Marilyn Peake - The Other

I had worked hard to get to this point. Graduated first in my class from the academy. Trained four additional years to become a time traveler on both the Anthropology and Medical teams.

I’d had all the blood work and other medical tests done. I’d pushed myself hard in physical training. I’d been on twenty BTTMs, the Brief Time Travel Missions in which we get into a pod and travel backward or forward a few seconds, later a few minutes and eventually a few hours.

The first missions backward were very odd. There were several times in which I’d landed back at a moment when I’d made a mistake. Of course, I wanted to fix it; but I knew that doing so would violate the Law of Noninterference, so I didn’t. The law had been made by the original Time Travel Council soon after time travel was invented. No one knew if it was necessary or not, but it was made on the basis of the multiverse theory that states there are many parallel universes in which every choice we’ve ever even thought about making is a reality. If we were to actually go back in time and change something we’d done, it could have unknown consequences for everything else in that time stream. The strongest example is if a person were to go back to a time before they were born and kill their parent, would they ever be born? If they were never born, what would happen to them? Would they suddenly disappear? And what about all the people whose lives they’d touched?

The law had been amended in 3020 after the mission of Xavier Blake and Ian Redding, two time travelers on the Anthropology team. They had gone back in time to World War I in order to study the first instance of war that had affected so many countries and people, it was viewed as a planet-wide war. They thought they had their coordinates set to an Italian city not yet involved in the fighting, but they landed instead in the middle of a battle that had never been covered in the history books or any historical papers.

Their time travel pod had landed directly in front of a FIAT 2000 tank. They popped their door open and Xavier stepped out. He was immediately shot and killed.

Ian worked fast, grabbing Xavier’s body and setting the controls for immediate return back home.

All time travel was canceled for a while until the scientific community could come up with guidelines for what to do in instances like this where there are two competing dangers to the integrity of the multiverse. In one instance, fighting back to save one’s life and killing someone from a past time period could change reality. On the other hand, if someone from a time period before the human gene pool was altered to create people with green skin captured one of us, that would definitely change history. Part of any mission is for us to stay hidden from all but a few people we feel we can trust by observing them before approaching them. No dead bodies are to be left behind. Of course, there have been accidents. The Roswell UFO Incident and several Area 51 incidents remain warnings in the textbooks we study.

The amendment to the original law basically states that in the event that a time traveler needs to save their own life or the life of a fellow traveler or needs to bring back the dead body of a traveler, they are to use their judgment regarding the Law of Noninterference. In other words, if they need to expose themselves to people from whom they would normally hide or if they need to kill a person from the past, it’s basically a case of let the multiverse be damned, we’ll take our chances.

The test that was the hardest for me is when I was sent back in time to right before my father’s death. We all had to do this. It was part of our training—to go back to a moment of intense loss or tragedy in our personal lives, to simply observe and do nothing. My father died from cancer, most likely caused by the aggression stimulant AgStim, one of the drugs designed to combat the overly calm disposition of modern people. The same mutations that scientists had made to the human genome hundreds of years earlier to allow our bodies to conduct partial photosynthesis, in order to reduce our need for food from a planet increasingly unable to supply enough for everyone to thrive, had a few side effects: green skin, greater passivity than previous generations, and increased empathy to the point where we could share thoughts. We were still animals. We continued to exhibit aggressive behavior and experience a wide range of negative emotions—anger, jealousy, hate—but none of that was particularly intense and we weren’t usually motivated to sustain it for too long. But some situations and jobs require aggression over longer periods of time. My father was a bit of a creative dreamer. He was a painter who discovered that AgStim allowed him to work longer hours. The longer hours he worked, the more paintings he could sell and the more our quality of life improved.

AgStim has nasty side effects. When my dad binged on it for months at a time, he usually became violent. I was beaten numerous times until I learned to hide as soon as I saw the telltale signs he needed to withdraw from the stuff: his normally lustrous eyes became dull, his skin took on a grayish tinge and his hands shook.

The Time Travel Administration (TTA) sent me back to three different points in time when I could have interfered with the timeline leading directly to my father’s death. The first mission took me back to the moment when he first decided to try AgStim. I was nine years old. AgStim was being heralded as a breakthrough invention in brain enhancement. The commercials that flickered across our virtual reality eyesets, the huge black lenses we popped over our eyes for direct neural access to the Information Hub, told us that AgStim was the invention that would advance the human race forward, just as the Photosynthesis Experiment had done for previous generations.

My dad came home from his art studio telling us that his doctor had prescribed AgStim for him because he’d been feeling tired. I asked him, “So, you’ll have more energy, Dad?”

He said, “That’s what they say. I should feel ten years younger and have the energy of a hummingbird drone.”

I’d run off to paint him a picture in which my dad was a hummingbird drone zipping around his office with a paintbrush poking out of the top like an antenna. My dad loved the picture. He took it to work and hung it in his studio the next day, my simple kid’s picture hanging next to the professional paintings he sold.

The TTA sent me back there. I had to be extremely careful not to let my family see me. I was to slip into the house through the back door and listen to the conversation from the kitchen. I’d remembered my mother wasn’t home that day and the younger me would be chatting with my dad and then off in my room painting the picture.

I wanted more than anything to walk in and explain the dangers of AgStim to my father and warn him about his future. When it was time to leave, I hopped into my pod with tears streaming down my face.

The next moment I was sent back to was a time when I was a teenager and my dad asked me to take his prescription to the pharmacy. His eyes had lost their shine and his hands were shaking.

I wanted to stop the adolescent me from filling the prescription, but I held back.

The most difficult mission of all, however, was when TTA sent me back in time to my father’s hospital deathbed disguised as a nurse.

I could have saved him. He didn’t die from AgStim itself. He would have survived, after going through enhanced withdrawal where his body would be monitored and replenished with everything it needed. They were about to begin the process when the computer malfunctioned and mixed a deadly combination of drugs that would be poured into an IV bag and delivered through a tube into his veins.