Diverse Energies

by Joe Monti Tobias S. Buckell

  A strong vibration in her left hand cut through everything else somehow. She looked down, her vision hazy but still able to make out the bright white-on-black letters of the app controlling the belt.

  EMERGENCY SHIFT: DATE? LOCATION?

  She blurted the first date that came into her head. “November 4, 2048, sixteen hundred . . .” It needed longitude and latitude for the location, but she had no idea.

  MAINTAIN LOCATION?

  “Affirm!”

  The pins and needles sensation swept through her, ending the endless pull and tug. The darkness cut her off from the sound. For a heartbeat she was at peace.

  More than anything, Iliana really wanted to lie on the floor of this room and not move. The shaggy carpet underneath her felt more comfortable than the fluffiest bed at that moment. As her mind ticked over her injuries and assessed the situation, footsteps thudded above her and voices trickled down.

  “. . . my uniform?”

  “. . . washed it yesterday, so . . .”

  Once again she forced herself to stand up, taking in the room around her. It looked about the size and shape of the space she’d just been in, now filled with appliances and clothes instead of computers.

  “Where, on the dryer?” The voice came from the top of the stairs. No time to gawk, Iliana chided herself, and ducked into what she hoped was a little-used closet. Through the slats she saw a pair of long, brown legs belonging to a teenage girl trundle down the stairs. As she riffled through the clothes on the dryer, Iliana nearly gasped aloud.

  Grayson.

  Older, definitely. Her hair still kinky curly, pulled into short ponytails atop her head. Still tall.

  Iliana wondered if they were still first best friends.

  “Hurry up, Grayson!”

  “Got it!” She pulled a top and shorts from the basket and ran back up the stairs.

  I did it, Iliana thought. It worked.

  She tapped at the mac, bringing up a map of the area. Her house was only ten blocks away.

  Leaving Grayson’s house the normal way didn’t strike her as a good idea. No telling who was still upstairs. So she shared her house’s coordinates with the belt control app and shifted four hours into the future, right into her own backyard.

  Her house looked like it had when she was younger, before the worst of the changes. No more peeling paint, no more patchy grass, no more fences. She counted on the darkness and the chilly night to cover her arrival. No need to freak out the neighbors.

  Her parents might be worried about her being out so late, but she planned to tell them everything that had happened. Now that she knew they were time travelers, too, she was sure they’d understand.

  The kitchen light flicked on, and her mother came in view of the back window, carrying dinner dishes to the sink. Iliana smiled. Adelina’s hair hung long and free down her back, just like the old days.

  The smile slipped away a moment later when she saw herself enter the kitchen carrying another set of dishes. Adelina hugged this other Iliana and kissed the top of her head.

  Viola had told her that if she collapsed the jump station, it might erase everything the time changers had done. She didn’t mention that it might erase her from her own timeline.

  Maybe this isn’t my timeline. Maybe the one I’m from is one they messed with too.

  She swallowed past the tightness in her throat and tried not to think about how utterly unfair this was.

  “They’re alive,” she whispered. “That’s what matters.”

  Saying it out loud didn’t take the pain away.

  “There she is.” Broken-up audio flitted through her earpiece. “I told you we’d find her here.”

  “You got lucky.”

  Sebastian. Viola. She looked around but didn’t see them.

  “We probably shouldn’t turn off the refractors in case someone sees us. It’s bad enough someone might see you,” Viola chided.

  “Sorry . . .”

  “Don’t make the girl feel bad. What else was she supposed to do?”

  “I know, I know.”

  Iliana’s mac buzzed again.

  “We set you to jump to the station at Xavier University,” Sebastian said just as the mac buzzed again, announcing it had downloaded the new coordinates. “You can see your parents for a bit before jumping forward with us.”

  “What? But my parents are in there!” She pointed at the house.

  “Shh! Not so loud.”

  Sebastian sucked his teeth, presumably at Viola. “That’s a version of your parents. But the people we’re taking you to see were trapped on a jump station the day after the 2048 election when their timeline disappeared. Sound familiar?”

  The last version of her Malcolm and Adelina. They still existed.

  Iliana hardly felt the prickling sensation this time, her mind reeling between extreme happiness and a longing to watch the Iliana in the house a little longer. When the darkness cleared and she could breathe, Viola and Sebastian stood in front of her in a giant room bordered on all sides by a persistently gray wall.

  They looked young again — college age. Was this the same version of the pair that sent her off before?

  “Safe and sound, just like we promised.” Sebastian’s grin was growing on her.

  Iliana looked around the room but didn’t see her parents.

  “Through that door,” Viola said, pointing to the far end. The wall split like a huge cargo bay, but she couldn’t see anyone beyond it. “They’re in the control room.”

  “Thank you,” she said, hugging them both.

  “No, thank you. You did really well.” Viola squeezed her tight. “Keep the mac, and message us through it when you’re ready.”

  “Ready to what?”

  “To come back with us,” Sebastian said.

  Iliana pulled back. “Can’t I just stay here with my mom and dad?”

  Sebastian made an exaggerated shrug. “You could, but . . .”

  “We really need your help,” Viola said, holding her gaze. “This isn’t over. There are others out there shifting timelines. None as crude and easy to deal with as that lot, but just as disruptive. And you’re the only one who isn’t affected by the shifts.”

  The idea didn’t really appeal. Then again, what else was she going to do with her life? Iliana had her parents but no home, no school, no world she belonged in.

  Because of them.

  A flare of anger rose up again, and she held onto it, thinking of the other Iliana in the window. The one with the life she should have had. And of Viola and Sebastian, trapped like her parents on these jump stations forever.

  “Okay. I’ll do it,” she said to relieved smiles.

  As she walked out of the chamber to the control room where her parents waited, Iliana made one more promise to herself. That this would be the last time her life changed without her say-so.

  Pattern Recognition

  by Ken Liu

  David knew that he wasn’t always called David.

  Even though he had grown up at the Volpe Ness School, he remembered a village by the sea.

  The village in his memory was not like any village he read about in the novels he had stolen. It didn’t have golden light or fields of hay, pecking chickens or red barns, fishing nets hung to dry, or pretty houses, each meant for just one family.

  The few words he could recall of the first language he spoke, his own appearance in the mirror, and repeated consultations of the few secret reference books he had all told him that the village was in a place called “China.”

  He could recall only disjointed images: a tiny, noisy room perpetually in darkness, impatient hands, a dense forest of concrete towers that shot into the sky, built so close together that no sunlight reached their feet. The dim streetlights were left on around the clock.

  He couldn’t have been more than three or four. He and the other children were playing in the perpetual dusk of the garbage-strewn, muddy streets. All of them were equally dirty, equally hungry. They sq
uealed and chased after a rat almost as big as he was. . . .

  David startled awake. He was in his soft bed, under his warm blanket. The alarm had not gone off yet.

  He looked across the room and saw that Jake, who had the bunk across from his, was still asleep. Indeed, judging by the snores, he was the only one awake of the eight boys who shared this room. He did feel hungry, but not the painful hunger of starvation, the unbearable craving of his dream.

  It was a stupid dream, he thought. How could a village be full of concrete towers? It was nonsense, the product of an over-active, directionless imagination. He reprimanded himself silently. How many times had Dr. Gau explained to all of them that undirected imagination was a waste of precious youth and even more precious time.

  Yet he had always been prone to temptation, to yield to his impure desires. That was why he had his hidden stash, and he thought about . . . her. His face grew hot with shame.

  The loudspeaker in the corner of the room came to life. 6:00 A.M. First came the sound of tinkling bells, then drumming that gradually grew louder and more insistent, and finally, an upbeat trumpet solo that ended on a long, sustained note.

  Blankets flew off the eight bunks around the room. Groaning boys sat up, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.

  “GOOD MORNING!” a recording of Dr. Gau’s voice boomed. “It’s the start of another wonderful day! Come on, work awaits.”

  Within ten minutes the boys were dressed in their uniforms: comfortable blue tracksuits and plain white sneakers. The eight of them left the room together and joined the boys from the other rooms on the same floor in the hallway. All of them were about thirteen, fourteen. They were just one floor below the top floor, where the oldest boys lived.

  Quietly, efficiently, they filed down the stairs and out of the dormitory into the exercise yard, where about a hundred boys, age five to sixteen, lined up in four neat columns over the asphalt surface, arranged by descending age.

  The girls from the dormitory across the exercise yard were already in the middle of their morning run. Dressed in their yellow tracksuits, they looked like a giant caterpillar wriggling across the yard. The other two sides of the square-shaped exercise yard were taken up with academic buildings and small houses for the teachers. And then, beyond all the buildings, was the forty-foot wall that completely surrounded and protected the Volpe Ness School from the Outside.

  David squinted to focus on one of the figures near the end of the yellow caterpillar. There was a certain rhythm to her movement, a pattern that made his heart beat faster.

  “Let’s get going,” said Mr. Danziger, the morning calisthenics coach. He blew his whistle, and the boys began their jog in the cool morning air.

  David stumbled, caught himself, and tried to focus on running.

  “Thinking about her again?” asked Jake, who was running right next to him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” David said. They hung back a bit, near the end of the pack, so that they could talk without being overheard.

  Except for the brief exchange of blessings after Temple on Sundays, boys and girls weren’t allowed to talk to each other at all. Dr. Gau explained that it was so they could concentrate on their work.

  “Sure you don’t,” Jake said, grinning. “You’re getting more and more distracted these days. Did you dream about her?”

  Jake’s skin was darker than David’s, and his hair was a bit curly. They had tried to figure out where he was from, but Jake remembered nothing of his life before the school and so they had little to work with. Almost all of the students at the school had skin like David’s or Jake’s or even darker (Like . . . hers, David thought) and most of the teachers did too. But a few had fair skin and hair like Mr. Danziger.

  David was about to answer when the boy in front of them turned back and angrily whispered, “Shut up, you two! Haven’t you gotten us into enough trouble?”

  The day before, all the boys had been made to run an extra mile because Jake and David were caught talking during the run. They finished the morning exercises in silence.

  Next was a quick breakfast of eggs, hot fried dough, and soy milk. At eight thirty, the boys went to the machine room, took their assigned places at the workstations, and began the morning shift, the first of three in the day.

  David liked his assigned task this morning. His screen was filled with horizontal lines of tiny square blocks in various colors — red, green, blue, yellow — like beads strung on skewers. Occasionally, there were gaps between some of the squares in a line.

  He could nudge the beads in each line left and right with his mouse, but he couldn’t swap two beads or move them from one line to another. The goal was to shift the sequences of beads on all the skewers around until he managed to align as many of them as possible — meaning they matched in color if you drew a line from the top of the screen to the bottom.

  This sounded easy but wasn’t. He couldn’t open up too many gaps between beads, which lowered his score and meant longer shifts and less free time in the evenings. He also had to keep the big picture in mind. If he got too greedy and focused only on matching the beads in one section, he might miss a much better, larger-scale match that required more gaps early on. Sometimes, to get the best overall match, he had to allow chaos to develop locally. It was just like Go: an easy game to learn, but hard to master.

  The students were forbidden to speak while working. Around him, everything was quiet except for the clicking of mice and the clacking of keyboards. David quickly developed a rhythm and fell into the familiar flow. His eyes lost focus as he stopped seeing the individual beads but began to see only a mosaic made of four colors within which larger patterns slowly emerged.

  David was very good at this game. He had been playing it since he was five.

  But gradually he noticed something tugging the edge of his consciousness. He felt the table under his hand vibrate.

  taaaaaaat tat tat tat taaaaaaat

  David’s face flushed, and he breathed faster. He looked surreptitiously to his right. Next to him was an eight-year-old boy focusing on fitting puzzle pieces of different sizes and colors into a box on the screen. Beyond him was a twelve-year-old girl who was manipulating some three-dimensional strings on her screen, folding them into knots. And then, at the far end, was Helen, her dark skin glowing and beautiful even in the harsh fluorescent light of the machine room. She was concentrating on her screen, not looking this way at all.

  tat tat tat taaaaaaat

  The boy next to him frowned and looked at his mouse. The vibrations stopped. Quickly, David turned back to his screen.

  tat tat

  David leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms high above his head, as though trying to relieve the tension in his back. He kept his knee pressed against the bottom of the table so that he could continue to feel the vibrations. He stole a look to the right and saw that Helen’s knee was pressed up against the table as well, lightly tapping.

  taaaaaaaaat tat tat

  Letters appeared one by one in his mind: D-A-V-I-D. . . .

  Lunch was half an hour. Fifteen minutes to eat and fifteen more to use the bathroom.

  David wrapped the small pile of dried lychees and apricots — his reward for getting the best score during the morning shift — in a napkin and put the package in his pocket.

  David saw Jake’s look and flushed. “Later, I’m saving it for . . . later.”

  Jake smiled but didn’t tease him. Instead, he just finished his noodle soup and smacked his lips. “I wish it were Sunday.”

  On Sundays there was no school, and the children would get a treat with their breakfast: a hot dog, a sweet egg tart, or even sometimes a bo luo bao.

  After breakfast the children would march across the exercise yard to the Temple, a large, cavernous hall filled with the smell of incense and lit by flickering candles. There were straw cushions on the hard stone floor for sitting. The boys sat on the left, the girls on the right. The ceiling of the Templ
e was obscured by the dark, smoky air, and the children would feel as though they were sitting below a dark, starless sky.

  Then Dr. Gau would get up in front and begin the week’s lesson. The children would stare, rapt, at the doctor’s gaunt figure, wrapped in a dark gray suit that was so clean and stiff it looked like armor. In the dim light, his shock of white hair bobbed like a guiding light.

  He spoke to them of the horrors of the Outside. The world that had been destroyed by sin, by greed. Out there, men would strangle their sons for fear that there wasn’t enough to eat. And women would smother their daughters because they weren’t boys. Out there was hatred, starvation, death. In some of the ruined cities, the air was scarcely breathable and water was dirty enough to melt flesh off bones.