A Matter of Time

Not all of us get a second chance...

Kelly’s pulse quickened as she raced inside the house. There was a high, acrid stench of ozone in the air, and a strip of her lawn was charred black for about six feet.
Ozone. Burn skids. A Tachyon-rich FTL field had developed here. Someone had traveled through time, and either started or stopped at this point. After all the work together, after all the heartaches and struggles they had gone through together, Effrin went through the Slipstream early.

The son of a bitch had tested the Vindicator without her.

“Motherfucker!” Kelly slammed the door with enough force to shatter a couple of panes, then proceeded to stomp her way towards the lab. She found Effrin in the foyer adjacent to it.

Dr. Hanse Effrin was sitting in his leather chair, his hands quietly folded in front of him. There was an untouched scotch on the table to his right.

Kelly walked up and knocked the scotch halfway across the room before slapping Effrin in the face. He didn’t make a move to intercept her.

“I thought we were together in every way, Ef! That’s what we said! No secrets, no lies, you fucking promised!

“And I meant every word, Kel.” Effrin’s voice was low, gravid with a morose tone.

“Bullshit! You went through the Slipstream alone!”

“no.”

“Don’t fucking lie to me! Not now! I can’t take this bullshit!”

Effrin raised his head and nodded to Kelly’s left, her angry red handprint setting up shop on his cheek. For the first time, Kelly looked through the lab doorway. It took her eyes a second to adjust to the sight, and a bit longer for her mind to register it.

The Vindicator was destroyed, a pile of twisted metallic rubbish bleeding colorful fluids from the severed hoses dangling from it. Various bits of jagged framework jutted out like some medieval torture device.

There would be no time travel now. It was gone.

Kelly’s knees buckled, and the ground rushed up to meet her. All those years of work, the research, the risks they took…!

“Hon?” Effrin’s voice carried from the adjacent room “Are you okay? Do you want a drink?”

“You son of a bitch” she snarled “You selfish asshole. I can’t believe you could be so childish as to go into the Slipstream without me and then destroy my dreams of seeing it as well!” Kelly stayed on the ground, sobbing. This wasn’t happening, it COULDN’T be happening, oh God…

Effrin sighed, came over and sat beside her on the floor. “Hey, you.”

“Fuck you. Bastard.”

Effrin shook his head slowly. “You’ve got it wrong. I didn’t go through time.”

“Don’t tell me that! Don’t even try! I saw the Tachyon burn outside!” She burst into tears again, and Effrin waited patiently beside her.

“Kelly, listen to me. Do you remember back in 2005? When you first got here?”

Kelly didn’t answer.

“Things were pretty fucked up weren’t they?” Effrin reached for her hand “I was pretty fucked up.”

Kelly swallowed dryly and nodded her head. At first his eccentricities had worried her, and she had considered finding another lab to work in. But Effrin paid well above the normal scale and she needed the money after a messy divorce.

“After Shannon, I was crushed. No, I was fucking DONE. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t even think. I had the wind taken out of my sails for a long time. I didn’t want anything to do with the outside world.” Effrin paused and looked at Kelly “That’s when you applied for my assistant position. You remember?”

Kelly remembered all right. Like all great romances, what had eventually developed between Kelly and Effrin crept in undetected at first, like a cat burglar. Small things, hardly worth the trouble really, a cup of coffee here, a birthday card there. Inconsequential gestures. Simple office stuff, safe and trivial. But the three remaining lab assistants began to notice that they had outlasted the previous eight for months now, and Dr. Effrin hadn’t screamed at them in weeks.

Dinner together became a thing of convenience for Kelly and Effrin, since they both worked long hours. No one was more surprised than she was when her trembling hand found its way to his knee under the table. Even more surprising was when he covered it with his.

Not that it had been easy. It had been a constant uphill fight to achieve and maintain their relationship. Kelly always felt like they were living with a ghost, a ghost whose name was well-known to her.

Shannon.

The bitch.

The good-time girl with big tits and wandering eyes. Kelly had signed on to Effrin’s lab about a month after what the other lab wretches called “the Shannon Effect” behind Effrin’s back. When she had taken up with another man, only Effrin was surprised. He had never seen coming what everyone else saw as clear as day. Why she had strung him along for so long afterwards was anybody’s guess. But no one denied the psychological impact it had on Effrin.

He had gone from cocky lab manager to psychotic whip-cracker with a Napoleon complex overnight. Always sticking to a reliable timetable for work, Effrin began to stay at the lab, working all day, all night, and straight through the next day as well. Sometimes he slept where he fell, and the assistants left quietly.

The turnover for lab wretches alone trebled in a single month, and his sudden temper tantrums became the stuff of legend. Progress on the Vindicator had slowed, slowed, and until Kelly had signed on, work had ground almost to a standstill.

“Without the events of the past 15 years, I wouldn’t be who I am today. Shannon was a big part of that. Without having gone through THAT relationship, I wouldn’t have been ready for you. Oh, I still would have discovered the time Slipstream, and I still would have invented the Vindicator. But I would have missed out on the evolving I did as a human being the past decade.”

“I don’t understand” Kelly said, “Evolving as a human? What…what is this about?”

Effrin smiled at her. “I wouldn’t be this version of me, the one that has learned all the life lessons from bitter relationships and difficult times. I had to go through the bitter waters before I reached the sweet. But without that bitterness I would be the arrogant, thoughtless, selfish son of a bitch I was back before you met me.”

“And we would never be together.”

Effrin closed his eyes and swallowed hard, and Kelly notice for the first time that he was trembling. He was coming down from some sort of emotional crest. What the hell was this?

“If I go back in time and change that relationship, I change everything else. You and I will go separate ways, and we will be different people. This-” he spread his arms out to encompass the living room “will never have happened.”

Effrin stood up and walked over to Kelly, holding her by her shoulders. “There are some consequences that are unacceptable in the name of science or discovery. There are some prices that I am unwilling to pay. Losing you is one of them.”

He looked into the lab, and a smirk crossed his face. “Testing the Slipstream would have been my biggest mistake. There is nothing in the past that needs changing. I don’t need to lose you to realize the good thing I have now. I don’t need to go back to Shannon to “fix” anything. The Vindicator is destroyed, but we still have our work on the Slipstream. That’s enough for me. Let some other fool change history. I have all the time I need right here.”

Effrin took her in his arms, and opened his eyes slowly when they pulled apart. “I don’t know about you” he said “but I could use a drink.” He headed towards the bar, stocked with French wines.

“Wait a minute.” Kelly’s voice carried a tone of command, and Effrin paused in his tracks, but didn’t turn around.

“There WAS residue of an FTL Field here when I drove up. There’s still a Tachyon burn strip on the lawn. You can’t deny it, the evidence is there. You went through time.”

“No, I didn’t.” Effrin turned to look her with haunted eyes “Another me did, though.”

For Caren