by A. G. Riddle
Sabrina drones on, oblivious to my catatonic state. “When you and Grayson died after they stole the therapy in 2071, Nicholas and Oliver were devastated. Since that day, they’ve devoted their lives to recovering the two of you, to starting over. They manipulated the Titans, steered Yul and Sabrina here in the future, and us in the past. They tricked and connived, all to get you and Grayson here. Nicholas will go to any length to be with you. He’s killed for you, and he’s planning to kill again.”
It’s hard to imagine the Nick I know taking a life, but I have to remind myself that this is another person, separated by over 130 years’ time, someone who has changed a great deal, no matter what he may look like.
Sabrina pauses, reading my expression. “After our plane crossed into this time, Nicholas and Oliver launched their attack at Heathrow. Their first targets were Yul and Sabrina, the keys to resetting the quantum bridge and returning the passengers of Flight 305 to 2015. During the fighting Yul tried to reset the bridge, but he was unsuccessful—he only sent a series of disturbances along the link.”
“Which crashed our plane.”
“Yes. Nicholas killed Yul and Sabrina before the bridge could be reset.”
“Those are the bodies I saw in the lab next door?”
“Correct. About half of all the Titans were killed at Heathrow. Ten remain loyal to Oliver and Nicholas. There are twelve here. Since the crash, they’ve all been looking for the three of us, but it was . . . my future self’s faction that found us.”
“Why?”
“They want Yul and me to complete our counterparts’ work, to reset the bridge and return Flight 305 and its passengers to 2015.”
“Is that possible?”
“We’re not sure. We’ve been working on it. And another project, the original plan to save the world we came from.”
Sabrina’s usually stoic mask fades a bit. That makes me nervous.
“We believe, however, that we may be almost out of time. A few hours ago one of our surveillance drones spotted Nick—the Nick you and I know—and Grayson entering the Titan camp at Heathrow. We believe they were searching for the three of us. Motivations aside, Nick and Grayson are with Oliver and Nicholas right now, who are no doubt feeding them misinformation, enlisting their help in a final assault.”
Don’t like the sounds of that. “Final assault?”
“They’re coming here, to Titan City. Their goal, as I said, is to destroy the quantum device, ensuring that the bridge can never be reset. Only one thing has kept them from destroying the city and the quantum device with it.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“You, Harper. You’re Nicholas’s one true desire; he would never risk killing you. So long as you’re here, Nicholas and Oliver can’t make a direct strike on the city. They’ll have to come in to extract you.”
“So, I’m . . . bait?”
“Leverage.”
Now we’re playing word games with my life.
“You’re the only thing that’s prevented everyone here from being killed already. I’ve told you all of this because I believe you might determine all of our fates. When the time comes, when Nicholas, Oliver, Nick, Grayson, and their Titans invade the city, you’ll have a decision to make.”
Oh, God, anything else. I put my face in my hands. I’d like a stiff drink about now.
“Harper, are you listening to me?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No, you don’t. In a few short hours, you’ll have to decide whether the passengers of Flight 305 return to our time or stay here in 2147.”
Blimey.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Harper
I THINK SABRINA IS AS PAINED BY OUR hour-long discussion as I am. We keep going back over the same things, debating, running through scenarios and what-ifs, but in the end it’s all quite simple:
Once Nicholas has me, this whole place will go up. Game over. And the passengers of Flight 305 will never have any chance of returning home. Those hundred and twenty-one souls who didn’t get the vaccine, who either died in the crash or the outbreak after, will be dead forever, and the rest of us will be trapped here. It will be as if Flight 305 disappeared over the Atlantic. The world will assume it crashed, all passengers and crew lost.
We’ll never see our families again. They’ll bury us. Mourn. Move on (hopefully). But they might also avoid the pandemic that claimed every life on Earth in this time, save for the Titans who now wage a civil war over the fate of Flight 305.
And then there’s the other side, the possibility that Yul and Sabrina will succeed and we’ll all return to Flight 305, unaware that anything ever happened. I will have never met the Nick Stone I came to . . . know (I want to use another word, but I won’t let myself; it will only make my dilemma worse). Must keep emotion out. Must make a rational decision. So easy to say . . . but the Nicholas from this world and my future self, they . . . Okay, last time I’m thinking about that.
“What’s your decision, Harper?” Sabrina presses.
They’re anxious to know what I’ll do when Nicholas and friends arrive. I wonder if they’ll jail me if I say the wrong thing.
“I don’t know.”
“Unacceptable.”
I let my face fall into my hands and mumble while I massage my eyelids. “I don’t know, Sabrina, okay? It’s a lot to take in. I just need . . . some time, all right?”
“We don’t have time.”
I just stare at her.
“Very well. Perhaps some rest will give you the perspective you need.”
She walks to a cabinet and retrieves two notebooks I recognize well. “I believe these are yours.”
The tranquilizing burr is still stuck through my journal, and the Alice Carter notebook is as I remember it.
“Thanks,” I mumble. I glance around the lab, unsure where to go. “Can I . . .”
“You’re free to go anywhere you wish, Harper. This isn’t a prison.”
Sabrina runs down the layout of Titan City, which contains five towers, each dedicated to one of the original five Titan Marvels and shaped like human fingers, together forming a hand reaching out of the massive dam toward the sky, the ocean to its backside, its palm facing the new land the Titans created, waving.
I’ll give it to them for originality.
Our current tower (finger?), which houses the labs, lies in the middle, rising slightly above the two on each side, to symbolize the central role of science and research. Facing the Atlantic, the tower to its right is a hotel; the ring finger represents the Titan union with humanity and visitors. The shorter, narrower tower closest to Gibraltar holds the Titan apartments. On the left side of the lab tower, the pointer finger holds an office complex, and the thumb, which points toward Africa, is dedicated to support staff and storage.
I leave the lab tower through the double doors and walk awhile along the promenade that overlooks the waterfall, down the dam into the shadow of the five fingers, which I had been too close to make out before. There I stand for a long time, staring at the ribbons of sunlight that slip through the fingers. From here I can see the Atlantic all the way to the horizon to my left and the deep, jagged canyon the dam created to my right. The charred airships sit placidly at the base of the hand of Titan City, awaiting their final battle. My hair blows around again, strands lashing my mouth and eyes.
In the sky just left of the last finger, I notice a streak like a red-hot poker, driving down through the clouds. It wasn’t there before. What could it be? A meteor? A comet?
BACK INSIDE, I EXPECT TO find Sabrina in the lab where she and I spoke at length, but it’s empty. She and Yul must be inside the lab tower somewhere.
On the second floor I hear a voice—Sabrina’s—talking at length, with no give and take. Not surprising. I approach the door, but something makes me wait. The tone . . . it’s different somehow. It’s Sabrina, yet not as robotic.
“Okay, I’m telling you this . . . well, just in case.”
Sabrina p
auses.
“I want to walk you through my notes on the therapy, but first, there’s some personal things I want to say, that could . . . help you if you manage to make it back with these memories.”
It’s Sabrina—future Sabrina—talking with herself.
“The first is to stop seeing your social limitations as an excuse not to socialize. For most of my life I saw my social inability as a reason not to build personal relationships. I felt I was incapable and that it was therefore useless to try. I was wrong. Every mind has limits. Some have a relative disadvantage in language production, short-term memory, math, or spatial ordering. Your mind has a significant limitation in social awareness and interaction. You have some capacity, and it will only erode with lack of use. You must see your mind differently. If math is a weakness, you must do math to get better. In the same way, you must socialize and try to form bonds with people to get better at it. It will be awkward. You will believe it’s a waste of time, but it isn’t. Your range is limited, but it exists—I know for a fact. I’ve had a hundred and sixty-seven years to prove it. When you get back, you must commit yourself to making an effort, and when you fail, ask yourself what you can learn. I kept a journal and reviewed my findings regularly, drawing correlations from my experiences. Your social shortcomings are like anything else: you must practice to get better. You must try, fail, learn, and try again to ever improve.
“There’s one other thing. Steven, in your lab, has a huge crush on you, but he’s far too intimidated by you to ask you out. In three years he’ll marry another tech in your lab. They will never be happy, and she will leave him in another five years. He’ll never be the same after that. Ask him if he wants to have coffee after work, and tell him there’s only one rule: you can’t talk about work. See where things go from there.
“Now. On to my notes. For years I made very little progress. The breakthrough was realizing that a person dies with the same neurons they are born with. Neurons don’t age like other cells. They don’t divide or die off and are rarely replaced by new ones. You are born with and die with the same roughly one hundred billion neurons. However, over the course of your life, the electrical impulses those neurons store changes. The electrical changes are your memories. Like the nodes in Q-net, the neurons in your brain are made of the same particles in both worlds. The only difference between here and there is the placement of electrons. . . .”
I inch around the glass door to the lab, just far enough to peer in. Sabrina sits on a stool with her back to me, hunched over a lab table, her black hair unmoving. There’s another Sabrina staring out at me, her eyes not quite as lifeless as the ones I’ve come to know. She’s still talking. It’s a recording, playing back on a giant screen on the far wall of the lab. The future Sabrina made a video, a just-in-case encapsulation of her notes. These people think of everything.
Instinctively I back away. The technical talk is beyond me, but I’m sure of one thing: whatever future Sabrina is telling her past self, it can’t possibly have to do with the vaccine—that’s already been solved.
So it’s a new experiment—something Sabrina didn’t tell me about.
I’m lost in thought as I turn the corner. The next corridor is the same as the last: glass doors set in marble walls. In the echoing space, I hear another voice. Yul. As before, I draw close enough to the door to hear him. It’s another recording, but it may as well be in Chinese; I can barely understand a word. It’s all mathematical theories and variables and stuff I can’t even wager a guess about.
Then it loops, starting from the top. Yul must be working while listening to the recording in the background.
“Okay. Sabrina wants me to make this video as a backup, a guide to my work in case . . . the worst happens. And I agree there’s a chance of that, but the truth is this: there’s little chance you’re ever going to complete my work—”
Someone shouts offstage—Sabrina, I think—and the video cuts out. It resumes a second later.
“I guess this is take two. I’m supposed to provide personal guidance to you, anything that could help you live a better life, assuming you make it back to 2015 with your memories, which, again, is doubtful—”
Another shout, and the camera cuts out again. The voice resumes after a few seconds.
“Anyway, on to the task at hand. The first thing you should know is that your understanding of quantum physics is incomplete. Woefully. In a few years—your time—an experiment at CERN will change the way you see the quantum world. Space-time isn’t what you think it is. It’s far stranger. Your current understanding is simplistic and limits your thinking. The discovery at CERN will be the breakthrough that makes everything in the next hundred and thirty years possible. So I’m faced with the impossible task of condensing over a century of breakthroughs in particle physics down into a two-hour video course. Even though I’m teaching a younger version of myself, I still believe it’s impossible, that it will take you years to even grasp the concepts my work is based upon, much less achieve the level of understanding necessary to complete it in weeks or days. Nevertheless, here we go. You’ve been warned.
“And before you get any wild ideas, let me stop you: time travel to the past is impossible. Even under the new paradigm, matter can only travel into the future, as your plane did. We can, however, change the state of linked particles that exist in both times. The problem is power. The more massive the particle, the more power you need. The dam only generates enough power to change the state of very small particles, those with a minute amount of mass. Electrons are the most useful, for our purposes. That’s how I sent the messages via Q-net. Here’s where it gets tricky. . . .”
What follows is the balance of the lecture I caught the end of, again in a language wholly foreign to me, spoken in English but in the vernacular of mathematics and physics.
After a few minutes of listening, I come to a conclusion: we’re screwed. I mean, why didn’t the Yul of the future just program an off switch on the thing? I guess to ensure his safety. Or maybe it’s more complicated than that. It certainly sounds like it. Or maybe the task at hand isn’t related to the quantum bridge at all. Maybe it’s another experiment completely—possibly related to Sabrina’s work. I feel like a revelation is just out of reach, a piece I haven’t connected. There’s something they aren’t telling me.
I peer around the doorframe. Inside the lab, Yul’s head rests on his crossed arms on the raised table in the center. He’s not working. Or is he . . .
I push the door open, and he looks up at me with bloodshot, watery eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I ask quietly.
“I can’t figure it out. He’s right.”
He shakes his head.
“And I’ve got a migraine. It’s killing me.”
“Sabrina can’t help?” I ask.
“We’re not . . . speaking right now.”
“You have to, Yul.”
He sets his head back on his arms. “I’ll die first. We’re all probably going to anyway.”
I back out of the lab, pace out of the wing, returning to Sabrina’s lab. I pause outside, waiting for the deeply personal part where she talks about the tech in her lab to pass, then push her door open.
She turns, surprised to see me. Her hand moves quickly to the table, and the screen blinks out.
“Harper . . .”
“Yul needs you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Harper
AFTER THE YUL-SABRINA INTERVENTION, I WANDER AROUND THE lab tower a bit more, then the Titan apartments, which are lavish in the extreme. The guardians of humanity weren’t exactly slumming it. Then I make my way back to the hotel tower, to the room where I awoke. I guess this is home. Maybe forever.
I’ve turned the decision over in my mind until I’m ready to scream. Stay here, doom the other passengers, possibly save our world. Go back, and all the passengers will live. We’ll disembark. Maybe Nick and I will pass by each other, strangers. Maybe he’ll help me get my bag down, just a
nother anonymous person he shared a flight from JFK to Heathrow with. Then . . . history repeats itself. Possibly. Or maybe not. Is the future already written? I suppose it comes down to that question.
I have realized one thing, why the antibiotics decision was so easy, back at the nose section of the plane: it was only my life I had to decide about. I was willing to sacrifice myself to save those others. I still am. When I was at the lake, that was another easy decision, made without a second of hesitation. Yeah, I’m a good swimmer. And that’s how it’s been my whole life—when others are involved, when my actions help somebody else, it’s easy. I never realized that before. But when it’s just me, my career, my love life, I fall apart. I know what I want: to stay in this ruined world with my memories and everything I’ve learned about myself, to stay here with Nick. But if I do, I’ll be sacrificing the lives of every passenger who died in the crash or from the plague in the days after. They will stay dead. Perhaps that’s the only certainty in this whole thing.
I’m caught in a mental loop. I need to get away from it for a bit.
I sit down at the wood table under the picture window that looks out on the seemingly endless Atlantic. In the air, the burning streak is gone, just a line of white smoke now. Next to it, a new, slender line of crimson is forming. What is it? I was so lost in the videos at the labs that I forgot to ask Sabrina. I consider returning, but something else calls to me more powerfully: the Alice Carter notebook.
I flip it open, and a loose piece of paper falls out. It’s my handwriting, a note, apparently to myself.
It’s never too late to start, never too late to finish. And I will. I’ve worked far too long on others’ dreams, put off my own love, this one and the one I can’t speak of. After all this time, I realize that it’s like Tennyson once said, ‘ ’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’ I know that now. I know that I would have rather tried and failed than never to have tried at all.
I gently place the note on the table and flip the pages, reading my old scribblings for a story about a girl who receives a letter on her eighteenth birthday . . . from her future self. In the letter, Alice tells her younger self that she alone holds the keys to the Eternal Secrets, three ancient artifacts that allow their owner to control time. Hunted by a shadowy cabal with technology almost indistinguishable from magic, Alice descends into a strange world where her decisions will determine the course of history and the fate of everyone she loves.