The Escapement Mechanism, Part 1

Notes and Introduction

Time travel stories are some of my favourite. Even when they don’t make sense. So SPOILER ALERT: this story may contain time travel, and its use in stories has not been authorized for general use by the literary health board due to potentially fatal (for the story) side effects.

Alas. Sometimes you heat the spoon knowing it is bad for you. Probably most times. Is Time Cop a good movie? No. Does it make coherent sense? No. Does it contain JCVD? Yes. Does that make me old? Hey look! Time Travel!

I vacillated between pulp shoot-em-up and Primer levels of threading for this story, and settled on a simple premise that is hopefully still interesting. Taking a note from Travis Baldree, this is a Tetris equivalent story, not Baldur’s Gate 3. One tetromino at a time as they say.

So here we go.

This is a draft of the story, which in my outline is a novella. I will update it as I go, which will include edits. At the end a story will remain, and my hope is that no time travel is required to prevent the author from ever creating it.

The main character just happens to be researching memory at a University lab. What fortune! Now, on to the tale.

The Laboratory of Dr. Lloyd Warner

Wemly considered the empty coffee mug with the focus she should have been levelling on her experiments. The dregs at the bottom were still wet. She could rinse it without having to wash it and be enjoying a fresh brew in two minutes. Surely that would be enough to refocus on the neuronal pattern that was probably burned into her computer monitor by now.

She liked running experiments with mice; she hated analyzing results on the computer. Each day was was more time in an office chair than the last, and less time in the lab.

“Grab me another one?” asked Utsab. He was down at the other end of the bench, connecting wires to a breadboard with one hand, and shaking an empty Coke can in the other. Wemly wanted to tell him that she wasn’t his mother, and that, yes, she was a postdoc and he a PhD student, and although their was a hierarchy between them, she was in no way responsible for meeting his basic needs; instead, she sighed and agreed to his request.

Utsab spent all of his time in Dr. Warner’s technology lab—Wemly would never call the tech room that—in front of a screen, and as far as Wemly could tell did the same when he was relaxing at home. Utsab had access to all of the fancy equipment whenever he wanted, simply because he was Dr. Warner’s crutch. Warner might have been an exceptional bench-top scientist in his day, but experimental work had moved on and he needed students to run the computers that everything now required, and to analyze the ungodly amounts of generated data. Utsab was Warner’s guarantee to continued high impact publications, which meant that Utsab had his pick of experiments and preference for use of the machines.

Utsab was clever. Probably the most clever student Dr. Warner had taken on during Wemly’s time. But still, she felt Utsab was naive to the politics that shaped his world, and had warned him on several occasions that Warner wouldn’t let a catch like him slip back out into the sea of academia. Even if Dr. Warner acquiesced to a degree defence, he would likely try and coerce Utsab into a postdoc position by threatening to withhold recommendation letters. Utsab had only laughed at her warning.

Wemly handed Utsab his unacknowledged drink and tried to focus her dry eyes on the screen. It was a bunch of mouse neurons, zoomed and mapped, with the regions of interest highlighted. She was working on implanting memories while the mice slept. Early work had shown that when mice found a treat in a maze, a specific spot in their brain was activated. The experiment was to activate that same spot in the brain of a mouse that had never run the maze, and see if it navigated like one that had. And sure enough, a mouse that had never run the maze could find the treat on the first try. By activating its brain while it slept, memories could be created.

Of course, crude spatial recognition was far different than specific memories, which was what Wemly’s PhD had been on, and what Dr. Warner had hired her to do in his lab. Utsab was ostensibly doing the same, but was mostly shunted to analyzing data for other students’ projects. Wemly would really have to talk to him about graduating, to make sure that he did. And so that she would have time to use the machines he was always monopolizing.

“Watcha working on?” asked Utsab. “I thought you’d be creating a poster for the NorWest meeting.” He gave a worried look at her screen. “Isn’t it due tomorrow?”

It was. She had been waiting for the inevitable deadline extension from the organizers, but it hadn’t come, and now Wemly was scrambling to summarize a month’s worth of imaging data and shove it into an abstract by the end of tomorrow. It didn’t help that she hadn’t been able to use the synchronous imaging lab until a week ago, and now Utsab had another experiment running in there—it wasn’t even his work, it was some new PhD student that Wemly was sure Warner had hired for reasons that could lead to his termination—so she had to make do with the data she had.

It was just an abstract, so she had considered adding conclusions she expected to find when she could confirm them in the lab. It wasn’t lying, really. Just anticipatory reporting. But she was getting ahead of herself. She had actual data to summarize, and Figures to create.

“Gotcha,” said Utsab. Wemly hadn’t said anything, but she was tired enough that her thoughts were leaking through into expressions she normally hid. Utsab donned a large pair of headphones and it was like they had never spoken. That was one of Utsab’s good traits. He valued time, both his own and others. Which was partly what made him so annoying—he didn’t waste time and was therefore super productive.

Less vaunted traits included sleeping until the afternoon and smoking weed in what could only be described as a dependent manner, but they only gave favourable contrast to the scholarships and publication awards that he received, and tightened the codependent positive feedback loop that he and Warner had entered into.

Wemly entered into deep focus mode and barely recognized the fading of evening into night. Once the late afternoon sun climbed its way off of her monitor, she nearly always was able to slide into a few hours of flow state. Maybe that’s why Utsab doesn’t show up until noon, she found herself wondering, the recognition of which signalled that the magic spell of focus had broken.

She checked her smartwatch, but it was already dead. Nearly 10 PM her computer told her. Through the window, the red brake lights and buttery yellow street lamps refracted off the ice crystals in the air, diffusing into a soft warmth within Wemly. It wasn’t snowing yet. If she hurried, they would still let her in at the Southgate Assisted Living Towers.

“See you tomorrow,” Wemly said over her shoulder.

“Love you too,” said Utsab, who somehow managed never to miss a comment from her despite his ubiquitous headphone usage.