“Oh, you bet I was.” He pulled a small device that resembled a GPS from the briefcase and set it atop the toy block. He switched the device on, then tapped at the computer keys, apparently responding to whatever information the device was sending. “And I’m going to answer all your questions if I can, but I suggest we cover things in order, and in small doses. You’ll understand once we get into it.”
A few more taps on the computer, and then he took the block and held it out. “Here. Hold this in your hand.” Dane extended his palm, and Parmenter set the block on it. “To get through the introductions, I know who you are and where you live and what you do for a living, so there’s no need for you to tell me. As for who I am, you obviously know or you wouldn’t have made such a lasting impression on Dr. Kessler. I can tell you my age—I’m fifty-seven—and I could list my credentials and diplomas and bore you to death or I could get right to the important stuff. So hold the block up so you see where it is and also”—he indicated the block’s former location on the table—“where it came from.”
Dane felt like a volunteer in one of his stage routines, but he was not expecting a magic trick.
“Lucky for us,” said Parmenter, eyeing the computer screen, “Mandy Whitacre is inactive at the moment, probably asleep in bed, so we’ll be able to squeeze in and do this. Don’t blink. You ready?”
Dane’s eyes were open.
Parmenter tapped the enter key on the computer.
The block vanished from Dane’s hand and instantly reappeared in its former location on the table.
Dane was impressed but not surprised. He’d already seen this phenomenon several times.
Parmenter looked at the block on the table, then at Dane. “Okay, you saw what happened?”
Dane nodded. “Interdimensional displacement?”
The scientist lit up. “You’ve been reading about me!”
“And this is how she does it.”
“Fundamentally, yes. To qualify myself in your eyes, I have just shown you the core explanation for Mandy Whitacre’s magic, and I’m not betraying a confidence. I invented it. Shall I break it down for you?”
“You have my undivided attention.”
“To put it simply, I set the block on the table, then determined the exact spatial coordinates, exactly where it was, at”—he consulted his computer—“eleven thirty-eight P.M., January thirtieth, 2011. I then moved it to another location, your hand, at approximately eleven thirty-nine. Then the fun part: I sent it back to where it was and how it was at eleven thirty-eight. Where it was and how it was, the exact state it was in a minute earlier. It’s crucial to understand that.”
“And how did you do it?”
Parmenter sucked in a whistle, then sighed it out, trying to come up with an answer, Dane figured. “It’s a combination of time and space travel, although the crucial difference is, the block didn’t travel through time, time traveled through the block.”
Dane had read the articles Preston’s people had found. He vaguely understood. “The parallel railroad tracks.”
“Yes, yes! And here’s a practical way of looking at it: I suppose you’re familiar with how to restore a computer to a prior state? Your computer gets snarled up or crashes because you’ve hit the wrong key at the wrong time, and the only way to fix it is to have it revert to exactly the way it was a day ago or a week ago, or whenever it was still working, before whatever went wrong went wrong.”
“Right.”
“Ever done that?”
“Yeah. A few times.”
“Well, that’s similar to what we just did with the block. It was on the table for a moment, then, in the course of time, about a minute, I put it in your hand. Now … the key difference here between reversion—that’s what I call it, reversion—and time travel like you see in the movies, is that the block didn’t travel back in time. What happened was”—he searched the ceiling for how to explain it—“this computer is linked with our Machine. I fed the Machine the data from the block, the Machine replicated a secondary timeline”—he gave his hands an erasing wiggle, frustrated—“well, we put the block on a parallel timeline …”
“The other railroad track.”
“Yes! Right! Then, without shifting the block itself in relation to our timeline, I shifted the secondary timeline it was on backward by one minute. So even though the block is still here with us, in our present, in our space”—he reached over and flicked the block with his finger just to make the point—“it is actually existing in a timeline that is one minute behind ours. The block is, and always will be, one minute younger in relation to us. If the block were a conscious entity, it would think it never left the table, but it would be wondering where that last minute went. Very simple.”
“Oh, yeah. Very simple.”
“So, to recount the story that goes with this”—he put the block back with its friends in a toy box—“I got to thinking about the practical, humanitarian use for such a discovery. Imagine someone getting cancer or being injured, and medical science having the ability to place them on a new timeline and revert them to a point and place in time before they got sick or before they had the accident. They could continue their life from that point and bypass the illness or injury.”
“Bypass the illness or injury? Not just go through it all over again?”
Parmenter drew an extra breath before answering, “That’s why we put them on a secondary timeline, a whole new route through time so they don’t retrace the old one.” Dane was figuring it out and Parmenter could see it in his face. “Yes, you see where this is going.”
Dane had been preparing himself, trying to imagine such a possibility while trying not to hope. Even now, he dared not speak it.
“It’s not all roses, I’ll tell you that now, but to continue the story, some friends and I managed to build a small machine that could revert things and we experimented with blocks of wood like this one and other small objects. We stepped on a toy car, then put the broken pieces in the Machine and watched the car put itself together again. We crushed a can and then reverted it to an uncrushed can. That was exciting. We thought, Wow, with a big enough machine we could take an old car and erase all the miles off it, or a wrecked car and unwreck it. Great in theory, a little shaky in the practical application.
“But anyway, we got around to reverting rats—hope you won’t find this offensive, but we injured the rats in various ways and then put them in the Machine, and voilà! The rats went back to the way they were before we hurt them. We went bigger and tried monkeys. Same thing.
“But”—he waved his finger in the air, signaling an important point—“we also did maze and memory tests on the lab animals, and sure enough, their brains also reverted. The rats learned a maze right before we injured them, and then we reverted them and they weren’t injured anymore, but they couldn’t remember their way through the maze either. The monkeys could perform tasks, but when we reverted them to a condition prior to learning the tasks, they didn’t remember what they’d learned. They were younger, too, because reversion means everything reverts: any injuries, any bodily changes—haircuts, nail trimmings, weight loss or gain—and memory. So for all practical purposes, the rat, the monkey, the human subject wakes up behind the times. It’s kind of a Rip Van Winkle effect: they’ve lost a minute, an hour, a few days, depending on how far they were reverted.”
“How about forty years?”
Parmenter hesitated to answer.
Dane calmly asked again, “How about forty years? Can you revert someone forty years?”
Parmenter thought for a moment, then nodded his head with chagrin. “Now we’re getting to it. Somehow we did, but we don’t know how it happened, so at this point we can’t repeat it and, on the downside, we don’t know how to fix it.”
Dane’s mind was racing, only beginning to process what little he had heard to this point. A mountain of memories, events, and questions waited to be reworked into an entirely new schematic by which all the impossibilities would be possible. It was more than he could handle in days, much less minutes.