The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  “Really? Are you sure? Can I help?” I knew I should offer, even though I wanted desperately for her to say no.

  “It’s going to be fine. In the immortal words of Lynn Margulis, ‘We are the great meteorite!’” Lizzy glanced at me, smirked, and started the car. I cracked a smile for the first time in what felt like a thousand years. Lizzy and I were obsessed with that PBS series Microcosmos in middle school, watching it over and over. We loved when the famous evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis got all philosophical about how humans transform global ecosystems, her voice lowering to a portentous whisper: We are the great meteorite.

  Thinking about Microcosmos made everything feel normal again. When we got to the curb next to my house, I opened the front door quietly and crept upstairs to take a shower. It’s exactly what I would have done if I’d been coming back from the movies.

  Looking at my fluffy yellow towel through the tropical flowers on my shower curtain, I tried to convince myself that the whole night had been a hallucination. The hot water was washing everything away: blood, mud, smells, weapons, words. Everything except Glorious Garcia, singing. Maybe if I thought about Grape Ape hard enough, the sound of her voice would replace the images encoded by every memory-clogged cell in my brain.

  My parents remained asleep down the hall, and I tingled with relief. Setting down my damp toothbrush, I stared at my face in the steamy mirror. An unremarkable white girl looked back: hazel eyes, skin heat-blotched red from the shower, shoulder-length brown hair that my mother called “dirty blond.” Did I look like a murderer? I peered more closely, relaxing the muscles of my jaw and lips. I knew from years of practice how to look innocent when I was guilty. Shrugging at my serene expression, I combed my hair and thought about those stupid, frantic seconds when I demanded that we go to the police. High on weed and horror, I’d almost forgotten that there was something more awful than being arrested for murder. It was what my father would do if he found out I’d broken the rules.

  THREE

  TESS

  Flin Flon, Manitoba-Saskatchewan border (1992 C.E.) … Los Angeles, Alta California (2022 C.E.)

  I stood inside a vast hangar, ceiling so high that it sometimes generated its own puffs of cloud and misty rain. The floor was pure Canadian shield bedrock, a piebald of red and gray veined with white, covered in a few patches of hardscrabble lichen. Here, the Earth’s crust had endured virtually unchanged for over 3 billion years, studded with metal deposits and ambiguous Cambrian fossils. The five known Machines had all been found in places like this, their control interfaces embedded in rock that originated before life evolved on land.

  Facing me was a row of refrigerator-sized server racks connected by fat wires to bulky CRT monitors on desks, cameras on metal stalks, and something that looked like the severed head of a traffic light whose color signals had been replaced with atmospheric sensors. Travelers in the process of leaving or arriving lined up outside the processing booth on the opposite side of the hangar, their voices nearly indistinguishable from the nearby hum of the servers. A professor wandered past the equipment, trailed by a clot of excited students and postdocs. They had come to watch the Machine startup sequence.

  A couple of techs typed on rugged keyboards, booting up the six tappers arranged in a circle around me. Half a billion years ago, these Machines had a sophisticated command interface made from what geoscientists called the ring and the canopy, but now all that was left was the rocky floor. The tappers, invented in the nineteenth century and refined in decades since, were crude, limited versions of what those old interfaces must have been. They looked like low steel tables punctuated by dozens of pistons, now moving up and down in a test pattern. Essentially the tapper was a reconfigurable set of padded hammers—much like those inside a piano—that would bang out a pattern on the rock. That pattern programmed the interface, and the interface would open a stable wormhole between the present and the traveler’s chosen destination in the past. With these humble devices, we manipulated the fabric of the cosmos.

  Geoscientists barely understood the Machines better than the first humans to describe them in writing thousands of years ago. Sure, we could control the exit date more precisely than our Bronze Age ancestors. Our tappers could produce complex rhythms that were accurate to the microsecond. So that was progress. We knew each Machine consisted of an interface within the rock, though so far our instruments could not detect anything in the rock other than the expected elements. Then there was a wormhole that came from … somewhere. Sadly, our biggest breakthrough was probably that we understood the Machines’ behavior in the context of geology, rather than magic. Even after thousands of years of using them, we still didn’t know much about how they worked, let alone why.

  “Ready when you are.” The tech with red hair and flushed cheeks looked up at me and made a shooing gesture.

  I made sure I was at the exact center of the tapper circle, knelt, and put my fists against the rock. There was the thrum of the hammers, their rhythms vibrating my whole body until I couldn’t tell where my skin ended and the Earth began. That’s when the rock softened to liquid. A wet-but-not-wet fluid rose past my hands, then waist, blurring the warehouse walls as it crept past my eyes, enveloping me in a shimmering cylindrical column. It took me a second to adjust to the familiar, uncanny sensation of breathing in water.

  Then I sank into the wormhole.

  Textbooks say it’s like submerging yourself in a warm bath, but that’s only one sensation. There are many textures as you slide between nanoseconds: fine dust, cool gas, feathery ash. They’re probably all illusions created by the brain in the absence of perception. Or maybe they’re real, for some value of “reality.” There’s a lot of ambiguity in the geosciences. Sometimes people enter the wormhole and never return. We’re left to speculate about whether they stayed deep in the past or were erased in transit. Floating toward my possible death, I always got slightly superstitious. So I had a ritual. I tried to focus on the molecular composition of my thoughts. As long as that skein of sugars, tissues, and electrons functioned, I was still myself. Chemicals pulsed through my brain and I waited.

  After minutes or millennia, there was a hazy light ahead, like fire through warped glass. Then solid ground knit itself together beneath me, the liquid drained away, and I could breathe air again. I was in the same position, kneeling, dry except for the place where my knuckles and knees met the salty puddle left by a mostly incomprehensible doorway into spacetime.

  The techs in 2022 didn’t look much different from the ones I’d left behind in 1992. Same fieldwork chic: heavy boots, easy-wash pants, and padded canvas jackets with the colorful Flin Flon Time Travel Facility logo embroidered over the right breast. Everyone wore toques. It could get chilly up here, even in summer.

  The far end of the hangar was occupied by the same processing office full of battered metal furniture. Inside, a Canadian government official was eating bannock and reading a paperback with swords on the cover. Outside was a line of about fifteen people, waiting for her to check them in or out of the present. I tried to figure out if any of them had come down from the future. Nobody stuck out as particularly anachronistic, and I decided we were all probably in our own present. So far, geologists had only figured out how to make the Machines send us to the past, and it always seemed like most of the traffic here consisted of people going back into history or returning from it.

  Once the union-mandated lunch break ended, our queue moved pretty fast. The official looked up when I opened the door. “Identification?”

  I raised my shirt to show the identity tattoo, a unique design created by algorithm and drawn partly with fluorescent ink as a half-hearted security measure. The university paid to have it needled into the skin of my left side before I traveled for the first time. Beneath a maze of tangled lines and dots was my date of birth: 1974 C.E. Most people looked exclusively at the date, especially in times before the 1930s. Sure, magistrates and monks in the 400s had heard about our computer-generated c
odes, but they didn’t have a way to read them. Until somebody figured out how to transport objects through time, or persuaded the masses of another era to build anachronisms at great expense, people were pretty much stuck with the tech of their age.

  She swiped a bulky handheld reader over my tattoo, and peered at her monitor. “What was your business in 1992?”

  “I’m a geoscientist from UCLA, doing some fieldwork for the Applied Cultural Geology Lab. I was at a concert.”

  “What kind of concert?”

  “A rock concert, in California. Do you know the band Grape Ape?”

  The fan on her computer whined as she typed. “Nope. Was that one of those grunge bands?”

  I flashed back to what “grunge” had meant to me when I lived through 1992 for the first time. “No. They’re something different.”

  She didn’t bother to ask anything else. I’d been using this Machine for most of my academic career, and there was a long digital record of my comings and goings. No need for further investigation.

  Outside the damp hangar, I took a walk through the sprawling Flin Flon Time Travel campus. The air smelled faintly of mown grass, and people were out having lunch at picnic tables dotting the open plazas between buildings that hugged the northern edge of Ross Lake. The campus was deceptively peaceful. All those buildings were teeming with bureaucrats, operatives from vaguely menacing state agencies, travel reps for every possible industry, and quite a few scientific labs.

  I caught a shuttle to the airport, rolling past strip malls, housing tracts, and a cavernous Canadian Tire. The city had changed a lot since the late nineteenth century, where I did most of my observation. Back then, Flin Flon was nothing more than a few cuts in the ground surrounded by tents and shacks, a podunk mining town named after an interdimensional traveler from a pulp novel. When prospectors discovered the world’s fifth known Machine, all that changed. Flin Flon was hardly a megacity, but now it was a thriving urban hub on the border between northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, supporting a steady stream of visitors whose jobs touched the timeline.

  Many of those visitors were a captive audience, waiting out their 1,669 days to qualify for travel. All five Machines had limitations, but the hardest to surmount was what travelers called the Long Four Years. Wormholes only opened for people who remained within twenty kilometers of a Machine for at least 1,680 days. The number seemed arbitrary until geologists realized that it was roughly the length of four years during the Cambrian period, half a billion years ago, when the Earth was spinning faster. Cambrian days were roughly three hours shorter than ours, meaning the years were about 417 days long. Any device designed to measure years using a set number of day-night cycles, rather than revolutions around the sun, would wind up with longer and longer “years” as the eons passed.

  I spent the Long Four Years working in a small Flin Flon lab surrounded by trees, returning home each night to a nougat-colored block of subsidized student housing on the Saskatchewan side of town. Through my dirty double-paned windows, I could see a golf course and condo complex for rich people with time to squander on a chance at temporal tourism. But that was rare. Most people in Flin Flon were there for work or professional training. All of us doing the Four Long Years were hoping it would pay off in a travel certification from the Chronology Academy.

  After the revisionist assassinations during World War I, the five nations with Machines—India, Jordan, Australia, Canada, and Mali—founded the Chronology Academy, which imposed international law on all five travel complexes. Other member nations created additional rules to govern travelers, but Canada and the U.S. went strictly by Chronology Academy regulations. Which made things easy for me, but sticky for travelers from places that had stricter laws—or looser ones.

  We rolled up to the airport terminal, a long brick building with four gates that mostly serviced puddle jumpers to Winnipeg and Saskatoon. I had a couple hours to kill before a tiring series of flights and layovers, so I poked idly through my e-mail and news alerts. A story was bubbling up from the conspiracy networks about how a traveler from the 2020s had caused climate change by going back in time and teaching people to use fossil fuels. I rolled my eyes. If only it were that simple.

  As travelers, we could observe, maybe spy, and sometimes save a life. But centuries of scientific inquiry suggested that it was extremely difficult for one person to alter the timeline in all but the most superficial ways. You couldn’t cause the world to industrialize before the eighteenth century, nor could you change the fate of nations by assassinating a famous leader. After killing the nineteenth-century tyrant Emmanuel, travelers were frustrated to find that Napoleon laid waste to Europe instead. It was the same discovery that travelers from the Tang Dynasty had made centuries before. There was no way to stop the Sogdian warlord An Lushan’s rebellion. Slaying one Sogdian warlord simply spawned another who rose against the emperor. An Lushan was the third one to rise; his sack of the legendary city of Chang’an could not be edited from the timeline.

  Geoscientists of the early twenty-first century eventually settled on the theory that small things change but big things don’t. Trying to cause a significant divergence in the timeline was simply bad science, a honeypot for fools and failing tyrants. It was also against Chronology Academy regulations.

  The Daughters of Harriet had a different theory. Call it a hypothesis if you must. Geologists agreed that the timeline was constantly in flux. Travelers exposed to edits returned with memories of lost histories, previous versions of the timeline they had witnessed. Agents and corporate operatives occasionally alluded to covert missions to shift the balance of power. Ancient scrolls contained references to travelers offering magical revelations that changed people’s fates. It seemed obvious to the Daughters that we lived in a heavily edited timeline, and that small changes could add up to something bigger.

  One did not admit that at academic conferences, however, so we had a cover story. The Daughters of Harriet had an official name, the Applied Cultural Geology Group, with the mandate to observe major social transformations as they happened in the past. We’d been recognized as a legitimate scholarly organization by the American Geophysical Union, which made it easier to apply for grants and schedule trips on the Machines. Every month we had a research meeting at my best friend Anita’s house in Brentwood, close to the UCLA campus where we worked. There, we did a lot more than share discoveries and scotch. We made plans to edit history.

  * * *

  Los Angeles glowed with smoky orange light as we touched down. Fire season had come early this year, and it was yet another reminder that I was back home in 2022, when industrialization meant dystopia rather than progress. I caught a rideshare to Anita’s place and felt the familiar dislocation of homecoming as we rolled past bungalows with high-performance windows and fake lawns. After years spent in the past, it was hard to feel like the present was anything more than ephemeral. Everywhere I looked, I saw previous versions of the city: these streets were once ruled by horse-drawn wagons, then cable cars, then finned Chevy convertibles full of kids in zoot suits inching past giant movie theater marquees. Today we drove through merely one version of Los Angeles, balanced in a precarious moment, and always on the brink of disappearing.

  When I arrived, Anita was putting out cheese and crackers, her flip-flops smacking the tile floor as she wandered between kitchen and living room. Snowy dreads fell in an elegant cascade around her dark, angular face. Hugging her, I felt something solid for the first time since returning to my present.

  “How was your trip?”

  I dumped my backpack on the sofa and flopped next to it. “Tiring. Weird.”

  Anita raised an eyebrow and put out a bottle of Balvenie. After the living room had filled with a dozen people, snacking and chatting, Anita called the meeting to order.

  We always started by going around the circle, describing lost histories we remembered. There were many events that existed only in our memories because we’d been present for the edits. We
recited these stories partly as a ritual, and partly to update each other on current research projects.

  Enid got us started. “I remember the Family Tax Reform Bill of 1988, which gave tax breaks to any family where the women could prove they had quit their jobs to become homemakers.” That was a new one for me. Enid, a Chinese American woman with salty hair cut into a dapper fade, had recently gotten back from the late eighties. There were murmurs of thanks from the group for deleting that particular gem out of our current version.

  “I remember this café chain called Farrell’s that used to have outlets all over L.A.” Shweta reported her memory with a puzzled face. “Now it’s gone. It seems like there are more Starbucks, too, but it’s hard to tell.”

  “Wait—why would a café chain disappear? Did you travel to the period when it first opened, or do something to the people who worked there?” C.L. always asked questions like that, usually while picking delicately at the sparkly designs in their latest nail art. They’d only been traveling for a few months, after working on a Ph.D. in shield rock formation. Their work focused on the physical mechanism of time travel, so they were still getting used to applied history.

  Shweta gave C.L. a tired look. Her brown eyes were sharp, but the skin around them was far more weathered than it had been last month. I realized she might have been away for years. “I was in Bermuda observing the slave trade,” she said at last. “And it was 1723 when I left.”

  “But there must be some connection.” C.L. sounded almost desperate. They wrapped a lock of hair around their fingers, and I noticed that they’d glued tiny red rhinestones to each nail.

  “There probably is, but we can’t always figure it out. That’s why we call them orthogonal deletions,” I said, shrugging. “We often see small, random changes like that and the causality is so complex that it’s impossible to say why they happened.”