Time Remembers Nothing: a short story by: GF Willmetts.

I can spot a scam. A long-term scam at that. Eventually.

A few years ago, I was asked to finance a time travel experiment. The bait was to save my younger brother, Torbrook, from a car accident twenty years ago. Sounded plausible. Not like it going back to the Stone Age. He wouldn’t be brought back to the present. Would I really want a teenager having to adapt to the modern world or someone nearer to my own age that I could connect to. It would be better for him to grow up elsewhere and find a brother he never knew he had so not to interfere with the timeline, especially mine. It wouldn’t be the grandfather effect but it would stop me paying for the time experiment and then how would I save my brother? As they explained it, if I didn’t pay for the project, then how would anyone go back to save him? That sounded convincing enough.

Unknown to them, a man arrived on my doorstep a few hours ago saying he was my brother. I’ve had several people claiming that over the years. A scam a lot of rich people suffer claiming to be dead or missing relatives. A DNA test proves otherwise to all except this one. He claims someone rescued him from being run over twenty years ago. That might be true but that would mean the time traveller, Franco, should be with him or at least stop him meeting me earlier than before he left. He was too early. A time traveller too early. The car accident was over the cliff. No body was found. The rescuer was to keep him safe and out of trouble. Later, he was eked enough to want to find his relatives. It took time. How many with our surname in the telephone book? I had to be rich. Wouldn’t have been difficult. I was being conned.

So, I’m investing in a time travel experiment and they are going to convince me that it was their intervention that saved Torbrook when it was someone rescuing an amnesiac him from a cliff ledge and introduce him later.

I might get my brother back but I’d been skimmed several million along the way. But it didn’t mean a time traveller, just someone who was there and missed by everyone else. For all I knew, it could have been a set-up for a ransom that went wrong. It might not even be young Franco rescuing back then but his father.

Even so, I had to edge my bets. Could I risk losing my younger brother a second time? Would time stay the same because it had already changed? I’m not a complete fool. I read up on the subject and all those alternative realities. Would I have stepped into one with a change? How many versions of my brother would there be? Some scams are so clever that they might be truth. The early tests with the time machine burnt up a lot of juice before we risked organics. Objects were there before they were sent. That could be part of the cheat. It had to be going somewhere. So did the non-objects that were on the pad and not be a conjuring trick. I was taking their word for it,

They said they were ready to do the first manned time traveller and save my Torbrook. They’ll leave him with information for him to come to the sit an hour after to prevent any significant time changes and paradoxes.

What they didn’t know was Torbrook could never tell the time and had arrived at the house an hour early. Twenty years older and one of those quick DNA checks confirmed it. Gave some preposterous story about two rescuers that stopped him from drowning and hiding him away for nearly twenty years. That definitely went against what they told me. Only Franco was supposed to go back. I excused myself but went determinedly to the station. It was pretty obvious now that they must have rescued him when young and completed the conjuring trick today having taken a lot of my money before brining him into my life. He was probably in it, too. I inherited the money in the first place. Why should I think that would change over the years? He would want the money.

I got to the depot or whatever they were calling it this week and they were revving the generators. Franco, the chosen time traveller was stepping onto the pad. It had to be a fake so I stepped on with him and things went black.

Then there was sunlight and a speeding car heading towards my young brother. There was little time to think, Franco had enough time to push Torbrook out the way, stunning him in the process. I was there just to watch. It wasn’t a trick after all, they really had made a time machine and there were two of us saving him. I was the other one. Our conversation drilled into my brain, going through the options. I didn’t have much option. My memory of the future was getting jumpy. There were two of us and I was the second person.

The following conversation with Franco was engraved in my memory.

‘Can we get back?’ was my most obvious question.

‘It was in test mode. It wasn’t supposed to do the rescue yet. Your extra weight set it off. We can’t get back that way anyway.’

‘How do we get back?’

‘The long way?’

I must have looked a bit gormless with that answer because he qualified it.

‘Just as we would advise your brother. Stay out of the way so we don’t mess up the timeline.’

‘What can we do?’

‘You know history for the next 20 years. You were rich before. Do you think you would stop making money for so long?’

‘How do we live without it? Food. A place to live.’

‘We can’t use any currency that didn’t exist 20 years ago.’

‘But you would have come prepared.’

‘We were only testing. I wasn’t prepared.’

‘But you still saved my…who were we saving?’

‘I didn’t have any choice. We can’t go to the same place twice.’

‘Can’t they send us supplies?’

‘Not to the same place twice.’

‘Won’t they know what we did?’

‘Do you know what you’re going to do?’

I shook my head. I must have survived or Torbrook wouldn’t meet me.

‘That’s the problem.’

‘I could sell my ring. It would give enough for seed money.’

‘Seed money?’

‘Money to make more money or do you want me to access one of my bank accounts?’

‘Did you ever wonder how one of your accounts lost money?’

‘No.’

‘Then we’ll have to use your seed money way then because that mustn’t happen. Just enough to get by for three of us.’

‘Three of us. You. Me. Your brother.’

‘Brother.’

‘Must be a problem with two of us coming back together.’

‘I have a brother I know nothing about?’

‘Oh you know plenty. You paid for this trip, although you were only going to watch. You’ll see him grow up instead of.’

‘I did?’

‘Look, one of the reasons I was chosen to be the time traveller was my age. You felt I was too young. But I don’t have a younger self here. You do. No amnesia effect…yet. We figured two of me existing at the same time would necessitate the older self losing memories so not to affect the past. That’s not for me for a couple years anyway. Your bodies might not be totally identical because of the seven year cellular regeneration but your mind is. You’re losing any knowledge of the future. Well, until you get older we think. Just treat him as someone you have to feed and protect.’

That was the most I remembered for the next twenty years. Three of us living out of time. The brother I didn’t know exist. Franco wasn’t a current history major and so no real memory of events to come. Then there was me. Living with myself in the same time with only the occasional insight as I caught up with myself and making a little money for us to live off than full-time employment. My business insights existed but had to keep that away from my earlier interests. The last thing I needed was to be my own rival if I could remember it all.

Just because I couldn’t remember my own past, it didn’t mean I couldn’t function. Things went well for all of two years and then the young time traveller changed. Seemed even more juvenile as if he was merging or possessing his younger self’s memories. Over the time I knew him, he said he was a prodigy. Was this an action of time travel? He was sharing his memories or knowledge together. All I had was memory loss. In the meantime, we both have to look after this stranger and prevent him doing anything significant in history. Maybe the memory loss would happen later. Its not exactly amnesia. Just odd memory jumps and not knowing why we’re protecting this stranger who just seemed to do whatever we told him to. How long will he be grateful for us saving his life or thinking bad people are after him?

The twenty years were nearly over and our memories were nearly back. Somehow in the process we lost Torbrook but it didn’t matter anymore. We were nearly back in our rightful places in time and nothing affecting our own timelines. What could he do now? In the present, he would be part of the timeline again and he could contribute. I felt more than the age I should have been. Well past my pension. Franco hadn’t quite reached middle-aged yet. The only place we could go was with the time travel experiment. We had made it back the long way but shouldn’t see our earlier selves leave.

Our palmprints got us into the buildings after a little protest from the technology but at least we knew our earlier selves were already there. There was a dip in the lights as the time machine drew in power. If we had bumped into ourselves, would we have remembered it as we lost our memories in the past? Would they have recognised us? We had grown beards. A simple disguise and easily shaved as we resumed our lives, albeit twenty years later.

What could go wrong? We saw our younger selves vanish on the time pad. They would become us. History was saved. Someone had a radio on.

A man had just been hit by a car outside my home. He died. Torcbrook died. Oh shi…!

the end

© GF Willmetts 2024

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