Uncanny Magazine Issue 37

by Lynne M. Thomas

  “Good, no problem. Any requirement, I can fulfill.”

  Her once-partner-in-crime-and-bed-but-it’s-complicated has already found the Time Detectives contract template, fingers and hair flying as she adds a clause for the advance while starting to download a finite element differential equation solver. Delta grins. “Then let’s get started. Can you give me as many details as you remember?”

  In the appendices of “Time periodicity in closed quantum systems”, posted online in June 2038, Burdokovsky calculated the probability of a monolithic macroscopic system—a dust particle, an ink comma on a page, perhaps even a living cell—spontaneously skipping forward in time, a pebble upon a smooth spacetime lake. Vanishingly unlikely, but not impossible, if the before-skip and after-skip environments are exactly identical. The key is the no-observer rule, the now-famous name for Theorem Two in the paper. Colloquially, it means that no time skipper or anything present at the “before” or “after” scenes—people, cameras, molecules—ever senses the transformation. The travelers always show up at the same place they left, identical save for the time on the clock, no witnesses at either end of the timeline. No flashing light, no puff of smoke. This isn’t the movies.

  Internet records show that the paper got all of twenty hits in the first month. When the free diver reappeared, a popular science outlet found Burdokovsky’s work, published the largely incorrect article “This Scientist Proves Time Travel Is Possible—Then They Showed Up”, and the rest was history.

  They are in bed together. Their mussed hairs—both black in this long-gone moment—intermingle like river streams, moisture cooling between their legs.

  “What happened?”

  Delta doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Kicked out of lab. Broke as my parents now, hence the five-star waterbed.” Completely true, though she doesn’t dare add, it was you. You left and solids turned into vacuums and equations stopped making sense.

  “You’re better than any of them. We’ll do our own thing.”

  Delta wishes she could believe that. Over her year-long fellowship, Lulu rarely answered her messages, except sometimes, weeks later, in cryptic code like Just now Dawn in her golden sandals [, wholly unrelated to How was your day and I miss you. Delta half-figured she had moved on and replaced herself with an AI chatbot. And now they’ve skipped the pleasantries and fucked each other back into their mental maps, but how can that be enough? The thought of her hurts. Not thinking of her hurts.

  Lulu twirls her hair, words drifting from her mouth like smoke. “And on beds of soft luxury, you would satisfy all your longing, for that tender girl.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sappho.”

  “Is that what you did in Seoul? Read lesbian poetry?” A blaze rekindles between her legs. “Wait, is that what you’ve been sending me?”

  Lulu smiles an enigma and leans in closer. Ignoring the pang in her chest, Delta rises to erase the space between them.

  Time skipping is an advanced application of statistical physics, where no ridiculous scenario is impossible, just extremely improbable.

  Happening-once-in-the-age-of-the-universe-exponentiated-by-Graham’s-number kind of improbable. The kind of improbable you would rather label as impossible so as not to confuse laypeople, because probabilities are weird when applied to individual instances. You can’t tell any particular person they won’t win the lottery tomorrow, because in theory they could. This reasoning leads people to drain their dollars on scratch cards and slot machines, to bet away their house and life.

  What are the chances, then, that Delta would be squeezed in a tiny office with hundreds of wilting flowers and her long-lost love perched supine atop a Flower Time Pod, orchestrating the reconstruction of Chinese wood planks circa 2005? That Lulu’s gotten them both mango habanero bubble tea dangling from purple drones out of nowhere, without ever pausing her derivation of posterior likelihood distributions?

  Whatever they are, Delta can’t remember feeling this good as she gulps sugar while coding, the outside world a negligible term. To experiment on the most advanced scientific equipment in the world, to use all her math and physics knowledge and some more—this is what she’d dreamed of doing, with Lulu, before it all went sour in grad school.

  A call jolts Delta from her flow state. From China, not Xu. She skips through the customary prompts with a glance.

  “You urge them, forget this thing, okay?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “I’m Xu Pingmei’s husband. Don’t you work for them?”

  “Yes, but she’s signed a contract.”

  “They are crazy. No eating, no sleeping, ignore me, ignore our son. Don’t care about their real family.”

  “Ziwen is her real daughter, too.”

  “They died long ago!” Delta flinches at the shouted anger layered beneath flat English.

  “Again, your wife signed a contract—”

  “How much they pay you? I give you double.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Goodbye.”

  “What a dick,” floats down from the pod. Delta doesn’t disagree. She registers the sender ID on the system blacklist. They have no time or energy for this, nine hours before Xu’s flight touches down, but her wrists nevertheless flare with overuse and doubt.

  The photo Xu sent is pinned on Delta’s overlay. A little smiling girl in pigtails, making a V sign in front of misty mountains and the ill-fated footbridge. She sends another round of simulations to the supercomputing cluster humming somewhere in a lonely warehouse, and stares at the fluid dynamics equations until her inchoate emotions surfaced into words. “Do you think your parents would abandon everything else to find you?”

  A dark chuckle. “They would rather I stay gone so they don’t have to micromanage me every day.”

  She’s never met Lulu’s impossible-to-please professor parents in their mansion. Her own parents are taking out another loan to help two of her sisters get through school. Every time they call, they tell Delta We’re so proud of you and refuse her bit of money. Don’t hand over the oxygen until you’re okay. The itemized expenditures for Xu to pay is ten times more than all of her family’s assets combined.

  A small hard thing grows inside her, knotting itself over and over.

  No one believed Jacob’s reappearance at first—hoaxes were too easy. But the genetics test confirmed the boy is the exact person who walked in the bathroom. Not a lost twin. Not a clone.

  The news burned through the world like wildfire, divergent demand and supply cross-blooming in its ashes. For those who wanted to get away, thousands of unregulated sleep pod operations sprang up, purportedly observer-less. The lack of space, as Delta pitched prospective customers, was a feature to increase your probability of skipping; the fewer air molecules sloshing around you, the easier for you to disappear.

  And others wanted the exact opposite. Rich elites, afraid of leaving the world unmoored in their absence, hiring dedicated security detail to observe their sleep every night. Parents, buying millions of wide-spectrum cameras for the dark spots in their house: in the closet, under the bed, anywhere pets and children can hide and never come out.

  Delta will not remember a lot of what happens during those sweltering weeks of sleep deprivation and stimulant haze. She remembers the jaw-dropping quarter-million dollars to operate the atomizer for twelve hours, and how quickly Xu wired over the money without hesitation. She vaguely remembers the endless paperwork to justify their experiment, them carefully phrasing it as an analysis of historical environments, and coding and recoding endless material simulations even as they drive overnight to Logan Airport. But she will never forget waiting at the terminal for Xu’s flight because Lulu slips a hand into her own, letting go far too soon when an eagle-eyed woman with silver-in-black hair runs down the escalator and instantly tenses into a huge smile in their direction.

  She will also remember snapping to attention as the scent of citrus pricks her nose. The three of them are in molded plastic ch
airs that they grabbed from an empty lecture hall. Through the glass wall of the cleanroom, the large silver cylinder of the atomizer operates silently under orange lights. Xu is peeling small tangerines from an old plastic bag peeking out of her endless pockets. She holds one out, but Delta has no appetite.

  She crosses her eyes to focus on the overlay, barely readable diagnostics coded hastily in the last thirty-six-ish hours. The atomizer’s gone through a hundred thousand or so of the six trillion possible arrangements of air and wood and rope molecules they divided the probability space into using Lulu’s Bayesian search model.

  I’m adrift, a man says in her ear, and it takes her a while to realize that’s from the CSB testimonies, not her visor reading her mind. I’m a stranger to my own friends and family. I’ve lost everything. My house, my dogs. I don’t wish this on my worst enemy. The free diver. Of course.

  NEW SUBVOCAL FROM L: stop watching CSB, it’s awful

  Let’s sync again, Lulu said last night, one arm dangling out the driver’s seat window, gaze split at the horizon between the streaking asphalt and her still-churning algorithm overlay. They had gotten the subvocalization modules together, back when Lulu knew another grad student who knew someone with a startup, and they implanted metal and polymers in themselves so they could think secrets to each other without moving a muscle. Delta is glad that when she erased her tattoo over the surgery scar on her jaw joint last year, she couldn’t bear to remove the rice-grain transducer.

  SEND TO L: what do we do next?

  NEW SUBVOCAL FROM L: get noodles I hope

  Her knot tightens to the point of breaking. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, or the lack of direction, but Delta can’t hold it in anymore.

  SEND TO L: you know that’s not what I mean

  Something beeps. The two of them start, but Xu waves and points at the clock on the sterile wall. “Just the atomizer cycle ending,” the overlay captions in English. Xu’s spent the last two months waiting for her visa poring over every manual and scientific paper related to their experiment. Delta’s certain she could put on the head-to-toe cleanroom suit and take over for the technician inside if need be.

  Said technician checks something on their readout, flashing a thumbs-up while initiating the next cycle. Delta’s taken back to grad school, toiling for years doing experiments that failed for no good reason. And then Lulu left and left again, and now Delta convinces people to part with their money for things they don’t need, whether it’s personalized flowers or hot Chinese air from thirty-some years ago.

  Delta looks over at Xu, still glued to the sight of the machine after five straight hours, a bundle of naked uneaten citrus in her lap. This is all wrong. How can they take so much of her money, then sit with her to watch it burn? How can Lulu pretend everything is fine?

  NEW MAIL: Hi, I represent ABG Consulting. We would like to contract Time Detectives’s services for our clients…

  Delta reads the message twice, chewing every word. A generous offer for her to give workshops at some offices and install cameras for six months, renewable if things go well. She checks and double checks that the sender email is legitimate, and then she takes a slow inhale, relief popping her spine all the way down. When their time is up here, she can apologize to Xu and sign her new contract. Get rid of the pop up visor ads. Get a real apartment. A real life.

  “Really, you all don’t have to wait. Go eat some food, I will pay—” A rapid series of beeps cuts Xu off.

  They rush to the glass as one person. The technician presses the abort button, and the atomizer depressurizes for what feels like hours until the gauge readings settle down. Delta counts down the screws being removed with a series of tiny loosenings until the glass viewport pops off. There is no girl inside.

  Typical. Experiments always break when Delta’s involved. Everything breaks.

  “I see something!” Lulu points to the shelf of gleaming components in the background.

  “I don’t.”

  “Just wait. It was a blob of some sort.”

  Lulu takes out pen and paper from her jacket pocket and scrawls a hasty message, slapping it on the window. The technician reads it and brings a ladder over to the shelf. As they climb up on the first step, a blur hurls about the orange light in a zigzag loop before landing on the glass, right in front of Delta’s face. A mosquito.

  At the sight of the insect, Xu screams and falls to her knees, as if struck by lightning.

  To prove something exists, just make one. Point to the fire-breathing dragon in your laboratory with your fingers and tamper-proof cameras. Quod erat demonstrandum. Or you can plug all the numbers into your theorems and show that something must exist, because if it doesn’t, the world would not look like it does. Perhaps unsatisfying, but a proof all the same.

  The lawyer asks at the trial: According to your paper, time skippers should not appear in our lifetimes. Yet we’ve had five confirmed cases. Why do you think that is?

  Burdokovsky shrugs. Probably there is something unaccounted for in the math.

  Would you undo it, if you could? Un-prove your theorem?

  This is stupid. He spits as if tasting something putrid. How can anything be un-proved?

  An instant highlight, on loop in the media and replayed in the concluding remarks. He sees Jacob as a variable in his equation, an inanimate pawn of the universe. Any reasonable human would feel guilt and wish for things to be different. Not Professor Burdokovsky.

  A living animal in the atomizer lab is a massive violation of safety procedures. This the two of them learned from the furious fire marshal and some twenty people in hazmat suits while they supported Xu through the hallway of trampled tangerine pulp and out of the green-glass-and-metal nanofabrication building. A full round of apologies and batch of paperwork promising to pay all fines later, the three of them stumble across the melting asphalt parking lot to the oven of Lulu’s car.

  Lulu hops in and boots up her console from the driver’s seat, tapping up a hurricane. Delta shuffles around the mountain of clothing and unidentifiable objects in the backseat until Xu, still sobbing, can sit down next to her. “What are you doing?”

  “Sequencing the genome.” Lulu’s console shows a close-up of a bristled insectoid leg.

  “How did you get a sample? Never mind.” Of course she did.

  Delta awkwardly pats Xu’s shoulder until her heaving subsides into hiccups. “As soon as I see the mosquito I knew. That day, on our faces, in the sky everywhere is the exact same mosquito. Wenwen cries while asking, Mama, why the bug only bite me and not you?

  “I say, because you are sweeter. I now remember I pick many bugs off my backpack, look up, my daughter is gone.”

  “DNA matches Aedes albopictus, Asian tiger mosquito!” Lulu’s head swings back, eyes huge with victory.

  “No way the cleanroom would have let that in.” Delta can already see the headlines. PhD-program-dropouts, still smart and capable people, made a real living thing appear in the atomizer. This is the stuff of Nature papers, professorships—she can reenter academia again, if she wants. Or get millions of dollars from investors who don’t understand probability, and be set for life.

  “Hold on.” Lulu resumes typing.

  Xu looks over at Delta, who points to the equations on the console. “She’s updating the probabilities that your daughter will appear.” A fly showing up in two times ten to the power of four seconds, normalized by the number of flies in Asia compared to people and the ratio of atoms in a human child to a fly, scale by Burdokovsky’s constant in Equation 3c of the paper…

  “God,” Delta mutters. Ziwen might show up in a few centillion years, an enormous number beyond comprehension. Lulu’s running a hundred sanity check calculations, but she never makes mistakes on things like this.

  “What’s the problem?” Xu asks.

  “Look.” Delta forces in a few breaths. She can see many branching paths in the conversation tree, all kinds of things that Xu can say, and she has no response planned to
most of them. “This experiment—it was a good proof of concept. We made a tiny thing that might be from China appear. But it isn’t going to bring your daughter back. We just did the calculations; the probability is basically zero, even if she skipped in time. Is zero.”

  The car suffocates them with silence, then Xu speaks.

  “You probably don’t know why I have so much money,” Delta’s visor supplies. Her tree disintegrates into confused mist.

  “On the day Wenwen disappears, I run up and down the mountain, asking people if they see my daughter. My head is a complete mess. I pray to heavens for her protection.

  “When I get home my husband hits me for losing Wenwen, calls me a stupid bastard. We go to the police. They do not help me. They tell me Wenwen must have fallen from the bridge. How is that possible? They are right in front of me. I only look away for half a second. If they fall, I must feel movement. When I look down, I must see them falling. I see nothing.

  “They all say I am lying. I go back to the bridge. I sit on the wood plank, thinking I should jump off because I deserve it. But I cannot do it, the fear of death in my bones.

  “So I ran away. I find a person who make cameras and we sell them on the streets to parents. I tell everyone when there is no camera my daughter disappears. I marry the camera man, give birth to a son, we grow the business to all of China.”

  Delta remembers the voice with thorns. “Your husband, he called and wanted you to go home. To him and your son.”

  Xu shakes her head. “My son is over twenty, already grown up. But Wenwen is still seven. She needs me.”

  She grabs both of their hands, new tears running down her face. “All my money I spend on private investigators and fortune tellers to find my daughter. They are completely useless.

  “This is, in over thirty years, my first real hope.”

  Delta’s never seen Lulu cry. She says something in halting third-generation Mandarin that Delta’s overlay interprets as “I’ll help you.”

  Xu looks out the window, trees faintly shimmering in Boston summer. From her pocket she retrieves a faded pink hair clip. “Wenwen,” she whispers to herself. “You are braver than me, always excitedly running ahead. For a long time I thought because I did so many wrong things, was a bad mother, that the heavens take you away from me. Now I know you are trapped by spacetime. I swear, no matter how difficult, I will spend my remaining time looking for you. You are my whole life.”