The Nature of Time
"Explain," ordered Jo, exchanging glances with Zane.
It was strange to feel allied with Lupo against the others, especially when one of the others was himself. But his unease was reflected in her wary look. Zane knew he could be insensitive sometimes, maybe most of the time. Jo was perceptive, though – had she picked up some clue that he'd missed?
The four from the future exchanged their own glances, and by some kind of silent tacit agreement, deferred to Henry.
"It's complicated," he said, rubbing his chin. "But we should start with the science."
"Sounds good." Zane was always happy to begin at science.
"If we must," Jo muttered. She'd probably rather begin with shooting something if she could, Zane thought.
"S.A.R.A.H., can you -" Henry gestured, and S.A.R.A.H. promptly responded by producing a holographic whiteboard in the center of the room. "Thank you, S.A.R.A.H."
"My pleasure, Dr. Deacon," the house responded.
"We used to think that time was supposed to be fixed," Henry said, drawing a line across the space, and then pointing at it. "A straight line. Start here, you end here, experiencing everything in logical order. Early time travel experiments with the tachyon accelerator seemed to prove this theory." He continued drawing lines and then started adding equations. "Changing the past created temporal anomalies that caused a fundamental quantum instability. We thought it demonstrated the effects of two alternate realities colliding."
"We?" Jo said pointedly before Zane had a chance to respond.
"Yes," Henry sighed. "I was involved in those experiments. And in the end, I agreed with the conclusion that alternate realities could not exist in the same space-time continuum. We – well, the changes were reversed, and the instability resolved itself. It was as if the alternate future never existed."
"But Novikov's self-consistency principle should have prevented you from changing the past to begin with," Zane protested.
"Novikov was wrong," Fargo interrupted. "It's entirely possible to change the past. We know that much for sure."
"Yes," Henry agreed, continuing to scribble equations in the holographic space. "You will have just learned this, Zane, but Carter, Alison, Jo, Fargo and I accidentally traveled back in time to 1947. While we were there, Alison saved the life of a man named Adam Barlow. By my understanding, that should have caused a quantum instability that could have destroyed the universe. When it didn't…" He shrugged, standing back and looking at the equations he'd written.
"What a minute, what?" Jo jumped to her feet. "We could have destroyed the universe and you didn't mention it?"
Henry glanced at her over his shoulder and smiled. "There was nothing you could have done. Until and unless the instability manifested itself, there was no reason to worry you. And the instability never showed. I decided that Barlow had only been in danger because of our presence. If we hadn't been there, he wouldn't have been in the car accident that almost killed him. Alison saving him didn't change history, it preserved it."
"But we still changed history," Jo protested. "When we got back, things were –" She glanced at Zane before continuing, "—different."
"Yes, we did," Henry acknowledged. "And that could have been bad. But it wasn't." Zane was frowning at the holographic whiteboard, trying to see where Henry was going with his extremely complex calculations.
"Speak for yourself," Jo muttered, turning her head away.
"Well, not universe-destroying bad," Fargo answered her.
"I was forced to recognize that the alternate realities theory didn't work, at least not as we had initially thought," Henry continued.
"That is some really weird math," Zane said. He was ignoring the others, their words just background noise distracting him from the fascinating physics puzzle of Henry's equations. "Are you violating the uncertainty principle? So you're saying that the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong?"
"Whoa, whoa." Future-Zane had been sitting on the arm of the sofa, next to Future-Jo, talking to her in a quiet voice, but at Zane's words, he stood and ordered, "S.A.R.A.H, erase." The holo-space disappeared immediately.
Henry was staring at Zane. "You couldn't have gotten that from that!" he protested. "I barely began the equations."
"Damn it, Henry," Future-Zane complained. "You knew you needed to be careful."
Future-Jo buried her face in her hands as if she didn't want to watch, while Fargo shook his head.
Henry sighed. "I thought I was being careful. This makes the memory-wipe even more imperative."
"Memory-wipe!" Zane took a step backward. No way was anyone messing with his memory. He was anti-anything that could damage his brain and a memory wipe undoubtedly involved killing brain cells.
"Relax," his future self snapped. "We can't do it to you; you have to do it to yourself."
"Like that's gonna happen!" Zane snapped back.
"Zane." Jo put a restraining hand on his arm. "We need to hear them out. Destroying the universe? It'd be bad."
Zane scowled at her, before finally nodding. "Fine, I'll listen. But I bet you didn't wipe your memory," he added, glaring at his future self.
Future-Zane shook his head slightly, "No, I didn't. Haven't. But if I can point out the obvious, when you wipe your memory, you wipe mine, too."
Hmm. Interesting point. In fact…Zane's eyes narrowed as he considered. How would that work exactly? "Can I see those equations again?" he asked.
"No," came the almost instant response from Fargo, Future-Zane, and Future-Jo. Henry shrugged.
"You'll figure out the details eventually," he said. "But for right now, let's just suppose that time is a lot more fluid and malleable than anyone ever believed it could be. It can be changed, and it has been changed. Repeatedly. Do you remember Leo Weinbrenner?"
Zane tried to think if he'd ever met anyone by that name, but Jo answered before he could. "Of course. The temporal physicist who used indigo light to send time backwards. That was how Stark…" her words trailed off and Zane nodded in recognition.
"From Leo's work, we learned that time can repeat," Henry went on. "Or rather that we can repeat our experience of time. What we now realize is that time is more like a sphere than a line. Our perception of it is linear: our consciousness experiences reality in a sequential fashion. But time exists outside of our consciousness, and on a grand quantum level, the events that we perceive of as happening are largely, but not entirely, irrelevant to the universe."
"Although not to us," sighed Future-Jo.
"So have you been screwing around with the timeline?" Zane asked, a little shocked. Scientists in Eureka didn't always follow safety protocols to the letter, but changing the events of the past seemed a little reckless, even for the craziest of them.
"No," Henry replied, glancing at Future Zane. "Not exactly."
"You have." Future-Zane's reply was accompanied by a wry grin. "Repeatedly. Or rather, I suppose, we have." He nodded at Zane's startled look.
"That sounds so like you," Jo said, a hint of bitter in her voice.
Future Jo stood and slid her arm around her husband's waist. "He should have included us in that we," she said gently. "I've been along for every trip."
Zane noticed the flicker of guilt that crossed future Zane's face but almost immediately set the information aside as he realized that Jo was defending him. Not his Jo, she was blaming him, no surprise there. But future Jo was on his side. That was nice. He liked that.
He looked at his future self. "Can we – " he started, half-jokingly, but before he could get the word 'trade' past his lips, his future self was interrupting him.
"Not a chance," he said, laughing. "And that thing you're going to want to say in about ten minutes? Don't say it. It's not worth the pain."
"Okay, that's spooky. You've really lived through all of this before?" Zane couldn't help being incredulous. Eureka could be weird but all the laws of physics were being overturned in front of his eyes.
"More or less," Future Zane sobered. "Not everything is the same. There are differences, some minor, some more serious."
"Like what?" Jo asked.
Future Jo leaned into Future Zane and his arm tightened around her. For a moment, she pressed her lips together as if reluctant to let the words go, but then she sighed and started, "Well, Jaime shouldn't have powered up your bridge today: it wasn't supposed to happen for another several months. And then Caiti—," she paused and there was a catch in her voice.
"—is behind the couch," Zane interrupted before she could continue. "She probably needs a snack or something, right?" Didn't little kids need to eat often? He thought they probably did, but it wasn't why he'd stopped Future-Jo from saying whatever it was that she was going to say. Something about her expression reminded him of overhearing his parents once talking about sending him away to school, and it wasn't a pleasant memory.
Future Jo sent him a look, one that mingled relief and exasperation. "Caiti," she said firmly. A dark head popped up from behind the couch and blue eyes glared at Zane.
"Amy," Future Jo said, raising her voice a little. The teenager stepped out of the kitchen, half-smiling, resigned at having been caught.
"Isabel," Future Jo continued. There was no answer. Her eyes narrowed. "Isabel," she repeated, louder. Still no response. "S.A.R.A.H., where—," Jo started, and the door to the closet slid open and another teenager, this one with Jo's brown eyes and long dark hair, stepped out, her face sulky.
"Jaime and Zander," Future Jo's voice was firm, not quite angry. The two boys – young men, really, Zane corrected himself, realizing that they were taller than him – stepped into the room from the hallway they'd disappeared down earlier. Their identical faces wore identical sheepish looks.
"You know better, all of you." Future Jo snapped. "I'm going to throw every one of you in jail for the night. See how you like that."
"Aw, Mom," one of the twins protested. "It's too crowded with all of us there."
"Not all in the jail," Amy complained. "Zander snores."
"Dibs on the cell at Mom's office," Isabel said hastily.
"You… throw your children in jail?" Jo asked her other self almost delicately, eyebrows raised.
"HIS children?" Future Jo gestured with her thumb at the man with his arm around her, who grinned cheerfully at Jo.
"Oh. Good point." Jo looked away.
Zane couldn't stop himself from smiling at his other self. HIS children. With the Enforcer. And they'd taken after him as much as after her. Surreptitiously, he pinched himself, a hard little twist of skin. Nope, not dreaming.
"All of you, back to the house," Future Jo ordered. "And that includes you two," she added to the boys.
"Mom!" protested a twin.
"Pack a bag, and take your sisters home." Future Jo moved away, rounding up her offspring.
"When the twins turned 18, they moved into S.A.R.A.H.," Future Zane explained quietly to Jo and Zane. "Zoe had been living here, but S.A.R.A.H. wasn't really big enough after…"
"Zane," Fargo interrupted. "Shut up. Remember? Trying not to violate causality?"
"Oh, right." Future Zane scratched his head, looking a little sheepish himself. "Sorry," he apologized to Zane and Jo. "But the less you know, the better."
"The better for what?" Zane asked. Or should he be asking better for whom? Time travel, large favors, saving the world, memory wipes, some incredible physics – it was almost too much to absorb at once, even for him.*
"We're hoping to try to restore the timeline," Henry answered.
"Well, not quite to its original configuration," Fargo said. "A few improvements won't go amiss."
"For that purpose," Henry continued, ignoring Fargo's interruption. "The less information you have, the more likely it is that we can break the time loop without creating a paradox that will threaten the space-time continuum."
"Not the whole continuum," Future Zane protested.
"Right. Just our place in it," Fargo said, rolling his eyes. "Like, just the important stuff."
"The universe goes on," Future Zane shrugged. "That's important."
"If none of us exist in it anymore, does it actually matter if the planets still rotate?" Fargo responded. It felt like an old argument, one that they'd had many times before.
"Guys," Henry sighed. "We've agreed to disagree on that subject. Can we focus?"
"Right," Future Zane said. "So here's the important part: the Einstein-Grant bridge devices don't connect to random wormholes, they connect to themselves. When Grant first turned on the bridge device in 1947, nothing happened. And the first time you turned on your bridge device, nothing happened."
"The first time?" Jo asked. "I didn't know you'd used it before," she added, in an accusing tone, directing her words to Zane.
He shook his head. "I hadn't. I'd barely finished building it. When we turned it on together, just a few hours ago, that was the first time."
Future Zane shook his head. "No. We've got no way of knowing how many times it's really been, but that wasn't the first."
Zane just stared, then asked, "Groundhog Day? Are we living in Groundhog Day?"
Future Jo, after a brief and quiet argument by the door, had rejoined them, and she said, dryly, "More like Groundhog Decades. But yeah, that pretty much sums it up."
"And we'd like the future back," Fargo said. "Which is why we need your help."
.
*Or, as my kid said, "Only a super-genius could follow this plot, Mom." My apologies to everyone who's lost! I hope it still managed to be a fun read.