Portal to Never (Fiction)

 

Portal to Never
(a brief science fiction story)
by Robert Arvay

The strangest person I ever met was memorable, which is the most ironic of ironies, as you shall shortly see.

I was a very low-level research assistant, in an obscure project, that was running out of its funding.  All the important people were spending more time and energy seeking opportunities elsewhere, than wrapping up what increasingly seemed to be a failed venture.  Even the bottle-washer had gone.  And so, most nights found me staying late, along with the project manager who, in previous months, had deemed himself too important to even ask my name.  He had recently taken note of me, however, and even authorized generous overtime pay for me, from the dwindling funds remaining on account.  Otherwise, I would already have joined the bottle-washer in his quest for greener pastures.

As it was, Dr. Gershner was particularly morose this night.  At first, I attributed his dark mood to his poor prospects for future employment, since the project he had long been leading, seemed now to have been discredited in the journals.  Needless to say, there would be no Nobel Prize in Physics for him.  Ever.  Or, am I saying too much, too soon?

“Quite to the contrary,” Dr. Gershner quipped, “I’ll be lucky if they don’t lock me in a rubber room.  Nobody even claims to know me.  Isn’t that the most bizarre twist?  That I, who caused so many others to disappear, should myself be utterly forgotten?”

At this point, I became a bit uneasy.  Gershner had leaned so close to me that I thought I detected the faintest scent of bourbon on his breath.  Before my silence could grow too awkward, I forced myself to say, “How could you have made anyone disappear?”

Gershner stepped away from the workbench, and glumly strode to his desk, where he brushed aside some papers that once had been important.  “Have a seat,” he said, motioning me to the chair opposite his.  I did as he bade.

“What do you know of our project?” he asked.  It seemed a rhetorical question, but I humored him.

I answered, “Only that it deals with retro-causation.”  Not that I knew what retro-causation is, but I had heard the term often enough, back when there had seemed a sense of excitement among the senior researchers.  Those days of heady optimism were long gone.

“Well, okay,” Gershner said, with a hint of condescension, but just a hint, mind you.  “We’ll call it that.  Retro-causation.  Do you know what that means?  Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t.  Few people do.  It has to do with the Grandfather Paradox.”

“Yes,” I said, hasty to establish myself as not a complete dolt.  “I know what that is.  It says that backward time-travel is impossible, because if it were, the time traveler could go back in time, kill his own grandfather before he had children, and by doing so, prevent himself from ever being born."  I said all that in one breath.  “And this in turn, would prevent him from ever traveling back in time to kill his grandfather.  That proves that backward time travel is impossible.”

 
Gershner chuckled.  “That is the conventional dogma.  And that is why this project uses the term, retro-causation, instead of retro-time-travel.  But here’s the thing, Conrad.  It’s all the same.”
 

Again, I felt the silence to be awkward.  Finally, I spoke.  “Are you saying that it is possible to travel back in time?”

 
Gershner reached downward to open a desk drawer.  He pulled out a half-empty fifth of bourbon, and placed the bottle on his desk.  My eyes must have widened a bit, because he said, “I take it you don’t imbibe.”
 

“Uh, no,” was all I could say.

 

“Just a drop,” Gershner insisted.  “Humor me.  Please.”

 

I’m not sure why, but I took a sip.  He was so pathetic, so forlorn, I could not refuse.

 

“Thank you, Conrad.  I hardly ever drink.  I just have a small sip now and then.  I actually don’t like the stuff, but it settles my nerves.  Yes, Conrad, it is in fact impossible to travel backward in time, at least for humans—at least in the tradition of an H.G. Wells fantasy.  Retro-causality is the reason why there is no time-travel.  But just because retro-causality forbids time-travel, this does not mean that retro-causality cannot exist.”

 

By this time, I was thoroughly confused, and I didn’t mind that it showed.

 

“All right, then,” Gershner said, “I’ll let you in on the secret.  I found a way to change the past.”

 

The bourbon, I presumed.  Even I could sense that it could cloud one’s judgment, just from the tiny bit I had taken.

 

Gershner continued.  “Look, there is nothing unscientific about that.  I got a grant to study the possibility.  The government wanted to make sure.  If it is possible to change the past, then sooner or later, some bad guys will do it, and so instead, we should be first.  My job was not just to prove that it can happen, but to find out how to control it—to prevent others from doing it.”

 

I felt obliged to comment, so I said, “If it were possible to change the past, then reality would be chaotic.”

“Exactly,” Gershner said.  “And there are those who say that, it is, indeed, chaotic.  Think about it.  How do you know that yesterday really happened?  You remember it, that’s how.  But if somehow, yesterday were to change, to become a different version of yesterday, then you would remember only the different version.  You would have no clue that it had changed.  You would correctly assume that the other yesterday had never really happened, because it didn’t.”

 

This was all a bit too much, and I said so.  “Dr Gershner, I’m just a lab assistant.”

 

“Very well,” Gershner said, perhaps growing a bit testy.  “Then I’ll just get to the point.  I caused people to disappear.  Not just disappear, mind you.  I caused them to never have existed in the first place.”

 
He’s crazy, I thought.  Not even the bourbon he was sipping could explain his delusional claim.  Although, I thought to myself, maybe it’s having that effect on me.
 

“See that machine?” he pointed to it.

 

“Yes,” I said.  “The quantum tunnel generator.  But it doesn’t work.”

 

“Oh, it works,” Gershner said.  “But not the way it was advertised.  I lied.  It was never about tunneling through space.  It tunnels through space-time.”

 

“Yes,” I said, pretending to be smart.  “Space and time are two sides of the same coin.  Einstein proved that.”

 
“There was an accident,” Gershner said abruptly.  “So many scientific advances begin with an accident, but this one was tragic.  There was a man named Frank DeBouss.  He was one of our research associates, very well known in the physics community.  Very famous.  But you never heard of him, Conrad.  Do you know why?  Because, after the accident, he never existed.  He had never existed.  Ever.”

 I squirmed.  “Perhaps I should go now.”

 

Gershner openly laughed.  “Not only did you never hear of him, no one else did, either.  I reported the accident.  I told everyone that Dr. DeBouss had stepped into the warp field, generated by the quantum tunnel generator, and that he had instantly vanished.  When people asked me who Dr. DeBouss was, I was astonished, incredulous.  What do you mean, who was he?  We all worked with him.  We all read his books, attended his lectures, reviewed his journal articles.  But, everybody insisted that they had never heard of him.  Ever.  It was exactly as if he had never existed.  Never.”

 

“I remember,” I said, “that you were the butt of a few jokes for a time.  People said you had been working too hard, that you had become eccentric.  Some even called you the mad scientist.  It was touch and go for a while.  But, Dr. Gershner, if Dr. DeBouss vanished, why are you the only one who remembers him?”

 

“That,” Dr. Gershner said, “Is why, for a time, even I began to doubt my sanity.  But then I discovered, that the quantum tunnel generator, generates a reciprocal field, and I had been in it when Dr. DeBouss had inadvertently stepped into the warp field.”

 

“Okay.  And that reciprocal field allowed you, and only you, to remember him.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I don’t get it.”

 

Gershner frowned.  “You will, Conrad.  I mean that in a nice way, the nicest of ways.  Do you remember Sally Danek?  Of course not.  She never existed.  But I remember her.  She was always very nice.  She even pretended to believe what no one else believed.  She told me so.  She told me that she understood my theory.”

 

“Very well.”

 
“She offered to collaborate with me on a journal paper.  I gave her all my notes.  Everything.  I was confident that, with her reputation as a theoretical cosmologist, the two of us could make others believe, as well.  Conrad, Sally tricked me.  She stole my work.  And then, she tried to turn on the tunnel generator while I was in its warp field.  She didn’t know that I had disabled it.  When I did not disappear from reality, she became angry.  Her plan to eliminate me had failed.  She cursed me, accused me of fraud, and said that she was going to report me.  And report me she did.  The next day I got a summons to appear before the full research committee for a hearing.  Then, Conrad, Sally made the most dreadful mistake.  She stood in the warp field, and dared me to make her vanish.  Dared me!  Conrad, I don’t know what came over me, but I did it.  I stood in the reciprocal field, and I threw the switch.  Sally instantly disappeared.  She disappeared, Conrad, not only from this room, but from reality.  Nobody has any memory of her.  There is no record anywhere of her having ever existed.  Conrad, it’s not just that it seems she never existed—not just seems—Conrad, Sally Danek never did exist.”

 I sighed.  “Indeed, Dr. Gershner.  She never did—except in your memory of her.”

 

“And soon, not even there.”

 

I was puzzled.  Gershner could see that.  I think he intended it.

 “Conrad, I have modified the tunnel generator.  I’m going to make it cause me to forget.  I’m going to make it reverse the reciprocal effect.”

 

“Okay,” I said tentatively.

 

“I’m serious,” Gershner said.  “I can’t live with myself after what I did.  It wasn’t just Frank and Sally.  There were others as well.  They were back-stabbers.  Liars.  Cheats.  Each one of them accused me of terrible things.  I had found the way to commit the perfect murders.  After all, Conrad, you can’t murder someone who never existed.  If they never lived, then they never died.”

 

“True,” I said.  Suddenly, I felt faint.  The drink.  Had Gershner put something in my glass?

 

Gershner spoke to me, but I could barely make out his words.  The room seemed to spin.  “Stand here,” I seem to remember him saying.  Then, something like, “Here is the switch.  When I tell you—”

 

Then I remember him saying, “Now.  Do it now, Conrad.  Turn the switch.”
 

I must have passed out, because I found myself on the floor, struggling to stand up.  Finally, after some time.  I regained my senses enough to look around the room.  The tunnel-generator was gone.

 

The security guard came to the door.  “Conrad, are you okay?”

 

“I think so,” I said.

 

“Well, it’s awful late, and I’m locking up.”

“Very well,” I said.  “By the way, the tunnel-generator is missing.”
 

The guard shrugged.  “Make out a report on it.”  He must have thought it was a minor thing.

 

“But it can’t be gone,” I said.  “The darn thing weighs over a ton.”

 

The guard seemed perplexed.  “Whatever.  We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
 

“And Dr. Gershner,” I said.  “Did you see him leave?”  The guard knew everyone in the project.  Everyone.  Personally.

 

He asked, “Who is Dr. Gershner?”

 

P.S.

 

By the way, for anyone who accuses me of insanity, I wish to assure you, this is only a science-fiction story.  It never really happened.  And Dr. Gershner never existed.

 

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

 

The Never Machine

--by Robert Arvay
 
As I revealed in my earlier account, I was a lowly laboratory assistant in a research project, run by the famous Dr. Emanuel Gershner.  You never heard of him, because he never existed.  Strange as those words may seem, they are true.  Dr. Gershner invented a machine that tunnels through space-time.  The whole idea behind the machine was to effect retro-causality, that is, to change the past.  Of course, doing that changes also the present.

Dr. Gershner deliberately stepped into the machine’s warp field, and when it was activated, he instantly vanished from existence.  When that happened, the past was changed, his past was changed, in such a way, that no one now remembers him except me.  Gershner had tricked me into standing in the machine’s reciprocal field, which is why I remember him, but no one else does.
 
It must be emphasized, and I know this sounds contrary to reason, but it must be made clear that Dr. Gershner never really existed.  He is a fiction.  When I tried to tell people about him, they thought me daft.  The same had happened to Dr. Gershner when he had told everyone about the disappearance of his colleague, Dr. Frank DeBouss.  No one knows about Dr. DeBouss, not even me, because Dr. DeBouss never existed.  He accidentally stepped into the warp, while Gershner was operating it in the reciprocal field.  Poof.
 
This places me in a very peculiar position, and in a sense, I feel cursed and betrayed.  If Gershner had felt so guilty, why couldn’t he have just vanished without a trace?  Why did he have to explain everything to me in such detail?  Why did he have to lure me into the reciprocal field?  He must have known that, in doing so, I would remember him, but no one else would.
 
That is a heavy burden to bear, as well he knew it would be.  It took me a long time to adjust.
 
But that was not the end of it.  Just when I began thinking that I could pawn off my account of him as a fiction, getting me off the hook—just then, there was a further development that, once again, caused people to doubt my sanity.
 
After taking a week off, I returned to the laboratory, not to resume my job, but to collect my final paycheck.  You see, the quantum-tunneler had vanished when Gershner had.  I’m not sure why that happened, but I am guessing that since Gershner had invented it, the elimination of his past had eliminated the machine’s past.  Does that make sense?  So little does anymore.
 
But upon returning to the lab, I found that there was a similar machine being assembled.  Not only that, but when I introduced myself to Dr. Gershner’s replacement, a Dr. Muhazzim Barsoom, he already knew me.  Indeed, it soon became clear that I had been his lab assistant for more than a year.  I remember none of that.
 
Worse yet, as time went on, I myself began to feel that I had indeed known Dr. Barsoom for more than a year.  It was as if I had amnesia, but was slowly recovering my memory.  Indeed, I met other people who knew me, but whom at first I did not remember.
 
Matters became critical when I contacted my family.  I had a sister whom I did not recognize, but one of my brothers did not exist.
 
Although I was completely sane in fact, but I was mentally ill in effect.
 
As time went on, there was an accumulation of bizarre findings.  History itself was no longer as I remember being taught in school.  Machines had been invented that were unfamiliar to me.  Worse yet, as if things were not already bad enough, I began to find that every day included new things that had not been there before.  A new lab tech showed up for work, but all my coworkers insisted that he had been employed at the lab for many months.  I finally concluded that, whatever had happened to me, it had disrupted the universe.  I feared that there was some kind of chain reaction going on that would reduce everything to chaos.
 
Finally, I was contacted by some very strange people, but people who seemed to know what I was going through.  One of them even sympathized with my plight, agreeing that Dr. Gershner had been selfish.  Gershner had extinguished other people, people who had vanished with no record of their ever having existed—making them in fact never having existed at all.  But Dr. Gershner, although he had become suicidal, wanted to be remembered by at least one person.  So, in a weird sense, he had not completely and totally vanished after all, because his past continued to affect my memory.  That created a glitch in reality, one that kept getting more widespread.
 
That inconsistency in reality, formed a sort of hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum, and the fabric was beginning to unravel.  Nature was somehow trying to correct the defect, but the repair was only an inadequate patch.  It was not holding.  If the defect were allowed to continue to unravel, then eventually, the entire universe would dissolve, and finally, everything would cease to exist.
 
The strange people told me that the only solution will be for me to enter the warp field of a machine operated by the strange people.  There is no other choice for me but to trust them.  In any case I am going insane, so I might as well go out on a positive note, saving the universe.  Once I do that, everything will return to normal.  If this works, even I will return to normal.  I will forget all the strange things that happened.  My memory of it will vanish.
 
The universe will return to the moment when Dr. Gershner vanished, never to have existed.
 
Of course I asked, won’t the process just start all over again?  Won’t someone else repeat the experiment?
 
No, the strange people assure me.  We’ll take care of it.  And you, Conrad, you will return to your hobby of writing science-fiction stories.
.