The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  But even he’s not as fast on the computer as I am.

  Without a degree in 22nd-century Chrono-Engineering, it will probably be hard for you to understand what I do, but essentially it boils down to this: the Garcia-Chidong Map marks the exact location in time and space where any given event takes place, and continually updates those coordinates against the General Timeline.

  Tiny aberrations in the system occur on a near-constant basis, 99% of which are non-significant. It’s terrifying the first time you see it — graphs constantly shifting in the blink of an eye.

  But you learn to filter out the stuff that doesn’t matter, the way astrophysicists learn not to think too hard about all the space debris hurtling towards Earth because the odds of any of it actually crashing and killing you are very slim.

  But until you get used to it, it feels like you’re hovering on the brink of disaster nearly all the time.

  The trick, my mother always said, was to look not at the moments but at the patterns, to take in the big and the small at the same time.

  Let’s say that a thirty-two-year-old accountant in Queens in 1986 has eggs for breakfast three days in a row and then on the fourth she changes her mind and decides she wants oatmeal.

  Does it matter? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe she’s just tired of eggs. Maybe she’s craving something sweet that morning. Maybe she wanted something easier to eat on the train. How hard do you think the thirty-two-year-old accountant is really thinking about it? Not that hard. It’s April. It’s tax season. Breakfast is the last thing on her mind.

  She would be astonished if she knew that a century in the future, we were watching her open the cupboard and take down the oats while lights flashed, alarms blared, panicked data techs sprinted from their desks with tablets in hand, and an emergency beacon commenced its frenzied blinking over the desk of the Director.

  That’s because what the accountant didn’t know was that she was supposed to have eggs this morning. That way, tomorrow morning she would wake up and realize she was out of eggs, run to the store before work, meet a twenty-eight-year-old veterinarian who was also buying eggs that morning, marry him three years later and give birth to a child who would grow up to discover the cure for Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

  Fortunately, the General Timeline carries within it a complex set of self-corrections. Maybe the accountant would miss the veterinarian at the grocery store but catch him two days later at the dry cleaners instead. Maybe she would come home from work that night and spill a whole quart of milk, sending her to the right aisle in the right grocery store at the right time tomorrow morning anyway to make sure she had milk for her coffee.

  That’s how you can tell the good agents from the great ones. The best agents — the ones like Grove, like my mother — can look at that picture and see past the details to find the pattern, to understand that it’s not about the eggs. It never is.

  So there I sat in my cubicle outside Grove’s office, staring at a dizzying array of coordinates, trying to look past the eggs.

  “How’s it coming?” I dimly heard Calliope ask from what felt like forty thousand miles away. I gave her sort of a mumbly grunt in response, my brain too busy to shape sounds into actual words.

  A few minutes later, I felt her shimmer into my peripherals as her white coat and golden hair emerged beside me from behind. She placed a giant mug of hot black coffee, God bless her, on the desk, wrapped my hand around it, and perched on the desk next to the screen.

  “Stop for five minutes,” she said firmly. “I can see your eyes glazing over.”

  “I’m fine,” I muttered without looking up.

  “Look away from the screen and up at me, and then drink your coffee. Five minutes. And let me call down to the kitchens and get you something to eat. You haven’t had any food since you had dinner. It’s after two now.”

  “I’ll be fine.” Pause. More seemed expected. “Thanks.”

  “Regina Bellows, un-fry your brain or you’re going to fall asleep in this chair. Or worse.”

  “What’s worse?”

  “You could make a mistake. In front of your mother.”

  That did it. I sighed, paused the screen, and turned to her. She had the giddy look of pleasure she always wore when she had some particularly juicy gossip for me.

  “All right, who did what?”

  “Well,” she began confidentially in her this-is-totally-a-secret-so-keep-it-better-than-I’m-about-to voice, “I just ran into Yasmina,”(she was my mother’s tech)“and she told me that Naomi on Six told her that there are ten apprentices getting fired tomorrow.”

  “Holy shit! Ten? What happened?” Apprentices got fired all the time; the whole point of the job, after all, was a brutal two-year elimination process to see who really had what it took to be an agent. We usually lost one or two a week out of the several hundred in the building. But ten at once was a big deal.

  “Naomi says that they were sending themselves back to two weeks ago to give themselves more time to finish their reports for the Director.”

  This was a major infringement. Besides the ban on unsupervised transport use, and the obvious fact that this was cheating and an apprentice who couldn’t finish their work on time didn’t deserve a chance to qualify as a field agent, there were few things more dangerous to the General Timeline — or to an agent — than a Double Incongruity.

  I said as much to Calliope, and she nodded.

  “They ran diagnostics and it doesn’t appear to have caused any lasting damage,” she said. “But they got busted on the return transport. A tech spotted interference in the Slipstream and told his supervisor. By the time they arrived back in the lab all their agents were waiting for them. And the department heads. And the Director.”

  I shuddered a little, temporarily feeling a twinge of compassion for my dishonest colleagues at the thought of how terrified they must have been to step out of the Slipstream and find themselves staring at those stony faces. They must have been so sure that they would get away with it, and now their careers were over before they even started. Poor cocky idiots.

  “Any of ours?” I asked.

  “Only one from this floor. Harriet Chao.”

  “Harriet?” I was astonished. “No way did Harriet need an extra two weeks for her report; she turns everything in three days early.”

  “It wasn’t her idea. The ringleaders were the Weston brothers, on Six. She was the only girl. The other nine were the Westons and their rich, white, asshole friends. That’s how Naomi found out, she’s their tech. They both got placed in Late Medieval and they’ve been struggling to keep up, so they got desperate to buy themselves some extra time.”

  She continued, “And then Chris Weston told a couple other people, and Jess Weston roped in his roommate, who is dating Harriet, so she went along with it. A bonehead move. But in her defense, I think she decided if she couldn’t stop them, she might as well make sure there was one person along for the ride with a brain to make sure they didn’t all totally kill themselves. I feel bad for her.”

  So did I. “She was never going to pass the practical exam, though,” I pointed out. “She declared for Mid-20th with an emphasis in World War II, but that era is a level 8 for Asians at best. Japanese-Americans were being rounded up and sent to internment camps. It’s way too dangerous. They were never going to put her in the field.”

  Calliope sighed. “Don’t you do anything stupid,” she said pointedly.

  “Like screw with the Timeline to cheat on a test? Not likely.”

  “Or give yourself a nervous breakdown. Or work thirty-six straight hours with no sleep and then get run over on your way to work because you were too tired to see where you were going. Or die of malnutrition. Or —”

  “I get it, Calliope.”

  “Did you know that after the first twenty-four hours without sleep, the human body —”

  “Yes, thank you, Calliope.”

  “I’m just saying,” she tossed over her shoulder as she bounced away. “You
should take better care of yourself. This floor can’t afford to lose anymore apprentices.”

  She was right. Harriet Chao was a big loss in an already-depleted department. Mid-20th had been my mother’s specialty. Back when she was a field agent, apprentices used to line up around the block to train with her.

  But five years ago, she had been promoted to Deputy Director, and once she was no longer an active agent, those showbiz-hungry newbies — the ones who wanted the glamour-by-association of the most high-profile Repairmen on their resume — found other mentors, just as flashy.

  Slowly Mid-20th began to revert to its pre-Katie Bellows state: a permanently exhausted and criminally understaffed department of overworked scholars who worked round-the-clock to patch one of the most chaotic 30-year periods in American History. There were at present only seven actives in our department, and only five of them had apprentices. After today, four.

  I understood why Mid-20th was unpopular. You didn’t get to fight with swords or ride horses or wear spectacular clothes. You didn’t get to hobnob with historical legends like in Renaissance or Colonial. Those are the gigs most apprentices wanted.

  Not me. This was my first and only choice. It wasn’t flashy, but its complexity fascinated me.

  * * *

  We took a class trip once to visit the 20th-Century History Museum at the Smithsonian. I think I was nine or ten but I remember it like it was yesterday.

  I spent the entire afternoon in the Early Computer Technology wing, running reverent fingertips over acrylic models of a 1977 Commodore PET, an 8-bit Apple II prototype, an original Jacquard loom, a Turing machine, and a whole evolutionary timeline of IBM processors before stopping short at the vast glass case enclosing the holy of holies.

  It was the centerpiece of the entire exhibit, the entire reason I had awoken cheerfully and uncomplainingly at 5 am to eat breakfast in the dark with my mother in order to beat the morning train rush and meet the rest of the class outside the museum before it opened at 7.

  The Colossus.

  Oh, how I revered the Colossus Mark II. The granddaddy of decryption, the original code breaker, the unappreciated genius whose brilliance went unnoticed in its time due to pesky UK national security concerns.

  The computer that ended World War II.

  It was a thing of beauty, the size of a small room, all metal pins and vacuum tubes and paper tape that seemed both ageless and ancient at the same time.

  Built in 1944 to decode German telegraphs sent by the Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine, the Colossus was kept under the highest security until the 1970s. Hardly anyone had even known that it existed.

  My mother, who had walked up the block from her office to meet us at the museum for lunch, (much to the starry-eyed delight of the café staff, my teacher, my classmates and random passersby who kept stopping her for autographs), peppered me with questions about the things I had seen and learned that morning.

  As I swooned to her, my mouth full of sandwich, about how the Colossus was the first machine to use vacuum tubes to perform Boolean operations, I could see the familiar weary puzzlement in her eyes, a sort of “Joke’s over, I’d like my real daughter back please” expression I had seen thousands upon thousands of times.

  It was the look I got when she came home from work to find Leo and his friends playing gladiators, Viking warriors or pirates in the living room while I sat primly on the couch with a math textbook.

  Leo Jr. and Regina Bellows, the only children of the late great Leo Carstairs and the famous Katie Bellows, two of the greatest legends in the past, present or future of time travel. Adventure should be in our blood. We were supposed to be made for bold, heroic things.

  Well, I can’t speak for Leo, but I certainly wasn’t.

  * * *

  A pencil hit me in the back of my head, startling me out of my fuzzy-brained reminiscences. “You’re staring into space,” Calliope shouted from across the office. “Go home.”

  I sighed. “Can we compromise?” I asked. “If I go downstairs and eat some post-dinner, will you let me come back and work?”

  She gave me a suspicious look, but finally nodded in agreement. One of the things I like about Calliope, and why I count my lucky stars every day that I landed in her department, is that she never complains about the hours or the workload.

  Apprentices aren’t supposed to be logged into the system without a tech present, which means she’s supposed to be here whenever I’m here. So the fact that I’ve been at the office for almost a full day and a half without a break means she has been too. And yet, she never complains.

  Though, just to play devil’s advocate for a minute, she did just throw a pencil at my head. So there’s that.

  Three

  Just A Glitch

  I had used the word “post-dinner” to Calliope, but it would technically have fallen more accurately somewhere in the dead zone between “midnight snack” and “early breakfast.”

  It was three in the morning, and the commissary was empty. Behind the metal counters I could see into the huge, gleaming kitchens. There were only a few staff members at this time of night.

  Kenny, the night manager, was washing out a big pile of baking pans in the industrial sink. As I walked up to the counter, I could hear him singing quietly to himself as he blasted the angry, steaming nozzle at chunks of crusted cheese from whatever the pans had originally held.

  Lindsay, his assistant, spotted me from her chair in the corner and set down her book. (It will tell you all you need to know about my work habits that I’m on a first-name basis with the night staff in the kitchens.)

  “How’s the report?” asked Lindsay. Kenny turned at the sound of her voice and shut off the faucets.

  “Hey Reg,” he greeted me.

  “Hey Kenny. It’s going okay,” I said, turning back to Lindsay. “I think I’m going to finish in time to maybe get a nap and a shower before I have to actually go hand it in.”

  “That oughta make Calliope happy,” said Kenny.

  “That’s the idea,” I said. “You know how she gets.”

  “Well, what can we fix for you? If you’re going to power through until morning, let’s get some protein in your system. We’ve got some lamb stew left from dinner that I can heat up for you if that sounds all right.”

  “It sounds great.”

  “She has low standards,” Lindsay pointed out, going to the cold storage case and pulling out the pan of stew. “She only eats when Calliope makes her and she couldn’t care less how it tastes.”

  “Gets it from her mama,” Kenny laughed, turning back to his scrubbing. “Carstairs was the food snob of the family. Isn’t your brother a cook somewhere?”

  “Dubrovnik,” I said. “He has a little seafood place on the water.”

  “I’ve been there,” said Lindsay. “My mom and I went on Opening Day when they launched the high-speed to Croatia and your brother’s restaurant was on the tour. There were lines around the block.”

  “What did you eat?” I asked.

  “Crostini with scallops, this totally to-die-for lemon shrimp stew —

  “I’ve had that stew. Amazing.”

  “It was perfection. And then a grilled sole in herbed butter. And lots of wine.”

  “You chose wisely,” I told her.

  * * *

  Mom and I were regulars at Leo’s. Though fairly catch-as-catch-can cooks on our own time — I frequently subsisted on government-issue nutritional supplements or took my meals standing in front of the refrigerator, and I know my mother did the same thing at her own house — we do appreciate good food when it’s put in front of us, contrary to Kenny and Lindsay’s teasing.

  Mom’s rule is that she won’t eat anywhere that it would take more time to travel to than to eat a good dinner at. The High-Speed Transatlantic Underground put Leo’s Croatian bistro just slightly outside that margin (with a transfer at Lisbon it was just over two and a half hours), but Leo was so busy that if we didn’t make reservations at least once
a month, we would never get a chance to see him.

  Leo was something of a puzzlement to my mother, I knew. He had never expressed the slightest shred of interest in joining the family business. He listened politely and with occasional interest to our stories about Repairman work, but it was an alien world to him.

  In some ways, my brother was a creature of another time.

  He had fallen hard for Croatia, one of the few developed Western nations that had never lost its Old World charm. You could take the Underground into Dubrovnik, but there was only one stop. You had to walk or ride bikes inside the city walls. They still built houses out of stone and mortar, so new houses matched the thousand-year-old castles and cottages lining the white sand beaches.

  In the military bases and expat outposts, they lived like we did, with food supplements and hydration tablets, but outside those walls the city still felt untouched.

  Time Travel was fortunate to be the only government bureau with a full-service cafeteria serving fresh food, but our agents wouldn’t have allowed it any other way. Try getting an agent who’s been posted in 18th-century Provence on a three-year assignment to come back to 22nd-century Washington D.C. to work behind a desk.

  No, our food service department had gleaming flatware made from real silver, a diverse international menu featuring our field agents’ favorite recipe discoveries — the lamb stew Lindsay placed in front of me, in a steaming copper bowl, was clearly North African in origin, exuding a dense steam of warm, heady spices — and even a sommelier in the executive dining hall on the top floor.

  Fresh produce wouldn’t transport through the Slipstream, but nonperishable items traveled just fine.

  About thirty years ago, an agent discovered the curious fact that spirits brought back through the stream would age correctly in transit — meaning, an agent who brought a bottle of newly-bottled whiskey back from two hundred years ago would arrive with a bottle of two-hundred-year-old whiskey.