Diverse Energies

by Joe Monti Tobias S. Buckell

  Tired of uncertainty, Iliana started experimenting with trying to alter the direction of the changes when they happened, just to see if it was possible. She knew they weren’t all about her, of course. However, she reasoned that if she was the only person who noticed, there could be something she could do about them. Whenever the sound rushed up on her, she closed her eyes and concentrated — at first on things she wished she could revert, then later on things she wanted to happened that hadn’t — only to be disappointed when she opened them again.

  Then after she turned sixteen, she made it through almost a year without any change. After three, then six, then nine months without even the tiniest alteration, Iliana swayed between happiness at a predictable, if crappy, life and fear of when the nightmare would start again.

  Then came election night 2048. Like everyone else, Iliana stayed up late with her parents to watch the election coverage. Poll results scrolled across the bottom of the CNN feed, and finally the numbers from Washington, Oregon, California, and the rest of the West Coast came through.

  “She’s ahead,” her mom said.

  “Don’t jinx it,” her dad replied, only half kidding.

  Five minutes later, Aishwarya Aguda came on live to announce that all of the West Coast states were for Amirah Ellison, making her the next president of the United States.

  Ili’s father whooped and cheered and danced like he’d made a touchdown. Even though her mom chided him to keep it down, clearly other people were celebrating just as much. The sound of cheers and honking horns filled the neighborhood. Everyone they knew supported or campaigned for Ellison. She promised to turn the country around.

  CNN had Ellison’s father on — he’d been the first Muslim congressman ever elected — and Iliana’s mom told them (again) about the time she’d met him years ago. Her father said something about champagne just as Iliana heard a change rushing up, yanking her hard into another reality. No, no, no! she thought fiercely. This wasn’t allowed to be different. Not after all their hard work. Amirah Ellison is still the president. Amirah Ellison is still the president.

  The noise out in the street ended abruptly. So did the sound from the newsfeed. Iliana opened her eyes. Instead of Ambassador Keith Ellison, Anderson Cooper’s face filled the screen.

  “Once again, all districts in California have reported in, and we can confidently declare that Timothy Edwards is the winner.”

  “No!” Iliana blurted. She didn’t know this Edwards guy. He wasn’t even Ellison’s opponent. “What happened to Amirah?”

  Her parents, who were not celebrating, turned and looked at her.

  “Who?”

  Under normal circumstances, Iliana would have just pretended they’d heard her wrong, or she misspoke. But the anger over losing Ellison overwhelmed her. She’d been the first person Iliana had ever really cared about being president. Now she couldn’t be sure the woman even existed. None of this was fair.

  “Amirah Ellison just won the election! And you don’t even remember her. No one ever remembers. It’s all changed and, and . . .” She wanted to scream. Everyone had worked so hard.

  At first her parents just stared at her, confused. Her birthday all over again. No one would believe, she knew it.

  But then her mother asked, “When did it change, Ili?”

  Shocked, she answered without hedging, “Just now.”

  “You saw someone else elected president, then all of a sudden it changed to a different person?” her father asked, tone and voice serious.

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Has something like this ever happened before?”

  Iliana thought about Grayson, and the hospital, and the doctor saying that she’d made her up. Like an imaginary friend. She didn’t need to go through that again.

  “No. I’m just being stupid. I’m going to bed.”

  Just then the electricity went out, signaling the night’s blackout period, and Iliana took it as a cue to leave without saying anything more.

  The next morning she avoided her parents, still not wanting to talk. The night before she hadn’t slept, at first from frustration and anger, then from reading over her notebooks with a flashlight, looking for any clue that would help change things back. Nothing came to her.

  All day at school she couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. If everything was just going to get worse and worse and Iliana couldn’t do anything about it, why care about anything?

  On the walk home the funk finally lifted enough for a part of her brain to point out that her parents had tried to listen. She didn’t give them a chance, just assumed they wouldn’t believe her. Maybe she should have. They were scientists, after all. She needed help figuring all this out. Who better than them?

  As she walked across her lawn, Iliana had resolved to tell the truth at dinner that night. Then the sound rushed up on her, so loud her head blossomed in pain almost as intensely, as the squeezing sensation in her chest. It hadn’t been this bad since the night of her birthday, and that scared her more than the pain itself.

  The grass beneath her, rushing up as she lost her balance and fell down, turned to concrete the moment her heart started beating again, a split second before she fell down hard on her left arm and screamed.

  “Iliana!” A woman’s voice cried out nearby. One of the neighbors breaking the unspoken rule only to care about what happened inside their own fences? “Are you okay, m’ija? What happened? You’re bleeding!”

  As arms helped her up, Iliana saw her arm scraped and bloody, saw the walk leading to her house on the wrong side of the yard, saw the peeling paint on the house that had changed from blue to brown.

  “Mira! Ili, look at Mama, sweetie,” the woman said. Iliana did look, but this was not her mother.

  At the hospital, Iliana stayed silent except to answer the doctor’s questions about her arm. The woman calling herself her mother not only looked different, but had a different name: Elena, not Adelina like her real mom. Later, a man she didn’t recognize came into the curtained area: her dad. Elena called him Victor, not Malcolm. Not that he looked anything like her real father.

  The only time she spoke outside of the doctor’s presence was to ask for her chart. She still had the same last name — Cruz — as did Elena. Victor’s was Nighthorse-Campbell, not Ahmed. None of this made any sense.

  The doctor pronounced her badly bruised but free of broken or fractured bones and told Elena and Victor they could take her home. A brief impulse to tell the doctor that these weren’t her parents, that something terrible had happened, to please not make her go with them rose up, then passed away quickly. Not just because no one would have believed her, but because it wasn’t true. This was the change again.

  Using the pain as an excuse to escape to her room, Iliana pulled out her notebooks and stared at all the pages she’d filled. Did this happen because she was about to tell her parents everything? Did she break a rule? How could there be rules if this didn’t happen to anyone else? For the first time it occurred to her that maybe other people experienced this too, and whoever else noticed the changes didn’t want anyone to know about it.

  The thought kept her up late that night, even though the pills the doctors gave her made sleep very tempting. Still, Iliana needed to work this out. If thought didn’t guide or make the change happen, it had to be something else. She needed to find out what that was so she could reverse it. She squished the idea that it couldn’t be reversed.

  “I will bring them back,” she said to the darkness. “I have to.”

  “You’re so quiet lately,” Elena noted at breakfast the next morning. “Still zonked from those painkillers?”

  “When you get better, I’ll teach you to tuck and roll.” Victor dropped extra bacon on her plate before sitting down next to her. “Better to get a little dizzy than break a bone.”

  Elena gave him a playful bump with her hip. “I’ve never seen you tuck and roll.”

  “I’m too graceful to fall down.”

  At lea
st they’re friendly, Iliana thought. And it was clear that they loved each other, just like her parents did. That morning she’d been a little afraid to go downstairs. What if these parents were in the middle of a divorce, or really strict, or some other horrible scenario?

  While relieved that none of those fears turned out to be real, the differences between these new parents and her real ones still kept her off balance. Elena worked as a journalist for the Cincinnati Post and Victor as an engineer at the public radio station. Iliana could tell that Elena was mestizo, like her real mom. Victor she couldn’t guess by looking, but from the award certificates on the wall in his study, she surmised that he had Native American ancestry, not Black and Arab like her real dad.

  That morning, after they left, she spent a long time looking in the mirror, trying to tell if she’d changed at all. Was she still half Black and Arab, or half Native American now? She didn’t look any different — thick, curly, kinky hair; brown skin; wide nose. . . . A thrill ran up and down her body. Her nose still looked just like her real father’s. Did that mean that whatever had changed, he still existed somewhere? Her mom, too?

  “I’m going to get you back,” she promised again. “No matter how long it takes.”

  The doctor suggested letting her take the day off from school, to which Elena and Victor agreed. So Iliana put it to good use. Even though it hurt her arm to type, she spent several hours copying the data from her notebooks into the computer in the living room, now the only one in the house besides the tablet.

  She stayed offline since they still had a data restriction of just 5GB per month. She’d come home to that change two years ago, and it took a while to get used to not being able to surf as freely as before. This had apparently happened in the current reality as well, since the house account was pretty close to the limit.

  Overages cost a lot of money. And she doubted Victor would be any less angry about her racking up a huge bill than Malcolm had been. Still, this was important. She needed help. And this was the best way to get it.

  Once she finished typing the data, Iliana picked ten websites to post it. They had to be ones that existed across the changes — a few social networks where she still had an account, news and zine sites, blogs, and forums. To preface the odd collection of dates, times, and notes, she wrote:

  The world keeps changing, but I’m not changing with it. How about you?

  Text pasted in, her finger hovered over the mouse button. If telling her parents broke the rules, telling the world broke them in a big way.

  “They can’t make everyone disappear,” she said under her breath. Before she could second-guess herself anymore, Iliana clicked SUBMIT ten times and watched as each posting went through.

  A change tugged at her, so lightly she hardly felt it. A beat passed — nothing. Then Iliana heard her favorite song coming from the kitchen. Grabbing an umbrella from the closet (for defense), she carefully opened the door, not sure what to expect.

  What she saw definitely didn’t fit into any of her preconceived notions. A person — a girl? — stood by the stove, dressed in what looked like a wet suit except it was white and cottony. The suit covered every part of the girl except her face.

  “Iliana?”

  “. . .Yes?”

  “Hi, I’m Viola. I got your message.”

  Viola tapped a device in her hand, and the music stopped. It looked like one of the droid handhelds Iliana used to have before her electronics downgraded, then disappeared completely.

  “Sorry for the drama. I didn’t think a strange voice calling your name would be a good way to start.” Though she saw Viola’s lips move, her voice came out of the kitchen’s speakers.

  Iliana’s head swirled with questions, and it took a moment to sort them all out, so she blurted the first thing that came to her: “Your voice, it’s . . .”

  Viola nodded at the speakers. “I know, it’s weird. I’m actually talking through your tablet because it’s the only piece of technology you have that’s compatible with mine. It’s connected to the speakers.”

  “Oh.” This explained nothing.

  “I’m phased. You can’t hear me unless I transmit.” Viola continued on, seeing the What does that even mean? look on Iliana’s face. “No one explained . . . ? Clearly not. I’m out of sync with you by 0.1123 seconds. So I don’t disturb the timeline.”

  None of this made any sense to Iliana, and this clearly confused Viola as much as Viola confused her.

  “Didn’t the walker who left the message for us tell you how this all worked?”

  “What? Who?” Iliana said. “I don’t know anyone named Walker.”

  “I mean the person who told you to post all those dates.”

  “No one told me to do it. I wrote those posts on my own.”

  Clearly Viola had a hard time believing this, though Iliana couldn’t figure out why. “How did you know about those dates?”

  Iliana wanted to be irritated that this girl had shown up in her kitchen and started demanding answers without providing any of her own, but she wanted more to tell her story to someone who would probably believe her. Reality changing around her wasn’t any crazier than being 0.1123 seconds out of phase. She hoped. So she explained everything that had happened to her, being as detailed as possible when Viola interrupted to ask about specifics.

  “So?” Iliana asked once she was done. “Do you know why this is happening to me?”

  Viola didn’t say anything for a long moment, her face unreadable. “I don’t have a concrete answer for you. But what I think is going on . . . it’s complicated.”

  She crossed her arms. “Try.”

  “All right, the short version: I’m a time walker — I travel in time. As I said, I’m phased so I don’t disturb time, just observe it. Normally I’m invisible, but I made an exception here. I thought another walker was trying to reach us through you.”

  “Why would someone use me?”

  “Your message had a lot of valuable data we’ve been trying to collect for a long time. Tracking down people who change time instead of just observe it.”

  It did not escape Iliana that Viola hadn’t actually answered her question.

  “Normally, when time changes, a new timeline takes its place and everyone goes on as if the new timeline had always been there. For them it has. But you . . . you remember all the old timelines.”

  “That’s not normal, even for you?”

  Viola considered carefully before she spoke again. “That’s ultracomplicated, too. Listen —” She held up a hand to stop any more questions. “I want to help you figure this out. I need to go talk to the others. But do not worry, all right? We’re going to help you.”

  “You can’t go yet!” Iliana started to get a little panicked. “I need help. My parents disappeared. I need to get them back!”

  Viola didn’t get a chance to answer her. A change rushed up quickly before Iliana could voice a warning, and she disappeared.

  “No time for more questions, Ili-girl.”

  The voice coming from the speakers had changed. Not Viola’s anymore but a guy. Iliana turned and saw him standing by the kitchen table — same suit, almost the same face. A brother?

  “I need to get you out of here,” he said, urgency in his voice.

  “What? Who are you?”

  He looked up from his droid, surprised. “I’m Sebastian, Iliana.”

  “Where’s Viola?”

  A series of emotions flashed across his face. “It just happened, didn’t it? A shift.”

  Guessing he meant a change, she nodded.

  Sebastian cursed. “You’ve got to go before it happens again. Put on the belt.”

  Assuming he meant the odd-shaped bundle lying on the kitchen table next to him, Iliana picked it up but didn’t put it on right away. There were a ton of reasons for her not to do what this guy said, the first being she had no idea who he was. Only one thing mattered, though.

  “If I do, you’ll help me get my parents back, right
?”

  “I will help you. But we need to hurry. One minute, forty-five seconds left,” he said, looking at his droid.

  Iliana wrapped the bulky belt around her, thinking it looked like something Batman would wear, and the front ends snapped together automatically. Two seconds later, every part of her body tingled. Not even in a pleasant way — more like each limb had gone to sleep, then woken up as blood rushed in.

  “Fair warning: Time travel without a suit is no fun.”

  “Wait, I’m time traveling?”

  “Only way to keep you safe.”