Saudade

"Come in, Robert. Have a seat."

Robert sat down and let out a long sigh.

"Rough day. I heard about what happened."

Robert ran his hand through his hair. "Why didn't we let her do it?"

Dr. Lowry took a deep breath and looked at his protégé. He had come a long way since Phil was his professor back in college.

"No doubt you've wondered this many times. You weren't ready to hear the answer before, but after seeing what you saw today, I think I owe you the truth."

Robert listened in rapt attention.

"When George and I first made the breakthrough on time travel, we uncovered something disturbing. Let me visualize it for you."

Immediately, a holographic diagram came up showing a line with many turns and edges twisting through the 3D space.

"This is the timeline. Everything that has ever happened in the universe is somewhere on this line. What you see here is only the most recent part of the timeline."

Robert looked on intently as Phil traced the timeline back further into the past. At any point, if he pressed on a part of the graph, they could see the entire world at the time. Phil kept going backwards along the line until his fingers reached a fork. The line branched away from the point where his finger rested.

"What happened here?" Robert asked.

"George and I wondered the same thing, so we looked further. Do you know what we found, Robert? It terrifies me to this day."

His protégé was clearly taken aback by his mentor's expression. Phil dabbed the sweat off his brow before continuing.

"The branch is at 1907. A hundred and fifty years ago. We aren't the first to invent time travel. Somebody already got there in a parallel timeline. Then they went back in time to Vienna in 1907 and killed a young artist named Adolf Hitler."

"Who is that?"

"Exactly," exclaimed Phil. "Who is Adolf Hitler? In our timeline, he's a nameless failed artist who was stabbed to death in an alley in 1907 Vienna. In the original timeline which you see branching out of this point, he was the one who would lead Germany in the second World War. He was a nasty human being and inflicted some of the worst horrors humanity had ever seen. Hence, I fear, our colleague in the same timeline wanted to make the world a better place by killing him before he became the Fuhrer."

Robert seemed to study the graph before him with more intent.

"History does not stop because one person died, Robert. The second World War happened anyway. Only, the Germans were not led by Adolf Hitler. Instead, they were led by Wilhelm von Bauer, who was an inconsequential captain in the army destined to have died a few years into the war in the original timeline."

"Wilhelm von Bauer? That von Bauer?!"

"The very same," Phil said regretfully. "All those terrible things you read in your history books—the nuclear bombs dropped over New York, the chemical weapons used in Moscow? None of it happened in the original timeline. Do you know why? Because Hitler lost the arms race. Von Bauer didn't."

Phil brought up some figures in front of Robert.

"The war lasted ten years longer and had a death toll twenty times as high. Hundreds of millions of innocent civilians—men, women and children—died who would have gone on to live long, happy lives in the original timeline. Not just that, think of all their children and grandchildren who were never even born. An entire generation of artists, doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, politicians wiped out... All because someone wanted to do the right thing."

Robert seemed to be grappling with the facts still when Phil spoke up again.

"It was that very day that George and I decided we could not have any major changes in the timeline ever again. Our supercomputer is programmed at its core to detect any changes to the timeline. A fail safe, if you will. If it ever detects a large change is imminent, the cause of it is identified and pulled out immediately before the change is effective. Small things like skipping a day of work, the timeline can correct for. But letting someone live who had died? We shouldn't play God again, Robert. We tried once and made everything much worse."

"If it's not us, it'll just be someone else."

"Who else?" Phil replied. "The British? The Chinese? The Indians? They're all buying our time travel technology. It can't be replicated. Our core code will be in all of the devices ever made, so no one will ever change the timeline again. Time travel is a multi-billion dollar industry waiting to happen. From authentic vacations in Ancient Rome, to academics seeing the origins of the Greek democracy. It has more applications than we can begin to imagine. Hell, I can't wait to relive the day I finally got divorced from my wife. The one thing we cannot do—whether we go back to our own consciousness like your sister, or back in time entirely—is change the past. That is where we draw the line. We observe, we relive, we experience. But we cannot change."

Robert Sangster leaned back in his chair slowly. He was quiet for a long time. Finally, he said,

"It's not fair. Ayomi Takahara died in a car accident on her way to visit her friends that day. My sister was too busy with her work during that time to even notice she was gone. The first time she knew something was wrong was when the police called her."

"It was an unfortunate tragedy, but one she has to live with. That is all there is to it. I hope you understand. You had explained to her the rules...that she cannot try to save Ayomi. It's not your fault, Robert."

"So what was she supposed to do? Should she have tried to save her lover and alter the course of history? Or should she have stood there and watched her go to a certain death? How could she possibly choose?"

"I don't envy the choices she had, but she had to know it was coming."

"I know that," Robert sighed. "That doesn't make it fair."

"Have you given her the bad news yet?" Phil asked. "Have you told her that since it has been recorded that she tried to change the timeline, she can never travel through time again? Her biological signature has been blacklisted. The glimpse of Ayomi she saw is the last she can ever see again."

"One bit of bad news at a time, Phil. I'll tell her when it's the right time."

Dr. Phil Lowry looked strangely despondent for a few seconds before he said in a melancholy voice. "You know, Robert, it's sad when someone has to say goodbye to someone they love once. Your sister is the first person in history to have to say goodbye to the same loved one all over again. Give her some time."

* *

"Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference..."