Eight months had gone by between Rolf’s first contact and this live visit with him standing on Steve and Kayla’s doorstep. Eight months for his wayward couple, that is, not for him. For him it was only moments of calculations and preparation. Not that they weren’t hard work, it took more than they would ever know for him to be able to plot a new visit to them that was not only chronologically later from their perspective, but also stable for him. Of course, no visit he could possibly make would be stable for them. As far as time was concerned, a jump into their offshoot timeline was an additional variable that time had to adjust to, which was only going to impact them later, just like everything else. His existence was stable, protected in its finite bubble. But it was also very temporary, and every moment he’d stood there on their porch while they stared at him was a moment he wasn’t going to get back, and he really didn’t want to do this again – he was lucky he was able to get to them a second time at all. He had to admit, between what he knew of Steve Johnson as a subject and the phone call he’d had with him just a short time ago on his own body clock, Rolf was surprised at the deer-in-the-headlights look the man and his wife were now giving him. He’d expected a lot more bluster.
“Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, you know who I am.” This first vocal introduction stunned Kayla out of her frozen state, and she quickly pulled her robe very tightly around herself before refastening the tie. This modesty sailed right over Rolf’s head, as he had only one thing on his mind: Disclosure. “The time I have available can be measured in hours not days, so may I please ask you to let me in.” It was not a request and not, therefore, phrased as one.
Kayla’s face was a stunned mask, but Steve’s was hard with distrust and resentment. He fanned his right arm across Kayla so as to keep her behind him, then he stepped both of them back allowing Rolf to enter, which he immediately did.
“Where may we speak?” Rolf asked.
“The livingroom,” Steve motioned ahead of them, indicating he should go and they would follow.
No pleasantries were exchanged. No beverage was offered. No small talk was made. The little man sat down lightly but with purpose and motioned for Steve and Kayla to sit, his demeanor very much like this was his own livingroom and they were the guests. Rolf was a brilliant man, and he knew it, thus his arrogance preceded him.
“We’ll stand,” Steve said from the doorway. Rolf saw immediately that the distrust was thick and that this was a show of the highest level of protection for the man’s wife and baby, whom he assumed must be sleeping up the stairs now under Steve’s protection.
“You operate under the false assumption that I pose a threat to your daughter.”
“That’s right.”
“As I said, the assumption is false, and you are mistaken.”
“Says the man who erases people’s identities and convinces them they’re someone else for sport.”
“Not sport, Mr. Johnson,” Rolf spat, offended at the qualification, “science. Science!”
Steve made a very unpleasant sound as Kayla quietly pulled the binder from the small desk in the corner. Then she came about to sit on the couch facing Rolf in his chair. “We’re wasting time,” she said calmly but very pointedly. She knew Steve would sit on his own terms so she didn’t push him yet. She did, however, begin talking. “You are the one sending us through time. That’s what you said when you called us last year, that you’re the one.”
“Yes, that is correct.” Last year, he marveled. The relativity hit him with profound wonder.
“Why? Why are you doing this to us?” There it was. It was the question that they’d been asking themselves and any God that would hear them for nearly two years. Now, finally, they were going to get an answer. Only that answer didn’t come as quickly as they wanted. Rolf had his own agenda.
“Mrs. Johnson, the why is unimportant, what’s important is—”
“How dare you!” She could feel Steve seething in the doorway, but she was the one verbalilzing it for the both of them. “Do you know what this is?” Kayla shoved the binder into Rolf’s lap and narrowed her accusatory eyes at him. “It’s the history of what’s happened to us.” Rolf cast off her tone as insignificant, but he eyed the binder with great interest. “The last day that we spent in our normal timeline was March 2, 2009. It was an ordinary day that had nothing spectacular or odd or particularly different happen.” Rolf cocked his head as she opened the binder she’d just shoved into his lap, stopping at the very first tab. “This is our first jump,” Kayla continued. “Every detail we can remember about it is there. Every one of our jumps are in there, and every one is painstakingly detailed. And do you know what we figured out?” Rolf opened several other tabs and scanned the pages extremely quickly, taking in what had been documented, but he did not reply to her. “Nothing! Nothing about why this is happening to us and when the jumps are going to come!”
When Rolf didn’t deign to answer her, she got very angry and pulled the binder back into her possession. Rolf looked back up at her and crossed his arms, not in defiance but in real interest. He had an agenda, but this woman was smarter than he gave her credit for and was very interested in what she was now saying.
“We’ve jumped 23 times. We’ve had dreams we can’t explain.”
“Dreams? What sort of dreams?” Kayla ignored him.
“We’ve had to make hard choices about making connections, and when we finally do we get ripped away without warning and have to start all over again!”
“Yes, I didn’t anticipate that that would be unpleasant.”
“Unpleasant?” Steve was incredulous. “You were expecting it to be a goddamned picnic?”
“We’ve changed our timeline over and over again but the changes never stick. Every time we jump the whole thing resets to our original past, even though we made changes. On the phone you said we were killing butterflies, but the changes are always contained in that jump.”
“Stepping on them,” Rolf corrected, “and you’re quite wrong about the containment. “It’s a theory called–”
“We know what it is,” Steve interjected with disgust, but Kayla went on quickly before her husband could become as combative as she already was.
“Well we’ve stepped on thousands of them but every time we jump it’s like the butterflies never existed. Like we’d never made any of those changes.”
“That’s right. Each jump starts from the original point in your past, and you create a new offshoot timeline. That does not mean that the butterfly effect is not impacting the slipstream.”
“Come again?” Steve deadpanned.
“Please, if you will simply allow me to explain.” Rolf was back to wanting to get this back on track and was frustrated that he wasn’t getting his way quite so easily.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve looking all annoyed right now when we’ve been waiting almost two years and 23 separate destinations, some of them so disturbing that we’ll never get over it, when all we’ve wanted was for you to do just that – explain.” Kayla clutched her large binder, and Rolf saw the care with which all of it was created, not just the pages he’d scanned. He was too arrogant to look chagrined, but he did find some patience, knowing that this had been torture. Now Steve came from the doorway and stood behind his wife with his hands on her shoulders, and Rolf sighed as he rubbed at his forehead.
“Just start at the beginning,” Steve said in one of the gravest tones Kayla had ever heard him speak with. Grave and something else she wasn’t expecting. Apprehension. It discomfited her.
“I have allotted myself two hours to be in your home before it’s no longer safe.”
“From you jumping away?”
“No, that will happen tomorrow, I’ve learned how to control the duration. That is one of the things I must explain to you. The danger is in my employer finding out that I am here, because it will bring undo attention to you. In 2009 I no longer work for Stefano Dimera, but here in 1989 I do, and it is imperative that I am not missed.
Panic rose in them both. “Are you telling me that you came here knowing Dimera might follow?” Steve asked.
“I am telling you that I have gone to great lengths to plan this visit here, my own safety most at risk. Now, let me speak, and then I shall answer your questions.”
Steve was on edge, Kayla could feel it just from his hands on her shoulders. She wanted to help him, but first she needed someone to help her. She craned her neck to look up at him, and Steve couldn’t help but react to Kayla’s plaintive plea to sit with her. He felt compelled to go back to the doorway and position himself protectively between this man and their child, but instead he sat beside his wife. Only then did he feel just how high her anxiety was ratcheted up. It felt like she was wound up so tight that she would unravel into chaos with her next breath. The moment he sat down Kayla took his hand into her lap and held it there.
“Fine,” Steve said. “speak.” They didn’t move from their positions beside each other while Rolf explained. And he did start at the very beginning. It was maddening at first to stay quiet while the rat-looking little scientist explained how his myriad of scientific theories had never been taken seriously by the scientific community and that when he’d first come to work for Stefano Dimera in 1980 he knew he had a chance the mainstream community refused to give him. Their patience for Rolf’s blathering wore immediately thin, because none of that had anything to do with either of them. Only it did, and that became clearer as the man kept talking.
“Stefano’s agenda was to eradicate every member of the Brady family that had any kind of relevance.” Kayla stiffened. Steve felt it and squeezed her hand. “My job was to end those existences, wipe personalities, and do it without ending the physical life. Then … then re-create it in whatever image we saw fit to deposit within it.”
“My God,” Kayla whispered.
“This branch of neuroscience—”
“Neuroscience?” Steve spat. “Is that what you call playing God?”
“—was largely unexplored,” Rolf continued unfazed, “because I was never given the opportunity. Now I had it! I was finally allowed to test and prove my theory that a human person could be made into a blank slate after conception, indeed after maturity, then recreated. The scientific community was uninterested in what I knew I could achieve. Groundbreaking proofs, if only I could be taken seriously and given the experimental subjects. But no one would hear me. The ethics always got in the way, and the money to finance such experiments was insurmountable. Until Stefano found me. He gave me everything I would need. Endless money to conduct my experiments, and endless subjects to experiment on.”
Ethics … subjects … Kayla had started to shake at the memory of finding her husband in that horrible cell after having been forced to be one of those very unethical test subjects. Steve felt her shake but was helpless to calm her. He wasn’t doing so well, himself, realizing he’d just been referenced as a test subject.
“This hatred of Stefano for Shawn Brady was never something I understood, but quite frankly I never cared. Not then, and not now.”
“Son of a bitch,” Steve hissed.
“We do not have time for your judgment, I am a man of science. Stefano’s directive was very clear, the first victim was to be his brother, and I began imprinting him immediately to great success. Stefano had immense funding coming in through the art forgeries of the Princess and his brother, and I had successfully proven my theory! I wanted to publish it, show the scientists that had unduly dismissed me, but to do so would bring unwanted attention to the art forgeries. So my work went unrecognized … and I was devastated. The most important discovery since splitting the atom, and I would not get my recognition. You can’t imagine how it is to have your life’s work ignored. That was not my only theory, however, I had others. Namely time travel. But before I could begin work on that, Stefano ordered John Black and the princess separated, and suddenly I was forced to re-imprint him with your brother, Roman Brady’s, personality. And then another came to me, Hope Brady. Suddenly, years had gone by, and I found myself hopelessly stuck, unable to do … anything. I could not publish my revolutionary proofs, I could not fulfill my time travel experiments. I very much disliked my employer’s torture methods, but that was not my scope. My scope was simply to make the imprinting happen. You, Mr. Johnson, took much longer than most.
Steve felt sick as he remembered the conditioning he fought against with everything he had. The putrid smell, Kayla’s screams, and the other sensory torture that was used to force him into forgetting who he was. It wasn’t until the faked photos demonstrating a follow-through on “plan B” that he’d given up and allowed himself to forget them. To be … imprinted.
Steve’s eye was very hard and very dangerous. “You imprinted me? Into a soldier, you imprinted me?” For the first time, Rolf felt unsafe in the proximity of Steve Johnson.
“I did. Regretfully.” Kayla was so full of red hot anger and hatred that she couldn’t even cry. All she could do was continue twisting her husband’s hand inside of her own. “If it is any comfort, the intended subject was Bo Brady; you were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the decision was made by all of those involved to continue.
“Oh yes, such a comfort to know my brother was the intended subject.”
Rolf blinked. His social aptitude was low, and he realized now that this was no comfort at all. He opened and closed his mouth to try to smooth that over but quickly gave up and moved on. “On you my drug was used for the first time. As you know, Mr. Johnson, it was not completely effective.”
“No,” Steve seethed. “Not completely.”
“Why are you telling us any of this?” Kayla shouted this so abruptly that Steve jumped. “What does any of it have to do with taking us away from our family and sending us through time?”
“Because, Mrs. Johnson, you need to understand why I wanted to give you back what I’d taken.”
“You can’t ever give back what you’ve taken!” Steve said. “You took 16 years away from me, my wife, and my daughter!”
“And I wanted to give them back! Believe it or not, I am not a malicious man! I’m a selfish man, and I am bitter that my peers will not hear me. But I am simply the most brilliant scientist that has ever lived, that is a fact.” A chill went up Kayla’s spine at the similarity of that phrase to the one John often used. “They fear me because of it! But I never intended to inflict the pain that I learned comes with proving theories such as these. I knew there would be sacrifices, no great scientific discovery comes without sacrifice! But the reality of the pain I did not know. And Stefano never let me do anything more than develop methods of creating soldiers of the Phoenix. He provided vessels for me to erase and re-create, and that was all I was allowed to do. It was not until 2007 that I was able to break away and begin my time travel work.
“You’re a liar,” Steve said. “I was there in the mansion when you were working with him and Andre’ and that thug of theirs. When he took the liver of the only good thing he ever created, and then killed him! You remember that, you sick son of a bitch?! You remember killing our Benjy?!
Rolf’s stomach lurched with the truth of these words. “I wanted nothing to do with that! My job was not to kill people to prolong Stefano’s life, but as you know well, it is hard to get out from Dimera once he has you! You must believe me, my time was at an end there!”
“Bullshit! That son of his, Elvis, still thought I was controllable with the Tarot cards. You were still working for him then, I was there!”
Kayla had begun to cry now at the mention of Benjy’s murder, and Rolf knew he had to get this back on track. “Mr. Johnson, I can assure you, I was not involved with Benjamin’s death, only the transfer of his liver, as I was in my last days as Stefano’s employee. Repairing the injuries to John Black and imprinting him for the last time was my final project. I now work in a location Dimera has not yet ascertained, and it is very unlikely that he ever will. You were deprogrammed, and your mind was intact. You’d lost something I knew I could give back without damaging you, and I chose you for that reason!”
“What reason?!” Steve was up now, pacing back and forth and constantly glaring off into the foyer toward the stairs as if the glance in her direction would ensure Emily’s safety.
“To give you those 16 years back that Stefano made me take away! My first choice, admittedly wasn’t you, I wanted to utilize John Black. He’d been through so much practically since birth, and I wanted to give him time back that his brother stole, and now he is a paraplegic. But his brain has been imprinted so many times that I didn’t know if he’d survive the effects. But you were different. You missed 16 contiguous years of your proper life that otherwise would have been lived. I wanted to give them back to you, and I was confident that there would be no effect of the slipstream on your brain.”
“Now we’re back to the slipstream. What the f*ck is the slipstream?”
“It’s the foundation of your timeline, Mr. Johnson. The linear past that you have lived. It supports every one of the branches that are created when you jump. And this is why I am here so I can warn you about your actions here within the slipstream, because you are in very grave danger of never getting back to your proper timeline.”
“So, we might be … stuck … in this jump forever?” Kayla asked. Steve’s eye widened, because his wife’s voice was hopeful. My God, Sweetness, you don’t want to go home …
“No, Mrs. Johnson, you will most certainly jump from here. The danger is that you will never stop jumping at all and, therefore, never get back to where you left off so you can continue living your proper lives.” A sharp ache shot through Kayla’s heart at the confirmation that she would be leaving this timeline.
“Don’t you see, I wanted to give you back the years I’d taken. My intention was to send you on a nostalgic journey. That you’d jump regularly and be able to re-experience the youth of your shared lives together. But things started to go wrong. You were only supposed to jump to places that provided close physical proximity, but that stopped happening. The numbers I was getting back on you were only slightly off at first. But then my equipment was showing me that those numbers were not one-off flukes. The slipstream had become unpredictable, and soon you were jumping to time you hadn’t even shared as a couple, let alone in the same room. The formula was only for time you had shared together, but you had several jumps to unshared time. Then the slipstream became not just unpredictable, but unstable. And right now it’s dangerously unstable.”
“Because we’ve made changes, right?” Kayla cut to the chase. “You’re here to tell us to stop making changes and further damaging the timeline?”
“The slipstream holding it all together. Yes, exactly.”
Now Kayla found a very strong voice. She stood up and swayed back and forth, her robe making shushing sounds. “Dr. Rolf, we make changes every minute we’re breathing! You can’t possibly expect us to remember if we did or did not eat at this restaurant or that, or walk on which side of the street!”
“Yes, that is true.” Rolf did not get up with Steve and Kayla; he rightfully decided that his safest place was there in the chair. “This is why we experiment, to determine that which we do not yet know.”
“We are not a f*cking experiment!” Steve shouted, unable to control himself even for the sake of his sleeping daughter, who blissfully kept on sleeping. “We are human beings! What gives you the f*cking right?!”
“Science gives me the right!”
“Science?!” The entitlement of this man blew Steve’s mind. “Are you out of your mind?!”
“Most groundbreaking scientists were, indeed, out of their minds. But without them society would not progress, now, would it?”
“I didn’t know society needed time travel to progress,” Kayla said disdainfully.
“The same could be said at the time for the Theory of Relativity.” Kayla spat out a curse, and Steve laughed mirthlessly. “Everything began to change drastically in Cleveland, Ohio. That was when you began jumping on separate phases.”
“Out of sync, you mean? Yes, we figured that out already. I have that in the binder, here, we began jumping out of sync when we jumped away from Cleveland.” She opened the binder to that section but knew what it was they did without even looking. Steve saw it when the blush hit her cheeks.
“What is it you did there, it is imperative that I understand what so profoundly affected the stability and threw you into this mess.”
“Just our actions in Cleveland threw us into this … mess?”
“No, no, not at all. That was simply what started it. That change impacted the jump, which very likely led your actions there, which then impacted the next jump. You see, it’s a compounding causality, not just the one action.”
“So, you can’t see what we’re doing on our jumps?”
“Well, of course, I can’t. It’s not like a security camera, madam. I know the dates and where you’re supposed to be. I have no idea what you’re doing while you’re there. So, exactly what was the change you made in Cleveland?”
“I-I-I … I think we-e-e-e …”
“Nothing. Ain’t nothin’ Kayla and I did that you need to know about.”
“But, Mr. Johnson, this is important, your lives are dependent on it!”
“We had sex!” Kayla blurted, her gaze set on the corner of the room.
“Kayla!”
“More than a year before we did in the real timeline, but that’s because we’re married! We don’t feel any less married just because the destination our awareness have jumped to says we’re not! That’s the only thing that was different other than not knowing each other yet. Kind of, I mean we did – we’d met – but we weren’t – we didn’t know each – we – weren’t friends.” The blush was now ematating heat off the top of her head she was so flummoxed by it all. “We didn’t leave the apartment, take any phone calls, nothing. We had s-s-sex and spent time i-i-intimately. Together. That’s it.”
Steve glared at Kayla, because this was one of the last men on earth Steve wanted knowing their intimate, personal details. But Kayla had to know if what she’d feared from the very beginning – from the very first jump – was justified or not. If making love in a place they hadn’t originally and, in fact, if making any substantive change, whatever that was, was going to impact them. From what she was hearing, indeed it was.
To his credit, Rolf did not react to the sexual and personal nature of the answer. “Are you sure there was no other change? It was many years ago, could you have forgotten a detail?”
“I’m positive, we weren’t there long enough. There wasn’t anything else.” She swallowed nervously; Steve worked a muscle in his jaw. “Is that what caused the … instability in the … slipstream?”
Brief pause. Then Rolf very simply said, “I believe so, yes.”
Kayla huffed out the breath she’d been holding and felt dizzy. “Oh my …” Her head was swimming. “Oh God …” Kayla collapsed back down onto the couch and started to panic. “Oh God. Oh dear God.” Steve went to her, but she was already hyperventilating. He begged her to calm down as she put her hand to her belly where Stephanie was nestled and tried desperately to control her breathing, but the horror of what this meant was stampeding through her in a mad rush. The thought of having to mimic their destination existences was so harrowing that she could not see straight. It meant living a lie. Not being with Steve as her proper husband. Allowing him to be tortured, living apart from him, living a relationship with Shane, letting him live one with Ava, watching her friends die where otherwise they could be saved. It was too much for her.
Steve held her face in his hands as she took the fast, uncontrollable breaths. “Baby, come on, now, you’ve gotta do it for the baby, here, you can do it.” He tried to make her look at him, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t look him in the eye, it was too intense. Somehow she forced her breathing back into a normal rhythm, but Steve saw that she was avoiding his eye, and he didn’t like it. He was, however, relieved that she’d calmed down. He tried to hold her against him, but Kayla felt like a live wire. She couldn’t be touched, every nerve was open and on fire. Instead she sat with her face in her hands. Rolf went on.
“You must believe me when I say that I had no way of knowing that this was going to happen. I could not have predicted any of this when we began.”
“We?” Steve spat back at him. “We didn’t begin anything, you began it for us! We didn’t agree, you just took us! You stole us from our lives, you didn’t ask!”
“Ask? What should I have asked you? If you’d like to come re-visit your lives?”
“Might have been good for starters!”
“Oh come now, Mr. Johnson, you know this is ridiculous. You never would have trusted me. Neither would the other potential subjects I’ve worked on in the last 30 years. I chose you for a reason. Roman Brady lost the most – you got your wife back, he did not – but his life was far more complicated. Hope Brady was not ideal, and John Black’s brain has had too much imprinting. You were the right choice, Mr. Johnson, because your brain is the most in tact, your shared life together is the most uncomplicated to live through … and you’re the one I felt most guilty about.” Steve and Kayla both sneered. “Yes,” Rolf reacted, “believe it or not, I am capable of feeling sympathy.”
Rolf got up, walked to the bookcase, and folded his arms before turning back to them. “The formulas stopped working after your jump to Cleveland. Predictability ended and stability broke down. You are only supposed to jump to times in your life that you lived together. Shared time. That is from when you met to the day you were presumed dead, Mr. Johnson. Not a moment before or after. But you jumped to many years before and after, and it caused issues in the aggregate. What I have deduced is that when you jump to unshared time, you make more drastic changes than when you jump to shared time. Whatever you did in 1979 was catastrophic to the slipstream, causing major cracks and shifts.” He saw them about to argue, but he waggled his finger. “It is understandable, you were fish out of water, you had to find a way to normalize to what your real time awarenesses could live with. That is why the changes are more drastic on those jumps. The problem is that time does not know what to do with these changes to what has already been written. I could not have anticipated this.”
“But if we’re on some kind of branch or arc from the real linear timeline, then why does time have to justify them? Why can’t it exist in parallel?”
Rolf smiled. Kayla Johnson had done her homework, and he admired it. “Ah, but it does, madam. It does, indeed, exist in parallel. It proves the existence of parallel universes, because you have now lived 23 of them, have you not. What I’ve learned, however, is that those parallels weaken the foundation and cause it to destabilize. And I believe that is because the parallels are unequal, as these destabilizations did not manifest until you made massive changes. People who die that should not, and people who are … born … that didn’t exist originally. They are a problem that will plague you down the line.
“You’re talking about my daughter.” Steve said in that low, dangerous tone again.
“I am sorry, Mr. Johnson. But, yes, I am referring to her. What have you named her?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
“Emily,” Kayla said softly. “Her name is Emily.” Steve exhaled in frustration and adjusted his patch.
“Anything else you wanna tell him, Kayla?” Steve said angrily. His wife finally met his eye with apology etching her own. She knew these details were important and tried to keep her emotions separate, but it was hard.
“How long do we have with our daughter?” she squeaked.
Something in Rolf told him that the truth would be their undoing, and he needed them to pay very good attention right now. He’d finally gotten them to listen to him. He was getting through to the wife, and he didn’t want to lose that. So, he made a very conscious decision about how to answer her. It was also a very uncharacteristic one, because much of his decision was based on the sympathy he had for them in this position. They were going to lose their child, and his heart actually felt badly for that fact. Such a thing was rare for him. So, he made the decision to lie.
“I do not know how long you have.” In fact, he knew exactly what the numbers were saying about this arc, and had predicted roughly when the end would be, but a non-finite answer would preserve the hope that was clearly keeping them going. “It is part of the instability that I’ve lost the control of the jumps.” He knew he’d made the right decision when the tension in her face eased just the slightest bit. But he had a job to do, and he had to get them back on track.
“Again, I am imploring you. I am confident that I can re-stabilize the foundation supporting your timeline and all the branches if you stop making changes. Wherever you jump, you must try to re-live it as best you can. Then I think I can get you home.”
“So, you’re saying if we’re married to other people we should stay married to them?”
Rolf looked toward the ceiling and dragged a hand across the back of his neck before looking Steve in the eye again. “Yes, I believe so.”
“Bullshit, man, bull f*ckin’ sh*t!”
“Do you want to get home, or do you not?!”
No.
The word ripped through Kayla with such intensity that it stole her breath. She practically stepped outside herself to push it away, deeply ashamed that she thought it at all.
“Of coure, I want to get home, but if you’re telling me that in order to do that my wife and I have to actually stop living together, then you’ve just done more damage than if you’d left us alone and let us deal with our 16 missing years in the first place!”
“A-a-a-are you sure? That we won’t get home if we don’t stop making changes?”
This was what made Rolf see the most red. Not knowing the answer to this. “Mrs. Johnson, I am not completely sure, no. What is sure is that ceasing changes will stabilize the slipstream, continuing changes will break it. If we reach stability, I will definitely be able to get you out of the slipstream and back into your rightful timeline. If it breaks … I do not know what will happen to you. Your awarenesses will, perhaps, return to their default bodies in 2009. Or they will, perhaps, stay whenever they are at the time it breaks to live out that parallel timeline. But my educated guess is that neither of those things will happen. I believe that if the slipstream breaks that you will be forever stuck jumping from one point in your lives to the next with no possibility of returning.”
When Marcus returned to his best friends’ house it was late, nearly 10pm. He just couldn’t leave things the way they were. He knew something very wrong was happening, and he loved them both so much. They were the only family he had in the whole world. Steve knew how much his family had meant to him back in Cleaver, and for him to tell Marcus not to go after the truth, and give up on maybe finding his lineage somewhere so that he could have a legacy to give to his own child like Steve now had to give to Emily … well, that wasn’t like the Steve he knew at all. Whatever Steve and Kayla were into, it didn’t matter. He’d decided before he’d even gotten home that it didn’t matter how bad it was, he needed to know, and he was going to help them. So, when he pulled into his parking lot, he sat there for a good ten minutes, then he turned back around to fix this. Marcus expected to see a dark house. He expected that maybe he’d have to wake them. What he didn’t expect was the unfamiliar Ford Taurus with the Hertz sticker in the window sitting in front of their circle drive. What he expected less were the raised voices of not two people but three, barely audible from his position at the front door. Without thinking, Marcus turned the handle and found the door to be unlocked; he really wasn’t expecting that. He entered the house and quietly shut the door behind him. He was about to call to them as the door clicked closed, but he was stunned into silence by the conversation that drew him in so quickly he didn’t know what hit him.
“Again, I am imploring you. We can re-stabilize the foundation supporting your timeline and all the branches if you stop making changes. Wherever you jump, you must try to re-live it as best you can. Then I think I can get you home to 2009.”
The heavily accented male voice was not one Marcus recognized, but it wasn’t the stranger that stuck him, it was what the stranger had just said that made Marcus’s heart beat very rapidly, the blood pumping through him running suddenly cold. That was when he heard Steve’s voice ask about being married to other people. “What the hell?” Marcus whispered to himself.
“Bullshit, man, bull f*ckin’ sh*t!”
“Do you want to get home, or do you not?!”
“Of coure, I want to get home, but if you’re telling me that in order to do that my wife and I have to actually stop living together, then you’ve just done more damage than if you’d left us alone and let us deal with our 16 missing years in the first place!”
Marcus was rooted to his spot like a California redwood. Rooted, frozen, and unable to form the words he desperately wanted to shout. Yet … something about the clearly otherworldly content of this conversation failed to actually shock him. He realized in a very detached manner that what he was hearing, while shocking and the stuff of science fiction, fit in a very logical sort of way that was oddly satisfying. Every action, every reaction, every time they’d slip into their nonsensical code language – it all fit exactly what he was hearing. He was horrified and relieved at the same time. On the cusp of belief and disbelief. And he didn’t move a muscle.
“A-a-a-are you sure? That we won’t get home if we don’t stop making changes?” It was Kayla’s voice finally. And it scared him how very scared she sounded.
“… educated guess is that neither of those thigns will happen. I believe that if the slipstream breaks that you will be forever stuck jumping from one point in your lives to the next with no possibility of returning.”
“This is insane,” Steve rapsed. “This is completely f*cked up. I can’t accept this. There has to be another way. Kayla …” His wife’s eyes wet with tears met his. “Marina … she’s … she’s coming.”
“We … we’ll …”
“No! Not if we wanna get home we won’t! Isabella is in that loony bin, and I know what that’s like! We can’t get her out if Rolf is right – if we wanna get home, Sweetness, we can’t get her out, we gotta wait for Jack, and we have to let the murder happen and your trial. And we have to live through that bullshit with the key again!”
Marcus had no idea what Steve was talking about, but he’d hardly ever heard that tone in his friend’s voice, and he was unnerved by it even more than by what the German man had said.
“Is that what you’re sayin’, Rolf?!”
“I am sorry, Mr. Johnson. But what I know is that if you make any more large changes then the slipstream will break. You cannot take that risk. If you want to get home, you must stop.”
“Who is taking care of our baby?” Kayla’s sudden question was so quiet Marcus had to strain to hear her.
“Is your daughter not upstairs?”
“Not Emily.”
“You are speaking of Joe Johnson,” Rolf realized. “I do not understand. Your son was not sent with you, why would you ask after his whereabouts?”
“Because you took that baby’s mama away from him, that’s why! It’s been two years, where was he supposed to go when our bodies just stopped getting up in the morning, huh?”
Marcus’s heart dropped. Joe and Stephanie …
Rolf looked from Steve to the stairwell, then back to Kayla. He was perplexed. “I’m afraid I do not understand what you’re asking me. When you return nothing will have changed, you will return to the moment your consciousnesses left. So you … will wake up in the morning.”
Now was where the timelines confused Kayla. “But we’ve been gone for two years. Joey is almost three now. Who’s been taking care of him?”
“Ah, I see,” Rolf nodded his head and then waggled his finger again. “It does not work that way. Your son is exactly where you left him.” Steve was starting to understand as Kayla wiped the tears from her cheeks. “You believe that time has gone on without you while you’ve jumped. That is not so. Your physical bodies are empty of their consciousnesses, that is true. But they have not lived more than moments. This is where that pesky Theory of Relativity comes into play. The slipstream under my control, or what I have left of it, exists separately from real time. You feel the moments and hours and days and years. That’s what allows me to give you 16 years, or as many as I’d like. But when you return, real time will then continue for you. That is why you do not jump into the future – you have not yet lived it, and I can’t deposit you into a spot that hasn’t yet been written. There is nothing whimsical about it, it’s pure mathematics. The linear date has not yet been lived by you and can’t exist without you. I also cannot bring just one of you back. You travel as a unit, you return as a unit.
Marcus was at rapt attention.
“Oh no we don’t!” Kayla countered. “We jump ten seconds apart, and we arrive with huge gaps between us!”
“And even before that we were arriving to separate places. When we jumped to my time undercover, I found Kayla in a truck, that was way before Cleveland.”
“I don’t have every answer, but I am quite sure that was a result of the beginnings of destabilization. And, yes, your jumps are separated by 12 seconds.”
“It’s 12?”
“Yes, 12.2 seconds every time, that has not changed, and I do not know what set that off. But the gaps in arrivals are quite fascinating. Your graph lines were very difficult to analyze in 1979, but that was your largest discrepancy.”
“Eleven days, Rolf. She was eleven days behind me, but it only took her the regular ten – sorry, make that 12.2,” he added pointedly “– seconds behind me. How is that possible?”
“Mr. Johnson,” Rolf sighed, “I’ve come to accept that time may have mysteries I will not succeed in uncovering. Much as I’m trying.”
“So … so you’re saying … Joey’s ok?” Kayla cried, no longer so softly. “You’re saying … that no one’s missed us? Our baby is safe in our apartment with us?”
“Yes, that is what I’m saying. Two years have gone by from your perspective, but not from his or anyone else’s in your timeline.”
Relief poured through both Kayla and Steve. They’d never considered that time wasn’t passing at the same rate in their proper lives as it was in their jumps. They reached for each other in that shared relief. Not only were they relieved of the torture of not knowing what became of themselves as they related to their children, but the knowledge that their son was safe was of indescribable comfort. They both let tears leak from their eyes with this news before Kayla finally went on.
“What about simple things, like—like—like grocery shopping and—and—and laundry. Paying bills. Beign social?”
“What about them?”
“I don’t know what I had for breakfast 20 years ago! There’s supposed to be a revival here right now, and there’s not! How do I know who I talked to on what day? Are those things we have to get right, too?”
Rolf sneered. “You’re overthinking this, madam!”
“Are you kidding?” she asked incredulously.
“Jesus Christ, man, you’re tellin’ us that every butterfly we step on is a compounding problem, and in practically the same breath you’re tellin’ my wife she’s overthinking it?! Which is it?!”
Rolf dropped his head into his hand and shook it. “It’s big changes. You had a child, that did not happen.”
“It sure as hell did! She’s our daughter, she happened!”
“That is not what I meant, and you know it, stop, how do you say it? Splitting hairs with me!” Steve literally balled up his fist and prepared to hit the man. “Yes, any change could do it, including eating at home when you originally went out. But that is impossible to manage and has been mostly accounted for in the formulas and schematics.”
“Mostly? So those actions could be important?”
“Technically, yes,” Rolf rolled his eyes, “but you cannot stop breathing, now, can you?! It is the large changes that must stop. If you want to get home.”
“How long till we know if it’s working? If we don’t make any changes, how long till you can get us home?”
Kayla blanched. Her fear of doing exactly that – of going home – now crept up on her again, and all she wanted to do was run to Emily and hold her. She wanted this man out of her house. She wanted him gone, and she wanted her daughter. Right now. Kayla rested a protective hand over her belly that had just started to form a small bump.
“You have 14 years left on the 16.”
“Wait … you mean we have to go through all 16 years? You can’t cancel the whole thing?”
“I can … once the slipstream stabilizes … if that’s what you want.”
“That’s what we want. Isn’t it, Sweetness?”
Kayla ran from the room. She ran from this man, and she ran from her own horrifying feelings that she realized she’d been desperately denying since Rolf’s phone call to them eight months ago. She bolted like her life depended on it and ran straight for Emily’s room. Only she froze before her foot even hit the third step, because she spotted Marcus leaned against the wall on the far left of the foyer. They locked eyes, and she knew that he’d heard everything. Or at least enough.
Steve had run after Kayla, and Rolf had followed Steve. All of them converged on the foyer with stunned shock on each of their four faces. For a moment no one spoke. Finally, Marucs broke the silence.
“Of all the cockamamie schemes I thought might be happening to you, brother, being from the future isn’t the worst one I could have thought up.” Steve swallowed hard as Kayla’s eyes became enormous saucers of shock. “Just so you know, I don’t think you’re gonna need that secret Stockholm code anymore.”