I stood alone in the dead spot on the cliff top and listened to the sea. There were three hours and fifty-two minutes until I would walk into the Riverside Café in West Bay, sit down and order the sea bass. I didn’t feel particularly hungry but I would finish the meal and compliment the staff.

I wondered briefly where my Guard would pick me up. No doubt at this very moment they would be scouring the country in a four hour radius of the Riverside, checking pubs, woods, fields. They would not find me, and they knew this, but they had to try.

On the beach below a couple walked their dog and I felt the usual stab of intense envy. They may have no idea what they would do for the rest of the day, where or what they would eat, whether they would enjoy the meal or find the steak overcooked and the vegetables limp.

I recalled an old joke that the British Royal family believed the entire world smelled of fresh paint. I believed the entire world consisted of perfectly cooked meals, faultless hotels and attentive shop assistants.

In two months time, just shy of my thirty-fifth birthday, I would change the world forever. From my small laboratory on the grounds of the Rutherford-Appleton labs near Oxford I would produce a safe, functional time machine and there was only one small problem: I had no idea how.

Upon my inevitable success the project would instantly be absorbed by the Government and in a fury of typical paranoia it would be decided that every effort must be made to avoid any Grandfather paradox events. Under no circumstances must there be anything that prevented my invention; no accidents, no illnesses, no assassinations. From the moment of my birth I would be assigned a Guard of elite men and women that would follow my every move, check and secure everywhere I went, ensuring that in thirty-five years I would tighten the final theoretical nut and make a discreet phone call to my boss. Despite all the arguments that by its very nature, a Grandfather paradox situation would still in all likelihood end in the invention of the machine, I could not escape the Guard. Except in dead spots.

Throughout my documented life there are a regrettably few points where there is no record of my movements. They vary in time from minutes to several hours and all attempts to penetrate them have failed. As I watched gulls wheel and dive over my head I enjoyed the remaining three hours and – forty three – minutes of one of the longest and the last dead spot before my invention.

The dead spots infuriated the Guard. After all, they had a time machine and full authority to use reverse travel whenever necessary where it concerned my whereabouts (or whenabouts as some tiresomely insist on saying). If my tail car would get a puncture, on that day there would be two. If I snuck out of a hotel bathroom window and shinned down the drainpipe, at the bottom would be a figure in the shadows (and probably a pile of soft cardboard boxes, just in case). Yet on occasions fate would give me a break, the plans would go awry and I would be free.

I wasn’t supposed to know my life of course. No-one but the senior members of the Department of Temporal Affairs were supposed to know the whole story but there were leaks, then floods of spilled information. It wasn’t hard to search the Net and find a minute-by-minute account of when and where I would be. I have met many people who have asserted that my documented future is no different from a solid belief in Fate. Easy to say when you don’t know you’re going to break your leg painfully the following Thursday at half past six. There are advantages: I can recall the anticipation of a midnight skinny dip with two young Swedish au-pairs – offset only mildly by the following paragraph that revealed they were more interested in each other than in me. I knew when and where I would meet interesting people, have fun evenings, kiss beautiful girls, but it was always unreal. I had no doubt that the Guard had ensured events would go as planned and that does kind of take the spontaneity out of situations.

Only in the dead spots was I really free. I could if I felt so inclined, throw myself from this cliff and plunge to a rocky death. If I met a young woman up here and was able to conduct an entire relationship in the scant space of three hours then I could and no one would ever know. However, the woman in question would never tell anyone about me and never mention meeting me, one of the most famous inventors in history, so the encounter would have to be very brief and entirely unmemorable.

The problem was the dead spots were also the only place I could fulfil my future.

I had (have?) done everything according to plan, I went to the schools I should have gone (did go?) to, got the grades I should have got, went to the university of my choice, such as it was, and did the PhD studies in accordance with the plan. I still have no idea how to make a time machine.

I know how it works of course. Everyone with any science background does – the plans are available in various wonderful forms all over the Net and the machines exist to be looked at, prodded and taken apart but that’s not good enough. I need to invent the time machine and I have no idea how to do it.

It’d be easier with something like the light bulb. If I knew I was going to invent the bulb it wouldn’t be too hard to make up some stories of me fiddling with a circuit, seeing it blow out and the wire glowing brightly for a fraction of a second. I could then realistically say that it occurred to me that if I could make that glow last I could use it as a light source. So far so good. Then following months, maybe years of experiments involving weirdly blown glass, a selection of odd filament materials and various vacuum pumps I’d get something workable. But this wasn’t a light bulb, it was a machine capable of travelling through time and I needed to present a clear path to my invention.

I have studied the workings of the machine all of my adult life and can hold my own in weird cocktail parties where everyone struggles with grammatical tenses. I could probably build one blindfold, except that I’d drop a lot of the bits. It doesn’t matter; in three months time I still need to be able to present a complete history of my invention. A history that can be followed by schoolchildren and scholars. Experiments that can be recreated and modified, a believable path to the invention. No matter how I try I simply cannot create enough work and experiment to stand up to the scrutiny of the ages. I can’t claim to have been chatting Quantum theory in the pub with a mate, sketching the plans on the back of a fag packet after the third pint of Stella. Hundreds, thousands of people would recreate my experiments, following the path I took in the same way that children perform simple physics and chemistry experiments. Unless my research held water I’d be exposed as a fraud within months.

This wasn’t the first time I’d had these thoughts. I just didn’t like the logical conclusion to which they would lead.

I had stolen the time machine.

There was only one possible solution. I was, undoubtedly, recorded in future history as the inventor of the time machine. Everything else about my life was correct and I have seen a million photographs and a thousand hours of video footage with me smiling next to the machine, presidents and actors. I was, undoubtedly, completely unprepared to create this device and had a deep conviction that the remaining three months wasn’t really enough time to pull my socks up and get down to it.

The time machine wasn’t my invention.

Someone else had done all the research, put all the time into the experiments, spent the long hours gazing into space and at some point I had simply taken that work and claimed it as my own. Since my entire life, every meeting, every conference, every phone call or video message is mapped from birth to the creation of the machine this must happen in a dead spot. And this is the last one. It must happen here, on this cliff top.

I scanned around for likely looking geniuses and saw only the couple on the beach whose dog seemed intent on digging sand for Britain and throwing it out onto their legs.

Two hours fifty seven minutes. Minus at least forty minutes to walk from here to the Riverside, meet someone, maybe fifteen minutes to say “Hello. My, are they time machine plans under your arm? Let’s have a look!” and we were down to two hours or so. Then I’d have to factor in disposing of the body.

I had considered any number of scenarios that might explain the inventor of such an earth-shattering discovery willingly handing over the research – and the discovery itself – to an unknown. None of them were in the least bit probable. The most likely case was that I would meet the person in question, kill them and dispose of the body. If this were true I would be fortunate enough that the body was never found and the crime never discovered. Such would be the fickles of fate.

It occurred to me then that the cliffs above the bay were treacherous and the fall deadly. Perhaps it was an accident, witnessed by the horrified sand covered couple and their dog.

No. There would be research in his labs, friends and colleagues that knew what he was working on.

But would there be such things?

I was the uncontested champion of temporal movement, there had been – would never be – any claims of theft or plagiarism. If the real creator died in a tragic accident, the fates might equally conspire such that his research and death were not investigated.

I shuddered. Was this how murderers planned and justified their actions? If this latest script was the correct plan for events in the next two hours was it fate or planning on my part? If a latter day Einstein took a stroll along the cliff top and I nudged him in the right direction was that fate or premeditation?

You can imagine how many such lines of thought I had suffered in the past few years.

The wind whipped up off the beach and I shivered. Whatever was going to happen would have to happen soon and I decided it was too cold for it to happen here. Turning away from the view out to sea I began to pick my way down to the beach itself; I could see that the car park contained several cars, perhaps one of them held the answer.

My mental image of a contemplative stroll along the shore was destroyed as soon as I reached the beach, turned graceless by the sand. I began to slog towards the line of surf, hoping the wet sand would be kinder to me, albeit spotted with holes dug by the frantic dog. As I came further along the beach I noticed an old man sitting among the rocks by the base of the cliff, his face hidden by a thick scarf, the hood of his waterproof raised against the wind and the spray it carried. As I looked towards him, he raised a flask in my direction, motioning with the cup-lid that I should join him. I stopped for a moment, my stomach sinking and knotting simultaneously, then I danced clear of a wave and began to make my way up the beach towards him.

We sat without speaking for a minute or two and I sipped at the coffee from a spare plastic cup he had offered. I knew that this was the moment but was reluctant to continue whatever process this meeting had started. I had begun today with a sense of anticipation and dread but had no desire to end it in guilt.

‘Did you come to meet me then?’ I said, not knowing what else to say.

‘Of course. You were expecting me, I believe.’ He pulled the scarf away from his face and fussily tucked it into the top of the jacket.

‘I was expecting somebody. I didn’t really think it would be me.’ It was impossible to judge how old this later version of myself was. His hair was mostly hidden but I was already grey in spots myself and while his face was softer and clearly more experienced, there was a timelessness about it. I chuckled, thinking of how ironic this observation would seem.

‘You’re thinking about how my face looks ‘timeless’. You have no idea how many times I’ve examined the mirror looking for signs of timelessness.’

‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said, truthfully. ‘You must be here to… help with this situation but I can’t think what that help might be and…’ I paused for a moment, seeing the figures of the couple and the dog reappear in the distance, ‘I’m a little scared by it.’

‘I’m here to help in the only way I can. By giving you what we need.’

‘The machine? How?’

The man dug in the pocket of his jacket and produced a small brown envelope, passing it to me. I could feel something heavy slide into one corner.

‘In there you’ll find a map, some directions and a set of keys. Tuck it away for now and examine them tonight. In a week or so there is another short dead spot that’ll leave you in a convenient position. Use that time to get there, you’ll be picked up again when you leave and that’ll establish the earliest provenance.’

‘Provenance for what?’

‘For your other lab of course. The one where you conducted all the real research in secret.’

I watched the couple and their dog moving slowly towards us along the shore. I – we – would have to be gone before they came close enough to remember the two men on the beach and time was running out.

‘And I take it that I’ll find everything I need there.’

‘Of course. Prototypes, experimental rigs, notes, files, even some video footage of early tests. It’s really a very impressive piece of work. I understand we employed some of the finest set dressers in the UK film industry, thinking they were working on a biopic.’

‘But…’ I hesitated, not wishing to seem temporarly unaware to my older self, ‘there are no records of this other lab in my future histories. Surely it would be a major part of the discovery.’

The man smiled, emptying his cup onto the rocks and screwing the cap onto the flask. ‘You’re thinking a little too literally – and linearly – for a man in your position. I think you’ll find that everything has a way of sorting itself out.’ He struggled briefly to push the flask down into the rucksack at his feet then straightened and eased himself to his feet. ‘Once you’re seen leaving the premises there will be frantic investigations by the Guard. They will discover your carefully hidden identity, records of the lease you took on the premises some years ago, tax records filed in the name of fictitious companies and a wealth of other secrets they’ll be quite pleased to unravel. There are enquiries within the Guard of course. I believe a couple of senior investigators get rapped on the knuckles.’

I frowned. This did not fit with my understanding of my life, predetermined and set. ‘But if this wasn’t part of my recorded history then does that mean other things could change?’

The man heaved the rucksack onto one shoulder and walked several paces towards the car park. ‘All things change, and that includes the future.’ He said, as he continued walking away.

I jumped down from the rocks, glancing over my shoulder at the couple who were now only a few hundred yards away. ‘But where does it come from? If you give me the plans and you are me…?’ I trailed off as he stopped and turned towards me.

‘I asked the same question myself when I met the old man on the beach, and this is the answer he gave me.’ He turned away again, pulling the scarf from his jacket and wrapping it around his face.

After a few moments, I followed his footmarks slowly up the sand, tucking the envelope into my pocket, thinking of sea bass, or possibly plaice.