Recursion

by Marion G. Harmon

  Nodding, she didn’t look any happier. “That’s why I haven’t said anything. I just kept piling up observations because it’s impossible. But it’s true.”

  “Okay, then lets . . .” I looked around, realized we’d just been hanging here in the sky above Chicago to argue my reality. A news helicopter chopped the air, flying by less than a mile from us on its way somewhere. “Let’s take this somewhere else.”

  The roof of the Sears Tower seemed appropriate, but didn’t give me any more perspective. Touching down and sitting on its edge, I remembered all the conversations I’d shared with Atlas here. I remembered the crushing grief. Which wasn’t crushing me anymore. When had it stopped?

  Last week.

  Like Shell said, I wasn’t all “giggles and sunshine” yet. But the dark cloud was gone and even sitting here, in a place I’d avoided, didn’t bring it back.

  Suddenly I wasn’t worried about Shell anymore.

  “So, let’s say you’re right about all of it. How could I have been switched without you noticing? Maybe,” I swallowed. “Maybe I’m still me but I’ve been ‘adjusted’? Somehow? Or swapped mentally, a new ‘me’ in the same head? Like a split personality? Do the Future Files say anything about this sort of thing?”

  Shell answered slowly. “You know I can’t say anything about your pre-California potential futures. But no, there’s nothing like this. Does anything feel out of place to you? Different? You noticed your dream-pattern shift. You stopped waking up a total mess. Is there anything else?”

  “Not really. Just—” No. No.

  I made myself remember to breathe. Breathing made me feel real, made the world feel real.

  “What is it?”

  “Last night’s dream,” I choked. “It wasn’t—it was good, I didn’t think about it, really, when I woke, I didn’t—” Shell couldn’t see my dreams, any more than she could read my thoughts, and oh how I wished she could right now. Because it was a memory, and it was impossible. “I need to go home. I need to go home now.”

  * * *

  Going home meant returning to the Dome to change into civvies, then driving. The city had cleared the streets after yesterday’s snowfall and traffic out to Oak Park was light, but comparing the twenty-minute drive to the one minute it would take me to fly when I needed to be there now almost had me pounding the steering wheel. Almost. I’d have needed a new steering wheel.

  The knot inside me unwound a little when I saw our grand old Victorian. Not that I’d expected the house not to be there, but just seeing it made my suddenly questionable reality feel more real. Dad had shoveled the snow before leaving for the office, and I parked in the driveway.

  “Honey?” Mom called from the kitchen as I came in the side door. Graymalkin padded over to wind himself around my ankles as soon as I finished toeing off my shoes, and I picked him up and went to find Mom. She looked up as I walked into the kitchen, hands not stopping as she chopped. The makings of a five-star salad lay arranged on the counter in front of her.

  “Hello, sweetheart. Would you like some lunch?”

  I shook my head, cuddling Gray. “Not hungry, thanks. Home for the day? And how’s . . . how’s Mrs. Robinson?”

  “We closed the office for a snow day. Mrs. Robinson’s fine. A little lonely, but I saw her at the garden meeting yesterday.”

  The knot unwound some more. “That’s good. Did you fight?”

  She laughed. Mom and Mrs. Robinson co-chaired the St. Christopher’s Garden Committee, and arguments between them over the layout of each year’s new plantings had been known to get epic. At least as epic as people who’d been good friends and neighbors for more than two decades could get.

  “No, dear. And how are you?”

  That was the most she’d ask about yesterday, and I put Gray down and hugged her from behind. Only now, after I could breathe again free of my dark cloud, did I think of how hard that had to be.

  The Fort Whittier Attack had been her worst nightmare. Hers and Dad’s—as a Sentinel reservist, he’d known Atlas and Ajax for ten years, trained with them. Two friends had come home from L.A. in boxes, and I’d come home a shadow of myself.

  “I’m fine, Mom.” I kissed her cheek and she put the knife down to reach up and squeeze my arm.

  “That’s good. Do you want to talk about it? Will you talk to somebody?”

  “I have to, before they’ll let me out for anything but emergency aid again.”

  “Good. Are you staying for dinner, then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe?” I reluctantly let go, reaching past her to snatch a juicy cherry tomato and pop it in my mouth. “Right now I’m going to make some calls and study.” I didn’t say just what I’d be studying.

  “Then you’ll stay long enough to see your father?” Not a request.

  “Yes, Mom.” I snagged another tomato and headed upstairs.

  I went right to my bedroom closet. A minute’s search and I found it, the black dress I’d worn That Day. Sitting down with it on my bed, I felt its wispy lace edging and remembered.

  My dream last night hadn’t been of the January funeral. That day, with the horses and the coffins, the bagpipes and the speeches and the black, black grief, hadn’t been any part of my dream. It had been another funeral, Mrs. Robinson’s funeral.

  And it hadn’t happened, yet.

  I knew Mrs. Robinson almost as well as Mom did. She was our neighbor and we shared a gated fence. Since her own children were all grown, she’d adopted a grandmotherly regard for me and my brothers. Aaron and Josh too, but me and Toby especially. She’d even baby-sat me sometimes. My brothers had all been unreliable sitters.

  And I’d worn this dress for her funeral mass at St. Chris’.

  Closing my eyes, I heard Father Nolan’s comforting words again. Faith is the belief that there is something more. That beyond death there is something else. Justice for the wicked. Forgiveness for the penitent. Love for the forsaken. Reunion with all our dead.

  Mrs. Robinson had been lonely because Hank, Mr. Robinson, had died two years ago. Sitting in the pew I’d cried for myself, because I’d miss her, but they’d been happy tears, because of the message. Because I knew he wasn’t waiting for her anymore, they were together again.

  Wiping my eyes, I set the dress aside and focused on the memory of those words and that feeling, tried to remember the world around them. Fall. It had been fall? At the cemetery the air had been crisp with the promise of frost. But in the service—beside me had sat. . .Shell? Real, and present, holding my hand? The impossibility of that almost threw me out of my memory. But there was also Jacky, and . . . Ozma?

  Oh . . .

  It was like pushing on a stuck door, only a crack of light to see by as I heaved, and then resistance just vanished and I fell forward into one impossible memory after another. Into a future that hadn’t happened yet.

  “So, did it work?” Shell sat beside me. “Because your heartrate just spiked.”

  I stared at her, seeing Galatea and Shelly, too. Of course I was calling her Shell now. I’d forgotten her future other half, forgotten the Shellys, my training and experience, my team. I’d forgotten but I hadn’t really forgotten, not even the ghost-pain in my shoulder, and now I remembered everything.

  Everything except how I’d gotten here. “Shell . . .”

  Chapter Seven

  “I saw this movie once, where the hero didn’t know what was real and spent half the show distressed and confused at every impossible thing she saw. That’s not how it works. Your brain says what reality is—if you hallucinate a one eyed, one horned, flying purple people-eater, your brain tells you that a one eyed, one horned, flying purple-people eater just flew past you. Afterwards your brain might say, ‘Hang on, there’s no such thing as a one eyed, one horned, flying purple people-eater,’ but when you’re seeing it your conviction’s complete and that’s the nature of insanity.

  “So if you’re looking at a purple people-eater and know it’s impossible, it’s reality and no
t your head that needs to be checked.”

  From the journal of Hope Corrigan.

  * * *

  “It doesn’t work that way. It can’t work that way.”

  “Shell, I remember. It’s been nearly three years since now, and you wouldn’t believe what’s— Everything that’s happened.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Shell paced, running fingers through her increasingly wild hair. It was becoming her signature move. “You can’t be in your past. The past is past. You can’t change it. It’s set, no retroactive continuity changes allowed—and you just said that, at the least, you’re back out in the field weeks earlier than you remember being. Just one change is impossible, and what else is different?”

  “Well . . .” I reviewed the last few days. “I don’t remember any report about a gravikinetic breakthrough back then—I mean, now. I never picked up Andrew’s two-piece design, either. Never even saw it.” For a distracted moment I wondered why not—it would have been lots more welcome than the produced costume he’d shown me the sketches for today. My costume a few months from today, and so not happening now.

  “And Kitsune didn’t join the team. I didn’t even meet him—her—until spring. He was . . .” I wasn’t even going to try and explain Kitsune. “And there’s Fisher’s investigation.” I hadn’t been assisting Detective Fisher yet—originally—but I was pretty sure I’d have remembered Ambrosius coming to town to work a case even when I was still off active duty. He wore a white cowboy hat, for goodness sake. Not to mention his southern drawl was a dead ringer for Atlas’s.

  “And you don’t remember why you’re here?”

  I shook my head. My last future memory was . . . I couldn’t say what my last future memory was, since nothing then attached to now, to me waking up last week. “And I don’t even know where here is, if it’s not my past!”

  What if I was trapped in another extrareality? One that was just chronologically “behind” mine?

  “Um.” Shell stopped pacing. “I’ve got a theory about that. One that fits the facts we know, anyway.”

  “Oh, do tell. Please.”

  She held up a placating hand. “You might not like it, okay?”

  “Fine. Fine.” I took a breath. “Really, Shell, it’ll be fine. I just need to— I need to know what to be careful of.”

  “This won’t help much, then. I think you’re from a potential future. Sort of.”

  “What, like the ones the Teatime Anarchist used to visit?” I tried to remember his long-ago explanation. Temporal superposition? That was it—an infinite phase-space of potential futures that collapsed into the single, actual present as time’s arrow moved into the future second by second. “You think another time traveler’s messing around?”

  “Or maybe someone from here and now, who can reach into the potential futures? I think they, whoever they are, might have tapped the most likely potential future a week ago, accessed your memories there, and dumped them into your head.”

  “Wow, that’s . . . Do you think that’s more likely than me dropping in from another reality? One that’s a few years ahead of this one? I’ve . . . jumped, into the body of another ‘me’ before.”

  Shell looked struck. “Really? Did I notice it, there? Did it feel just like this to you?”

  “No.” I slumped. “I don’t know if you would have spotted it, you weren’t quantum-ghost Shell there. But in that jump I remembered who I was and didn’t know anything about her.”

  “Yeah,” Shell sighed. “That fits the observational literature. If you’d jumped here from somewhere else, you’d know it.”

  I lay back on my bed, rubbed my eyes. “What do I do, Shell? I’m not leaving this room until I know I won’t break something.”

  “Like your future?” Her voice got real quiet. “Yeah, well, that ship has already sunk.”

  “What?” Breathe! Why couldn’t I breathe?

  “You said it yourself—everything’s already different. You’re doing things different, meeting different people. What happens later might be like what you remember, but everything happening the way you remember it? Uh-uh. The cascade of changing events is literally incalculable.”

  “But—” But what, then? Shell, duplicated and alive, back with her mom? Jacky fully alive, more than a living corpse? The Green Man stopped, Littleton safe, the Ascendancy thwarted, Tokyo, everything I’d done . . .

  Shell might as well have been reading my mind. “It’s not that bad! I mean, you’re twenty-one? Wow. But lots of the things you helped with, you can still do. Better, since you know they’re coming.”

  I found myself nodding, hands itching for pen and paper. I could make a list. At the least, Villains Inc. would be going down fast. And with no civilian casualties, since I knew enough for us to stop them hard. Blackstone would know what to do with what I had in my head, and . . . “We should sweep the lakes for a Godzilla. Soon.”

  “What, really? But yeah, that’s what I mean—stuff you can see coming from over the horizon, now.”

  “Okay.” Breathing got easier. “I can see that. But still, why? Why would anyone do this?”

  “Someone’s playing a game we don’t know about? Maybe they need an older, more experienced Astra for it? Or at least one who’s not . . .”

  “A shuffling zombie?” Three added years of distance meant my memories of my state of mind just a week ago were mercifully a little bit fuzzy, but I remembered how I’d acted well enough. I laughed, barely keeping myself from running downstairs to hug Mom again. “Shell, I was useless. And I’m pretty sure I scared the crap out of everyone.” Just ten minutes ago, I’d had no idea. “I was useless for weeks yet, the first time around.”

  “So there you go—the one result we know for sure is you’re yourself again. Or even better.” But she was frowning again.

  “What?”

  “But how do we know your future-memories are ‘real’? Maybe they’re misdirection? Point you in a direction that’s going to mess us over?”

  “I— Wow, that’s twisty. And way to make me question everything I think I know.”

  But Shell was right. What was more likely, really? That my memories were from a future that wouldn’t happen now, or that they were fabricated? Was real future-knowledge more likely than something faked up?

  No. I wouldn’t allow my future to be wrong. “That one’s easy enough to check.”

  “How?”

  I laughed. “Science! If my memories are true, then I know stuff now that I didn’t know till later, right? Like the Godzilla thing.”

  “Yes!” She nodded eagerly. “So, what can you check now?”

  “Easy. You told me, later, that in the pre-California Quake history, Chicago was going to get its own Godzilla attack in a few years? Not this spring. That the attacks on Tokyo and New York came early. Am I right?”

  Her mouth opened and closed. “That’s— Wow, not a conversation we’ve had yet, but yeah. In the pre-Whittier Base futures, the big critters showed up way later.”

  “So, not faked.” My grin almost split my face. Whatever was going on, with all that I knew there was so much that would be easy this time.

  “Hope!” Mom called from the stairs. “Would you come down?”

  Shell’s eyes widened. In her pre-death experience, calm and polite Mrs. C. didn’t shout. Ever. Even when our sleepovers had gotten a little active, we’d always heard footsteps on the stairs, a knock on the bedroom door. Or Mom had simply called on her cellphone. Mom hadn’t shouted when my field hockey knee injury had taken me to the emergency room (although that time she’d gotten really intense).

  That was still my experience and I nearly tripped getting down the stairs. When I slid into the kitchen Mom pointed at the tv on the counter by the fridge. The information bar at the bottom of the screen identified the local news station as an anchorwoman droned on about the video being shown.

  It looked like a low-angle view recorded by somebody’s cellphone, mostly shadows. The important thing was the
audio; I recognized that voice. Benjamin Trent, the gravikinetic who’d died this morning. The channel actually bleeped out a string of his curses, then came the crash as I shot through, then darkness as the building came down.

  “Reviewing the footage taken by one of the meeting attendee’s cellphones,” the neatly coiffed commentator who replaced the image said solemnly, “does show that Mr. Trent, while manic, was offering no threat to anyone when struck by Astra last night. In light of this discovered footage, Fiona Trent, Mr. Trent’s surviving family, has announced that she is suing Astra, the Sentinels, and the City of Chicago. We now have a comment from—”

  Mom turned it off, and just for a moment her expression was naked. “Are you . . .”

  I lowered my hands from my mouth and then I was hugging her. Again.

  “I’m alright. I’ll be alright.”

  Her arms tightened like she’d hold me forever. “When did you get so strong?”

  “Under an overpass, duh.” But that was it—I tried to fight it, but my emotions had been wildly swinging all day. Crying was definitely happening.

  Two sniffs and some minor waterworks later, I got my We’re Cool mask mostly on. Mom did too, and we smiled at each other’s silliness. “I really am alright.”

  “I know. Are you going back to the Dome?”

  I nodded. “But I’m calling Legal Eagle first.”

  * * *

  “When do superheroes get stuck in traffic?” Sitting in the passenger’s seat, Shell unfocused her eyes. “StreetWatch says there’s a fender-bender two blocks ahead. Tell me future-you didn’t still put up with this stuff.”

  No, I got outed and after that I could just fly. “Shut up.”

  “Way to act twenty-one.”

  “I’m eighteen. Again.”

  * * *

  “Hi, Tom.”

  Since he could openly fly any time and didn’t have to change, Tom Brannigan, Esquire—Legal Eagle—beat me there. He looked startled as I took a seat in Blackstone’s office. It could have been my new costume; not even the team had seen it yet, and after being the Girl in Black for the last weeks, the change had to be startling. Or maybe it was the twisty grin on my face when I realized that, this time around, I could completely avoid the infamous Paulina Street Noodle Incident. He wouldn’t need to be working his magic to keep me out of court for that, at least.