The Revenge of a Teenage Genius
Bryan Callway had to juggle the competing interests of his life. There were so many things for a seventeen-year-old boy to keep track of. There was time spent with his parents, who loved and cherished him. There was time spent at school, where he pretended to work hard to maintain his 5.0 GPA so as to not scare the other students or teacher. Then of course there was the time spent trying to avoid Mike Voles who had made it his mission in life to cause Bryan as much pain as possible, whether it was the physical pain of being punched in the stomach or the emotional pain of having his pants pulled down in the cafeteria.
What was left of each day was spent fine-tuning his time machine.
With the money he had gained from subtly manipulating the financial markets, Bryan had rented out a storage lock-up and spent most evenings in there working on his machine. His parents thought he was playing board games with his friends. What had started as just a computer tucked in the corner running simulations had grown into a leviathan of a machine, cogs and gears spreading across the storage space and ending in what could only be described as a man-sized centrifuge. Not much larger than a bathroom stall, Bryan had already stood in it as the three great plates spun around him, tracing their way back through time before depositing him in the past. Bryan had only done test runs so far, never going back more than a few hours, but tonight he was going to perform his first real journey back in time. He had one goal in mind: he was going to wipe Mike Voles from existence.
Bryan hadn’t built the machine for this purpose. He wasn’t a psychopath. He had built his machine out of a thirst for knowledge. Out of a desire to see if time could truly be traveled. However the opportunity to take revenge on his bully had dropped unexpectedly in his lap one Friday evening as he ate dinner with his parents. He was sporting a bruise on his arm and for the first time he revealed to his parents that Mike was treating his education as a very long opportunity to try and make Bryan’s life hell. They had erupted of course, jumping up to call the principal at once, but he begged them not to. It was only going to make matters worse and they sat back down at the table.
“I could talk to Lucy, his mother,” Bryan’s mom said helpfully with a smile. Bryan shook his head. “If you’re sure. It’s a shame really because Lucy’s such a nice woman. It’s not surprising Mike is difficult though considering the facts, though.”
“The facts?” Bryan repeated.
Bryan’s mom spent the next ten minutes of dinner recounting Lucy Voles’ life story. They had got to talking one school event and Bryan’s mom learned that Mike had never known his father. When Lucy was only nineteen, she had an explosive one-night-stand with a boy on an overnight train. “The love of her life she said, which is stupid since she only spent twelve hours with him,” Bryan’s mom added to her story with an eye roll. Nine months later, Mike was born and Lucy had no way to contact her mysterious lover. She was left to raise Mike all alone. Her parents must have been wealthy though because she never wanted for money despite being a single mother, living in a nice house in the suburbs.
That night Bryan hardly slept. All he could think about was the obvious opportunity that was in front of him. Lucy Voles had spent only one night with Mike’s father. If he was able to disrupt that night, if he could stop it from happening, then he would stop Mike from ever being born. It wasn’t just the fact that he wouldn’t be bullied for the rest of the school year – it would be that Bryan would never be bullied at all. All the emotional baggage and physical bruising could be wiped from existence. He decided he had to see if he could try and do it.
Bryan wasn’t even sure if it was possible to change the past in such a drastic way. On his previous test trips, time seemed malleable enough, but to remove an entire person was a far larger step than rearranging something in his storage locker. It was taking a big risk – but if it worked then he had gained valuable data on how time could be changed and the butterfly effect would work. If he was going to do it, he needed data. Bryan’s time machine work on causality. It traveled through the interconnectedness of events in time. If he wanted to travel back to the evening before, his time machine traced a course through lunch, then breakfast, then him waking up, then him sleeping, and getting ready for bed before arriving at the desired time. The limitation was that Bryan couldn’t travel forward in time – the machine didn’t know the necessary causality – but considering no one else had time machines, a time machine with a limitation was a fair trade.
For the next week, Bryan did his research. He realized that for any trip before the internet would need to be far more generalized and less specific, but with the internet at his disposal he was able to locate much of what he needed. He had Mike’s birthday, which meant he could pinpoint his conception to a set range. From there he rescued the early social media pages of a young Lucy Voles in 2003. He hunted through what he needed. He saved a photo of her and printed it out, a reference check for when he was traveling. He noticed that her posts changed from Chicago to Seattle during July and narrowed down the exact point even more. Finally Bryan found mention from a friend of Lucy’s that she arrived in Seattle on July 12 2003. He had the date. He had his moment.
Bryan took a deep breath. He was really going to go back in time – seventeen long years. He plugged in 11 July 2003 on his machine and set the time for the early morning – he’d need the extra hours to travel from his home in Ohio to Chicago. He packed a bag with some food, some money from pre-2004 and a book, just to pass the time. He made sure to pick something old, Dan Simmons’ Hyperion. He didn’t want to read a book that hadn’t been written yet in 2003. He watched as his machine picked out the route through history, jumping between events before the centrifuge started to spin. He set the timer for 24 hours – after that time, the machine would yank him back to the present day as if he was wrapped inside a big rubber band. It was now or never.
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Union Station, July 11 2003. Bryan could hardly believe he was there. His heart was beating in his ears. He had to keep on pausing to take deep breath to avoid passing out from the excitement. He had traveled from the safe spot his machine had dumped him in near the storage locker, a safeguard to make sure he was never left trapped in some location, and made his way to Chicago by bus. He arrived at Union Station three hours before the sleeper car to Seattle was due to leave. He bought a ticket with old notes and then moved to take up a seat at the entrance to the platform. His hands shook, holding a book that he hadn’t turned a page for at least an hour.
Bryan kept wondering if he looked out of place, a boy from 2020 sitting in a train station in 2003. But no one paid him any attention. He wasn’t a very noticeable person. He wasn’t incredibly handsome but he wasn’t very ugly either. He was plain. He was average height, he was average build. He had some muscle and some fat. His skin wasn’t the pasty white of other nerds, but he wasn’t a bronzed model either. He had kind brown eyes, scruffy black hair, and a pair of glasses perched on his nose. Clearly his tan khakis and short-sleeved shirt didn’t garner any attention. He sighed and tried to compose himself.
All the while, he looked for Lucy Voles. Every so often he would check the photo of her that he had in his bag – a redheaded girl with a pretty face. He tried to ignore the slight twitching in his groin that any virgin seventeen-year-old felt when looking at the photograph of a pretty girl. He couldn’t let his hormones get ahead of him. He was here to stop Lucy from hooking up with Mike’s father – nothing more and nothing less. He shifted in his seat, looking around at the other people starting to arrive, waiting for the sleeper to Seattle. Any one of the young men around him might be Mike’s father. He tried to see if anybody reminded him of his bully, but no familiar faces stared back at him. Bryan settled back into his seat and pretended to read again.
Lucy arrived fifteen minutes later. Bryan caught sight of a flash of red hair walking in front of him and his heart skipped a beat. He only had a view of her rear and already his cock was straining to get a better look. Lucy Voles was drop dead gorgeous. She had long red hair that ran down past her shoulder blades, wavy and ruffled. She was wearing a simple white top, her shoulders peeking out from above the fabric and the hint of a tattoo running down her arm. Her heart-shaped bottom had been squeezed into a pair of daisy dukes shorts, the fabric barely covering her bubbly posterior. Bryan swallowed thickly. He was sure it was her. His suspicions were confirmed a moment later as she turned to look back at her family and he saw the pretty face from the photograph, electric blue-eyed, thick ruby red lips, a small, cute little nose. Bryan shook his head trying to shake out the indecent thoughts. He was here on a mission.
Bryan watched closely as Lucy said her goodbyes to her family. He told himself that it was to make sure she didn’t disappear in the crowd. Instead his eyes stayed locked on her assets. The way the denim shifted and tugged against her ass as she bent over to give her little sister a hug, the way her breasts pushed against the white fabric of her top as she threw her arms around her mother. Bryan had to take a deep breath, willing the blood away from his cock. He didn’t want an erection in the middle of the train station. Instead he discreetly tore up the photo of Lucy and dropped it in the garbage can, not wanting to possibly explain why he had it, and then followed Lucy onto the train. He noticed that many other men of all ages were watching her too and he realized figuring out who was Mike’s father may have got more complicated.
Bryan only had a ticket for a seat – he hadn’t paid for more, but Lucy’s parents evidently had as she disappeared to the corridor of small bedrooms to put away her luggage. Bryan shifted uncomfortably, unsure what to do. It would look suspicious to follow her there and so he had to sit down in one of the cars, waiting for her to reappear. It was a one-night stand. She didn’t know Mike’s father before then. He had to trust that she would reappear down here to find the man who would impregnate her. Instead he turned his attention back to Hyperion, barely paying attention, only feeling relaxed when Lucy reemerged and sat down several row of seats down from him.
Bryan thanked his lucky stars. The way that the train car was set up in configurations of four seats, and that Lucy had taking a seat facing toward him, meant he could just keep her in view. He saw her long, bare, tanned legs stretch out almost in the aisle. He saw the way her tongue slipped out from between her lips as she concentrated on settling in for a long train ride. He shook his head to again clear away the debauchery in his mind – he needed to stay focus. His eyes moved away, scanning the other men nearby, trying to identify the threat. As the train jolted to life, which did wonderful things to Lucy’s perky, fair breasts, Bryan settled into his long vigil. For the next two hours he sat, his attention constantly switching between the men who surrounded Lucy Voles, and the girl herself.
Bryan still hadn’t settled on a suspect when a figure dropped down in the seat opposite him. It was Lucy herself. She was smiling at him, an enchanting smile, an impish smile, like that of some fairy creature about to trick you out of your life. “Hey,” she said. Bryan flushed, his face lighting up as he mumbled some greeting back. He wasn’t accustomed to talking to beautiful girls. “I saw you staring. Hey, don’t blush, don’t worry. I don’t mind. Half the train is staring anyway. But I thought I should say hi since we’re book twins.” Lucy dropped down a copy of Hyperion onto the table between – it was far less battered and ragged than Bryan’s copy, but unmistakably the same edition.
“You read Hyperion,” Bryan said in surprise and putting his foot in it. He couldn’t stop himself though. Lucy Voles, the mother of the boy who made his life hell for being a nerd, for loving books, read science fiction.
Lucy raised an eyebrow. “What is that meant to mean? Girls can’t like sci-fi?”
“No, God, no. They can. Of course. I – I – I just didn’t expect someone like you to.”
“Someone like me? What does that mean?”
Bryan wanted the bottom of the train to fall out and for the ground to swallow him up. “Someone so pretty,” he stammered. His face was now the same color of the inside of a volcano.
Lucy stared at him and then let out a whistle, low and long. Several people looked over at them but she was already smiling. “Good save. You’re a real smooth talker. I’m Lucy, you?”
Bryan knew this was a bad idea. He was there to be a distant meddler, to stop Mike’s father from interacting with Lucy, not to talk with her herself. But the idea made some sense. If he was there talking to Lucy then Mike’s father couldn’t come over and start chatting her up – and if he did then Bryan would at least know who he was and could somehow deal with it. So, he kept talking with the girl. It wasn’t a chore. She was funny, smart and most of all very flirty. She mentioned that she picked him to talk to because he was the only guy she caught staring who wasn’t mentally undressing her, only to then lower her eyes to her tanned cleavage in her white top. She giggled when Bryan’s eyes lowered too. She called him cute and laughed at his blush, she ran her bare leg along his khaki covered leg and winked. Bryan was getting the impression that Lucy was a little bit of a wild child but he didn’t care – she listened to him with interest as he discussed books and science and she answered back with her own ideas. He was having the time of his life, barely noticing that outside it was going dark.