Chapter 1

I don’t know what it was that awakened me. It could have been the neighbor kids, it could have been one of the cats knocking something ELSE off of my counter, or perhaps the fact that I really, really needed to empty my bladder was the thing.

In any event, I was awake, and really needed to pee. Stumbling to the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, as I passed.

Looking kind of rough, dude.

Once the pressure had been released, and I was washing my hands, I caught something that had escaped me on my first pass: a note scrawled on the mirror, in a wax pencil.

“Hey, stupid!” it greeted somebody. Probably me: it was, after all, my bathroom.

“Hey, stupid! I know you’re hung over, and I know why you’re hung over. At this point, you have no excuses: you already have proven, time and time again, that you are not going to drink her off your mind. So, while I have your attention, go get your phone. Make sure you did NOT drunkenly call her last night.”

I shrugged, already planning to ignore my unknown correspondent’s advice. I opened the cabinet, looking for the Tylenol I probably had in there, somewhere.

A sheet of paper flapped on the inside, bold red sharpie capturing my attention.

“Not only stupid, but stubborn as well, right? You weren’t going to look at your phone, were you? Take the damn Tylenol, and go get your phone. I’ll still be here!”

I grumbled a few swear words, tossed a couple of the tablets into my mouth, and washed them down with tap water.

I stumbled into the bedroom, and found my phone in my discarded pants. I scrolled through my recent calls: several I did not recognize, likely a ride share driver confirming my location, and that was it. It appears that I had not called The Ex.

Back to the bathroom, where I tore the snide note down. I folded it, preparatory to crumbling it up and tossing it, and noticed bold black writing on the other side.

“If you weren’t a loser, and called her, then you have earned a few points. You still have to get next to two things: she is not coming back, and you cannot continue to drink yourself into a stupor. The stupor does not let you forget her, and the drinking simply makes you look pathetic. Just. Stop.”

I un-creased it, and looked the paper over again. At the bottom was a signature: “Sober Me”.

I half stumbled my way into the kitchen, realizing that coffee would, at least, structure the next several minutes of my day.

I halted, abruptly, once I entered my kitchen, and noticed two things. One, there was a woman sitting at my table, drinking her own coffee, and reading something on her phone. Two, there was steam rising from my coffee cup.

I cinched up my sweats, and grabbed my coffee, sitting across from her. Taking a sip, I noticed it was prepared just the way I liked it, and was hot. Miss Unknown apparently had just made it, not too long ago.

I settled my cup on the table, and addressed my guest.

“Um, hello? I’m Mark Anderson. And, you would be...?”

I expected something along the lines of ‘I’m the girl you picked up from the bar”, or some other clue as to how I had both blotted out last night, as well as found myself in the company of a very pretty woman, dressed, near as I could determine, in my bathrobe. I was going to be disappointed.

She had looked up once I had entered the room, and watched me gather my coffee and settle in my chair.

“I know your name, great grandpa. I’m Emily Gruesel. Grandma talked and talked about you, and made me swear that, if we ever met, I needed to tell you two things.”

She had me. I looked at her, stupidly. (which was, of course, character acting for me.)

“Uh, what two things?”

She smiled. I realized that I had not felt the sunshine radiance of a woman’s genuine smile, in quite a while.

“Well, first, Grandma ordered me to tell you that she loves you, and misses you, her Dad. Secondly, she needed me to tell you that you have to stop drinking, and clean up your act, and get your shit together. If you do not, she will never exist, and therefore my mother will never exist, and therefore, I will never exist, and we will never have this conversation!”

I really, really needed that coffee. I took several deep gulps, and savored the warmth starting in my stomach and reaching throughout my chest. Suitably fortified, I rejoined the conversation.

“Huh?”

(I didn’t say I contributed to the conversation, but I was there)

She smiled. Charitably.

Sighing, she tried again. “So, you know about the tokamak, in Culham, England?”

“Nope,” was my reply.

She tried again. “Do you know what a tokamak is?”

I wasn’t entirely certain. “Some sort of thermonuclear thing?”

She settled her coffee on the table, looked me in the eye, and began to sort me out.

“A tokamak is a device to contain a fusion reaction. Fusion is the sort of thing that makes a hydrogen bomb go BOOM, but, if you can contain it, you can get a whole lot of energy, which is handy if you have, say, 100 million electric cars and trucks and houses and factories and things to power. So, it turns out, that early tokamaks had problems, and it took years and years to figure it all out. In the course of getting fusion power to run reliably, and reasonably safely, several accidents demonstrated that, if you focus enough energy on one place, in the right configuration, you can safely send people and things back in time, and bring them back.”

Emily frowned.

“That did not do the first time travelers a lot of good, because, if you screw it up, the traveler dies along the way. We don’t know how, yet, but the first accidental travelers were brought back as crimson gelatin.”

She brightened. “But, now, decades later, we have it figured out. It’s about as safe as airliner flight. Well, about as safe as airliner flight once Boeing went out of business.”

I figured that I had learned enough about high energy physics, as I was going to comprehend that day.

“So, how does that lead to you here in my kitchen, in my bathrobe? With whatever the hell that message is, from somebody I do not even know! I don’t have any daughter, and so I do not know what the hell you’re talking about!”

Emily pushed her chair back, came around the table, and, scootching my chair back, settling on my lap, crosswise. She wrapped one arm around my neck, and began to run her other over my chest.

“Your daughter, Brenda Anderson, will marry my grandfather, Armond Guiterrez. They will have four children: Adam, Blanca, Candace, and Daniel. Candace will marry Leon Greusel, and I will be their oldest. Brenda will grow up, and study electrical engineering, Candace will follow in her mother’s footsteps and study quantum engineering, and I will grow up to be a particle engineer, building tokamaks to power our world, as well as investigating the time travel insights those accidents I mentioned, showed us. That’s why I’m here, great grandpa!”

My stupid look must have persisted. She clarified.

“I grew up on grandmother’s stories of you, and how you had been a paramedic, and then a nurse, then a nurse practitioner. I wanted to meet you one day, and when Andries Freydenlund brought a practical time machine to market, well, I had to go work for him! I have had the biggest crush on you, for the longest time! When I saw how you are living now, and contrasted that with the man my grandmother filled my head with stories of, well I had to try to get you to get it together!”

Not making a lot of sense. I was, what, pushing in on 30 years old, and the woman in my lap (who my ever inquisitive krenk was interested in making the acquaintance of) was looking like she was around 20. So, if she was my grand daughter (GREAT grand daughter, the voices in my head corrected me!), either I was insane, or I was really around 90 plus years old, or this entire confabulation about time travel was NOT confabulation, but was real.

And that thought abruptly brought me to realize that, assuming that her tale was not mostly (if not entirely) bullshit, I was lusting after my own great grand daughter.

Make that “creeping on my own great grand daughter”.

So, of course, I changed that subject.

“So what does your presence on my lap have to do with my unfucking my life? And, who is the author of the notes on my bathroom mirror?”

She leaned in for a peck on my cheek, and as her (well, MY) bathrobe gaped, it appeared that she was only wearing that bathrobe. Which was not a particularly good fit, for her petite frame.

Well, not all of her was petite. Her breasts, from the glimpse just granted me, were not petite. Not gigantic hooters, but, well suited to her build and frame.