Nomad

by JL Bryan

  "I promised you the best, and I lied." He forced himself to swallow a mouthful of his own coffee. They sat at a table in front of a closed fast-food restaurant, in chairs that had been chained to the table for the night. "So, how's that secret mission going so far?"

  "I don't know what you mean," she told him, and he laughed. Then he looked at her again, in his overly familiar way.

  "Do you still have the amnesia?" he asked, and she jumped. "I nearly forgot that part. Ha ha, I forgot the amnesia. It's from an explosion when you made your first jump through time, right? That must have been nice and confusing, finding yourself in the past with no memory of who you are. Are you over that yet? Are you home in there? Or is it still a blank?"

  "How do you know these things?" she whispered, leaning closer to him. She looked up and down the mall area, searching for saw-toothed drones or security agents in power armor.

  "You told me about it. You and I are...friends." He hesitated before picking the word, and she wondered why. "We will be, anyway, in your future. We haven't met yet. Except, now, we have, and so your future has changed. Does that make sense?"

  "I wouldn't say so."

  "Especially not with the amnesia. Let's start this way: You're from the future. You've traveled back from...when was it? 2063? 2064? Let's check your timepiece." He reached for the moonstone bracelet on her arm and circled his fingertip around the edge of the stone. "Activate," he whispered.

  She jumped again when a glowing blue circle appeared in the air above the stone, a translucent hologram. It gave the current date and time down to the nanosecond, and the map location of the New York Port Authority, 40.7574 degrees north by 73.9931 degrees west. The circle was surrounded by thin concentric rings, and as he touched his finger to different rings, the numbers in the center changed.

  "There's your current location...here's where you jumped in...and here's where you originated, the year 2064. Thirty-two north, one-oh-six west...I'm guessing the American Southwest, somewhere around Utah."

  "2064." Raven shook her head. "If I started out in Utah, why did I land in Kentucky?"

  "Couldn't tell you," he said. "You traveled back about fifty years, anyway, to carry out your mission."

  "What mission?" Raven tried to sound sarcastic, as though she didn't know what he meant, but she had a pretty good idea of why she'd traveled through time.

  He gave her a thoughtful look, then shook his head.

  "I don't want to intervene too much," he told her. "As little as possible, actually. You figured out your mission the first time, so I don't want to change things by telling you before you're supposed to know."

  "What do you mean? How are you intervening?"

  "The first time around, I didn't come back to see you. We never had this conversation. You sat alone at the Port Authority and ticked away the hours until you could finally board the bus to Connecticut--"

  "Could you please not say that?" Raven glanced around the terminal again.

  "--or wherever you're going," he added in a hushed voice, with a conspiratorial wink. He seemed to be making fun of her, as though her life weren't in danger at all. She resisted the urge to throw hot coffee at him. "You went on and did your mission, and then...It doesn't matter. Eventually, you met me, you lucky girl." He smiled. "I'm from the future, too, of course."

  "You're from fifty years in the future?" Raven wanted to think he was crazy.

  "In all factuality, I was born in the twenty-fifth century, in the Atlantic Federation."

  "The twenty-fifth century?" Raven mentally added a check to the "possibly crazy" column.

  "Correct, but let's not get lost down that path," he said. "The reason you and I will eventually meet--the original basis for our friendship, you could say--is that we are the same kind of people. Nomads. Time nomads."

  Raven stared, waiting for him to continue, but he didn't. "And...what? I'm supposed to know what that means?"

  "You always say it would have been nice if someone had explained it in advance. When you have to figure it out for yourself, it's...confusing, scary, surreal, a living nightmare that won't end, all of that."

  She looked up and down the terminal again. It was possible this man was here to distract and confuse her until the real attackers arrived. If so, he was succeeding--she felt very confused.

  "A nomad," he continued. "Listen now, what follows is a familiar example. If you travel back in time and kill your own grandfather when he is only a child, what happens?"

  "I recognize that. Is it a riddle?" Raven considered it, thinking that the boy had an odd way of speaking. "If you do that, you're never born."

  "And so?"

  "So if you're never born, then you can't travel back in time. If you can't travel back in time, then you can't kill your grandfather. But that means you do get born, and so you do travel through time, but then you stop yourself from being born...it's an endless loop, right? It's not possible. It creates a..." She struggled to remember the precise word, but her brain wasn't working properly.

  "A paradox," he said. "Which, some have feared, would unravel space and time, destroying the universe. It's not simply limited to bizarre cases of grandparent-related homicide. If you travel back in time to change a certain event in history, and you succeed, then what happens next? You return home?"

  "Why wouldn't you?"

  "Because if you succeed, you can't go home again." He leaned forward, his dark gray eyes burning into her in a way that made her uncomfortable. "Because of this, now listen....If you go back for a specific purpose, and you achieve it, then you never had a reason to go back in time. Right?"

  "Slower," Raven said. "I'm tired."

  "Let's say your goal is to save somebody, or assassinate somebody, twenty years in the past. Now, in the new course of history you've spawned, that person was already saved, or assassinated, twenty years ago. Why would you get into a time machine for the purpose of doing it yourself? It's already been done. There's no reason for you to change history. No motive for your trip through time."

  She thought about it, though she wasn't sure whether she believed anything he said, especially the part where he claimed to be from Atlantis in the deep future. She admitted to herself that having this far-out conversation with this odd boy, who was actually a little bit attractive under the grimy exterior and the strange eyes, was just possibly better than sitting alone all night.

  "Okay, let's pretend this isn't completely crazy," Raven said. "So, since history has already gone the way you wanted, you don't go back in time to change it. You don't have a reason to travel through time."

  "But if you don't go back in time, then you don't accomplish your mission, so everything goes back to the original history," he said. "In which you do go back in time, and then...it's a paradox. It's like going back to kill your own grandfather, but it doesn't have to be that extreme. If you accomplish your purpose, any purpose, you create a new future in which you never go back in time at all, at least not on that particular mission."

  "So what happens then? The universe blows up?" Raven asked.

  "The universe is slightly smarter than that. Instead of allowing the paradox to spread, unraveling all of space and time in a supreme Armageddon sort of catastrophe, the universe treats you like an infection. It isolates you. You become an abscess on the flesh of space-time. That's what I am, and that's what you're going to become. A nomad. Rootless, wandering back and forth in time. It's a very Slaughterhouse-Five kind of existence, cut off from the natural flow of time."

  "How am I isolated?" she asked. "What does it mean when you're cut off?"

  "It goes this way: you travel back in time, you change history. You spawn a new timeline in which you never travel back on that mission, and maybe your entire life is different. The universe replaces you, the way your skin regrows and knits together under a scab. Meanwhile, you're the scab. You fall off."

  "It replaces you with what?" Raven asked.

  "Another you. A probable self, we call it, who lives this al
ternate version of your life, the version in which you never go back in time for this particular mission. Maybe that version of you never travels in time at all. Maybe, because of the changes you've made in the past, he's living an entirely different life altogether. He's the one who gets to enjoy the benefits of what you've done." A look of anger flashed across his face. "You have nowhere to go. You don't belong anywhere in space and time. You can't go home, unless you want to kill that other version of yourself, bury the body, and step into his shoes. But that seems..."

  "Extreme?" Raven asked.

  "Unlucky, at least." He shook his head. "That's why we're nomads. We are the ones who've traveled back to change the past, only to find there's nowhere for us to return. The universe cuts you loose, patches itself with another, less troublesome version of you, and time goes on..." He pitched his empty coffee cup into a barrel-sized rubber wastebasket lined with a black bag. "That's what the universe will do with you, if you carry out your mission."

  "Are you saying I shouldn't carry out this 'mission'?" Raven glanced at the wastebasket, full of plates, cups, and plastic dinnerware, feeling disoriented in a world where people threw away so many things with so little thought.

  "Oh, no, wait, do what you want, that's your choice." He pulled back from the table, raising his hands with his palms out, as though he didn't want any responsibility to splash onto him. "Being a nomad has high points, too. You can see the sights, the past, the future...and we always know when history changes."

  "Does it change very often?" Raven gave him a little smirk.

  "All the time. You'll be walking down a city street and the entire place shifts--the city becomes a ruin, or grows twice as large. There might be a different language on the signs around you. The level of technology might advance or regress--horses to monorails and back again. The entire world might change, but few people notice, because their lives and memories change with it. Anybody who does notice seems crazy to everyone else. Our memories don't change, Raven. It's a benefit of being a nomad, if you choose to consider it a benefit."

  "I'm not a nomad yet, though," Raven said. "Only if I complete this 'mission' you keep talking about, right?"

  "That's true. You aren't one yet."

  "So why are you here? What do you want from me?" she asked.

  "I'm here as a favor to you. I'm talking to you as a friend."

  "You're not my friend. I don't even know your name."

  "Eliad," he said.

  "Seriously?"

  "That's just what you asked the first time we met," he said. "And I'll tell you again: it's a very common twenty-fifth-century Atlantean name. You usually call me 'Eli.' Or sometimes 'Lad' or 'Laddie' when you want to annoy me...I wish I hadn't mentioned that."

  "So why are you here, Laddie? To warn me about becoming a time nomad?"

  "No, forget I said anything about that. As far as your decision-making goes, just drop that information for now."

  "I know how to make my own decisions."

  "It will be your funeral..."

  "What?"

  "Possibly." He shrugged. "Some sort of gunmen from the future are hunting you, aren't they? So your life is currently in great danger."

  "Have you seen them?" Raven sat up.

  "No, relax, I'm just remembering what you've told me. You must be careful. We know you lived through this mission the first time around, because you and I met later. Now that I've intervened and changed things, anything's possible. They might kill you this time around because I'm talking to you right now. There's no way of knowing how things will change because of my presence."

  "Well, thanks so much for that," Raven said.

  "It's just a warning. Here's the real message--from you. From a future version of you, anyway. A probable future version of you, I should say, who may or may not come into existence now that I've intervened with the original--"

  "Get to the point!"

  "We have arrived there. Here's the message..." He leaned his face close to hers, so that his eyes filled her vision. He spoke slowly and carefully, as though reciting something he'd memorized. "History is the collision of countless events. You can't rewrite a story that complex with a magic bullet. You can change the world with time travel, but you can't control the results. You might make things better, but you're far more likely to open the gates of Hell."

  He stood and stretched.

  "Is that it? What does that mean?" Raven stood with him.

  "It means, my pretty little bird, that your current mission won't accomplish what you think it will. You have to change course."

  "Change course how?"

  "You didn't fill me in on the details. I'm just delivering a message from you to you. You figure it out. I'm just the messenger, don't shoot me."

  "If it's from my future self, why didn't I deliver it myself?"

  "Interfering with your own past can be extremely risky. We want to intervene as little as possible. You have to be precise and surgical with these things. I've already put your life in danger just by altering events in any way. There's no guarantee you'll live this time. So promise me you'll be safe, right?" He leaned closer to her, and she tensed, ready to strike back. "Do you promise?"

  "Sure," she whispered, wondering why his face was suddenly so close to hers.

  She was prepared for a knife or a gun, so when he kissed her, her brain shorted out for half a second. She closed her eyes, letting his lips linger on hers for a long moment before she fully realized what was happening.

  She snarled and threw a punch at his jaw, but her arm seemed to pass right through him. She opened her eyes.

  He was gone. The terminal lay wide open and brightly lit in either direction, with only a thin, scattered crowd, but he wasn't anywhere among them.

  She turned a quick circle, searching, but he'd vanished entirely, leaving her with the strange feeling that she'd just been kissed by a ghost.

  Chapter Seven

  The two-hour bus ride to New Haven departed early in the morning. Along the way, Raven passed time by using her sunglasses to learn about the city before she arrived. The glasses responded to both voice and hand gestures, and they connected to the 2013 version of the Internet to find whatever data she needed.

  Raven learned the name "New Haven" sounded like a cult compound for a reason. It had been founded in 1638 by a breakaway sect of Puritans, who were of the opinion that other Puritans just weren't strict enough. It was one of the oldest American cities, best known as the site of Yale University.

  She felt anxious as the bus arrived in New Haven. She was closing in on her target, an eighteen-year-old Yale student named Logan Carraway who was destined to become dictator of the nation.

  At the New Haven bus terminal, she stepped off the bus and took a moment to stretch her legs and look around. The day was sunny and clear, and the salt-tanged air smelled fresh and clean after two hours on a bus.

  Raven locked herself inside a bus station bathroom stall and checked the three-dimensional grid map of New Haven. In the narrow stall, the projection was so tiny she could barely read the text.

  The red dot marking the target's NEXT KNOWN LOCATION was time-stamped thirty minutes from the present moment at a coffee shop called Willoughby's, located in an art department building on campus.

  Raven walked to the university, wearing her dark glasses and keeping her hand near the pistol under her jacket. Though the city looked tranquil, she felt she was deep inside enemy territory.

  She crossed a sprawling, grassy green lined with trees, walking on paved paths past fountains and antique churches with towering steeples. Ahead of her loomed the massive colleges of Yale, each one like a medieval fortress, imposing structures of brick and dark sandstone.

  The entire scene was unreal to her, like an idyllic dream, a world that only existed in old movies. There were no armed men or armored vehicles patrolling the streets. Birds sang in the tall trees around her. She felt deep in her bones how much she did not belong in this world.

 
She walked in the shadows of dark Gothic spires and massive brick fortresses. The place struck her as a kind of fantasy land, a pleasure park for a crazed trillionaire, full of castles pretending to be centuries old.

  Raven reached the place where she would find the target--a glass-walled coffee shop on the ground level of a tall, blocky art department building, which did not fit the overall medieval look of the school campus.

  She bought a cup of organic Costa Rican coffee and took an empty table at the back with a broad view of the shop.

  The map's timestamps must have been pulled from old data, she reasoned, like phone and bank records. Soon, the monster would be here, using his phone or paying with a credit card. Her anticipation caused the minutes to pass slowly.

  "Search Logan Carraway," Raven whispered, covering her mouth with her hand. She wondered what the Internet of 2013 might tell her about Carraway and his family. Her glasses returned a list of results. The text and images that seemed to float in the air in front of her, though they were projected inside her lenses.

  The first names on the list was LOGAN CARRAWAY (1995- ), Grandson of Senator Archibald Carraway (Indiana). She pointed her finger to select it.

  More text, images, and blocks of video filled her vision. A transparent square floating near the center offered a Wikipedia article from 2013 about Archibald Carraway. He was born in 1941, currently serving his fifth term in the United States Senate, representing Indiana.

  Raven skimmed to find Logan's name, but it was only mentioned in passing as one of Senator Carraway's grandchildren. There was no link for more information.

  There was a link to another article about Logan's father, Martin Carraway. He had graduated from Yale in 1984 and taken a law degree at the University of Chicago three years later. He'd served two terms as governor of Indiana, then left public office to create a private company...

  An icy chill shuddered through her. She swallowed and forced herself to read the sentence again: