Edwin knew the risk. The penalty. Two Earth-Years ago, and of course that was still how they counted time, a crew member was ejected from the station for the very same thing. The security guards grabbed the lonely old man from the mess hall and dragged him into the airlock without a spacesuit or tether. Heads turned. People shouted. Boots hit the polycarbonate floor with dull thuds. Edwin watched with a spoonful of gruel held halfway to his open mouth. The intercom crackled with the cold, metallic voice of Captain Henriksen. Unseen for almost five years, rumors spread that Henriksen was dead, that the Lieutenant used software to mimic his voice. Edwin thought it more likely that Henriksen was alive and slowly growing edgy, paranoid, maybe even insane. While the old man trapped in the airlock pounded his fist against the thermoplastic doors the metallic voice listed a series of numbers: the power consumed, the fuel burned, the volume of tainted water, all the resources gobbled up by the machine. As the situation became clear, crew members returned to their seats. Heads nodded. Spoons stabbed back into gruel. A mumble of assent swept through the mess hall. The old man kneeled down and turned to face the blackness and coldness waiting for him. When the outer doors opened, one less mouth to feed, one last person breathing the recycled air, one less body to keep warm, one less drain on the dwindling fuel. The voice of that ghostly captain listed those numbers too, then the intercom crackled and was silent.
Carry on, everyone.
Back to the endless toiling.
But remember that what happened today could happen again.
Edwin thought about the ejection often. He thought about it when he was supposed to sleep, when he stirred the oxygen tanks, when he cleared debris from the exterior of the station, when his commanding officer barked orders into his face, when he consumed the gruel that contained all necessary nutrition for human survival. He thought about it almost every day for two years. When Edwin first climbed aboard the station, the station fated to become the last outpost of mankind, he had been a healthy man in the twilight of his youth, and the oldest member of the crew. After thirty Earth-Years, his joints ached, a faint cloudiness hung over his vision, his hands trembled, and thinning white hair perched above a creased face that he barely recognized as his own. Sometimes Edwin wondered if living on the station accelerated his aging. Sometimes he wondered what would happen to him when he could no longer perform his basic duties, what the voice of Henriksen would command, if the guards would drag him away when the rest of the crew was distracted, a quiet, private mercy, or perhaps Henriksen would prefer the crew witnessed the price of infirmity. One less mouth to feed. One less old and frail thing to keep warm. When Edwin watched the ejection, his heart rate remained steady, his breathing calm, and his gaze never faltered. Fear of death had evaporated with his youth. One more resource gobbled up by the machine.
Edwin climbed down a ladder into a narrow tube and closed the hatch, prompting a faint red light to paint the walls and the control panel, a collection of switches and buttons surrounding a touchscreen, in a rusty hue. Edwin tapped the screen. A command line and keyboard appeared. With a deep breath, he began typing the codes that would send him into the past for two minutes. One hundred and nineteen point six-seven seconds, technically. The longest the engineers ever achieved.
Only some of the travelers returned. They emerged from the tube after their bodies were disintegrated and reassembled at a different point in spacetime, once into the past and once again to the present. They claimed the process was painless, perfect, like falling asleep and waking up someplace better, or escaping from a decades-long nightmare, but there were some travelers who never emerged from the tube. Edwin had heard plenty of theories about what happened to them, that sometimes the travelers were never put back together, that sometimes the machine sent them to the wrong location, someplace where they could never escape, that they were reassembled in some horrid form that the engineers actively prevented from returning. Every machine has a small but non-zero failure rate, and something as advanced, as experimental, as traveling through time was bound to encounter errors and unknowns. Edwin knew there was no reason to believe in a happy ending for them, but he hoped the rumors and whispers were wrong, that the ones who never came back were someplace or some time better, under a blue sky holding a golden sun, listening to cold, clear water lapping against a clean, sandy shore.
When the travelers and the lieutenant were hidden away in their secret meetings the rest of the crew whispered that even when travelers returned, the reassembly could never be perfect, that it was impossible for every cell, every strand of DNA, every synapse, to come back into exact arrangement. Frequent traveling, the crew whispered, might lead to disease, mental instability, that with every trip the travelers returned less and less like their younger selves. None of that mattered for Edwin. Not at his age. Not with his goal. He knew he would be lucky to complete even a single journey. The mathematics alone had been a challenge for Edwin. He had to take into account the spinning of the Earth, how far the Earth, the Milky Way, the Laniakea Supercluster had drifted since the cataclysm relative to the location of the machine when he planned to activate it. And even then, he was still guessing about where to find them, the ones he thought about every day. Where had they been when it all fell apart?
Edwin entered the spacetime coordinates into the control panel then initiated the process. A mechanical whirring. Coolant gurgled through pipes. An electric hum. Air whistled through vents. He hoped the rest of the crew slept deeply.
He waited.
He closed his eyes.
He had wondered if fear would return to him when the moment came. His heart remained calm, his breathing even, but then the air in the tube began to feel thin and whisper, as if he stood at the top of a mountain that no longer existed. Darkness spotted his vision. Suddenly Edwin wanted to stretch out his arms, to lift his knees and walk, to exit the suffocating narrow walls of the tube. His heart thumped, thumped, thumped in his chest like that old man pummeling the airlock doors and Edwin wondered if he would faint or stroke or suffer a heart attack and nothing but a corpse would be sent back–
A flash of total darkness.
And then he was there.
Back on Earth.
Thirty Earth-Years ago.
His heartbeat was slow again, his breathing calm, all the anxiety of the moment dissipated when his body was torn apart and stitched back together by processes he did not understand. Edwin wondered if there had been a moment when he ceased to exist entirely.
Sun shone through wispy white clouds drifting through an endless blue sky. Birds chirped. Insects hummed. So vivid were the colors compared to the dull and mute station that Edwin almost covered his eyes. With the feel of a soft wind through his white hair and sunshine on his cold face, with the smell of fresh air, Edwin almost forgot that his time was limited, that he might not get another chance. Every second was worth a lifetime.
A little boy knelt by a large outdoor fountain and pushed toy cars across its rim. The boy vroomed and screeched as cars turned and rolled. Edwin sighed with relief. He had guessed the correct place. His mathematics had been correct. Or close enough.
Edwin approached the boy and held something out to him.
“Would you like this?” Edwin asked.
The boy turned and looked Edwin up and down, scrutinizing him. Maybe the boy wondered where the strange old man had come from, but the boy took the plastic toy truck.
“Thanks, Mister. I used to have one like this but I lost it.”
“Maybe it found you.”
The boy squinted at him.
“Do I know you, Mister?”
Edwin glanced at the boy’s mother. She chatted with a friend on a park bench a bit farther away than Edwin thought was safe. Not that it mattered. The boy glanced at her too, then looked back at Edwin.
“You look sad, mister.”
“Maybe I am.”
“You look familiar too.”
“Do I? I must have one of those faces. Is that your mother over there?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know where your daddy is?”
“Oh, he works on the Infinity Station. It’s orbiting Mars right now.”
“Very impressive. Do you know what type of work they’re doing?”
“No, he says it’s a secret. Can’t talk about it. Even mom doesn’t know.”
“Sounds like important stuff. Were… are you proud of your dad?”
“I guess,” the boy frowned, “I wish he was here.”
“I’m sure he wishes the same thing. You know he loves you, right?”
The boy scoffed. “Of course he does.”
Edwin looked to the sky.
Almost time.
“You look like you need cheering up, Mister.”
The boy stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry. Edwin smiled.
“You didn’t laugh.”
“Sure I did.”
“You smiled. A smile isn’t a laugh.”
“You’re a smart boy.”
“Want to hear a joke?”
“Sure.”
“What did one tree say to the other tree?”
“I have no idea, what did the tree say?”
“Nothing! Trees can’t talk!”
Edwin smiled again.
“That’s very good. Did you make that up yourself?”
“Yeah. One day I’ll be a comedian.”
“That would have been something to see.”
The boy looked to the sky.
“It’s alright,” Edwin whispered.
A vast roar descended from above and the sky burst into flame as something plummeted through the burning atmosphere. Edwin thought it was almost beautiful. After the impact, debris and destruction spread faster than sound. A silent wall of fiery annihilation. How it slipped by the gaze of every satellite as if it dropped out of the sky from nowhere was another mystery.
Edwin closed his eyes.
The roar consumed the world.
Edwin felt a small hand tug at his sleeve.
Then it was quiet again.
When Edwin opened his eyes, he was back in the Infinity Station, the plastic truck clutched in his hand. What the travelers said was true. The past was immutable. Changes never propagated to the future. Somehow the past repaired itself. After decades of traveling back again and again and again, the travelers claimed all traces of their meddling vanished as if it never happened, and with the truck in his hand Edwin thought it must be true. He could not do something as simple as give a child a missing toy. The physicists on the station theorized about parallel universes, about being trapped within a timeline, a particular future, but the truth was unknown.
Edwin sighed and placed the plastic truck back in his pocket. The station was silent, so silent that Edwin began to think he had gotten away with it, that perhaps he could make another trip back, perhaps strike up a conversation with the women on the benches, but the control screen flashed white and the tube filled with the crackle of static. A horrible face appeared on the screen, inches away from the tip of Edwin’s nose.
“Edwin,” Henriksen said, “I didn’t think you had the guts.”
Edwin gasped.
“Captain Henriksen?”
“More or less.”
A sick smile spread across Henriksen’s face.
“Everyone thinks you’re dead,” Edwin said.
Henriksen laughed like a sick dog barking, the bald patches scattered through his long, gray hair wrinkled and stretched. Lesions covered the creased, pallid skin of his face. What teeth remained were rotted. Edwin thought he could smell decay and rot through the screen.
“We’re all dead, living on borrowed time, floating in a coffin. I was going to use the tube tonight until you beat me to it.”
“You’ve been traveling? Is that why you…”
“Why I remain the spitting image of that handsome young man who once was chosen to lead mankind’s greatest voyage?”
Henriksen barked laughter again, but the laughter became deep, ragged coughs that only ended when Henriksen spat blood.
“You should be ejected,” Edwin said, “How much power have you wasted?”
Henriksen shrugged.
“The station is almost dead, Edwin, we’ve been fudging the numbers for years. Tell me, what did you see? How did you spend your last minute in paradise?”
Henriksen hunched over at his desk, large toad-like eyes hungry to hear what Edwin visited, saliva dribbling down his chin. Obsession. That was the word that came to Edwin’s mind. Obsessed with the dead past that haunted every decision on the station. Edwin minimized the video and began typing codes into the command line.
“Edwin, what are you doing?”
Henriksen chuckled.
“The lieutenant is on his way. He’ll pull you out and beat you to death if I demand it but I’d rather hear what you saw. Did you see it? The end? It was beautiful, wasn’t it? I watched it with my wife. With my daughters. Once I watched it from the moon. From the ocean. From a plane. The impact. The waves. The wall of death that marched around the globe. It’s alright to admit there was beauty in it, Edwin, the dead need not lie.”
A clank echoed through the tube. Someone hammered at the hatch.
“Edwin,” called the muffled voice of the lieutenant, “I know you’re in there.”
Edwin typed as quickly as his old, thin fingers allowed. He was trapped. The machine could be shut down from the outside, and the hatch pried open, but Edwin typed and typed. He entered the spacetime coordinates, hoping the station had not drifted too far in the last couple of minutes, then initiated the process. A mechanical whirring. Coolant gurgled through pipes. An electric hum. Air whistled through vents. Henriksen cackled. The hatch clanked.
Edwin closed his eyes.