Drive Time Read online

  Simon returned to the non-living room. “I don’t suppose you could lend me some money towards my half of dinner could you?”

  “How much of it?” Victor asked, pulling out his wallet.

  “Let’s see, erm, roughly, ahh, all... of it.”

  “OK, since you shelled out for the new boxes.” Victor sighed. “You’ll have to let me share the cost of that too, although I suppose it won’t matter soon enough.”

  Chapter 3

  Origin Point -5 Hours

  Spencer Egan and Simon Raines perused the shelves of the supermarket alcohol section.

  “Any preference?” Simon asked.

  “We need champagne, we’re going to have plenty to celebrate,” Spencer replied.

  “Fair enough. Ladies choice.”

  Spencer grabbed the cheapest bottle from the shelf and placed it in the basket that Simon was carrying.

  “And these,” Spencer said as she grabbed a couple of wine bottles.

  “Do we need all this? You know I don’t really drink, I’ll take a sip after the toast, and Victor will finish the rest.”

  “Oh, the wine’s for me, Victor’s bringing his own beer.”

  Spencer’s long blonde hair was tied back in her usual ponytail, with her light grey eyes and even features, most heterosexual males would find her attractive, but her tomboy disposition and style of dress made it clear that she was far from a ‘girly girl’. Despite this, she still had a maternal temperament, if Simon was the brains of the group and Victor was the mouth, Spencer was the heart. She had the strongest morals and capacity for compassion and empathy.

  Simon took the basket to the registers and placed the bottles on the conveyor. Spencer added another bottle. The checkout girl ran the bar codes over the scanner.

  “Twenty-five fifty, please.” the girl said.

  Spencer brought her purse from out of her handbag and removed the twenty-five pounds, leaving the note compartment empty, she sifted out a fifty pence coin, leaving a few pound coins and pennies.

  “This drive better work.” she said.

  “I have full faith in what we have,” Simon replied. “Not long till we find out.”

  Spencer handed over the cash then passed the packed bag to Simon.

  Back at Simon’s car, he placed the bag in the back while Spencer took the passenger seat. Simon climbed behind the wheel and pulled out of his space; a few feet before they were able to exit the lot, the car began to sputter and cough, then the engine died. Simon tried the ignition again, but it failed to turn over. He read the fuel gauge, sighed and glanced at Spencer. She rolled her eyes and got out the car, luckily the supermarket had its own petrol station. Five minutes later she returned with a can of unleaded — filled as far as the coins in her purse would allow — and emptied it into the fuel tank before getting back in next to Simon.

  “Like I said, it better work.”

  Simon started the ignition and continued the short journey towards his flat.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Simon and Spencer climbed the stairs to the flat, Simon fished the keys from his pocket as they reached the door. He inserted the key and turned, but the lock wouldn’t disengage. He pulled the key out and inspected it, bent and stared confusedly into the hole, then gave the key another fruitless try.

  “Uh, Si?” Spencer said warily and tapped on the door at eye level.

  Simon looked at the door and saw the sheet of paper within a clear plastic filing sleeve. He pulled it from the door.

  “Eviction notice?” he exclaimed, “How can this have happened?” If Victor were with them, he would have slapped his forehead in exasperation. “We need to get in there for the drive.”

  “Maybe you can speak to your landlord, get him to let us in long enough to move the stuff.”

  “I’ll try.” Simon took out his phone, brought up the contact for his landlord, Gary, and hit Call. After several rings, Simon wondered if Gary was ignoring the phone to avoid speaking with him. The call hit voice mail; Simon hung up and redialled. When the call went back to voice mail, he decided to leave a message.

  “Hi, Mr Dobson, it’s Simon. Simon Raines. I’m really disappointed you’ve locked me out of my flat, we were about to make enough money to cover the rent and all of the arrears. We went out and bought alcohol to celebrate. Please don’t be mean, let us back in so we can perform our prototype experiments, get money and then we’ll all be happy. Please call me back once you hear this message. It’s Simon. Did I say that? Simon Raines. Give me a call. Please. Thank you.”

  “‘Don’t be mean?’” Spencer asked.

  “Well, I’m upset, and I hate speaking on phones. I like voice mail even less. Makes me anxious.”

  “I see that. How long should we give him to stop being a mean ‘ol meany?”

  “Let’s give him five.”

  They sat on the hallway steps while they waited for a callback, which happened after a nail biting four minutes and fifty-two seconds.

  Simon picked up. “Hello, Mr Dobson?... No, no I’ve calmed down a bit, and I regret calling you mean, it was harsh... Yes, maybe I was mean to live here without paying you what you’re owed, yes. If I can just get in to get my equipment maybe? You are? Yes, I promise I won’t try and cause trouble, I just want the equipment. Yes. Okay. See you soon.” He hung up. “He’s on his to let us in now. He was passing anyway.”

  “Glad we got meangate sorted, I didn’t want to have to put either of you in time out on the naughty step.”

  Gary appeared ten minutes later, and he let them into the flat, watching them carefully as they removed the equipment. It took Spencer and Simon a few trips up and down the steps to load everything they needed into the car. Simon felt self-conscious, repeatedly making the journey with a red face, getting damper and more out of breath progressively, while Spencer barely showed any signs of strain. Gary continued to watch, never helping. After the embarrassing parade was finally over for Simon, Gary apologised to him for how this had ended, he didn’t like having to throw anyone out, but he had a business to run. They arranged for Simon to pick up the rest of his things at a later date.

  Simon and Spencer returned to the fully-loaded car and sat inside while reviewing their options.

  “We can’t go to mine, I have a room-mate, and Victor’s place is like Waterloo station with the women he has going in and out of there. We’re still keeping all this confidential, right?”

  “Right.”

  “We were going to run everything from the warehouse eventually, why don’t we just move that up the schedule?”

  “There’s no electricity. Or internet.”

  “Well, we can deal without the internet access for now, but the electricity might be a problem. We could run it off a generator.”

  “Do we have a generator?”

  “No,” Spencer replied.

  “Do we know anyone who has a generator we could borrow?”

  “No.”

  “Do we have enough money to rent a generator?”

  “Okay, there’s no need to be a dick about it.”

  Simon looked at Spencer in confusion. She realised that Simon was rarely sarcastic and, now she was thinking about it, she couldn’t remember a time when he ever was. He was genuinely trying to diagnose a solution.

  “Forget about it,” she said. “I guess we can’t power it from a car battery either.” She thought for a moment. “If we’re quiet, we can run the first test at my place and hope my roommate doesn’t catch on.”

  “That might be our only option. Do you really think Vicky will deduce we’re running experiments in time manipulation?”

  “Point taken.” Maybe Simon could be sarcastic after all. “Okay, let’s call Victor, get him to meet us at my place instead of the one that used to be yours - sorry - and we’ll get stuff set up there for tonight, then we’ll move it once your warehouse has electricity.”

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  An hour later, the three physicists were at Spencer’s shared flat, setting
up the equipment on the desk in her bedroom. Her roommate, Vicky, wasn’t home to see them bring the gear into Spencer’s room, but once she returned, she wondered what her roommate might be doing hidden in her bedroom with two men. As Simon had predicted, space-time experiments were not even close to being on her list of possibilities.

  Once the drive was set up and engaged, they would make a note of the time, and that instant would be the used as the destination for their first message from the future. In the traditional linear way that time is experienced, they would have to wait until they had the required information, then sent it to the date and time of which they had made a note. But, in ‘Drive Time’ — their label for the altered flow of time when utilising the drive — they should receive their first message as soon as the machine was working, since the drive allowed them to effectively skip the time in between. Up until they made their first experiment, theories were all they had, they didn’t know the outcome for sure.

  “Everything is set up as it should be, we just need to connect to the laptop and boot the program,” Victor said.

  Simon started up the laptop and connected it via USB to the drive, and its series of photon boxes.

  “Okay,” he said. “I know there are a variety of ways this could go, but if I had any money left, I’d still put it on the instant arrival theory.”

  “Well, it’s that, or we get screwed by the bootstrap paradox,” Victor added.

  “Well, that’s a possibility too. This is unknown territory, we could bring about the end of the universe for all we know.” Simon recognised his companion’s sudden trepidation. “But I’m sure the chances of that are infinitesimal,” he said for assuasive effect.

  Their expressions relaxed. They knew the odds of something like that happening, but Simon was the smartest of the three and that caused a moment of doubt for them.

  “You guys sure you’re okay with this? You know, with the morality of it? Cheating at the lottery?” Spencer said.

  “It’s just the one time, we can’t do it more than once, or we’ll arouse suspicion, it’s just to get us going,” Simon said. “What comes after is probably a lot more immoral, we’re messing with the space-time continuum. I don’t think we could have a more precarious situation when it comes to our morality. Want to back out?”

  “Sod that, let’s just do it,” Victor said. “YOLO, motherfuckers.”

  Chapter 4

  Origin Point

  Simon clicked the Initiate button on the app. Nothing happened.

  “Is it running?” Victor asked.

  “The light on the drive is green,” Simon replied, “and the software says it’s operational.”

  “Looks like you lost your bet, Si,” Spencer said, dispirited. “We will have to send the numbers back ourselves, once they’re announced, then our past will change.”

  “Maybe,” Simon said. “Or the multiverse theory is correct and another reality reaps the benefits while we go on as we were, penniless and miserable.” Spencer and Victor looked at one another with a shared melancholy, Simon had a terrible bedside manner. “Hang on a second, I’ll just check something.”

  He brought up a file explorer window for the external drive. He checked the ‘Received’ folder and found a twenty-byte simple text file named ‘lottery.txt’. Simon opened the file, and the notepad application appeared on-screen. The text area contained six two digit numbers.

  06 11 22 34 42 44

  “How did that get there?” Simon pondered aloud. “I coded a pop-up notification for when we’ve received data, or at least, I thought I had.”

  “Well, you can worry about that later, right now we have a ticket to buy,” Victor said, his mood instantly elevated.

  They all looked at each other.

  “It worked,” Spencer said, verbalising the leading thought on each of their minds.

  “It worked,” Simon said. He became almost unrecognisable to Spencer and Victor, displaying a level of delight they had never before seen on his face.

  “It worked!” Victor said and began jumping up and down on the spot with a childlike glee. He leapt onto Spencer’s bed and continued to jump. Spencer squealed and joined Victor on the bed; they all laughed and bounced together. Outside the room, Vicky listened, looking surprised and disgusted.

  “We already have some fascinating information about how space-time works,” Simon said once their initial outburst was over. “The message did come through instantaneously, as we theorised, we didn’t have to wait until tomorrow’s lottery numbers were announced and send them back here. It’s a causal loop, which brings your bootstrap paradox into play, Victor.”

  “Yeah,” Victor replied. “If we didn’t send these numbers back to ourselves, who did? Do we still need to do it, or are they from a version of us in a reality that has been replaced? If we don’t, would the numbers still stay in place on the drive?”

  “I’d say they would,” Simon said. “Time could be like a whiteboard, you can draw a picture of a cat, erase it and draw a dog in its place, but once you do, you can’t bring back the drawing of a cat. You can try and recreate it, but it won’t be the exact same image. I think the numbers are the dog. Anything else would be paradoxical.”

  “I guess so,” Victor said after a moment trying to get his head around the suggested paradox.

  “We’ve raised more questions for ourselves than we’ve answered,” Spencer admitted. “There’s still a possibility that a timeline exists where we didn’t receive the numbers, the miserable, penniless reality that Simon had to bring to our attention. Or has that timeline been erased and replaced by the one we’re currently in?”

  “You’re right, Spence,” Simon said. “We’re back to theories we have no way of proving.”

  “Let’s put a pin in those questions for now and go get that winning ticket,” Spencer said, breaking their brief regression into non-elation.

  “We can do that from here,” Victor said. “They sell them online.”

  “I think I’d like a physical ticket that we can put in a frame,” Spencer replied. “This is going the be the beginning of something bigger than all of us.”

  “Good point,” Victor smiled. “Let’s get in the car.”

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Victor stepped away from the lottery counter and held the ticket up for the others to see.

  “Give it to me, I want to touch it,” Spencer asked.

  “If it weren’t coming from you, I’d have had a lot of fun with what you just said.” Victor gave her the soon to be winning ticket, she stared at it and grinned, then started another jig, hopping from foot to foot. A passing woman gave her a bewildered look, visibly confused as to why anyone would be so pleased with a pre-draw lottery ticket.

  “Okay, who’s keeping it safe until tomorrow?” Victor asked. “It’s either me or you, Spencer. If we give it to Simon, it will be accidentally lost, shredded or burned within minutes.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Simon admitted.

  “Someone has to sign the back too. Who’s getting the honour there? It will be on the ticket permanently.” Victor said.

  “Let’s draw straws,” Spencer said. “I’ll look in my bag for something we can use.”

  A few minutes later, she held out her fist, three strings protruded from between her thumb and forefinger and dangled down the back of her hand.

  “Okay, so the one with the black marker on the tip is the winner.”

  She held the fist out to Victor, her other hand wrapped around it, keeping the contents fully covered and out of sight. Victor picked a string and pulled upward until the newly unwrapped tampon squeezed out from within Spencer’s hands. The trio checked the cotton cylinder.

  “No mark. Simon?” She offered the remaining strings to him.

  He selected a strand and pulled out the attached tampon. There was a definite black mark on the rounded end opposite the cord. Passing shoppers were once again given the opportunity to be perplexed, this time by the sight of a chubby adult ma
le whooping and swinging a tampon in the air.

  “I’m just happy that you found the black marker,” Victor said, the first marker to emerge from the bag had been red.

  Victor picked up a pen from the lottery desk and passed it to Simon. Spencer handed him the ticket, and he carefully signed the back.

  “Phew,” he said, “I was worried I might have signed the wrong name.”

  “How? Who’s name would you have signed?” Victor asked, with a confused laugh.

  “I don’t know, I’m just nervous. Want to draw again for who gets to keep a hold of it?”

  “Nah, that’s fine, give it to Spencer. We can keep it with the machine once we’re back at hers, anyway.”

  “Okay. Now we just wait for tomorrow’s draw, then once it’s official a winning ticket, we call the number on the back to get it verified. I’ve been reading up on it, they give you a call back the day after, then send someone round to your house to deal with the transfer. I presume they’ll be with us on Monday.”

  “We’re probably the first people to actually make plans for that before the draw,” Victor said.

  “I don’t know, there are some crazy people out there. Crazy and optimistic. Some people can take the Law of Attraction way too literally.” Spencer said.

  “We’re bending the universe to our will right now unless our future selves are playing a really unfunny prank on us. The Law of Attraction is no longer purely philosophical.”

  “Slow down, Victor,” Spencer said. “You have plenty of time to develop a God complex.”