The Beautiful Land

by Alan Averill

  “I’m working on it,” she growls.

  “So the first time I used the Machine, I thought I’d go back a few decades and mess with something small. You know, bury a box in the woods, then dig it up in the present just to make sure everything worked. But when I went back, I found myself in this totally barren wasteland. There were no buildings, no people, no nothing. Just a flat, empty plain filled with red sand.”

  The waitress comes by with two containers of syrup. Tak downs his water, pours a new glass, downs that, and pours a fourth. Samira, trying to play along, drinks half of her glass before erupting in a coughing fit. Tak leans over the table and pats her on the back before pouring a refill.

  “Okay, so I didn’t get that at all,” he says with a wave of the hand. “I expected to be in the 1920s and meet a bunch of guys with awesome mustaches, but I was just…nowhere. So I wait around, and after a few hours, the Machine pulls me back and we try again. Same thing. Big wasteland. So we keep trying, and we keep trying, then one day, I finally figure out how to go somewhere else.”

  “And how’s that?” asks Samira, who has decided that playing along is better than trying to convince Tak how nuts he is.

  “I don’t really know how to explain it. The Machine isn’t like a dishwasher or a computer, you know? It’s more like a musical instrument. It’s like jazz. You just have to get a feel for it.”

  “Okay. Sure. Why not. So where did you go?”

  “I was in Paris, and it was 1954 and everything seems to be good. But because I’m in a major city, I can’t do something small. I can’t bury a box because someone will find it before I can get to it in the present. So I decide to do something that no one can possibly overlook and I kinda…stole some dynamite and blew up the Eiffel Tower.”

  “You blew up what?” asks Samira.

  “The Eiffel Tower. But just the top. And I didn’t kill anybody, so don’t go calling me a murderer or anything. I made sure it was empty.”

  Samira grabs her water glass and drinks deeply. Finishing it off, she utters a tiny belch and pours another. “But, Tak, wait. The Eiffel Tower is still there.”

  “I know.”

  “You didn’t blow it up,” she states. “It’s still there.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Tak! It’s there!”

  “I know!” he says with a grin. “I know! That’s when I knew we had it all wrong.”

  “You had what wrong?”

  “Time travel! We were wrong, everyone was wrong. You can’t time travel. Not the way people think. You have to—”

  At that moment, the waitress comes over with a tray and begins to set down plate after plate of pancakes. Samira and Tak shove the condiments and napkin dispenser to the far end of the table to make room, but seven plates later it’s completely full.

  “I’ve never seen two skinnier kids order more food,” says the waitress, who dumps the remaining two plates on a nearby table before disappearing in the back. Samira stares out across the table, buttermilk and syrup overwhelming her nostrils, and suddenly feels a bit ill. For his part, Tak seems delighted. He slides two plates over to himself, slathers them in syrup, and begins to fork huge pieces of pancake into his mouth.

  “Eat,” he says, spraying bits of breakfast across the table. “Seriously, Sam, you need to eat as much as you can, or the trip’s gonna be really gnarly.”

  She pours a thin stream of syrup over a short stack, cuts off a hunk, and chews slowly. “I’m not really hungry,” she says after a minute of chomping. Her eyes are focused on the plate at the far end of the table, where a sideways pat of butter is melting into a sticky yellow film on the table. The dirtiness of it is making her hand itch, but she resists the urge to clean it off.

  “Yeah, well, get after it or you’re gonna be sick later,” says Tak. “So, um, what was I saying?”

  “You said you can’t time travel. Or something like that,” says Samira. She’s making a game effort at her stack, but the thought of downing so much food is making her stomach flip. “I don’t really remember, Tak. You’re not making much sense.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he says. “Okay, here! Here. I’ve got an idea.”

  Tak grabs an untouched stack of pancakes, piles it on top of the plate he’s already finished, and slides it to the center of the table. Then he takes his knife and lays it across the top cake, creating a depression in the butter. “Look at this,” he says. “Now, when you think about time travel, what do you think about?”

  “I don’t think about time travel,” she says between bites.

  “Yeah, you’re right, that was dumb. So, in general, people who do think about time travel think about it like this knife, right?” Tak points at the knife, moving his finger from the end to the tip and back again. “Everyone figured this is how it works. You start here, in your time, and then you jump forward or backward. Everyone assumed time was a straight line, and all a time traveler could do was bounce around on that line. You with me so far?”

  “I guess?”

  “But we were wrong. It doesn’t work that way, because that’s not how time works. You can’t time travel, Sam! You can’t. It’s impossible. The universe won’t let it happen.”

  Tak flicks the knife off the pancakes, sending it clattering to the side. “It’s like I said: what if I kill my grandfather, or step on that butterfly, or do anything at all? Any little thing you do changes everything, and that creates these crazy paradoxes that can’t possibly happen.” He points to the pancakes and moves his finger up and down the pile. “This is time travel, Sam! It’s not a line. It’s a stack.”

  “You lost me,” says Samira. “I mean, you kinda…You kinda lost me a while ago, but now you really lost me.”

  “Think of it like this: our timeline—the one that you and I exist in right now—is a single pancake. It’s round and complete and perfect, and everything that happens there stays there. I call it the solid timeline because it’s the one that locks everything else down. It’s our point of reference. You with me?”

  “Yup,” says Samira, who tears a piece from her napkin and finally begins to clean the butter off the table.

  “But instead of letting me travel forward or backward on the solid timeline, the Machine sends me to a different timeline—a random timeline. And once I’m in that random timeline, I can do whatever I want. I can blow up monuments or kill Hitler or whatever, because our pancake, the solid timeline, is still humming right along somewhere else. Got it?”

  Samira nods slowly and pulls her hand away from the butter before she starts to wipe down the entire table. Tak, who is so into his story that he doesn’t notice her cleaning frenzy, pushes another pile of pancakes toward his friend. “So once I figured this out, once I realized I wasn’t affecting the solid timeline, I thought we were done. I mean, Axon is spending billions of dollars on this project, but none of it matters. They can’t change the past, they can’t go back and invent the pet rock, they can’t do anything. I figure I’ll be fired and they’ll shut it down and that’ll be the end of it.

  “But it’s not the end,” continues Tak as he rolls two pancakes together and starts eating them like a burrito. “Axon decides to keep going, so I keep exploring timelines, and eventually I get really good at it. I can find timelines that are nearly identical to ours, or I can find ones that are so crazy you wouldn’t even recognize them. And this goes on for years. Guys come to me with a request—gimme a timeline where bears rule the world, show me a timeline where cavemen never evolved—and then I go search it out. It’s kinda…fun.”

  “Why would they do that?” says Samira, who’s starting to wonder if Dr. Carrington has room for one more patient. “I mean, if it’s all like you say, why would they keep going?”

  “They were watching me. Taking notes. Backtracking on all the work I did and reverse-engineering things. They whole time I was fucking around, these guys were using me. They totally used me, and I never caught on.”

  Tak’s smile fades. He reaches out
for a another plate, then pulls his fork back and sets it down. For the longest time, he can’t seem to meet Samira’s eyes. “Six months ago, they came to me with a new request. They wanted to find a timeline where the Axon Corporation controls everything. Governments, banks, people…Everything.”

  “And you did?” says Samira.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

  “That doesn’t strike me as a very good idea.”

  “I know, but I just…I was already into this thing up to my eyeballs, and I figured that even if I found it, it wouldn’t matter. I mean, it’s a random timeline, right? I thought they were gonna use the Machine to go there and take over. I thought…I thought they wanted to leave.”

  Tak stops talking. The waitress comes by and clears the empty plates. Two of the men at the counter pay their bills and leave. Outside, the snow begins to fall with more force. When Tak finally speaks again, it is in a voice deep with regret.

  “I fucked up, Sam,” he says. “I fucked up everything.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks, as a shiver runs down her spine. “How?”

  “They’re not leaving the solid timeline. They’re bringing the other one here.”

  chapter eight

  Yates takes the long way to his meeting with the board, stopping first at floor B14 to make a cup of coffee. Though the Axon Corporation exists in a building with the square footage of Central Park, it is staffed by a crew of less than a hundred—most of whom are professional mercenaries used to keep the local population in line. The twelve leaders of the company, who refer to themselves simply as “the board,” knew that each extra employee was another security risk, so they made automating the building a top priority. Yates had designed a number of systems along this line over the years, and the end result was a marvel of modern engineering and thought that practically ran itself.

  After making his coffee, Yates moves up a couple of floors to check on his latest side project: an ambitious idea that used microscopic robots to repair damaged human tissue. The experiment had been plagued by a steady stream of nagging issues—namely that his machines could not yet distinguish damaged tissue from healthy—and his trials usually ended with test subjects bleeding to death from their pores. This failure bothered Yates, but only in a vague, clinical kind of way. He knew he would eventually succeed, as he had in everything that had come before, so he viewed the deaths as mere bumps along the road of progress. Thankfully, there was no shortage of subjects on which to work; if there was one thing the world did not lack, it was homeless vagrants who would not be missed.

  After taking a few notes on his latest trial—and ignoring the man’s terribly distracting screaming—Yates finally makes his way to the conference room where the board is waiting. They are seated, as always, behind a massive table carved from endangered Brazilian redwood, a material that seems not to reflect light so much as transform it into a luminous presence. The twelve men behind the table are by any measure the most powerful in the world, used to having whatever they want at a moment’s notice. And judging by the scared and angry looks that cross their faces as Yates enters the room, what they want is answers.

  Yates sets his notebook down on the small podium and adjusts his glasses. “Gentlemen? I hear you want to speak with me.”

  “You have heard about Mr. O’Leary?” barks the man on the left, a large Chinese national named Hsu. “You know that he has fled the country?”

  “I was just informed.”

  “And were you informed that he stole something from us?”

  “I was told this also, yes.”

  A man named James Caulfield leans forward and points his index finger at Yates. When he speaks, it is with a soft Southern drawl. “We’ve heard some disturbing things about this theft, Yates. People tell us he took something quite extraordinary.”

  “It was a little experiment of mine,” says Yates in a soft, controlled voice. “Something I was tinkering with in my off-hours. It is of no consequence.”

  “Oh, but we heard that it’s of great fucking consequence, Yates. We heard the bastard fled the country with a working version of the Machine.” Caulfield, an arms dealer who made his fortune selling yellowcake uranium to various foreign governments, raises his eyebrows slightly, as if waiting for the old man in front of him to crumble into dust.

  “The experiment that Mr. O’Leary stole is useless,” replies Yates. “It does nothing more than weigh him down.”

  “So you aren’t building a portable Machine? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Eventually, yes, I was hoping to create a portable Machine, but my current efforts have been fruitless. Had I more time, I might have been successful, but…Well, we’ve all been a little busy lately.”

  This elicits a round of chuckling from ten of the men behind the table although Hsu and Caulfield continue to frown. They suspect more than the others, Charles thinks to himself. Well, let them. In a few hours, none of their suspicions will mean a thing.

  “You should not have let him near your experiments,” says Hsu, pressing the attack. “In fact, I thought the plan was to eliminate Mr. O’Leary sometime last week.”

  “That was your plan, gentlemen. Not mine.”

  “I think you underestimate your level of involvement here, Charles,” says a fat, bald man named Daniel Peterson. He made his fortune in the stock market back in the early nineties, then had the good sense to get out before everything went to hell. He is the wealthiest man on the entire Axon board, although in Yates’s experience, such wealth did little more than make men soft. “You’re in this just as much as we are. You can’t duck responsibility when decisions get messy.”

  “And you’ve never struck me as particularly squeamish,” adds Caulfield. “You’d smother a baby with a pillow if it served one of your damn experiments.”

  “Do you remember when I joined your company?” asks Yates in reply. The men in front of him nod slowly, unsure of where this is going. “I came to you fifteen years ago with the most fantastic idea ever created: a machine that could control time itself.”

  “We know all this!” exclaims Hsu. “I hardly think—”

  “I found a location where we could harness solar and geothermal power at an exaggerated rate,” continues Yates. “I designed solar panels, gave you batteries that could store untold amounts of electricity, and created a means to transfer that energy to the Machine. I powered it up, I turned it on, and in the years since, I have solved every technical challenge that you have placed before me. I gave you the world, gentlemen, and all I asked in return was the funding to complete the project. I did not hunger for power, or wealth, or fame. I simply wanted to see if the Machine was possible.”

  Yates pauses for a moment, then glances from one man to the next. Each one meets his gaze with a look of bemused interest, an emotion that suits Yates. Very well. Underestimate me yet again. That will work just fine. “Mr. Hsu, you are one of the highest-ranking officials in the Chinese National Army. Mr. Casipit, you made billions of dollars selling military weapons to various groups across the African continent. Mr. Ritchie, your son currently heads the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “What’s the point, Chuck?” says David Casipit as he leans back in his chair. He is a thin, wiry man with a vicious temper who once murdered a dry cleaner when he didn’t like the starch in his shirts. “Smoke up my ass makes me uncomfortable.”

  “Gentlemen, I came to you as a physicist and an engineer, and in those capacities I have performed admirably. The killing of Mr. O’Leary, if that was your desire, should have been handled by one of your mercenaries. While my ‘damn experiments,’ as you so fondly refer to them, sometimes end in failure, I am no murderer.”

  “Well, we woulda killed the son of a bitch if he hadn’t fled the damn country!” says Casipit with a snarl. “Whatcha think about that?”

  Yates goes silent as a vision suddenly enters his mind: Casipit trapped inside a large, clear jar, banging on the glass. Green gas flows into the jar from an
unseen tube at the bottom, as the man’s face begins to bulge and stretch. Such violent thoughts had been coming to him more frequently of late. This could be related to the grand experiment. Perhaps I have underestimated the effect it would have on my own mind.

  The board mistakes his pause for nervousness and break out into self-knowing grins—they clearly enjoy seeing him out of his element. Yates decides to wait a few more seconds before answering, even going so far as to shuffle his notebook around the podium in a feigned display of nerves.

  “I think…” begins Yates. “I think that Mr. O’Leary’s theft and flight is unfortunate. But I also know it does not matter. Even if he has lost faith in our goals, there is nothing that can be done. What police agency would believe him? What government would think that a private corporation was about to alter reality by way of a fantastic new machine? And even if someone did believe him, they could not possibly act in time. We have only to wait until this evening, and the change will be unstoppable.”

  “Um, about that,” says Daniel, staring into his laptop. “We see here that you want to engage the Machine at ten seventeen p.m.”

  “Correct. By starting at ten seventeen, the batteries will gain an additional—”

  “We will engage the Machine at ten precisely,” says Hsu.

  “May I ask why?”

  “We’re, uh…we’re just not comfortable with the original schedule,” stammers Daniel.

  “Hell, Chuck,” shouts Casipit, “we’re already all nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockin’ chairs. Why wait around for an extra seventeen minutes just to get some one billion of one percent’s worth of power or whatever it is yer doin’? Let’s just turn the fucker on and be done with it.”

  “Perhaps ten fifteen would be acceptable,” begins Yates. “I realize it is only two minutes, but even that extra time would be—”

  “The Machine will be turned on at ten o’clock,” says Hsu. “Is this going to be a problem?”