“But you survived because you trusted the king of Denmark,” I say. “I know the story. Everyone knows the story.”
“The king? It was my father I didn’t trust. He was delusional and I was judicious enough to say no. Why would you think it had anything to do with the king?”
“Because that’s what you told an old classmate at Niels Bohr’s funeral. He wrote a book about it. Everyone you ever spoke to about anything wrote a book about you.”
“Showing up uninvited at his funeral was vanity. I was young and too easily impressed. Bohr had some insights, some ideas, but did he ever build anything? No. He liked to see his name in the newspaper. He certainly didn’t remember my name. Some student he once taught. Some life he once saved.”
“Lionel, I get that you have nobody else to talk to. But since you’re threatening to murder my family and the woman I love, I don’t really feel like listening to you.”
“The woman you love?” he says. “Is that a joke? You met her two weeks ago. Do you really think I wouldn’t bother to learn everything about you? I’ve been watching you for thirty-two years. Waiting for you to become the man who came to me in the past. To even use that word with me after the life I’ve lived because of love. You’ve never spent more than a month with any woman. You keep your family at a distance. You have no friends. You have the grudging respect of your employees because of your talent. Your talent is what gave me hope. That one day I’d be free of this wrong life.”
“And where are your loved ones, Lionel? Where are your family and friends? In fifty years, the only person you could find to care about you was someone else’s wife.”
“You don’t know a goddamn thing about it. Who have you ever loved? Who have you ever lost? Your life is buildings. You don’t care about the people inside them. I risked everything for her. I crossed time and space for her. What could you possibly understand about that kind of love? That kind of loss?”
Considering he’s a towering genius and all that, I’m a bit confused by how utterly wrong Lionel is about me, until I realize—of course, he thinks I’m John.
Even if Lionel surveilled every second of John’s life, he could only observe what happened in this timeline. Everything he knows about my world is conjecture.
In the past three weeks I lost the woman of my dreams and my unborn child, stole a trillion-dollar piece of technology, became history’s first time traveler, witnessed the experiment that began the modern world, broke reality, plunged humanity into dystopia, caused billions to never be born, ruined my father, resurrected my mother, got a sister that shouldn’t exist, met the love of my life, became the planet’s most brilliant architect, found the smartest person who ever lived, and discovered the secret history of global technology, but it took until this very moment for someone to finally underestimate me.
I know love. I know loss. I know the grief that chews and swallows you whole.
But Lionel doesn’t know any of that. He’s been wasting his time watching John.
My name is not John. My name is Tom Barren and I’ve already changed the world once. I can do it again.
124
As the only person to ever try both kinds of time travel, I can tell you that Goettreider’s version wasn’t at all like my father’s. And the son of a bitch definitely didn’t prepare me for what was to come.
I stand there, holding the time machine, and Lionel looks me in the eye.
“I hope that by the time you arrive at your destination,” he says, “you will understand why I did what I had to do.”
Then Lionel says something genuinely strange—halting unintelligible noises that sound rehearsed but make no sense.
“Yrros ma I,” he says.
And, with that, Lionel sends me back in time.
I assumed it was going to feel more or less the same as it did when I used my father’s time-travel apparatus and, at first, I have a similar sensation of falling back into a drawn-out moment between balance and gravity. But the mind-bending, body-inverting sensory swirl that I anticipated never comes.
Instead, Lionel stands in front of me making these off-puttingly jittery movements as his hand retracts from the device’s control panel. His eyes meet mine and he opens his mouth, his jaw flexing oddly when he speaks.
“I am sorry,” he says.
I want to tell him that his apologies are meaningless to me but I’m paralyzed. My mouth won’t move. My eyes won’t blink. All I can do is stare straight ahead.
“Od ot dah I tahw did I yhw dnatsrednu lliw uoy, noitanitsed ruoy ta evirra uoy emit eht yb taht epoh I,” Lionel says.
It takes me a moment to realize he’s speaking backward.
Mostly I’m confused, like, is this Lionel’s idea of a prank? He apologized in reverse on purpose, like a clue. But right before that—“by the time you arrive at your destination”—what did that even mean? With my father’s time machine, the traveling part was instantaneous. There was no time to arrive. You were immediately there. What could I possibly come to understand in a trip that happens in microseconds?
Except it wasn’t happening in microseconds. It was happening in regular seconds, one by one, ticktock, but in reverse. I see the twitchy motions and hear the wobbly alien phonemes that Lionel and I make as we speak in the moments before he activated the device. That’s when I start to get it, not all of it, not yet, but the very beginning of shocked comprehension—Lionel’s time machine turns back the clock, literally.
A raw terror creeps up and I try to mash it back down because this isn’t going to happen in real time, right? This is going to accelerate, any moment now, any moment now, any moment now, any moment now, any moment now, any moment now.
It doesn’t.
This is what Lionel neglected to mention—I’d go back fifty-one years and experience every second of it. Although it doesn’t take long for concepts like seconds and minutes and hours to feel like nothing but the abstract human constructs they are.
I watch Lionel and me talking in the domed room, our herky-jerky movements and reversed dialogue. But I’m not paying close attention because I’m waiting for everything to speed up into a dizzying wormhole velocity that instantly propels me to 1965. So I miss what turns out to be the last sight of myself that I have for five decades.
The platform that the Goettreider Engine sits on lowers into the windowless underground chamber from which it powers Lionel’s operations. And I follow it down, frozen in the position I was in when the time machine engaged, tethered to the Engine, invisible, immaterial, immobile, holding the device like a courier bringing a package to someone’s door. I’m not following myself back in time. I’m following it—the Goettreider Engine. A reverse path into its own history, winding up the thread of its tau radiation trail like an unspooled yo-yo.
I don’t see anyone for what feels like months. It turns out Lionel doesn’t visit the Engine too often. As long as everything runs properly, he has no reason to. He checks the machinery once or twice a year, but his visits are abrupt and banal, eyes darting across the readouts, nodding, and leaving. And Lionel is the only one who comes in, not trusting anyone else, which makes sense when you have the most valuable piece of technology in history and don’t want to share it.
I would’ve lost my mind within a week if not for Penelope.
Not Penny—Penelope. It was that thing she told me, how she’d master a training module by breaking down each technical procedure into discrete tasks and counting them down by the second. It was a way to take control of something as vast and liquid and riotous as time. It’s what kept me sane in that first decade. Or as sane as can reasonably be expected in a circumstance for which the human mind is not fit. And so Penelope Weschler did for me what I couldn’t do for her: She saved me.