The archival room was entirely dust-free – it would not do to let dust accumulate on the old manuscripts, so a sophisticated ventilation system kept it out of the air – but it still felt choked with dust. The ventilation system was the most sophisticated thing about it – otherwise, just a fluorescently lit room crammed with cabinets of manuscripts. No windows, just a heavy metal door with a digital lock – to keep the manuscripts from escaping and causing havoc, I guess.
I was reading a copy of a copy of a copy of an ancient Roman text, E Filium Henrici, found in an old monastery in Germany when they catalogued their library last year. It wasn’t making sense to me, I figured due to careless errors propagated and perpetuated each time some monk painstakingly copied the document to preserve its text.
Translating the document in my head really took more attention than I was paying it. It had been growing increasingly clear that I wasn’t going to make tenure, that I was never going to be able to pay off my student loans, that the best I could hope for with my classics PhD was sitting in a stuffy-despite-not-being-stuffy archival room studying ancient Latin that didn’t make sense. Not for the first time, I was thinking of going back and getting into engineering. I had always been pretty good at engineering; it had come down almost to a coin toss in undergrad whether I would end up going into humanities or STEM. My best friend Utkarsh went for the program I should have, and he was doing very well for himself until he got laid off from his job at Clepsydra Corp. My mind was drifting.
The text was saying something mathematical about time – no mean feat using Roman numerals: there’s a reason we use Arabic numerals today. I wasn’t sure if the shift to math had been sudden or gradual and I just hadn’t noticed. I backtracked until I didn’t see any math. I noted what was probably a copying error just before the math started, but could have been a hapax legomenon, a word found only in this one place in the entire body of surviving Latin. It took me a solid second to notice that the word was specifically “Utkarsh”, which jolted me right out of my inattention.
The whole sentence translated to, “Utkarsh will be interested to see this.” Not the kind of name you’d ever see in Rome – did they have enough contact with India for a Hindi name to show up in such a text? I suspected a hoax, a forgery, but the provenance of this document had seemed so definitive.
I was interested enough to pay attention this time, and as I read it with Utkarsh in mind (not that the author had my Utkarsh in mind when he wrote this two millennia ago, of course), it actually did turn out to really be the kind of thing my Utkarsh would be interested in, math to do with the passage of time – that was why he got the job at Clepsydra Corp in the first place, they were working on engineering time itself.
I was at the receiving end of a long game of Telephone because none of the monks who copied this could possibly have known anything about what it said, but I quickly figured out it was some pretty high-level math. Even today it would be high-level math; two millennia ago, they were still working on inventing advanced concepts like zero.
I flipped back to the beginning of the document and began to read it for real this time. It seemed to be something about it being possible to backtrack on a road and take a different fork than you took before; that, if you get the math right, it’s possible to eat the stalk of a plant when previously you had eaten a person. Back to not making sense. “When the anomaly appears”, it interrupted itself repeatedly and with emphasis, “do not go with yourself into it. Stay good.” I was baffled, so I turned back to the math.
It soon became clear that I, not being a mathematician, was out of my element here, too. I was barely better than the monks – I could translate it, but I did not comprehend. But at least my confusion made sense here – the earlier bit was worse because it almost felt like I should understand it but was just outside my grasp. Something about the branching paths and eating the plants and people was right there, ready and waiting for my brain to apprehend, but I didn’t have a handle to grab it by.
“POTES CAULEM PEREDERE.”
You can consume the stalk.
You can eat the stem.
You can…
Wait.
You can consume STEM?
Where previously you had eaten human… the humanities?
I can change my mind about having studied the humanities, go back to the fork in my path, and have studied STEM instead? If I get the math right? The math that Utkarsh would be interested to see?
I was in the process of pulling out my phone to text Utkarsh when reality abruptly turned inside-out across the table from me. My eyes immediately started to hurt when I looked at the distortion of space. It looked like a vortex, but more so – just as the third dimension added by a whirlpool would be unnerving if all you knew was the two-dimensional surface of the water, this was unnerving because all I know is four dimensions and it was impressing a fifth – or more? – onto my senses.
Out of the vortex-but-more-so peeked a face. The face unnerved me, too, but for a different reason – it was intensely familiar, but wrong. It was the face I see every time I look in the mirror, but with more gray in the hair, a longer beard, a variety of crow’s feet and worry lines. The face said, in a voice entirely unlike what I hear when I speak, but exactly like what I hear when I listen to a recording of myself, “It’s very important that you step into the anomaly and come with me. They’re coming for you.”
My first instinct was not to trust this guy wearing my face, to turn and run.
Then I thought, no, that’s ridiculous, who can you really trust but your own face emerging from an anomaly?
…Wait. The document told me specifically and repeatedly not to go with myself.
But could I even trust the document? The document that said, about going back down the path, to the fork… A dozen questions burbled from my brain at once, and the one that reached my mouth was, “Why did you come back to now?” I pointed at the Latin document, “You could go back to undergrad, study STEM instead of humanities.”
The face that was like my face scoffed, “When do you think I went first once we got the math right? I never studied humanities at all. Now come, we need to get you out of there before they come.”
“Who’s they?”
“They want you not to have invented time travel, so they’re coming for you before you have.”
That wasn’t an answer to the question I asked, but before I could press more, there was a slamming against the archive room door. If somebody was after me out there, I didn’t have any choice but to go into the anomaly with myself, against the explicit and repeated recommendation of the document. The document that I figured I needed if I was to invent time travel. I looked at it, looked at the face in the anomaly, looked at the door.
I hesitated.
I hesitated long enough for the door to get blown off its hinges, falling with a metallic KLANGG into the room. I was paralyzed with confusion. Half a dozen black-clad, black-masked guys with guns swarmed into the room through the doorway. There was a lot of overlapping shouting –
“He’s here!”
“Get down!” “They’re both here!”
“Surrender yourself and the device!”
“Don’t let him get away!”
“Disrupt it!” “Protect this one!”
“Don’t let him hurt him!”
Amidst the chaos, the face disappeared into the anomaly and the anomaly disappeared into itself.
The shouting died down – a quieter voice replaced it. “Are you alright, Dr. Harrison?” The voice was familiar, but I was more concerned about the document, making sure it wasn’t damaged by the blast and the dust. “We couldn’t let you go with him. He’s bad news.”
I furrowed my brow. An ancient Latin document and a squad of men in black agreed on one side, against my self from the future on the other.
The lead black-masked guy pulled off his mask, revealing another mirror-familiar face. He pointed at the Latin document, and began to explain, “We need you to do it right this time.” He pointed where the anomaly had been: “That us is a monster. We need you to stay good.”
I stared into his face – my face – with a gradually dawning sense of who wrote E Filium Henrici two millennia ago. Time travel promised to be complicated.
