Helen had sat there and listened for over an hour as Tobias explained what exactly had happened to her and how exactly they came to be there sitting across from each other and how exactly he knew all of this information in the first place. She was hearing the words he was saying in between the sips of his cappuccino alright, but she wasn’t quite taking it all in. As he finished trying to explain things for the second time she looked at him blankly again, something she had been doing rather a lot of since they had sat down at the coffee house.
It was one of those places that probably wanted you to consider it trendy and an attractive place to get your caffeine intake but you knew full well there was most likely another half dozen of them with slightly different yet almost identical styling within walking distance. A dishevelled looking tramp and a slightly bewildered, possibly hungover, but not unattractive brunette who might just still be wearing the same clothes she went out in the night before made for the most peculiar of breakfast partners. What the strange Irishman had been trying to explain to her was something far stranger then any of the theories about why they might be sat there together that had been forming in the minds of the other customers of the coffee house.
“So let me get this straight,” she interrupted him in full flow. “when you say that I don't really exist any more you don't mean that I might be dead, I'm just not alive?”
“Exactly, not dead, think of it more as being ‘misplaced’ by the universe. Let me explain again, did you understand what I explained about how time works and the parallel theory?”
Helen shook her head slowly, “not exactly no.” Which wasn’t entirely true, she was beginning to grasp what he had been trying to explain, even if she found it unbelievable, going over it for a third time wasn’t going to hurt.
“Ok, let me break it down again slowly. Every choice every person makes has a number of possible outcomes yes? When your alarm clock goes off any given morning you could get out of bed there and then or you have the choice to lie in, keep sleeping and not go to work. That choice would mean that your day will play out in a very different way. Your life might even be very different, imagine you got fired for sleeping in for example, what you have is two or more very different scenarios of what might happen as a consequence of your decision.”
Helen nodded. “That much I can keep up with.”
“Good. Well, you see some freak, and they don’t tell front line guys like me the actual how of this bit so I don't know the details, figured out that it was possible to predict all these outcomes and with sufficient time and inclination you could, well, predict the future, or at least see all the possible futures as parallel time lines, as it were, that branch out from each and every decision. You getting this?”
“I think so.”
“Fine, now the problem with that is that there is quickly an incalculable number of possible futures with so many things interacting, there isn’t even a number big enough to describe the possible outcomes. In fact anyone who did have this ability was actually stark raving mad, they went insane with the amount of insight they got into all the possible futures. They had a really hard time telling which was the actual reality they lived in.”
“but someone did figure out a way?”
“Bingo! Now you're getting it. You see they discovered two things, firstly that it was possible to predict the most likely of these multiple futures but that these futures changed so quickly that the calculations changed almost every damn second.”
“Wouldn’t that make it impossible then?”
Tobias nodded, “if we were all normal yes it would be impossible, but not everyone is normal. Turned out that certain people through the course of history found they had a natural ability to not only comprehend these possibilities, but to predict them to a degree and not to be driven mad by the visions. They could switch it on and off as it were.”
“so they are kind of like fortune tellers?”
Tobias laughed out loud, “nah, those hacks? Those hacks are pure wannabes mostly, with one or two exceptions but that's not the point here.”
“Alternate futures and predicting the future I can just about wrap my head around,” Helen said sighing, “but what the hell happened to me this morning!”
“Yes, that’s the bit people always struggle with,” the tramp nodded, “what happens, in so far as I can ever get my head around it, is that from time to time all these possible futures reach a point, a paradox, they kind of collide and the timelines get themselves all ‘confused’ as it were. When that happens, something, or in your case, someone, can fall through the cracks.”
“Fall through the cracks?”
“Yeah, goes missing, drops out of the reality it is supposed to be in, and ends up stuck between them all. So things might end up in the right reality, this reality, but things have changed and what was might not be anymore. When the possible futures meet things can end up in the wrong timeline or disconnected from any timeline.”
“Disconnected? What exactly do you mean by that?”
“Well usually its just a pen or a pair of socks, something that isn't really missed or it's loss is dismissed as accidental. Now obviously sometimes, very rarely it’s something more substantial, something like you, or me.”
“Socks?” Helen said sceptically, “you are comparing me with socks?”
“No, but where do you think all those odd socks go to? Don’t just vanish into thin air you know.”
Helen chuckled softly, the Irishman had a certain rough charm to his words, an honesty that was somehow reassuring in as much as anything could be reassuring under the circumstances.
“Look what happened was that you got removed from history because our future, the real future, collided with another possible future where previous events meant you never existed, but obviously you did, thus you end up here in limbo. Alive and well, but with no past and no future, at least not in the real future”
“The real future?” Helen asked confused, “how the hell do you know which is the ‘real’ future if there are all these limitless possibilities?” She suddenly felt like she was getting into this, she wasn’t sure why but something was clicking.
“Now your thinking like us Helen, that’s good. To be honest I’m kinda fuzzy on this bit.”
“Fuzzy?” Helen raised an eyebrow, something told her that explaining this wasn't something that the Irishman was used to.
“Don’t give me that look, I just do the leg work, the guys upstairs are the brains,” he scowled, “Anyways it turns out that they realised that there was one true time thread carrying on through all the chaos and all the other possible alternate timelines were just ‘ghosts’ indicators of what might be., but they came across a problem…”
“What kind of a problem?”
“Well, it all ended, there came a point, would have been around the year 2252 by all accounts, that the world would just have ceased to exist, all the alternates time lines stopped with the end of the this one time line, the real timeline. So they realised that if they could change that one true timeline they might be able to avoid this end and sure enough with a little tinkering the true timeline is now running into infinity. It’s our jobs to keep it that way.”
“Stop!” Helen sighed grabbing a cigarette and lighting it up anxiously, “you’re crazy.”
“Maybe, but being immortal has that effect,” he smiled.
“That’s not funny, how can you be immortal?”
“You are too now,” he reminded her, “you are still here in flesh and blood, because well, you existed in the true timeline up to this point, but now you don’t because the true timeline was infected by another one and viola, limbo, you exist but you don’t. No-one knows who you are, and time doesn't recognise you any more to find the time to organise your death.”
“You mean I can't die now?”
“Well, I exaggerated a little there, you can actually die in the right circumstances, not sure what all the conditions are, but you can't be reckless and think walking in front of a bus won't hurt because it very much will. You still feel pain, just not in the same way and being disjointed has some other side-effects.”
“Side effects?”
“Not the time to be going into those,” Tobias muttered waving his hand randomly, “what we really need to get down to is whether or not you accept all this?”
“I’m not exactly sure what it is I am supposed to accepting.”
“The job, to work for FATE Incorporated and do your bit.”
Helen nodded, although she wasn’t sure why, none of this made much sense at all and she was fairly sure she’d wake up any minute now. She closed her eyes hoping to open them to find herself back in her nice pine floored bedroom.
No luck, just the bedraggled Irishman making shapes in his cappuccino froth with a fork.
Helen sighed, “FATE incorporated? Fate is a business now?”
“For want of a better word yes, I guess it is. Not into profit or anything like that though, our only mandate is the survival of the one true timeline.”
“You do realise how crazy this all sounds don’t you?”
“Totally, newcomers always have trouble adjusting, perfectly understandable given the circumstances. It was worse before people had episodes of Star Trek as reference to even prepare them for the possibility of shit like this” Tobias grinned, “you try explaining time and space mechanics to a seventeenth century farmer and then you’d understand, hell at least people these days comprehend the possibility” Helen couldn’t shake the feeling the wiry Irishman was somehow enjoying her obvious discomfort at the situation.
“Look,” he went on, “another hour, let me take you to the office, you can see your own file, realise that I’m not stark raving mad, and we get a move on.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It is, you don’t really have a choice, unless you particularly like being homeless, penniless and having no identification. Your options are pretty slim I’d say. Although…” he paused, looking her up and down, “I could put you in touch with a decent pimp in King’s Cross if you’d rather.”
Helen coughed and threw him the kind of look that could stop a charging bull at ten paces.
“Just joking,” Tobias smiled raising his arms in mock surrender, “they are always telling me I need to improve my people skills.”
“Whoever they are, they are not wrong.” She retorted, “This has to be a crazy dream.”
Tobias laughed, “There isn’t a substance still around strong enough to induce shit like this now is there? Opium had quite a kick to it back in the day, but…” he trailed off almost wistfully
Helen slumped back and tried to compose herself, suddenly conscious of the fact she was still wearing her rather more revealing than is appropriate for breakfast clubbing clothes. She tried to comprehend why she was even listening to this bizarre Irishman, let alone allowing herself to believe that he might just be telling her the truth. If this was happening to someone else she’d probably have found it funny, she was a little warped like that. She almost smiled thinking about it like that, this would be a great prank to play on someone if it weren't for the whole waking up in a totally different world to the one you went to sleep in thing.
“Did my friends put you up to this?” she asked suddenly
Tobias just shook his head slowly, “listen, you can’t rationalise what just happened to you, no matter how hard you try. I understand that. Thinking it is a prank, even an elaborate one is a pretty common reaction amongst you newcomers. Come on though Helen, how would anyone have gotten you into bed with your ex, changed your locks and changed your phone? And do you really think they would have managed to convince old Misses Hudson next door to play along?”
“No, I suppose not.” Helen said, sighing deeply again and letting her head sink into her arms in front of her on the table.
“Listen, how about this? Come with me, see the office, then if you still don’t believe me you can walk away.”
“I need to go powder my nose” She said getting up quickly.
“At this hour of the morning….oh wait, that’s a polite way of saying you need a piss isn’t it…sure, we have all the time in the world.”
Helen made her way through the café to the toilets at the back, all the other patrons looked normal enough, the black cabs and couriers fighting each other for space on the road outside looked normal enough and an hour’s worth of coffees were fast convincing her that if this were a dream she’d have woken up quite a while ago.
She sighed again; the signs weren’t good at all. She glanced back at the table and Tobias grinned back at her. Whilst she didn’t buy all this ‘fate’ crap she didn’t see she had many options open. It wasn’t the first conclusion she would have reached for to explain the morning’s events but it was all she had to go on. Hangovers didn't get this bad, she was fairly sure she hadn't gone crazy, and for all the insanity of the words she heard coming out of his mouth, something told her that this Tobias character wasn't some kind of talented con man. In fact she had a strange feeling that lying wasn't one of his strengths at all. There was nothing else for it, once she had relieved herself of the other effects of having four big mugs of cappuccino already she may as well go and see what this office was he was talking about...
It was one of those places that probably wanted you to consider it trendy and an attractive place to get your caffeine intake but you knew full well there was most likely another half dozen of them with slightly different yet almost identical styling within walking distance. A dishevelled looking tramp and a slightly bewildered, possibly hungover, but not unattractive brunette who might just still be wearing the same clothes she went out in the night before made for the most peculiar of breakfast partners. What the strange Irishman had been trying to explain to her was something far stranger then any of the theories about why they might be sat there together that had been forming in the minds of the other customers of the coffee house.
“So let me get this straight,” she interrupted him in full flow. “when you say that I don't really exist any more you don't mean that I might be dead, I'm just not alive?”
“Exactly, not dead, think of it more as being ‘misplaced’ by the universe. Let me explain again, did you understand what I explained about how time works and the parallel theory?”
Helen shook her head slowly, “not exactly no.” Which wasn’t entirely true, she was beginning to grasp what he had been trying to explain, even if she found it unbelievable, going over it for a third time wasn’t going to hurt.
“Ok, let me break it down again slowly. Every choice every person makes has a number of possible outcomes yes? When your alarm clock goes off any given morning you could get out of bed there and then or you have the choice to lie in, keep sleeping and not go to work. That choice would mean that your day will play out in a very different way. Your life might even be very different, imagine you got fired for sleeping in for example, what you have is two or more very different scenarios of what might happen as a consequence of your decision.”
Helen nodded. “That much I can keep up with.”
“Good. Well, you see some freak, and they don’t tell front line guys like me the actual how of this bit so I don't know the details, figured out that it was possible to predict all these outcomes and with sufficient time and inclination you could, well, predict the future, or at least see all the possible futures as parallel time lines, as it were, that branch out from each and every decision. You getting this?”
“I think so.”
“Fine, now the problem with that is that there is quickly an incalculable number of possible futures with so many things interacting, there isn’t even a number big enough to describe the possible outcomes. In fact anyone who did have this ability was actually stark raving mad, they went insane with the amount of insight they got into all the possible futures. They had a really hard time telling which was the actual reality they lived in.”
“but someone did figure out a way?”
“Bingo! Now you're getting it. You see they discovered two things, firstly that it was possible to predict the most likely of these multiple futures but that these futures changed so quickly that the calculations changed almost every damn second.”
“Wouldn’t that make it impossible then?”
Tobias nodded, “if we were all normal yes it would be impossible, but not everyone is normal. Turned out that certain people through the course of history found they had a natural ability to not only comprehend these possibilities, but to predict them to a degree and not to be driven mad by the visions. They could switch it on and off as it were.”
“so they are kind of like fortune tellers?”
Tobias laughed out loud, “nah, those hacks? Those hacks are pure wannabes mostly, with one or two exceptions but that's not the point here.”
“Alternate futures and predicting the future I can just about wrap my head around,” Helen said sighing, “but what the hell happened to me this morning!”
“Yes, that’s the bit people always struggle with,” the tramp nodded, “what happens, in so far as I can ever get my head around it, is that from time to time all these possible futures reach a point, a paradox, they kind of collide and the timelines get themselves all ‘confused’ as it were. When that happens, something, or in your case, someone, can fall through the cracks.”
“Fall through the cracks?”
“Yeah, goes missing, drops out of the reality it is supposed to be in, and ends up stuck between them all. So things might end up in the right reality, this reality, but things have changed and what was might not be anymore. When the possible futures meet things can end up in the wrong timeline or disconnected from any timeline.”
“Disconnected? What exactly do you mean by that?”
“Well usually its just a pen or a pair of socks, something that isn't really missed or it's loss is dismissed as accidental. Now obviously sometimes, very rarely it’s something more substantial, something like you, or me.”
“Socks?” Helen said sceptically, “you are comparing me with socks?”
“No, but where do you think all those odd socks go to? Don’t just vanish into thin air you know.”
Helen chuckled softly, the Irishman had a certain rough charm to his words, an honesty that was somehow reassuring in as much as anything could be reassuring under the circumstances.
“Look what happened was that you got removed from history because our future, the real future, collided with another possible future where previous events meant you never existed, but obviously you did, thus you end up here in limbo. Alive and well, but with no past and no future, at least not in the real future”
“The real future?” Helen asked confused, “how the hell do you know which is the ‘real’ future if there are all these limitless possibilities?” She suddenly felt like she was getting into this, she wasn’t sure why but something was clicking.
“Now your thinking like us Helen, that’s good. To be honest I’m kinda fuzzy on this bit.”
“Fuzzy?” Helen raised an eyebrow, something told her that explaining this wasn't something that the Irishman was used to.
“Don’t give me that look, I just do the leg work, the guys upstairs are the brains,” he scowled, “Anyways it turns out that they realised that there was one true time thread carrying on through all the chaos and all the other possible alternate timelines were just ‘ghosts’ indicators of what might be., but they came across a problem…”
“What kind of a problem?”
“Well, it all ended, there came a point, would have been around the year 2252 by all accounts, that the world would just have ceased to exist, all the alternates time lines stopped with the end of the this one time line, the real timeline. So they realised that if they could change that one true timeline they might be able to avoid this end and sure enough with a little tinkering the true timeline is now running into infinity. It’s our jobs to keep it that way.”
“Stop!” Helen sighed grabbing a cigarette and lighting it up anxiously, “you’re crazy.”
“Maybe, but being immortal has that effect,” he smiled.
“That’s not funny, how can you be immortal?”
“You are too now,” he reminded her, “you are still here in flesh and blood, because well, you existed in the true timeline up to this point, but now you don’t because the true timeline was infected by another one and viola, limbo, you exist but you don’t. No-one knows who you are, and time doesn't recognise you any more to find the time to organise your death.”
“You mean I can't die now?”
“Well, I exaggerated a little there, you can actually die in the right circumstances, not sure what all the conditions are, but you can't be reckless and think walking in front of a bus won't hurt because it very much will. You still feel pain, just not in the same way and being disjointed has some other side-effects.”
“Side effects?”
“Not the time to be going into those,” Tobias muttered waving his hand randomly, “what we really need to get down to is whether or not you accept all this?”
“I’m not exactly sure what it is I am supposed to accepting.”
“The job, to work for FATE Incorporated and do your bit.”
Helen nodded, although she wasn’t sure why, none of this made much sense at all and she was fairly sure she’d wake up any minute now. She closed her eyes hoping to open them to find herself back in her nice pine floored bedroom.
No luck, just the bedraggled Irishman making shapes in his cappuccino froth with a fork.
Helen sighed, “FATE incorporated? Fate is a business now?”
“For want of a better word yes, I guess it is. Not into profit or anything like that though, our only mandate is the survival of the one true timeline.”
“You do realise how crazy this all sounds don’t you?”
“Totally, newcomers always have trouble adjusting, perfectly understandable given the circumstances. It was worse before people had episodes of Star Trek as reference to even prepare them for the possibility of shit like this” Tobias grinned, “you try explaining time and space mechanics to a seventeenth century farmer and then you’d understand, hell at least people these days comprehend the possibility” Helen couldn’t shake the feeling the wiry Irishman was somehow enjoying her obvious discomfort at the situation.
“Look,” he went on, “another hour, let me take you to the office, you can see your own file, realise that I’m not stark raving mad, and we get a move on.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It is, you don’t really have a choice, unless you particularly like being homeless, penniless and having no identification. Your options are pretty slim I’d say. Although…” he paused, looking her up and down, “I could put you in touch with a decent pimp in King’s Cross if you’d rather.”
Helen coughed and threw him the kind of look that could stop a charging bull at ten paces.
“Just joking,” Tobias smiled raising his arms in mock surrender, “they are always telling me I need to improve my people skills.”
“Whoever they are, they are not wrong.” She retorted, “This has to be a crazy dream.”
Tobias laughed, “There isn’t a substance still around strong enough to induce shit like this now is there? Opium had quite a kick to it back in the day, but…” he trailed off almost wistfully
Helen slumped back and tried to compose herself, suddenly conscious of the fact she was still wearing her rather more revealing than is appropriate for breakfast clubbing clothes. She tried to comprehend why she was even listening to this bizarre Irishman, let alone allowing herself to believe that he might just be telling her the truth. If this was happening to someone else she’d probably have found it funny, she was a little warped like that. She almost smiled thinking about it like that, this would be a great prank to play on someone if it weren't for the whole waking up in a totally different world to the one you went to sleep in thing.
“Did my friends put you up to this?” she asked suddenly
Tobias just shook his head slowly, “listen, you can’t rationalise what just happened to you, no matter how hard you try. I understand that. Thinking it is a prank, even an elaborate one is a pretty common reaction amongst you newcomers. Come on though Helen, how would anyone have gotten you into bed with your ex, changed your locks and changed your phone? And do you really think they would have managed to convince old Misses Hudson next door to play along?”
“No, I suppose not.” Helen said, sighing deeply again and letting her head sink into her arms in front of her on the table.
“Listen, how about this? Come with me, see the office, then if you still don’t believe me you can walk away.”
“I need to go powder my nose” She said getting up quickly.
“At this hour of the morning….oh wait, that’s a polite way of saying you need a piss isn’t it…sure, we have all the time in the world.”
Helen made her way through the café to the toilets at the back, all the other patrons looked normal enough, the black cabs and couriers fighting each other for space on the road outside looked normal enough and an hour’s worth of coffees were fast convincing her that if this were a dream she’d have woken up quite a while ago.
She sighed again; the signs weren’t good at all. She glanced back at the table and Tobias grinned back at her. Whilst she didn’t buy all this ‘fate’ crap she didn’t see she had many options open. It wasn’t the first conclusion she would have reached for to explain the morning’s events but it was all she had to go on. Hangovers didn't get this bad, she was fairly sure she hadn't gone crazy, and for all the insanity of the words she heard coming out of his mouth, something told her that this Tobias character wasn't some kind of talented con man. In fact she had a strange feeling that lying wasn't one of his strengths at all. There was nothing else for it, once she had relieved herself of the other effects of having four big mugs of cappuccino already she may as well go and see what this office was he was talking about...
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