Credit: Jamie Tufrey

Faded orange signs led Zane Tsien to a crippled old house. He pulled into the driveway. Before Emily, he never would have put his life on hold to find a garage sale, but in 22 years of marriage, she'd converted him to her musty religion.

Now that Emily rested beneath the cemetery stones these past nine years, awaiting perhaps some cosmic force to rescue her as she'd rescued so many forgotten treasures, Zane carried on the tradition. Secretly, he called it phantom wife syndrome, because he knew she'd have found it amusing.

Zane closed the door on his elderly car and surveyed the battlefield. Garage sales tended to break down into three basic types, from best to worst: people moving away, people doing a random or spring cleaning, and those who made a business of it, running garage sales continuously.

At first glance, this one fell into the second category. The ancient biddy in the torn recliner had decided her son's old college books and grandpa's weight set could finally go, along with those dresses her daughter never came back for sometime during the '80s.

Zane smiled like a predator and headed for the cardboard box of books beneath a sky that threatened to drench them into oblivion. He gave the old woman a friendly nod. She returned it with a tired smile.

Most people collected books he'd have been embarrassed to display to the world. Romance novels that were anything but romantic, true crime books about the worst of humanity's evils and, always, a cookbook with recipes for the modern woman of 1955.

He sorted through the usual junk, piling the weeds upon the folding plastic table. When he finally reached something interesting, he lifted it as one might a child or relic of ancient Greece.

The ink, the artwork style and the lettering all betrayed its 1970s origin. The cover featured a broken hourglass and the curious title Chronocide by Travis M. Teel.

Zane suddenly felt absolutely sure he'd seen this book before, somewhere. As a heavy oak leaf landed on the table, he felt strangely aware that he'd seen that happen before, too. He shook off the déjà vu.

The chances of having seen this particular book somewhere else were vanishingly small. It had all the hallmarks of a vanity press: yellowing pages, weak binding and a typeface only the author could love because finally his creation was real. Yet the sensation of familiarity persisted. As Zane cracked open the book, he felt certain it wasn't the first time.
He flipped past the table of contents, began reading chapter one.

If you feel as if you've been here before, reading these exact words at this exact moment in time, skip to chapter two.

Zane jerked his head up and looked over at the old woman. She wasn't watching him, but the cat was. The tortoiseshell stared as if expecting something, which only served to stir a growing sense of paranoia.

He'd had déjà vu before, and each time he'd tried to tell himself it was nothing more than a quirk of memory, despite the overwhelming feeling that it was nothing of the sort. Indeed, he'd experienced it so often that he'd consulted his physician about it.

Merely a sort of game played on the mind, he'd been told, by a tug of war between short- and long-term memory. At the time he'd believed it, but that faith had just taken a serious blow. He flipped to chapter two.

More likely than not, those who are drawn to time travel are already time travellers without being aware of it. If you skipped here from chapter one, then there is no question about it. You have travelled back in time, and you will do so again.

Zane smiled as he lifted his gaze from the text. His rational mind sneered at the unqualified statements and the blatant tricks of using targeted marketing to coax a sense of authority.

The fact remained, however, that he'd had a déjà vu at the precise moment the book had predicted. If nothing else, he rationalised, it would be an interesting read for the evening. Anything would beat television and the emptiness.

"Hello there. How much for the book?" he asked the tattered lady. She raised her frosty eyebrows in appraisal as he showed her the cover. A glint of recognition crossed her age-softened features.

"My son used to read that book all the time," she said quietly, slipping away into the memories where the old seemed to dwell. Zane found himself wondering what had happened to her son, but didn't want to ask. He could feel anxiety building within him; he had to read more.

"Twenty five cents will do," she said. Clouds bruised the sun. Zane dug out a dollar bill and waved off the idea of change.

His tea sat cold and forgotten on the coffee table. The living room reading lamp had a bulb that Emily would have found too dim, but Zane didn't bother stopping to change it. Chronocide had him entranced.

The act of time travel tunes you in to godliness in a way that no church, shaman, or guru can. Objects you thought lost forever, return. Events you thought untouchable, you may now change. You will witness the broken things of your life repaired as if they'd never come apart. Order flows out of chaos, and all the world obeys your inverted perceptions.

Zane tore through the chapters, only occasionally re-reading a paragraph that struck him as particularly right or familiar. The diverse changes in tone suggested more than one person had added a hand to the work. The technical areas were dry and factual with exact proportions, while others read like a drug experience. A strange, nearly forgotten obsession with time travel resurfaced; he found himself wanting to skip.

How was it supposedly done? He justified his fascination: it was so he could examine the pseudoscience and discredit it, finishing the ridiculous subject once and for all. But he knew that wasn't the reason at all. That he wanted to try it for himself.

I hold degrees in biochemical engineering, neurobiology and quantum physics. By all accounts I am a qualified scientist, but scientists are not the only pioneers. In fact, we often forget our counterparts, the pure experimenters who focussed on attempting the impossible, rather than pontificating about what could not be done--people like the Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Timothy Leary and Nikola Tesla.

I cannot properly and fully explain why my method of time travel works, I can only assist you in demonstrating that it does. I will provide a basic framework for the mechanisms I believe are involved, but ultimately these are irrelevant. What is important is that I can reveal the limitations and possibilities I've discovered, and I can show you how to achieve time travel for yourself, because I, myself have achieved it. I am not simply a scientist, I am an experimenter.

Zane read and reread the techniques, the formulas for the chemical compounds and the obscure electronic devices that would be required. Flipping to the end of the book, he half expected to find an order form to confirm the scam, or at least a place where one had been. No such luck.

Re-examining the materials needed, he saw that it would take more time than money, ironically, to construct what the author had in mind. The obvious hazards of electric shock combined with the mysterious nature of the chemical compounds vaguely frightened him. If this book really were self published, could the author have gotten away with suggesting something that might harm or even kill people?

Zane set the book down and looked at his watch. The hour hand had slipped well past midnight, and he had to get up early for work. With a half grin at his own childish curiosity, he marked his page with an unopened letter from the power company and went to bed.

The ideas followed him like ghosts all day. The mind could be desynchronised, the book asserted, and sent back, along quantum pathways in the brain, into an earlier time frame. Never forward, always back. Yet because memory is a physical function of the brain, and not an aspect of what the author called 'observational awareness', taking memories into the past remained extremely difficult.

They had to be encoded into feelings, ephemeral patterns with only the barest chance of affecting the brain in the past. Because the desynchronised state occurred among most people at least once in their lives, the phenomenon of déjà vu had a rational explanation.

Zane wasn't sure it sounded quite rational, but the idea was intriguing. He'd copied down the formal names of the chemicals and run Internet searches to determine the nature of the compounds listed in Chronocide&lt. He was not altogether surprised that they bore more than a passing resemblance to obscure derivatives of mescaline. The book had been written in the '70s, after all.

According to various websites, electrical shocks delivered in the fashion described would either cure headaches, induce a mild seizure, or do nothing at all.

And acoustic recordings of specific electronic frequencies channelled into separate headphones would either open up his mind to a new level of awareness--so claimed the New Age crowd--or have absolutely no effect whatsoever, according to the sane members of the scientific community.

It was all pseudoscience and psychotropic drugs, as he'd expected from the outset. The only remaining question, he mused, was why, if it really were just pseudoscience, did he continue to feel that it were real? In the final analysis, he realised with growing anxiety, he'd have to try the experiment himself.

The working week dragged as Zane prepared for his first attempt at time travel--or, he thought wryly, serious personal injury. Preparations were tedious and a bit more difficult than he'd anticipated, but in the meantime he'd finished the book.

Well, nearly finished the book. He'd been warned to stop at the final chapter. Apparently that one was meant exclusively for advanced time travellers.

Only read this section if you have one hundred per cent recall of everything that has happened to you in the past few days, and you have had that awareness since arriving back in time a few days ago following your experiments. Only then are you ready for the next step. Until then, none of what follows will make any sense and can only serve to dissuade you from continuing the necessary steps to get here.

He'd been sorely tempted to read it anyway, but decided to focus on first things first. He looked over the assortment of mad equipment and illegal substances in his living room. The shades were drawn, the doors locked and the telephone unplugged. His cell and PDA were in the car.

Familiarity suffused the scene. Had he truly done this before? That would explain why he was doing it now. According to Chronocide&lt, just to begin getting 'observational awareness impressions' and converting them into physical memory traces, you had to re-experience the same events at a ratio of roughly one cycle per day to the number of days travelled back in time.

The dosage of the chemical, the volume of the recordings and the level of voltage to the electrodes strapped to his head were all tuned to regress him four days. Anything farther back could cause 'end-state damage', which he still didn't understand. He suspected there would be more about it in the final chapter.

It is often difficult to determine how many times you have cycled, but do not let this disturb you. If you do not remember to change anything, the actions you are taking right now will be taken repeatedly until you cross the memory retention threshold, allowing for new action based on those future memories. Eventually, linear causality will create the conditions by which you will achieve what we could reasonably call free will.

Zane's task was to concentrate upon the day he found the book. He remembered the storm clouds approaching and the smell of impending rain. He remembered the look on the old woman's face, finding the book that led to this insane mess in his kitchen and living room.

He sat down in the chair Emily had always taken. Even after nine years, her knitting basket still sat beside it. The 'chronotropic compounds', as Mr Teel called them, waited invisibly in his tea cup, mixed with a splash of Earl Grey. Old headphones were plugged into the equally archaic tape cassette recorder. The 'inducer', which would administer the shock, sat beside the cup, its makeshift electrodes backed by first aid kit medical tape.

Apprehension seized him. A dark fear of some terrible consequence gripped him and the absurdity of the experiment became crystal clear as he caught his reflection in the glossy dead stare of the television screen. But I've done this before, he realised. He didn't recall it exactly, but he remembered the fear. With a confidence that only such an impression could bring, Zane taped the electrodes to his head, pushed the PLAY button, and drank his drug-laced tea in one bold gulp.

For several minutes, eyes closed as he focussed on the day he'd found the book, nothing happened but a mild sensation of lightness. The instructions were clear. Do not activate the inducer until the compounds begin numbing your body. Zane waited for it, annoyed by the uneven buzzing of the electrical sounds in the headphones. He reached to turn it down when the compounds kicked in.

A world of understanding bloomed in a silent explosion of consciousness. Everything happening had happened before, mirrors facing mirrors. His mind looked into that endless hall and witnessed the light of creation shining from the depths of a space that didn't exist.

Free will and predestination were just names for the two facing mirrors creating the illusion of infinity. He saw his thumb flip the switch on the shock device before he realised he was about to make the decision to do so. Stars filled the darkness that rushed in from the walls.

Zane picked up the book with a profound feeling of familiarity. He remembered remembering that he'd seen it before! He didn't know if he should call that a double déjà vu or just a temporary imbalance in his memory centres.

"An oak leaf is going to …" he started to say, just as it hit the table. The sense of the familiar was matched only by his growing paranoia. That cat was looking at him again with an expectant glare. He opened to chapter one. The lines of text struck him like thunderbolts. As he started to flip to chapter two, he whispered, "You have travelled back in time, and you will do so again."

When he saw those same words on the page, he closed the book and marched straight over to the old lady to ask her what she wanted for it. She mentioned her son again before Zane drove away.

Zane picked up the book, the broken hourglass on its cover leaping out at him with terrible force. My God, how many times have I done this? he asked himself, knowing what he would see as the oak leaf fell where it always had.

Zane reached out and caught the leaf. With a smile for the cat who stared at him, he didn't even bother to open the book. Now he was ready for the final chapter. The woman, of course, mentioned her son, and this time he decided to ask.

"Where is he? Your son, I mean?"

She looked up at him with suspicion and fear. It only lasted a moment before her features settled. "Northbrook Care Centre," she said softly, then smiled a wide strange smile. "His body is there, but not his mind. He went back to his friends in college, he always goes back there." She tapped the mottled skin of her skull. Zane paid her his dollar and left, distinctly uncomfortable.

He felt cold and shaky, setting the book down. Very well. Time travel was not only real, but he'd done it several times, if his multiple recollections were accurate. The next step filled him with a revulsion and terror that far out- shadowed the first time he'd sat down in his wife's chair with the gadgets and compounds in a sequence he'd only half completed this time. He took a deep breath, and sipped his tea.

To travel beyond eight days into the past requires a dosage of chronotropic compounds and voltage levels from the inducer sufficient to cause irreversible neural tissue damage in the abandoned time line. Effects range in intensity from mild memory loss to a permanent catatonic state. Because of this, and out of a very natural fear of personality death, some travellers limit themselves to shorter journeys.

The old woman's son in Northbrook. He'd taken the long ride back, so in this time line his body remained a mindless shell.

I have to make a choice, he told himself. Is it worth risking permanent brain damage to see Emily again? He looked around the empty house, at,the forgotten drapes, the figurines he kept forgetting to dust. He wanted nothing more than to be with her again. He'd always said he would die for her, and in the darkness of her disease he'd begged God to let him die in her place. Now, it seemed, his devotion was being put to the test, not by God but by a man named Travis M. Teel.

Longer trips require proportionally more cycles to recover any memory at all. A 20-year journey requires over 7,000 cycles to achieve anything approaching full recall. That is 140,000 years in linear time. If you choose to do this, you will stay on the same event loop. You only fully remember the one culminating effective cycle. The rest of those years you're just killing time.

Zane finished building the inducer and brewing the compounds. He wondered what they would think when they found his body? Out of paranoia, he decided to burn the book. If it didn't work, there would be no point in hurting others, and if it did, he'd keep finding it at that garage sale before he burned it.

The maximum dose gave him 20 years. That would put him eleven years into his marriage with Emily. He smiled at the thought of seeing her again as the drugs took hold. Infinity yawned out, and he watched as his hand flipped the switch, as it had been doing for thousands of years. In the quiet darkness of Zane Tsien's house, a man who'd once been considered sane drugged and shocked himself into a permanent catatonic state.

"Honey, I remember everything that's going to happen in the next 20 years," Zane told his beloved wife, feeling a wave of euphoria: he had never said those words before. He remembered endless incidents of déjà vu, always accompanied by a powerful and mysterious impulse to do the same thing, always with the feeling that it was utterly important simply to go with the flow. Now he knew why.

"What? Are you feeling OK?" Emily put the back of her hand to his forehead. He brought her hand down to his lips and kissed it.

"God, it's good to see you again, my darling. I do remember the future, you know," he said with a warmth and sincerity that startled his young wife. It was Saturday evening and, after all, they'd been home together all day.

"Really? Then what am I going to say next?" she asked, always the pragmatist. Zane shook his head.

"I don't know, I didn't do this last time," he answered honestly. She smiled with that lovely, superior smile she had and shook her head.
"A likely story, Mr. Fibber," she said gently and kissed his cheek before turning back to her stew. Zane ached as he watched her.

He realized with a shock, that perhaps this time, he could convince her to get checked out early. If they could catch the cancer before it spread, she might not die this time.

"Oh look, a garage sale," said Emily pointing at the faded orange sign. Zane obliged with a knowing smile and followed the arrows to the broken down old house. As soon as he saw it, he knew which garage sale this was. Over the years she'd come to believe in his story about the book, especially after they caught the tumour early. Though he knew she didn't fully understand it, she had been grateful, and the additional nine years of life had been full and good. And the future remained open.

Now, as he caught the oak leaf, Zane glanced over at the cat who purred happily as Emily stroked his head. Zane had to wonder if that's what the animal had been waiting for all along.