The Secret Manuscript (25 page)

The flames
grew inside and billowed out from the window of a third-floor
apartment. It was difficult for Ben and Vanessa to just stand by
and watch from the sidelines without helping, but there was nothing
they could do. Besides, Ben knew everyone made it out alive so
there was no point worrying.

Within minutes
of the alarm, people began to pour out from all exits and gather on
the front lawn in their pyjamas. The fire crew and paramedics
arrived shortly after, parking their large trucks on the road and
blocking Ben and Vanessa’s view. The sirens where off, but the
flashing red lights rotated around, lighting up the street.

From Ben and
Vanessa’s vantage point, they were not able to see anything so they
moved to a better position. They did their best to scan the crowd
to look for the man who saved Ben.

“Do you
remember what he was wearing?” Vanessa asked.

“No, but keep
your eyes out for an elderly man carrying me. I will be the last
person to make it out.”

“There!”
Vanessa pointed.

From a side
exit, the couple caught a glimpse of an elderly man staggering out
of the building, struggling to carry a younger Ben in his arms.
Immediately, paramedics and neighbours swarmed around them,
obscuring the view.

“Come on,” Ben
said, rushing across the street.

The paramedics
were quick to respond. They attended to Ben and lifted him off the
ground and onto a stretcher. An oxygen mask was placed around his
nose and mouth as he was hauled into an awaiting ambulance. Another
paramedic offered assistance to the old man, but the man waved them
off and insisted he was fine.

By the time
Ben and Vanessa arrived, the younger Ben had already been loaded
into the back of the ambulance. They went separate ways, weaving
through the crowd in an attempt to apprehend the old man, but when
they met up again, they came up empty handed.

“Where’d he
go?” Vanessa asked.

“I don’t know,
it’s like he just vanished.”

“What do we do
now?” Vanessa asked.

“Let’s not
give up yet. We’ll keep looking.”

“And if we
don’t find him?”

“I know one
other place to look. At some point he’ll show up at the hospital
and leave a note for me with the receptionist. If we can’t find him
here, we can wait for him there.”

Vanessa looked
around and from the corner of her eye, happened to spot an elderly
man slink away behind the building.

“I think I
just saw him,” she said.

“Where?”

“He went
behind the building.”

“I’m going
after him,” Ben said, as he ran off.

Vanessa took
it upon herself to run around the other side. Eventually, they met
in the middle at the rear of the apartment.

“Where did he
go?” Vanessa asked.

“I’m not
sure.”

Then, from the
shadows, an unexpected voice startled them “Looking for me?”

The mystery
man emerged from the shadows and revealed himself. It was dark, as
the building shielded them from the street lights, but the moon
provided just enough illumination for them to see.

“Who are you?”
Ben asked.

Without saying
a word the man approached Ben and stared at him face to face.
“Don’t you recognize me?” the old man said. “I’m you.”

Ben studied
the man. They were both the same height, similar build, and had
similar facial features. If observing a younger version of oneself
was strange, observing an older version was even weirder. Ben knew
what he looked like a year ago, but to see himself as an old man
was a trip.

“I go bald?”
Ben asked, running his fingers through his hair.

“I’m afraid
so,” the man said with a chuckle.

“Do you mind
telling me what the hell is going on?” Ben asked.

“You know,
Ben, you don’t give yourself enough credit sometimes. We’re a lot
smarter than you think. Forty years ago I stood where you are
standing now, and I asked the same question. I’ll tell you what the
future us told me, but not here. Let’s go back to your hotel, I
believe you have an extra bed for me.”

The three of
them entered the vehicle with Vanessa taking the back seat to allow
the two Bens to talk. During the short ride back to the hotel room,
older Ben began to fill in the missing details of this grand
mystery.

“You have it
mostly figured out already, Ben. You figured out you travelled back
in time, bought the lottery ticket, and met with Velena. But as of
this moment, you have no idea what to do next, right?”

“No clue.”

“You’ve
probably read some notes about your life having a purpose. You
inherit a house, discover a secret manuscript, and learn about the
lost connection you have with Charles Gringer, but what does it all
mean, you wonder?”

“Yes, that’s
exactly what I’m wondering. Please tell me you have the
answers?”

“Yes, I will
tell you everything, including who those two thugs are who were
chasing after you.”

“Please, I’m
dying to know.”

“Don’t say
that,” older Ben said. “If you die now, you’ll kill us both.”

“Sorry, figure
of speech.”

“The two goons
are from the future. They’re called guardians.”

“Guardians?”

“It’s a long
story, but they are essentially time cops.”

“What do they
want with me?”

“They want to
prevent you from changing the world.”

“I change the
world?” Ben asked.

“Yes, and in a
big way. You see, so far all these events have happened to you, but
the truth is, your purpose is to serve Kyle.”

“Kyle?” Ben
said. “What does he have to do with any of this?”

“Everything.
What you do from this moment forward is integral to helping him
invent time travel. The money you leave for Kyle, which he will
discover a year from now, will enable him to build a lab and employ
some of the most brilliant minds around the world. Together, they
will embark on a journey to do what no one else has been able to
do. After nearly fifty years of toil and sacrifice, he and his team
eventually develop a working prototype of a time machine — that
little gizmo in your pocket. To test it, he needed a volunteer. Any
guesses as to who he chose?”

“You… me… I
mean, us?”

“Yes,
exactly.”

“You have no
idea how many questions I have had throughout this past year. After
you came into my apartment and saved my life, things became really
strange.”

“Indeed,” the
man said. “And yes, I do have an idea.”

“Is there no
time travel etiquette? I mean, couldn’t you have left me a note or
something?”

“I did leave a
note.”

“Don’t give
up, your life has a purpose and then some abstract numbers — that’s
the best you could come up with?”

“Hey, it
worked, didn’t it?”

Pulling up to
the hotel, the three of them left the vehicle and entered through
the lobby of the small hotel. The receptionist was now even more
perplexed as to why an old man was accompanying a young couple into
their hotel room at 4:00 a.m.

As soon as
they stepped into the elevator, Ben asked. “So what do we do
now?”

“We go to
Calgary, reunite with your estranged grandfather, and... oh by the
way, wait until you see this guy, he looks exactly like me.”

“What happens
to Charles Gringer?”

“He cashes the
lottery ticket and splits it with you as per our agreement. He
forms a new identity and vows to live the rest of his days as
Elliot Hershel.”

“Who’s Elliot
Hershel?”

“He’s nobody,
I just made him up,” the man said, holding up a fake passport and
ID.

“So in
exchange for the ten-million dollars, he agrees to give me his
house?”

“Wouldn’t you
do the same?” the older man asked. “Who could possibly refuse an
offer like that?”

Now in the
suite, the older Ben walked across the room to a desk in the corner
and wrote the following note on the hotel stationary:

DON’T GIVE UP,
YOUR LIFE HAS A PURPOSE – 40 35 55 81 11

“I have a
question,” Vanessa said, looking puzzled.

“Shoot.”

“If these
numbers come from you, and they were given to you by some future
you, then where did they originate from?”

“I’m not sure
I follow,” younger Ben said.

“Think about
it; there must be an original Ben who didn’t have all this stuff
happen to him, and then somehow travelled back in time to set this
whole thing in motion.”

“Huh?”

“I was
struggling with this earlier, but needed time to wrap my head
around it. Earlier we met with Velena and you informed her of your
plan about her giving you a note on the bus. You then instructed
her on what to write, which included her phone number.”

“Yeah,
so?”

“But you only
knew her phone number because it was given to you a year prior. So
in effect, you told yourself what her phone number was, and that
doesn’t make sense. Unless, of course, there was an original Ben –
a Ben Prime, if you will – who was told the number by someone other
than himself.”

“An original
Ben?”

“This
so-called Ben Prime would have had a much different life than you.
He did not inherit a house, did not find a secret manuscript, and
did not win the lottery. And if he didn’t win the lottery, he could
not have funded Kyle’s lab, and therefore, without the lab, there’s
no time travel. But if there’s no time travel in the original Ben’s
life, how then does he travel back in time and orchestrate
everything.”

“You put all
this together from a phone number?” Ben asked.

“It took some
time to sort out in my head, but I think it makes sense to me now.
Someone must have told the original Ben what Velena’s phone number
was. Once it was told to the original Ben, then forever after he
could tell it to his younger self.”

“She’s right,
you know,” the older Ben said. “I can see why you are with her.
Vanessa, you have made a very astute observation, articulating the
apparent paradox eloquently.”

“And another
thing,” Vanessa added. “I thought time travel is logically
impossible due to the ‘you’ paradox?”

“The ‘you’
paradox?” older Ben repeated. “Don’t you mean the grandfather
paradox?”

“Slow down,”
young Ben said. “I’m not hip to all these paradoxes, what are you
two talking about?”

“Allow me to
explain, if I may,” the older Ben offered. “The grandfather paradox
states that a person cannot travel back in time because in doing so
they could theoretically kill their grandfather as a child. If the
time traveller’s grandfather is killed as a child before he could
have a son, then the time traveller would not be born. But if the
time traveller is not born, how could he go back in time and kill
his grandfather? So it would seem that one could both kill and not
kill their grandfather… hence the paradox. But your beautiful and
equally brilliant girlfriend has pointed out the redundancy of the
paradox. In order to have the paradox, one does not need to go back
in time to kill their grandfather, they just have to go back in
time and kill themselves.”

“Is this what
they teach you in science classes?” Ben asked.

“No, of course
not, I learned about this in philosophy.”

“So how do we
make sense of this?” Ben asked. “Through this hypothesis, time
travel seems impossible, yet we know it to be true. By the way,
please don’t kill me to prove the hypothesis wrong.”

“It’s still
not well understood, but some philosophers have postulated a
multiple-universe hypothesis as a way around the grandfather
paradox. So instead of time being linear, like travelling up and
down a river, it would take you to an alternate universe where
everything is the same. What happens to your relatives on that
universe has no bearing on what happens to you. So you would not be
killing your grandfather, or yourself, but rather some copy of your
grandfather.”

“Makes sense,”
Ben said.

“Think of time
travel as sending a file in an email. When you attach a file, you
are not sending the original file, you’re sending a copy. The
sender still keeps the original. So forty years from now, I step
into a time machine, but it doesn’t seem to work. I step out and
live my life, but a copy of me actually does travel back in time to
an alternate universe, where reality is the same.”

“So you’re a
copy?” Ben asked.

“There’s no
way to know for sure, but that hypothesis seems to make the most
sense.”

“So people
will continue to work on developing their time machine and never
get confirmation that it actually works?”

“Unless they
get confirmation.”

“What do you
mean?”

“If someone
from the future suddenly shows up on their doorstep one day and
tells them it will work.”

It was nearly
5:00 a.m. when the two Bens left the hotel. They walked through the
lobby and paid no mind to the confused-looking receptionist.

“Look, Ben,
before we walk to the hospital to drop off this note, I need to
tell you something,” the older Ben said.

“What is
it?”

“I didn’t want
to say this in front of Vanessa, but you have to do something later
that will seriously challenge your morals.”

“I have
morals?” Ben said in jest.

“You’re going
to have to kill Charles Gringer.”

“You want me
to travel back in time to kill my grandfather?”

“Yes, I know
the irony of it considering our previous discussion, but this has
to happen. It won’t affect anything since you are killing an old
man, not your grandfather as a child.”

“Why does he
have to die?”

“It’s just the
way it is.”

“No, I can’t
do that,” Ben protested. “I won’t do it.”