There Are Many Tokyos In Flower

Chapter 15: Ontological Paradox

"Oh, fuck, I wish you hadn't said that," Rin moaned, and she clapped her hands over her ears. She shook her head, and her hands moved from her ears to cover her face. "Why would you say that?"

"That I need your help?" Martin asked.

"That too, frankly. By the power of Skynet, Martin, I'm starting to feel what Frodo must have felt carrying that stupid ring to Mordor," Rin said from behind her hands. "Martin, I need you to be more careful."

That last line struck Martin surprisingly hard. He gulped, and nodded. "What do you mean?"

"Martin," Rin sighed, visible exasperated. "I've spent most of my adult life researching temporal continuity. You walking into my life like this is the worst temptation someone in my position could be offered. You're handing a diabetic child a bucket of ice cream and a spoon, and expecting them to make a responsible choice."

"Wait, sorry, but I thought you'd want this?" Martin asked.

"Of course I do, that's exactly the problem! Things I would take years working myself towards in a lab, slowly and carefully, you've just trampled over. And worse, you talking about the future going wrong makes me want to change it. And we just spent the last five minutes talking about how we don't know the consequences of time travel, let alone deliberately meddling."

Rin sighed, put her hands down, and smiled. "At least the first thing you did when you realized you could time travel is come to an expert. Or at least as much of one as you can find. And I'll help you. But we need to establish some rules first."

"That sounds fair," Martin said. He paused, and frowned. "Would it make more sense to go into the future? If time travel is possible, it stands to reason it would be more common in the future, and I could ask someone who's had more practical experience."

"I don't think it becomes more probable in the future," Rin disagreed. "If it were, I suspect you would have been arrested by some kind of time cop, for the same reasons they don't let small children pilot spacecraft. I also a few colleagues who think we'd be swarming with future-tourists if time travel were possible. It's also possible there's an apocalypse coming up, and there are no time travellers because there's no future for us."

"Okay, so travelling into the future is a bad idea," Martin agreed. "So I guess I'm left with you. I can think of worse fates."

Martin surprised himself, as much as Rin, by saying that aloud.

Rin smiled, and raised an eyebrow. "Trying to tell me something, Mister Rawley?"

He wanted to. The force of that feeling was an ache in his chest that made his next breath difficult. But he wasn't here for that. "You're a better conversationalist than BIRD," Martin said drily, trying to deflect the conversation.

"Probably because she insult you less than I do," BIRD added.

"So back to those rules," Rin said, bringing Martin back to his job. He found it was distressingly easy to let his guard down, to let himself just live, around her. "First, you can't tell me any more about why you're here."

An easy rule for Martin to agree to. But an impossible one to understand. "Why?" he asked.

"Like we discussed, paradoxes. We don't know the consequences of time travel, or how much you could change things by dabbling with history. Now, one thing I can deduce about your presence here, is that I didn't know about whatever brought you to come and see me in your past. I think it's best we keep it that way. After all, if I know what brought you back in time, that might change the reason you came back."

Martin's mouth hung open. He gaped for nearly a whole second, before he turned to BIRD. "Holy shit. I think coming here was the right call."

"Told you," BIRD replied.