BSFS Jack L. Chalker 2024 Young Writers’ Contest
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The question renowned physicist Ron Marshall always got about his work was the Bootstrap Paradox, where a person or object being sent back in time created an infinite time loop, with no observable origin of the person or object. Like in Robert Heinlein’s story, “By His Bootstraps.” The main character copied something down from an old notebook, but the old notebook was actually his copy the whole time. So where did the original writing on the notebook come from?
This was something he could never make sense of, and he found himself returning to that theme, over and over again in his scientific papers and talks. Plus, it was Mary’s favorite time travel paradox, back when she was a physics student with him in university.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” seventeen-year-old Susanna repeated, head resting on her hands, trying to make sense of it all. Her younger sister Olivia, fourteen and a rebellious teenager, squirmed in her chair, anxious to get on the phone and chat with her friends. The three of them were sitting at the dinner table. Even six years after Mary died, it felt wrong and empty. Ron had to go on endless rants on time travel and physics to prevent the conversation from drifting away into oblivion.
“Time travel never really does make sense, huh?”
“I think it’s stupid,” Olivia interjected, stabbing her green beans with her fork. “Theories are so useless. Like, why don’t you go build a time machine and test it out, huh?”
Ron shrugged. “Huh, you’re right. Why don’t I?”
There was a little gleam in his eye when he said that, like he knew something they didn’t, and he intended on keeping it that way.
The question Ron Marshall always got about his life was his daughter Susanna. What happened to her that night, when she vanished, disappearing without a trace? Did she run away? Was she kidnapped? Was she murdered?
Ron Marshall loved to theorize, but he couldn’t figure this out. Not just because it hurt, losing another family member, but because he had no idea. He always took safety precautions, to the extremes, with a camera by every door and every window. Any possible entrance to the house was monitored. Not a single person could have left or entered that house.
The police went crazy. They tore down every wall, insisting Susanna must be somewhere in the house. But they couldn’t find her. They checked everywhere, but the only lead they had to something being amiss was Olivia’s testimony; her swear that she heard a loud crash, and the voice of an unfamiliar, thirty-something woman. Ron didn’t hear it, so he must have been asleep when it happened. Eventually, the police dismissed it as a teenage girl hearing things, being paranoid, or doing it for attention.
Just thinking about what could have happened to Susanna made Ron sick to his stomach. So he didn’t dwell on it. He let the police do their job. If it came to it, if no one found an answer, he had a backup plan. But seeing Olivia, all fragile and broken-down like that, he could only imagine what would happen if he failed and the plan went haywire like it most likely would. She had already lost two family members. What if she lost him, too? She’d be an orphan, all alone, with no one to hold on to. So he kept quiet and he kept still, praying that one day, everything would click into place and life would be fine again.
The question Olivia Marshall always wondered was, how in the world do you find a girl who’s been missing for over twenty years? Trick question: that’s impossible. Instead, you find your father’s old time machine and travel back in time to save her.
Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.
The police never figured it out: who did it, where Susanna was, what happened to her. It remained an unsolved case, buried at the bottom of a cabinet. The media never gave up though, with people all over the country playing detective and trying to solve the mystery themselves. They had terrible ideas: that Ron had a fight with Susanna and killed her. That Olivia did it, jealous of the nonstop attention she was getting.
Ron had never tried that hard to investigate, which Olivia would’ve found a little suspicious, if he hadn’t died of heart complications two months ago, induced by stress and grief. They were one tragic family, weren’t they? Dead mother, missing daughter, dead father. And Olivia, the last of the bloodline, wasn’t much either. Never the favorite daughter, not then, not now. Competing with a dead girl was impossible. She felt like a bunch of broken glass shards, barely held together. It was only a matter of time before she fell apart too. And now, at age thirty-four, all she had was a house filled with secrets to explore.
She didn’t remember much about her conversations with her father back in the day, before everything was strained small talk and reminiscing about Susanna. But she recalled him constantly talking about time travel. Oh, and did she forget to mention? He had a time machine. This she knew for a fact. She’d snuck into his study before, as a dare from her friends, since he never let anyone enter, and she saw something, a mysterious cylinder at the very back, buried behind stacks of papers and cardboard boxes.
She didn’t think much of it at the time. She just thought of it as another one of his weird crafts. But now, twenty years later, she remembered small things clearly, like that twinkle in his eyes when she mentioned a time machine at dinner once, many years ago.
That was his secret, wasn’t it? Then why hadn’t he tried to go back and save Susanna?
Obviously, in the back of her head, she knew why. A time machine was unheard of. There was no precedent to follow. To use that time machine, however desperate you were, could be signing a death sentence. And Ron decided he had more to live for: he still had another daughter, friends, things to explore.
But not Olivia. She was unemployed, getting fired from every job for being too unmotivated, too unreliable, too flakey. She was living off of the will and her story, which garnered a few pennies now and then off her GoFundMe page. She was too tragic, too sad, too depressing for her so-called friends to stick around. So, she spent her days alone and cooped-up in her old room. All because Susanna was gone. Funny, wasn’t it? Olivia never thought she’d miss Susanna when she went off to some Ivy League college, but it turned out they were a little more bonded than she thought. Susanna might’ve been the one presumed dead, but Olivia lost her life too, in a different way.
And now she stood in front of a massive black cylinder, plugged into the wall, dusty but other than that, completely the same as when she last saw it. She swung the door open before she could stop herself, revealing the inside: just a cushioned yellow seat and a bunch of exposed wires that looked like a hazard, connected to buttons on a control panel on the inside of the door.
She’d never had any impulse control, ever. Even when she turned twenty-five, the age when your brain was supposed to fully develop, she still made decisions on a whim. Just like now, with nine years of a fully developed brain. Because this was what she’d wanted for years now. Twenty years, and she wasn’t going to back out now.
The question that ran through Olivia Marshall’s head right then, at that exact moment, as she traveled back in time, twenty years into the past, to the exact night when everything was lost, was what was her plan once she made it? Why hadn’t she even planned for this? All she knew was she had to keep Susanna safe and in her sights, without alerting anyone of her presence. And now, she had no choice but to wing it, like she always did, only this was a life or death situation. The stakes were a little higher than some math test.
It felt like a flash. A quick flash, a loud bang in her head, a feeling like she had just been electrocuted, only she wasn’t sure if that was really what it felt like, since she’d never been electrocuted. And, just like that, she sat upright, still in the time machine. She felt dizzy and her head spun at a million miles an hour, and she felt nauseous in a way she never had before. The air felt stifling and wrong, burning her nostrils when she inhaled.
She stayed inside for a bit, regaining her senses. If she’d done it right, it should be late at night, so Ron was already in bed, away from his study, meaning the coast was clear and she could leave the time machine. That is, if it actually worked, and didn’t just electrocute her. She reached out blindly, until she felt the door, and she pushed it open, letting the moonlight outside the windows flood in. She blinked, taking a few moments to register where she was. She was still in Ron’s study, in the same spot, and for a moment, panic rose in her chest, thinking the time machine hadn’t worked. The study was almost identical, but when she looked closer, something had definitely changed. There were fewer papers and fewer things written on the chalkboards. He was less obsessive back then.
She’d made it.
She also knew this was the past because Susanna stood five feet away from her, frozen, eyes wide, the book she was taking from Ron’s bookshelf falling to the ground with a loud crash that shook the whole house. She wasn’t supposed to be here. Ron never let anyone go into his study, ever. Not even his favorite daughter. She was sneaking in to read his books.
“Mom?” the girl croaked out.
Susanna became even more horrified when she realized it wasn’t a hallucination of her dead mother. Rather, it was a woman she had never seen before, standing in her house in front of a strange machine. Olivia stared right back at her, just as terrified. She hadn’t planned for how it would feel to see her sister right in front of her, alive and breathing, just like she’d last seen her.
Susanna snapped out of her shock. She jumped back, opening her mouth to scream. Fear took over Olivia, alarm bells going off in her brain.
“Shut up,” Olivia hissed, lunging forward and putting her hand around Susanna’s mouth. She resisted, but Olivia was bigger, taller, stronger. And somehow, she knew exactly what to do, as if her brain had just finished developing during that trip on the time machine. She was a girl possessed. There was only one place she could put the kicking and screaming girl in without alerting the rest of the house. She punched in random buttons on the door, trying to send Susanna as far away from her, as far away from now, as possible. Fifty years into the future, that sounded nice. She kicked the door closed, Susanna inside, protesting and banging on the door and begging for help, but no one could hear her. Panic rose in Olivia’s chest, and she dropped to her knees, inhaling and exhaling sharply, until the commotion inside went silent.
She didn’t want to move. She wanted to lie here forever, and forget all her worries and everything that had just happened. But she remembered where she was and what could happen if someone found her, so she got up, slowly at first, then quicker and more frantically, her whole body shaking. Her fingers crashed into the buttons, smashing down on them, trying to send her away, away, away. She set it to about thirty years before she collapsed into the seat and swung the door closed, desperate to leave. She felt sick to her stomach.
What had she just done? Who was she?
The question Olivia Marshall would always wonder for the rest of her life was, what happened if your sister disappeared, so you went back in time to save her, and caused her disappearance? But if you only made her disappear because she disappeared in the first place, how would that work? It was like the paradox Ron was always telling them about: the Bootstrap Paradox. She’d always refer to it as the Sister Paradox, from now on.
The media would have a feast tonight. The missing girl finally found in the middle of her family’s old house, fifty years later, the rest of her family gone, only she was the exact same age as when she disappeared. She would tell them what happened, that she was kidnapped by a random woman who forced her into a time machine in her father’s office. Then they’d find the time machine. They’d seize it, do whatever they wanted with it: use it for scientific exploration, or destroy it before it caused any more damage. They’d get someone to do a sketch of the woman’s face and they’d match it to Susanna’s younger sister, Olivia Marshall, but that couldn’t be possible, because she disappeared thirty years ago. But really, she’d been living off the grid in the middle of nowhere in Montana for twenty years, with a new name, new face, and new life, watching from a distance as the world went crazy again over the unsolved mystery of the Marshalls. But this time, she held the keys to the answers.
It was funny, how Olivia, the only one in her family who hated science, was the one who brought a time travel paradox to life. It was funny, how Susanna was benefiting the most from her own disappearance, with a real, happy life to live. It was funny, how Olivia felt okay about it all. Hopeful, even. Because unlike before, she wasn’t alone, even if she felt like it. She had a sister out there, alive, her heart beating. They were still connected, even after everything that happened. She didn’t think she’d ever talk to Susanna again, or let her know she was out there somewhere. She didn’t want to make their lives any worse than she already had. She was sorry, and she regretted it. Every single day, every breath she took, every living minute of her life, she regretted it. But she always took a look at the new life she had built from ashes, and reminded herself that sometimes, you didn’t have free will. Some things were meant to happen, not because it was fate, but because they already did.