THE TIME-WALKERS

by Sonye Anih

There was something in the way the patrol-bot looked at Dave. He could tell that it wasn't the real ruthless patrol-bot he'd evaded all his life. The biosec logo on the bot's shining metallic chest was different too. Dave was surprised that no one else on the bus noticed everything he was noticing. The patrol-bot too, seemed to be consciously aware that Dave was looking intently at him. Hence the unsolicited gaze.

"Everyone out of the bus now!!!" the bot yelled.

Every other person in the bus looked terrified apart from Dave. They all scampered out in terror.

Nothing was strange. Since the initiation of the Biosecs into the government, everything had gone sideways. The harassment of the Biosec patrol-bots were common. Especially in traffic congested cities like Lagos, Nigeria.

Something looked strange to Dave. In fact, everything seemed strange. A normal Biosec programmed patrol-bot would do something off. Something like yelling and calling the road travelers; "Pieces of Scum!"

The patrol-bot began the scan. Another normal stuff.

To Dave, the scan was different from every other scan he had evaded all his life. The patrol-bot acted like the scan was unnecessary.

The patrol-bot stopped in front of Dave and started blinking its red light. The red lights meant a single thing to the inhabitants of Lagos - IMPLICATION.

"I don't understand ..." He tried to say in defense. The patrol-bot struck him so thunderously that the world around him blacked out on him.

Another irregularity; a patrol-bot might be consciously ruthless and rude, but it will never strike a man in public.

Things might have changed as always. The Biosecs were getting stronger in their grasp of power, and their patrol-bot striking a man was just another way to show that they were in charge.

Dave woke up in a room smelling dense with iodine. The first lights that shone on his face told him one thing; that this wasn't the prison he'd expected to wake up in.

The entire room was empty. There was no sign of any malfunctioning bot or any wickedly smiling Biosec official. His head thumped with ache. He struggled to get up and get himself ready for whatever was to come. He'd been expecting this all his life, long enough since his anti-biosec rebellion started. And everything was turning out to be his last stupid behavior. At last, the Biosecs were winning just as they won his mom.

The door made a gliding sound and opened. The man standing and smiling behind the door was the man Dave had imagined killing a thousand times. Maybe he could still do so, before his final judgement.

"Good day, Mr. Soko. My apologies for summoning you like this, but as you can see there was no other way of doing so without having them notice," said the man in the most gently-deceptive voice Dave had ever heard.

Dave did an illogically stupid thing next. He leapt out of the bed he was laying on and wrapped his thick muscular palms around the man's neck.

The man struggled to escape from Dave's grip. It was fruitless. Dave was wordlessly strangling him.

"Please.... P..lease, Mr. S...oko. W... We are on t... the s... same page here," the man stammered.

Dave released his grip forcefully and the man struck the hard floor, coughing.

"You'd better start talking!!!" Dave yelled thunderously.

 

Thirty minutes later, Dave and the man were in the elevator moving down with its great haste.

"I'm sorry for everything that happened between us, Mr. Soko," said the man, "but, like it or not we're on the same hunt here."

Dave stared at the man with leering eyes and said nothing.

"I know I made a terrible mistake," said the man, "I..."

"Can you please shut the fuck up and tell me where the fuck we are?"

"We are in a super-secret facility off the coasts of the Delta. This is the only place that have managed to escape their intricate gaze and suspicion."

"Save me the stuff."

The elevator stopped and the door slid open. Both men walked into a perfectly impressive underground laboratory.

A man in a wheel chair came rolling towards them. Dave could not believe what he was seeing. The man was older, very much older than when Dave remembered.

"Welcome to the secret lab, Dave," said the man.

"Dr. Noah I... I thought ..."

"You thought I was dead," the old man smiled dryly. "As you can see, I am very much in good health."

"Why am I here?"

"I presume my son hadn't mentioned it yet," said the man.

Dave saw the close resemblance very clearly now. "What do you mean? That this ruthless piece of shit is your son?"

"Yes Dave. And so long as this battle is concerned, he's very much as innocent as you are," said the man rolling his wheelchair to a large computer at the end of the room.

Dave looked on. Confusion was wearing down his mind.

"Have you ever heard about time-walking?"

"Is that some kind of time-travel or something?" Dave asked. He moved closer to the computer.

The man that brought him chuckled, "It is time-travel, not a kind."

"Let me tell you a little history, Mr. Soko," said the old man. He turned to face Dave squarely, "It is a history you are part of."

Dave sat down with the man.

"Some time ago, in the early days of the year 2029, I sat with the west-African league of scientists and presented the idea of the OMEGA-HOMOSAPIEN. It was a horrible mistake that birthed the early biosecs. The idea was genetically modifying a human's DNA in its fetal stage to create highly adaptable homosapiens. We started the OMEGA program in the second part of the year, and before we knew it the whole idea spread."

"Sorry to interrupt, what has this got to do with me?" Dave asked.

"You had dedicated all of your life to fighting the oppression of the Biosecs, perhaps it's time we end this struggle once and for all," said the old man. He pulled a lever on his wheelchair and a secret door opened beside his son. In the room, Dave saw a tub-shaped machine with colorful tubes linking it to a large cylindrical frame.

"What is this?"

"This is a time-walking machine, the first of its kind. I asked you if you've ever heard of time-walking, this machine makes it possible. The concept of time travel has been debated for centuries, workable theories had been presented over the years but one trouble remained; if time travel was achieved, paradoxes were bound to be plentiful, one of this is that an individual cannot exist twice in a particular timeline, it breaks the laws of physics as we know it. So, we started imagining a theory that connects biology to the science of time travel, that was when the theory of time-walking became alive," said the old man.

"I still do not understand this fully," said Dave, still looking lost.

The man's son began, "This machine sends a human's present consciousness back-in-time to a younger self."

"That way we can't risk the paradox of having an individual exist twice in a single timeline," concluded the old man.

Dave nodded, "How do you intend to stop the Biosecs with this?"

"If we can send our present consciousness back to a timeline before my idealistic paper was presented, perhaps we can stop the Biosecs from ever getting created."

"Why then do you need me? Any of you can just jump into the machine, go back-in-time and stop you from presenting that catastrophic idea."

"According to research, an average human develops independent consciousness at adolescence. If either my father or myself steps into that machine, we would be headed to a timeline where our present consciousness would struggle with our past consciousness until there's a snap and that would lead to an exchange, our present trapped in the past and our past trapped in the present," said the old man's son.

Dave understood everything then. They needed him because he was the only one there who was yet to be an adolescent at 2029.

"How sure are you that this is going to work?" He asked, "how sure are you that a ten-year-old boy could stop you?"

"I believe in you, David," said the old man tenderly. "I believe you have the courage to end this ruthless oppression."

 

Dave laid in the tub-machine and shut his eyes. He was about to time-walk to the past. The machine was comfortable, except for the brush of his skin on the body of the tub.

"Please try to relax, Mr. Soko. Keep your mental health stable, any fluctuations in thoughts could send you to an alternately different timeline. Now take a deep breath and think of January 10, 2029."

He felt a rush of currents sweep past his body for some minutes. He remembered the day clearly, it was the day his mom drove him to high school, his first day at secondary school. He relaxed his mind until the rush of the torrential current stopped and he opened his eyes to the rude ringing of his bedside alarm clock.

It worked. He was about to leap off the bed when he remembered that he was 10 and less of his manly vigor. The time was 6:45am and he remembered again that it was his first day at secondary school. His mom would enter the room at any moment and ask him to get downstairs for prayers. If the plan was supposed to work, then he shouldn't go to secondary school today.

There was a knock on his door.

"David darling, are you up yet?"

It was his mom. He was overcome by emotion, he hadn't heard her voice for fifteen years, and here he was now. He felt tears wet his cheek.

"Yeah, mom."

She pushed the door open and entered his room. Dave saw the face he had wished constantly for fifteen years to catch even a slight glimpse of. Her face was priceless, her smile at him enthralled him. Then he remembered his mission, perhaps if he could execute it wonderfully then his mother might still be alive at the future.

"Now get yourself ready. Remember you're going to high school today."

"OK mom," he said.

Less than an hour later, his mom found him vomiting painfully into a tub at the bathroom. She rushed and stood beside him rubbing his back.

"What's wrong darling?"

"I don't think I can make it to school today mom, I'm terribly in much pain," his voice was shaking and he was shivering.

"You know what, Dave? I think I should take you to the clinic," said his mom before rushing to her room to get ready.

He smiled; the plan was going on as arranged. In three hours, Dr. Noah would leave his residence at Lekki to board a flight to Accra for the scientist's meeting. Dr. Noah's residence was less than three blocks from his uncle's clinic where his mom would be taking him. He smiled again.

 

He sneaked out while his mom was discussing with his uncle about his urgent sickness. The hospital street was quite busy. In his other timeline, he would have gone with his mom to the school. He would have been excited to meet new friends, very happy to finally get to stay in a school dormitory. But that was the timeline where there was no knowledge of the Biosecs, a timeline where his mom saw him as her world. In this timeline, the future depended on the action he was about to take.

The doubt still lurked within him, the doubt that Dr. Noah would listen to whatever he would be saying, but he waved off the doubts and headed to the old man's past residence.

 

"Common Daryl, I hope my breakfast is ready?" He heard Dr. Noah yell from inside the mighty house as he stood by the door.

He knocked, looking at his young fragile body frame and weighing the possibilities of the old man letting him in.

Dr. Noah, still in the prime of his youth, welcomed him in.

"Who might you be looking for, my dear youngster?"

He took a deep breath and reminded himself that though he was in the body of himself as a child, he was still the brave thirty-year-old dude who led the anti-biosec rebellion.

"You must not present your paper to the west-African league of scientists today," he said suddenly. He turned around to notice the shock in Dr. Noah's eyes.

The older man was speechless.

He continued, "You sent me here from the future, Dr. Noah. You told me to make sure you never presented that OMEGA-HOMOSAPIEN paper to the W-ALS today. Please you have to believe me, for the sake of all of us in the future."

The older man found his voice now, "Are you real?"

He nodded, hopefully his words were having the effects intended.

The old man came and hugged him. "Finally, I've been blessed to meet the one person Hawkings has waited all his life to meet."

The old man took a deep breath. "Now, come along, my dear youngster and tell me all about myself in the future. Even the W-ALS could wait."

 

He slept soundly on his bed that night, with the full realization that he would awake in a new world. A world devoid from the terror and oppression of the Biosecs.