Repetitio est mater studiorum
Repetitio est mater studiorum
October 23, 2024
The women in my family range from intelligent to genius. The men, mainly my father, occupy the other end of the spectrum. My grandmother taught electrical engineering. My mother, with dual masters in computer science and mathematics, worked as a contractor for a variety of governmental projects. I have my doctorate in physics and am an inventor of sorts.
My father drinks beer and spits vitriol every chance he gets.
Why the minds of the former met the hatred of the latter has always been a mystery to me. I never had the opportunity to speak to my mother. She died giving birth to me. I have her journals and her notes, but nothing not related to her work. My father has never once told me a story of her or how they met. I do not know the details of their relationship. Was she blind? Did he change for the worse? My grandmother wants to divulge details, but something holds her back. She spends our time together preparing me for some grandiose adventure in science that will soon arrive. She knows something.
My father knows nothing.
He does what he needs to do to get by. I do not believe he graduated high school. I know he must have repeated a few grades trying. This made him too old and too large to be with children. He was, and still is, a bully. He is physically intimidating. He is strong enough to impose his will. He is weak enough to recognize his faults and correct them.
My father is corrosive and wishes to remain that way.
And yet, I live with him. My grandmother lives with him. He never married my mother and she still lived with him. The question that remains is “Why?”
There is no answer.
So I searched for one. I became engrossed with my mother’s journals. She wrote of the abstract and then explained with the concrete. She meandered in a myriad of volumes all culminating in one central, never discretely mentioned, thesis.
She wrote of time travel.
Once I garnered this singular fact, my grandmother unleashed a torrent of information upon my person. She spoke of my mother as never before. She took me to the safe deposit box at a bank I never knew existed. She gave me access to my mother through what she invented, what she postulated, and what she theorized.
In essence, my grandmother gave me nearly 40 years of my mother’s life.
And then, without warning, my grandmother took too many sleeping pills the next night.
She never woke up. She never wanted to wake up. The smile on her face told me she finally fulfilled a promise, unloading a burden, giving that final performance (her swan song) that would define her existence in this world.
I gave her a eulogy wanting to say these very words.
But, no one attended; my father least of all.
He spent both the day and the night on the couch in the basement drinking beer and watching TV.
When I found him, I left him.
My new life begins nearly two thousand miles distant. I work for myself. I have my own lab. I am off the radar. I am my own woman and I am on a mission.
I am going to build my mother’s time machine.
I am going to find the answers that consume my life.
And then, I am going to make corrections.
My mother deserves better. My grandmother deserves better. I deserve better. The women of my family should take their place among the giants of science that occupy the hallowed ground of honor they so rightfully earned. There is enough room for three more.
All I need is time and (now) I have nothing but.
Two years later, I am now 38, but still look 18. I have great genetics.
I also have a time machine.
How it works, how it is powered is of no matter. I will keep this black box of information secret for now. I will explore its limitations and subsequent applications later.
Today (under the circumstances, a newly obsolete word), I am going to visit my mother when she was 18, in high school. Her journals begin here. I have many questions for her.
I also have one warning.
Since time is neither continuous nor discrete, it is always misunderstood. Time is best thought of as amorphous. All times are at all time everywhere. Time is not synchronized with space. Time is space and space is time. You exist with you always and forever. Once I understood this, it became easy to invent a machine that could not place the time and space I wanted in my grasp, but rather, filter out all of the infinite times and spaces I did not want. What remained (quoting Sherlock Holmes), no matter how implausible, must be the truth.
I located my mother, my father, and my grandmother in 1980. I do not manifest as truth here, so visiting will not initiate one of the many time paradoxes of science fiction writing. I cannot kill myself. I can create a new timeline in which my reality does not manifest itself as I know it.
Worst case, I may never be born. Penultimate worst case, I may never create the machine that permits me to return. Under the circumstances of my existence, I will risk the former as the price I must pay for the life I have chosen. As per the latter, It may not be so bad to know the outcome of events certain to occur for the next four decades.
I like my odds.
So,
I walk into Benjamin Harrison High School. The secretary asks if I am a transfer student. I lie, tell her yes, just until graduation, and explain that my paperwork will arrive shortly. I am sure my grandmother will be able to forge appropriate documentation.
This was good enough for the secretary.
She gives me a general studies schedule and I walk to my first class, English. There in the second row is my mother. In the third row, right behind her, is my father. She looks like every picture I have ever seen. She is attentive, beautiful, and smart. He does not look like the fiend I remember. He is charming and kind of cute. I see the attraction. Unfortunately, others see me see their attraction. He takes it as an invitation. She is repulsed by my existence.
I sit on the other side of class.
I have biology and history with my mother. I have algebra and PE with my father. In history, my mother tries to pass me a note. The teacher intercepts it and reads it aloud. It has two words, “GO AWAY”. The class senses tension. The look in her eyes is the look of a woman on the defensive. I might just have made an enemy today.
By the time PE begins, word has spread. My father is on the prowl. He wants to meet me. He wants to greet me. Cornered in an empty girl’s locker room, he wants even more of me.
By the top of the hour, he has raped me.
His weight and his strength he uses to pin me down and have his way. He uses my sock to stuff in my mouth to muffle my screams. He is smart enough not to tear my clothing (thus catching me while I change into my gym clothes) or leave any violent bruising. When finally caught, he claims it was all consensual and I lured him in.
I am numb to the entire experience. I am also, most likely, pregnant. It is only a matter of time to know for sure. In this time, I have options, but they are limited.
Later, at the police station, the police want me to press charges. They explain my father has a history of sordid behavior and with my testimony, thay can convict him and send him to jail for twenty years. The prosecutor informs me where he will go is a place so hostile, he will never live long enough to return.
All I have to do is sign the complaint.
My grandmother is waiting outside, posing as a relative who is responsible for me. My mother must have informed her of the crime. Where my mother is, I do not know. I should, but this is not the time to ask.
I ask the prosecutor if I can think this over. He tells me this is my only chance to do the right thing. If I consign my father to jail and death, I will not be born, my mother may never be the person she should be, and I will have a baby and the associated stigma. I am steeled for these consequences. However, I will never get to know my mother.
I sound selfish, almost hysterical. I came to know my mother, above all else.
I do not sign the paperwork.
I am out of school before I spend a second day there. My grandmother takes me in to live in a rental house on the edge of town. I know this house. This is where I grew up. This is my stomping grounds. This is where I began my questioning.
But, it (somehow) is different. The paint is brighter than I remember. The furniture is different. Perhaps it is just my perspective. I am an adult, a pregnant adult, looking through my memories with the eyes of a child.
It shouldn’t make a difference, but it does.
That night, my grandmother came to see me. For a raped woman, I am surprisingly in good spirits. This is odd. I am not of this time, thus, I am odd. Everything is too odd.
My grandmother asks for my arm. She wants a blood sample to send to the lab. She wants proof prior to giving me answers. In for a penny, in for a pound. This will take a week. Until then, I am not to leave, nor have anyone in. She asked my mother to stay away. She asked the police for a restraining order against my father. This is crazy. Nothing is going according to plan.
However, I expected as much.
I must have changed the timeline. Is this new one parallel to my old one or is it diverging? With every second, it will become more difficult to make the return trip.
I want to speak with my mother.
Ten days later, both my grandmother and mother arrived at the house. The tension was obvious, I offered them both coffee. Neither partook. My grandmother began the conversation.
“Greetings, Lillian. I wish to formally welcome you to our little time traveling family. I am Rose, your grandmother on your mother’s side. Beside me is Amy, your actual mother. Your blood work indicates a positive test result proving what I am about to relate to you. Before I go any further, do you have any questions?”
“Am I pregnant?” Yes was her reply. “However, Trent, the man who raped you is not really your father. In this timeline, you do not yet exist. This information will help assuage some of your worries.”
“How can you positively confirm that I am pregnant?” She replied that she took my blood a few years into the future (75) and ran the test herself. I assumed our mitochondrial DNA match as confirmed in her future lab.
“So the machine works both forward and reverse?” Both nodded their heads in agreement.
“Then why all of the secrecy? Mom, Amy, why didn’t you tell me? Why leave me to the harsh reality of my father? Why did you die so soon? Wait, did I just spoil something? Are you really dead in all of the timelines? Am I really saying this correctly?”
My mother, Amy, took my hand before she spoke. “We have much to talk about. All you need to do is listen. It will be very difficult for you to accept, but you must. The laws of time travel dictate that you do. Please understand.”
Over the next five hours Rose and Amy told me how the Universe worked. Those immutable laws of physics providing peace and comfort to billions are not exactly as they seem. Time is indeed immutable, but time travel is not. Once you breach the barriers man was not meant to cross, the totality of reality becomes exposed, as a raw nerve, for you to poke and jab. At first, you feel an acute sensation, then a throbbing. Finally, much like a missing tooth, you yearn for the absence and wonder why the pain left.
Time travel makes you feel all of this. However, Rose looked right at me when she stopped here, “You will feel nothing if you are pregnant.”
“Why is that?”
“Because pregnant women cannot time travel.”
That hit hard. Almost a punch in the solar plexus.
“So what is the plan?”
Amy took her turn. With a slow rhythm, she began. “I keep my life as it is. You take the role of Rose after you give birth. You will raise Lillian (her name), but will always be known to her as her grandmother. Rose will move forward in time to meet future Trent. I will soon follow to perfect the machine and give future Trent his copy. That is the deal. The cycle will be as it always was. There will remain no loose gaps or holes. You will move forward when young Lillian travels back to initiate the cycle again. It has always been this way. It will always be this way.”
I had to ask, “But what of Trent? He seems to have an extremely long life. Is he even human?”
Amy fielded this one. “He is human enough to pass as human. His kind offered the theory for time travel. We (now holding Rose’s hand and mine) engineered the machine. Anything more, well, wait until you move forward in time to understand the rest.”
It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Rose said her goodbyes and she evanescensed from the room. Amy took a more conventional route with her goodbyes. As she was leaving, I had one more question. “How do you know the baby is a girl?”
“They always are. Bank on it.”