Hindsight

It was 10 years ago that I found the journal he left me in a box marked “stuff”. It was nondescript, like all the others, but it felt somehow valuable in my hands. I don’t know exactly why, but a vague “fear of missing out” squeezed my heart and something just compelled me not to toss it aside, forgotten and unread. Battered and discarded as it was, hidden by its nondescript blank black cover, it might hold some nugget of useful information.

Its author was a voracious writer of nothing in particular. By then, rummaging through a lifetime of detritus, I had already found many such notebooks amongst his things; scribbled notes mostly, mundane telephone conversations summarised in three or four phrases completely devoid of context, lots of careless messy sketches, ideas for things that would never come to be but hastily recorded for posterity, random thoughts - sometimes philosophical, sometimes just drug fueled midnight ramblings. Most of the notebooks went straight to paper recycling. So, I wasn’t expecting much from this one. Annoyingly there was no way of telling without reading it through, but amongst the rough stones of a cluttered mind lay lost and forgotten diamonds, pearls of wisdom, and the silver lining of a truly (if inconsistently) ingenious mind. What I found in the pages of this black book surprised me though, in a way that I had forgotten I was ever capable of being.

At that point, I had already worked for the last 20 years developing my research. Half a lifetime of scientific discovery and profound personal growth. Not long after I was tenured at the Nikola Tesla Academy for the Sciences in Liberation, Massachusetts, I had found a note in my lab, affixed to a wall by an admiring student intern that simply read:

Any sufficiently advanced technology Dr. Jazz is indistinguishable from magic.

An inside joke amongst the students. At the time, I pretended I hadn’t seen it, and left it there for a whole term before fully succumbing to the great weight of my ego and taking it home to stick on my fridge. But, egotism, inaccurate quotes, and fawning over-simplifications aside, that note does summarise what I do in my lab quite well. It is magic, the magic of a new frontier in human experience, in science, and like any good magician, I am both researcher and test subject. Of course, I don’t really see it that way, as magic I mean. To those who don’t fully understand, it must seem truly supernatural, but not to me, I’m the magician. I know how the trick works.

And so did he all those years ago, written in a little black book, laid out for me to find, the missing piece to the greatest puzzle of my career.

—-

“Sue!” … “Susan! Have you seen my pen?”

James Riley was standing in his garage workshop, black journal in hand looking around wildly for something to write with.

“What did you do with my pen!’ he bellowed accusingly, “I can’t find anything in here!” Exasperation filled his very being. James was a tall, heavy-set man, though you wouldn’t notice just how heavy as his almost 7 foot frame seemed to hide it amongst his proportions. A gentle giant, he often lost things, mostly because he was almost permanently in a cloud of cannabis smoke, but also because he simply didn’t have great eyesight and being shortsighted made finding things way down on the floor a challenge. Furthermore, like many highly intelligent people, James’ life was a bit of a comfortable mess.

“I didn’t touch your goddamn pen, James! Why would I do that?” a woman’s voice shouted as she stormed from the back door of the house a few feet away. “But if you’re going to yell at me anyway, I might as well just trash everything you own!” James’ partner Susan was about three years older than him, and constantly about a half a day short of murdering the man she loved with her bare hands. It had been a long two decades they’d been together, full of trial and heartache, but from the day they met in the university’s lab she had loved him, and he her.

“For fuck’s sake, James! It’s right there in front of you.” She exclaimed as she walked in the door, picking the pen up from a table next to the entrance, in plain sight. Susan Tinsdale was a woman with virtue and strength, and was well used to giving as good as she got. In her late 40’s, she cut an imposing figure in the doorway. James had always been impressed by her classic beauty; kind, but uncompromising attitude, and her seemingly infinite patience with him.

She shook her head in resigned exasperation and pulled herself close to him as she looked up into his suddenly apologetic eyes. “Oh shit, sorry. Thanks.” he said sheepishly as he took the pen and put his arm around her shoulder.

“What am I going to do with you? Eh?” She gave him a kiss and turned to walk out as she said sweetly, “Blame me for moving your shit again and I’m going to punch you in the nuts, ok? Love you!”

“Love you too…” he said softly as he turned his attention to his notebook and sat down to write on his workshop stool, pen in hand, little black moleskine resting on his thigh.

...it’s like a ripple on a pond. The stone breaks the surface, and from that point waves of energy flow out in all directions. If you were travelling towards the point where the stone broke the water in a boat, you would never get to see the pebble break the surface, but you’d encounter the ripples running back towards you, and you’d know something had happened to cause them. If they are small and diminishing, then it would be fair to say it was something small, but if they are large and fast moving you can start to narrow down the list of possibilities and get some idea of what might have happened. That’s time…

“That’s shit, that’s what that is!” James muttered to himself, before slamming the notepad shut and tossing it carelessly at a pile on the corner of his workbench. “Pebbles in a pond! That’s not it at all!” He thought to himself. “Why can’t I get a real sense of this thing?”

“Because, it’s ineffable.” He said aloud, answering his own question with frustration.

“You can’t just experience something like this and explain it in words, man! Think!”...

“Aw, fuck it!” he exclaimed as he spun round to get his smoking paraphernalia from the cabinet behind him. “Just get ripped and it’ll come to you”.

Like so many things, James’ incurable preoccupation with cannabis, and psychotropic drugs in general, was both the source and the hindrance of his scattered genius. He smoked everyday, all day. From the first moments of morning, to the depths of the early hours of night. Altered states were useful for engendering lateral thinking, and he was addicted to thinking, but the crutch of habitual dependency made capturing and processing his thoughts challenging. Writing things down made it easier to keep track, but his perpetual inebriation was such a common and practiced state of consciousness for him that most people, Susan included, couldn’t genuinely tell when he was or wasn’t sober. Most people assumed, often correctly, that he was never sober, but aside from a seemingly clumsy appearance, chronic absentmindedness, and a voracious appetite, James functioned just like anyone else in public.

He took a huge puff on his vape pen, and held it for 20 seconds before exhaling a satisfying cloud of white vapour. His mind wandered to steam trains and thought experiments on the nature of the speed of light and the persistence of time.

—-

“Hey Dr. Jazz!”

I could hear the familiar tiny rushed footsteps on the concrete floor a second before my lab assistant Samantha excitedly called to me from across the room.

“The first results are back from the quantum computer simulation! It worked!”

Of course, I knew already what a half a billion dollar quantum computer took four months to prove. I had already experienced the result. Time travel.

I know, time travel, the very mention of the word illicites visions of Jules Vern like victorian steam punk machines, Star Trek warp drives, and that famous mid 21st century film character Euriah Plass. But all of that is technological illusion and unexplained, magical sci fi leaps of physical impossibility, most often used merely as a plot tool for a story that is essentially about unusual circumstances taken on faith by the reader in order to drive the action.

That is not the sort of time travel I am referring to. This, this is real time travel. Travel through the quantum existence of a unified consciousness. Travel both as phantasmagorical and observably real as the concept of the passage of time itself. A two way communication with the past, and the future.

Strictly speaking though, it isn’t travel as such. But the result is the same, a crossing of experience through the restraints of normal human temporal perception. Something like that, as you might imagine, is exceedingly difficult to translate into a shared observation for the purposes of scientific study.

The quantum computer simulation that my assistant was so excited about had simply confirmed the reality of my incomprehensible experience. The culmination of my life’s work and an experiment that started ten years ago with that little journal and a set of 6 random numbers.

“Come Samantha,” I beckon “we have too much work still left to do.”

—-

“Aw, fuck! I’m stoned.” James absentmindedly spoke out loud as he wrote the same words in his journal, like the beginning of a stream of consciousness poem.

He looked at the page and thought hard about clearing his mind to let something come through, but got wrapped up in thinking about not thinking. In frustration, he threw the book across the room where it flapped in the air before skidding across the floor. “ARRRGH! FUCK!” He got up, took a few steps towards a beat up old armchair he had pulled from the neighbours trash last year, and fell into it with a dusty ‘thump’.

As the dust floated in the air, the light through the window caught it in it’s beam. As if by magic, thousands of bright little fairies suddenly came into existence, only to float for a second in the light and then immediately disappear as they reached the invisible boundary of the shaft, evidencing both their existence as well as that of the light. Of course they hadn’t disappeared anymore than they had popped into being the moment they appeared in the beam. They had always existed, on a very specific and predetermined trajectory, from chair, to air, to floor, and so on, only to be revealed by the thin veil of light. A moment in time revealed by a singular lens of perception, only to carry on with their travels, beyond the field in which James could observe them.

“Beyond the field in which I can observe them…” he repeated. The realisation crept into James’ mind like a wildfire growing from an ember in the wind. “They exist, and I only *see* them at the point where they are in the field of the light, the field of perceived experience, of my perceived experience!”

James leapt up from the chair and started frantically scrabbling on the ground for his carelessly tossed notebook. As soon as he grabbed it he didn’t even bother to get up off of the floor before he began writing with a frenzy of now crumpled pages and almost illegible penmanship. He had to get this down before it slipped away from him, like the twinkling dust disappearing into the shadows.

As he wrote, a voice inside his head seemed to speak to him, like a muse, or his wild half inebriated imagination. “Keep writing, it’ll be your birthday soon.” He felt this too, stopped to acknowledge the strangeness of this auditory hallucination, and wrote it down repeatedly in the margins, dual revelations arriving in one moment of enlightenment. To himself, aloud, he’s said “Holy crap! I think I just figured it out.” Self assured, he knew he had to wait now, until his birthday to prove it to himself, 4 months from now.

—-

“Pinch, punch, first of the month.” Susan hit him on the arm as she entered the kitchen. It made him spill a bit of his coffee. “What are you going to do today? You still haven’t told me what you want to do for your birthday.”

He sat down with his tablet and placed the journal next to his coffee and said “I don’t really want to do anything. You know me, there’s nothing I’d like more than a day to myself, and you of course!. Maybe we can have some dinner together, and just spend the night alone?”

“I’d like that, but are you sure? You don’t want to go out and celebrate at all?” she asked “What about your friends?”

“Oh, I see them all the time anyway. I’d really just like to work on things in the shop and then spend the important time with you. Maybe we can go for a few drinks later in the week?”

“OK, if that’s what you want to do.” Susan was unsure, but she had known James long enough to get used to his bouts of self-isolation. At least she was included, most of the time. “He’ll come round eventually” she thought to herself. “It’ll be nice to get him out of that workshop for once.”

James said suddenly “I might buy a lottery ticket.”

Susan looked at him quizzically, “oh kaayyy…”

“It’s my birthday, I might get lucky.”

“No. That’s fine. It’s your birthday, you do you.” She said, thinking at the same time “He never gambles?!”

“I will!” He said self assuredly as he grabbed his cereal, got up from the table and bent over to kiss her on the forehead “just going to get on with a few things in the workshop.” And with that he strode out of the room.

Susan felt a sense of disquiet, “What’s he up to?”

—-

“Language is an imperfect form of communication. Description falls far, far short of direct experience. How can one impart a sense of the ineffable wonder of being with the limitation of a few thousand words? Some languages have even fewer, never mind trying to communicate across dialects. There is nothing as directly understandable and universally common to all life than direct experience. However, without the means to project our experiences directly into each other’s heads, the next best thing we have within language is metaphor. Metaphor provides common ground to a catalogue of shared experiences. It describes events with seemingly unrelated imagery that elicits a common understanding of experiences unique to the listener. It is, in particular, very useful to use when concepts are so complex or unfathomable that to try to directly describe them with technical language as precisely as can be done within the constraints of vocabulary would lose the meaning entirely. With that in mind, allow me to explain how time works.”

As I speak these words, I am standing in a room of post graduate students, at a podium, in front of a screen with a static image of the word “RETROCAUSALITY” behind me. A dim light is illuminating the famous black journal in front of me.

“Time is like a river. In one sense it is flowing and changeable, moving in one direction and yet in another sense, unpredictable. From one perspective, the entire course of any river at any given moment is set and complete from beginning to end, yet from a different perspective it is a swirling chaotic flow of unpredictable Eddie’s and changing currents. We experience the river of time almost exclusively in the second perspective, like someone cast adrift on a raft without an oar would; we start at the headwaters, and the river takes us one millimetre at a time through its entire length, twisting, turning, bubbling, eddying. Over rocks and under ferns we sometimes gather speed and other times are caught up in rapids and debris, but always, from our perspective we are only ever able to see a glancingly short distance ahead to the obstacles and events that are immediately approaching. If we are lucky and have some skill, we can change the way we sit on the flowing surface to steer ourselves a little away from danger, or towards calmer water that we hope will ease the rest of the journey farther on, but by and large we are taken haplessly ever forward, only ever able to really sense where we are in the moment.”

“If we had a bird’s perspective of the river though, we could see the entire course laid out as one entity. All of the past and future in one view, existing as it does all at the same time. Even though time exists like this, all at once, we are not omniscient creatures able to experience it in this way. Our corporeal limitations require us to see it in little slivers of time, one after the next as we flow through it, like the raft on the water, or the dust that floats through a beam of light.”

“So, if we are to navigate these waters without having the benefit of that wider vision we need to have some way of knowing what is ahead. Fortunately, we all have a friend in time who can help here, namely ourselves. If time exists as a river both flowing from one instant to the next and constant in its entirety, then so do we, since time is not a river, but the whole of creation, and being a part of that creation, we are therefore a part of time itself.”

“We experience ourselves in the moment, but the whole of our existence is there to draw upon if we can only escape the limitations of the eternal ‘now’. And we can, just as our past communicates with us through the experience of memory, tracing our journey up to now in the annals of our mind, so too can we communicate with the future in a similar way. The secret to this sort of time travel is to have a beacon to focus on, like a memory in time to travel to. One cannot project one’s consciousness willy nilly into the voids of the 4-dimensional constant construct of space-time without it.”

“Constructing a beacon has to be simultaneously the easiest and most difficult task that can be imagined. Firstly, you have to appreciate that it is yourself with whom you are communicating. Not an inner dialogue in the present moment, or an imaginary projection of a memory of who you think yourself to be. No, I mean your actual future self. But not only that, you must prime your future self to do the same when communicating with you in the present. It is not a phantom limb that exists only in your mind, it is the body, connected by the same nerves and synapses as exist in this moment. Truly getting your head around this conundrum, not just intellectualising it, but feeling it as you would the skin on the palm of your hand, that is the hard part.”

“Secondly, you must understand that an intention to fulfil, and fulfilling an intention are two different things. Promising yourself that you will do something is not the same as remembering that you did something. You must adopt a belief in your future actions so strong and vivid it is as real as a memory of having done it in the past. The vividness of this future memory is often made more visible through a connection to great emotion. Emotion takes us out of our limited experience of time and places us in a field of pure energy. We can easily see how this works when we recall past events and the emotions they carry, especially when they are tied to strong emotions. We often say that we are ‘transported’ back to the event, and can feel all the same emotions as if they were happening to us all over again. With this emotion, you must light your beacon with a fire so intense that it cannot be mistaken for anything else, that is to say, you must connect to a deep part of your personal experience and attach some significant meaning to it such that the sensation of the message itself conveys the new information. By attaching our intention to emotion we can bridge the temporal gap between now and then in whichever direction we choose.”

“And then, thirdly, you must actualise the intention. Your future self must use their predetermined present moment to reach back in time to your current self and enact the distinct and precise action that was determined in the past, triggering the emotional response. It is a bit like a self fulfilling prophecy. You say it is so, and through your actions, it becomes so. And in so doing, you can affect the past with your future. It is helpful if these are actual physical actions, at set dates, with precise control over the conditions in which they occur, even so far as to be in the same physical space. If everything is as similar as possible, it makes the last part of the process much easier.”

“At this point, you are halfway there. You have created a channel of communication, but so far, it is only one way. A future memory only to be experienced in hindsight. The final stage to this process is to be able to communicate in two directions; to speak to yourself in such a way as to understand and respond in the same breath, and to bring new knowledge from the future to the present, and from the present to the past. To do this, you must be receptive to the subtleties of the signal within your beacon. The distractions of the material world are sometimes too much to ignore. They can muddy the waters and prevent a clear interpretation of the message being conveyed, if not obscure it completely (as is most often the case). Removing yourself from this world, letting go of inhibition and the codified cultural veils through which we perceive the world - making yourself a blank slate - engages your ability to filter the signal from the noise through intuition (aka subconscious thought, or as some know it, body intelligence). I find the best way to do this quickly is through a specific dose of hallucinogens, like psilocybin, but with practice, one can reach this state with meditation and focus.”

The lights of the lecture hall are suddenly and blindingly switched on just as I’m about to move on to the next part of my lecture. I notice the projector being switched off, and I can see the dean of the school and a handful of official looking suits making their way purposefully down the aisles towards me. There is a stunted air of confusion in the hall, but I know what is coming. I gather my papers and notebook and start to make a quick exit.

“Thank you everyone, I hope you took notes. I’ll see you all in the future!”

—-

James sat in his workshop. In the dim light of the afternoon, with no lights or screens to illuminate the room, the light from the single dirty window created a soft gloom that forced his eyes to adjust. He sat motionless, scanning the darker corners of the space, cataloguing the shadowy shapes and outlines, listening intently in an unfocused wide beam, trying to take everything in at once, like examining the whole of a painting from a distance, or hearing the whole of a song without picking out the individual instruments. With each long soft breath he was tuning his mind to a wavelength of empty attention.

Beside him lay his journal, open to the most recent passage. “Today, I will find myself.”

His breathing grew shallower and more automatic. In his mind the world began to slip away from view. Sounds that he could hear no longer drew his attention, and his vision blurred into soft focus, and then like slipping into a dream, his focus shifted completely into his head. The void was filled with a pregnant stillness, a delicate calm that could fall away at any moment like a house of cards, to even notice it would bring destruction.

He picked up the thread of his intended thoughts and called into the empty stillness. “Happy birthday, James. Today, I will find myself.” James repeated the thought, turning it into a mantra in his head, creating a rhythm, imbuing the words with meaning and emotion. Today, James would find himself.

Then, from the void came a voice. It said, “twelve thirty three” This was immediately followed by a burst of visual information, cars, people. James could see himself in a mirror, older, smiling. “Twelve. Thirty three.” His reflection repeated, slightly differently though this time, the emphasis was different. “Twelve …. Thirty three.” The images came fleetingly, disjointed. There was a man in a suit, and then suddenly a fireball in the sky. James saw Susan dressed in black and felt a sudden pit in his stomach. Then there was nothing but the void, with the words “Twelve” and “Thirty three” echoing in his mind. The house of cards fell to pieces and James was back in the comfortable chair in his workshop. He immediately began writing down everything he experienced in his journal, racing to get it all recorded on paper, attempting to decipher the imagery and the meaning of the numbers. Were they dates? Were they amounts of something? It seemed to him that neither of those things fit the sense he got from the moment. Twelve felt to him like an increment of time, a unit or block of time. Whether it was twelve days, twelve months, or twelve years, he couldn’t tell. Thirty-three though felt much different. Like a name almost. Them more he thought about it, the farther he felt from the sense of things. The whole experience was becoming more like waking from a dream as direct observation lost it’s bright lustre and became dulled by memory, uncertainty, and missing detail.

He felt he had recorded everything he could and was verging on the boundaries of filling in gaps with imaginary and irrelevant fiction. In the margins he wrote, “Today, you found yourself. 18/8/23” and he closed the book and got up.

—-

I’ve been replaying the events of my first experiment in my head for hours now. I had the taxi drop me at Heathrow Vectorport after the lecture and I’ve been wandering around from one cafe to the other since buying my ticket almost 5 hours ago. I have to get to Geneva as quickly as possible, but last minute transports are few and far between. It’s been two years since I performed the experiment for the first time, and it was a confused and cryptic affair. I remember experiencing a sense of urgency then too. Events are unfolding in an almost unreal manner. The things l have discovered since then have all come to pass as if my future has pulled me along a track to this place, and yet every step of the journey was my own.

My thoughts are broken as I catch a glimpse of three men standing together at a railing above me. They are too late, but still, I have to move. I know that the path, as much as it feels set, is as fragile as a house of cards. One wrong move and it will all crumble into something outside of my control. I have to move.

—-

“Samantha! Are you ready with the instrumentation?”

“Totally Dr. Jazz!”

“Please, this is an important day, let’s not make light of it, ok?”

“Yes, sorry Dr. Riley. All measurements are functioning and being recorded.” Samantha was always very dedicated, and as she sat in the dim light of the instrument panel in the labs of the academy it reminded me of my target. I remember returning to the kitchen in our house only three miles away in Springfield, Massachusetts as it was called then, before the Culture War. Susan had baked a cake. She was lit by the dim light of the candles, and smiled lovingly at me as she set two places at the table.

I looked at the note in my hand as I held on to the memory of that day. I read it again, “Today, you found yourself.” And I thought to myself, “That was the day I lost myself”.

The DMT began to take hold and I managed to signal Samantha as I was instantly transported from the dentist’s chair I was sat in to a plane of existence far beyond imagination. I repeated to myself “Happy birthday, James.”

—-

I’ve arrived at my departure gate, I don’t think I have long before events catch up to me. I need to get to Geneva in time. I have just a few minutes before my vectorcraft leaves and takes the short 15 minute flight to the continent. At this time of night, I find I am the only passenger in the waiting lounges. I am consumed with the need to tread precisely the fragile course I have set over the past 12 years. I know that I must take two journeys today, and before I take flight, I must trip to the past to close the loop. My formula of synthDMT allows me to exactly determine the length of my existential journey; 6 and a half minutes in the real world including recovery, an epoch in the existential plane. As I take the bump, I can see the shine of the hull of the vectorcraft glint in the darkness just outside the window. I close my eyes with the flight number burned onto my retina - 30-03.

—-

Outside of the realm of normal life, existence in the temporal world, the river of time, the dreamscape of the existential plane is impossible to describe. Beings of light materialise from thin air, the properties of physics are non existent, perception itself is warped and unfamiliar. I feel a distinct sense of place and position, but I can “see” everything around me in 360 degrees at once. Colours take on full sensory experience with tastes and smells that are totally alien to those in waking life. Confusing and overwhelming as it is, it provides a portal through space and time, a junction for travellers much like a transport hub with flights connecting to destinations remote and exotic. With the right intention one can navigate this plane and find the right departure gate to reach your destination.

Ten years ago, I touched the realm and glimpsed the very edges of the realm, but it was enough for me to set a beacon to navigate to. Now, I am here as a fully fledged time traveller to find my way to myself.

Within this place, everything observed is within the mind. That is to say that everything conjured comes from my own subconscious imagination, but that is not to say that it is all imaginary. Reality is never fully revealed, but like a reflection of the moon on the surface of a pond, what you see might ripple unnaturally, but it is a true reflection of reality. As such, it is important to pay attention to everything that can be observed, as it all has individual and collective meaning.

I am moving through a city of light. There are cars moving around, and I am suddenly in one, travelling to a space with other vehicles moving and floating through the air. A person in black sits next to me, and I hear them whisper to me in a tone that sounds like they are shouting from a great distance. “Happy birthday, James!” I can see the creature take on Susan’s face, and I realise she is crying. I am suddenly in an empty space with rows and rows of chairs extending into the dark. I can see myself from behind as I walk through a tunnel of fire away from the space with the chairs. I can see in the other direction, looking back from where I/we were, a man in a dark suit. I turn to myself and we say to each other in unison, “Happy birthday, James.” We are still in the tunnel, and I feel like I am stuck between a rock and a hard place, a decision without a good choice.

I ask, “What time is it?”

“Twelve thirty three” is the answer.

I can see a great bird loom over me, and its name is 3003.

I am consumed by fire.

I can see Susan crying, she changes into not-Samantha who tells me to look at the instrument panel. It is just a pool of water in which I can see my own reflection. “Happy birthday, James”. I can see that my reflection has become a corpse and decomposes in front of me. I look at my hands and the flesh has fallen off leaving only bones and worms, and I reach into the water to grab my reflection. I am compelled to say, “Stay away from the bird! Get to Susan in Geneva! Twelve, Thirty, Three.”

As my reflection turns into the man in the dark suit and pulls me into the reflecting pool, I suddenly awake in the real world, tears streaming down my face, Samantha holding my arm beside me, “Dr Jazz! James, are you feeling ok? What did you see?”

I am in a stunned silence and though I try, I can’t really say anything for a few seconds. She moves around to the other side of my chair, and turns up the saline drip, while I force out a groan as I try to speak. It’s as if I am trying to talk with a mouth full of peanut butter when I eventually manage to blurt out, “I was in danger!”

—-

Recovery takes a few minutes. I sit quietly in the chair as I gradually come to. The vector craft is boarding and the only other person in the waiting lounge is the flight attendant asking me from her desk “Are you waiting to board sir?”

I look again out the window at the craft and the flight number 30-03. I look down the long hallway of the terminal and I can see the three men walking towards me.

“No” I say.

She closes her book and pulls a belt across the boarding gate entrance. I remain where I am as the men walk up to me and two sit down either side of me. The third stands in front of me and says, “Dr. Riley, do you know who I am?”

“Yes, you are here to remove me from this timeline.”

He tilts his head. “Why would you think that?”

“Isn’t that what you do? Interfere.” I am incredulous.

“It’s what you’ve made me do. There can’t be two of us.”

I am about to put my journal back into my pocket. The discovery has been made, the secret is out. It is for others now to carry on.

—-

Ten years ago today, Susan and I were moving house, I had been given the chance to work at the Albert Einstein Institute of Physical Sciences in Geneva. Susan was looking forward to settling down in a house with an impressive view of the Matterhorn 30 kilometres away. I was looking through the lost items of my workshop when I came across a little black book. What was written inside would change the future of my life completely.