Déjà Vu: A Technothriller by Hocking, Ian (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📕

But it wasn’t plausible. Why copy a future Saskia?

That was the flaw. She told David.

He had prepared his reply. “Time travel,” he said.

She gave him a hard look. “Explain.”

“Time travel is implied by several theories. Not, perhaps, time travel as you or I conceive of it, but time travel nonetheless. The general theory of relativity predicts that objects travelling at a relatively faster speed will experience time at a rate slower than objects travelling at a relatively slow speed.”

“You are beginning to sound like you did yesterday, when you were telling me your story. Does this argument conclude that neither of us have free will?”

David rubbed his chin. “I don’t think so.”

“I was joking.”

“Gotchya.” He cleared his throat and kept his eyes on the horizon. “There’s a famous example of this kind of time travel called the Twin Dilemma. It goes like this: there are a pair of twins. One of them becomes interested in space flight and gets a job as an astronaut. One day – on, say, their thirtieth birthdays – the astronaut twin takes off on a spaceship that travels near the speed of light. On board that ship, clocks work just as they always have; the astronauts live their lives and notice absolutely nothing. Back on Earth, things proceed normally too. There is nothing abnormal about either the ship or the Earth. The spaceship returns to Earth. On board ship, only six months have passed. On Earth, twenty years have passed. The twins are reunited, but the Earth-bound twin is fifty years old, whereas the spacefaring one is still thirty. This is entirely consistent with Einstein’s theories. In fact, it has been proven by comparing atomic clocks on aeroplanes to those on the ground. On aeroplanes, clocks slow down.”

Saskia’s eyes were wide. “Interesting. I have been on a spaceship while my twin sister stayed on Earth. At some point she entered a Scottish convent. Later, she became entangled in a conspiracy to help you escape. Meanwhile I crash-landed on the FIB roof.”

“Saskia, do you get formal sarcasm training in the FIB? Vulcan neck-pinch in the morning, sceptical-eyebrow work before lunch, sarcasm in the afternoon?”

“I cannot believe that you are seriously suggesting time travel as an explanation for your experience. Hallucinations or memory problems are more likely.”

David shook his head grimly. “There’s more. It gets too complicated for my own understanding, unfortunately. It seems to be that particles that are accelerated – just as the spacefayring twin was accelerated – experience a slow-down of time. The faster those particles travel, the greater the slow-down. If you were a particle like a photon – a light particle, which travels at the speed of light – time would be so slow for you that the lifetime of the universe might pass in an instant. If you went even faster than that, you would travel backwards in time.”

“How is that?”

“I don’t know. Professor Michaels would, though.”

Saskia sighed. “And who is Professor Michaels?”

“He is the supervisor of the research project that Jennifer is involved with.”

“A research project requires a research centre.”

“Yes, I know that. Jennifer works at one. I would guess it’s somewhere near the Valley of Fire. John Hartfield partly funds it. He’s a driven man. He threw a great deal of money at me when I was a young researcher.”

Saskia was silent for a while. She did not like the way the conversation was developing. Time travel was easy to dismiss in the normal course of things. It was less easy when they were heading towards a research institute designed to further knowledge of cutting-edge and experimental technologies. “If this time travel theory is true…”

“Then you have no choice. You must go back.”

Her heart lurched. “But I don’t want to.”

David looked at her. “Saskia, I saw you in Scotland. That means that the choice has already been made. Whether you want to or not, you’re going. It could be that the universe itself will ensure that you do. It would be an interesting experiment to try to avoid it. It would be a law like gravity, but one that operates in almost intelligent way. I saw you there. You were in good health. That means, I think, that from now until then, you are, more or less, invulnerable. You did go back, therefore you will go back. Trust me Saskia, it’s less easy to dismiss time travel when you consider the ingredients: huge financial backing, a driven and clear-thinking physicist, and a theoretical foundation that has already been proven. It’s no longer science fiction. It’s a cutting edge technology.”

Saskia was saddened by the strength of his delusion. Undoubtedly, the time travel story would be disproved by events. As with a haunting, an improbable physical cause would no doubt be at the root of the ostensibly straightforward supernatural one. David interrupted her thoughts. He said, “One more thing, Saskia.”

“What?”

“When I saw you, you were aged about forty, I’d say. How old are you now?”

“Actually, I have no idea.” She reached into her jacket pocket and retrieved her FIB identification. She flipped the golden badge and read the laminated details underneath. It stated her height, hair colour, weight and age. “I’m twenty-seven. Strange. I feel older.”

“OK. Twenty-seven. Now, remember that if you travelled back in time more than a few months, you wouldn’t be able to get back. There –”

“Why not? Wouldn’t it work both ways?”

“Could be, but you’d need a time machine at the other end. If Michaels’s machine does work, it is bound to be a recent invention. So it would be a one-way trip. If I saw you aged forty, then it would take about fifteen years to reach that age. So you travelled back in time fifteen years. That would be 2008.”

“Why would I do that?”

David took a deep breath and held it. Then he expelled the air and scratched his head. “I really can’t remember anything that happened in 2008. You know, I might have misjudged