The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  I thought about that for a while. “So does collective action mean a bunch of people have to band together to edit the timeline, or can they be … kind of disconnected people making a lot of different edits?”

  “It’s probably a mix of both, but the honest answer is that nobody knows for sure.” She ran a hand over the close-cropped froth of her hair and I noticed she wore purple nail polish. “Are you interested in traveling one day?”

  “I like your class a lot, but I’m more interested in the physical side. I want to study the origins of life in the Cambrian.”

  “Well, most of the Machines seem to originate in that same geological period, so maybe you’ll wind up studying them a little bit too. There is some great work on wormholes happening here at UCLA.”

  I’d never thought about researching time machines, and I was suddenly intrigued. “Where do you think the Machines come from?”

  Anita gave an elaborate shrug. “It’s not really my area, but the jury is definitely out on that one. Some people say it’s a natural consequence of crustal formation that we don’t understand yet. But that doesn’t explain the interface, and why it filters out weapons but not clothing. I’ve always been fond of the idea that it was aliens.”

  I was surprised. “Really? Do people think that?”

  “Sure. Or that it was a primordial civilization on Earth. There’s so little evidence that you can imagine a lot of things. Most geologists agree that the Machines were built, or at least the interface was. There’s some kind of intelligence behind them. It’s not a phenomenon created by plate tectonics or weathering or any other known geophysical process.”

  “But there is a physical process involved. The timeline itself—”

  “Sure. The Machines seem to be exploiting a force that pulls potential timelines into our own. But there’s a conundrum there, too. Let’s say there is a cosmic force that is engaged in a constant background shuffling of timelines in the universe. It’s like gravity, or an unknown form of energy—it’s causing historical change all the time. If that’s true, maybe the Machine is simply a viewing booth that allows us to see the shuffling. So we think we’re changing things, but that’s an illusion. We’re merely witnessing, or remembering, a change that would normally be imperceptible.”

  Now I was frustrated. “So nobody knows how historical change works culturally or physically? How can we … I mean, what are we even doing?”

  Anita grinned. “You really should study time machines. We all start out with that same what-the-hell feeling. It’s probably the main driver of scientific insight.”

  I wasn’t any closer to knowing what I wanted to write in my essay, but I was intrigued by the idea of studying the Machines. As I wandered into the afternoon sun, I thought about all the possible timelines reshuffling in Tess’s wake. Was it a natural process that Tess could see because she used the Machines? Was she a tiny part of an unfathomably complex collective action that caused the shuffle? I wandered south toward Westwood, barely noticing as the hangar-sized campus buildings gave way to city streets. I passed a few bars and a Tower Records before finding myself at Falafel King, where I realized that I was incredibly hungry.

  Falafel King served up the best pita sandwich in L.A., topped with crispy disks of potato and at least five kinds of spicy salad. As I ordered, I wondered with a twinge if I’d be able to afford this place once I was on financial aid.

  All the tables in the restaurant were jammed, so I hunkered down on the warm sidewalk outside, watching a line of students waiting to order stoner fuel from Stan’s Donuts nearby. I was wiping some white sauce off my T-shirt when I heard a familiar voice.

  “Hey, Beth?”

  I looked up and immediately wished I wasn’t holding a messy sandwich that kept dripping tahini. “Hey, Hamid.” I scrambled up and surreptitiously wiped my hands on my jeans.

  “Fancy meeting you here.” He had the same lopsided smile that made me want to kiss him, and I tried not to think about that as I twisted the edges of my sandwich wrapper.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Getting some donuts for my study group. Midterm madness.”

  “Oh yeah? What class?”

  “History of film.”

  That was unexpected. “What happened to pre-med or business?”

  “I keep forgetting to take classes in those.” He leaned easily against the wall and I realized he wasn’t exuding that melancholy neediness I remembered from high school. He seemed more stable. Happier.

  “I’m getting ready for a midterm too. I have to write about collective action in history, but it turns out that nobody knows how history works.”

  We started talking about the timeline, and the montage technique in film, and whether chocolate donuts were better than glazed. After I finished my pita, I decided to get a donut at Stan’s. Hamid said his study group was at the library, in the same general direction as the dorms, so it made sense to walk together back to campus.

  “I’m glad I finally ran into you. I thought I would probably see you at some point.” Hamid ducked his head and looked embarrassed. “Not that I was hunting around for you or anything.”

  “I’m glad we ran into each other too.”

  “Hey, do you have … an e-mail address?” Hamid said the word “e-mail” like he was describing something extremely obscure and fancy.

  “Of course. I got one on my first day of classes.”

  “I just got one! I could send you my first e-mail!”

  “Really? Your first e-mail? Didn’t your family have AOL?”

  “I mean, I guess my sister had AOL. I never used it, though. It seemed like it was mostly for people talking about boy bands.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, allow me to introduce you to the wonders of e-mail. I’m elizabethc@magma.ucla.edu.”

  “Easy to remember. I’ll mail you some electrons!” He gave me a quick hug and raced off in the direction of the library.

  I stood there for a moment thinking about the hug, and what I wanted it to mean. Then I took the long way back to the dorms, puzzling over my essay for Anita. By the time I got back to my room, I was still unsure what to write. I knew history could be changed, but none of the hypotheses fit my own experience. Why wasn’t there a scientific theory that described how we change our own lives and the lives of our friends?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ANITA

  Excerpted from the memoir of Anita Biswas, found in the Subalterns’ Archive Cave, Raqmu, Jordan (2030 C.E.)

  There are some memories I will never share with the Daughters of Harriet, and this is one of them. I remember a nation without women’s suffrage. It’s where I grew up. As a little girl in Los Angeles in the 1970s, I was one of the lucky ones; Alta California gave us the vote a few years before I was born in 1968, and the UC system had been coed since the 1950s. When I was in middle school, my mother and I watched a soap opera called The Geologists every week because it had two African characters who traveled through the Machine at Timbuktu. Exposed to liberal ideas, treated to a college education, I had no doubt a woman like me could become a traveler. I landed a good position at Flin Flon. Then I spent my Long Four Years at a think tank called Past Engagements that provided evidence-based historical analysis to policymakers in Washington, D.C.

  The first time I traveled, it was to Mississippi in the late 1860s. My assignment was simple: gather firsthand evidence for a lobbying group trying to prove that women’s suffrage movements are always doomed to fail.

  My supervisor sent me to the period before the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. This was during the bitter post–Civil War congressional debates over whether enfranchisement should extend to male former slaves, a subset of “educated” male former slaves, or both genders of all races. Conservatives were so angered by the process that they started defecting to the once-marginal Democratic Party, whose main platform was basically white nationalism. Lincoln’s Republicans were fearful of losing ground to Democrats in the South, so they hatched a desper
ate plan to make universal suffrage attractive to their dubious GOP brethren.

  First, a group of Republican abolitionists persuaded the war hero and beloved cultural icon Harriet Tubman to run for U.S. Senator in Mississippi. Of course she couldn’t vote—and, therefore, couldn’t technically run for office. What she could do, however, was bring out huge crowds of women and ex-slaves at rallies and events where they filled out “provisional registration” forms as Republicans. The abolitionist Republicans were betting that activists in the South could get thousands of these people to fill out their forms. Behold: so many untapped voters, eager to toe the party line! It might persuade conservative members of the GOP to support universal suffrage. More Republican voters was a good thing, no matter how questionably human those voters might be.

  I was the only Black person among the travelers at Past Engagements, so my supervisor decided I would be the ideal observer of this unique historical moment. “You’ll blend in. They’ll trust you,” he said. He didn’t understand that a mixed-race girl from California might have as little in common with a recently freed slave in Mississippi as he did. I couldn’t contradict him if I wanted this assignment, though, so I nodded and said nothing. Of course, I was right. During the six months I traveled, the activists kept asking me what I was. Sometimes the locals did too. Southerners were used to mixed-race people, because so many ex-slaves had white fathers, uncles, or grandfathers. But nobody had a father from India like I did.

  I tagged along with a group of younger activists from New York, who treated me like their pet alien from the future. In late 1869 and early 1870, I took notes as they registered thousands of people in Mississippi, riding from town to town in a wagon with Harriet Tubman’s face painted on the side. Sadly, I did not get to meet the senatorial candidate herself; she was always campaigning or managing the elder care home for ex-slaves she’d founded outside Jackson.

  The campaign was a spectacular failure. Men achieved universal suffrage, and women were sacrificed for the sake of Republican unity. A freedman named Hiram Revels won the Mississippi senate seat. Harriet Tubman went broke, and was forced to beg Congress for the soldier’s pension she hadn’t been granted previously because she was a woman. I returned to 1991 full of rage. We were so close to winning! Maybe if I’d participated, committed one small edit, it would have changed the fate of over half the people in the United States. I felt the effects of our loss in my present, and in my bones. Women still couldn’t vote in Mississippi, nor in most of the South and the Midwest.

  My supervisor was extremely pleased with the data I brought back, and immediately turned it into a research paper for lobbyists about why women’s suffrage had a long history of failure in the United States. I got fourth author credit, and he offered me another assignment right away—this time for a State Department committee evaluating whether to fund human rights organizations in Haiti. “You may have a career in witnessing key political failures,” he mused. “What do you think about traveling to Haiti in the late 1790s, to record how the slave uprising was put down? You’ll fit in there, too.” I looked into his watery blue eyes and stopped believing that he was ignorant but meant well. He was fucking with me, and profiting from my research to boot. That’s when I decided the point of travel was not to observe history, but to change it.

  I have recorded my experiences during the Haitian Revolution in another document. Hopefully, if you are reading this, you are in a timeline where my edit has not been reverted. The uprising was a success, though I nearly lost an arm in the fighting. Transformation rippled down the timeline. Seventy years later, abolitionists and suffragettes rejoiced together when Harriet Tubman was elected to the Senate in the United States. When I returned to 1991, my supervisor treated me differently. He never once suggested I wouldn’t be first author on our paper about what makes slave uprisings successful. There were also a few more brown faces in our lab. These small changes mattered.

  I don’t believe I was responsible for altering the timeline. I was merely one of many people authoring those edits across many generations. What I learned on that trip to Haiti is something I try to teach to my students, and to the Daughters of Harriet. Nothing is inevitable, and you always have to go back farther than you expect.

  But like I said, I don’t tell them everything about the timeline I remember. I don’t want them to know how close we are to that other version of history. I want them to have hope.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TESS

  Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory … Chicago, Illinois … New York, New York (1893–94 C.E.)

  We’d given ourselves six months to complete the Comstock edit, but Morehshin and I couldn’t book passage on a ship back to Chicago for three weeks. It was an annoying delay, but it gave me a chance to spend more time with Anita, processing everything that had happened. To earn money while waiting for us, Anita took on some research duties with the American Geophysical Union and taught public classes at Raqmu Technical University. Meanwhile, C.L. traveled back and forth to do more analysis and possibly get some clues about what those cuts in the Machine interface might mean.

  As long as I kept busy with research at the AGU library, I could put aside my emotional vertigo from what had happened with Beth. The local pharmacist got used to my requests for willow bark extract, which made my stomach burn but took the edge off my near-constant headache. After a couple of weeks it got so bad that I bought some opium to relieve the pain.

  I tried to keep it to myself, but it was hard to fool Anita for long. We were sharing a small room. One night she came home early from the university and caught me with a dab of opium, blowing smoke out the window.

  “Tess.” She folded her arms. “You know that stuff is seriously addictive.”

  “Sorry. I don’t do it very often. Sometimes it hurts too much to sleep.”

  “You’re still getting those headaches? From the double memories?” Anita sat on the edge of our cubby while I stashed the remaining nugget of opium in a silver snuff box. I hadn’t smoked very much, but my agony had dulled to a twinge. I was probably too high to have this conversation, but I knew she wouldn’t let me off the hook.

  “Correlation doesn’t equal causation, so we can’t be sure the pain is related to my memories.” I was mumbling. “Besides, the memories aren’t the difficult part. It’s more … the feelings.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I used to feel certain about our mission. Like we are definitely making the timeline better. Now I feel … divided. What if we’re making things worse?”

  Anita sighed. “I’ve been feeling this way a lot since my mom died.”

  “Wait, what?” Some of my drug haze lifted. “Your mom died? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was right after you left, and there’s been so much going on … I guess I didn’t want to deal with it.”

  I thought of Anita’s mom, a fierce woman named Yvonne who had raised Anita by herself and worked the whole time as a nurse—then, when she had time to get more education, a doctor. When she visited L.A., I often went out to dinner with the two of them. I’d heard the story about how Yvonne hooked up with Anita’s dad while carousing across the U.K. with hippie friends. Anita’s parents had one of those baby boomer relationships I didn’t really understand, half-traditional and half-liberated. They never married, but her father had taken care of Anita financially, given her his last name, and invited her on summer trips to London, Mumbai, and Singapore. He’d been in and out of Anita’s life, but Yvonne was there every day. Anita called and texted her all the time. I couldn’t believe we’d been talking about my stupid headaches when Anita was dealing with this.

  “Anita, I’m so sorry. What happened?”

  “You know … getting old. She died in her sleep. But somehow that makes it worse. It’s like her time came, and it was peaceful and natural, but I wasn’t ready at all. I feel like I’m in the wrong timeline, even though I know this was supposed to happen. Suddenly I can’t figure out who the hel
l I’m supposed to be. She was the only person who remembered my childhood other than me, you know? I keep wanting to get her advice, and thinking that I see her…” Her voice cracked, but she didn’t cry. Somehow that made her face look more raw and broken.

  I hugged her and listened for a long time. We talked about how death feels like abandonment, especially when you lose your mother. “Mothers are a primordial force that links us to our history,” Anita said through tears. “When they die, it’s like some of history dies too.” In the early hours of the morning, we kept whispering through our exhaustion. I wondered whether the timeline itself was an endlessly repeating cycle of loss that divided humanity from itself, and Anita nodded, her face wet on my shoulder. Wrapped in blankets together, holding hands, we finally started to drift off.

  “Anita, don’t ever do that again, okay?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t not tell me when something huge happens to you. You are my best friend. I don’t want to feel like we’re in one of those crappy movies where the black girl has to fix all the white girl’s problems and deal with her own shit too.”

  Anita snorted. “So you’re saying I have to tell you my problems to alleviate your white guilt?”

  Now she was sounding more like the Anita I loved. I laughed sleepily. “You know what I mean. I’m here for you. I know I can’t be what your mom was to you, but you are my family.”

  “You are my family too, Tess.”

  “I’m sorry I was so caught up in my own bullshit that I didn’t ask how you were doing sooner.”