The Significance Cofactor

Your children love you. They cry as you leave with promises of souvenirs. You need to catch your flight. Ah, but their runny faces as you get in the car—I do not look. 

You’re raising them well. The girl’s brazen, as girls her age should be, and asks questions at all the right times (Why can’t I drink coffee? Why do birds sing in the morning? Why don’t you smile anymore, Daddy?). Your son is younger, at that age where he is more puppy than boy. He follows you around the house in devoted silence, trailing after your ankles and attacking them with toys or gums or hugs. 

Your kids love you. So does your wife. When you no longer know your phone number—when you fumble with your medication—even when you forget your children’s names (I’m bad with names, always have been), she throws me a look that I cannot decipher but which I’m sure holds some secret meaning between the two of you. I assume you’re a funny person. She believes you’re joking, that these bouts of amnesia are a bit that gets you out of chores and makes the kids laugh (Daddy, Daddy, of course you know who I am, you’re so silly, Daddy).

Your family likes to touch each other. Your kids have sweaty hands that find mine constantly. They have sticky feet they like to suction to my chest as they push their unwashed heads under my arms or chin. Your wife has those kinds of wiry hands with pressure behind them—hands that feel like she’s catching you before a fall, or testing the elasticity of your skin.

You should know, I am aware of these privileges. Of receiving the love that belongs to you, of living in your home, eating your dinners, sleeping in your bed. Your household is in a safe neighborhood. Close to the tube. Public parks nearby. Nice restaurants. You’re a lucky man. 

When I leave, you will have a raging headache throughout your conference. I’m sorry about that. You will have a gap in your memory. Body aches as well. Your muscle memory will need readjusting. You might have a lingering accent. I’ve tried to cover it, but it makes your kids laugh. They think it’s a joke. “Too much rubbish TV,” your wife says with rolling eyes. 

You will not remember me. I will leave you with nothing but perhaps a whisper of my voice, unfamiliar memories slipping through the whorls of your brain. But you will dream. You will dream of faces you have never seen; you will dream of horizons gleaming over planets that have not yet been discovered. You will dream of hands, stained darkly. 

You will not understand any of this. Too much work, too much caffeine, and a midlife crisis is what you’ll say. “It’s the parental fatigue,” you will tell your wife, and because you are funny, you will make her laugh. Take your family on a vacation after this is over. That’ll clear your head. It’s a beautiful time. Go somewhere sunny with a beach, for the kids. 

• • •

Your wet palms clench the seat belt tighter about your chest, a welcome suffocation. 

I do not understand your cars—I do not understand the risks associated with them. Where I am from, there are trams that take you across planets and shuttles that take you across star systems. You have a pass or a ticket and there is little worry about collisions. Space is vast. 

 In your time, any singular person can operate these machines, which cluster and crowd down your black, narrow streets with prayer as your only guarantee of safety. Prayer and a strip of leathery cloth over a shoulder. These are reckless times you live in.

When the car next to us launches across the lane, horn blaring, your nails dig into the upholstery. I press your legs against the chair back.

“Don’t you worry,” the driver says, raising his voice over the radio. “There’s always these kinds of arseholes at this time of day.”

My friend, your body is very uniquely oriented in this interval of space-time. Despite my intrusion, I would like to keep it intact for the both of us.

“Please take caution,” I say in your voice, and he laughs. 

“Oh, you got it, mate. It’s traffic hour, you know? It’s outta my hands.”

I am not reassured by this stranger, nor his fickle machine. 

As we pass the long and anxious ride to the airport, I catch sight of your face in his rectangular mirror. It occurs to me that I know exactly where you’re scarred, where you ache, where you itch. I know your family’s most intimate morning rituals. I know you are colorblind. 

It does not seem fair that you know so little about me. You are not aware of me, nor will you remember my intrusion—you, floating unconscious deep down underneath the vast crevices of your mind—but we very well may die on this asphalt road together as (gah!) a motorbike veers a hair’s breadth away and nearly ends us all. You may not listen, but I will speak. 

I was once born as you are, mind and matter unified. I once had a name. I do not remember it now. I come from a far future, when your bones are naught but nuclear dust, and your country a forgotten memory. I have shucked many faces throughout my life, many identities. I have been old, young, male, female, tall, short, strong, sickly, beautiful, hideous, plain. 

After skimming through the anatomy books stacked by your bedside, I may argue that in your time, doctors such as yourself have too much faith in the gray meat. In my time, we acknowledge that minds are not flesh, but electricity. The flesh itself can be manipulated, spliced into something new, but the thrumming consciousness that drives it lies in the pattern of powerful electric waves dancing from cell to cell. Electricity is energy, and energy can be transmuted.

This is not a technology within grasp in your time, but in mine it is commonplace. We have talented and powerful people who charge fortunes for others to live in their skins for a day. Some sell their strength, their talents, their good looks and let others wear their bodies, piloting their minds as easily as slipping on a new pair of shoes. 

For some, this is a pastime. For others it is a gamble with immortality—a method to gain or sell youth. For me, it was a means of survival (I contemplate survival as we enter a roundabout. Enter is a passive term for the hard slam of your shoulder against the window as we careen sideways and nearly skid into an adjacent vehicle. I gasp and the driver snickers around his toothpick). 

For all its dangers, you live in an innocent age where space is an abstract ocean, adorable with its rovers and fantasy aliens. Space, in my time, is a continent—a vast one, with no clear delineations of borders or territory, and thus thousands of small nations with tens of thousands of small wars. 

These wars never end, as yours do. Our soldiers may die then reappear the next day with a new face and height. So long as we protect our skulls, so long as we keep a constant supply of prisoners as unwilling corporeal donors, we may fight again with a stranger’s reflexes if we are maimed, march again with a stranger’s bones if we break on the battlefield. I speak personally when I say it is not a glamorous resurrection—more reminiscent of being washed, wrung, and reused like the rag on your kitchen countertop.

I have gripped weapons with many shades of hands. I have forgotten everything about who I was originally. It stopped mattering after the first dozen or so transfers. 

 All is the same on the battlefield. It does not matter what you look like or who you are when you are nothing but Death behind a helmet, the hands that once belonged to someone else pulling a trigger again and again—

Now, at last, after the honking, the roundabout, the cab driver’s infernal laughing, we arrive. I emerge with unsteady legs. 

Your wife calls a few minutes after I arrive at the terminal. It takes some time to understand what she is saying—your daughter sings in the background at the top of her lungs. You should sign her up for music lessons. 

Evidently, your son is at that hoarding age, and your passport is a particular favorite because of the shiny seal on the cover. When I check your briefcase pocket, it is no longer there. She found it tucked in his nappy. 

We still have time. I hail another death machine at the curb.

When the cab pulls up, the driver smiles. He is the same man who dropped me off.

“Forgot something, mate?” He chuckles in a good-natured way I find irritating.

“Kids,” I say. “Such little thieves.”

“Cheers.” He nods. “I hear that.”

• • •

There you are.

You stir, and your pinky jumps. Most hosts lie dormant throughout my stay. You do not overthrow me, you cannot, but at your daughter’s shrill crescendo over the phone (very nice, sweetie), I feel you resist. 

I was a soldier. I know resistance. I know how to quash it before it grows. I snuff you as easily as a cinder. It is better this way, trust me. 

Your brother is also a soldier. I know because your mother calls several times a day to complain about it. I know she means well when she says, “Honestly, he had so much potential! Why couldn’t he go to uni like you?” and, “What do they even feed them in Afghanistan?” and, “Christ above, what if he comes back with his legs blown off?”

She’s terrified. Of course she is. She wants your little brother home, just as dreamy-eyed as the day he left, asking for a warm meal. Actually, no, that’s not it. She wants your little brother small again on her lap, asking her what stars are made of.

Your daughter pelted me with a kiwi yesterday. While I wiped the green stain, she explained that she’s Uncle Peter, and I’m a terrorist. The kiwi was a grenade. It exploded. I’m dead. 

I’m merely a buzz in your brain, an uninvited guest, and have no more right than your goldfish to comment on your parenting. But your daughter is in grade one and threw a grenade at a terrorist. Kiwi juice is very difficult to get out of clothes. Do you understand? 

What I’m trying to say is, do not let your children go to war if you love them. Your mother learned that the hard way. 

Your riot of a daughter dressed your son in a toilet paper crown and a blanket cape. “He’s the Queen,” she explained and gave him a sharp salute, because obviously, Uncle Peter fights for the Queen. 

 I do not know your brother Peter, but he is certainly not fighting for the Queen. He is perhaps fighting for stability, a scholarship, an identity, the opportunity to travel, and maybe because your grandfather was a soldier (His portrait is in the hall. You have his nose). Does he know why he is in Afghanistan? 

I never knew why we went anywhere. Since childhood, my loyalties were to a planetary system ruled by elected officials, overseen by a higher council of non-elected officials. You don’t think of the Queen in her toilet paper crown when you’re on a battlefield—you only think about surviving so you can rest afterwards and feel like a human being for a brief second before shipping off to the next massacre. We’d—theoretically—travel to completely new star systems at incomprehensible speeds, but for all I knew on those windowless shuttles, I sat in a dark room for hours on end, breathing the sweat of hundreds. 

I cannot remember the names of any of the places we traveled to. Very few were terraformed, and those that were had stagnated in the earliest stages. We tramped through marshes, thick with fetid water gone to rot from underfunded development projects. The half-baked biomes seeped into settlements struggling for survival. The scenery hardly changed between colonies, so it was often difficult for me to discern if we’d traveled at all. 

We fought to seize control of mines, of ice oceans, of proximity to young suns, and sometimes for slogans like “prosperity” or “justice.” The enemy lines were always a hateful horde of black and gray armor, antithetical to the heroism of our navy and silver army.

The small settlements never had much of a say over who got to own their mines and oceans and suns. They just lived there, like an inconvenient backdrop, and we mowed them aside to get at each other, much like how your daughter topples aside your son’s large head for a better view of her talking dog show. 

I heard love in many voices. I heard love in pleading. I heard love in screams. It was there in names wailed over a panicked crowd. It was also there, in the silent aftermath, when there was nothing left except the stains.

It is here too, tucked into the softened folds of your wife’s voice as she envelops your children in the illusion that the world is a safe place. 

I liked to justify myself back then. As we stepped over the bodies, sometimes torching, sometimes looting, I told myself I was following orders. My mix-and-match limbs were not my own, but property of a removed government on a faraway star system.

I am not a parent. If I were, I would teach your children to take ownership of their actions. If a commander tells them to shoot on sight—that is still their decision to make. And if they obey because they fear death or disappointment or because they’ve lost their soul, that was nobody else’s fault but theirs. If they don’t realize this soon, just like poor Peter, they may end up with the echo of love—that horrible sound—ringing in their ears every night until the end of time.

• • •

When I return to your home after another harrowing journey, your daughter bounds down the steps with a grin smeared on her face.

“Daddy!” she screams and takes a running leap. I imagine you could have predicted this move with ease—but I do not, and she tackles me flat to the ground.

You will have a bruise on your left shoulder.

“Get off me,” I groan, which is not Daddy-speak, so I salvage it with, “Bugger.”

She laughs, clutching my neck tighter. 

“Don’t leave again. Please?”

I do not answer and carry her inside. The culprit of this inconvenient detour is sitting in the hall, chubby legs splayed, holding a toy train.

“Da,” he burbles, and grins, toothless.

You twitch. 

Your wife emerges from the bedroom, pinning her braids into a bun. She is in her suit, which comes as a surprise considering it’s a weekend.

“Oh, good timing,” her eyes flood with relief when she sees me. “I have to head to the office. One of the attorneys had a family emergency—mum in Mumbai got sick—and flew out last night without warning. Now we’ve got to reassign the Smith–Stevenson case, but the other attorneys are tied up this week.”

I glance down at your daughter’s greasy head and your son’s bald one. 

“I called Stacy,” says your relentless spouse. “She can be here in half an hour. You’ll still have plenty of time to make your flight.” She presses your passport into your hands. 

“But—”

She shoots me a look—and this one I recognize as universal exasperation. An instinct in your bones compels me to keep your jaw shut.

“Have fun with Daddy!”

She kisses your cheek then your daughter’s head. Your son clings to her shoes but she shakes him off with a tickle to his belly that sends him laughing. She is out the door. 

And I am alone with them. Your daughter shimmies down your torso and holds your legs like a warm shackle. 

I do not know if I should make eye contact or not. I compromise by focusing on the arch of her neck. 

“Did you eat lunch?”

“Yah.”

I think wistfully of that potentially charming scene—Stacy pulling up to find your son covered in applesauce, your daughter mashing lentils into the grain of the table, me rushing out the door saying, “Sorry, sorry, I have to catch my flight, thank you for coming.” Perfect. 

Instead, your daughter grabs me by the hand and—with more strength than I’d expect—forces me into her playroom. Your son crawls after us. 

“Play with me, Daddy!”

“What do you want to play?” 

“Uncle Peter.” She hands me a foil crown. “You can be the Queen.”

She makes a rifle out of Legos. She puts a colander upside down on her head and marches, straight back, knees up. She aims the yellow Lego barrel at her baby brother: “Bam, bam.”

I snatch the rifle out of her hands and smash it.

No, not Daddy-like. She stares at the scattered blocks as if I ripped the teeth from her mouth. 

“I have a better game,” I say quickly. 

“I wanted to play Uncle Peter.”

“You can play someone cooler than Uncle Peter.”

“No one’s cooler than Uncle Peter.”

Is that something you told her? 

“Well, I have a friend,” I say. “Who lived a pretty interesting life.”

I set to work on the Legos. They’re wet, for reasons I do not want to know. I hand her a wide block tapering to a neck of stacked squares.

“What is it?” she asks.

“A spaceship.”

Stacy comes, twenty minutes later. The scene is still charming: your daughter, battering me (Mars), with her Legos, me holding your son (an alien) and shaking keys over his face as he giggles and burps. 

I make small talk, asking her about a husband I have never met, and the weather, and brands of baby food. She’s a nice woman. I’m glad your wife has a friend like her (Or is she her sister? I cannot remember). 

Your daughter keeps a sharp eye on me as I taper off the conversation. The love of a child is such a simple, possessive thing. 

Good Stacy distracts them with a skilled maneuver involving the television and cereal. They do not hear when the door clicks behind me. 

In front of your house, my knees go weak with a sudden powerful craving I cannot name. Ludicrously, I want to take your Sunday dinners, your wife’s hair oil, the smell of baby powder, the plastic dolls, with me. I want to package and bunch it all into something soft I can keep in my pockets and sift between my fingers. 

I feel the dappled sunlight warm the fabric of your shirt. Through the open window, I hear your daughter singing a song about school buses, your son burbling along. The clean air smells like your neighbor’s geraniums. 

“God, it’s nice,” I think. “It’s so nice—hard to believe it all goes away.”

Because it will. I’m sorry to say, but it will all be gone sooner than you think. It would be so easy to steal this fleeting thing from you while it lasts.

I am tempted, but I do not turn around. I stand, paralyzed, for a moment longer. Then I hail a cab and lo and behold, it is the same driver I rode with before.

“Got what you needed, mate?” he asks as he starts the car. “Slow day, so I stayed in the area.” 

I thank him. 

“I’ll wait outside the terminal,” he winks in the rearview mirror. “Just in case.”

My reply is a dry, “Sure,” but he chuckles in the way only truly happy men can.

• • •

On this third and most unpleasant ride yet—the seat shuddering, your fingernails embedded into your thighs as we swirl into yet another cursed roundabout—I will move on to the topic of time travel.

It’s simpler than you think. Your scientists have already theorized it, in a way, with light particles and sound waves. 

A theory revealed itself to the scientists of my time. If minds are nothing more than electric patterns, then surely they can break the bonded laws of matter and move across space-time. The experiments that followed spared no expense. After shattering several thousand test subjects across the continuity in attempts to infiltrate the central nervous systems of presidents and dictators, then generals and senators, then celebrities and judges, these intrepid scholars finally concluded that the past cannot be changed. Any consciousness sent too close to consequential events were atomized like insects on a windshield by an irrefutable force they could not explain by theory or definition (which they then defined with a theory named the Significance Cofactor).

This of course, meant many involved parties abruptly lost interest. The planetary governments of my time had enjoyed the prospect of legging up over each other by, for example, ensuring their opponents had never been born. Or delivering vital technology that could have won decades of conflict. 

Without the means to do any of that, time travel largely faded in both significance and funding. 

In the meantime, the distant government behind my battalion abruptly bankrupted. Most of us scattered when we heard the news. Better to start over somewhere else than slink off to a planet we barely remembered in bodies that weren’t originally ours. 

I drifted for a while, taking odd jobs in private armies or security. I did not transition well—I had not matured in the decades I had spent as a soldier and still had the irrational selfish impulses of a child.

War, in its natural progression, is a painful metamorphosis that transforms the young into the very old. This was not the case for me. I lived like the fairy boy on the island who never grows up (Such an amusing story. Your daughter finds it frightening). Slaughter meant nothing to me when a bunkmate could tell a joke one morning then finish it the next day in a different voice. 

After many decades, I came out of the battlefield with an acquired reckless inconsequence for the value of human life. This resulted in an angry, lonely existence smashing through jobs and potential friends and temporary homes until I ended up really nowhere at all. 

I finally landed at a travel agency on Old Earth, in a nice quarter-hemisphere mopped clean of latent radiation. They specialized in heritage crusades, essentially involving shuttles of unassuming tourists flocking to the planet for oceanic escapades to the ruins of ancient cities. The cruises promised a full immersion experience with era-specific dining, entertainment, and living spaces. The staff, including myself, wore appropriately themed attire. 

Security work for vacationers across a dead planet is about as appealing as it sounds. My patrons were either academics, who came to gawk at mangled skylines, or geo-naturalists, who came to “be one” with the mother world. I largely avoided them all. 

As we sailed past sunken coasts of statues, skyscrapers, and bridges festooned in mutagenic jungles, I entered a period of self-reflection. It dawned on me then that Old Earth possessed a perpetuity I had never fathomed. Its empires had stood for thousands of years, and its lifeforms for millions. In contrast, each impermanent colony I had encountered had been prone to destruction or renovation or relocation. Every person I had ever met had sloughed off as skin cells do, as bodies do. For the first time I thought about the face I had at the time, one of the captive stock stolen by my battalion. I wondered if I had swallowed him over the years, or if a part of him still lurked deep down, yearning to go home. He never stirred, as you sometimes do. 

In this corner of Old Earth, I paid attention. I learned the names of the fallen civilizations we frequented and the people who had once lived there. I downloaded media—I satisfied my curiosity, an unfamiliar sensation at the time. 

I grew enamored with the Earth and experienced true sorrow for its loss. It seemed a terrible waste. It didn’t make sense to me that nobody had thought to bring it all back—why we lived in these floundering empires instead. 

The answer, of course, was because I and a lot of other stupid brainless fools had shot and exploded and burned every young civilization with half a shot. But I didn’t see that at the time. 

After a few more years, I learned that my agency had bought time travel. To be more specific, they had invested a portion of their wealth into reviving a disgraced research project with the assistance of shareholders and bribed-away ethical bylaws. It was not governments, or academics, or radical resistance entities that became the sole proprietors of the fabled potential to travel into the past. It was a vacation company on an abandoned planet—a company that proffered bottomless cocktails and tango lessons. 

Their goal, they outlined in one employee meeting, was to expand their heritage crusades directly into the past. Many would certainly pay fortunes to feel the sun as our ancestors did, or to see a dolphin. 

In theory, said the research department, it was fully possible to send a human mind into the past and then safely extract it. The problem was evading the Significance Cofactor. It was impossible to predict how far removed any one person could be from changing the future. It would look very bad for the company if patrons risked obliterating themselves each time they inhabited a host.

They needed subjects, they said, to go back in time and mark Insignificant lives for potential inhabitation. It meant risking Significant destruction with each trip, but they promised the compensation would be worth the danger. 

In my uneducated understanding, all I heard was a chance to visit my beloved Earth—to see these crumbled civilizations in their prime, in person.

I volunteered without hesitation. 

In the electric mapping of my mind, they included a photonic code that would both tether me to my present and imprint whoever I occupied. For my first run, I awoke in the body of a teenager on the Konkan coast, 450 BCE. 

I returned shaking, hysterical, weeping and laughing. All I could say was, “The colors— The goddamn colors—”

• • •

Our wretched journey ends. I tip the cab driver generously (Not my currency to spend, of course. Apologies). 

I check your bag. I get your boarding pass. I wait in lines. I take off your shoes, your belt, and your jacket. Under the scanning arch, I wonder if the mechanisms can see me in your body—glowing like a yellow star on their computer screen. But they do not, and I pass through without incident.

I walk slowly throughout the airport, taking my time, peering into shops, looking for presents I will never buy for your children.

The time comes soon when we will part ways. I will put you on your flight. An organization from a far-flung future will extract me, like plucking a parasite with tweezers. I will wake up in another borrowed body, and confirm your Insignificance. Then I will tell them about your daughter, your son, your mother, and they will cross you off from a list. Does it offend you to know that you are nobody’s ideal vacation? They will not want your life, liable, mundane, messy as it is. You will never meet another like me again. 

You will then wake up with an aforementioned headache, an ache in your joints, and a disorienting loss of direction and logic, all of which can be easily explained by your being thousands of meters in the sky. 

You will check your calendar. You will frown and scratch your head.

When you land, you will call your wife to ask some questions that will make her laugh for their absurdity. You will mumble a slapstick line like, “I really need a vacation when I get back.” 

I hope you go to Italy. I downloaded pictures of Lake Como into your phone, hoping you will get a clue. 

I have lived in many others. Over the course of my life, I have stepped in the shoes of hundreds of people from the beginning of human history to the eve of the Earth’s abandonment. I return, each time, to a borrowed body in a far-flung future none of you could ever imagine.

I was lucky to have experienced it all. But I am especially glad I got to experience your life—a perfectly Insignificant father from Leeds. Right-handed. The son of an Anglican reverend. Remarkably unremarkable, possessing nothing yet everything at the same time. 

Good luck at your conference. Don’t forget to buy souvenirs. Remember, your son likes shiny things. Your daughter might be a fine singer someday. Your children may look up at the stars, asking what it would be like to live amongst them. 

You will look at their sweet faces and say, “I have no clue.”

• • •