The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  “You didn’t barely know me! We were … we’re friends. You said you liked me.”

  “I do like you. A lot. That’s why we’re here, right?” I nudged his shoulder with mine. “But back then, I was doing a lot of really stupid things. I needed to figure shit out.”

  “Like what? What kind of shit? You totally stopped speaking to me. Heather said you wanted to pretend I was dead or something.”

  It’s true that I’d said something like that, in the weeks after we killed Mr. Rasmann. “I’m really sorry about that. I was…”

  “Dealing with shit. Yeah.” Hamid was mumbling, and I realized that at some point his urgency had simmered down into defeat.

  “I’m not going to do that again, okay? I’ve made a resolution to … to try to change the timeline for the better. Even though nobody knows how history works.” I put my hands on his shoulders and looked at him. “Can I kiss you?”

  He nodded and waited for me to lean forward and find his lips. Only then did he put his arms around me. We walked back to my dorm hand in hand, not saying anything.

  I kept thinking about the day he drove me to the abortion clinic, right after he got back from Disney World. Looking back on it now was strange, as if my memories were being reassembled from broken pieces. As I recalled the colors and sounds of that time, they seemed to suture closed over a different set of events. With a shudder, I wondered if this feeling was related to the suicide I didn’t remember.

  We’d had to walk a gauntlet of Operation Rescue assholes lined up along the sidewalk outside Planned Parenthood. A woman in a “Jesus Saves” T-shirt held a canvas sack full of baby doll parts splattered with red paint. She threw severed plastic arms at me and the whole group chanted, “Murder! Murder! Murder!” I stared at the sidewalk, imagining the provenance of the clay and chalk that formed it. Then, without missing a beat, Hamid grabbed a bloody hand out of the air and pretended to chomp on it. “Tastes like chicken!”

  I smothered a grin and opened the tinted glass door. He’d evoked a spirited rendition of “Amazing Grace” from the protesters, and suddenly I was seized with the spirit of punk rock. “ABORTION IS LEGAL, YOU KNOW!” I yelled. “YOU’RE STUCK IN THE 1950s!” It wasn’t a terribly cutting insult, but Hamid laughed. Then I slammed the door and walked to the waiting room, where a receptionist with a purple streak in her hair signed me in. The abortion itself was a haze of concerned, kindly faces, questions about whether I was comfortable, and mercifully effective painkillers. When I returned to the waiting room woozy, Hamid helped me to the car and drove me around until I felt good enough to go home.

  Hamid was right: I did know him back then, and I’d definitely liked him. But I couldn’t bring myself to get together again after that day. My mind was too crowded with the gory weirdness of what was happening with Lizzy and my father’s ongoing threats. I wasn’t ready for another layer of emotions, especially not after we’d had to deal with the abortion together. Things had gotten too intense too fast. The more I thought about who I was back then, the less I could imagine a place for Hamid in my past.

  But there was a place for him now. I stopped suddenly and kissed Hamid on the cheek. He grinned. “What was that for?”

  “I was thinking that it would be perfect if we could have met now, instead of back then. Can we pretend that’s what happened? Like I ran into you at Stan’s Donuts and we decided that our destiny was to see Cyborg Cop together?”

  Hamid gave me his serious look. “I think we can do that. As long as we see Short Cuts next week.”

  “Does it have supersoldiers in it?”

  “Probably. Or dinosaurs. Robert Altman is really into dinosaurs.” And he kissed me again, in a way that felt familiar and yet completely unlike anything else in the history of the planet.

  * * *

  I’d left my midterm essay until the last possible minute on Sunday night. No big deal. I’d stay up, turn it in first thing in the morning, then crash for the rest of the day. Most midterms were already over, and the dorm hallways were unusually quiet. Rosa was out, so I put on the new Xicanistas CD to fill the room with something more inspiring than the sound of my keyboard clacking.

  I still felt a lingering frustration with the idea that nobody knows for sure how history works. This feeling, more than caffeine and cigarettes, buoyed me through the night and into the early morning. I realized that my perspective had changed since talking to Anita in office hours. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in great men anymore. But now I could see that every great man was actually a tiny piece of something much larger: a movement, an institution, or possibly a set of loosely interconnected people. Maybe the only real difference between the Great Man perspective and the Collective Action one was that great men had followers instead of communities.

  Back when I was in high school, they taught us that changing history involves massive battles and heads of state. But by 7:30 A.M., I knew that was wrong. I reread the last line of my laser-printed midterm before I deposited it in the box outside Anita’s office:

  Collective action means that when someone does something small or personal, their actions can change history too. Even if the only thing that person ever does is study ancient rocks, or listen to a friend.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Hamid and I were cuddling in my bunk while Rosa studied in the lounge. We’d been spending a lot of time together, and I was starting to think that maybe he was my boyfriend. Were we supposed to have “the conversation” right around now? I looked at him and wondered how I would ask about our status without sounding like a cliché.

  “Beth, I want to ask you something kind of intense, okay?”

  Maybe I wasn’t going to have to figure out how to have “the conversation” after all. I kissed his chin and nodded. “Sure—what’s up?”

  “Remember how you said you were going through some shit and that’s why you stopped talking to me last year?”

  My shoulders tensed. “Yeah.”

  “What happened to you? I know you and Heather stopped being friends too. You don’t have to tell me if it’s super personal, but … I really want to know about you. It affects me, too.”

  I took a breath and started to say something ironic about my friends being serial killers. Then I started to say something dismissive about how parents are the worst. Finally, I found myself telling a story I’d only ever narrated inside my head.

  “I was feeling, I guess, anti-social? Mostly because my dad was … well, he’s really strict. Both my parents are. Like we have a lot of rules in my house about how to act. Certain things I can’t say, and—I dunno, weird stuff like how I clean my room or where I set my cup down on the counter. And if I broke a rule, they would ground me for a really long time. Usually a couple of months. I mean, I could go out for school, but other than that I had to stay in my room.

  “Actually, I guess they made those rules because of something that happened a long time ago, when I was in sixth grade. I got kind of rebellious, you know? My mom was in the hospital for a few days because she had this condition—and anyway, my dad got mad because I didn’t wash the dishes enough before putting them in the dishwasher. He said I was grounded for the next month. Because it was part of a pattern of me being disobedient or something. And I—I got really mad. I told him he was being unfair and crazy and I don’t know what. I remember I was screaming, and he—he grabbed my face really hard. Then he pulled my pants off and started spanking me with his belt, and—it was really bad. Like I was bleeding.

  “And then he freaked out and started crying and saying he was sorry and he made me get in the shower with him to clean up. It was really fucked up and scary … I mean we were in the shower naked and he was rubbing me with soap which really stung and he kept putting his fingers inside … inside me … and saying he loved me more than he loved my mother…”

  Hamid was hugging me really hard and I realized my voice was shaking.

  “I know it doesn’t sound like that big of a deal. Parents are
weird, right? It was a long time ago, and he never did that again. But he always acted like he was right about to do it, and he was definitely acting like that a lot last year. So I just couldn’t deal with anything. He kept making these threats…”

  Hamid nodded, his expression unreadable. Suddenly I needed desperately to know something.

  “Does that seem normal to you? I mean, kids get spanked all the time, and he only did it once … and lots of parents are strict…”

  “No.” He whispered it into my hair, wrapping me tightly in his arms. My cheeks were wet. “It’s not normal, Beth. That is not normal. I am so sorry that was happening to you and I didn’t know.”

  I mashed my face into his shirt, flooded with relief that someone did know. Someone knew all along. And she saved my life.

  * * *

  I visited the campus lawyer the next day.

  She smiled when I sat down in the wooden chair across from her. “I’m glad to see you again. How’s it going?”

  “I’ve thought about it and I want to get a dependency override. My father has been abusing me for a long time, and I need to get away from him.”

  “You’re going to have to make a sworn statement to that effect. Are you ready for that?”

  I swallowed hard. “Yes. I’m ready.”

  THIRTY

  TESS

  Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory (1894 C.E.) … Western Gondwana Coast (447.1 mya)

  I was relieved to be back in Raqmu after a month at sea and on trains. There were more established commercial routes to Raqmu than there were to Flin Flon, but nineteenth-century travel was always exhausting. Morehshin and I settled into the rooms Anita had kept in the scholars’ quarter during our absence, and I made some muddy, rich coffee for Anita and me while Morehshin rained a small lunch out of her multi-tool. Suddenly, C.L. burst through the door. “I’m glad you’re back because I’ve done another analysis, and we are in deep shit.”

  C.L. had dyed their hair bright green, to match their nails. They looked older.

  Anita was surprised. “How long have you been working on this?”

  They scratched behind an ear. “I got an extension on my field season work, so I guess about a year in travel time, give or take. Mostly in the past. But I am about a month ahead of you in the present. I had to go back once in a while to use the computer cluster in the geology lab. Sorry about that.”

  That wasn’t too bad; it meant we had to avoid them for our first month back, to prevent merging conflicts.

  “What did you find?” Morehshin asked.

  “They are very close to wrecking the mechanism that keeps the wormholes open on both ends. I have the data right here.” C.L. patted their chest.

  “You memorized it?”

  “No, of course not. That’s insane. I uploaded it to my shirt.”

  Now Morehshin was excited. “You figured out an interface hack!”

  C.L. beamed. “That’s right. There’s no way to bring tools or computers through the time machine, right? The interface only permits clothing and implants. That’s how Morehshin brought the multi-tool—she can absorb it into her body. At least, that’s my hypothesis.”

  “You’re right.” Morehshin opened her hand and the multi-tool emerged from it, growing like a bubble in tar before taking on solid form. I had no idea she could do that.

  C.L. continued their infodump. “So I have a friend who got me this prototype of a smart shirt that Alphabet is making—basically there are wires woven into the fabric, connecting the CPU and sensors and memory, so it’s part of my clothing. All I have to do is output to a mobile device, which is why I got this implant.” C.L. tapped their eyebrow. “I can save all my data and read it locally using ultra-wideband. The cool part is that it’s great for fieldwork anywhere, not just during time travel, right? I’m going to use it for this project I’m doing with carbon dioxide in Antarctic meltwater because my shirt runs Fuchsia OS, and one of my labmates wrote a great API for gas chromatographs. Hey, did you guys know I finally got a National Science Foundation grant for that? It’s going to be—”

  Anita waved her hands. “Okay, okay, C.L.—we can talk about your funding later. Get to the point.”

  “Right. I’ve been taking photonic matter levels on the Machine at several critical points in the timeline. Each change is registered instantly on the other Machines, as far as I’ve been able to determine. So that hypothesis about how Raqmu affects the other Machines—my data suggests it’s correct. There’s a very real possibility that destroying the machine at Raqmu will destroy time travel completely.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Also I figured out what the Comstockers are trying to do. I traveled closer to the divergence and found a campsite with a stone forge. They’re making steel blades to re-create a part of the old interface controls, from when the Machines had a console with buttons. That’s why they’re randomly cutting into it—to activate a trigger. Basically, there’s a setting that decouples the interface from the wormhole. Probably for maintenance or something. Anyway, the result is you’ve got a wormhole and an interface, but they don’t connect.”

  “And where does the smelting come in?” My head was exploding from all this news on top of my migraine, but thankfully C.L. liked to explain everything.

  “You need a metal alloy to unlock it. After I saw Morehshin use her multi-tool on the canopy, I realized we’d been using the wrong tools. I mean, not simply the wrong tools, but also in the wrong places. The interface isn’t gone; it’s more like the user-friendly part of it eroded away. Like when you wear the letters and numbers off an old keyboard. You can still type, but finding the right button is a crapshoot. Except this isn’t a keyboard—it’s an incredibly complicated mechanism that controls physical properties of the universe that we don’t yet have names for. I was thinking that maybe the Machines aren’t really for time travel—”

  Morehshin cut them off. “Obviously they haven’t found a decoupling switch yet. Neither have we, in my time. But they are getting somewhere. That time when we landed in the Ordovician—the reboot fixed it then, but I don’t think that will keep working much longer.”

  “It won’t,” C.L. confirmed. “Photonic matter emissions are through the floor.”

  “Why do these anti-travelers have to go back at all?” I wondered. “Can’t they destroy the interface from their present?”

  C.L. sighed in exasperation. “Tess, he has to go back to a period when the interface was still visible, but not underwater, so he can mess around without drowning. So basically that’s the Hirnantian. You know—right before the gamma ray burst that scoured the Earth’s surface, causing a rapid-onset ice age that killed millions of species in the ocean?”

  Anita was nodding as if that explained everything. “It makes sense.”

  “So what do we do when we tap back?” I looked from Morehshin and C.L. to Anita. “We don’t know how many of them there are.”

  “I have an idea.” Morehshin had a smug tone.

  “What’s that?”

  “Go back and kill him. Like Hugayr told us.”

  “First of all, no, we aren’t killing anyone.” My voice wobbled as I tried to convince myself. “And second, who is ‘him’?”

  “They don’t know how to send multiple people through at once,” C.L. broke in. “It’s probably only one going back. Maybe two at most.”

  “Couldn’t we overpower him and drag him back up to 2022?” I was getting desperate. “Sabotaging the Machine is illegal, and C.L. has digital evidence of what he’s done.”

  Anita was dubious. “Do you really think the Academy would buy it? I think at most they’d send him back up to his time.”

  “I could take him back to his time,” Morehshin said reluctantly. “What he’s doing is still a crime in the Esteele Era. It was one of the last American democracies before the hives.”

  C.L. perked up. “Would you do that? I could leave evidence for you in the subalterns’ cave.”

  “How can we be
sure you won’t kill him?” I asked.

  “You can’t. But you can be sure he will kill us and our daughters if we do nothing.”

  “All right.” I nodded. “We’ll go back and make a … citizen’s arrest. We can knock him out or immobilize him, and tap you guys back up.”

  “Are you still prepared for this to be a one-way trip?” Morehshin was grim.

  I thought about Beth and Soph, both alive; and I imagined Aseel, using the music business to make the world safe for women’s bodies. My neck was a burning knot of pain. There was nothing left for me here, but there were billions of other people who needed the Machines to keep our histories open to revision. I nodded at Morehshin. “We’ve already talked about the risks.”

  C.L. and Anita nodded too.

  We walked to the AGU together. Luckily one of Anita’s students was scheduling slots on the Machine, putting in her Long Four Years, and she got us in quickly. As we left, she bowed slightly and whispered, “Safe travels, Daughters.”

  * * *

  When we got into the chamber, one of the techs was mopping the floor. “I must warn you that the Machine seems to be covering people in mud and snails.”

  C.L. nodded curtly. “Like I said. Situation is getting worse.”

  We arranged ourselves around Morehshin, the floor still wet beneath our shoes. The tech positioned three small tappers around us, cotton-padded hammers poised to bang out a pattern in the rock. When our knees were covered with warm water, Morehshin used her multi-tool to access another part of the interface I’d never seen before. It looked like a jar of mud and darting lights, hovering in the air roughly where the ring once was. She reached into the jar, hand completely disappearing into the mud, and I could see blue flashes between her fingers.