Chapter Two (Camille, age 27)

It had been over two years since I had last seen Benjamin, since he had last seen me, my body, destroy our work. He looked much the same as before, tall, thin but not terribly muscular, with long fingers, and those eyes. Those big, beautiful, soft, almond-shaped eyes. The same color brown as his hair, shaggy eyebrows, and requisite beard. He was an American graduate student; it was practically part of the uniform. By now, he should have finished his dissertation, and attained his PhD, but something about the disheveled appearance made me think he hadn’t. Not that he wasn’t always a touch disheveled. You’d think he never even heard of an iron, but that was Americans for you. Benjamin always kept his beard neat though. He knew enough about women to do that much, until recently.

And now, here he was, in Paris, of all places, at my door.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Hello to you, as well, Benjamin.”

“Can I come in?”

“No, you may not. You can very well go fuck yourself, that you can do.”

“Camille, please.”

“No. Nous ne somme pas amis, Benjamin. We’re not friends, not anymore. I haven’t heard anything from you since you let Mikkelsen destroy my career, force me out of my department.”

“Let’s be fair, I didn’t let him do anything. He’s a billionaire. I can’t stop him from doing … y’know, whatever he wants.”

“Yes, let’s be fair. I’m blacklisted from academia. I have a brilliant mind, Benjamin, and no one will let me use it. These aren’t the days of Madame Curie; I can’t do my work on my own. I need colleagues, and I need access, and I have neither. I can have neither, because Mikkelsen poisoned the well, because you told him what you thought happened.”

“Look, I’m sorry. But you know what it looked like, and that telescope was very expensive.”

“Goodbye, Benjamin,” I said and slammed the door in his face.

He stuck his foot in to stop it closing. “Son of a bitch! Oh, God, that hurts.”

“Does it?”

I slammed the door on his foot again.

“Ow, stop!”

I slammed the door again, and Benjamin pulled his foot out of the way. He started knocking at the door again.

“Camille, please! I believe you!”

“Merde,” I muttered, and opened the door. “Come in and explain yourself.”

I led him into my apartment.

“This is nice. Big for Paris, n’est-ce pas?”

“Don’t try to speak French to me, okay? You’re already testing my patience.”

“Got it.”

“Sit,” I said.

He moved some the clothes that were strewn across the divan and sank awkwardly down. Americans only know sofas, and chairs the size of sofas. He awkwardly tried to fold his long legs this way and that, eventually sticking them out in front of him on like a bearded rag doll.

“So,” he said.

“Allors,” I said.

“Would you walk me through your time travel hypothesis?”

“So much for foreplay, eh?”

“Pretty please?”

“Ah, yes, begging. The quickest way to my heart. Fine. The two main theories of how time travel would work I call the butterfly and the monorail. You know the very stupid encapsulation of chaos theory as a butterfly flapping its wings here and causing a hurricane there. In the butterfly, any deviation in past events can cause a cascade of changes that end up with, you know, maybe there are dinosaurs now or the sky is purple or some bull shit. The monorail is a trip down a single track. The cars further forward are the future, the cars in the back are the past. Even if you manage to move from a forward car to a rear car, you arrive at the same destination with only trivial variation.”

“Whatever happened, happened.”

“Yes. There might be some, whatever, wiggle room there since history is an incomplete document, but more or less.”

“But you don’t believe either of those ideas.”

“You know I don’t.”

“You had that soup metaphor, right?”

“You know I was very drunk that night. My uncle had just sent a case of that year’s new beaujolais.”

“Do me a favor and tell me again.”

“You show up at my door and now you’re asking me for a favor?”

“Please, Camille.”

“Like adding starch to a soup, or, more aptly, greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. A little bit here and there, and yes, you’ve technically changed the composition of the mixture, but overall the system remains unaffected. Until you add too much, as the acidification of oceans due to added carbon dioxide destroys marine creatures that produce oxygen, and more heat adds more moisture to the atmosphere in the form of clouds, which trap yet more heat, which thaws the permafrost, releasing more carbon that traps more heat, and on and on. One incident of time travel, even when the actors are deliberately attempting to change the future, won’t change much. You stop us from collecting data at one point, but you can’t stop that information from existing in the universe, so we discover it somewhere down the line. But, the more incidents of time travel, the more unstable elements are added to the system. At some point it tips, becomes a positive feedback loop. Changes in the time stream could start effectuating subsequent changes until ...”

“Too many cooks spoil the broth, huh?”

“Not really. Why the hell are you here? You said you believed me. Why now?”

“Because I woke up in a metal room with a two-way mirror and when I came back to the present, some very expensive equipment was smashed to pieces and I was out of a job.”

“Jesus. Do you want something to drink?”

“Coffee?”

“I have red wine and Vichy water.”

“Really? It’s like, quarter to eleven in the morning.”

“Then have a water. You want coffee, there’s a cafe down the street.”

“Vichy water sounds great. Besides, I think we should talk about this stuff alone, just the two of us.”

“Fair enough, I suppose. Although, I’ll explain why you’re wrong in a moment.”

“See, this is fun. Just like old times.”

“Shut up. Renaud!” I called.

“Ouais?” came the groggy reply from the bedroom.

“Levé-toi!”

“You’ve got a guy in there?”

“Don’t seem so surprised, Benjamin, I’m attractive and I have a lot of time on my hands.”

“Qu’est-ce que tu veux?” Renaud asked as he ambled into the salon, yawning and stretching and entirely nude.

“Ok, wow, so is he completely shaved, or has he not hit puberty yet?”

“Don’t be so shocked, he’s nineteen.” I turned to Renaud. “Tu as dix-neuf ans, ouais?”

“Ouais.”

“Yeah, he’s nineteen.”

“There’s a naked boy in your house. Why would I be shocked?”

“Don’t be so American. You talk about your sexual revolution, but you never lost your puritanical origins.”

“Qui est ce mec?” asked Renaud.

“Il est un idiot que je connaissais autrefois.”

“Did you just call me an idiot? And can he put some pants on, please?”

“I did. And you’re right.” I turned to Renaud. “Enfile ton pantalon; seras en retard pour la classe.”

Renaud said, “psssh,” and made a swatting motion with his arm before turning back to the bedroom.

“So how do you two know each other?”

“He’s a student at the university. I’m his physics tutor.”

“Wow. Full service tutoring.”

“I’ll get you that water.”

After Renaud had departed, and I had brought Benjamin his water, and myself a glass of Corton Grand Cru, I asked for Benjamin to tell me more about what he saw.

“It was me, but I was old, maybe late forties, early fifties. There was nothing in the room, no signs of technology, but everything was made of metal panels. No windows, either. The air was kind of stale, recycled, maybe? It could have been underground, or in a police station, or a space station for all I know.”

“You didn’t see anyone?” I asked.

“No one, except myself in the mirror.”

“And no one spoke to you.”

“No.”

“What did you say to them.”

“I said ’hello’ a couple of times, that’s about it.”

“That’s all?”

“I knew they wouldn’t respond, and I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.”

I shook my head. “That’s so like you, I can’t even pretend at surprise.”

“So, does it sound like what you experienced?”

“Almost exactly. What was the table like?”

“There was no furniture.”

“Yeah, that was a test. What were you working on? Still trying to track down Philip’s tachyons?”

“That was our main focus, yeah.”

“Tachyons are bull shit,” I said.

“Oh, here we go.”

“Pardon, but first, even if tachyons don’t give off Cherenkov radiation while traveling in the vacuum, that doesn’t solve the runaway acceleration problem. Also we know I was right.”

“How?”

“Because of what happened to us. If tachyons were real, and if we somehow discovered a method of encoding information in a tachyon signal, it would have been just that: a signal. And signals require receivers. We would need the technology to decode the information in the tachyon stream or packets or whatever the fuck. That could take years to develop, even after the existence of the particles was confirmed, and a method of encoding discovered. You couldn’t send a signal back to a time before the receiver was invented and expect it to be received.”

“What if you could?”

“Is this your theory I’m about to hear, or Philip’s?”

“Lani came up with it, actually.”

I blew a tendril of hair out of my eye with a percussive breath. I’d been experimenting with new hair colors; I was four shades lighter than natural. Benjamin had yet to comment. This was not the sort of observation he was used to making. “Go on.”

“If you could send a signal back to a kind of receiver that might not be designed to decode that information, but take in, say, a broad spectrum of data that you knew would be recorded, you could, theoretically --”

“Ugh,” I said, before drowning my own interruption in a bath of Corton.

“--send back a message to a time before you needed to be understood and then hope that someone figured it out eventually by sifting through the data.”

“You mean, perhaps, an instrument such as an Extremely Large Telescope?”

“Right.”

“Like the one my future self damaged two years ago when she hijacked my body?”

“Yes...”

“Then why hijack my body. Why would that bitch go through the trouble?”

“When you say that bitch, you mean you, right?”

“Me in twenty-five years, yes.”

“Yeah, no idea.”

“Because you’re forgetting that my hypothesis for time travel involved entanglement of systems at different points in the time, rather than only space.”

“Right, and at scales much larger than the molecular level we can currently entangle stuff at.”

“Yes.”

“Which we would accomplish … how?”

“I don’t know yet, but we obviously figure it out at some point, Benjamin, because there’s no other explanation of what we experienced when we woke up in that room, in our future bodies. It has to be some form of entanglement, okay? They didn’t shoot us with a tachyon and then we wake up in the future, that makes no fucking sense. I was right. Entanglement is the method, and we figure it out, at some point, and we come back in time to sabotage ourselves.”

“Let’s say you’re right...”

“I am right. I think about this a lot, Benjamin, I have very little else to do.”

“Why do I feel like every time you say my name you’re being condescending?”

“Because I am.”

“Hey, that’s great. One question though … why would we sabotage ourselves?”

“Two answers, Benjamin. First, the question of why our future selves are doing, or what they are doing, is irrelevant to how they are doing it, which is with my entanglement method. Second, the most likely scenario I can think of is that it’s happening: the positive feedback loop. Things in the future are breaking down and they’re attempting to prevent it.”

“By sabotaging us in the past? They can’t stop us from developing whatever tech we develop, or they wouldn’t be able to stop us, right?”

“Not according to my theory. As I said, a few incidents can’t change the overall direction of an entire universe. Whatever we’re doing, we are on a path to discover a way to send information to different points in time.”

“So maybe they’re trying to slow down the discovery process, delay whatever sort of negative externalities come with using the tech.”

I scoffed. “Tech. Why is it you can’t say the whole word?”

“So what do we do?” he asked.

“We can’t assume the good intentions of our future counterparts,” I said. “Think about what they’ve done: destroyed our data, damaged equipment, tried to discredit us. And then there’s the room. If they have the ability to communicate with us while one of us is in our future bodies, then why don’t they? Why not explain what’s happening? Instead, they lock us up, make sure we see ourselves but otherwise have no information. We have to assume they’re keeping the full picture from us from a reason, but we would be fools to assume that reason is good, that it’s beneficial to us.”

“That is grim, Camille.”

“Yes it is.”

“So what do we do?”

“We go to work.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 3 (Benjamin, Age 28)