One Word Kill

‘What? How can you not know?’ I pulled a stray D6 from my pocket. ‘Call it. Show her!’

‘That isn’t going to work, Nick.’ He shook his head.

‘Why not?’ My stomach lurched, the nausea returning after all the excitement. ‘Have we gone off-script?’ If he didn’t remember this, then my recovery wasn’t guaranteed anymore.

‘No.’ Demus said, not looking at me. ‘I don’t know what number you’re thinking of, Mia, and I don’t know what number that die would roll. But I know things about you. I know you don’t have a favourite colour. I know you had a rabbit called Mr Woffles when you were six. I know your Aunt May died of a heroin overdose, even though you tell everyone it was a car crash.’

Mia reached for the door. ‘Get me out of here, Nick. This pervert’s been watching me. Going through my things.’

‘I know about Robert Wilkins under the holly bush, Mia. You never told anyone that. You never told anyone how the old leaves spiked your bum, or that you saw a big orange centipede on the floor of that little cave in the holly tree and Robert tried to convince you it was magic. How could I know that? You never wrote it down.’

Mia was halfway out of the car, freezing air gusting in past her. She stopped. ‘How are you doing this? Can you read my mind?’

Demus’s voice changed. It went soft. ‘I know because these are things you will tell me. I don’t know the number you were thinking of just then because you never told me that.’

Mia moved back into her seat, pulling the door closed; still angry, but with curiosity winning out. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

‘I’m a time traveller, Mia.’

‘Bollocks you are!’

‘Mia, I know about the mud scraper outside your house in Barking when you were two. I know you have a crush on Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees and have sworn never to tell anyone. Either I’m a mind reader, or you’re insane, or I came back from a time when you had told these things to someone. In fact, since we’ve just told them to young Nick here, you can assume I learned them from him.’

I sat silent, watching the exchange, wondering why Demus was hiding the fact that he was me. And how Mia couldn’t see it anyway.

‘But . . .’ Mia frowned, unable to squeeze her objections into words. She slumped back. ‘Tell me.’

Demus explained that when you come back through time you come back just as James Cameron predicted in Terminator. Buck naked.

‘That was a lucky guess, mind. He just wanted to show off Arnie’s muscles. The fact is, though, that it only works for living things. The equations that govern the universe don’t care about time. There’s no “now”, no past or present, just a solution to the equation. That’s how rocks see it. How atoms see it; planets, stars; antimatter, dark matter. None of it cares about “now”. Time is just a variable. We make now. Consciousness makes now. We live it and we can, with sufficient energy, move it about.

‘I took care choosing the place I came back to, as well as the time I came back to. I appeared outside the police station on Watkins Street at three in the morning of January the first. They assumed I was a drunken reveller and put me in a cell with some blankets. In the morning when they couldn’t get any sense out of me, they rustled up some old clothes. Really nasty old clothes, it has to be said. And pushed me out the door.’ Demus gave me a curious wink as if some kind of message were hidden among the detail. ‘I went straight to the Ladbrokes on White Ladies Road. I’ve memorised the results of quite a few races and the race meetings on New Year’s Day are always popular.’

‘But you had no money, right?’ Mia asked, hard-eyed and suspicious.

‘I didn’t. They wouldn’t even let me stay in the shop. To be fair I did smell pretty bad. But just before the first three races that came up I called out the winner through the door. After the third time, several punters came out and asked my opinion about the winner of the next race. I told them on the understanding that I wanted a quarter of their winnings. After that I had money, then quite a bit of money, and lots of friends who didn’t care how pungent I was.

‘Next I had to find somewhere to live on a cash only basis and set up my laboratory.’

‘Laboratory?’ Mia asked. ‘Figures that you’d be a mad scientist, I guess.’ She slapped the seat. ‘Shouldn’t this be a DeLorean?’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘A DeLorean, like the film.’

‘Oh.’ I knew she was talking about Back to the Future, but it only came out the month before, and I’d been kind of busy.

‘Were you building something to get you back to when you came from?’ I asked.

Demus shook his head. ‘I was building two of these.’ He reached over to the passenger seat and held up a circular device, a heavy-looking object like a metal headband sporting a collection of boxes and cylinders along its outer surface and connected to several cables. It looked rather homemade and significant amounts of duct tape had been used in its construction. ‘I had to simulate the manufacture using current day materials before I came. It wasn’t easy. But the technology I would have normally have used requires a massive infrastructure, and putting that in place would reshape the future. Which is exactly what I don’t want to do.’

Mia slapped the seat. ‘Wait!’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t care about your gizmos. The important question, if any of this is real, is why the hell some guy from the fucking future is here, now, stalking Nick, talking to me in a car?’

It was true. That was the important question and I still had no idea of the answer, even though it was me doing it.

Demus stared at her, as if choosing his words carefully. ‘I need to record your memories, Mia.’

Mia shot out of the car so fast I didn’t have a moment to object even if I’d wanted to. She left the door open wide and sprinted off down an alley between two low blocks of council houses.

‘Shit.’ Demus put his space-age headband back down on the seat. ‘Well, that went well . . .’

‘Seriously, you knew to be there to pick us up . . . but you didn’t see that coming?’ Clearly I was destined to become stupid as I grew older.

Demus sighed. ‘As well as recording memories, these devices can erase them. At some point in the near future you decide to erase your memories of recent events. My memories of them. By doing so you allow me to act however I choose without immediately jumping us off my timeline. I’m no longer forced to stick to the script. Things don’t have to go how I remember things went . . . because I don’t remember how they went. Events do, however, need to turn out the same as I remember them in the longer term.’

‘And why did I choose to blank my memory back to some point between Mia getting into the car and jumping out of it?’

‘You chose to do it that way because you remembered this conversation and realised that if you didn’t blank our memories in just the way I described then you would not be me, your recovery from leukaemia would not be guaranteed, and my plans would be ruined . . .’

‘If I buy that . . . and it’s a big if, why didn’t you remember that Mia needed money and just give her some? That would have avoided a lot of grief.’

‘I shouldn’t be able to remember any of this, if you recall. As soon as I showed up there should have been a whole new timeline. That’s the way it works. As soon as there isn’t a new timeline you start to drown in paradox, you set up an endless loop of second guessing yourself. Which is why it can’t happen. But it did happen. Somehow that loop got frozen in place and we’re stuck with what we got when the dial stopped spinning.’ Demus lifted his hands helplessly. ‘Over the next few days you are going to find yourself asking over and over “Why didn’t he just do this instead?”, “Why didn’t he just go back to this time instead?”, “It would have been so much easier if only . . .” And the answer to every single one of those questions is simply, yes, it would have been better, but that’s not how I remembered it happening and so I didn’t. Because if it doesn’t go down the way I remember it, then we’re on a new timeline, not mine anymore, and nothing I do here can make any difference to what happens in the future of my timeline after the point I left it to come back here.’ He dug in the glove compartment and pulled out a thick wad of ten-pound notes. ‘I knew she needed money. I can give her money now. I was going to do just that . . . but she’s run off.’

After Demus’s torrent of mind-bending nonsense, the money seemed like a cold, hard, actionable fact. Something I could use. ‘Give it to me. I’ll see if I can find her. She can’t have gone far.’ I reached for the offered cash and scooted along the back seat to leave by Mia’s door.

‘Bring her to the park on Sunday. Same bench!’ Demus called after me. ‘Tell her she’s the one who sent me!’

He shouted more, but I was off and running.



CHAPTER 11