A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1)

by O'Hara, Kim K.

“Why don’t you just make the notes in digital form?”

  “That would be more efficient, I know, and that’s what Doc usually does, but there’s a kind of energy you get from having papers piled around you, being able to scribble notes in the margins, emphasizing things by pressing harder on the pen.”

  “Okay, I guess I can see that. Can’t really imagine doing it myself, but okay.”

  “Anyway, if Doc wants to study my results or want to pass information without an electronic trail, we make a copy on this machine over here. We built it ourselves. It was one of the first projects we worked on together.”

  He remembered when they started, those first mornings after his mom had died, when he was feeling the need for something to fill his empty days after spending so much time at the hospital. Doc had told him that if he wanted to handwrite things, they needed a way to share. Many hours of research later, they had some diagrams and schematics, and they began building the copier, the same way Doc had built most of the other instruments and machines in the lab.

  Dani was fascinated, more interested in the way it worked than in the copies themselves. After she told him which pages she wanted to look at, he left the door open to the innards of the machine. She watched, absorbed in the workings of all the gears, drums, and multi-colored inks, while he made the copies.

  When he was done, he handed it to her with a flourish. “And just like that, it’s done.”

  “They’re warm!”

  He laughed. “Yes, the machine has baked the ink into the paper so it won’t smudge.”

  She flipped through the papers. It was amusing to watch her check each page, as if she thought it was some sort of illusion. “It’s amazing. Every page is here.”

  She tucked the papers away in the back pocket on her worktablet. “One more blip, I suppose. You would never have made a copy if we hadn’t met.”

  He didn’t even have to go look at the monitor to answer. “True. Those copies only exist here. In the other reality, they’d be blank paper. I’m sure there’s a blip. But what’s one more?”

  28

  Distraction

  SEEBAK LABORATORY, Vashon Island, WA. 1730, Sunday, June 11, 2215.

  “Thank you for making the copies,” Dani said. “Is there anything else I can help you with before I head home?”

  “You’ve been amazing!” Lexil’s smile was genuinely appreciative, without a trace of his earlier passion, and she was grateful. She had been worried that their relationship would get even more awkward after the moment in the woods, but instead, the decision had helped them turn back to their real focus and work. They had made a good team, and it felt nice to be productive. Tomorrow, she would find an opportunity to run the extract program, and soon—oh, so soon!—she would be hugging Jored again, without any memory of the last few days.

  For just a moment, she let herself visit the corner of her mind where she had stuffed all her feelings for Lexil. It would have been nice if they had been free to explore that possibility further. If they’d met in the real timestream, she had no doubt she’d be hugging him goodbye, leaving reluctantly if at all, instead of merely asking if their work was done. Part of her still wanted that, but she made the conscious choice to ignore its muffled voice.

  “Would you like to see the rest of the house before you go?” Lexil broke into her reverie.

  “You mean there’s more than a library and a kitchen?” She smiled.

  “Let’s go see.” He led her around the side of the house so they could enter through the front door. The entry way featured a tile floor. An umbrella stand, a shoe rack, and a simple bench sat against the left wall. On the right, a staircase led up to the second floor. “If we go straight back, we’ll get to the part of the house you’ve already seen. But here’s the living room on the left.”

  In the living room, a couch and two comfortable-looking chairs flanked a fireplace in the center of the far wall. To Dani, it looked rustic and old-fashioned, an effect lessened only slightly by a couple of ergonomically-correct, modern plastic chairs on the right near a small gaming center. She knew the plastic chairs would automatically provide the exact support needed for anyone who sat down in them, but these other chairs, the upholstered ones, looked strangely inviting, and she wondered what it would feel like to sit in one of them. Her move to try them out was cut short by Lexil ushering her out of the room.

  As they passed the gaming center, he commented, “Doc got me started on these games when I moved in.”

  “Doc got you started?”

  “Oh yeah, he loves them. He’s way better than I am, too, but I have fun playing. He says they remind him of scientific experiments. You try one thing, and if it doesn’t work, you get do-overs. And he likes that there is guaranteed to be at least one solution.”

  “That’s always nice.”

  They moved on. “We have a guest room down here. Doc had an extra-wide doorway put in for wheelchair access when we thought my mom might recover.” He paused. “Back in the beginning, we had a lot more hope.”

  “I’m sorry, Lexil.”

  “No, I’m fine. I’m happy here. I like it a lot. I miss her sometimes still, that’s all.”

  Judging from his expression, she doubted that he was telling the full truth. But she didn’t really expect that kind of familiarity, not after just a few days. And a few days was all she would ever get; she would never have a chance to get to know him well enough for any real trust.

  He was leading her upstairs. By island standards, the house was neither large nor small. Its upper floor included one more guest room and the two bedrooms for Lexil and Dr. Seebak. The bedrooms were furnished neatly but sparely. Each had its own viewwall. Doc’s was set on a jungle scene and Lexil’s was set on “translucent” to let the natural sunlight in.

  “What’s your favorite so far?” he asked.

  “Oh, the library. I’d love to browse that more. I only really looked at that one shelf.”

  “I think you’ll like this next part even better! Come see.” He opened a door at the end of the short hall between his room and the doctor’s. It led out onto a wide deck on the west side of the house, which wrapped around to the south. Four deck chairs and a round table were arranged so that their occupants could absorb the view.

  The view was amazing.

  Firs and madrona trees painted the landscape with lush greenery. She could see from here that the house was set on a hillside, which hadn’t been evident on either the path from the lab to the house or from the lab to the tube station. In the distance, looking down the hillside, she had a clear view of the Olympic Mountains.

  “It’s peaceful out here,” she said, standing at the railing. “What’s the water I hear? Is that a stream?”

  “Well, there is a stream, but you’re hearing the waterfall.” He gestured out to the left, and Dani saw it, water cascading down a bank, tumbling over piles of stones and ending in a pool with a flat stone patio around it. She inhaled the scent of the fresh-water spray.

  “You can’t see them from here, but we have fish in the pool.”

  They stood quietly for a few moments, letting the soothing sound drain away the stresses of the day.

  “Sometimes we eat up here.” Lexil said softly. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

  Dani realized that she would, very much.

  “Dinner” turned out to be salmon and green beans, with boiled red potatoes.

  “Fresh off the boat,” Dr. Seebak said, as he took the herbed salmon fillets off the grill.

  “Did you actually go fishing?” With these two, anything was possible.

  The doctor laughed. “No, I have an old friend who delivers them. He helps manage permits for a small fleet, and we get tube deliveries when they’re in season.”

  “We grew the beans and potatoes ourselves, though,” Lexil said, straight-faced, as he took a bite of beans.

  “Don’t let him tell you that, Dani. We are nowhere near that self-sufficient. We depend on deliveries, same a
s everyone else.”

  Dani scowled at Lexil, then she smiled at his wink. “Regardless, they’re really good. No stories needed. The flavor speaks for itself.”

  At first, it felt a little awkward, eating with these people she’d only known for a few days. The memory of the kiss made it worse. But within minutes, their light-hearted banter had relaxed her. By the time they were finished with the meal, the topic of conversation came back to their research.

  “Your notes talk about three forces. Hang on, let me look at those again, because I had a question,” Dani said. Where were those pages he had made for her? She knew she had brought them up here with her. Aha! Under her chair. She brought them up to the table, pushing her plate back a bit, flipping through until she found the spot she was thinking of. “Here. You mention the disturbances, the natural damping force, and then a third force that seems to erase blips. We know what causes the disturbances, or some of them anyway, but have you discovered what causes the other two forces?”

  Lexil shook his head and moved her plate out of the way, stacking it with the others. “Not for sure.”

  Dr. Seeback added, “We have some ideas, though.” He pushed their beverage glasses together to make them easier to pick up.

  “I’d love to hear what you’ve been thinking.” Her childhood training kicked in. “Can I help you carry stuff down?”

  “We weren’t going to take it down yet, but you can grab the silverware, if you want to. Might as well take care of it now. Can you carry the papers too?”

  “No problem.”

  As the three of them walked down the stairs, Lexil continued, “We see the second force as a natural force, something akin to the tendency of an object at rest or in motion to remain so.”

  “Newton’s First Law.” Dani recognized it. “So the timestream has inertia and momentum?”

  Lexil nodded. “That’s what we’re thinking. That would mean the second force is simply the timestream’s resistance to change.”

  “But the blips have overcome that resistance, somehow.”

  “Well, considering that the blips are human responses to the timestream change, that’s easy to explain.” Dr. Seebak chuckled. “You’re a walking blip, Dani. Humans make choices that can be stronger than the inertia of the timestream.”

  “But sometimes the universe pushes back, and repairs the timestream? Is that the third force?” Dani wasn’t sure she completely understood, but it was fascinating to try.

  “You can call it a force of the universe if you like, but I think it’s something different.” Lexil glanced over at his mentor. “Doc and I talked it through the other day, and we keep coming up against the obvious intentionality of that third force. It’s like there’s a consciousness making deliberate choices to repair the timestream.”

  The doctor nodded. “And it would have to be a consciousness that knew precisely what kind of action to take to exactly offset the changes that caused each blip. Nobody knows that much about this science.”

  “Not yet,” said Lexil. “So we narrowed it down to two possibilities. It could be people in the future who have developed the science of chronography to such an extent that they can make intentional changes like this. We’re planning one such intentional change, but we had the unusual advantage of your knowledge of what had caused the change.”

  “Because I was in the observation box, and happened to know Jored personally.”

  “A slim chance, by anyone’s standards,” said Dr. Seebak. “How likely is it that someone from the future can come up with a way to restore these blips we’ve been noticing?”

  “Not very likely at all,” said Dani.

  “In addition to that, there’s another complication.” Dr. Seebak rinsed the dishes and silverware and placed them into the self-cleaning cupboards and drawers. “Shall we go back to the library?”

  Lexil led the way. “Dani’s second-favorite part of the house.”

  “After the deck.” Dani confirmed it.

  “Right, after the deck.”

  When they were settled in the library chairs, Dr. Seebak spoke again. “If a person from the future changed the past to restore a blip, the absence of a blip would make it so he would have no reason to initiate the change. Would that make the blip come back?”

  “Possibly?” Dani guessed.

  Lexil leaned forward. “And if it did, we’d have a repeating cycle. We wouldn’t see those blips smoothed out at all. Which is why I think that the agency that restores the blips has to be outside of the timestream.”

  She was startled. That was not where she expected him to go, not at all. “What could be outside of the timestream? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It would have to be a being who wasn’t bound by time, who wasn’t affected by the timestream changes.” He was watching her carefully.

  Suddenly, her mind made the leap. “Never ending, never beginning. Eternal.”

  Lexil nodded, gratified. “I thought you’d get it.”

  But that would mean— “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “What do you think I’m saying? That there is a God after all? That somehow, for reasons I don’t know, he concerns himself with our affairs?”

  “Is that what you’re saying?”

  He nodded again. “I’ve seen too many things inexplicably put back together.”

  “Like Kat and Marak meeting anyway.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  She pondered that. It would explain a lot, but it wouldn’t explain one thing. “Why didn’t he fix Jored’s unbirth, then? Where’s the third force in the whole problem of his existence or non-existence?”

  Dr. Seebak had been silent, but now he spoke. “I think I have the answer to that one.”

  They looked at him.

  “Judging from the ripples at that moment, I think it was arranged that you would be in the observation box at the precise moment the padlock hologram was played, protected from the timestream switch. I think the third force has been directing us on this all along.”

  RIACH TUBE STOP, Alki Beach, Seattle, WA. 1710, Monday, June 12, 2215.

  The signal had worked perfectly, and now Dani sat on the bench at the tube station, facing away from the tube cars, ready to fake a connexion call to cover her anticipated conversation with Dr. Brant. She checked for the clock tower, and chided herself for worrying when she found it exactly where it had always been.

  Early that morning, in between doing the day’s assigned tasks, she had extracted the object records from the VAO converter. Some were tagged with identifiers associated with interns, some were simply labeled “Administrative.” She thought about using just the “Administrative” ones, but quickly realized that might take her in a wrong direction. Her own task list had included scanning the padlock in preparation for the blackmailer’s needs, so she knew interns were used for some of the illegal data gathering. Instead, she filtered the list by recent time frames. Joph and Lora should be able to get through all of them, and she wanted to be sure not to leave out anything that might hold the clues they needed.

  The conversation from the night before echoed in her thoughts as she worked. She wondered how many of her actions might be directed by this third force. Was it really something—or someone—sentient? Lexil had used the word “intentional”: a force that acted toward some intended purpose. She tried to detect any hint of being nudged as she worked, in subtle or not-so-subtle ways, and then laughed at herself. She supposed that as long as she was working to restore the timestream, she wouldn’t have to be nudged anyway. Still, it would be interesting to isolate and identify the effects of the force in her own life, since she seemed to be something of an epicenter right now.

  Perhaps she could talk to Lexil about it when she saw him at Kat’s tonight. They had agreed to meet there, so they could talk with Kat and Marak about their plans for tomorrow.

  At noon, she had left the institute to go for a walk. Once off the institute grounds, she had sent the filtered list to Jop
h. He and Lora had promised to send her back a list of times that seemed to coincide with the unidentified contributions. By this evening, she would have a much smaller list of objects to scan, and tomorrow she would look for the blackmailer’s possible victims.

  In the afternoon, she had used Lexil’s device to extract the file structure he’d asked for. She had been so busy, she almost hadn’t had time to think what that meant. That had almost been a necessity at work. She had never stopped missing Jored, and now, in less than a day, or two at the most, she would say goodbye to this timestream and be casually looking forward to the next time she spent an evening with him, or watched one of his games on a weekend. Her other self wouldn’t even know he had been gone.

  And her other self wouldn’t know what she had left behind to return, either. A new, unexpected sense of loss gripped her suddenly. Unconsciously, she touched her lips, closing her eyes, remembering a kiss on a forest pathway.

  When she opened them, she was so involved with her memories, she was almost surprised to see Dr. Brant walking toward her. The doctor was looking at the passengers waiting for tube cars, looking at the time, looking at the distant tube entrance to see if another car was coming, looking anywhere but at Dani. Finally, she sat on the bench behind Dani with an exasperated sigh and took out her worktablet to fill her time while she pretended to wait for the next car.

  Dani pressed her temple so that anyone who heard her talking would assume a connexion and look away. “Do you have the list of the board members?” she asked.

  “Yes, both the old members and the new ones, with the dates their appointments ended or began. I didn’t dare put it on my worktablet, though. I believe they are monitoring its transmissions. I hand-copied them onto a sheet of paper.”

  Dani had never before in her life met so many people who used paper! “Okay. Um. Do you want to let it slide through the slats in the bench, and then later I’ll drop my bag and grab the paper at the same time I retrieve it?”

  After a few seconds, Dr. Brant said, “There, it’s done. I folded it a few times first. Dani, be careful with this. I don’t know who among these names is responsible for the blackmailing. I suspect they all are involved to some degree. Don’t take any risks that would hurt you or hurt people you love.”