(With apologies to all students of physics, and a certain Author)
I
My name is John Grant. I'm 18 years old and I'm in the bedroom of my home in Oxford. Soon I am going to be offered the opportunity to have sex with my own Mother. I know this because it's not the first time I've been in this time and space. What will happen tonight happened once before, many many years ago, and the memory of it is still clear in my mind.
Soon my Mother will come to the entrance of my bedroom. She will stand in the doorway for several minutes just looking in, as if uncertain whether or not to enter. She will be wearing a plain full-length white slip. Why she has removed her dress I won't know. My bedroom will be dark and the only source of light will come from the bulb in the hall. Standing there my mother will be illuminated from behind, making her nylon slip almost transparent, and I will be able to see the outline of her body through the material. Under the slip she will be wearing a white pointed bra, white panties, and a suspender belt. I will even be able to see the straps of her garter belt and the dark outline of the tops of her stockings. The slip will look like a silken cocoon shimmering in the dim light, and I will be aroused by this vision of her loveliness.
At this time she will be 52 years old, and although not untouched by age she will still be a handsome woman with long brown hair, which soon will be hanging down in broad curls. She has soft blue eyes that sparkle even in the near darkness, full sensuous lips, and a slim mature body. She stands about five feet two in her stockinged feet but tonight she will be wearing stiletto heels.
After what will seem to me an interminable time she will enter the room and walk quietly over to me. I will sit up in bed and she will settle down on the bed cover close beside me. She will smile softly and put her hand on my shoulder. Her silken slip will rustle as she sits down and I will be drawn to the way it clings to her body. The pointed bra she is wearing make her breasts thrust out erotically, and I will be fascinated by how clearly I can see its shape under the nylon. The slip will even reveal slight folds and indentations at the points of her bra, and as I look down I will see the outline of the clips of her suspenders, traced and sketched by the fabric.
She will appear to be in my room merely to say goodnight, but I will feel something more. There will be a strange and powerful charge emanating from her that will puzzle but also excite me. I am sexually inexperienced and I will not recognise the scent of arousal oozing from every pore of her body.
After a few moments I will look up at her and be aware she has seen me looking at her breasts. I will flush in the darkness, but she will simply smile again and lean forward to kiss me on the forehead. As she bends towards me her cleavage will be revealed, and I will look down the front of her slip taking in the swell of her breasts. She will stay that way, her lips on my brow, for an unexpectedly long time, giving me the opportunity to examine the shape and curve of her bosom. I will note the goose bumps on her skin and wonder if she's cold, and even be conscious for a brief moment of how sexy such tiny indentations are in the smoothness of her breasts.
Then she will lean back and begin to tell me how unhappy and lonely she is now that father is away. She will take my hand and squeeze it and say she is glad I am still there. As she speaks one of the straps of her slip will slide off her left shoulder revealing her bra and the top of her breasts, but she will leave it be unattended.
After a moment she will release my hand down on to her thigh and for the first time I will feel the erotic softness of her slip. My hand will tingle and fizz, not just from the slip, but also because underneath I can feel her suspender clip and the thicker material of her stocking top. Her hand will hover for a moment and then descend softly on to my lap, directly above my hard penis. Her fingers will twitch as if they have received a slight shock.
As a virginal boy who knows nothing of women, I will be embarrassed and restless at her touch, and try to wriggle my body away from her hand. She will appear not to notice, but her eyes will change slightly. I will think I've made her uncomfortable. I will have no concept her reaction might be one of disappointment.
Then she will tell me how much she loves me and press herself against me. My hands will slide across her slip and around behind her back. I will be trembling, partly because of the silken softness of her slip, partly because my hands feel the catch of her bra, and partly for reasons I will not understand until many years later. As she holds me I will feel a sudden overwhelming urge to crush her to me and tell her how much I love her too. I will want to run my hands freely and passionately over her slip.
For a barely conscious moment I actually want her, want her as a woman, but it will scare me deeply, so instead my hands will fall lifelessly down on the bed, and I will merely wait patient and unmoving as she holds me. I will have no understanding she might want me.
As she pulls back she will look deep into my eyes as if searching for something.
"I love you so much," she will say. "I would do anything for you... anything."
I will be unsure what she means or what to say in reply, but as she sits there staring at me with an odd look on her face I will distinctly feel her fingers close around my hard penis. Embarrassed and frightened, I will look down and away, and again try to shift position. As if in response she will move her hand away and sit upright. She will look at me again, but now her eyes will be empty.
Finally she lean will forward and kiss my cheek, and then with a sigh stand up and make to leave the room. Although I will feel a strange sense of relief as she leaves, the rustle of her slip as she straightens, the purr of her stockings as her legs touch together, the clipping sound of her high heels on my bedroom floor, and the fading sight of her bra and breasts partly revealed by the hanging shoulder of the slip, will all live in my dreams for years untold.
After she's gone I will slide back down in the bed and my hand will encompass my penis. As I gently rub it I will try to understand why I feel so aroused. Eventually however I will reject all I have felt, and tell myself over and over again how dirty and evil I am to have allowed myself to react in such a way. Wanting your own Mother is the worse thing any boy could ever do. Eventually I will repress altogether the memory of tonight, and it will resurface only many years later.
Now, on my return to this time, I wait for my Mother to come once again to my bedroom door. As I lie in my bed I think about the incredible fact I have travelled back into my own past. Far off in the future I am a sad old man, living alone in my flat and still masturbating to fantasies about my mother. But that will soon change I tell myself, although how it will change I have no idea.
II
Two things have brought me to this point. One is an unhealthy obsession with my mother which I believe has damaged me in some way, and the other is my scientific interests which led me to make time travel possible.
After I'd left home I had gone to university, but for some reason was unable to make relationships with girls. Whenever I was near a girl in anything other than a controlled environment I became anxious and sought to avoid intimate contact. This made me a very good student. I never went to raves or parties, took drugs or got distracted from my studies. As a result I got a good degree and eventually became a science teacher at a secondary school.
As the years rolled by my problem with women retreated somewhat, I had flings and one-night stands, but I was never able to make a full proper relationship. I found it hard to be myself, my real self, with a woman, I was always hiding some part of me away and pretending to be something I'm not. For a while I speculated I was gay, but as my fantasies were never about men I dismissed the idea. Whatever the cause, my inability to get close to a women meant I never married or had a family.
There was one woman I thought I loved. Her name was Elizabeth and she was a work colleague. She was kind and thoughtful person but also a strong and sophisticated woman. I worked with her for several years and found myself developing feelings. I even persuaded myself that she had feelings for me too. But I could never bring myself to reveal how I felt, for whenever she came physically near my anxiety would overwhelm me and I'd have to run away. Eventually she left teaching. I can still remember that melancholy look she gave me as we said goodbye.
It was only many years later, after a long period of therapy, my childhood memories began to return, and I started to understand my problem had something to do with my relationship with my mother. In rejecting and fearing my feelings for her, I was told by my therapist, I rejected and feared all women. Indeed he implied that by coming into my room that night the way she had, my Mother set up a chain of events which had crippled my ability to relate to other women. Because I had instinctively labelled my desire for her as dangerous, any situation which might arouse any sexual desire was also dangerous.
But when I asked him what would have happened if I'd actually responded to her advances he was reticent, insisting incest was always a bad thing and I should learn to forget and move on. However despite my long period in therapy nothing really changed. I suppose understanding does not always make things different ... and having a map is not the same as walking the road. So I continued to live alone, and turned to my hobbies and interests instead.
The notion of time travel appealed to me (as it does to most people). That said, I'd always believed it impossible in the present day. As every student of physics understands, whilst Einstein believed time-travel was possible in theory, it was unattainable in practice. This is because of the curious relationship between time and space. Put simply an increase in speed slows time, so in order to achieve any form of genuine time-travel one would need to travel extremely fast... at the speed of light in fact. However, increasing the speed of an object also increases its mass, and the greater the mass the more energy required to increase speed further. The problem is as one approaches the speed of light mass becomes infinite and thus one would need an infinite amount of energy to actually achieve time-travel. So although I had fantasised about travelling back in time, it was always just one of those day-dreams you have just as you're falling off to sleep.
But then one day things changed. I found an old book in a garage sale. The author claimed he had experienced time-travel, albeit only for a few brief moments. His solution to Einstein's dilemma was actually quite simple. In order to travel in time one has to do it without involving mass. In other words only something that has no physical presence can travel in time. Thus although one cannot send an object or a person through time one could send something immaterial... like human consciousness. He described a series of mental exercises which he claimed would result in an individual being able to 'jump' back to a previous time in their own existence. More and more this idea excited me, and I began a process of research and training which I hoped one day this would allow me to go back and change my life.
The training involved conditioning the mind to conjure and maintain clear and realistic images. The process is called 'visualisation', and I suppose the closest analogy would be to describe it as learning how to dream while you are still awake. Theoretically the time-shift occurs when you can clearly visualise a moment in your past. It has be strong and real in your mind, as if you were really there... and then suddenly you are. After many years of work, and innumerable amounts of trial and error, I believed I had learned how to make it happen.
But the ability to move one's consciousness in time presents its own problems, for time-travel is blighted with an inherent paradox. Basically anything you change in the past affects the present. So, for example, if something that happened in the past was your motivation to go back in time, then going back in time and changing the past would remove the motivation... and therefore you wouldn't need to go back in the first place. This would ultimately lead to an infinite regress. In other words if
