Chapter One: No Redemption

What people never understood about Cole was that he never would have gone through with it.

He would never have blown up the school with Clay. He would never have shot the place up. Maybe it looked that way from all of the bombs they made. Maybe it looked that way from all of their notes to each other. Maybe it looked that way from all of the diagrams they’d drawn, figuring out exactly where to put the bombs to cause the most damage.

Maybe it looked that way, but it wasn’t that way. He never never would have done it.

At least…he didn’t think so.

Cole didn’t really want to hurt anyone. He never had. He’d only liked to plan it. Thinking about it was kind of fun. When he imagined it, nobody died. They only ran scared, staring at Cole and Clay with wide eyes filled with a newfound respect. Because fear brought respect in a way that nothing else did, and that was all that Cole had really wanted back then.

His ninth-grade life had been hell. The girls who laughed at him and made fun of his height. The asshole jocks who called him a fag and threw bottles at him in the cafeteria while the teachers pretended not to notice. His parents who always said Cole could talk to them about anything, but when Cole told them about how sad he was feeling, how he couldn’t see the point in anything, they became irritated with him, saying he was only fifteen and had no business being depressed. It all clashed together, clamoring at Cole’s psyche until he found himself agreeing with Clay. Yes, humans were assholes. Yes, being alive was pointless. Yes, they could make a statement.

Cole had never thought it was real. Only to Clay it had been real, and when Cole had realized that…

Katie snitching was the best possible outcome. It was probably why Cole had told Katie about the bombs in the first place. He’d wanted her to snitch. Katie had always been the good kid, the straight and narrow type. She didn’t break rules. She didn’t color outside of the lines. When they were arrested, despite the fear and anger and total devastation, Cole had been relieved. He didn’t have to find a way to back out of it now. Katie had taken him off that awful path and set him onto a new one. She’d saved him from becoming a murder, becoming the most violent, perverse version of himself.

In another world, in some other version of reality, Cole would have simply done his time in prison, been released, and gone on with his life. The domestic terrorism charges had been dropped after all, and the only charges he and Clay had been slammed with were conspiracy to commit murder and a handful of illegal weapons charges. Cole got ten years, but was out in six. Good behavior and all. Clay got ten, but was paroled at eight. Their records were sealed. They were only fifteen when they’d done it. The world should have forgotten it.

The world would never forget. The Basement Tapes. Those fucking tapes made sure the world would remember, keep making memes, keep his name linked in the zeitgeist with failed mass shooters. The tapes had been Clay’s idea. If they were gonna take inspiration from Columbine, they ought to take time to pay homage to the tapes. Cole had thought they looked really cool at the time. But no. They hadn’t. At all. And now he was a meme. Tumblr had done some really creative stuff with the screenshots, making good use of Pumped Up Kicks, of course. A lot of the memes captured the cringiest of Cole’s facial expressions.

It wasn’t just embarrassing; it was a death sentence. It killed the possibility of any sort of future. Cole had been out of jail for four years now, and he still didn’t have a life. He couldn’t get a decent job. He couldn’t get accepted into college. No administration wanted him on campus. He was twenty-four years old, working fast food, with nothing to look forward to, no redemption in sight.

He’d never have a career. He’d never have a good life. Never have a house and family. Never be important. He had wanted so badly to do something noteworthy, to be important.

He’d spent his life feeling small and insignificant. Shy. His shyness was like a cage. The real him was stuck inside. It was so difficult for him to talk to people, to look them in the eye. How would he ever do anything really important when he was such a pussy he couldn’t make eye contact? Then Clay had come along and put all those ideas in his head. ‘We could be infamous. They’d talk about us forever. Like Klebold and Harris.’

And Cole knew now that being remembered like Klebold and Harris was worse than never being known at all. Because everyone knew him now. But he hadn’t done anything important. He’d done something evil, and while back then he’d wanted infamy so badly, now he’d give anything for obscurity. He wanted to disappear.

That was why he applied for the time travel experiment. The opportunity came from the same lab that had introduced super powers to the world two years ago, selling off the power to fly and make fire and read minds to anyone who had enough money. Now they were working on time travel. They said they’d found the link between consciousness and the physical world. It had something to do with quantum mechanics. Something to do with spooky action, the way a particle on one side of the universe somehow affected particles on the opposite side.

They’d been searching for people to test their time machine for over a year now. It was because of that link between consciousness and the physical world, a person had to truly want to go back in time in order for it to work. So far, nobody had wanted it badly enough.

The company wasn’t selling time travel the way they’d sold the superpowers. Instead they were searching for volunteers. Cole was an ex-con. Cole was an infamous failed mass murderer. He didn’t think he’d be chosen, but when they kept looking, when they kept appearing on news outlets saying they had to find people with no qualms at all about leaving their life behind, he started to think he might have a chance.

And three weeks after submitting his application, he received the email he’d been waiting for.

Still covered in grease and grit from his shift at McDonald’s, Cole stomped through the house, ignoring his mother’s probing questions about his day. He kicked his bedroom door shut and sat down at his desk.

The day was hot, but his bedroom was cool, the blackout shades keeping the room at a comfortable temperature. He fired up the computer and pulled the McDonald’s hat from his head, tossing it onto the floor where it became part of the mosaic of debris, mixing in with all of the crushed cans of seltzer, dirty underwear, and tattered mangas that traversed the small space.

Cole had been checking his emails every day since putting in his application. In a new time, he could be a new man. He could leave his life behind. He’d never have to see that look of recognition, and then disgust, and then fear that flickered over the faces of nearly everyone he met. He’d never have to watch his mom throw out unread hate mail. He’d never have to stumble across a meme of his own face, paired with a caption that cut too deep, that struck him as far too true.

He checked his email every day, but didn’t seriously expect to find a response from the scientists. Maybe there would be a notification from Reddit. Maybe there would be a message from Clay, who sometimes reached out to him discreetly, despite their strict no-contact order. These were the things Cole expected to see in his inbox.

No…there it was…an actual response from Speculative Science Enterprises.

There it was.

Staring at the screen, he blinked rapidly, his heart thrumming. Somewhere in the distance, a lawnmower roared. Out in the kitchen, his mother hummed lightly and a drawer slammed shut with a clattering of silverware.

He took the mouse in hand, but paused, finding himself unable to click.

Right now, time travel, a new life, a new beginning, it was all possible. It was still a hope he had. Once he opened this email, that hope could be gone, and what would he have once that hope was gone? For now, he still had it. He lived in a world where he had been both accepted and rejected, either one was equally possible.

Cole grit his teeth together.

“Coley, you want some lasagna?” his mother called.

His tension mounted. His lungs tightened. “Coming, Ma! Gimme a minute.”

He steeled himself. He prepared for rejection, already feeling the fires of anger smoldering deep in his belly.

He clicked.

Dear Mr. Velardi,

After reviewing your application for the position of Time Travel Volunteer, we have determined that you may be a candidate for a successful Time Travel experiment. We would like to meet with you at your earliest convenience to talk further about the possibility and conduct some preliminary screenings to determine if this would be a good match.

Are you available to meet in our Boston office the week of July 16th? We are hoping to screen yourself and one other candidate over the span of three or four days.

Should you be interested in meeting with our team, travel and accommodations will be taken care of by the Speculative Science Team.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

-Judy Tramil

Project Lead and Anomaly Coordinator

Speculative Science Enterprises

Cole stared hard at the email, his body rigid as the words on the screen sunk in.

And then he jumped from the folding chair and started to whoop.