The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  “We look amazing. We are total babes,” Lizzy said in her best Valley Girl accent. We giggled before joining the clot of kids waiting to pay the bouncer. The venue was on a nondescript row of single-story family homes, slightly faded and cracked around the edges. There was no way to know what kind of backyard lurked behind these facades, but I couldn’t imagine it was very big. Two dollars and we were inside, walking down a long cement passageway that smelled faintly like beer, until we emerged into an enormous open space. Nobody in my neighborhood had a backyard like this, with a sound system on one end and a perfectly modified gazebo for selling booze on the other. A few little kids peeked out the windows of neighbors’ houses and waved. If we’d been in Irvine, somebody would have definitely called the police by now. Here, the promoters had rigged up a huge bank of lights, their whirling beams visible from the street.

  Some of the lights illuminated the stage, which was in a corner of the yard covered by a canvas shade structure. There was no formal bandstand; the musicians played on the same level as the audience, sometimes indistinguishable from it. Brat Punxxx thrashed and howled and shoved the hurtling bodies who swirled past in the mosh pit. That was the final shock for me, after the size of the yard and lack of cops. At Irvine Meadows, the mosh pit was a tiny spot near the front of the venue. Here, the mosh pit was the venue. There were chairs and spots to stand still around the edges of the action, but I could tell right away that nobody stayed there for long.

  We went to the bar to get some beer, listening to the girls behind us move fluidly between Spanish and English, talking about how the Xicanistas had started their own zine. Finally I got up the nerve to say something.

  “I’m so excited for the Xicanistas! I’ve never seen them.”

  One of the girls gave me a weird look. “Where you from?”

  Suddenly, I could hear my suburban white girl accent clearly. I’d come to this backyard party in East L.A. from my middle-class Jewish family in our freshly painted neighborhood and I felt like an interloper.

  Lizzy jumped in quickly with a vague answer. “Down south?”

  “Where … like Santa Ana? Long Beach?”

  I didn’t see the point in lying. “Irvine.”

  Now all three of the girls were looking at us dubiously. “Irvine? You got punk rockers down there?”

  “Some. Not much. We came because we love Grape Ape. I have all their EPs.” I sounded so stupid. I thought about my dad scoffing at the goyim and wondered if I was like that to these girls, right now. Wasn’t gringo another way of saying goy?

  Then one of the girls cracked a smile. “My cousin lives in Irvine. He says it’s totally dead down there.” Her eyeliner was as thick as Lizzy’s.

  “It’s the worst.” I shook my head.

  Another girl threaded thumbs through the belt loops on her jeans. “What did you think of ‘See the Bitches’?” She was talking about the newest Grape Ape song, which was only available on a compilation from this tiny riot grrl label called Fuck Your Diet.

  “I love that song.” It was true. I had listened to it over and over again, rewinding the tape so much on my Walkman that I worried it would snap. “Also, the bass sounds really good now that they have Patty G. playing with them. I’m glad she’s doing something since Team Smash broke up.”

  The girl whose cousin lived in Irvine nodded vigorously. “I know, right? I’m Flaca, and this is Elba and Mitch.”

  “I like your dress.” Lizzy gestured at Flaca’s modified cocktail dress, as black as her eyeliner, covered in safety pins and patches. She’d added a bunch of studs to a cracked vinyl belt around her waist, and it did look objectively great. “I’m Lizzy, and this is Beth.”

  I was about to ask Mitch if she knew whether Fuck Your Diet had any new albums coming out when a familiar voice boomed over the cement yard.

  “HOLA CHICAS! LET’S SEE THE CUNTS IN THE FRONT! I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHAT THE BOYS ARE DOING!”

  We put our beers down and raced toward the mosh pit carousel, bouncing between each other, smashing and laughing. Glorious Garcia ripped into her first song, swinging one foot up on the amplifiers. When her voice rose, her face contorted with ecstasy and rage. My scream almost shredded my throat because it was the new song, the one I had been yelling in my head and out loud for the past two weeks.

  WE’RE ROCKIN AT THE SHOW

  BUT HE CALLS ME A HO

  SO I SMASH HIS SHIT

  THAT FUCKING DICK

  HE TRIES TO HIT ME AGAIN

  HE’LL NEVER WIN

  WE’RE RISING UP WE’RE RISING UP

  AT THE SHOW AND AT THE POLLS

  THAT’S WHERE I LIKE TO SEE YOU OH YEAH

  I LIKE TO SEE THE TALL GIRLS

  I LIKE TO SEE THE SHORT GIRLS

  I LIKE TO SEE THE FAT GIRLS

  I LIKE TO SEE THE THIN GIRLS

  I LIKE TO SEE THE TRANS GIRLS

  I LIKE TO SEE THE CIS GIRLS

  I LIKE TO SEE THE BROWN GIRLS

  I LIKE TO SEE THE BLONDIES

  I LIKE TO SEE THE SWEET GIRLS

  I LIKE TO SEE THE BITCHES

  THE BITCHES THE BITCHES I LIKE TO SEE THE BITCHES

  We were all singing along, chasing each other in a thickening circle. It was like Glorious Garcia’s voice turned my heart into a fist that could punch through my ribcage and smash everything wrong in the world. I ran toward the biggest guy I could see and rammed my shoulder into his chest. He pushed back, and I stumbled into Flaca, who shoved me into another guy. His arm was thick and bare and covered in tattoos; when he thumped it into my side, the pain shot like sunlight through my bones. I ran hard into two bodies of indeterminate gender, going blind with the chaos of our movement, each hit reminding me that I was alive. I could survive anything. The harder I charged, the more certain I was that I would not fall.

  FOURTEEN

  TESS

  Irvine, Alta California (1992 C.E.) … Los Angeles, Alta California (2022 C.E.)

  I slumped on the shady bench where Beth left me and tried to parse where I’d gone wrong. There was the immediate failure, of course. I hadn’t been prepared to look into the face of an angry teenager and explain why she needed to do something painful to benefit herself in an ambiguously defined future. But then there was my bungling over a week ago, the first time I actually talked to Beth. I hadn’t bothered to change my clothes after racing from the Machine at Flin Flon, through three airports, to that ugly subdivision where Mr. Rasmann died. Of course Beth had thought I was a crazy person and didn’t listen to me.

  So now she was a killer, and I knew all too well how that felt. How it was going to feel for the rest of our lives.

  I looked up at the towering eucalyptus trees that dominated this part of the UCI campus and took a long, shaky breath. The tangy scent of crushed leaves permeated the air, and a cloud elongated overhead, its body torn apart by air currents. There was an uncanny quiet here, in the nature zone. The Irvine Company had fabricated a plot of wilderness at the core of an academic habitat that was indistinguishable from the malls that surrounded it. Two young women walked by, their hair streaked with blond highlights, upper thighs coyly revealed in the flow of silky shorts from the Express. Flirty, but not slutty. Tan, but not brown. Fuck. I hated this place, where we’d had to choose between artificiality or invisibility.

  I never should have come back upstream from 1893. It was a ridiculous extravagance to make the long trip to Flin Flon, and now I was stuck here. This wasn’t an episode of The Geologists, where everybody was always bouncing back and forth between times, despite the difficulty of reaching the Machines before we had airplanes. In real life, if I wanted to see Beth again, I had no choice but to stay in 1992. After that night at Mr. Rasmann’s, I’d scrounged up a dorm room at UCI for visiting scholars. But I couldn’t afford to stay here much longer. My covert visit was definitely in the historical record now, and extending my stay would raise questions in my home time. What the hell was I thinking?

  I reached down between
my feet, scooped up a stray acorn, and picked at its thick skin. It was useless to be angry with myself. After joining the ritual in Soph’s parlors, I’d felt strong again. Purified. There was no way I was going to leave my past alone. True, I’d missed my chance to intervene after the Grape Ape concert. But there had to be a way to revise that night in Pasadena—the one when I stood on the bridge, looked over the edge, and saw the crumpled, broken body. I dreamed about it every night. I’d wake up in my Chicago boardinghouse, dizzy with nightmares about how I was getting old and might never have another chance to repair myself. Once I was finished with this edit in the nineteenth century, I wouldn’t be in a position to go back to 1992 without raising a lot of questions. I had to change my life now.

  Comstock was arriving at the Expo in August, and it would take me weeks to get to the Machine and back. If there were any delays, I might miss my chance to make the edit. But I went anyway. I told Aseel and Soph that I had traveler business, and I told the Algerian Theater performers I had a family emergency in California. When I’d gotten off the CP Line, I’d found passage with a group of Cree trappers doing a run past Flin Flon. My only peaceful nights of sleep came then, in the bush, on the watery road to my past. Once I was at the Machine, it had been easy to convince Wax Moustache to tap me forward to 1992.

  And now I was here, feeling almost as shitty as I used to when I was murdering people with my friends.

  I stood up and looked at the greenbelt around me. I could invent some semi-legitimate excuse to stay at UCI for the summer quarter, deliver a few guest lectures, and try to talk to Beth again. Or I could get out of here, back to my mission. There was obviously a reason why so few travelers reported editing their own lives, and maybe it wasn’t demon-induced madness or edit merging conflicts. Maybe it was failure.

  A clot of students walked past, arguing about the upcoming presidential debates. My editorial efforts were nothing compared to what people did every day to change their own times with something as simple as an election. I needed to forget my conversation with Beth the same way I’d forgotten the night in Pasadena and most of high school. Whenever a memory emerged, I made myself think about something else. I focused on the blank anti-sensation of traveling through the wormhole. Inside its impossible mouth, history was obliterated.

  Two days later, I got off the bus at the Flin Flon campus. But as I waited in line, I realized I couldn’t face returning to the nineteenth century quite yet. Talking to Beth had shattered my sense of purpose. I needed to see my friends again. Luckily I had the budget for a flight to L.A. up in ’22, so I told the tech to tap me there. She stuck a floppy disk into her PC tower and consulted an incomprehensibly huge spreadsheet. Everything was in order, and they had an open slot right now. I was going home, to my present.

  I walked onto the smooth, damp rock of the interface and knelt, pressing my fingers to stone. I was surrounded by a ring of six tappers, connected to each other by wide, flat cables. A tech behind a row of humming CRT monitors typed a few commands, and the tapper closest to me started to pound out a pattern. Its felt-muffled mallets beat the ground like a bass drum, and then another tapper started, its rhythm complementing the first. A third joined with staccato bursts. Now I could feel the vibrations in my body, and the water rising up my arms and legs. But when the wormhole opened, nothing went the way it was supposed to.

  I had a shocking, vivid sense of sliding down water-slick stone in the dark. Then I materialized in a dark, shallow cave, its mouth a perfect rectangle of sunlight. Where the hell was I? This wasn’t Flin Flon, nor anywhere I recognized. Terrified, I stumbled toward the cave entrance, which sucked me back into the wormhole’s familiar nothingness. When I emerged, I was cold and slimy and staring at a tech whose bendable tablet told me I’d reached the Flin Flon Time Travel Facility in 2022.

  “You’re the second one to do that this week.” She looked startled.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re completely covered in … is that algae? Are you okay?”

  I touched the gooey blobs on my shirt, shivering. Then I flashed back to the cave. “Was there anything else unusual when I came through?”

  She checked her tablet for readings. “Nothing that jumps out here.”

  “I think I … It seemed like I fell out of the wormhole on my way here. Into a cave. Is there a way for me to get today’s sensor logs?”

  “You can, yeah—the Machine sensors have a Slack channel where they output readings.” The tech jotted some notes, then looked up and cracked a grin. “It’s not totally unusual to see or feel strange things in the wormhole, but it’s impossible to fall out.”

  “But this…” I gestured at a streak of bright green slime on my arm.

  “Yeah, that’s definitely strange, but we’re seeing it once in a while. It doesn’t mean you left the wormhole. I’m going to take some samples.”

  We scraped as much as we could into sterile vials, and then I desperately needed a shower. Good thing I’d left a change of clothes in a locker along with my mobile. That was months ago, but only a few hours had elapsed in local time.

  * * *

  I spent most of the flight back to L.A. distracted, staring out the window at wildfire plumes whose white fingers stretched across Saskatchewan and British Columbia. What had happened to me in the Machine? It was like I’d jumped in space as well as time. Could it be that the Machine was treating me differently because I’d changed the timeline? Geoscientists knew the Machines had some way to track the behavior of individual travelers, which is how they prevented us from going back to times we’d burned—or forward to futures we hadn’t yet lived through. Was there some specific reason I’d been rerouted to that cave?

  Maybe my edits had altered something fundamental. I bought thirty minutes of slow airline internet and poked around in UCLA’s legal databases, looking for changes to the Comstock Laws. Nothing obvious. Abortion was still illegal, and doctors were barred from providing information about birth control in most states. I checked Nexis for 1990s news stories. Everybody who had been dead the last time I was in 2022 was still dead.

  Was I suffering early effects of merging conflict dementia, caused by my meetings with Beth? A terrifying possibility. But then something more disturbing occurred to me. Maybe the Comstockers were making progress in their efforts to disable the Machines. My visit to the cave might have been a cosmic bug, the result of their sabotage. I needed to talk to the Daughters right away.

  Wandering through the Space Age glory of LAX, I texted Anita. Want to grab a drink? I’m here for a few days then it’s back to the nineteenth century.

  Hell yes. Hipster gin bar tonight?

  Neither of us could remember the actual name of the gin bar, partly because we’d insisted on calling it “hipster gin bar,” and partly because it was in one of those old buildings with preserved historic signs that advertised defunct newspapers. The place was quiet on weeknights, and we met up at a cozy table in the corner whose fake Victorian chairs were far more comfortable than the real thing. The gin was better too.

  I drank a shot and enjoyed the brief hot tingle in my fingers and nose. “I think those Comstockers are affecting the behavior of the Machine.”

  Anita raised her eyebrows. “What happened?”

  I told her about the cave and the algae.

  She looked puzzled. “I’ve definitely had some strange visions in transit, but usually they’re sort of abstract colors or smells or sensations.”

  “Sure—I have too. But never anything that left a physical trace, like the algae. We need to get more data from the Machine facilities, to see if it’s a widespread phenomenon.”

  “Yeah, we should call a meeting.”

  A flurry of texts, and we were set to meet tomorrow in one of the more battered conference rooms in the geology building. By then I’d have some preliminary results on the algae question, too.

  Anita and I spent the rest of the evening catching up on news about the latest horrible mem
es on Instagram. It turned out some billionaire had paid hundreds of operatives to run a conspiracy campaign proving that women who’d had abortions were now giving birth to fish because “they had ruined the bodies God gave them.” Gory, doctored pictures of naked women surrounded by dead fish were spreading fast. Some flak at Instagram said it was impossible for their algorithm to eradicate it, but the company was working on “making social media safe for everybody again.” Venting about politics with Anita was making me feel normal. Things were terrible, but at least I was trying to do something about it.

  * * *

  The algae turned out to be cyanobacteria, one of the oldest life forms on the planet, and also one of the most common. It would have filled the oceans at the time the Canadian shield was forming, over half a billion years ago. The techs in Slack had a preliminary hypothesis about it. Given that the five known Machines were all built into shield rock that formed beneath the primordial seas, they thought it made sense that the Machine might sometimes spit up cyano along with water. At this point, they said, six other travelers had emerged from the wormhole covered in ancient ocean microorganisms, all in the past week.

  I turned this over in my mind, wondering whether people up and down the timeline were experiencing similar anomalies.

  We’d called this Daughters meeting to talk about my news, but that went out the window when Enid told us what she remembered. Berenice had been deleted from the timeline, but Enid reverted it. She held Berenice’s hand tightly as she described the would-be killer, a man with a mark that put his home time hundreds of years in the future. I noticed Enid carefully avoided explaining how exactly she’d saved her future girlfriend. In my bloodthirsty frame of mind, it was easy to fill in the gaps.