Story: The Disappearance (VI)

(Part V , VII)

Meeting yourself is one of the more bizarre things you can do. I say this with the sure experience of having done that same thing four times to date. This was the first time and counter-intuitively also the least shocking.

"Hi. How's it going?"

"Fine. Average day?"

"About usual."

We both paused.

"Want to spill on what's going on here, pal?"

"Time travel, doofus. I've come from the future. It's a crummy future and we want to change it. It's like that movie with the robot-thing."

"'Shakey Davies and The Robot Gladiator from far-off Future Fascist Rome, Part II'?"

"Always the quip, always the slam."

"Look, just spill the information."

"Fine. McGonagle Biscuits will implode into a dense chronal singularity in three days and we have to stop them. I'm from six days in the future, when three tenths of the nation has been sucked into the singularity and the rest is holding on by its fingertips. If we stop them I should stop existing. Well, I should have stopped existing already but here I am. Those rules are still just as fuzzy as all time travel tends to be."

"Super singularity? What about Agnes?" I looked at the stunning Agnes and was displeased suddenly at the idea of her being sucked into a singularity.

"She's sticking with me. I'll keep her out of trouble."

Agnes maintained a level silence. I had a feeling there were things being left unsaid. Probably things I would be extremely interested about. "I want to know where to start, I want to know how you got here, and I want to know why McGonagle here is keeping her lips clamped so tightly together."

Agnes finally broke down. "I'm not your Agnes. I'm future Agnes. All this happened because I withheld the truth from you when I met you the first time. Originally I would have met you here and filled your head with flirtatious nonsense and muddled your case, but now I've come back to tell you the truth about what's going on. The reality of it all. I didn't know myself to be honest. The Higher-Ups don't tell me everything. If you're curious then you'll find the first me gagged behind those chairs over there. And I haven't vanished either."

I dug out my old theoretical physics. "You guys have caused a separate timeline now, and you're trapped and persistent. If not then you would have evaporated as well. 'Temporal inertia' and 'bubbles on the surfaces of time' are just movie gibberish. Fantastic. Twin brothers after all this time, and mom never told me. The shame of that woman. You have to have worked this out already?" That last shot was pointed and pointed at my doppelganger.

He sighed. "If this were a novel, Agnes and I wouldn't live to the last page and would go out fighting the good fight."

"And..."

He knew what I was asking. "The singularity was caused by a time travel effect. McGonagle biscuits got sucked - will get sucked - into a collisional time vortex. It's all to do with time travel."

"We've inspected for weird equipment. There's nothing. I don't get it."

"There doesn't have to be anything there now, but in one hundred years there will be, and they use that technology in the most ridiculously stupid way, send future biscuits here to this time and to that factory, and the residual energy is what causes the anomalies. As it turns out, it's cheaper to make the stupid things after you've sold them. It's the scummiest reason to lose people in the bizarrest of ways."

Money! At least Agnes had enough conscience to look ashamed.

To be continued...