Sally Tennyson

Sally Tennyson was a cheat. When she failed her Physics A Level, because she wrongly answered that time travel WAS possible, she jumped in her time machine, visited herself just before she was due to take the exam and gave herself the correct answer.

 

 

I don’t understand, you look just like me. Exactly like me.”

 

“That’s because I am you.”

 

“But that’s not possible. I mean, I’m here, so I can’t be there. That’s basic physics.”

 

“That’s why I’m here. Physics. I need to talk to you. We failed our physics A Level.”

 

“Ha, now I know you’re not me. I don’t like to boast, but I am simply brilliant at Physics. There is no way I could fail my A Level.”

 

“That’s why we fail. You’re too good. You lose marks by proving that time travel is possible. It will be years before the world of physics is ready for the evidence. Certainly not the jobbing teacher charged with marking the paper, he probably lacked the physics needed to understand your argument, let alone give it the recognition it deserved.”
“But I don’t believe time travel is possible, so I wouldn’t have written that in the exam. They physics is quite clear, time travel is simply impossible given everything we know about the universe.”

 

“Yes, yes, but you prove the laws of physics wrong. I prove them wrong. How else would I be able to travel back in time?”

 

“Funny you should say that. Is it possible that perhaps you’re not me? Perhaps you’re just a look-a-like trying to freak me out.”

 

Which is when she proved me wrong. I won’t provide you with the details, because they’re all EXTREMELY personal, but the things she knew about me only I could know about me. It was freaky.

 

“Let me show you my time machine,” she said. “The time machine I invented. The one you invented. The one you will invent.”

 

What else could I do? I followed her. Or should I say followed me? It’s all quite confusing, I hope you’re keeping up. Writing courses tell you never to have two characters with the same name, or similar names, but here I am writing a story where both characters are the same person. Now that is confusing, frankly it pisses on having a Cliff and a Clive on the same page.

 

I digress.

 

The time machine was quite a basic construct. Once I’d explained the principles to me it was easy to see how it worked. The difficult bit was that it involved tearing up everything I thought I knew about the laws of physics and starting over from scratch.

 

The following day my head was whizzing. Emotionally, meeting yourself is a difficult experience, added to which everything I thought I knew about physics had been disproved. I was, with my future self now returned to her ‘normal’ place in the space-time continuum, possessed with a knowledge about physics far beyond anyone else on the planet. Brian Cox could kiss my ass, the know-nothing idiot. Einstein wasn’t fit to kiss my boots. I was the greatest brain in the universe.

 

It was time for my Physics exam.

 

There it was. The question. The bane of my existence. ‘Explain, using the latest theoretical understanding, why time travel is now known to be impossible.’

 

I let rip. I wrote down everything I had learned from my future self. I destroyed the blind, ignorant thinking that was contemporary physics. I even sketched out how a time machine might work. In short, I completely fucked up my exam. No wonder I failed. Or would fail. Or will fail. Jesus, language really wasn’t designed with time travel in mind was it?

 

After the exam I went to the pub and got extremely drunk.

 

The next morning I woke up with a head so sore it was beyond the understanding of science. I spent most of the day vomiting, crying and sleeping. Sometimes simultaneously.

 

The following day I woke up, alert again. I produced a question. ‘How could I have failed?’ Until I visited myself I accepted the physics that stated time travel was impossible. If I hadn’t appeared I would have gotten high marks, possibly 100%. I would have gone on to great things, university, more university, more university. Therein greatness lies.

 

But now I had sabotaged that. I had tricked myself into failing the exam.

 

And then the joke appeared. It was trending on the internet the next time I looked online. I paraphrase it here: Sally Tennyson was a cheat. She travelled back in time to prevent herself failing a Physics exam by wrongly answering that time travel was possible.

 

I was appalled. I made myself fail, then I colluded with a (poor quality) gag writer to make a joke about myself failing, sending it back in time so that all my contemporaries would regard me as a cheat, though the only cheating I had done involved my future self cheating me out of the brilliant result in Physics A level I deserved.

 

You simply couldn’t make it up.

 

I had only one course of action open to me. I would have to build a time machine, using the technology I had taught myself, go forward in time, and prevent the future me going back in time. By killing my older self.

 

Ha – let’s see you make a joke about that Mr Funny Man.