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collector’s item that he’d completely forgotten. It was a toy that he’d loved when he was small: a robot that stood about thirty centimetres tall, dark blue with red hands and feet, and on its chest was a logo that took him back ten years, to his childhood. He had a hard time remembering anything from that time of his life, but he recognised that robot. One of its features was that it could serve as a container. You only had to push a button behind its neck, and the chest split apart and swung open.
    When Alex tried it, he was astonished by what he saw.
    â€˜What on earth?’ he exclaimed when he saw the video cassette hidden inside the robot. He pulled it out and read the words written on the label stuck to the spine of the cassette.
    WATCH THIS ON 22 NOV 2014
    That makes no sense , thought Alex, before slipping the video under his belt and covering it with his sweatshirt. That’s today … When he went back to the house, he left the Christmas boxes in the front room, locked himself in his bedroom, and pulled out the video. His hands were shaking.
    He couldn’t wait. The minute his parents went out to do some grocery shopping, Alex ran into the living room to find the old VCR that, in recent years, had been replaced by a Blu-ray player. He found it in a chest behind the sofa. It was buried under a mountain of rubbish, but it was still there. And it still worked perfectly, as far as he could remember. When he hooked it up to the television set and slid the video cassette in, his face fell. He raised an eyebrow as Marty McFly’s DeLorean went screeching past on the screen, hitting eighty-eight miles per hour as it rocketed back into 1955.
    â€˜ Back to the Future . Okay … so what?’ he said, as he looked for the stop button on the VCR.
    He was about to push the button and eject the tape when, suddenly, the movie disappeared. The screen went grey and staticky, as if someone had recorded over the tape. Then an image started to take shape. The little boy in front of his eyes was him. He couldn’t have been any older than five or six. Behind him was the old wicker toy chest. Next to it, an enormous teddy bear lay upside down on an old crimson armchair. All these things no longer furnished his bedroom, and hadn’t for almost longer than he could remember. On the walls were posters of various boyhood idols, from Ayrton Senna to Michael Jordan. Little Alex was sitting on the floor with his legs crossed. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Scrooge McDuck jumping off the diving board, about to plunge into a swimming pool full of gold coins. He was also wearing a pair of dark-blue shorts. His blond hair sat on his head in a bowl cut, with a fringe that almost covered his eyes. When he looked up, straight into the lens of the video camera, the message that he uttered in his childish voice was as clear as it was chilling.
    â€˜This message is for me, for when I’m grown up. In November 2014 I’ll have to leave. Go to her. Before it’s too late.’
    The child stood up and disappeared behind the video camera. The screen went black again. A few seconds later, Michael J. Fox reappeared in a cow barn in Hill Valley in the 1950s.
    This can’t be , Alex thought to himself as he rewound the last minute of tape. When he played it again, he discovered that he had indeed heard it right. He put everything back where it was, took the video back to the cellar, and put it inside the old robot, before his parents got home.
    That VHS bore the date of the day he’d found it, and the message that he’d sent himself was by no means ambiguous. In fact, it was disturbingly exact. Inexplicably exact.
    There was something absurd about the whole story, and he had to figure out how to decipher it. Even if it meant travelling halfway around the world.
    Alex knew this without a doubt: there was only one person who could help him achieve that objective.
    â€˜I’m not sure