv was brilliant – but altogether too nervous, and far too willing to agree to just about anything anyone said.

A moment later Kirk realized that Merv hadn't ended their conversation because he was satisfied with the answer. It was because the boss had drawn near. Morelock's hand came down like an anchor on Kirk's shoulder, almost causing him to sever one of the component's delicate micro-wires.

"Ooops," Morelock said, laughing. "Sorry about that. Any damage?"

"No, Professor, it's fine," Kirk said. He rolled his shoulders and pointedly bent over his work again.

Morelock didn't pick up on the hint. "Tonight's the night, boys," he told Kirk and Merv.

"I'm super excited!" Merv replied, his face beaming.

Kirk rolled his eyes, then straightened up and faced Morelock. "Pardon me, Professor, but if you mean you want to put the hardware through a test run..."

"That's exactly what I mean," Morelock told him.

Now that he was looking the professor in the face, Kirk could see that Merv was right: Morelock was drunk as a bishop. "That won't be possible," he said. "The equipment isn't fully assembled. Even if it were, there are about a hundred and sixty point tests we need to carry out to be sure that – "

"Oh, to hell with all that," Morelock said. "I know you, you're always overthinking things. I drew up the schematics; I knew the minimal needs for the project. And the hardware is ready right now."

Kirk held up the component he was working on – held it up gingerly, as befit its dozens of frail constituent parts. Considering the enormous amount of energy the machine as a whole was going to use, it seemed impossibly fragile... to say nothing of the prospect of localized gravitational anomalies. Those probably wouldn't result, but the maths describing the machine's effects on space and time didn't rule it out.

"There's more to it," Kirk said. "I really think we should refine the calculations to be sure – "

"We have all the calculations we need!" Morelock said loudly. Too loudly; he wasn't just drunk, he was on edge. His merry demeanor was on the verge of a drastic change into something else, probably rage. Kirk had seen him fly into cataclysmic furies more than once in recent weeks over the most trivial of matters, a result of how hard Morelock was pushing himself, as well as everyone else on the team.

Kirk consciously softened his voice and put on a warm, understanding expression. "Eli, until we know more about the effects on temporal manipulation on gravity..."

"Yes, yes, I know all that," Morelock said. "But I keep telling you the space-time equations concerning gravity are not a two-way street. A black hole's gravity well distorts time. We all know that. But you're assuming the reverse is true, when it's not. Creating a transit to the past or the future isn't the reverse situation to a black hole bending space-time. We're using electromagnetic effects to change leptons into tachyons, then shape the tachyon field to bore through time. Gravity plays no part whatsoever."

"Gravity may be the innocent bystander in this situation but that doesn't mean it won't dive for cover," Kirk said, his peevish nature getting the better of him.

"Huh?" Morelock looked him over with puzzled eyes. "Odeglen," he said, using Kirk's last name, as he did with everyone, "sometimes you talk right over my head. You have a way with words, though – I'll give you that. You oughtta be a writer or something."

What I am, Kirk thought, is a physicist, and a damned good one.

He didn't say it, though, because Morelock was also a damned good physicist... better than Kirk, better than anyone in the room. Better than almost anyone in the world, probably.

But that didn't mean he didn't have his blind spots.

"Go make some coffee," Kirk told Merv.

"Good idea," Merv said. "I'd love a cup of coffee!"

Kirk turned a cold glare momentarily at Merv's hastily retreating back, then looked back to Morelock. Again, his expression softened, because sympathetic. "I know today's the... the anniversary. Seventeen years..."

"Eighteen," Morelock said.

"Eighteen?" Kirk shut is eyes for a moment. "You're right," he said. "But you can't seriously think you can bring him back."

"Of course I can," Morelock said, striding away from the workbench and heading for the master sequence panel.

Kirk followed, frowning, a sense of alarm replacing both his irritation and his sense of sympathy. He became aware of a strange, harsh noise from across the lab, then placed the sound: It was the telephone. Morelock had never had the old land line taken out. The vintage phone sat on a desk in a far corner, black plastic and clunky lines, an out-of-place holdover from another era.

"Uh, should I get that?" someone called.

"Leave it!" Morelock shouted. He hovered unsteadily over the controls and gave Kirk a sidelong look from the corner of his eye. "It's probably a nuisance call, but on the other hand, it might be the chancellor, calling to tell us the project has been scrapped. Well, that's happened to me before... projects abandoned by the powers that be on the eve of success. Not this time!"

Morelock stared at the master control panel, and Kirk knew he was either making calculations or else rechecking calculations he had already made. Then he stretched his hands over the main keyboard.

Across the lab the vintage phone fell silent.

The entire lab seemed to go quiet along with it. Morelock paused and then laughed. "The literal eve of success in this case!" he laughed.

Kirk thought he was surely too drunk to enter any commands. But then his fingers were playing the main keyboard the way a concert pianist would play a keyboard.

"I offset the arrival point..." Morelock hummed to himself as he entered geolocation data. "Then I calibrate the raw energy production level and factor in heat loss through directed EM field attenuation..."

"And there's a risk of radiation," Kirk pointed out.

"Hardly anything," Morelock scoffed. "You get more radiation from summiting Everest and spending an hour at the peak than I'll get from this jaunt."

"Wait – you're going to go through the aperture? " Kirk stared at Morelock, his dark eyes registering more than worry. He was downright shocked.

Morelock gave Kirk an exasperated look. "What the hell did you think?"

"I thought you wanted a test run tonight. We won't be ready for an attempt at transiting a person for... for months, maybe years..."

"We're ready now. Which is to say, I'm ready now." Morelock's happy, drunken affect turned sober and serious. "Eighteen years, Odeglen. Eighteen years tonight. Every one of those years is acid dripping on my soul. I'm burnt clear through. I have to make things right."

Kirk's hand shot out and arrested Morelock's tap-dance across the master keyboard. "You can't."

"Of course I can. After all this work? I'd better be able to. That's the point of what we're doing."

"No, Eli, it isn't," Kirk insisted, his voice low but intense. "The university isn't paying for all this just so you can correct a past mistake."

"In fact, that's exactly what they're paying for," Morelock shot back, shaking Kirk's hand off him. "Whether they know it or not. And they'll get every penny back again, many times over. Just the subsidiary technological benefits from this project will flood the university with money. As for the main objective, you think the government won't shell out to take full ownership?"

"They won't have to pay a goddamn thing if you get yourself killed or fry everyone in the lab... or, for that matter, create a singularity that swallows this whole building," Kirk said. "They'll shut us down and probably charge us with treason or something."

"I wouldn't put it past them, if any of those things were going to happen. But they're not. And if they do, we won't be here to deal with it, anyway."

"That's a shitty attitude."

"That's confidence," Morelock said, his jovial manner returning. He smiled and winked. "Remember confidence?"

"That's fine, but it's beside the point," Kirk insisted. "The universe can't, won't allow for changes in its established flow of cause and effect. You can try to change history, but... but you can't. And something terrible is bound to happen if you try."

"That's what you get from the math?" Morelock shook his head. "You're not looking at it closely enough. Or, knowing you, you're looking at it too closely... with too narrow a focus. You're missing the bigger picture."

"There's something else in the math," Kirk said. "It looks to me that we're more likely to use this technology to achieve faster than light propulsion than to travel into the past or the future."

"Sure," Morelock said, distracted, entering another string of commands. "Space and time are intimately intertwined. We've always known FTL technology could be an offshoot of this research. But..." He hit EXECUTE one final time and turned to Kirk, a wild glint in his eye. "...we'll have to build the Starship Enterprise some other day. Tonight, we're taking the time machine out for a spin."

"Eli..."

"Kirk," Morelock said. The fact he'd used Kirk's first name was enough to pull Kirk up short. The two stared at each other for a long moment, a moment fraught with a silent struggle of wills. A moment fraught with pain.

"Don't you want him back?" Morelock asked.

"I'd give anything," Kirk said.

Of course he would. The three of them had been graduate students together, had been best friends.

"And that's why you're here," Morelock told him. "After all these years, after all your griping and all your skeptical nay-saying. But you want this. You want me to succeed. Even if it means wiping out this entire version of the world because we change one thing in the past, and we set a new pattern of causes and effects into motion, and we re-write what the moving finger of time couldn't be bothered to go back and fix. A terrible thing, Kirk. A terrible thing. If the cosmos has neither conscience nor heart, I have both – and I have the brains to force the issue. I will not let this stand, Kirk."

Kirk stepped back, his hands raised in a gesture of surrender. "I know," he said.

"And so," Morelock told him, as he reached for the toggle that would join the raw power in the energy matrix to the particle field generators, "you had better get everyone out of here, yourself included. Just to be safe."

Morelock smiled as he flipped the toggle.

Kirk put his hands to his mouth in a makeshift bullhorn. "All right everybody! Clear the place. Trial run! Evac procedure!"

Shocked faces looked toward him from every part of the lab. "Are you shitting me?" a grad student called back, his nasal voice full of attitude.

"Shut it, Schoenhof," Morelock yelled back from behind Kirk.

"Not kidding, people! Let's go!" Kirk shouted. "This is not a goddamn drill!"

The lab emptied quickly. Kirk didn't hesitate as he palmed the big square button that closed the reinforced and shielded door, which slid into place and locked.

A wave of weakness overtook him and he slumped against the wall. Kirk realized he was hyperventilating. His heart hammered in his ears and a throbbing sound bounced through his ears.

The same grad student who had spoken up before – Perry Schoenhof; that was his name, Kirk remembered – was pointing at him. "Your cell phone," he said.

Kirk realized that Perry was correct; the strange sound he was hearing was his own ringtone. He hadn't heard it in a long while. He'd given up friends, family, everything for the sake of the project, and no one called him anymore.

Someone was calling him now, though. But before Kirk could answer the phone, a deep seismic throb rumbled through the floor and the lights went out. His cell phone fell silent.

The seismic tremors continued. Kirk clung to the wall in the darkness. Next to him, he heard Perry saying a something... it sounded frightened. It sounded like a prayer. Kirk smiled grimly; good on Perry, but Kirk didn't believe in gods or prayers. Whatever was going to happen, would happen.

***

Morelock didn't know what he expected time travel to feel like. Burning? Heat? Cold? A sensation of speed, or of falling?

It felt like a intense itch over his entire body. It felt like ants chomping away at his skin. He had expected a bright light, and he saw one through his closed eyelids; the machine wasn't complete yet, and though he'd had time enough to get to the platform there was no shielding or barrier to draw closed around him. The EM field took shape and the temporal aperture formed, surrounding him with growing brilliance, and then –

A cool breeze found him. The light had gone. Morelock stumbled slightly, feeling himself come into contact with a solid vertical surface – a wall. He opened his eyes.

He was standing on a street corner, leaning on a building made from yellow bricks. He knew this street; he knew this building. He moved to his left and peeked around the corner. His memory was, as ever, flawless: It was the correct date, the correct time. He saw himself – a good deal younger; now, that was something he had forgotten; being that young – on the outdoor patio of The Burgermeister Brew Pub. His younger self was sitting at a table across from...

Geo? Morelock squinted. Was that him?

It was. He saw Geo getting up from the table; saw himself arguing with Geo, gesturing. Saw himself signaling to a server for another round.

"Oh, no, you fool," he sighed softly. "You goddamned fool." He remembered this moment. He'd been arguing Geo out of leaving because he didn't want Geo driving drunk. In his own inebriated state the best he could think to do was get Geo another vodka tonic and himself another greyhound.

Stupid.

Also stupid: He'd gotten drunk before putting himself through the machine, rather than coming up with an actual plan. He wasn't sure if that was the result of having decided, in the back of his mind, that he was really going to do it, and needed a little liquid courage, or if he'd made the decision only after some lubrication.

He'd drunk a lot of that bottle, just as he drank a lot on this date every year. Just as he drank a lot every night, over the last few years. He'd also poured a lot of that bottle onto the ground, in honor of Geo – again, just like every year.

And then he'd gone to the lab, even though he'd assured Kirk he'd stay home tonight and get some rest.

"Jesus, will you never learn," Morelock asked himself in an angry whisper.

Someone bumped against him. "You drunk?" he heard them say.

Morelock raised a hand, waved the person around.

They bumped him again.

"Yeah, you are drunk," they said.

Morelock recognized his own voice. He turned.

"What the actual fuck?" he said. It was something people had said when Morelock had been in his twenties. He said it out of shock, seeing himself... not at the table across the street, but here, up close. And not young, but old... as old as his present age.

"You idiot," Morelock heard his other self say. His own face stared hard at him, registering contempt. "Of course you're drunk. You were drunk way too much back then."

"What?"

In the glare of streetlights and the illumination of neon signs and the ambient golden glow of downtown, Morelock made out his own face with growing clarity. The other self he beheld wasn't quite the same age as him, but perhaps a decade older... and yet, he also looked healthier.

Morelock looked around the corner of the building again, toward his younger self and Geo, and then saw another face that caused him to pull back in shock.

Himself, again – watching from a small park beyond the brew pub. Standing under the spreading branches of a tree, its leaves blocking the streetlights, casting a blanket of darkness. The third Morelock was hovering at the edge of those shadows, perfectly situated to watch their younger self and Geo. But he was not monitoring the two younger men; rather, this third Morelock, this lurker, was looking right at him – right at the forty-four-year-old version of Morelock who had come here thinking that what he had to do would be straightforward, expecting that changing the course of the future and preventing a tragedy would be self-explanatory, convinced it would be easy.

Instead, it seemed as though things were getting more complicated, and more indecipherably confusing, by the second.

Morelock faced his counterpart. "What the fuck?" he repeated.

"Get yourself together," his older self snapped. "Jesus Christ." The other Morelock wore a green polo shirt and beige slacks. His hair has a fashionably cut. He'd lost the slight gut that had grown on him over years spent in the lab, poring over laptops and notebooks and whiteboards. As his older self leaned in past him, and slightly against him, to peer around the corner, Morelock noticed that this Green Polo Shirt version of himself smelled rather good – not like cologne, which he had always hated, but like...

Like himself, free of booze and guilt. Like himself, if he were a better man.

Polo Shirt pulled back suddenly, ducking behind the corner. He looked at Morelock. "There he is," Polo Shirt said accusingly. "And he just looked right me."

"Who?"

"Who do you think?"

"I mean... which?"

"Older, like you and me. The lurker in the park. Not the kid." Polo Shirt leaned forward again and craned his neck around the corner for another look. Then he stepped forward, shouldering Morelock out of his way, and, signaling to the version of them that waited in the park, brought his arms up in a quick, forceful gesture – a "cut it off" gesture. Then he retreated again, concealing himself once more behind the building.

"Shouldn't you be careful? They might see you," Morelock said.

"Who, the kids?" Polo Shirt snorted. "They're too wasted to see anything, and even if they did, you think they're know me, or know us, for who we are?"

"No, I guess not," Morelock said.

"Anyway, what was your big strategy? How were you going to stop them?"

"I..." Morelock actually had no idea.

"I'll tell you how," Polo Shirt said. "You were going to call a cab and tell the driver to pick up you and your friend. You were going to tell the cabbie that the two of you were so drunk you thought you might forget having called him, but to call you and Geo by your first names and be sure to get the both of you home."

"Did it work?" Morelock asked.

Polo Shirt glared at him.

"I mean, obviously you're from further in the future than me. You must know."

Polo Short kept glaring.

"Okay, it didn't work," Morelock said. "Or else you wouldn't be here."

"Or else," Polo Shirt corrected him, "he wouldn't be here," and he pointed in the direction of the brew pub – and the third version of their older selves who lurked beyond it. "And then, no, I wouldn't be here."

"Why... why are... why so many of us?"

Polo Shirt rolled his eyes, then said, "Okay, look. You come here tonight. Right?"

Morelock nodded, making a gesture at himself that said obviously.

"And you try your little stunt with the cabbie. Only, Geo doesn't want to take a cab. He wants to drive himself home. So he pushes you into the cab, and you're half passed out already, so you don't stop him."

"And he tries to drive home, but he runs that light and..."

"And he runs the light and nothing," Polo Shirt snapped angrily. "Because you delayed his departure. That car he ran into is already come and gone. But half a mile later he misses a turn and he ploughs straight into a house, and he kills two thirteen-year-old twin girls when his car crashes into their bedroom."

"Oh, Jesus, no." Morelock hung his head.

"Yes, you drunk fucker. And Geo doesn't die. He lives in shame, he's disgraced, he's sent to jail... and it's in a jail cell that he commits suicide."

"Holy mother, no," Morelock moaned. Then he looked up. "But you're here to stop me."

"I'm here to stop him," Polo Shirt said, pointing again at the park and the lurker. "And he's here to stop you."

"Why?" Morelock asked. "What happens if the guy in the park stops me?"

Polo Shirt grew visibly angrier, and he seemed about to pour out a stream of invective and accusation. Morelock wondered what could possibly have gone so wrong, but then Polo Shirt pulled himself back. "You don't want to know," he said.

That wasn't true, Morelock found himself thinking, feeling like he was out of his body, feeling his own drunken state and regretting it. In a horrible way, he did want to know.

He thought of Kirk's warning back in the lab: You can't change what's happened, he'd said. The universe won't let you.

Evidently, that was true. Evidently, every time he tried, he only made things worse.

But... Kirk had been wrong. If things could get worse... and clearly, they had, at least twice... then surely they could get better.

Morelock looked at Polo Shirt, who, he saw, was looking back at him with just as much judgment as at that first moment. He hadn't softened his approach one bit.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. So we give up on trying to be clever. We take a more direct approach."

"We – what are you going to do?" Polo Shirt asked, his look of contempt turning to one of apprehension as Morelock shoved him aside and walked around the corner.

Behind him, Morelock heard Polo Shirt start after him. He glanced back and saw the older version of himself quickly shy back. He heard Polo Shirt cursing as he concealed himself around the corner again.

"Relax," he called over his shoulder. "You said it yourself: Even if they see me, they won't have the faintest fucking clue who I am."

"Get back here, you idiot!" Polo Shirt hissed after him.

Morelock chose to ignore that advice. Instead, he broke into a jog and headed for the pub's patio. Ahead, past the pub, he saw himself... the lurker... staring at him with a look of bewilderment and panic. The lurker stepped out of the shadows for a moment but then, like Polo Shirt, quickly drew back again.

Morelock saw his own shadow stretch out in front of him as a bright light flared at his back and then faded. Polo Shirt must have cut and run, he thought – or else he'd simply run out of time; Morelock had set his own return to take place automatically after nine minutes in the past, which he thought would be sufficient. He shook his head. Nine minutes and no plan. He'd given himself too little time. No wonder things had turned out so badly.

And the lurker? Had he come here any better prepared? Presumably so, but if Polo Shirt was here to prevent whatever even worse calamity the lurker had set in motion, maybe it wasn't a matter of planning or preparation after all. Maybe it was a matter of being bold enough to stand up to time, challenge cause and effect, and force his will onto the shape of events.

Morelock had only covered half the distance to the brew pub's patio, but he was already feeling out of breath. No wonder Polo Shirt had seen fit to get in shape again. This whole thing, his whole life, it was one big train wreck; he was a slob, Morelock thought. He was a fuckup and an asshole on a cosmic scale.

Maybe that was the booze talking. And maybe him thinking he could wild west his way to a happy outcome was the booze talking, too, but his nine minutes had to running out soon. If he was going to do something, he'd better get it done.

Morelock bounded up to the patio area and then jumped over its low, wrought-iron fence. He caught a foot in the process and went down hard, sprawling across the concrete.

There were exclamations and a woman's voice asked, "Are you okay?"

Another voice – male – asked angrily: "What the hell are you doing?"

Slightly dazed, Morelock pushed himself up to his hands and knees. Blood ran down his face and spattered the concrete; he'd scraped his cheek and chin badly. "Shit," Morelock muttered, clambering quickly and clumsily to his feet.

"Hey!" the man said, stepping toward him. "I'm the manager – "

"Yeah, I'm not here for you," Morelock said. "I'm here – for him!" He pointed at the table where his own younger self sat with Geo.

Both young men were staring at him, shock on their faces. Then Morelock's younger self started laughing – inanely, drunkenly. A moment later, Geo joined in.

"Are you his father or something?" the woman who had spoken earlier asked.

Morelock glanced at her. It was the server he'd seen bringing the kids drinks.

Morelock rolled his shoulders and sighed. "Not exactly," he said. "I mean, it's kind of the other way around."

"Um," the server said.

"Hey!" the manager yelled again, still sounding angry.

But Morelock was rushing the table, rushing at Geo, thinking, All I have to do is hit him right in the face, bring him down, knock him out, send him to the hospital... all I have to do is put him out of commission, stop him doing anything but taking a nice safe ride in an ambulance...

Then someone crashed into him from behind, and Morelock collided with the table, which turned over with a crash. Before he could reagin his footing and get a grip on Geo, whoever it was that had tackled him was grabbing him, dragging at him –

The manager?

No. The manager had tripped and was on the ground; the man who had grabbed him was his own younger self. "Fuck off!" twenty-six-year-old Morelock was shouting. A punch landed on his ear.

Geo was jumping up from his chair, backpedaling... in a moment he'd run away, or else join the fight.

That was okay, too, if only Morelock could paste him one or two good ones. Anything, anything to stop him getting into his car in his drunken state.

"Fucker!" Younger Morelock hit him again, and over his shoulder Morelock saw the manager was on his feet again and closing in. A couple of male patrons were also moving toward him. That was no good.

Desperate to get his younger self off him, Morelock grabbed the kid and threw him toward a nearby table. More crashing, a new commotion. Morelock set his sights on Geo once more and headed toward him. Geo, his face white with fear, staggered away, half-running, half-looking back over his shoulder.

Morelock was about to put on a last burst of speed, but then a tangle of arms grabbed him from behind, snared him, brought him to a halt.

"No! God damn it! Let me go!" The more Morelock struggled, the tighter they held onto him. Three... four guys were tussling with him now. Finally, Morelock stopped struggling. "Look," he started to say.

But then there were more shouts and a scream from the table where Morelock had thrown his own younger self. Morelock looked over to see a big man, his face twisted in rage, holding a bloody knife. A body lay on the ground in front of him.

Morelock felt an electric surge of fear. Geo? Had the man stabbed Geo?

No, of course he hadn't. Geo was standing nearby, his attention shifting, along with everyone else's, to the new drama. Geo was shouting now, running toward the body, even as the big man and the people with him were moving away.

Geo was turning the fallen body over, saying something in an unintelligible panic.

Morelock saw who it was on the ground – saw his own face.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," he said aloud.

Still feeling as though he was looking down at his own body from the outside... his own bodies, actually... Morelock, watching his younger self die, had the wry thought that the moving finger the poet had spoken of in his famous verse, having been set back, was moving forward once again – relentlessly, mindlessly, inevitably.

Geo looked toward him. His face was pure misery, his mouth stretched in a cry of grief and rage. Their eyes locked, and Morelock saw Geo's bewilderment and hatred.

Morelock smiled back.

I did it, he thought. He'll be safe now. I did it.

The four men holding Morelock were suddenly groping, scrabbling, clutching empty air, looking around and looking at each other. The lunatic they'd been holding onto was gone – simply gone.

Meantime, the killer with the bloody hands and the knife was running, along with his friends.

The four men gave chase.

Geo knelt cradling his best friend, sobbing, asking the same question over and over again:

"Why?"

***

Green polo shirt-wearing Morelock had cut and run as soon as he saw his decade-younger, drunken self start toward the brew pub. He'd learned from his initial mistakes: Auto-timing the return was too risky. He needed more flexibility; he needed, ironically, more time. He'd built a TDC, a trans-dimensional controller, for this last attempt. The device allowed him to return to his lab, and the present, with the touch of a button.

Morelock moved across the shadowy space of his lab –�quiet, abandoned except for himself – to the master control board, and entered a new string of commands and coordinates. He had returned safely to his own present time, but this wasn't his destination. He was here for a short moment only, then on his way to somewhere else... this same lab, ten years ago. That was the moment he needed to access, not the night all those years ago when Geo's life had been derailed. Morelock had to stop himself from trying to save Geo in the first place. Otherwise, things would just get more complicated... and worse.

Morelock paused, realizing that if he put himself into his own lab at the moment of that first transit he might end up making things worse anyway. The platform was safe, but the rest of the lab was subject to erratic flares of energy. He could get zapped... or, stumbling around blind in the glare the transit generated, he could damage delicate equipment, or hit the wrong control on the master panel. The results would be unpredictable, to say the least.

Better to offset the physical coordinates, arrive outside the lab. Outside the building, actually, since he didn't want to materialize inside a wall... or, god, inside another person.

Calculating swiftly, he keyed in the locale for the swatch of grass near the lab building's main entrance. Nobody should be in the yard at the time of night he was targeting.

Flipping the toggle, Morelock rushed to the booth – a conical enclosure constructed from a heavy mesh of dull grey metal that stood at the center of the platform. Jumping inside, he pulled the grate shut.

The EM field built. Morelock felt the familiar sensation of ants chewing on his skin. Brilliance mounted. He squeezed his eyes shut against it.

Just a few more minutes, he thought. Then this will all be over. No more chasing around, no more trying to outwit the universe and its cruel patterns of fate. I'll stop myself from making that first transit. I'll sabotage the machine if I have to, or draw my earlier self diagrams, make him understand the futility of his bull-headed quest...

The light was gone and the fresh air of a spring evening washed over him. Morelock opened his eyes, saw the entrance to his left, and headed there. Producing his key card, he pressed it to the black pad mounted on the door frame.

Nothing.

"Fucking hell!" he shouted. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the TDC – not what he needed. His hand plunged into his pocket again and came up with his shielded cell phone. Hopefully that would still work. It should; he'd forgotten about the annual updates to the key cards, but he hadn't change his cell service over the past ten years.

Ever the completist, he'd programmed the land line number for the lab into his contacts list. He'd never actually needed it until now. It took a moment of frantic scrolling to find the number, but when he selected it the connection went through and the line started to buzz.

And buzz. And buzz.

What the hell? Was no one going to answer the goddamned phone?

A vague memory came to him then: A memory shrouded in a drunken haze. The vintage phone, squat and angular, made from heavy black plastic; it looked like something from the 1960s. Had he heard it ringing just before that first transit?

Jesus. Yes, he had. He remembered keying in commands, arguing with Kirk, shouting an order to the lab's occupants not to touch the ringing phone... it had never once rung in the time he'd been using that lab space, and for it to ring just then, just as he was preparing to make that first transit, seemed a bad omen...

I was calling myself, he realized. God damn it!

Morelock killed the call and then started scrolling for Kirk's number.

Kirk. Dead for three years now. Killed in a helicopter crash in Hawaii, of all things. Morelock had never had the heart to delete Kirk's contact information from his phone. Sometimes, when he drank a toast to Kirk and Geo – non-alcoholic; he didn't need to descend back into that particular pit – he chided himself for his sentimentality.

Now he was glad of it.

Morelock was still scrolling for Kirk's number when the door opened. A young woman stood in the door. "Professor?" she asked. "Did you forget your key card?"

"Yeah," Morelock said, giving her a grateful smile. "Thanks."

Morelock charged up the hall, glancing at his phone as he went. He saw Kirk's name. He initiated the call.

Sprinting up a flight of stairs, ramming a door open with his body, and stumbling into another corridor, he listened to the ringing on the line.

"Come on Kirk, come on, goddammit..."

Then the lights went out and his phone went dead.

Morelock came to a standstill, trembling, his frustration boiling over into a scream. The machine's intense EM field had opened the temporal aperture and triggered a momentary disruption in nearby electrical systems. It had been a problem until he'd installed shielding inside his lab – an improvement he undertook at the same time as he'd finished constructing the booth that sat on the platform.

But in this instance, the power cutting out wasn't just a nuisance; it was a signal of failure. Again. Another failure on his part. His younger self had gone through the temporal aperture; he was already in the past.

Morelock was too late to prevent his initial mistake. He knew how the world would change now, with Geo still dead but having killed himself after causing the deaths of two other people. He wondered whether he would change somehow, too, or if being a time traveler gave him some immunity from the alterations that were about to rewrite the past and future.

The equipment had to reboot before his younger self could return. The changes wouldn't hit until that moment. He had maybe a full minute... more like thirty seconds now. Morelock started running again. He had to be there to greet his younger self, to explain it. Maybe the two of them could still figure something out...

Rounding a corner he saw Kirk at the end of a long corridor that led to his lab. Kirk was leaning against the wall, the lab's door shut and secured next to him. The lab's technicians and grad students were milling around. Kirk had his cell phone in his hand, and puzzled expression on his face. One of the grad student paused at Kirk's side, said something to him. Morelock recognized the kid – Perry Schoenhof. Kind of a jerk, but ambitious and talented. He was at Columbia now, had his own lab...

That distracting line of thought fell away as Morelock shouted out to Kirk, and Kirk looked up...

***

"Did you see that?" Perry said.

Kirk stared at the empty corridor where, a moment earlier, he'd caught a glimpse of a familiar figure. It was Morelock... and then it wasn't; he'd been there, and then he simply wasn't there any more...

Kirk blinked. He looked at the grad student standing next to him. What was the kid's name again? Perry?

"What?" Kirk asked. "Sorry, say that again?"

The two of them were standing in the lab, on the platform, next to the newly-built booth that would help focus the EM field that would. If all went well, coalesce and then channel transmuted leptons into a coherent structure, a kind of wormhole that would bridge the present and the past.

"I said I think we're ready," Perry repeated. "I just ran the final software check and went over the system status readouts. The new transphasic computer cores are one hundred percent."

Kirk looked at Perry wordlessly, confused.

"That's what you were worried about, right?" the grad student asked. He had a nasal, irritating voice, and an equally annoying demeanor, but he was efficient and never seemed to make mistakes.

Kirk took a breath and reoriented himself. "Yes. Good. Thank you."

Perry started to turn away, but then hesitated. "Professor," he said, "I get the feeling there's something more to this test. We've been pushing for weeks to get this done, but the last couple days have been especially... intense. I mean, you said a couple times that we're getting this done tonight, we have to get this done tonight. Why tonight? What's so special about it?"

Kirk smiled at him – a smile both sad and hopeful. "I admit it," he said. "It's a personally meaningful date."

"You want to tell me why?"

Kirk started walking back toward the main control panel. Perry followed him. "No, I don't. But after the test... maybe."

"After the test?"

"Perry, I'll tell you this much: I need you to supervise getting everyone out of the room while the test happens, and then I need you to monitor the master readouts."

"What will you be doing?"

"I'll be... I'll be doing the test."

"You're gonna put yourself though that thing?"

"Hush," Kirk said sternly. Then: "Yes, that's what I'm going to do. Don't worry – I'll be fine. I've gone over the math time and again. I've planned this and gone over every detail for eighteen years. I know what I'm doing."

"But – "

"Perry. Can you do this or not?"

Perry's doubtful look evaporated. "Yes, I can, Professor. I'll get it done."

"I like your confidence," Kirk said. He began keying commands into the master console. He'd worked out the specific physical and temporal coordinates long ago. In a few moments he'd be there – where he hadn't been that night, the night Eli had gotten killed in a stupid fight at a restaurant. Geo had seen it happen, and he'd never been the same; he'd left his degree unfinished, gone on a long trek in Nepal, then joined the U.N. as a human rights monitor and gotten killed in some chaotic country that had been swallowed by the global wave of authoritarianism and civil strife. Brave Geo. Foolish Geo. Poor, haunted Geo.

Kirk was haunted, too.

If only I'd been there, Kirk thought, nearing the end of the strong of commands he needed to enter, instead of off doing whatever the hell I was doing that night... I could have done something. I could have prevented all of that from happening. Things would be so much better, if only I'd been there.

He hit the EXECUTE key and formed a bullhorn with his hands. "Everybody out!" he shouted. "Live test in twelve seconds!"

Stillness all around the lab as everyone stopped what they were doing and looked over at him in surprise. Then Perry got busy.

"You heard the professor!" the kid yelled. "Everyone out! Let's go, let's move!"

Perry glanced back at Kirk, who nodded back to him. Kirk dropped a hand to the toggle. He paused, smiled, then flipped it. Perry got the last of the kids into the corridor, and the reinforced lab door slid shut behind him.

I should have been there, Kirk addressed Eli and Geo in his thoughts, as he strode toward the booth. I should have been there to help.

And now, thanks to so much hard work and so much ingenuity... now, he would be.

For Tom Elliot

Next week we eye an improbable couple: A marriage of man and machine that comes about when a bereft widower resorts, in his grief, to an android replacement for the love of his life. But will Doug-R find fulfillment in his role as a surrogate... or will his carefully engineered empathy lead him into an existential crisis? We won't know the answer " 'Til Obsolescence Do Us Part."