Maggie sat at the corner booth of the bustling Italian café and tried to stop her hand from shaking, she thought it very odd that it was just the right hand. This was different to the panic attacks, this was different to the hot flushes, this was different to the sleepless nights, this was so different she had officially categorised it as strange. She’d just had a twenty-minute talk with her mother,
‘What exactly are you going to do after your A-Levels.’ her mother had asked. Nothing odd or strange about that she thought, Oh yeah, except Mam has been dead for ten years.
‘Waatta you wanna, Miss Haywood.’ the barista shouted, he had come around from the counter, Anna the only waitress was busy elsewhere, ‘Youaaaa early today No.’
‘Oh Mike, come on, cut the bullshit I can’t take the phoney Iti accent today, could you turn down the Louis Primo tape and just give me the usual, I’ve had a rough morning.’
‘Yeah, I can see that, you look as if you’ve seen a … ’
‘Mike, make that two Americanos. You OK Maggie ‘June Ryan, Maggie’s boss had just arrived at the coffee shop.
‘I followed you out, what happened, a hypo?’
‘No, it’s not that, it’s nothing really … June, eh thanks, I just had a bit of a headache, I needed a break.’
Maggie had worked with June for the last two years and while she liked June, she didn’t fully trust her. It wasn’t the seniority thing or June’s abrupt manner, it was just some nagging doubt, like one of those renaissance pictures which you need to look at sideways to get the true picture; reading it awry so to speak. Maggie smoothed off some imaginary fluff from her Marks & Sparks trouser suit, rearranged some of the debris in her clutch bag and then applied the necessary amount of lippie to cheer herself up. Her hand had steadied and she was more composed, she decided not to tell June about the tremor and definitely not about the flashback.
‘OK, as long as you’re alright. Joe Jones just phoned me. He wants to see you when you get back, he wants your opinion on the new retina security device, take your latest content with you as well’ she then added caustically. ‘You must be sleeping on the right side of the casting couch love.’ June had missed the sensitivity training weekend and reverted to type at the drop of a fedora. She quickly finished her coffee, gave Maggie her “concerned look,” and then left. Maggie didn’t immediately follow June back to work, she fancied another Americano, a scone to boost her blood sugars, and a minute or two to take in what June had said.
Maggie entered the boardroom, there was a small meeting in progress. Joe Jones, the “founding and funding” CEO sat at the top, and dead centre of the board table. Either side stood Tom O’Leary, the company doctor, and to Maggie’s surprise, June Ryan. They were reviewing documents that looked like photographs. Maggie thought that she could just make out the interior of an Italian café. Joe Jones stood, and said to Maggie
‘Miss Haywood, would you be so kind as to take a seat and tell us what happened to you earlier today.’ Maggie quickly looked at June for guidance; June flashed back a look to heaven. ‘It’s OK Miss Haywood, take your time. It’s fine, we know you’ve been talking to your mother; tell us about the flashback.
‘How did you …, why have you been spying on me’ Maggie looked directly at the flat TV screen hanging above Jones’ head, an internal security camera was trained on her work area, she then looked directly at June.
June remained silent, Tom O’Leary said softly to her, ‘I’m so sorry Maggie, just tell them what happened. It’ll help, trust me.’
Maggie had been working at the Dial Company, Dial dot com, Dial991.com, for a couple of months when she had “gone hypo”, fainted in front of June. She’d been diagnosed with hypoglycaemia, low blood sugar levels, a sort of inverse diabetic condition. This wasn’t really a shock to her as it sort of run in the family. What was a shock, Tom O’Leary had told her that she must give up smoking as well; the combination of the two could be medically catastrophic. Maggie found this to be a total understatement; the combinations of nicotine withdrawal and surges in her blood sugars resulted in panic attacks, a year long depression, and just for good measure almost hourly mood swings. Tom had prescribed the statin, the mini aspirin, the glycol supplement, and the beta-blocker; he was nothing if not thorough. At the end of all the treatments Maggie trusted Tom, he was after all an ex-smoker like herself, one of the dying breed. Based upon that trust she decided to tell her story.
‘June asked me to flesh out the Garcia biog with some local colour and some back story material from my life, I’d amassed more than I needed so I decided to edit the media on my i-pad this morning and then forgot that instead of logging on I was supposed to use I.R.I.S.’
Jones threw his pencil across the table, stopping Maggie in her tracks, ‘The what Miss Haywood?’
‘Oh it’s that new security gizmo that we’re trying out, it scans your eye image and links back to the central mainframe and authenticates that the i-pad user is me. “Internal Retina Input Security,” I thought June said you were interested in that?’
‘I was, I am, I, I, just carry on Miss Haywood.’ Jones voice wavered he was flustered and impatient, Maggie could not understand why.
‘Well, I had a slight head ache so I took one of the beta blockers that Tom, sorry, Dr. O’Leary gave me and I then attached the eye piece and the i-pad docking mechanism. But I don’t see where this is…’
‘Miss Haywood please, get to the story ‘Jones was starting to get under the deeper levels of Maggie’s epidermis, and not in any Frank Sinatra way.
‘I logged onto the new Google SatNav system and called up my parent’s old house in Cambridge, and instead of the simple aerial map view there is now a street view, so I could see my mother’s surgery as it looks now. The image is taken with a 360 degree, 3D camera. It’s good, the definition is… ‘
‘Miss Haywood, please concentrate, your imagination is running …’
‘Mr Jones, if you keep carrying on like this I will just shut up and I won’t talk to you or your geeks again, I know you have contacts, I’m not attacking your imagination’. She had had enough of Mr. Joey “Bloody” Jones. He gave her a thin wane smile that would have gifted him a line or two in “Mac the Knife” he nodded for her to continue.
‘I started to wonder how my mother’s GP surgery had changed over the years and while I was considering this the image on the screen, well it started to change. It, it, it sort of came alive It was like time-lapse photography but backwards. Paintwork refreshing, decaying, refreshing. Patients getting younger, sky lightening then darkening. Trees changing colour, yellow lines removed from roads, traffic reduces. It all speeded up and went into a purple haze. I thought that I had broken the i-pad and the IRIS. The next thing the image was of the house and surgery as it was in 1984 perhaps 85, I thought I could hear the sound of Bono singing “In the name of Love”, I got a whiff of that ethyl alcohol clean clinical smell from the surgery, Aunty Betty was cooking my Dad’s dinner, Mother being busy in the surgery. Then I think I blacked out again.’
‘Sorry Miss Haywood, what exactly, did you have another hypo.’ Jones had learned by his pervious mistake and kept his tone conciliatory.
‘No not exactly, it wasn’t like that, the next thing, I was sort of there. Firstly I was the observer then I’d sorta flipped into that reality.’
‘Maggie, did you take another beta blocker?’ Tom O’Leary asked.
‘Yes I did and it was really weird. I just laughed out loud and then, then I was just there. I was walking up the drive, my hair long again, light chestnut coloured, jeans ‘n’ jokey WHAM t-shirt. I could feel the pebbles under my tennis shoes; everything appeared much brighter than I remember. Should I go and see my Dad and Betty first, she lent me cigarettes. Should I go and see Mam in the surgery. I ended up not having any choice in the matter’
“Maggie, come here, I want a word with you”
“OK Mam, I’ll be there in a minute now.”
‘Are you telling us that you were actually speaking to her, you were there?’ Tom O’Leary asked excitedly.
‘Yes, even my thought processes seemed to be tuned in, no turned on to is more correct. I had dropped out of my time and into that moment in time. I was seventeen again, perhaps, perhaps not – but with some knowledge of things to come – it was weird I knew that it was April 1985 my mother wanted to know if I was going to follow her into medicine or do the diploma and the job with the local paper. I knew what I had previously said to her’
‘Maggie did you still have the IRIS device attached.’
‘Yes I think so. Sorry I’m not sure. What I can remember though, and very clearly, is avoiding that particular conversation with my mother all that month. Avoiding her, but asking Dad what to do, behind her back. He was always the easy number. Later in life, I’d always regret what I’d told her that day. Anyway, back to the past. It was after 4:30, so the last patient would have been seen and Mam would be marking up the patient records.’
“ Maggie, I meant to ask you what you intend to do after A-Levels , you mentioned at one stage something about a medical degree, I can help in that line you know.” She looked up from the mound of manila files.
“Yes I know Mam.”
‘I had decided that unlike in my real timeline reality, I would placate my mother in this one, I would tell her a white … ish lie. We chatted away for another fifteen minutes or so and then well, I just …’ Maggie turn her face away from Tom , June and Joe Jones, her eyes focused on something in the middle distance, a cold sweat crept over her, her finger tips started to tingle and the tremor was back in the right hand. She started to mumble something about black holes burned into Lancastrian cheese, her mind was simultaneously racing and slowing down, part of her mind could understand the silliness of what was happening to her, part of her mind didn’t care, part of her mind told her that she was 68 but another part said that she was 24. The hypo took a grip of her brain and Maggie slumped slowly to one side.
‘Well, Dr O’Leary are you happy with this part of the project, are there any variables or parameters that you wish to change.’ Joe Jones poured himself a glass of mineral water.
‘I’m not sure that we can carry on like this. We’ve regressed her too many times. Each time we take her back, it’s taking longer and longer for her mind to recover, she’s retaining more and more of the trip. Did you hear that reference to holes at the end?’
‘Yes, I get the impression that she’s remembering bits of this interrogation as well, it’s just the way she looks at me in the coffee shop, I’m sure she remembers.’
‘June, there’s no way that she can work that out. The neural programming we did on her right at the start of her induction period means that the only memory that she has of you is as her boss and senior editor.’
‘Yeah, that’s fine but why is she holding more back from me, three trips back she was telling me about the flashback, now it’s just a headache. What’s going on if she isn’t remembering?’
‘June, haven’t you worked it out yet.’ Joe Jones sneered the words across to her.
‘Obviously not Joe, please enlighten me.’
‘The primary objective of the DIAL project is to enable time travel via a combination of technologies. We have determined that all history is based upon the collective memory of society, and the recording of that collective memory is now based upon computer technology. By manipulating that technology at a “micro” level and using mild psychedelic drugs on susceptible subjects, we can effectively travel back to a point in their personal history.
‘Joe, I am the senior facilitator for this project, I do know our mission statement, I was the one who brought Maggie Haywood on board, I was the one who recognised the link between virtual reality, LSD, history and smoking cessation. For Christ’s sake, I even named the company DIAL after the Beatles song. What exactly am I missing?’
‘June, cool down. There were two possible side effects that we have been looking for which will mean that when we put this into production we will be able to charge more for the experience. This is after all a commercial enterprise.’ Tom O’Leary chipped in. A shadow straight from the 23rd Psalm crossed June’s face. Joe Jones stretched his arms above his head, yawned, and then nodded for Tom O’Leary to continue.
‘June, you are right she is remembering more of each trip and there is a very simple reason for that. She is remembering more because she is taking control of the timeline, she is changing what happened in the past she is not merely observing she is, eh, affecting change’
‘Don’t you mean effect?’
‘No, she is influencing the change, the “effect” is to change the past, she is changing not only her history but all history. Well, of this particular time line anyway.’
‘You said there were two possible side effects you where looking for. What was the second?’
‘Ah, now you have the real clincher, the deal maker, where we get the big bucks from.’
‘OK Tom, cut it, what exactly are you on about.’
‘Did you notice anything different about Maggie today?’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘Excellent, the last couple of times we regressed “Maggie” we have used a different subject, but didn’t tell you. With a touch of neural programming each time, they “affected” the same change in the past and effectively became Maggie Haywood. Each time they “came back”; you did not recognise the change. You were the real experiment, not Maggie Haywood’
‘I don’t understand, what’s the point of …. Oh dear God I get it, you can send someone, anyone, back in time assume a different identity and if needs be can change key events for that timeline. You could change anything you wanted, and with a subject in the right psychotic state could change any event in history. History becomes multi dimensional, totally customisable.’
******
Dr Margaret Haywood sat at the corner booth of the quiet Italian restaurant, her mother was late for their usual Tuesday lunch date. Unconcerned, she popped a Bensons into her mouth, lit it with her Zippo, threw her long black hair back, and laughed.
