Hard Reset

By Kevin J. Phyland

Be careful what you wish for. You just might get more than you wanted.

It started as all good tales do, with rats running mazes.

A high energy physics lab might seem an unusual place for rats, but with unknown radiations it seemed prudent to test for tissue problems on verminous rodents than the arguably more useful physicists. When the dimensional breakthrough occurred in the lab the rats simply vanished.

A puzzle that was only solved by accident when an adjacent medical lab, researching memory, found that the rats they'd been using seemed to be identical to the ones missing from the physics lab. Rats which had suddenly known how to run all the mazes without error and without rewards.

A brief news story of the event at the physics lab had included a picture of the heroic rats, which had distinctive markings, and were thus identified as the same ones from the bio research lab.

Had the rats travelled back in time? Had they crossed into a parallel universe? After some hefty debate it was concluded that something even more amazing had occurred.

The rats had leapt back into a previous version of themselves, complete with the knowledge gained from their maze-running efforts prior to the physics lab experiment. A literal case of 'if only I knew then what I know now'!

Pinpointing the details was slightly trickier. Since the rats were moved on to the physics lab some four weeks before the dimensional accident, it at least gave an upper limit to how far the effect had leapt backwards. Presumably the rats vanished as their do-over four weeks ago gave rise to a different present. Not terribly different, obviously, since nobody could remember any changes.

A strange event, no argument, but one that slowly slipped from the newsfeeds and the business of cranking ever larger energies into ever smaller particles continued. It was assumed that eventually the entire universe would disappear up its own fundament given enough time and money.

Enter Jamie Callender, grieving husband, whose wife was killed in a car accident on their twelfth wedding anniversary. His story is not so heroic. A rather possessive individual, the removal of his spouse had triggered conflicting emotions. Mostly anger but some remorse. With vague ideas of going back in time and saving her from the car accident, Jamie sought out the lead physicist on the dormant dimensional experiment.

Despite warnings of 'unforeseen concomitant causal spreading' and 'hard reset backlash', Callender's handgun was finally the overwhelming argument. The physicists were not entirely against the effort either, truth be told. They'd considered some human experiments themselves but had been vetoed with extreme prejudice. So both parties could see something in the attempt.

They placed the woebegone widower in the same place as the doughty rats had been and cranked up the electrical volume. A split was indeed created dimensionally and the mental overlay of Jamie Callender and all his memories shot backwards onto his own mind somewhen a bit earlier. To the physicists it was all a bit anticlimactic. Callender just vanished and the energy expenditure blacked out most of the city for an hour, but otherwise it appeared that humans were just like big rats.

But for Callender it was all different...

Jamie blinked and continued driving. It was like he'd phased out there for a second and he was having this really vivid dream about going back in time. With a jerk he pulled the car over and waited for his hands to stop shaking. He recognised where he was, or had been going. This was three weeks ago and he now had about two days to stop his wife from driving to her mother's.

Around the next intersection he would see an old flame from high school and wave to her. Or would have. But by pulling over he had already irrevocably changed things.

He put the car back in drive, and headed back to his home. Something odd seemed to be happening in the traffic though. Random drivers were pulling over, some screaming. Others were pounding their steering wheels and accelerating crazily. Had the whole world gone mad? Had war been declared or something?

Pulling into his drive he saw his wife Sally waiting on the doorstep. She seemed to be expecting him. How fun, he thought, to have this secret knowledge of the future.

When he got out of the car Sally said something rather odd. “You took your time you idiot!”

This set Jamie back a tad but his warning of her impending death should smooth things over.

“And before you start telling me to not drive to my mother's next week, I already know.”

This shocked Jamie. He noticed his neighbours all were assembling nearby, some with an unrecognisable emotion on their faces. But the weapons in their hands spoke volumes.

“What's...” he began, but Sally gave him the bad news. “We've all got the memories of the next three weeks Jamie. Whatever the hell you did, it affected everyone!”

Slowly the ramifications of this started to seep through. People who died between now and three weeks from now would all know both the time and place of their impending doom, and how it felt. To some this might come as an unwelcome piece of news or even a shock. It did allow those killed or injured in accidents to avoid those events, but for some it did nothing but cause more pain.

Jamie was killed the next day by a mob of disgruntled cancer patients and suddenly divorced spouses for whom their foreknowledge was completely valueless.

Still, by the metric which Jamie himself had set, the experiment had been a rousing success. Sally did not die in that car accident and many people avoided accidents that would have maimed or killed them. Not all of course. Humans are nothing if not a fractious species prone to questioning the obvious.

Meanwhile, millions of rats were cleverly running unknown mazes in the world that Jamie built.

About the Author

Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.

Retired now from teaching he amuses himself by reading, writing, following his love of weather and correcting people on the internet.

He’s been writing since his teens and hopes he will one day get it right.

He can be found on twitter @KevinPhyland where he goes by the handle of CaptainZero and his work is around the place if you search using google or use the antisf.com.au archive.