Thirty Three Days

August 2nd 2049 Perth, Western Australia.

After three weeks of exhaustive research Jenny O’Brien thought she was ready. Well, she thought, as ready as I will ever be for the journey to come. She was going back into the unknown. That term confused her: going back into the unknown? Did that even make sense? She was going back into her own past, to her younger self, with a task to perform that was so important that the future depended on her being successful. The outcome of that would be, unknown to her but she hoped and prayed she would be successful. She had taken a leap of faith from the kindly farmer, Simon, who had convinced her that she was the one, the chosen one, to save the planet from extinction.

Me, the chosen one? A normal woman who lived and breathed her studies, who taught, mentored and provided tutoring to students after hours, had been chosen by a “Committee” some two hundred and thirty years hence? Ridiculous, wasn’t it?

But, when she had eventually accepted it was true, rather than feel thrilled to have been selected she was scared, very scared. Jenny worried that she would fail, and therefore be responsible for millions and millions, if not billions, of deaths.

She had taken extended leave from the University, to prepare emotionally and conduct her research. Jenny was an introvert, having preferred study to making friends over the years. She knew that she would need to make, for her, an extraordinary effort, if she was to win over her target, because she knew, she was not, or ever had been, a ‘people person’.

She had worked from her one-bedroom apartment on the eighty third floor of the Monument Tower at Ascot Waters for sixteen hours a day. She had studied the available history, and committed to memory all the facts she would need when she arrived, if she was to have any success of convincing Iain, and more importantly, his son, Bradley Destaine, that she wasn’t completely mad.

It had taken a full week after Simon had made contact for her to be convinced that he wasn’t a candidate for an asylum, so she knew how difficult it would be for her to do the same. After all, the story was just so fantastically unbelievable. She remembered clearly how she had laughed when he first broached the subject of the future being able to be changed by her alone going back into her past. Yet, she now believed in her heart that it was true. She knew she would have only the thirty-three days that the drug allowed to make a difference, and she felt a combination of fear of failure and excitement for the possibility of success.

Fortunately, the kindly young man, Simon, had helped her synthesise the drug, using instructions from his ‘Leaper’ before him. He had been taught by his ’tutor from the future’ as he had jokingly called him, and as his predecessors had called the one before that.

Her trip was to be the last link in the chain, the final ’leap of faith’ Simon had called it, and hence they called themselves ‘Leapers.’ And this was it; she was the one who could save the future of mankind. Simon had been the sixth leaper, she was to be the seventh, and to her that somehow seemed appropriate. Seven had always been her favourite number; the one she had always chosen for everything she could. Even her apartment number was 8307.

She opened a celebratory bottle of Margaret River Wine, which she intended to finish before taking her ASX101 and going to bed to wake up……….in the unknown past. It was a particularly fine Semillon Sauvignon Blanc from The Wheel Cutter’s Winery, which had been one of the first in the West to embrace the Genetically Modified grape varieties that had revolutionised the wine growing industry, thanks in no small part to the discoveries made by one Mister Bradley Destaine.

She wandered over to the full-length glass wall which looked out over the river, not that she could see it anymore from her floor. The smog always obscured it. With her wine glass in hand she smiled faintly. The government of course didn’t call it smog, no, we couldn’t have that, could we? It was an inversion layer which, they said, was caused by Perth’s weather pattern with the prevailing breeze, locally known as the Fremantle Doctor, reacting with the rising heat from the hills which surrounded the metropolitan area. Balls She thought, or as her dear departed father would have said, horse puckey. It was smog, day after day, after day.

She sipped her wine lovingly, it was one of the very few vices she allowed herself, in the strict regime she lived of teaching, tutoring gifted students after university, and her cat: Boof, short for boof-head. He was currently asleep on her bed. She had made sure there was plenty of food for him, and that the litter tray was clean as she would be “gone” for a full twenty-four hours.

Even knowing what she now knew, that the mutation of genetically modified prime food supplies would in the future be catastrophic, she enjoyed her wine. She found it somewhat ironic, that her favoured drink de jour was itself of the same ilk of what would in the future be called biological genocide. She sipped again, and enjoyed it more for the feeling of being incredibly naughty.

She had no real plan of how to achieve the goal that scientists had set for her over two hundred years in the future, but she knew she had more than just the one option. Simon had said that there had been discussions within “The Committee” that she should kill Bradley Reginald Destaine. But that, she decided, would be her final solution, and only if she could not convince him of the catastrophic error he would make if he ignored her warnings and continued. She wondered, not for the first time, if she could, if required, commit cold blooded murder, no matter what the justification was. She hoped upon hope for another way, as that would mean she wouldn’t have to find out. Jenny was not a killer, and didn’t think she ever could be. When she had been a student herself, all those years ago, there had been a debating topic which had been fought out with much vigour. The question had been: If you could travel back in time, and kill Hitler, would you? The yes team said they could save millions of lives, while the no side showed what the world might have been like had those lives not been lost. They pointed to the economic disaster that would have swept up Europe. They also suggested that no-one had the right to murder another human being, and Jenny believed that philosophy, wholeheartedly.

As she poured another glass of wine she thought about the father and son combination of the Destaine’s who were her prime targets. She knew that when she woke up in the past she would be eight years younger that Iain, and that he was a single father after his wife; Bradleys mother, had died of breast cancer over three years before. Could she attract him? He was after all a good-looking man, and in her younger days she could turn heads, though she had always thought of herself as very average in the looks department. Not that looks had mattered to her either way in the path she had chosen to take of virtually non- stop study to achieve her triple Masters Degrees.

In matters of the heart, her problem had been than that when she should have been dating, she had been studying and had had very little time for men, and particularly sex. Despite the occasional invitations, she had just been too busy, or had felt too indifferent, to accept. Before she knew it, the years had sped by, and she then knew she had “missed the boat”, as her mother had often pointed out to her.

If she could somehow capture Iain’s interest and get him to fall for her, it would be so much easier to convince him to help her talk his son into changing his vocational direction, and therefore not go on to make the discovery, he otherwise would. That was her plan, such as it was. Of course, at some point she would have to convince him, and then his son of her sincerity, and she hoped she could use her intelligence, and knowledge of events which for her, had already happened, to prove that she was genuinely from the future.

While discussing at great length the mind bending possibilities of time travel and the consequences of altering the past she had asked Simon, what to her, was the most obvious question: “Simon, when they were planning these leaps, why didn’t they just organise a leap into a young version of Iain or Brad himself? Wouldn’t that have been so much easier than an outsider trying to convince him not to make the discovery?”

He shook his head in a fatherly gesture, which seemed odd coming from such a young man. “Jen that’s a great question, and one I asked Bill, my tutor, myself, and I knew you would ask it of me. I wrote this out having memorised it from the library obituary files from July 2020.”

He reached into his denims rear pocket and took out his crumpled grey leather wallet. From inside he took out a carefully folded piece of paper and passed it to her. Nervously she opened it up and read a hand-written excerpt from the Death Notices. Iain and son Bradley Destaine had been killed in a car accident after leaving a soccer game when their car had been crushed by a heavily laden truck. The team had featured Bradley as the star centre forward, and father Iain as the coach. She read that he had coached his son since he had taken up the game as a six-year-old. Family and friends hoped they would both now be at peace with mother, and wife, Simone, who had been taken tragically from them; a victim of breast cancer some years prior.

Jenny looked into Simon’s kindly but sun weathered face. “That’s so sad, they are going to die? Brad is going to make a discovery of such epic proportions and then die in a vehicle accident? Can’t I stop that when I go back, warn them somehow?”

“Jenny, I’m just like you, a normal person, only nowhere near as clever. By that I mean you’re a university educated lecturer while I’m a simple farmer from thirty-three years’ in the future. Neither of us has any idea about time travel. All I know was told to me by Bill, who came before me, who was told by his leaper and so on. Any change we make now will affect what has already happened in the future, because as we now know, time is a continuum. If you save someone’s life who otherwise would have died, who can say what will occur because of that. One alteration now could cause fifty others down the line and have some sort of huge domino effect. Maybe they will be good changes, maybe they won’t. The whole reason for ASX, and us taking it, is to save humankind from the Yellow Spot Blight. Anything else? Well that’s up to you and your conscience in your allotted thirty-three days.”

“So, are you saying I shouldn’t save their lives?”

“I’m saying that will be your call when you are there. People will not, and cannot, judge you because whatever changes you make will become the new reality, no-one would know any differently. Just remember this though, Jenny.” He paused to gather his thoughts. “When your thirty-three days are up, the young you won’t remember what the older you did. It will be as if you’ve been asleep, and as you know, your dreams disappear some time after waking. Similarly, when you wake up, back in the future, within hours you won’t remember what happened in the past. If you are successful, you alone will have saved the future of every person, animal and plant on earth, but you won’t know it. So, you do whatever feels right to you in the past, and damn the consequences.”

July 8th 2082

Simon Muransk knew, he just knew with every bone in his body that he had done something monumental, at least he hoped he had; if only he could remember if he had succeeded in doing it.

Two names were in the in the foggy part of his memory, like poorly lit signposts flashing past on the skyway. Jenny O’Brien, and William or Bill Johnson.

Another thought flashed through his mind: thirty-three days. Now what did that mean? He had been given only that amount of time by………. Bill? Yes, he could remember that. To be precise, William Johnson was Bill, but who on God’s Green Earth was he?

He stood and walked to the window. He looked out over the fields of green, lush wheat stretching across his farm for as far as his eye could see in the West Narrogin sun. He had the feeling that it had something to do with the wheat dying, but what?

Clearly his wheat wasn’t dying, it was the healthiest he had ever seen it. The Destaine Wheat, which he had sewn years before was phenomenal. They had told him it would grow all year, many times faster and give two to three times the yield, and that CSIRO scientist was right. His farm had been selected to be part of the program because of the area’s stable climate and favourable conditions, not that, apparently, the wonder grain needed ideal conditions.

They would be harvesting within a month and would re-seed immediately afterwards, which would give them three crops that year. The family’s future and financial security had been assured from their very first harvest. His memory couldn’t be correct, his wheat wasn’t dying, though now he recalled that if what Bill had told him was true, one day it might.

It seemed to Simon, that his recollections of before his leap, and during, were rather like the seas at Augusta, in the South West of the state. Years before when they had visited the lighthouse, the guide had showed the group that that was where the Indian Ocean met the Southern Ocean. There was a definite line where the waves crashed against each other, each one vying for supremacy.

So, what did it all mean? And, who the heck was Jenny O’Brien?

Suddenly he had a blinding flash of memory. She had once been blonde, though when he had met her she had been grey; almost white, because she wasn’t the kind of person to bother with dying her hair. Pretty, by her pictures in her youth, though a very mature woman, when they had met. She had been a lecturer at a Perth university somewhere. Then he recalled where: The University of Western Australia. Now how did he know that, and who was she? He remembered that he had gone to recruit her, and he knew why, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember their conversations or whether he had been successful in convincing her to be a ‘Leaper’ herself. That word sounded alien to him, ‘Leaper’, what the heck was a ‘Leaper’?

His head was swimming, trying to remember things was making him nauseous. He swallowed and breathed deeply, tried to clear his mind, but it was no good. Without warning he vomited and the sound of his retching brought his wife, Beryl, running into the living room from the kitchen.

“Simon! Are you all right?” She yelled, “Oh my God, you’re ill. You’ve been away, God only knows where and you come back home sick. Come and sit down.”

She wrapped her arms around him, and helped him back to the couch.

“Jenny, I must get to Jenny, get her to stop him.” He mumbled before passing out, spread-eagled on the brown leather sofa.

“Oh my God. Wake up Simon, what is wrong with you? Who is this Jenny?” But he was incapable of answering.

Beryl was scared. Her husband of forty-eight years had disappeared, and then reappeared, saying only that he had had a meeting in Perth. He had returned only that day with a smug, contented look on his face. She had worried at the ’cats got the cream’ look in his eye and demeanour, but he wouldn’t say why.

Had he been with someone else, another woman? The thought, at first, was preposterous, especially at his age, but then again, was it? This Jenny person he was mumbling about maybe? After raising three children together and being everything a wife could ever want in a husband, she had always felt, he had just up and left her, and their farm without so much as a see you later.

It had been right after that young man who introduced himself as Bill, had visited and spent hours with her husband in the study. She had taken them sandwiches and coffees, but they had promptly shut up while she had been in the room. She had tried to listen from outside, but the solid wooden door would not permit eavesdropping, so she was none the wiser about their conversation. Then, they had left together.

Simon had been uncontactable; it was as if he had just vanished. Then out of the blue he had come back and wouldn’t talk of where he had been or what he had been doing. And now, he had thrown up all over the place and then fainted.

Beryl shook him and screamed at him to wake up, even slapped his face, quite hard, but, he was dead to the world. He went on to sleep, as if in a coma, for fourteen hours.

While he slept old Doctor McVitee, the same doctor the family had had for over forty years, arrived to check him out at the insistence of Beryl. Beryl was not a woman to say no to when she had a head of steam up. She knew the good doctor would have loved to have spent a life with her himself, but she had chosen Simon over him, and he had stayed single ever since.

The medical scanner he waved over Simon indicated that all his vitals were normal. As far as the digital display showed, he was just in a very deep sleep, one he wouldn’t wake up from to stimuli. She wanted him to order a Medi-Vac ambulance, just in case. She pleaded with him. But he explained to her that if he did that, the hospital bed shortages were so bad he would be ridiculed if there was nothing wrong with Simon. Then he would have his visitation rights cut, and that would be no good at all for him or his other patients. The public health system had gone to the dogs ever since the Democratic Alliance Party had gained power and had cranked back Government spending even further than it had been before. He could not risk it, and he assured her there was nothing wrong with her husband.

“Beryl, I think he’s fine, he’s just very, very tired for some reason. What’s he been up to while he’s been gallivanting around?” He asked, looking compassionately at her sad, dark brown eyes.

“I just don’t know, Jim. He wouldn’t talk about it. But he did mention a woman’s name just before he passed out, Jenny something or other. Do you think he is going to leave me for her?”

“Now Beryl, I’m sure he has more sense than to swap you for someone else, he isn’t that stupid, he couldn’t be. Now, when he wakes up in the morning, as I’m sure he will, you bring him into the surgery and I will give him a full physical.”

She smiled crookedly at him; the compliment disguised in his words hadn’t gone unnoticed. She knew he had always wanted her, and if she was so inclined all she had to do would be to snap her fingers, and she could still be a doctor’s wife. She decided to steer the conversation back to Simon, which was much safer ground.

“Jim, he was gone for a week, and won’t tell me anything about why or where he went. I’m worried, really worried.”

He reached out for her hand, and gave it a squeeze. “I’m sure tomorrow when he wakes he will explain everything, and you will find you have worried needlessly.”

But, he was wrong. The next day When Simon did wake from his slumber, he said he could remember nothing at all. It was a complete and utter blank canvas, he told her.

When Beryl informed him that he had said that someone named Jenny was the only one who could stop someone else, he simply stared at her as if she were mad. That was when she lost her temper and accused him of treating her as if she were an idiot.

She dragged him off to the doctor’s and he agreed to a series of tests, all of which came back negative. There was nothing wrong with him, and he assured them, he felt fine. He had just lost his memory for a short while; maybe he had banged his head, he suggested to them. No-one could explain why or how he could lose that time, yet he had, and with hand on his heart, he promised them that was all.

His memory for his thirty-three days in the past never returned, except for one moment when he almost remembered completely. It was, he thought, like looking through thick opaque curtains as he lay in his own bed on the farm, his fever high. He could see the outline of his memory for that missing time through the drapes, and, if he could just reach out and pull them aside he would remember everything. The sweat dripped from his brow as he shivered uncontrollably, he was, he knew, close to death.

He had caught a bad dose of Peruvian Flu that winter. At eighty-six years of age, that had rapidly turned to pneumonia. He knew he was ill, very ill indeed. But since Beryl had passed away only the year before, he had lost all will to survive. Simon had not called the doctor or his children, content to let nature take its course.

Beryl had slipped on the wet bathroom floor the year before and had broken her hip and shoulder. Simon had been supervising the harvesting of another crop, though for the first time ever the yield was down. Worse, in some areas the crop had developed a yellow spot on the grains, and no-one knew why, or what had caused it. By the time he had got home that fateful day and found her, he called for the doctor, though he knew it was too late. She never returned home from the hospital.

Of course, he could always remember what had occurred before he had taken the drug, that Bill had convinced him over a period of a few days, to take. But he also knew that to talk to people about time travel, and that he had gone back on an incredible journey for thirty-three days on a very important mission, would be enough for others to lock him away. There was no way he could have told Beryl about it on his return once his memory had cleared. She would never have understood, and not being able to remember what he had done while back in the past would not have made his task any easier. She would have thought that either he had gone mad or he was lying, and hiding something far worse from her. To her it would have been as if he had felt the need to invent a fantasy. No, he had decided it would be best to fake a total memory loss, rather than the partial one he had experienced. It was bad enough that she thought he might have been unfaithful, but if she had thought he was insane?

His task, given to him by a very persuasive Bill, had been to go back and convince Jenny to also take a leap of faith and go back too. Only she could stop the oncoming Tsunami wave of disaster.

With the appearance of the yellow spot disease on his wheat, which Bill had told him was the first step in a very long and slow growing road, he now knew for a fact that the impending doom of the future of every single plant life on earth, was firmly in the hands of Jenny. Had he been successful in convincing her to leap? He had no idea, but he hoped upon hope that he had. In his darker moments, he thought that with the appearance of the yellow spots on his crop, it would suggest that she had failed. Surely, if she had succeeded, would he have even planted Destaine in the new reality she would have been responsible for? But, the endless permutations of cause and effect of travelling in time baffled his aging mind. Farming had been his life, and he didn’t want the wheat that he had helped promote to become the scourge of the future.

It was almost as if a breeze gently blew the curtains across his memory, just for a moment for him to catch a glimpse through, and he remembered Jenny’s face, and her incredulous look as he desperately tried to explain what her role had to be. The world’s population was going to starve, if she didn’t help. He hoped, right before he slipped into oblivion, that because of his actions, Jenny would succeed and save the lives of every person in the future.