Heads Up
by Carla Girtman
“Rob,
you’ve really messed things up. This is
going to take a while to fix—if we can fix
it at all,” Ralph, my boss—now my ex-boss
of We’ll Get You Back In Time travel
agency— said.
“Yeah,
Rob. You messed up royally,” Alph,
Ralph’s second head, echoed.
“Shut up,”
Ralph said. “Whoever said two heads were
better than one, didn’t have two heads.”
“You shut
up,” Alph retorted.
“We have
to lock you up until this is fixed, Rob.”
“I
understand. Let me know if I can help,” I
offered.
“No,
you’ve helped enough,” Ralph sighed and
locked the cell.
All I wanted
was to tweak time just a little bit, to erase
that one little incident, to keep myself from
asking that witch to marry me. Except her brother
got in the way. That’s when it went wrong.
Somehow he got vaporized. Apparently he was the
one who fathered the scientist who figured how to
prevent the viral epidemic that altered DNA and
gave everyone two heads. And why I am sitting
here with two heads in a detention cell for
tampering with the time continuum.
“It’s
not so bad, Bob,” I started talking to my
second head. Maybe two heads wasn’t such a
bad deal. It would be refreshing to be able to
have an intelligent conversation. “Can
I call you Bob?”
“Sure.
Bob is good.”
“What
were you trying to do?” Bob asked.
“I went
back in time to keep from getting married.”
“Nope,
didn’t work.” Bob said. “She
divorced you last year. Don’t you remember?”
“No, I
was back in time.”
“No you
weren’t. If you had been, you might have
saved your marriage.”
“I mean,
I was in the past. I don’t have the memories
for your future.”
“Rob,
everyone knows you can’t travel into the
past.”
“Of
course you can. We temporal scientists do it all
the time.”
“I love
tempura.”
I couldn’t
believe that he didn’t know what temporal
meant. After all he was part of me.
“Temporal,”
I said, “it means ‘of time’.”
“Oh.”
Bob knitted his brow. “So how can you have a
brother-in-law? Your ex-wife doesn’t have
any brothers, not even dead ones.”
“She used
to. I went back in time and accidently erased him.”
“You
work for this time agency?”
“Not
anymore.”
“So how
come you remember stuff I can’t?”
“When a
time traveler jumps back into time, an event
bubble is created that keeps the traveler’s
memories outside of occurring time. This lets you
remember events that no longer exist in the new
time line. Unfortunately, it doesn’t protect
you from the physical evolution of things like
developing two heads.”
“We’ve
always had two heads.”
“Now we
do, yes.” Bob was beginning to annoy me.
“I didn’t always have two heads.”
“Really,”
Bob said.
“Of
course, you wouldn’t notice.” I stared
at Bob. “In my original time line, humans
don’t have two heads.”
Bob seemed
unfazed by this revelation. “So we’re
scientists?” he asked.
Oh God. Bob
was as stupid as my brother-in-law.
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