I Never Was by Benkei

"Don't press that... "

The air decompressed with the sound of a paperback softly falling closed, instantiating as a subsonic tremor, so slight that nobody would remember hearing it a moment after it passed through the universe, filling up what went missing. The door to the lab opened and a dark-haired, Asian girl stuck in her head and looked twice. Nobody was there.

On the floor was a black, leatherbound notebook and a cheap BIC pen lying across its open page. She tried to pick up the notebook but couldn’t. Squinting, she noticed it was translucent and fading quickly. She started reading:

[i]Time travel was possible, he said. I believed him. So after I graduated from university with a physics degree I became his lab assistant. Professor Steinberg was obsessed with time travel. Now, years later, I realise I confused his obsession with intelligence and brilliance. He wanted to converge a segment of worldvolume into the same spacetime. That segment being himself because only an egomaniacal narcissist thinks that’s a good idea. I’m just here to take notes.

If all goes well he’ll meet himself at the exact same time and place where he was before. Sounds like [s]deja[/s] déjà vu when described like that but in reality it would be time travel. So déjà [s]vècu[/s] vécu really. Ah, screw French, I’m always struggling with the accents. Anyhoo, I’m writing this because we’re about to start our test and I’m afraid things won’t go as planned. It would be nice to know something will survive in this time even if things do go wrong. So I worry, because there are still too many unknowns. We saw particles disappear in our time, suggesting the worldline had collapsed on itself but we never found evidence where those particles went.

After what we thought were successful convergences of worldlines and worldsheets, Steinberg is ready to try it on himself. He generated enough exotic matter two years ago and through quantum entanglement created a “negative copy” of himself that, as he moved forward, would move backward in time. Or that’s the idea. By forcing a convergence of the worldvolume through a localized wormhole within the specific frame of reference of the lab, the negative copy, the self of four years ago and the present self would all be in one place. The four year old self would be nullified by the negative copy, resulting in the present self remaining in place at the convergence two years in the past. Sounds great in theory.

We’ve tested so often I dream about the tests – each slightly different but eerily familiar and entirely realistic. Come to think of it, I always had a sense of being there before. It got so bad I was daydreaming for a while too. I can’t even recall how often I misplaced things because of it. I’d place my laptop on a chair only to find it on a desk in the spot where it was when I dreamt about it. Or the other way around, I can’t really recall. It’s all a bit blurry really. Well, gotta go and flip a switch.[/i]

The notebook and pen deconstructed in what could only be interpreted as a puff of non-existent smoke and appeared in a way as if it snuck up on you unawares, like an effervescent wave under a cloudy, moonlit night. But since it’s just a notebook and a pen and you didn’t notice it until you became aware of it, it really had been there all along. And so it was for the girl. She tried to remember where she was going. She looked around.

Nobody was there. On the floor was an empty notebook and a pen.

“Huh, I swear I saw that before”.