Chapter 22
The Answer
“No!” screamed Ryan, an act that caused additional daggers of pain to plunge into his head. “You can’t go now! What did you mean?” he demanded.
There was no answer. The Teacher had been forced to leave and would not re-connect soon—maybe never.
While Ryan was just able to withstand the searing pain inside his head, Regan was not. She fell to the ground, gripping her head in agony. Luckily, the immense pain lessened with each second they were no longer connected telepathically to the Teacher. Ryan knew the Teacher had done the right thing. They couldn’t take it in their minds any longer, but the timing couldn’t have been worse.
Now what? It had told Ryan that they could somehow save his mother but they would have to hurry. But where was she? The Teacher had seemed to know and must have assumed that they did also.
The blinding pain in Regan’s head had lessened considerably and was now equal to just an ordinary splitting headache. “Did you hear that, Ryan,” she whispered. “Mom’s still alive!”
“But she won’t be for long if what the Teacher said is true,” said Ryan. “And it said that we could do something to save her. But where is she? Where are the other scientists? And how can we save her if they can’t?”
“Are you sure it wasn’t malfunctioning?” said Regan. “It wasn’t making any sense there at the end. It said that mom didn’t disappear. We know that that’s wrong.”
“Things aren’t always what they seem in this place,” said Ryan. “Let’s assume that everything the Teacher said makes perfect sense—if only we could understand it. And if that’s true, then Mom will die in a few hours if we don’t figure out what the Teacher was trying to tell us.”
“Then we’d better get started.”
Ryan nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s suppose the group didn’t disappear from the room. Then why didn’t we see them?”
“Invisible?” offered Regan.
“Maybe. But I think that counts as disappearing. So let’s assume that they were still in the room and easy to see.”
“Then how could we possibly have missed them?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it,” said Ryan. His mind raced through the possibilities. He had to think! Their mother’s life was at stake. “The only way is if we weren’t in the room,” he said finally.
“But how can that be?” said Regan. She paused in thought. “Unless there were two identical rooms in the building and we somehow came back to the wrong one. I guess it’s possible. That would explain why we didn’t see any trace of equipment or people.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” said Ryan. “Anything is possible in this city, but I’m sure we came back to the same room. And this wouldn’t explain why the entrance to the city was missing.”
“The Teacher said that Mom will die from being hit by that generator if we don’t hurry up and stop it,” said Regan. “The Teacher used those exact words.”
Ryan nodded. Hearing things telepathically made them easier to remember.
“So what does it refer too?” said Regan. “She’ll die from being hit by the generator if we don’t stop it. Stop what? Stop her bleeding?”
Ryan shook his head. “No. You would think it would have to refer to the generator. This is the only way the sentence would make any sense. But that would mean the Teacher really was malfunctioning, because of course we can’t stop Mom from being hit by the generator. That has already happ—”
Ryan stopped in mid-sentence. The only way the Teacher’s words made any sense was if it had not already happened. If it was going to happen, but had not happened yet. But if that was the case then . . .
“We traveled in time!” whispered Ryan, his eyes wide.
“What?”
“That’s it! I’m sure of it,” continued Ryan. “We traveled in time. Why not? We went through a doorway and found ourselves on another planet. Why couldn’t we have gone through a doorway to another time?”
“Like the one we went through when we were leaving the soccer-ball shaped building,” said Regan excitedly. “Remember how those three doorways suddenly appeared when you knocked into that podium thing, and we went through the middle one.”
Ryan’s heart raced. What was she talking about? He remembered there being three doorways when he had expected only one, but he had no idea they had appeared suddenly from nowhere after he had hit the podium. He must have been too busy recovering from the impact to see this happen. But that would explain a lot. “The podium must have been some kind of control panel. I must have accidentally hit the controls to open a time doorway. When we ran through it, we traveled back in time. To a time just before Dad broke into the city.”
“That would explain why the entrance was gone!”
“Right. And also why the scientists and equipment and nano-robots were gone when we got back to the room. The Teacher said that Mom didn’t disappear, and I bet I know what it was about to say but didn’t finish. It was, ‘Your mom didn’t disappear—you did’. Nothing happened to them. Something happened to us. We disappeared—back in time.”
“So we can still stop the accident from happening!”
“Exactly. And the Teacher said we only had a few hours. So we’ve almost caught up to the time when this whole thing began. In two hours, the generator will fall on her.” He paused. “We traveled back in time a little over a day. When we first checked for the entrance to the city and it wasn’t there, we left. I’m guessing if we had just waited an hour or so we would have been there when Dad first broke in.”
“That would have freaked him out for sure,” quipped Regan.
Ryan laughed. “Can you imagine? He succeeds in breaking through an unbreakable force-field he’s battled for almost six weeks, and when he walks through, surprise, he find his kids already inside. At that point, if we just innocently said, ‘Hi Dad, welcome to the alien city’, I’ll bet he would have passed out.”
Regan grinned at the picture her brother had painted. “This situation really is incredible,” she said. “This means there are two versions of each of us right now. Our younger selves are probably talking in the woods right now, discussing plans to investigate Proact.”
“Very, very weird,” said Ryan.
“So I guess we do know exactly where to find Mom,” said Regan. “Back at the building we were in. She must be there now! All we have to do is go there and warn Mom about the generator before it falls. Then she’ll be saved!”
Instead of celebrating, Ryan was deep in concentration. “It might be that easy, but let’s think it through carefully,” he suggested. “Time travel is very tricky. So what happens if we warn the group about the falling generator and explain about the nano-robots so they aren’t afraid of them?”
“Ah . . . we save the day?” offered Regan.
“So what effect would that have?” asked Ryan, and then answering his own question said, “I guess it would change everything that happened next. The two of us won’t be running out of the building like we did before—the other versions of us won’t even be in the building yet. So the younger me won’t run into that podium in just the right way to activate the time doorway . . . ”
“So we’ll never get sent back to the past,” whispered Regan, catching on.
Ryan scratched his head. “So we—the versions that did go back in time—will never have existed.”
“But if we never existed,” complained Regan, “how did we save the day in the first place?”
“Good question,” said Ryan. “This is why Dad says that time travel is impossible, because it leads to impossible situations. For instance, what if you went back in time and killed your father when he was a boy—before you were born?”
“Then you would never be born.”
“But if you were never born, then how did you kill your father?” said Ryan. “And if you didn’t kill him, then you would be born, and then you could go back in time and kill him.”
“Did I mention that I still have a headache from being in contact with the Teacher,” quipped Regan.
Ryan smiled. “My point is that it gets pretty complicated and there are a lot more questions than answers.”
“To say the least.”
“But we do exist now,” Ryan pointed out. “So what happens if we change things so that we never did? What would happen to us?”
“I don’t know. I guess we would just vanish.”
Ryan frowned. “That’s my guess too. I was hoping you would come to some other conclusion.”
“If we vanish, what would happen to our other selves? Wouldn’t they continue on? No matter what happens to us, our other selves should be okay.”
“I agree,” said Ryan. “They’ll be us exactly as we were a day or so ago, but once we change things they’ll live a totally different future than we lived. They won’t remember anything we’ve experienced.”
They paused to ponder the implications of the situation they were in. The prospect of vanishing from existence was quite scary, even knowing their earlier selves would be just fine. But both quickly came to the same, inescapable conclusion.
“We don’t have a choice, do we?” said Regan softly.
Ryan took a deep breath and shook his head. “No. We don’t. Not if we want to save Mom. When we do, our earlier selves won’t go back in time and won’t become us. There is no way around it.” Ryan’s expression turned to one of steely resolve. “But it doesn’t matter what happens to us.”
Regan knew her brother was right. All that mattered was saving their Mom. Yes, their other selves would live a different future, but it would be a far better future. A future in which their other selves had a mother, alive and well. “We’re wasting time, Ryan,” she said firmly, her eyes now glowing with a fiery intensity. “Let’s go save Mom.”
Ryan nodded, his newfound respect for his sister growing even further. “After we save her we should help the Prometheus team as much as we can before we disappear. Hopefully we’ll stick around long enough to report everything we’ve learned about this city.”
They started walking in the direction of the building their parents were in. Five minutes later Ryan stopped in his tracks and said, “Wait a minute! I just thought of something. When we find the team, we’re going to have to explain ourselves before they’ll believe anything we tell them. Just like before, they’ll insist on knowing how we got in here.”
Regan shrugged her shoulders. “So?”
“So we’ll have to tell them—how we got past the fence and lasers, how we solved the passwords, how we tricked Carl, how we got sent back in time—everything. Then, when we save the day and vanish, they’ll have plenty of time to make sure we—meaning our earlier selves—never discover the city in the first place. They’ll know to look for the younger versions of us outside of the fence. We’ll change our past so that our earlier selves are stopped before they even get close to the Proact facility. Do we want that to happen?”
Regan frowned. “No we don’t. This city is fantastic. Good point, Ryan.”
“Yeah, we owe it to ourselves—well, our other selves—to still discover the city. But we have to save Mom.”
“I have an idea,” said Regan. “What if we go back outside and find our earlier selves and tell them everything we know. Then they can enter the city and save Mom. We’ll vanish, but they’ll already be in the city.”
Ryan thought about this for a moment. “Good thinking,” he said.
They reversed direction and began heading back to where they were now confident the entrance would be waiting for them. This was really going to be something, thought Ryan. How would it feel to talk to himself? Would the old him believe the new him?
The old him was in for the surprise of his life. He wondered where that Ryan was now. Still planning with Regan? Maybe hanging down from a tree expecting to be caught at any moment by security.
And with that thought he had one of the most startling realizations of his life. He stopped in his tracks, stunned.
“What is it?” prompted Regan.
“It’s not going to work,” he said with certainty. “We’ll never make contact with our other selves and the generator will still fall on Mom.”
“What?” said Regan. “Why do you say that?”
“Because it didn’t work the last time we tried it,” responded Ryan simply.