by Ryan Graudin
Earth’s capital was the seed of a million migraines, with its smog and tangled lights, but there was a pause every day when it transformed. Locals like Burg knew this as the “Flaming Hour,” when the setting sun caught pollution particles at just the right angle to spread orange bright into every corner of the evening. The city became fire itself, unmatched by anything in history. One world, one light. It was Rome ascended, forged from peace instead of war.
None of this materialized from the black. Nicholas stayed hunched over his screens, taking strings of numbers and crunching them into the precise result that would land the Ab Aeterno when they wanted: April 18, 2354 AD, 12:01 PM. One minute after their departure one year ago.
Burg sat down at his own station to disconnect Empra’s feed from his comm, but there was no need. Her shrieks had gone silent, a rougher, wordless cry taking their place.
Nicholas looked up at the sound, cheeks ashen. “Is that—”
It was. Newborn lungs drunk on their first swig of air. The cries kept on and the Engineer made the eight-pointed sign of a cross over his chest. Burg felt his own color draining while he looked toward the infirmary, then back to the dizzying dark of the Grid. As a time traveler, he was used to bending the laws of nature, sometimes all the way backward.
But this… a child born outside of time…
Such an event didn’t just distort the laws of nature.
It broke them.
Burg switched off the datastream and ran to the infirmary. It was a sight: Doc tending to Empra on the floor. Her stola had gone purple with bloodstains, and she could not stop crying as she rocked her child with med-patch-covered arms. The infant was already squirming, as if he was ready to fight something. His head bloomed full of dark curls.
Though Burg was a large tree trunk of a man—built for bar brawls and bouncer jobs—he was also very intuitive. He’d noted that Empra’s datastream lingered a bit too long on the gladiator with those same dark curls. He’d noticed how, at night, always hours before she returned to the Ab Aeterno, she would switch off the recording devices and mute her mic. He’d watched love like stars shine through her eyes—the kind of love she never shared with him. Or Doc. Or Nicholas. Or her ex- fiancé, Marin.
The Historian was watchful enough to pick out these things, smart enough to piece them together. Like all registered members of the Corps, Burg had memorized the Corps of Central Time Travelers’ Code of Conduct to the extent that he could recite it in reverse. When it came to this child’s father, Empra had gone well outside her jurisdiction, and if the Central authorities caught wind of her actions, there would be consequences. Ruthless ones, applied to mother and son alike.
Burg looked down at the baby—so breakably small in Empra’s arms—and swore he’d never tell. When the infant’s clear eyes latched onto his, the Historian went a step further, doing some calculations in his head. In order for Empra’s secret to stay a secret, there had to be bribery involved. Burg knew if he could get the right amount of credits to the right lab techs, then the child’s DNA tests could be fudged. Senators did this all the time to cover up unwanted paternity claims.
But the senators’ pockets were far deeper than Burg’s. He didn’t time travel for the money. No one did. Most of the Corps’ cash flow went to the mechanical side of things: fuel rods, CTM maintenance, server space to host the datastreams Recorders were collecting from all across time.
How many credits would it take to bribe the lab techs? A thousand? Five thousand? Maybe even more, to hide a misstep as large as this…
“Would you like to hold him?” Empra asked.
Burg nodded. How could he say no? The baby squirmed as he was transferred, curls tickling the inside of the Historian’s elbow. It was then that the bearish man decided to hash it all. What were numbers to a life? Whatever price it would take to keep this child alive… he’d pay it. There wasn’t much that could be done to cover up the birth outside of time. He just had to have faith that that anomaly would sort itself out.
Burg cradled the boy who should not have been—close as a heart—waiting through the timeless time-between-times for them to land.
PART I
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
— WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY “INVICTUS”
1
THE BOY WHO SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN
MAY 5, 2371
“STATE YOUR NAME.” THE MED-DROID’S AUTOMATED voice was cut clean, every syllable filed down to replicate a Central accent. Why machines needed accents, Far didn’t know. Maybe the programmers added this touch of humanity to put the med-droid’s patients at ease. The tactic had failed, though the robot couldn’t be faulted for Far’s discomfort. Sitting tail-naked on an examination tabletop wasn’t exactly Relaxation 101. The stainless steel surface was a few degrees shy of frosty, nipping places on his body where cold had no business going.
“Farway Gaius McCarthy,” he answered.
The med-droid recorded the reply, shifted into the next query. “State your date of birth.”
Far sighed. They asked this question. Every. Single. Time. And every single time he answered, the med-droid’s computers would whir through the census databases, find nothing, and state in its elegant accent: “Answer invalid. Restate your date of birth.”
This routine was old hat. He’d done it scores, if not hundreds, of times, for all the scores, if not hundreds, of Simulator exams he’d taken at the Academy. The anticheating measures—a full stripping and thorough identity scan before every Sim session—seemed extreme, but as Far’s instructors had taught him, time travel demanded flawless precision. Cheating now could lead to world-ending catastrophes later. Maybe. Time’s immutability was something much debated by the Corps, who were too afraid to test their theories in case they ended up changing the future they lived in—butterfly wingbeats and whatnot. Thus, perfection was their MO.
Traveling the Grid—exploring the past in real time—was all Far dreamed of. He’d been raised on a steady diet of serialized datastreams and Burg’s expedition stories: outrunning velociraptors, witnessing Vesuvius’s rage against the night sky, surveying the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But watching pixels flicker through screens and listening to an old man’s recounted adventures wasn’t enough to sate Far’s hunger. Even the Sims’ state-of-the-art sensory replications, with their sounds and smells and hologram people imbued with enough artificial intelligence to mimic an interactive scene from history, weren’t enough.
He wanted to meet history face-to-face. He wanted to be the blood in its veins, as it was in his. Far was a McCarthy—son of one of the most beloved Recorders of her generation. Everywhere he went, Empra’s name followed. Older Academy instructors always did a double take when they came across Far in their class rosters. You’re Empra’s boy, they’d say, along with some version of: She was a bright girl, one of my best students. It’s such a shame about what happened to the Ab Aeterno….
His mother’s legacy and loss were always there, pushing Far to be the best, always the best. And he was. Today he’d pass his final exam with flying colors, like he always did, and receive his license. Today his Sim score would earn him a coveted space on the crew of a Central Time Machine. Tomorrow he’d be exploring many yesterdays ago, documenting momentous events for scholars, scientists, and entertainment moguls alike.
But first—first!—he had to get past this pragmatic med-droid. “State your date of birth.”
“Can we just skip this part?” Far shifted on the table, a vain attempt to keep his unmentionables from going numb.
“Answer invalid. Restate your date of birth.”
“April eighteenth, 2354 AD.” Far tried the date that made him seventeen and a smidge. It wasn’t his true birthday, but that didn’t stop his cousin Imogen from buying him gelato and sticking sparklers in it every year. He’d tried to make 4/18/54 official, but
no clerical worker could be persuaded to fill the blank gap on his birth certificate. Far’s birth outside of time had to stay on the public record, for historical purposes. Med-droid malfunctions be hashed.
Speaking of: “Answer invalid. Restate your date of birth.”
Far attempted the date he used whenever he was trying to impress a girl. The date that made him 2,276, minus a smidge. “December thirty-first, 95 AD.”
“Answer in—”
“I know, for Crux sake! I don’t have a hashing birthday!” Far knew it was useless to get mad—he was the glitch, not the med-droid’s programming—but sometimes it just felt good to yell. “I was born on the Ab Aeterno!”
The examination room door slid open. A living Medic stuck her head around the corner. Her features were as edged and elegant as the Hindi on her ID card. A stethoscope dangled from her neck, competing for space with gold-tinted headphones. “Is something wrong—oh!” Her face brightened. “Hello, Far!”
“Hey, Priya.” He grinned at the Medic and tried oh-so- subtly to tense his abdominal muscles. “Like the headphones. Where’d you find them?”
“Some hawker in Zone Four was trying to pass them off as genuine BeatBix, asking three thousand credits for them. Can you believe it? With the BB logo facing the wrong way and everything.”
“I’d expect nothing less from a Zone Four hawker,” Far told her. “One of them tried to convince my cousin that a kitten with an awful dye job was a red panda cub.”
“Aren’t red pandas extinct?”
“Exactly. So what’d you haggle him down to?”
“Two hundred and fifty credits.” Priya’s rip-off headphones gleamed as she shrugged. “Could’ve gone lower, but some prices aren’t worth the fight. Hawker gets to pay his bills and I get to listen to Acidic Sisters through something other than my comm.”
“Answer invalid,” the med-droid informed them in its tireless cadence. “Restate your date of birth.”
“Ah. Birth date question again?”
“Never not,” Far said.
Being a Medic in an age where droids made up fifteen percent of the population required training beyond human biology, so like most of her peers, Priya doubled as a mechanic. She pried open the med-droid’s chest plate and rearranged some wires—a routine Far had seen her perform scores of time—to bypass the question manually. “You’d think they’d have this bug fixed by now.”
Far laughed as he offered his arm for the inevitable blood sample. Of all the Medics who came to intervene with his examination hitches, Priya was his favorite. She always pretended the problem lay on the med-droid’s end and not his. And where her coworkers were quick to scurry off—their silence like fear—she lingered, often close enough for him to hear the notes beating through her headphones. Today it was a punk-tech ballad. Catchy to the max.
“So… your final exam Sim. I’d ask if you were nervous, but who am I kidding?”
He laughed again. Nerves were for people who didn’t know what the future held, and his was pretty clear: valedictorian of his Academy class, acer of Sims. Sure, final exam Sims were the toughest of the bunch. You could get anything from Neolithic bonfires to a twentieth-century high school keg party to watching King John sign the Magna Carta. The goal was simple—record the event and study the people without being noticed. One misstep and you could be thrown out of the Academy tail-first, banned from time travel forever.
Far didn’t make mistakes, however, just calculated risks. “Got any song suggestions for my impending victory dance?”
“Classic or current?”
“Classic. I’ll need to get used to some historic beats once I’m licensed.”
“Let’s see.” Priya tapped her chin. “There’s Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’ and DJ Khaled’s ‘All I Do Is Win.’ Oh—and you can’t go wrong with Punched Up Panda’s ‘Top of the Rise.’ M.I.A. has some good ones, too.”
Far made a note of the band names on his interface so he could look them up later. “Queen, Khaled, Panda, M.I.A. Got it.”
“You should breathe.” The Medic’s smoky eyes flickered from Far’s exaggerated, oxygen-starved abs to the vitals graph on the med-droid’s chest. “You’re skewing the readings.”
Ah! She’d noticed! Perhaps not in the way he’d intended, but still…
“When will you go once you pass?” Priya asked.
That was the question, wasn’t it? Far had spent his entire life watching other times. A whole quilt of cultures and humanity… prehistory, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Progress, all the way to Central time. And that was just the Western Civilization track. So much was still unexplored—for while there were hundreds of licensed time travelers, there were only so many CTMs to go around. The finite life spans of the explorers they carried covered just a fraction of history.
The possibilities were endless. Almost.
“I could go back and kill Hitler,” Far joked. “Isn’t that every time traveler’s dream?”
Priya shot him a you shouldn’t kid about that look from under her bangs.
“Whenever the Corps wants to send me, I guess,” he recanted.
“You don’t have any preferences? You aren’t scared you’re going to get stuck trying to collect bubonic plague cultures from corpses in the name of science?”
When Far was fourteen, he watched a datastream of the Black Death. Even at that age he could tell it was highly edited: choppy shots, faded audio. The Recorder taking the footage had gagged at a blurred-out cart piled high with bodies. “Not my first choice.”
When the med-droid finished its ritual pricking and prodding, it rolled toward the door, calling Far along. “Proceed to the next chamber to acquire your final exam Sim wardrobe.”
“I want to see it all,” he told the Medic.
“Speaking of seeing it all…” Priya bit her lip, but her smile was too strong to hide. Every other corner of her face lit with it as she nodded to the door where the med-droid had vanished. “You should go get dressed.”
Far found his final exam Sim suit in the next room, pressed to perfection and composed of too many pieces. Wool stockings went on first, followed by knee-length breeches and a dress shirt with rabid lace frothing from its ends. These ruffles peeked out of a blue waistcoat embroidered with vines and some long- extinct flower Far couldn’t remember the name of. A green- and-gold-striped coat weighted all this into place. The outfit was bookended with leather shoes and a powdered wig.
“Not the plague, then,” Far muttered as he reached for the stockings.
He’d experienced a few Sims from the eighteenth century—witnessing the signing of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, sailing the Pacific as part of James Cook’s crew, watching the streets of revolution-era Paris crumble into parades and chaos—but it wasn’t a time he’d studied thoroughly.
It made sense. The point of the exam was to demonstrate how well you could improvise. Time travelers had to use costumes, knowledge, and technology to blend into their surrounding environments. On board a traditional CTM, the responsibility for providing flawless covers fell to the Historian. They assembled the Recorder’s wardrobe: clothes, hairstyle, and translation technology… the works. They were responsible for briefing the Recorder on the time period they were walking into. They ID’d key historical figures and sent instructions about how to behave over the comms.
During examination Sims, the Historian’s role was played by a computer linked directly to Far’s comm. It greeted him with the same accent as the med-droid: “Welcome to your final examination Sim, Farway Gaius McCarthy. Your mission is to observe and record an hour-long datastream. You will be graded on the quality and content of your datastream as well as your recording methods.”
The usual, then. Far snapped his breeches into place. For Crux sake, they were tight. It was a miracle the human race managed to keep procreating after years in pants like these…. “When
exactly will we be going?”
“May fifteenth, 1776 AD. Seven o’clock in the evening.”
The shirt was snug, too, and the waistcoat pushed the ruffles up so they feathered Far’s neck, making him feel ostrichlike. “Who wears this many layers in May?”
“The residents at the Palace of Versailles,” the computer informed him.
Versailles. A glamorous den of royals, where the air was prickly with wig powder and the golden halls swished with gowns so voluminous they could second for circus tents. There were girls in Far’s Academy class who would kill—or at least significantly maim—to be placed in such a Sim.
Far shouldered the overcoat, secured his wig, and ran through his pre-Sim mantra: I am Farway Gaius McCarthy, son of Empra McCarthy. Birth date unavailable. With timelessness in my blood and nowhere calling to my heart. Born on the Ab Aeterno, for Ab Aeterno. I am a single Sim away from all of time.
The Palace of Versailles, France, 1776 AD would be a cinch.
He switched on his recording devices and stepped into the Sim.
2
LET HIM EAT CAKE
PLUNGING INTO ANOTHER TIME WAS ALWAYS a dizzying affair. Vertigo and culture shock and déjà vu all crushed together. Far found the reeling sensation passed sooner if he focused on a single point. The first sight he caught in Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors was, well, a mirror. Far hardly recognized himself—white-wigged and poufy. Only his sharp cliff of a nose helped anchor his own reflection.