5.

Indoors, in by the ticket office, John sits on a bench with a briefcase with which he finally has possession of and access to. Disconcerting how his hand just phased right through the handle the time he tried to grab it once before. Just the touch of it now makes things a little more ... normal.

As well as touching the briefcase physically, along with feeling its importance, and being led to believe it may or will provide seriously needed answers, he opens it with his anticipation level being at a high. If there are answers in this briefcase then he must use them, if there are no answers ... what then? Time to get to it, sort this mess out and set things towards normality if that is at all possible.

Deep breaths, three of them, then the popping of the locks and an opening occurs. What he sees is something John most definitely had not expected to see. No folders or files, or anything paper related at least, there is however an electrical tablet, something which also definitely does not belong to this time period.

He looks around; there is no one close to his position, no one within the station area except for a conductor who is beyond a glass panel in an office of his own beyond a position where he could pay any attention at all to John. So, feeling secure, or as secure as he is ever likely to be in the here and now, he attempts to power on that tablet and on it comes without any problem, no problem that is until he sees that the tablet requires a password to gain access to its contents.

'Ah hell' he speaks aloud to himself.

He moves into a slump and puts his right hand to his forehead. What the hell is he to do now? The station conductor has moved to look through his hatch window having heard words being spoken. Seeing a man slumped in despair has him throw a shrug and move back to attend to something else in his office. Then as if divine inspiration hits or something else entirely, John removes his hand from his forehead and stares at the wall only a few feet away and directly in front of him.

On that wall, there is a poster for something which also very much appears to be out of time, displaced to an era where it should not exist. The poster appears to be science fiction in nature with real world applications. It shows the image of a person donning a metallic outfit and being in a position of floating in outer space while reaching out and taking in the awe and beauty of planet Earth with one star in particular shining bright next to and beyond this world of ours.

The poster comes with the tagline Battle Tech Battle Suit, the world is in reach. This triggers something within John, a memory perhaps, a boy wearing something similar to what is worn in the poster except what the boy has is a toy version and he is playing within this room as if he were a superhero.

The boy is perhaps seven or eight years old, and he is oh so familiar, a son perhaps? Georgie, is this the boy's name? John feels as if it is, so he enters the name Georgie into the tablet and indeed it gives him access to what is on that tablet. There are three files showing on the home screen, three video files, all labelled either one, two or three.

There are ear buds within the briefcase, so he takes them and puts them on then clicks the video labelled one. It is forty-three seconds long and it is of the boy playing with a model railway set and speaking words such as 'look daddy' and 'choo-choo'. Caught completely off-guard, John reaches for the screen with his right hand and speaks the child's name 'Georgie'.

Despair takes a hold of him and there is a need to watch that video again so watch it again he does. Once it is done, he puts the tablet down to his side to allow himself a moment to deal with what he just seen. Georgie is not all so unlike Christopher, the boy who fell onto the tracks and as sure a fact it was that Christopher would have died if John had not intervened, the knowledge returns that Georgie did die.

John was able to save Christopher at the cost of being hit by the train, with Georgie, there was nothing John could do.

A carnival ride accident, an overused under maintained ride coming apart and injuring a dozen people, five adults and seven children with one fatality. John remembers it completely now, he remembers it clearly, how could he have forgotten? The worst moment of his life compounded in the moment he held his son's lifeless body.

He met his wife at the hospital, and she collapsed into his arms. They had their final moment with their son at the hospital. His wife, as fate or time or whatever else would have it, is not unlike the lady he followed onto the train, the Miss Adams who turned away from a Mister Duncan.

What is this? What is happening? John's wife had left him only eight months after the loss of their son. Is there some sort of parallel here? If John created time travel to save his son, then why is he here at this train station so very many years before his son died?

Someone else got to travel first, wasn't that what he was told? There must be some sort of sense in all this, some sort of connection. However, his own mind has been affected there still is that haze, he hasn't got everything back, not yet at least maybe he won't ever fully get it back. Time to look at the second of those three videos, maybe whatever else is to be see will trigger something else, some other kind of memory.

This second video file, it has a length of ninety-three seconds. It is of a small metallic cylindrical room and the angle of recording is from above viewing down and across. There is one person in this room, a man; it is John himself working at controls possibly within the room he was informed about, the room he was supposedly in when an incursion apparently hit.

With seconds to go on this file, a shadow can be seen as if someone is about to make an entrance into this laboratory room but before anyone can be seen walking into this room, the file comes to an end. Right, this doesn't really do all so much, it could confirm some of what John has been told though it could also throw a lot of things up into the air.

If what has been offered has thrown things up into the air, then the third video really blows it all apart. It is a video of a man who is about to address John as he still sits alone in the ticket office at the train station of his.

'John, do you recognize me' speaks the man of the third video rhetorically. 'Take your time, there is no rush. You can pause and or replay this file as much as you like ...'

'Holy hell ...' John says to himself.

The man in this video was the man who Miss Adam's met with on the train she had got onto. No, it is, he is more than that ... he is or at least was the attending physician at the hospital Georgie had been taken to. No ... John cannot accept this; this is not right.

'You do recognize me, don't you?'

'I do' John says in essence only responding to himself.

'What I am about to tell you is very important. You must listen to me very carefully. I need you to work with Doctor Evans. He only wants to help you. Your wife is worried about you and will support you through your recovery ...'

Recovery ... what recovery?

'The loss, your loss ... it is never easy for a parent to lose a child ... I am going to be blunt here. Look John, there is no train station. There is no platform and there is no ticket office. No train is coming; it is not five minutes away. You did not invent time travel and neither did anyone else. You are at the Carmichael Center of Mental Health and Wellbeing ...'

'I'm what? ...' John asks himself.

'... The sooner you accept this, the better. I wish you well John, God speed.'

Video three ends right there.