“I got a little burned, but I don’t think it’s bad.”
Mym eyes my hand before checking it again on the screen. She zooms back out and runs her finger around the rest of the image. “You have a couple specs in your shoulder blades, a few in your abdominal tissue and looks like another one in your right femur.”
I can’t help but notice that the scan shows all areas of my anatomy, but as it’s displaying only the insides, it’s slightly less embarrassing. Even so, I’m grateful when she closes the image and turns her attention back to the real me.
“You got lucky.”
“So I’m gonna be okay?”
“I didn’t see anything that would cause hemorrhaging, or anything in your brain. That’s good news. Though the decision to jump in the rain in the first place may suggest something else wrong with you.”
I’m again aware of our close proximity. Mym seems to notice, too, but she doesn’t move away. She lays the tablet on the desk and puts her hand on my arm.
“It would be easier to not worry about you if I could trust you to not do stuff like this.”
“So you worry about me?”
Mym narrows her eyes, but her lips still hint at a smile. “Somebody has to. Look what happens when you go off on your own.”
“Then don’t leave me alone.” I slip my hand to her waist, watching to see how she’ll react. She eases closer to me.
“How many days has it been for you? Since . . .” her voice trails off softly.
“Five. They’ve been long days though. How long has it been for you?”
“Two weeks.”
“Too long.” I incline my head closer to hers.
“It was.” She lifts her face toward mine and we linger there with our lips centimeters apart. The tip of her nose grazes mine. “Ben, I’m—”
I press my lips to hers and the rest of her words are lost in the kiss. Mym’s other hand finds my stomach and my arms encircle her, one hand tracing up her back to the softness of her neck. She leans into me and her cap drops to the floor, her hair falling over my hand at the back of her head. Her lips part around mine and I breathe in the subtle scent of her. She smells like orange blossoms and a little like rain. I pull her to me till there is no space left between us. Her hands find my face and, as our lips separate from one another’s, she keeps her hands there, staring into my eyes as if trying to read my thoughts. One of her fingertips touches my bottom lip.
“I thought about this.”
“Just once?”
She laughs and strokes the side of my face, brushing over the week’s worth of stubble, then tracing a finger around my ear and up into my hair. “Maybe more than once.” Our lips find each other again and I let my hands glide down the outline of her. I lean and scoop her up onto the edge of the desk. Her eyes open and watch mine as I set her down, and her lips are smiling while still kissing me. Her eyelids settle back over the radiant blue of her gaze and we go back to our other senses, letting our bodies find their own way around one another. When I finally pull my face away from hers, she has her legs wrapped around the backs of mine, and her hands tarrying on my chest. She leans her head back, letting her arms drop to the desk behind her. She settles back on them but keeps her legs locked around mine.
“You’re full of surprises, Benjamin Travers.”
“As long as they’re good ones.” I reach my right hand out and she lifts one of hers to it, letting our fingers intertwine. We stay that way, relishing the newness of the moment and the anticipation of whatever is to come.
There is a clatter from the hallway as someone rushes past the door to one of the other offices. Mym glances at the door then slowly untangles her legs from around me, sliding off the desk to her feet.
“We shouldn’t stay here.” She packs her belongings into the satchel and hoists it over her shoulder. She slips past me to the door, so I scoop up my jacket and her fallen cap and follow. She pauses before opening it and extracts another device from her pocket. This one is only the size of a mobile phone, but I recognize it as the multi-function device she uses to calculate her jumps. “Traus looks like he’s already gone. I wanted to see if he met anyone here, but I don’t want to blink back and check now.” She speaks toward the MFD as if thinking aloud. “There’s no way of knowing who was where before the crash. It’s too dangerous to free-jump something without a photo here, and I’ll find him anyway.”
“You have a way of tracking Traus?”
Mym looks back to me. “Yeah. Dad helped me with it. He figured out a way to find a person’s timestream signature in the data used by the Temprovibes. I had to get close enough to Traus to get a reading from a temporal spectrometer on him, and I had to match that to the serial number of his specific Temprovibe. That wasn’t easy, but once I did, we had enough to go on. Every Temprovibe transmits info through the Grid to a central data processor owned by Digi-Com. I couldn’t pick up any of his signals farther back than the Grid satellite system has transmitters, but now I can track him anywhere from 1800 on in most timestreams.”
“There have been satellites in orbit since 1800?” I follow Mym out the door into the hall.
“No. Well, some actually. Time travelers have launched satellites for personal use in a lot of times, but the actual Grid system doesn’t start functioning till the late twenty-first century. Digi-Com uses transmitters that can relay data forward in time to keep their customers safe. Takes power though, and the lack of reliable electricity is a problem in earlier centuries. Dad tuned our tachyon pulse transmitter to intercept the company’s Temprovibe frequencies and track Traus. He was too far out of range of my chronometer to chase till now, but from here I know where he’s going.”
“Where?”
“According to the data from his Temprovibe, he jumps to 2156 and visits the Academy of Temporal Sciences.”
“I’d bet that’s where the next gate will take me.” I fish the paperwork from my objective box out of my pocket and look through it. On the back of the schematic of the airship I find a small map of the airfield. The time gate symbol is behind the airship hangar and has a note next to it that reads, PROXIMITY TRIGGER. I cycle through the modes of my race bracelet’s display till I find my ranking number. It still shows an eleven, but the number isn’t flashing. It must open when I get close.
Mym pauses by the front door of the office building, glances outside briefly, then shuts the door again. “It’s probably best if we split up from here.” She rummages in her bag and pulls out another anchor. This one is a golf-ball-sized geode that’s been split in half to reveal the violet crystals inside. She shows me a matching photo of it and places both in my hand. “This is how you can find me at the Academy. We’ll meet in the minerals wing of the science center. Do you still have your degravitizer?”
“Not on me, but it’s with the rest of my stuff.”
“Get it back and come find me.” She puts her hand to my chest and rises up on her toes. Our lips meet again and she lingers there, clenching the front of my shirt in her fingers. When she drops back down she’s smiling. “You’d better miss me when I’m gone.”
I flop her cap back onto her head. “I’m starting right now.”
Her fingers find mine and we grasp them together one last time before our hands slip reluctantly apart. Mym tucks her hair up under the cap and slides out the door. I wait thirty seconds before following. Outside there’s no sign of her, but I can’t help glancing around as I make my way toward the back of Hangar One. A grin breaks out on my face, and I have to concentrate in order to force a more appropriate expression. A few other pedestrians pass me. Most are Americans from the naval base, but I spot some of the survivors from the airship too. A few are wearing bandages on their hands or their heads, but even so, the atmosphere around the base seems lighthearted and even cheery. The news that everyone has survived the disaster seems to have spread.
I locate the time gate at the back of the airship hangar and find that it’s simply a plain doorway leading into the
interior. This must be where Traus was heading.
I open the door and a beep comes from my bracelet. The air in the doorway shimmers and, despite the fact that I can still see the interior of a hangar in 1937, I know I’m headed somewhere completely unknown. I hesitate with my hand still on the doorknob, and consider the fact that I’m about to step beyond everything I’ve ever known.
Despite all the dangers I’ve faced traversing the past, there was something familiar about traveling through history. Now I’m facing a total question mark, the realm of my competitors, and at least one enemy who has been clear that he’ll not hesitate to kill me. Options flit through my brain. I could still slam this door and make a run for it. They would find me eventually, but I could put up a fight.
I watch the colors shift and change in the light and my bracelet begins to beep faster. My mind finally settles on one clear thought. It’s not all unknown. She’ll be there.
I step into the doorway and let the future swallow me up.
21
“Once the invention of time travel became public knowledge, I feared an eruption of timestreams as everyone rushed to be a part of it. It didn’t quite happen that way. Lots of people doing it wrong and dying of stupidity probably helped with that. It’s the only time I’ve been grateful for idiots.”–Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2130
A small, freckled man is beaming at me. He’s young, not more than nineteen or twenty from the look of him. His giddy smile makes him seem even younger. He bobs forward from behind a control panel and bounces up a couple steps to seize my hand.
“You made it!” He energetically pumps my arm before spreading his other hand out to the space around us. “Welcome to platform thirty-seven! I’m Tucket.”
I glance around the glass-enclosed room. Natural light is streaming from clear panes above us and from the circumference of the room. Viznir is behind the bank of controls that the young man came from, but his expression is far less joyful. He looks annoyed about something.
“Hi, Tucket. I’m Ben—”
“Ben Travers. I know!” Tucket interjects. “Such an honor to meet you. I’ve been waiting for you—I mean, we’ve been waiting for you.” He gestures to Viznir and possibly the entire outdoors.
He straightens up and concentrates. “Are you . . . DOG TIRED . . . or um WIPED OUT from your trip?” He watches my face intently.
“Um. I’m okay, I think.” I extract my hand from his grasp and look toward Viznir for some explanation of who this person is. Viznir merely clenches his jaw and shakes his head.
Tucket sallies onward unabashedly. “I’ve been assigned by the academy as your acclimation host. It’s school policy to meet new temporal travelers on arrival and make sure they’re adjusted. You being part of a chronothon is a special case, yeah? But we still wanted to do it. I put in an application last year and I’m a third year trainee, so I got to pick my favorite racer, so of course I picked you.” Tucket grins again. “Cause I’m studying twenty-first century timestreams for my thesis, you know?”
“That sounds great, Tucket.” I step around him toward Viznir. “I really appreciate that.”
“Yes. It was a NO BRAINER, right? A no brainer? You say that where you’re from, right? I’ve been excited to use my language training with a real life Jehitles.”
I pause on the steps. “A what?”
“A Jehitles, like you.” Tucket blinks at me, then smacks himself in the side of the head. “Oh sorry. You wouldn’t say that. That’s just the name we have here for your timestreams. You’ve got Jewish Jesus, right?”
“Were there other options?”
“Oh yeah. There was Chinese Jesus and Detroit Jesus, well actually his name was Jamal then, but messiahs are big for a culture’s development, and you had that guy Hitler, right? He was a sort of bad guy, I guess.”
“Bit of an understatement, but yeah. I guess you could classify—”
“See that’s what I thought. I told my alternate history professor that and she said—”
“Wait, you guys didn’t have Hitler?”
“No, not usually. A lot of early time travelers thought it was good to kill him. They seem to take him out right away for some reason, or sometimes they made it so he was never born, but it made some big changes. It started the Soviet States of Eurasia. That lasted a long time, but you never get the other defining characteristic of your time. You guys had The Beatles.”
“The Beatles altered history that much?”
“Maximum alterations. They were the biggest influence on my favorite band, Avocado Problems.”
“Ha. That’s funny. You know I actually just saw them the other day.”
“You saw Avocado Problems?”
“No, The Beatles.”
“Oh wow. Yeah, they were cool, but I really think AP’s new album does some—”
Viznir clears his throat.
“Yeah, we should probably get going here, Tucket,” I say. “We do have a race to compete in.”
Tucket bobs his head. “Oh, right. I bet you guys want your objective. The race officials said I should give it to you right away.” He looks back and forth between Viznir and me. Finally Viznir speaks.
“So where is it?”
Tucket blinks again, then jumps. “Right! Mine bad, guys.” He marches between us and out the glass doors onto the rooftop balcony of what I now realize is a very tall building. The clear blue sky around us does in fact contain clouds but they are lower than the top of the building. As I cautiously approach Tucket’s position, I get a better sense of where we are. Our arrival gate is in the penthouse of an enormous skyscraper. Its elevation is significantly higher than even my sojourn atop the Hindenburg.
“Doesn’t anyone on this race committee believe in doing things on the ground?”
Viznir ignores my outburst and follows Tucket to a table that holds our packs and begins putting his on. I join him and rummage through mine, pushing items out of the way until I find Mym’s degravitizer. I feel immediately relieved when my fingertips brush the cool metal and I have to resist the impulse to start degravitizing Mym’s anchor right away.
“Here is your objective. That box is pretty GROOVY, huh?” He hands me the container.
“Sure. Thanks, man.” I wave my bracelet over the box till I hear it click open. Viznir is watching intently. “So how long were you here waiting for me?”
Viznir frowns. “Not long. Just long enough for the committee to tell me they bumped the guides forward a level.”
“Did you hear where they sent us?”
“The Hindenburg, right?”
“Yeah. It was pretty crazy. We had to get the people—”
“We should probably concentrate on this level,” he says.
We stare at each other for a moment and his eyes drop back to our objective box.
“Yeah, sure. Whatever.” I yank the lid open and extract a tablet like I’ve seen Gen and Jettison use.
“Oh wow. Haven’t seen one of those in a long time!” Tucket is at my shoulder in an instant. “I guess that makes sense since you don’t have a metaspace ID. That’s cool, though. My cousin had to have his Third Eye removed because of a medical condition and he uses something like this now. It’s a pretty common disability. Nothing to be ashamed of or anything.” He smiles reassuringly and glances back to the tablet. He points toward the single irregular bump on the face of the screen. “Even has a button. Nice antique touch.”
I press the button and the screen illuminates with three-dimensional depth. Tucket’s head is immediately in my way, ogling the screen. “So historical. I can see why people like the chronothons. All this nostalgia and—”
I side-step the view of his cranium. “Hey Tucket, you mind if we have a minute here? It’s kind of a confidential thing, race stuff, you know?”
Tucket bobs back in front of me and laughs. “Got carried away there! No BIGGIE guys. Right? NO WORRIES! I’m gonna be over here and I’ll CHILLAX while you guys get all jiggle with that stuff.”
“Thanks, Tucket.”
I skim through the information on the 3D display. Despite my lack of familiarity with the technology, I’m able to navigate through the data quickly. The image seems to intuitively know where I’m looking and brings up information I want to see without effort. The rest I can specify with simple movements of my hand or taps of the screen. A virtual envelope with my name on it opens and displays a 3D blueprint of a machine containing multiple vials of fluid. I scrutinize it briefly, then show it to Viznir. “What am I looking at here?”
Viznir takes the tablet and is able to pull up a text description of the device. “It’s a medical containment unit. Looks like it disperses something, too.” He zooms in farther on one side of the blueprint. “This is what we have to get, right here.” I lean in and study the component. It’s a ball of perhaps five inches in diameter. I have no idea what it does, but the description reads “Gravitan stabilizer.”
What is a gravitan?
Viznir pulls up a location for the object and it’s listed as a particle physics lab, Building 1701. According to the map on the screen, we’re miles away.
“Hey Tucket, you know a quick way to the particle physics lab?”
Tucket grins. “Sure. Do you need the meta-lab or the physical lab?”
“Physical lab,” Viznir replies.
My curiosity gets the better of me. “What’s a meta-lab?”
“It’s in the metaspace,” Tucket replies. “It’s enhanced, like in your century when technology first became able to link with other technology. ‘Smart technology,’ I think you called it. It’s like that, but the whole environment.”
“So virtual reality?”
“It’s more than that,” Viznir says.
“You’ve seen it?”
Viznir nods. “All the testing for guides now happens in the metaspace. It’s less dangerous. The students here all learn in meta environments, too.”
In Times Like These Boxed Set Page 83