Best Case: Time Travel (Prologue V)

The monitor beside his bed began beeping faster.

The voices stopped.

Shit.

"Oliver?"

***

POV: Dr Whitmore

The boy didn't respond, but Whitmore had little doubt that he was awake. His pulse had risen noticeably within seconds, and beneath his closed eyelids there was just enough movement to confirm his suspicion.

"Oliver?" he repeated calmly.

This time, the boy opened his eyes.

Considering what had happened less than an hour earlier, Whitmore had expected confusion, perhaps even another bout of panic. Instead, Oliver merely blinked against the light and looked around the room. His gaze passed over the monitor beside the bed, moved to Emily and finally settled on Whitmore. He didn't seem dazed or absent, which was encouraging.

"Hello, Oliver. I'm Dr Whitmore."

Oliver said nothing.

Whitmore gave him a few seconds before continuing. Fear and confusion were hardly unusual after a serious head injury, especially after what had happened less than an hour ago. For now, he wanted to get a better idea of Oliver's condition.

"You don't need to be afraid. I just want to see how you're doing." He paused. "Can you tell me what you remember?"

Oliver seemed to consider the question before glancing towards Emily.

"I woke up here." He paused, then added with distinctly childish annoyance, "I tried to talk to her, but she ignored me."

Emily's eyebrows rose. "I did not—"

"Emily." Whitmore stopped her before looking back at Oliver. "What happened after that?"

"I got out of bed."

"Why?"

Oliver looked at Emily again. This time, the look lasted just a fraction longer.

"I called after her and told her to wait, but she just kept going." His expression turned remarkably wounded. "So I tried to follow her. I was scared."

Emily stared at him, dumbfounded, while Oliver stared innocently back. Whitmore almost smiled. The little devil had somehow managed to turn a question about his memory into a complaint about Emily.

Time for something more direct.

"I'm going to ask you a few questions and check a couple of things. Nothing difficult. Do you know your name?"

There was a brief hesitation.

"Oliver."

"Oliver Bennett," Whitmore confirmed.

Oliver gave no visible reaction to the full name.

Whitmore continued with the examination, checking Oliver's pupils before asking him to follow his finger with his eyes. He had him move each hand separately, squeeze his fingers and then move both legs. Oliver followed the instructions without difficulty.

The basic neurological examination gave Whitmore little cause for concern. Oliver was quiet now, a marked contrast to the panic Emily had described from his first awakening, but he remained attentive and responsive throughout the examination.

Once he was satisfied with the basic examination, Whitmore moved on to orientation.

"All right. Do you know why you're here, where you are, and what today's date is?"

Oliver took a moment before answering.

"There was an accident. I don't know where I am. And it's September."

Whitmore nodded. "That's right. You were in a serious road accident. You're at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, and today is the twenty-second of September, 1994."

Oliver said nothing.

For several seconds, he simply stared at Whitmore. His fingers slowly tightened around the blanket, and the monitor beside the bed began to register the change in his heartbeat.

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Whitmore gave him a moment. "Is something wrong?"

Oliver's eyes shifted towards Emily before moving around the room once more.

"Why am I alone?"

***

POV: Oliver

An hour later, painful as it was to admit, the experiment theory was dead. Faking a hospital room was one thing. Faking everything beyond it was another. Which left, broadly speaking, two possibilities.

More importantly, he had to accept that something had happened to him that he simply couldn't explain. Magic, God, some cosmic accident, Truck-kun finally expanding his business model—whatever it was, there were clearly forces at work here that he didn't understand.

And until he did, he had to be careful.

So, best case: time travel.

It was insane, impossible and, based on everything he knew about physics, probably complete bullshit. But at least it would still be his world. His past. The rules hadn't changed; he had simply been thrown thirty-two years backwards.

And he knew this world.

Not every detail, obviously. He couldn't tell you what the FTSE had closed at on some random Tuesday in 1998, and most of the dates he'd memorised for school had disappeared from his head approximately five minutes after the exam. But some things were difficult to forget. September 11th. The financial crisis. Covid. Wars, elections, recessions, technological breakthroughs. His studies had given him a decent understanding of economics and finance, and thirty-five years of simply being alive had filled in plenty of the rest.

Then there were the companies. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix—names that meant something very different in 1994 than they would decades later. He wouldn't know exactly when to buy or sell, but he certainly knew which ones weren't going to disappear.

That alone could be worth a fortune. More importantly, he knew roughly what was coming. History had already happened once for him, and while he certainly hadn't memorised all of it, he remembered enough of the important parts to give himself one hell of an advantage.

And then there was his family.

If this really was 1994—his 1994—then they were out there somewhere. His mother. His father. Adrian, Jasmin, Lea. Younger, perhaps living completely different lives from the ones he remembered, but alive.

He could see them again.

The thought hit considerably harder than Apple stock ever could.

If this really was his past, then yes.

That was the best case.

The worst case was Isekai.

Unfortunately, that was also the possibility his brain had spent roughly fifty-five of the last sixty minutes obsessing over.

And it had not been productive.

Somewhere along the way, a vague what if this is another world? had turned into what if this is the world of Harry Potter? From there, things had gone downhill remarkably quickly. By now, his imagination had killed Harry Potter, promoted Oliver to emergency replacement protagonist and scheduled his first meeting with Voldemort for sometime after his eleventh birthday.

Apparently, his brain had decided that waking up as a four-year-old in 1994 wasn't stressful enough on its own.

The problem was that he had no way of knowing. He needed information, and as he looked down at his tiny hands, he realised that meant coming to terms with something else as well.

For the time being, at least, he was Oliver Bennett. Four years old, English, with dead parents and apparently no known relatives.

His old life hadn't suddenly become meaningless just because he was now trapped inside this body. Oliver swallowed as his thoughts inevitably returned to Bern. He didn't know what had happened after the operation. Maybe he had died. He had probably died. Maybe his family had sat in that hospital waiting for news until someone finally walked into the room and told them he wasn't coming back.

The thought hurt, and he didn't want to think about that. Not yet. He hadn't said goodbye. Not to them, not to his life, not even remotely. He had gone into an operating theatre expecting to wake up again, and if his current situation meant what he thought it meant, he never had.

For several seconds, Oliver simply stared at the blanket. There was nothing he could do about it now. If this really was the past of his own world, his family was alive somewhere—or at least the people who would one day become his family were. And if this was another world entirely, perhaps they didn't exist here at all.

Later.

Right now, he had more immediate problems.

He had overheard Whitmore and Emily talking about Social Services. No known relatives. That meant someone was going to decide what happened to him once he left the hospital, and at four years old, he wasn't exactly in a position to rent a flat and start investigating temporal anomalies. Presumably, that left some kind of children's home or a foster family.

Neither option sounded particularly appealing, but he needed somewhere to live, adults who wouldn't think he was completely insane, and access to information. For now, the safest thing he could do was behave like Oliver Bennett, cooperate with the doctors and Social Services, and avoid giving anyone a reason to look too closely at him.

Once he was out of the hospital, figuring out whether this was really his 1994 shouldn't be too difficult. Newspapers, television, sport, politics, familiar companies and names—there were thousands of things he could compare with what he remembered. If history matched, the time-travel theory would start looking considerably better.

The Harry Potter problem was more annoying.

If the magical world actually existed, it was specifically designed so that people like him never noticed it. He could hardly ask whoever ended up looking after him whether there happened to be a hidden school of witchcraft and wizardry somewhere in Scotland.

There was, however, one place he remembered: King's Cross. Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.

The Hogwarts Express left on the first of September, which would have been perfect if today weren't already the twenty-second.

Of course.

He had missed it by three weeks.

That gave him almost a year, which was probably a good thing considering he was currently four years old, in a hospital bed and didn't even know where he would be living next week. King's Cross could wait.

Until then, he would watch, listen and read. If this was his world, sooner or later he would find enough familiar pieces to prove it. And if it wasn't...

Well, he had already spent fifty-five minutes imagining that particular disaster.

Either way, one thing seemed obvious: he needed to keep his mouth shut. In a normal world, a four-year-old claiming to be a thirty-five-year-old Swiss man from 2026 would already be enough to make every adult around him extremely concerned. If this really was the worst-case scenario, he didn't even want to imagine what a secret magical government would think of a Muggle child who knew things he couldn't possibly know.

Time travel, magic and dead protagonists could wait.

For the moment, finding somewhere to live seemed slightly more important than catching the Hogwarts Express.

Prologue END