One does not simply change time

A story about a time-travelling woman trying desperately to save the human race.

Harper Lowe was on a train. There was a pretty blonde woman sitting in front of her. She was dressed poorly; looked about 27-28. She was furiously writing in a journal with utmost concentration. She looked very familiar, but Harper couldn’t seem to place her. She decided to strike up a conversation.

‘Have we met before?’ asked Harper.

The woman looked up startled; she hadn’t seemed to realize Harper was there.

‘No, I don’t think so.’ she said.

‘You just look very familiar,’ said Harper. ‘You mind if I ask what you’re writing? I’m Harper, by the way.’

‘Joanne,’ she replied, ‘but you can call me Jo. I’m writing an idea for a story. It just popped into my head.’

‘Could I have a look?’ asked Harper.

Jo hesitated. ‘It’s probably not that good, you know.’

‘That’s ok, I just want a look.’

Harper had a shrewd suspicion she knew who this woman was. She just needed to confirm it. As she glanced at Jo’s notes, she knew she was right. She grinned to herself.

‘So do you like it?’ asked Jo, nervously.

‘If I give you my honest opinion, will you let me name the main character?’ replied Harper.

Jo smiled. ‘It’s not like this story is ever going anywhere; why not?’

‘I think it’s a brilliant idea. You should definitely complete this and get it published. Mark my words; you’ll be one of the most famous faces in the country one day. Maybe even the world.’

Jo laughed. ‘Thank you, Harper. That’s very generous of you. So what’s the name of my main character going to be?’ she asked.

Harper got up to leave. ‘What do you think of Harry?’

Jo looked away thoughtfully. ‘Yes... Harry Potter!’ she said excitedly. But by the time she looked back, Harper had vanished.

***

Harper was excited beyond measure. She was standing in the Dealy Plaza at Dallas, Texas. The president of the United States was in a car right in front of her. She had to get a picture of this. If she ever made it back to her world, it would be priceless. She whipped out her smart phone just in time to witness one of the most important events of history.

A shot was fired. The President slumped in his seat. Harper had just recorded the assassination of President John F Kennedy from as close a range as possible. She stood there in shock and the camera kept rolling. She realized about 30 seconds too late that smart phones didn’t exist in the year 1963. She put it back inside her pocket and ran from the scene before anyone saw her.

Her caution came too late. Someone had filmed her holding a camera and recording the assassination. She went on to become famous as the mystery woman in the brown coat and red muffler " The Babushka Lady.

***

She was on a film set. She had no idea what year it was. The camera seemed to be rolling and she was standing somewhere in the background behind the main actors. She quickly tried walking away from the scene. One of the assistant directors told her to get back in and play her part. He must’ve mistaken her for an extra. Since she had no idea what part she was supposedly playing, she just pretended to answer a call on her phone and walked to the other end of the studio.

Decades later, the director of a Charlie Chaplin movie claimed to have proof of time travel. He had a tape of a woman walking in the background of a movie scene talking on what appeared to be a cell phone, long before cell phones had existed. Unfortunately for him, people waved him off as a conspiracy nut.

***

Harper had been jumping through time for years now. She hadn’t yet found a way out of it. Sometimes, she would end up in the future, where nothing was left, except a few scattered villages. These trips were very relaxing. She didn’t have to worry about people finding her out and interrogating her. Once, she had ended up somewhere in the middle of the 15^th century, right in the middle of a war. Who was fighting, she had no idea, but she remembered seeing a startled soldier just before disappearing. She wished in vain that she could somehow complete the task she had been sent here for. Ever since that godforsaken day, she was on the most erratic schedule in the history (and future?) of mankind. January 4^th. Or what she liked to call, The-Day-The-Earth-Stood-Still-And-She-Kept-Moving.

***

America had been wiped out. The continent of Asia had almost completely desiccated into nothingness. All that was left was the western border. Europe didn’t have much time, and neither did Africa (Africa eventually went on to survive this). What had caused this shocking state of devastation?  What conspiracy nuts had been shouting about for decades. Nuclear Holocaust.

All it took was a little push. Two weeks earlier, on the 21^st of December, unknown to any, a sweeper somewhere in Russia had stumbled into a control room, completely drunk. While trying to use a machine for support, he placed his hand on a large red button without realizing it. In a minute, there were nuclear explosions in different places all over the world; especially in the Americas. The cloud of radioactive smoke slowly began to spread, claiming its victims. USA mistook this as a hostile attack by the Russian Government and immediately retaliated by launching nuclear missiles on Russia. One thing led to another, and it all snowballed into nuclear world war. The world was self-destructing. Europe didn’t have much time left.

The Agency had gone into action mode the moment the first bomb had dropped. And of course, there’s nothing like a deadline to set the mind’s wheels in motion. Desperate ideas were being put forth. Old plans which had been classified as unsafe or insensible were being pored over. A particular blueprint of a time machine was found and with a few tweaks, it was completed. After several unsuccessful attempts, some scientists set the speed of the particle accelerator to ten times the normal safe limit and lo, behold! A Wormhole in time had been created. Completely by accident, they had a way to save the world. But with less than 10 days at hand, they had only so much time to make this plan as foolproof as possible.

Of course, no one volunteered to be the person who would actually have to travel through time and stop the drunken man. Then someone realized that as long as this entire nuclear arsenal existed on Earth, something like this could easily happen again. So perhaps they would have to travel farther back in time, before the nuclear bomb was invented, and stop that from ever happening. Someone would have to go back and change something, to change everything. Who this was and what had to be changed, no one knew.

After much discussion, the company decided to send Harper. She was the only person who hadn’t refused. But that was only because she was the only one who wasn’t present. She was an intern; she wasn’t invited to important meetings like this one. They hatched a plan to trick her into saying yes, and thought they had solved their problem.

***

‘No more arguments!’ said Professor Axon. ‘This is happening. It’s the only way.’

‘But... But... What if something goes wrong and I do something irreversible? Do you not know me at all? I’m bound to mess things up.’ said Harper.

‘Nonsense. You just have one simple task. Find the event that started it all, and change it!’ said Professor Axon.

‘Ok, wait. Someone explain this to me. If we go back in time and change something, won’t that affect everything that has happened between then and now? What if we never discovered the Wormhole? What if we had never been born? Or shouldn’t the change already have happened? I mean, it’s all a loop isn’t it? I mean... Ok I don’t really know what I mean. This is all very confusing,’ said Harper.

Professor Axon sighed and addressed Harper’s question with the lie they had been preparing to feed her. He didn’t really understand it himself, but the aim was to confuse the poor girl.

‘Consider Space as an endless set of infinite parallel threads. One of these threads is our universe, in the present. One way of time travel is to travel back along the same thread. This would probably cause a loop to be created in the thread and that loop would persist forever. However, this is theoretical speculation. Nobody has been able to prove this theory yet. Or rather, we haven’t reached the loop in the thread yet. The Wormhole is something else. It will allow you to jump from our thread onto another thread. We think the portal opens out sometime in 1930. It’s the same people, same universe, but different timeline. It’s a different past. Changing it won’t affect our present. The humans will survive; even if it’s in a parallel universe.

‘Do you understand now?’ he said, glaring at Harper.

Harper wasn’t completely sure she understood; her mind was imagining a trapeze artist jumping from one rope to another. But she nodded to avoid further embarrassment.

‘So it’s settled then. Harper will travel across the Space between the threads and find the event which led to Doomsday. And as discussed in yesterday’s meeting, we all agree that the chain of events which led to the aforementioned disaster began with the end of World War I and then with Adolf Hitler coming to power. The portal has been redirected to 1930. Harper will save the day!’ said Professor Axon.

***

‘Now, remember, the portal is still extremely unstable. Do not touch anything. We can try our best to direct it to the right year, but you might end up a decade or so ahead or behind time. If that happens, just keep your head down and don’t do anything. Understand?’ asked Professor Axon.

Harper nodded. She was wearing a brown overcoat and a red muffler. Something which might blend in with the year she ends up in. She looked a little green, though that might’ve been the weird lighting in the room. Harper never understood why labs must have such creepy looking colours. She walked over to the door of the particle accelerator.

‘Well, here goes nothing,’ said Harper.

She entered the particle accelerator and walked cautiously toward the gaping hole in the middle of the corridor which was illuminated by a crackling light. She turned back to have one last look at her present.

WHAM!

She was hit with a force greater than anything she had ever experienced in her life. Something had gone terribly wrong. Someone had forgotten to turn the power off. The crackling light had expanded until Harper had been hit by it in the back. It seemed to go inside her. The last thing she remembered was a crowd of people rushing in through the door a few feet away from her. She woke up some time later feeling extremely dizzy and found herself in front of a big building. She knew immediately it was a different time period by the way people dressed. She got up nervously and observed her surroundings. She asked a passer-by what year it was and got the reply ‘1930’ along with a very strange look.

After asking around a bit, she found out that she was in Berlin. The United Kingdom representatives were going to announce the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in the city square today. She remembered a little of what she had read in her history class; this treaty had been signed at the end of World War I by all the countries which had taken part in it. This could be an ideal place to start looking for the problem to solve.

As she hurried to the square, a man walking in the opposite direction knocked her over.

‘I’m so terribly sorry!’ he said, helping her up. He thought she was rather attractive.

‘That’s alright,’ said Harper, as she made to continue on her way.

The man motioned as if to stop her and said, ‘Can I perhaps buy you a cup of coffee?’

Harper was startled. She wasn’t used to men being so forward. She fumbled, made some excuse and walked away.

The man stared after her and mistook her to be hurrying towards what appeared to be a group of wealthy men. This wasn’t the first time a woman had rejected him, preferring those good-looking rich Jewish men. He silently vowed to take his revenge.

Harper looked for a very long time for anything which she could possibly change to protect the future of mankind. Little did she know that instead of stopping the chain of events that led to Doomsday, she had just triggered it. The man who had knocked her over was Adolf Hitler.

***

Author's Note

I haven't written much, and I haven't shown my writing to many people. Any kind of feedback is most welcome. :)

Reviews

[Persona]

You've thrown in way too many ideas. Lots of ideas for one writing should go toward a novel. I like time travelling but a conversation on a train is not the best way to begin. Also, don't have so many sections that gloss over events. Have one story, one time she travels to, rather than showing us a glimpse of the character in different places.

[Deeksha Sinha]

Thank you for your input. I will keep the points in mind when I next write a story.
I was trying for a comic effect with the multiple events, but that doesn't seem to have come out right.