A Window into Time (Novella) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nobody today is a
lad.
”
    “I know.”
    “Really? Down with the kids, huh?’
    “Going down with something.”
    Rachel giggled. Their bed started squeaking.
    I pulled my headphones on and streamed the new episode of
Big Bang Theory.
    Michael. That’s who the not-me memory came from. There was more memory this time, not just a quick glimpse of BusSplash Road like before. I could remember what Michael was thinking. For a start, he’s called Michael Finsen, age…mid-twenties, I estimated. Or he was when he played that football game. There’s no way I could work out exactly what year he was playing. I was sure it was late autumn, though. I remember the ground wasn’t all hard like it was after a frost, and there were still a few brown leaves left on the trees. I was pleased with myself for working that out. It’s the way Sherlock Holmes would have analyzed the memory.
    But I wasn’t sure where. I’d never seen that park before. It was big. There were no houses visible, just trees and two more football pitches—they both had teams playing. There was a background sound of traffic, like London always has.
    And it was all men playing. No kids. Michael knew the supporters—wives and girlfriends and friends from the pub, which was more solid evidence he was a grown-up. Michael had a girlfriend: Karen. She had short auburn hair and a nice round face. The memory didn’t have her second name—he just thought of her as Karen—and I guessed she was about twenty-one (I’m not good at guessing age for old people). He liked the way she smiled at him. Which was embarrassing enough to watch, let alone having that memory in my head forever.
    If Michael was in his teens in 2000, when he got splashed by the bus (say seventeen), he’d be in his early thirties now. He was in his mid-twenties in the second memory; therefore the football game must have taken place around 2009, give or take a year. So I supposed he and Karen were married now.
    When I got home afterward and shoved all my clothes in the laundry basket, I put his name into Google. There were plenty of people with the same name on Facebook, but that didn’t do me any good. See, I overlooked one important fact. The memory didn’t have his face in it. Unless I got another memory that included him staring into a mirror, I wouldn’t know what he looked like.
    After I realized that, I went through the Facebook pages, anyway, and checked the relationship status on each of them. No Michael Finsen was married to anyone called Karen. There were five Michael Finsens in London. Two of them were about the right age, assuming I’d deduced everything properly. And one did look familiar—it was very weird. I know I hadn’t seen him before, but as soon as I checked his Facebook photos (there were only seven, and three had him in them) I was sure I had. So there was now some part of his subconscious memory in my head that recognized him for me. Which was really spooky.
    The Facebook page said he worked in finance and lived in Docklands. He hadn’t filled in the rest of it. He hadn’t updated it in over eighteen months. Who does that?
    When
Big Bang Theory
finished, I suddenly wondered if this brain-to-brain time travel was two-way. Did he have my memory? That would be unbelievably awful. I was running from Kenan Abbot and his crew. So that’s all Michael Finsen would know about me. I didn’t want him to know anything about me, let alone what happened this afternoon.
    Later: He couldn’t have a memory of me. If he did, he would have been there on BusSplash Road to stop Kenan. Any decent law-abiding person would stop a gang assault, surely. He seemed pretty normal. And if he did work in finance, he’d be middle-class. He’d alert the police.
    Later again: Maybe he wasn’t there because he was sectioned and locked up in a mental ward. It was all right for me; I could use the Internet to look things up that have happened to him—his life is history to me. But for him, back when