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Aristotle’s home, Ealing, London W5
Ari woke up the following morning having had a restless night. He couldn’t get the events of the previous day out of his mind and it was pure luck that he managed to finally drop off and get a couple of hours sleep. His mind had been buzzing. Now, in the clear light of day, the memory was still with him.
He shuffled into the kitchen – his body hadn’t caught up to his mind yet – and over to his c.1880 Doulton ‘Improved Bread Pan’ breadbin that sat on the worktop next to his cooker. He lifted off the tin lid and took out two slices of wholemeal bread.
His cooker was quite simple, a black cast-iron box with an oven, a grill, and a hot plate and looked more like a safe than something people would use to cook their meals. But, it was appropriate to Ari’s décor and so it served its purpose well.
He would have liked it to have run on gas, as it would have done back in the 1800s, but everything was directly or indirectly solar-powered in the 2070s and he’d had no choice but to accept the paradigm. He’d steampunked his home as best as he could but he still lived in the late twenty-first century and it was impossible to adhere solely to the Victorian era’s technological constraints. Not everything in his home was as it looked.
He popped the two slices of bread onto the grill and watched them turn brown.
A sudden thought interrupted him. If Doctor William Spencer didn’t exist, how come he could remember him?
That was the thing that bothered him. He’d studied the paradoxes of time travel when applying for his time travel licence – the Predestination Paradox, the Bootstrap Paradox, the Grandfather Paradox, the Hitler paradox, and even Polchinski’s Paradox – but that didn’t explain why the existence of Doctor Spencer hadn’t been wiped from his mind too. Something must have happened in the past to cause Dr Spencer and all evidence of his life to be extinguished – which explained why neither Susan nor Tom had heard of him – but Ari appeared to have been excluded from the erasure process. That was bizarre.
However, he didn’t have time to worry about the mental gymnastics of time-travel paradoxes. He had an appointment with Tom about a new case. His unusual lifestyle wouldn’t pay for itself.