Hello tumblogs! It has just now occurred to me that I have done a lot of talking about writing on here, but never shared any of my writing. So, for your reading if so inclined, beneath the "Read More" is a story I wrote earlier this year that I ended up quite pleased with. (Note that tumblr's formatting isn't quite the best, so you're more than welcome to copy/paste it into something that invites reading a massive pile of text more easily!) I hope you'll spend some time with it and find some pleasure in reading it.
Adrien spent three weeks in mourning after his fiancé Lynn died before he decided he needed to take some sort of drastic action. He made this decision after his third consecutive sleepless night, his fourth day without eating, and a phone call from the University telling him they couldn’t pay him on leave anymore, but they’d give his job back as soon as he could handle it.
The decision called for action, however, and he didn’t know what action to take. He began to hash it out with a pencil and paper.
Option One, he wrote. Move on.
Implausible, logical, these words appealed to him. But this decision seemed unrealistic at best. Adrien knew he had killed her. He started the argument that got Lynn in the car and drove her away and crashed her into the tree on the corner, just a few hundred yards from their home. The police looked into it and ruled it an accident. Lynn’s family looked into it and told Adrien it wasn’t his fault. But he knew. He couldn’t forgive himself for as long as he knew. Even if he could, he didn’t think he’d live long enough to get there, to make things okay. His guilt actively conspired against him, kept him from eating and sleeping for days at a time, kept his fingers so shaky he could hardly grasp the pencil to write his options.
Plausible, but illogical. Adrien did not believe in heaven, not for sinners like himself or for saints like Lynn. Death would be a permanent state of non-being, nothing more or less. Even if it didn’t seem like such a pointless absolute, he didn’t think his shaking fingers could keep a grip on a trigger or a steering wheel or a syringe long enough to do the job. He would gain nothing but a bleak end, and he feared his last thought being his part in Lynn’s death, his last impression on a beautiful universe such an ugly, cruel thing.
Option Three. Time travel.
He wrote this one slowly, in a scrawl even more spidery and ephemeral than the other two. But he looked at it, and he thought about it, and he traced over the words. He made the lines thicker and darker. He had the theories, a sizable bank account, and he rented a small warehouse-turned-lab with two friends who could make this happen. They could build this machine there, with these things. Pull the concept out of imagination and into reality with science like so many creations beforehand.
Adrien let himself into the warehouse. He hadn’t come by since before Lynn died, but he still had the key. His friends were surprised to see him in their own ways; Chet grinning and happy as usual in his Hawaiian shirt and flip flops, Patricia frowning seriously to match her plain blouse and pants. They greeted him, he greeted them, and they went to the backroom they made into a kitchen for coffee.
They asked him all the typical questions. How’ve you been? I get by, Adrien told them, but he didn’t tell them about his lack of food and sleep. Talked to anyone about it? Yeah, he said, family. Adrien could see they didn’t believe him. Lynn was his only family. Feeling okay? Not really, he said, and that was as honest a truth as he could give.
The coffee finished. Patricia poured it for everyone; Chet sat backwards on his chair, arms folded around the back of it, and smiled non-stop at Adrien, told him it was good to have him back.
Adrien drank before finally speaking.
“I have a plan,” he said. Chet and Patricia waited. “We’re going to build a time machine and I’m going to travel back to stop this from ever happening.”
They stared at him in wide-eyed disbelief for a moment. Chet’s grin came back first.
“Shit, man, I believe in everything and I still think that sounds crazy.”
Patricia elbowed Chet in his ample gut. “Adrien, are you sure you’re okay?”
“As okay as I’ve been since the accident, Pat. This will fix everything.”
“No,” Patricia said. “No, it won’t, and I don’t think you’re okay. You need help, not pseudoscience.”
“It’s not pseudoscience,” Adrien said. “We don’t do pseudoscience. Sure, we’re on the fringe, we’re the outsiders, but there’s a reason for that. We know science can change. We’ll change it ourselves.”
“Wish that was how it worked, dude, but it’s not,” Chet said. “Crazy theoretical physicists we may be, ha ha, but that doesn’t just let us flip back the clock, you know?”
“We’ve got the theories,” Adrien said. “We just need to turn it into practical science. It’s nothing when it comes down to it, a discrete shift of consciousness to a focused point in time somewhere back a ways, moving back by achieving relativistic speeds in a small enough space to really focus the energy and just push in the right direction. It’s not too different from what Jack Thurston tried to do a couple of years ago.”
“Thurston failed,” Patricia pointed out.
“No, he didn’t. Thurston made a mistake, but he came out of his machine telling everyone about the past he had seen.”
“And he’ll spend the rest of his life yelling it at padded walls, man,” Chet said.
“I can improve on his design. I based a lot of my work on his paper and I could see where his flaws were. I can do this. I can save Lynn.”
“You need to save yourself,” Patricia said softly. Chet fidgeted in his seat.
“I will,” Adrien said. “With this. But I need your guys’ help. I…I would do it alone, if I could. But I can’t.”
Patricia and Chet exchanged a long look. Adrien took another drink.
“Okay, man,” Chet said. “I’ll do my best.”
Patricia shook his head. “I’ll help you, Adrien, because I love you like a brother. But the thing you’re looking for probably doesn’t exist.”
“We’ll see,” Adrien said. He thought of Lynn’s wide blue eyes filled with tears, then thought of them closed at the funeral. “We’ll see.”
Adrien had spent the prior sleepless night on schematics for a possible machine and writing down countless equations essential, he thought, to the creation of the machine. He laid them out on the table for Patricia and Chet to look over. They almost spent more time glancing at each other than the plans, and Adrien wondered if they were looking for confirmation that each of them found this entire situation ridiculous. But as they worked their way through, Patricia even going as far as grabbing her own pencil, paper, and calculator to check some math, they became more engaged. Chet only paused from reading to push his massive glasses up the bridge of his nose.
Adrien just watched, arms crossed over his rapidly beating heart. He knew he wanted to take this option, he convinced himself he could, but the way Patricia and Chet ended up enthralled in the plans made him certain this plan would work.
“This math is magnificent,” Patricia said.
“The design is good, too,” Chet added. “Shit, if we can pull off the numbers you’re cranking out…”
“I told you.” Adrien unfolded his arms and leaned on the table, looking over his work.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Patricia said. “The math is great, but it’s all tied together tenuously at best, and numbers can only prove so much.”
“With your help, my math is only going to get better,” Adrien said. “And this is enough for a start, right?”
Both of Adrien’s friends agreed it was enough, and they got started. Patricia began going over the math in more detail. Chet went out to purchase parts for the actual machine as they planned it, the preliminary build. It resembled a coffin, to Adrien, just a man-sized box more than anything else. Not a casket like the five thousand dollar masterpiece of cherry wood and satin lining that he’d buried Lynn in; just a coffin, just enough to keep a dead man where he ought to stay.
While they worked, Adrien went up to the warehouse’s office, a spacious room overlooking the whole building and the weird science that filled it. Failed attempts at perpetual motion devices, big models of spacecraft Chet designed to imitate the UFOs he believed in, the solid masses of Patricia’s secretive machines without any clear purpose, and smaller, more pitiful projects beside. They all three did well enough working at the University, but they hadn’t had a big break before. Adrien didn’t care what happened with the time machine after he used it. They could keep all the patents, all the profits themselves.
Adrien just cared about seeing Lynn.
He sat down heavily at his desk and buried his face in his hands, closed his eyes for a moment’s rest that just turned into a moment’s torture when he remembered the night. He couldn’t stop remembering it.
It started out as just a stupid fight. All couples have them, Adrien told himself. And sometimes they get out of hand. But in ten years of a relationship, none of them had been as bad as the fight became. At this point, Adrien couldn’t remember what started it off. Fighting over money, maybe, a usual point of tension, or about Lynn’s inability to find a job. Or, on that note, about Lynn’s art, a lifelong pursuit that seemed like it would never make her anything but some nice paintings to hang up in the front room.
Adrien couldn’t even remember exactly how the fight went. It was just images in his head, a slideshow, with a general theme of them being particularly vicious to each other.
You’re too busy with your head up your ass, she might have said, stuck on trying to make science yours instead of doing anything worth a damn.
As if you can talk, he might have shot back. At least I dream of making a difference. All you can think of is making bad art, and how miserable you are any time you aren’t making bad art.
It would have escalated from there. It would have been the back and forth those kinds arguments become, building up as either side looks for more ammunition to lob at the other, every supposedly forgotten grievance re-emerging as a new bullet point in the fight. Adrien couldn’t remember the specifics, but he could remember it got nasty, and he could remember the last words he and Lynn exchanged.
It’s time for you to grow up, he said. To find something worth doing.
At least it’s something I love, and something I can actually do. Better than pretending you’re just a push and a shove away from bringing science fiction to reality, wasting all your time on your stupid little projects.
I don’t waste half as much time on my projects as I waste on you.
That’s when she began crying. She grabbed her keys and she left, and Adrien didn’t even try to stop her, too angry to really care.
Adrien didn’t care, didn’t regret his words until he learned that she died.
Adrien jolted suddenly awake at his desk. Lack of sleep finally caught up to him, but he couldn’t tell how long he’d been out. At least long enough for Chet to get back. He could hear his friends talking downstairs, attempting to be quiet but just loud enough for him to pick up on the conversation.
“If he speaks any more pseudoscientific techno babble, I’m going to have a hard time shutting him up,” Patricia said. “But we’ve got to play along.”
“Play along?” Chet asked. “I thought we were in this together.”
“Just long enough to find him some help, Chet. There’s not even an infinitely insignificant chance this could work.”
“Well, that’s technically not right once you bring infinity into it,” Chet said. “And I worked with Jack Thurston on his attempt, remember? Adrien’s not wrong, the guy’s work was sound, but he messed up hard. We all thought he decompressed wrong, came shooting back to the present too hard…Adrien fixed that, far as I can see, and that’s gonna take this to the next level.”
“Am I the only one that remembers Thurston went mad?” Patricia asked. “You can pretend Adrien stands a chance, but if this goes wrong, he’ll need our help.”
“Right, yeah. I mean, I want to believe Jack made it there and back, but who knows, could have been a madman hallucinating, you know? If this doesn’t work, though, what can we do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe when this falls through, Adrien will snap out of it. If we’re lucky. Worst case scenario, it fails, he breaks down again, and he can start getting realistic about dealing with this.”
“In the meantime just play along, right?”
“Exactly,” Patricia said. “Do the work we have to do, keep him around here at least – I don’t want him on his own. Nod and smile, whatever it takes to keep him placated. But don’t feed into him.”
“I mean it, Chester. I know this kind of science goes right up your strange little alley, but try to keep it cool. No more talk about Jittery Jack Thurston and his journey into madness.”
“Shit, man, I said I got it!”
Adrien coughed loudly and they immediately stopped talking. He looked out on the floor and saw them going in their opposite directions, Chet waving up at Adrien as he went for his welding tools, Patricia not looking back as she headed towards his desk.
Adrien didn’t need them to believe this could work. He just needed them to play along.
A week went by and they worked closely. Adrien didn’t say much, only instructions for his friends. They didn’t say much in return, at least not to him. Adrien could frequently hear their conspiratorial whispers. He knew how he must seem to them, and he absolutely didn’t care. He worried a little that they might try to “help” him before they finished their project, but he kept them busy and knew they were too worried about him to leave for any long period of time. They thought it was a good sign that Adrien spent so much time at the warehouse. He just didn’t have anything better to do. Adrien spent most of his time working, calculating and fabricating, fine-tuning the smallest parts of the machine and putting it all into place. He could barely name or explain the principles, physical or theoretical, that drove his design. He worked as he did almost by intuition alone, a great frustration to Chet and Patricia.
When he wasn’t working, Adrien was thinking of Lynn.
They met ten years ago, when the both of them were still in high school. They couldn’t have been more different, Adrien always busy with schoolwork and reading the latest peer reviewed papers, Lynn occasionally taking a break from socializing to produce some artwork for an assignment. She was smart, but not ambitious, passionate but without any real direction. That’s what led to them meeting at a lecture at the nearby university about string theory and the many worlds interpretation. He had an interest in the validity and authenticity of these theories. She wanted to inform her art. They were the only students in the crowd who asked questions at the end; Adrien asked about the scientific and moral relevance of the many worlds interpretation, Lynn asked if the speaker thought it was possible to artistically render a quantum state.
They liked each other’s questions. They liked each other. They liked the date they went on after the talk. Then ten years seemed to flash on by.
Adrien loved Lynn, without a doubt, from a short time after they first met. He loved her all along, too. Sometimes he thought maybe she held him back, or he wished she could talk the way he did about science. She could irritate him like no one else, and she usually found it entertaining to do so. They fought often enough, but not in a bad way. Sometimes, he had thought he gave her a reason to push him, that it was her only act of rebellion against him hurting her in some way. But he loved her. And then he killed her.
Adrien would fix it. He would fix it all.
Then the machine was ready, by Adrien’s reckoning. Patricia and Chet couldn’t believe it when he said so, just the same way they couldn’t seem to believe anything recently. They had been waiting for Adrien next to the machine, unsure of what to do to it next. It looked particularly capable of something scientific, a big metal coffin with wires trailing out of it into a number of boxes, big and small, holding all the moving parts key to making this work.
“That’s it,” Adrien told them. “It’s ready.”
“Are you sure?” Patricia said, fumbling for the words. She clearly hadn’t expected Adrien to ever think this project was completed. “I mean…it seems kind of abrupt. Do we have everything?”
“I’ve got the last thing it needs,” Adrien said, and he held out a crumpled photograph. “My focus. The point I’ll go back to.”
It was a picture that he’d thrown into a desk drawer some time ago, of Adrien sitting at a beach, looking out at the sun over the waves. On the back was the date, a year after he and Lynn had started dating.
“Uh, how’s that gonna work exactly?” Chet asked.
“Just like I said before. We turn it on, my consciousness goes there, the past me comes here. I’ll have a couple of days to fix things, and the old me will just sleep for a few minutes before you flip the switch again.”
Chet and Patricia glanced at each other.
“Isn’t that an old picture though?” Patricia asked. “Why don’t you just go back to the night Lynn…you know…”
“I think it would be too late by then. I think I made mistakes a lot earlier than that night. And I can barely remember it. I remember every detail of this beach, and I’ll change things then…I’ll change them in a fundamental way to prevent something like this ever happening.”
“And you’re just going to climb into this untested machine?” Patricia asked. “Just like that?”
“I know it’ll work,” Adrien said, resolute. He thought of Jack Thurston, screaming about a past he hadn’t effected to whatever orderly would listen to him. But Adrien was better than Thurston, and he knew it.
“What…what if you do go back, man?” Chet asked. “I’m behind you a hundred percent, but no one has done shit like this before and come back normal! I mean, you could change everything…many worlds and all that, you know? Step on one butterfly, and then-“
“I’ve read that story too, Chet,” Adrien said. “I don’t know what will happen. But I have to try.”
There was a moment of awkward silence while they all waited to see what would happen next. Adrien stepped towards the machine and opened it. The interior consisted only of metal, uninviting in its utility, promising in its capabilities.
“I’ll probably just seem to be asleep for as long as this lasts,” Adrien said. “Throw the switch a minute after I’m inside. Do it again five minutes after that. I’ll see you guys in the future.”
Chet laughed. Patricia frowned.
“Are you sure about this?”
“As sure as I’ve been about everything these last few weeks.”
Adrien stepped inside and closed the door. It was completely, totally dark. He closed his eyes anyway, and thought of that moment on the beach years ago.
Adrien heard the sound of waves, and Lynn’s laughter.
