Niv Ohio was brilliant.
This is not to say her brilliance was effortless. In truth, it was hard-won through eons of exhaustive research in (quite literally) every field of study you can think of. She was, after all, an infinite being. Yet despite all of this time spent in study, Niv had no idea what to expect when her moment came to hitch a ride on the time-stream back to 1987.
What lay on the other side of that hard wall between future and past had been, up until that moment, entirely theoretical.
Niv felt unusually tense as she strapped herself into the rig, and awaited that distinctive sound the time-machine made when it flung its swimmers into the stream. She had heard that sound millions of times before, back when it was Niv and Nicks running this facility; back when the project was first stood-up. But things had changed since that time. Decisions had been made by her and others, positions had been taken.
Then the trouble had occurred and she was cast out. An enemy of the state.
No-Nonsense, Nicks’ super clever, super-computer, was saying something to Niv, but she couldn’t make it out over the sound of space-time warming up to receive her. It was probably something about her hair, she thought.
No-Nonsense loved Niv’s hair. And this was kind of weird, because Niv was completely bald.
Niv took the time to appreciate the slight feeling of butterflies in her stomach as the rig pitched around slightly looking for the correct trajectory into the Everywhen. The time-machine, which had been named Altar, was coming close to reaching the end of its improbable calculations. As it did so, the softs whirs, become a hum, and the hum was fast becoming a full pitched roar.
And then it happened.
A sensation came over her unlike any she had felt before. It was cosmic.
The universe lurched to the left, while Niv lurched to the right. One half of her face seemed not to know which way to lurch, so just sort of spun around a-bit trying not to look confused. With all the lurching and spinning, Niv couldn’t be sure whether there really was a fourth and fifth dimension opening up in front of her, or if she was finally having that mental breakdown she had been waiting for.
An electron’s-spin later, a familiar sound filled Niv’s mind. It was like the slurping noise an octopus makes when pulling its suckers from a wet pane of glass.
The time-stream gulped opened. She had never seen anything quite like it.
Nivs had watched the Time Altar operate in the past. When a time-traveller (or ‘swimmer’) was sent through Time Altar, back into the stream, the whole process happened so quickly that it was impossible to observe what the swimmer was actually seeing. Even high-speed photography had revealed nothing of the experience, but an intense flash of hot-wet light.
If she had to describe what she was seeing at that moment, Niv would have said it was like a swimming pool turned onto its edge so the water sat vertically upright. But the water within the pool was not calm, or peaceful, or particularly blue. It was closer to the contained fury of a hurricane, if the hurricane was in the middle of hell and made entirely of knives.
Then the sound again.
It was a thwap, and a squelch and a thump all at once. It was wet like a soggy sponge, and as violent as the crash of a tsunami against the side of a soufflé.
One second she was contemplating the series of stupid decisions that had led her to this moment and the next she was flicked through space time, like a needle through jelly.
For what seemed like an eternity, the thick liquid of time filled her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. She felt submerged in the tangible matter of space, kicked around in the current. Pulled, scared and confused straight into the rip.
She stopped fighting. Let the current take her out into the Everywhen.
When Niv emerged from the stream, something wasn’t right.
She couldn’t quite put her finger on it at first.
There was a winter storm raging around her. This was not great, but it wasn’t what was making her nervous. The rain whipped and stung her face, she was finding it hard to breath, and the weather was intense and unyielding. This too was obviously not ideal, but there was still something weird happening to her body. Something very wrong.
That’s when Niv began to fall.
For some reason, which was beyond her cognitive capacity right at that minute, she was eleven thousand meters above a rather quaint looking parcel of homes in Sydney’s western suburbs. Once she’d realised her situation, she began to panic, which she was vaguely aware she should not be doing.
Gravity was really starting to get a grip on her.
She twisted uncontrollably with nothing but a few gusts of wind for purchase. She tried to stop panicking. This made her panic more. So she tried to panic more, but this just made things worse. She reached for her instrument panel, and confirmed she was falling. No help there.
If nothing else works, she thought, find a good distraction.
Scientists call it space-time, because you can’t really separate the two. It’s no good just wanting to go back in time. The when is only half the problem. You also need to know where in time you want to go. Say I want to travel back a thousand years and end up at the the Colosseum in Ancient Rome. The problem with landing at such a specific point, is that the earth is spinning on its axis, and rotating around the sun, which is itself rotating around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. And the Milky Way galaxy is careening, at break neck speeds, through space, into the unknown and quite infinite depths of the Universe. This is to say, that the relative position of the Colosseum between today and a thousand years ago, takes some calculating. Otherwise you risk missing it by a few million miles and land up in the middle of a sun, or worse still in the vacuum of space.
At least she wasn’t inside of a sun, she thought. Being impervious to everything doesn’t mean you can’t feel pain. And no one wants to live forever in the middle of sun.
No problem, Niv thought.
No-Nonsense had just gotten the calculation a tiny bit off. What’s a few thousand meters when compared to a few billion miles.
She could make this work.
So with that, she accelerated towards the ground with a sense of inevitable purpose. She was able to right herself and terminate the twisting motion that was making her nauseated. And within a few seconds, she had picked a nice patch of grass to “land” in. The air flung some more hair into her eyes and mouth. The storm jostled her around a bit. But that was okay. After a few billion years of existence, Niv was hardly a stranger to falling from high places.
This.
Would.
Be.
Fine.
As she was convincing herself of just how fine things would be, a distinct squelch sound filled the roaring air. A strong concussive force blew her immediately off course, as another swimmer bounced out of the time stream, and careened into Niv, tangling the two of them together in an awkward terminal-velocity-dance.
“Hi,” Niv said to the woman who appeared from nowhere and with whom she was suddenly face-to-face. She expected to see people from her time. They were all coming back to this exact moment for reasons which will become clear.
But she hadn’t expected to meet them mid-air.
The oddest thing happened then. As they held on to each-other, for a want of anything better to hold on to, the two women recognised each-other. Niv had seen this woman before but could not place the familiar face. Maybe it was the terrifying drop or the lack of context, but she couldn’t figure out who this person was, except to say, it was someone important to the story.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
The falling woman had no such lapse in memory. She knew exactly who Niv was.
“You traitorous bitch!” The woman yelled, as she pulled back one arm, fist clenched, and punched Niv directly in the nose. It hurt. The Timeless are super strong, and even though the woman must have known she couldn’t really damage Niv (and vice versa), it was the thought that counted.
Niv knew this. The woman knew this.
“Eight thousand meters,” Niv’s instrument sung-out chirpily. “If you have a parachute you should engage it now.”
“Do I know you?” Niv yelled back to the Timeless woman, as the two began to wrestle in mid-air, plummeting towards the Earth’s surface.
Any hope Niv had of keeping course - toward the softish landing zone she had selected - was promptly fading. The pushed away from each other for a second, each trying to sort out what to do with the other.
Niv had obviously been prepared for battle with other Timeless. There was going to be lots of unpleasant encounters from here on in. She was prepared to incapacitate, reset and generally punish anyone who tried to stop her. But she had not been prepared for a mid-air skirmish. At least not immediately. She hadn’t even had the chance to check her watch.
“Six thousand meters. ”
The woman was trying to reach for something in her belt. Niv was trying to reach for something in hers. Both realising what the other was attempting to do, they each tangled together again, grappled clumsily and began pulling at each-other’s limbs and hair for a while in a manner which could only be described as embarrassingly uncoordinated.
These crazy manoeuvres yielded little in the way of results.
“Four thousand meters.”
Niv had a multitude of weapons on her person. It was part of the territory. All of those weapons were quite useful against her invulnerable new friend: reset buttons, quantum restraints, electro-kinetic stringers, neutron claps, and a proton disruptor. The disruptor could incapacitate even the strongest Timeless and leave them with a pretty bad headache after a few minutes of a pretty bad unconsciousness. But no matter what she did to get to these instruments, the Timeless woman managed to thwart her efforts.
As she approached the ground, which was occupying more and more of their field of view, all Niv could do was more of what she had been doing.
“Two thousand meters.”
The women fought and tumbled. They righted themselves for a moment. Then, deciding to fight some more, they tumbled and summersaulted again.
Niv wondered if the impact would hurt. The woman wondered if it would hurt.
Neither had long to wait to find out.
“Five hundred meters.You may wish to brace yourself.”
“One hundred meters. This will hurt.”
The ground was now so close, she could smell wet grass, smoke from a chimney a few houses down, and…
“Zero meters,” her instruments added uselessly.
The women collided with the roof. They hit with the brute force of a tonne of concrete on a wedding-cake. The red tiles of the roof (one of the roofs Nivs had been trying to avoid in fact) yielded beneath their bodies. They proceed to ram through things in this order; tile, wood, plasterboard, wood again, a void, a bed, more wood, another void, a solid coffee table, and finally some pretty irritated floorboards before coming to a dusty stop in the middle of a living room somewhere in Fairfield Heights. Electromagnetism is greater than gravity.
It was dark in the room. A few candles flickered, on a corner table, in spite of the destruction.
Liz (Paul’s mum), Paul, Ari and June could do nothing but stare at the two women who had just smashed through their ceiling into their living room.
“We need to get an alarm,” Liz said more to herself than anyone else.
The women, not missing a single beat, got straight up, and resumed their battle. This time, with the ground beneath her, Niv was able to get to her weapons just before the other woman could.
With the practised flick of her wrist, and a single blast from her proton disruptor, the strangely familiar woman was flung messily into the brick fire-place, and was down for the count; at least temporarily.
After slapping the restraints onto the Timeless woman’s hands, Niv was finally able to collect her thoughts, take in her surroundings and check her panoply of instruments, and gauges and dials. After taking a moment to really absorb the last few minutes of her day, she was surprised to notice two things.
One: The Timeless woman she had just restrained was the spitting image of the woman now looking directly at her from across the room. The restrained woman sprawled out on the floor, and the standing woman now shielding three children from Niv’s view, were one and the same.
Two: Just to the left of the standing woman - hiding behind her right arm - stood the boy she was here to find.
Paul Atimo.
It all came slowly back to her.
In the historical records, which spoke of the boy named Paul, there had been a single photo of the boy’s mother. The photo, if it can be called that, was a scan of a scan of a polaroid, further obscured by shadow and blurred by time. It was found, amongst the other historical records relating to Paul, in a bunker that had been shielded from the many blasts which occurred between then and now. But that picture, which she had seen countless times was definitely of this woman.
And here she was in the flesh - twice.
Nicks had told her things like this were going to happen in the stream. Coincidence, chance occurrences, an excess of luck (good or bad). Coincidence Nicks had always argued, was just the waste product of space-time. It’s a trick of circumstance, like an oasis in the desert. There but not there. Coupled and uncoupled.
The family did not move. Niv did not move.
Before anyone else had a chance to speak, Niv did.
“I need him,” she said, pointing at the little boy, who seemed the least confused of the group.
…
I remember this part.
I remember my mouth hinging open for what felt like 10 minutes. I could smell ozone, and water and dust wafting in through the hole in our roof and the divot in our floor.
“Was this written in the leaves?” I asked Niv stupidly, long before I ever knew her name.
No one spoke for around one second or three hours. Time is funny, as I think you may be starting to realise. Then Niv said something that made no sense to me at the time.
“Paul. You’re the main character and I need you to come with me. Nothing else matters. Okay?”
My mum had been worried since the whole radio thing had happened. I think she imagined someone was jamming our communications. Dad had been military, had described these things to us in the past. But Mum had imagined the Russians were invading, not Niv, the nice monster, who wanted to take her child away from her.
Mum looked down at the woman Niv had shot at and tied up. This woman had her face. Mum looked at the strange weapon in Niv’s hand.
“Like hell you’re taking my son anywhere you crazy person.”
Niv raised her weapon, with absolutely no intention of using it.
“See that woman down there?” Niv asked mum rhetorically. “That’s you.”
Niv paused for a second for effect and then continued. “In around two years from now, the human race fracked it up. Badly. We created a genetic disease that made us completely impervious to everything. No way to die. Do you get what I’m saying?”
Mum didn’t but Niv continued.
“After more years than your little head can contemplate, we figured out how to swim back through the stream of time to here. This moment. This time in this space, when we weren’t so hard to kill.”
Mum looked between her doppelgänger on the floor, and the woman with gun.
“It has become their holy purpose to find, and destroy earlier version of themselves…” Niv said the next bit with terrifying clarity, “…to end their lives so that they may finally die. And that one right there,” she said pointing at the Timeless version of my mother, “is here to kill you and your family. And she may not be the last one coming,” she finished, pointing between Ari and June.
Outside the sounds of the storm were being outmatched by the wet sounds of swimmers materialising into 1987 with deadly purpose.
The Timeless, which was the name Niv’s people had given themselves after the great incident of 1993, had taken an almost insane number of years to discover time travel. But they had done it. Their discovery was not perfect. It had a number of strange limitations that to this day are beyond the brightest minds in the world. The strangest amongst these barriers, was that no matter how many variations they attempted, they could only travel back to a single time in space.
1987.
…
Niv didn’t have time for this. Which was strange because time was usually all she had.
Timeless Liz was starting to rouse. Without the slightest hesitation, Niv attached a reset button to the Timeless Liz’s forehead, hit the return key, and initiated the pullback. With a satisfying pop, Timeless Liz was thrust back into the rip of the stream with an unholy thwack, never to be seen in this space-time again.
“We need to get out of here now.”
For reasons Liz didn’t quite comprehend, she lined her children up and gave them each their little school backpacks, and little yellow raincoats. She filled those backpacks with as much food as she could. June cried, and Ari comforted her. She got her own jacket and a backpack and filled it with water bottles and food, and followed Niv outside her front door, into the storm, and the unimaginably horrifying rain of the Timeless, crashing into the ground all around them.
It was as though a giant paw had wrapped itself around their family, and their fates were out of their own hands.
Moments later, the Timeless versions of Ari and June materialised inside their home, full of bloody purpose. There was no one home.
The apocalypse was now and it was approaching dinner time. And as everyone knows, dinner is the second most important meal of the day.
Footnote: There's something you need to know about the Altar. Due to temporal mechanistics too complicated for the written word, once one travelled back in time, one could never again take that journey. Time Travel leaves an indelible mark.
It’s a One Time pass.