by Glover, Nhys
‘And if I don’t want to go with you?’
‘Then you’ll die.’
‘When, how?’
‘I can’t tell you that. It would alter the time line. We don’t mess with the Continuum. Ever.’
‘The Butterfly Effect.’ Her voice was very soft and monotone.
‘Yes. We can’t know what effect your continued existence on this time-line might cause. The people you might influence. The seat you take on a plane that’s fated to crash, which should have belonged to someone else. The person who should have replaced you at your job, who doesn’t get the chance to say what they need to say to a person who should have gone on to greatness… The possibilities are limitless. ‘
‘But I will die soon.’
‘You would have died soon. I’m going to make you something to eat. You haven’t had breakfast, have you?’
He let her hands go, and walked back into the kitchenette. He hated this: the marking time. Not having anything to do. Having to wait to see which way she would jump. Needing to be prepared for whatever questions came next.
‘Will you tell me about your time, so I know what I’ll be agreeing to?’
He’d found some eggs, tomatoes, spring onions and capsicum in the fridge. From another cupboard he pulled a skillet.
‘Do you like omelettes? I haven’t done a lot of cooking in the last few hundred years, but I think I can still make an omelette.’
‘Mmm? Oh, yeah. Anything. You really don’t have to do that, though. I … I’m not really hungry.’
‘You’re in shock. I need to feed you. Ground you.’ He set about making her a meal.
‘’Kay.’
For a while she said nothing as he pottered around in the kitchen. He tried to keep his hands from shaking. The sense of being out of control was back with a vengeance.
‘When you asked me how I’d cope if everything was taken away? That wasn’t an idle question was it?’ she asked a little while later, when he had the omelette in the pan.
‘No, not an idle question. Call it an interview question. My job is to determine if a candidate is going to be able to handle what’s going to happen. We can make some educated guesses, based on the way you’ve lived your life up to now. What our records tell us, anyway. But your internal world – no way we can truly understand that, unless we meet you and probe a bit.’
‘So, if I said I nearly committed suicide when my son died, I’d be crossed off the list?’
Jac tipped the omelette onto a plate, grabbed a fork, brought the plate to her, and watched as she started to eat.
‘You didn’t attempt suicide when your son died. Or that’s what our records say.’
‘I nearly did. I got really, really close. Had the bath filled up with hot water. And the knife … But then I couldn’t do it. Maybe I was too scared of the pain, or of dying. I just couldn’t do it.’
‘That gives you a tick on the checklist. Everyone feels like ending the pain, when it gets unbearable. It’s whether you carry it through, that counts, as far as we’re concerned. In your own words, you bounced back. You have made a good life for yourself. And you’re the sort of person who can make a good life for herself again. In my world.’
Cara sat quietly on the sofa for a few minutes, eating her omelette. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She fascinated him. The kiss they’d shared wouldn’t let go of him, and his body throbbed with pent desire. In all his three hundred odd years, he couldn’t remember ever feeling so wound up, so sexually charged, as he was in this new body right now. His feelings and his behaviour were highly uncharacteristic.
He’d blame it on the body itself, if he hadn’t had the exact version of himself every time. Its responses were always the same, once he was fully integrated. But even when the integration wasn’t complete, as it was now, he should be experiencing absences, dead spots, where responses would later develop. He wouldn’t behave in totally uncharacteristic ways.
After three hundred years, he knew exactly who he was and how he would react in any given circumstance. Or he had, up until this Jump.
It might have been more interesting, if they’d been able to chop and change bodies, to experience different perceptions or emotional responses. That was the aim, in the early years of experimentation with hyper-accelerated cellular development. They’d learned how to grow a body to maturation in thirty days. While the world was falling apart, in what was later called the Second Dark Age, scientists worked to manufacture genetically engineered armies for war. They’d had such high hopes.
But they found they could create bodies from DNA, but they couldn’t create Consciousness to animate them. The drones, as they were called, were like puppets without a puppeteer pulling their strings.
So they went to Plan B. Take the Consciousness of a weakling, and put it into a genetically superior body. But they quickly discovered that Consciousness couldn’t be integrated into a body that wasn’t its own, genetically speaking. The Consciousness couldn’t activate the neural pathways of someone else’s brain.
The scientists had no idea why; the amalgam just wouldn’t take. And so the program was put on the backburners, until the Last Great Plague decimated the population, and left those that remained physically compromised. From that point on, clones became the only possible future for mankind, sterile as they turned out to be.
He’d been so lost in thoughts of the past, that when Cara stood up and took her plate into the kitchen, he was surprised.
‘Would you like a glass of wine? I know it’s still morning, but I feel like alcohol. Unfortunately, all I’ve got is a bottle of chardonnay I got as a gift from someone at Christmas.’
He didn’t feel like drinking, but if it helped her deal with the situation, he’d share a bottle with her. From his records, he knew that she hadn’t had a drinking or drug problem. It was not a way that she dealt with her issues.
‘Sure, why not.’
He watched her intently, feeling the tension building in her body. It was all getting too much for her. As she began struggling vainly with the bottle, the wine bore the brunt of her intense emotions. She grew more and more agitated with each botched attempt she made to remove the cork.
Coming up behind her, Jac reached around, and gently took the bottle and the corkscrew from her shaking hands.
‘Thanks, thanks. I seem to be all thumbs at the moment. I’m not handling this well. I’m sorry,’ she muttered as she watched him make quick work of the cork.
He put the bottle down, and folded her soft body into his arms, feeling her shaking against him. Brushing her silky hair back from her face, he kissed her gently on the forehead.
‘You are doing really well, Cara. I’ve dumped a whole lot onto you in one go. You are holding up far better than most.’
‘How many times have you done this … Retrieval?’
‘A lot. We’ve been able to move through the Space-Time Continuum for about sixty five years or so. That’s one of the advantages of an extended lifespan. You can keep working on your projects for as long as it takes. It took a hundred and fifty years to prefect time travel, although experimentation had been going on as far back as your own time. Quantum Physics provided the breakthrough.
‘I was one of the first candidates enlisted to undertake Retrieval. My background was in cultural studies. I was fascinated by the way people lived in the past, especially after … after it was all gone. It was a form of escape, I think in the beginning, studying the past.
‘I had my specialities. Cultures like this one. And when the Government gave the go ahead for Retrieval, about five years after the Portals were created, they went for periods when there was plenty of existing data. There’s not a lot of information about individuals living in Classical Greece or the Mayan Culture, you know. We gather information from those periods, for research purposes only. We rarely Retrieve from them.
‘Unless we know exactly when and how someone is to die, and can extract them without creating an anomaly, Retrieval is out.�
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‘How can you know your space co-ordinate is right? I mean, you might walk into a tree or a house. Or if you went way back into history, where the land would have been much lower than it is today, you’d end up walking into empty space, ten feet above the ground.’
‘Smart girl,’ Jac said with a smile. ‘We have to use pretty detailed topography, and geological extrapolations, that sort of thing. Not my field. But the Portal can’t be crossed if there’s a blockage on the other side. A bit like walking into a wall. If I hadn’t used the co-ordinates for Olympus before, and the portal had opened next to a wall, or even in the middle of a wall, then when I went to put my foot through, I’d have stubbed my toe. I wouldn’t have got any further.
‘So we always step carefully into unknown territory. In a case like the one I just described, after I stubbed a toe, I’d recalibrate, and try again. Bit of trial and error.
‘The first Jump is always a risk. We don’t know whether there’ll be people around on the other side or not. We do a lot of two stepping. Open a portal, step through, take in the situation, step back, and close down. The portal stays open maybe two seconds.
‘For anyone on the other side who might observe a portal activating, it would seem like a flickering on the edge of their perception. You know, when you think you see something, but then there’s nothing there. Your brain convinces you it saw nothing. I think our experiments are probably responsible for a lot of the reported unexplained phenomena throughout history, like fairies, ghosts, and magic. ’
He stopped to see if she was following, and the little frown and nod reassured him she was taking it in.
‘The further back in time you go, the less likely people are of picking up the flicker. They aren’t expecting it, and it flashes in and out so fast it doesn’t even register. Like if you watched a movie that flashed an unrelated image at you during a scene. You wouldn’t consciously see it. There was a lot of work done on subliminal programming using that technique in your time.
‘Your culture is very sophisticated, visually. Your media has given you that. So you’re likely to see the flicker. Even register it consciously. But sixty years ago, different story. A hundred and sixty years ago, even less visual sophistication.
‘We try for late night Jumps, to reduce the risk of observation. Once we’ve established contact within a certain time-line we have a rather sophisticated GPS system, which means that we can open the Portal in a more effective position. We then use that, as and when we need to, for the return Jump.
‘The Portal I took you through – to that spot on Mount Olympus. I calibrated that for my last exit. The chances of being seen were limited.’
Cara placed her head on his shoulder, and drew in a deep breath. He knew he was overwhelming her and should stop. But while ever she asked questions, he would answer her.
‘How many Retrievals have you done personally in those sixty years, Jack?’
‘As I said, a lot. Hundreds. Maybe closer to a thousand. I don’t keep count, although the Techs do.’
‘How many of those don’t go through with it? Or, when they get to the other side, don’t handle it?’
‘God, you go right for the jugular, don’t you? I have a high Retrieval rate – about 90%. As far as my C & B rate? Only 3%.’
‘C & B?’
‘Crash and Burn. It’s a slang term from your era we employ. We use it to describe those who do not make the transition, psychologically. They have what you’d call a nervous breakdown.’
‘How many years of therapy does it take for them to recover?’
He looked away, wishing he could lie to her. But he couldn’t. It wasn’t fair. She needed to know exactly what she was getting herself into. She needed to know her chances of survival. Most people never asked these questions, especially so early on. It was an indication of her excellent mind that she did.
‘They don’t recover. A C & B can’t integrate with their new body. They will die fairly rapidly, in that case. So to speed the process, they’re terminated.’
‘Terminated. As in killed.’
‘As in euthanasia. They would have died anyway, in their own time-line. And they’d die comparatively quickly, after the Jump, if they stayed in their own bodies. We bring it forward to reduce their suffering.’
‘Why do they die quickly?’ She stepped back out of his arms, and looked at him suspiciously, obviously not liking what she was hearing.
‘The buzzing you felt? That’s not healthy. It accelerates cellular degeneration. It also causes sterilisation. Clones have a shelf life of about a hundred years – adult years. Healthy, comparatively youthful years. We Jumpers go through them much more quickly than that. A consistent Jumper will go through a mature clone in thirty years. As I said, if I’d Jumped here a few weeks ago, you’d have met a man who looked about fifty. I couldn’t sustain the body past that age though, because of rapid internal degeneration. So I had to take on another cloned body, just before I made this Jump. I usually undertake intensive rehab with a new body, before Jumping. This time I didn’t. That’s why you’re seeing glitch behaviour. Normally it would be another week before I’d be functioning close to normally.
‘But to answer your question, you can say that Jumping reduces life expectancy by maybe 75%.’
‘The more you Jump, the faster the cellular degeneration?’ Cara asked.
Jac nodded. He wanted to scream as he saw her brain turning over the information.
‘So, if you jump hundreds of times, and you get to live thirty years. Why does a Crash and Burn, who only Jumps the once, have such a greatly reduced life expectancy?’
He thought of telling her it was that Originals were weaker. To a certain extent it was true. That’s why they sustained damage to their reproductive capabilities. But that damage wasn’t enough to make the kind of difference he’d led her to believe.
‘So it’s crap. The euthanasia thing. They could live decades after the Jump, but if their mind isn’t strong enough for the transition into a new body, they’re terminated immediately. Throw the petri dish culture out, and start a new batch,’ she said with disgust.
Jac grimaced at the cynical description. He wished it wasn’t true, but it was. The 24th Century could afford to cherry-pick its inhabitants, and so it only kept the best and the most useful. It didn’t have time to undertake lengthy psychoanalysis, especially as the chance of a quick fix was small.
‘We don’t have the resources to deal with non-productive members of society. It might seem cruel, but balanced against that is the fact that we have no crime, no aggression, no serious illness, and almost no death. In so many ways, we are a utopian society.’
‘Unless you crash and burn?’
‘Yes.’
‘You terminate the life and just go Retrieve someone else?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see.’
Chapter Six
Cara waited for Jac to pour her a glass of wine. Her brain was on overload, she knew. All the information was piling up. But the more she got, the more questions came to mind.
Taking the wine, she returned to the sofa and sat staring out the open french windows. It was nearing midday, she estimated, and the lovely summer’s day was laid out for her enjoyment. Sitting here, she could see the scattering of white fluffy clouds around the distant mountains. From here, she could see when a storm was coming in. She loved watching them approach.
But this storm was not one she could watch approach. She was in it, and it crashed around her, terrifying her with its intensity. Terrifying her with its outcome. She was dying. Or going to die. In some way, very soon, she would cease to be in the world she had known all her life. She would never see Laura again. She would never see her students again. There would be no trips to the Mall, or the gym, or dinners out with colleagues. No days like today.
Suddenly, she didn’t want to be sitting around drinking herself comatose. She wanted to be out there, in the sunshine, enjoying what was left of her life. And she wa
nted to share it with Jac, she realised with a start. It wouldn’t be as good if he wasn’t with her.
She placed her glass on the coffee table in front of her, and stood up. Jac, still standing in the kitchen with a glass of wine in his hands, looked over at her in surprise.
‘I want to go out. If my time here is limited, I want to make the most of it. Do you have something you have to do, or can you come with me?’
The smile he gave her was enough to send her heart into over-drive, reinforcing the realization that he was the most attractive man she’d ever met. The young Brad Pitt looked ordinary in comparison. She loved the golden tan of his skin and the way his forest green eyes twinkled. Even the tawny lock of hair, which fell over his forehead into those gorgeous eyes, was appealing. Although the urge to brush that recalcitrant lock off his face was hard to quell.
But, to succumb to the temptation of brushing that hair back, would be too intimate a gesture. They may have shared several kisses and a hug, but she still felt unsure around him. Rejection was still a possibility. After all, she was just a job to him. Just one of hundreds he had done over the course of sixty years.
She wondered if he used his sex appeal to convince women to make the Jump. It stood to reason he would. It certainly was the reason she was considering it more seriously than she might otherwise have done. What did that make her – a foolish old woman?
‘My time here is my own, until you make the Jump with me, or decide against it. And I would love to spend the day with you, exploring your world a little more. I’ve never been to Lake Innes before. It seems like a nice town.’
‘It is. We’re far enough from New York City to be safe, but close enough to have access to what that city does best. I’ve lived here most of my life.’