The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  There were people I had to see about access to the Machine. So I left the two of them in the hostel, Soph writing sadly and Morehshin running her multi-tool over the walls, conducting an analysis that defied translation.

  My destination was a nondescript two-story structure cut into the walls near an ancient theater, its facade bumpy with Victorian flourishes. AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION, read a large plaque mounted over the double doors. Over time, this archive for geoscientists had grown to become part professional association and part meetinghouse. The AGU cave was also permanent home to a small council of underpaid academics who held positions in the Raqmu Machine bureaucracy.

  A bell tinkled as I opened a wooden door set into the cave entrance, as if this were a dry goods store. Beyond an unoccupied reception desk was the library, whose battered chairs and tables looked pretty much the same as they did in 2022—though they lacked a fleet of computer terminals. I was about to take some creaky stairs up to the council offices when somebody shouted my name.

  It sounded like Anita, but that couldn’t be right.

  “Tess! You’re here!” Definitely Anita. What the hell? Had something gone horribly wrong? I walked into the library, and found her sitting with C.L. and a few students, surrounded by piles of books. Despite the weirdness of seeing both her and C.L. in the wrong time, I suddenly felt like everything would be all right. My best friend was here. I practically knocked over the table next to her in the midst of our enthusiastic hug.

  “Why are you both in 1893?”

  C.L. cleared their throat. “We’re … uh … researching … things?”

  I was nonplussed. “What’s going on? Has something happened with the Applied Cultural Geology Working Group?”

  Anita and C.L. looked furtively at each other. “We need to talk to you about something.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s … private.”

  The students made a big show of leafing through their books and tried to act like they weren’t listening. Anita glared at them until they suddenly decided it was time to go out for brunch in Englishtown.

  When the door slammed in a cacophony of bell noises, C.L. jumped up and started pacing. I noticed they had a new ocular implant, forming a faint crescent-shaped bulge over their right eye. “I’ve completed my field season, and anomalies are increasing at the Machines. A few more people came back covered in extinct single-celled organisms from the Ordovician. One told me off the record that he’d seen a glimpse of an archive cave, like you did. So I’ve been systematically going back to different periods in the Raqmu Machine, trying to figure out if something in the mechanism has changed. I kept wondering whether the wormhole might be dipping into the past before linking to the correct time. It’s kind of what you’d expect if the interface were … buggy, I guess.”

  “The Comstockers?” I felt cold.

  “Well, it might be wear and tear. More people than ever are using the Machines, and we’re using them in new ways. Morehshin showed us that there are parts of the interface that we didn’t know existed, and we have to assume people are using those in the future all the time. But…” They looked uncertainly at Anita.

  “But what?”

  “The Comstockers may be getting somewhere. My guess is that they’re destabilizing the wormholes. I went back to the Ordovician from here and found these cuts in the rock, with traces of metal alloy in them that could only come from humans…”

  “Why would sabotage on the Raqmu Machine affect Flin Flon, though?”

  “You know the hypothesis that the Raqmu Machine controls the others? If that turns out to be true, then all they have to do is destroy this one.”

  “And then we’re completely fucked.” Anita was grim. “We’ve got to stop these shitlords before that happens.”

  “I don’t get why they would do this. If they lock the timeline, they can’t make edits either. They might get stuck in a timeline where … I dunno, things are pretty much like this one. Universal suffrage.”

  Anita looked at me like I had eaten a library book.

  “Don’t you think it would be bad enough if we were fixed here in this timeline, where women can’t get abortions and black kids are being murdered by cops? They don’t need to take away our right to vote to make our lives hell.”

  She was right, as usual. “So … why did you come to find me?”

  “We need Morehshin to take all of us back to 13 B.C.E. There’s someone there I need to see.”

  “That’s where we were headed anyway.”

  Anita nodded curtly. “Excellent. I’ve already booked us on the Machine.”

  “Okay, but I am still confused. How did you know that we would be here?”

  Anita’s expression was unreadable. “Ah. You don’t know yet.”

  I blinked. “What do you remember?”

  “A Spiritualist named Sophronia Collins committed suicide under very mysterious circumstances, after Anthony Comstock got her convicted for obscenity during the World’s Fair. I wasn’t sure, but I guessed that was your handiwork. Especially because you wrote that paper about secret travelers using suicide as a cover to escape their present. I figured you’d hidden her in the past, and that meant you’d come through here. I’ve been waiting for a couple of weeks.”

  “I came down a couple of days ago,” C.L. added. “Anita said you’d be here.”

  “What about … is anything else different? The Comstock Laws?”

  Anita shook her head. “Abortion is illegal.”

  The edit war was far from over, but I was intoxicated by the news that at least part of my edit had taken. I couldn’t quite believe it. When I’d studied this period, there was no record of a person named Sophronia Collins fighting Comstock. I’d met her by chance at the Algerian Village. I allowed myself a moment of satisfaction. It was the first time I’d made an edit of any significance, and that meant I might be on the right track.

  * * *

  Early the next morning, Anita knocked on the door of our room at the inn. “We’ve got a slot at 9:30 A.M. Let’s go.”

  Morehshin would be doing another demo of her collective travel technique for a small but admiring audience of scholars and techs. The Machine room at al-Khaznah was already full when we arrived, its sandstone walls carved with abstract designs and inscriptions in pre-Nabataean. Some of these explained the rudiments of the interface, which the ancients treated like rule-based magic. Now, there were two steam-driven tappers in place to pound out the pattern that would open a passage to our destination. We stood at the center of a shallow bowl worn into the smooth rock by thousands of travelers over thousands of years.

  “You must all be touching me when we do this.” Morehshin waved us in close. I wrapped my arm around Morehshin’s waist, then positioned Soph’s back against my chest, her arm curved around Anita. Anita tucked C.L. between the two of us. At last, we were all spooning each other and hugging Morehshin as tightly as we could. From above, we must have looked like we were doing a Busby Berkeley dance. But from eye level, we were merely a group of travelers, slightly sweaty and desperate. Morehshin reached out and clawed the air open overhead, revealing that square black interface controller I’d seen for the first time at Flin Flon. Inside it, attenuated light wavered like it was traveling through fluid. Then Morehshin drew a zigzag shape in the air, while palming the multi-tool. It strobed pink.

  “Hold on!”

  I had never gripped my sisters harder than I did in that moment. Fluid sloshed up from the floor, filling my nose and mouth with a swampy froth, and then we were in wormhole free fall until we landed hard in the middle of nowhere. There were no bureaucrats or techs. We stood on a bright, sandy cliff, sterile except for a few patches of lichen that looked like black stains. A shallow emerald ocean stretched below, thick with vegetation that broke the surface. The air smelled intensely of salt. And then, with a shock, I noticed the rock ring, its rough red surface encircling us. Overhead, the canopy looked like a parasol made of fluid, filtering the li
ght through rippling waves.

  A peculiar silence hung over everything, and I realized there were no birds calling to each other over the swells. I could hear only faint waves and wind scouring the seemingly infinite volume of empty yellow rock behind us.

  “Where are we?” I muttered it into the skin of Morehshin’s neck, and tightened my grip.

  C.L. looked around wildly, their hair brushing my cheek. “Holy shit. I think we’re … in the Ordovician.” They started to pull away from our cluster, pointing at something huge and armored that swam through the waters below.

  “Don’t let go!” Morehshin was pounding a travel pattern into the ground with her feet and trying to torque something in the canopy overhead.

  Abruptly a hot rain gushed from the crust beneath us and the air became void. We emerged on the floor of a smoky cave lit by torches. All of us were covered in a thick layer of dust that made me cough uncontrollably. Eight slaves sat in a semicircle around us, flanked by baskets of bones and lithics. These people, some with the dark complexions of Africans and others with varying shades of Mediterranean tan, were the tappers of classical antiquity. Property of the Raqmu Machine’s priesthood, they pounded out rhythms that programmed the interface. A bored-looking man with oiled brown skin and gold bangles on his upper arms sat on a stone bench beside us, its contours softened by several layers of furs and rugs. He nodded, his clubbed beard protruding stiffly from his chin, and made a quick notation on a damp slab of clay.

  “Welcome, travelers.” He spoke Nabataean. As my eyes adjusted, I realized we had arrived at our destination. Barely.

  “That was … not good.” C.L. was shaken. “I haven’t seen anything like that before.”

  Anita whirled on Morehshin. “What did you do to get us back?”

  “Reset to last destination.”

  “There’s a reset button?” C.L. perked up.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Get out of the circle. You are blocking travel.” The bureaucrat was irritated. “And show me your marks.”

  Soph addressed him in halting Nabataean. “We apologize. Thank you for your hospitality.” Then she followed us awkwardly out of a thick red circle painted onto the floor. It marked the boundaries of the wormhole opening the same way the ring once had.

  “So many of you,” he marveled. “I did not know that was possible.” He made another notation on the tablet, then checked our marks. When Soph shook her head, he frowned. “You cannot travel without a mark.”

  “She’s my student, so she travels on my mark.” Anita was brusque, as if this were done all the time.

  “I’ll need to inform the Order.” He referred to the priesthood that controlled access to the Machine during this period. “Travelers without a mark are in violation of the law.”

  “Well, you’ve never seen five people come through, have you? We’re part of a new experimental group in 2022 C.E.,” I said. My grad school Nabataean was rusty, but he seemed to get the gist.

  The bureaucrat frowned and stood up, blocking our exit. “You need to come back tomorrow and speak to the Order.”

  “I will.” Anita drew herself up to full height, towering over him. People in the ancient world were usually at least a foot shorter than modern humans, and Anita was imposing even in our present. He bowed his head and stepped aside.

  “See that you do.”

  “Let’s go before he starts asking more questions,” Anita whispered in English as she led us out of the travel chamber into the temple proper, an atrium with high, curved ceilings and red walls. Light spilled in through the doorway and windows, illuminating scholars studying tablets and scrolls at a wooden table. Incense curled into the air beside a few shrines. People came and went from various side rooms on traveler business, barely noticing us. They were used to people in anachronistic clothing wandering out of the Machine chamber in a daze.

  “Are they going to send me back to my time?” Soph raced to keep up with Anita’s pace.

  “They would if we brought you back tomorrow, but we won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if all goes well,” I said, “we’re going to sacrifice you to the goddess al-Lat.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  BETH

  Los Angeles, Alta California (1993 C.E.)

  After not speaking to Lizzy for so long, sitting in her car felt like returning to a childhood playground. It was familiar, but also somehow smaller and less colorful than I remembered. She drove up the I-5 while I pored over the LA Weekly listings, pausing to read a story about how geoscientists were reporting strange activity at the Machines. Unfortunately the bit about Ordovician algae was only two sentences long, lost in a boring discussion of whether the Chronology Academy was corrupt. I crumpled the paper under my seat and sighed.

  It was too late to scrounge up an invite to a backyard party, and besides it was Tuesday. The legit venues were probably pretty dead too. We decided on an all-ages show at Starless, a café in Echo Park that was a regular hangout for some of the girls we’d met at backyard parties.

  Sure enough, Flaca and Mitch were there when we arrived, sitting at one of the tiny circular tables that wobbled so much nobody used it to hold drinks. Tonight it served mostly as an ashtray pedestal.

  “Hey, girlies!” Mitch waved us over excitedly, her heavy wallet chain clanging against a chair. A couple of other kids we didn’t know were there, and Flaca introduced them in a blur of names. All the girls from East L.A. had perfect eyebrows. They were in the middle of dissecting the latest details about some bullshit where Tower Records wouldn’t carry Fuck Your Diet albums.

  “It’s racism!” Flaca folded her arms.

  “They said it’s because they have fuck in their name.” Mitch shrugged.

  “But everybody says fuck in their band names now. They can put little stars over it or something.” I scowled, but I was also relieved to be upset about something that wasn’t murder or my dad.

  “Oh shit, it’s that dude from last week,” Flaca hissed and pointed at a guy who had arrived with a couple of friends. He looked like a Billy Idol impersonator, with spiky bleached hair and a pasted-on snarl.

  “That poseur? What did he do?” Lizzy checked him out in an extremely non-covert way.

  Mitch lit a cigarette and picked up the story. “He came here last week and started hitting on a bunch of girls, telling them he likes Chicanas because they know their place and understand that men are men. Usual white boy line—sorry, Marcus.” She nodded an apology to a ginger in the group and he shrugged. “But it got really fucking insane. What was that thing he said to you, Flaca?”

  “He went off on how he’d treat me like a queen or some shit? He said he had a special room where I could have babies and never worry again. It was creepy as fuck. Like serial killer talk. The boy is crazy.”

  Flaca’s mention of serial killers got everybody debating who was scarier—John Wayne Gacy or the Night Stalker? What about Jack the Ripper, who traveled through time to eat Victorian hookers? But Lizzy kept her eyes on the guy after the show started. In the mosh pit, she kept racing up to him then pulling back from a body slam with a little smile. He ate it up. Pretty soon he was chasing after her in the pit, delivering soft little swipes to her ass.

  We were panting at the counter between acts when the serial killer decided to make his move. He leaned right up into our space and pulled the cigarette out of Lizzy’s hand.

  “You’re a lot prettier when you’re not smoking and trying to push men around in the mosh pit.”

  Ugh. Of course he was one of those guys who flirted with pseudo-insults.

  Lizzy emitted a fake giggle and grabbed the cigarette back. “You think so? I bet that’s what you tell all the girls.”

  His face became serious for a minute, and I realized his pale skin was impossibly smooth. Literally no pock marks or scabs anywhere, as if he were made of plastic. “I don’t talk to girls. I talk to queens. You could be my queen.” When he smiled, his teeth exhibited th
e same uncanny perfection.

  “Wanna talk outside? Your queen requests an audience.”

  I should have known Lizzy was lying when we were at the railroad tracks. This was exactly like that night at the horrible party with Richard. Was she still carrying a knife? There was an alley behind Starless where everybody went to do drugs and have sex. Etiquette dictated that nobody looked at anyone back there—you had your dark, private spot, and you let your neighbors have theirs. It was the perfect place to murder a scumbag.

  The scumbag in question gave Lizzy an appraising look. “I’m Elliot.” He grabbed her hand and lifted it to his mouth for a kiss. She reached her other hand around to her back pocket and adjusted something that had the unmistakable shape of her knife sheath. I had to intervene.

  “Hi, Elliot. Wow, it’s great to meet you. I bet you are a really fun guy, but my friend is unfortunately super busy right now. Super busy. Like until the end of time.” I yanked as hard as I could on Lizzy’s arm and unglued her from the counter.

  She was so surprised that I had her halfway to the door before she protested. “What, Beth? What the hell?”

  “We are leaving. Now.” I was so pumped with adrenaline that I thought maybe I was having one of those moments of super-strength where people lift cars to rescue trapped children. I dragged her to the alley where I was pretty sure she’d been planning to kill Elliot and pushed her against the graffiti-caked wall. “I thought you said you weren’t doing that shit anymore. Remember how like three hours ago you said that?”

  “I wasn’t doing anything.”

  I glared.

  “I was just going to scare him.”

  “No. I saw the knife in your pocket.”

  “Fine. Maybe I was going to fuck with him. But you heard what Flaca said. You heard how he talked to me. That guy is a shitstain of epic proportions.”

  The door to the café slammed and Elliot and his pals stumbled into the alley. One of them hooted drunkenly. “There’s your little feminazi cocktease.”

  Elliot took a step in our direction then changed his mind. “Let’s go to a bar with some real women.”