Erasing Time

by C. J. Hill

  Sheridan kept talking, answering Jeth and Elise’s questions while Echo and Taylor sat close together, staring at the computer screen. Their hands moved across the control panels. Sometimes they whispered things to each other. Every once in a while Taylor smiled at him.

  I’m not jealous, Sheridan told herself. I’m not even sure I trust Echo. Still, it stung to see him sitting as close to Taylor as he had been with her. She felt so replaceable.

  And what kind of girl sat so close to the guy she’d seen kissing her twin sister?

  These thoughts kept returning during her conversations on whether or not girls were allowed in auto parts stores (only before Father’s Day) or men were allowed in grocery stores (yes, but they couldn’t walk down the feminine hygiene aisle), and why girls had so many shoes. (It was an unwritten law. You had to have more shoes than would fit neatly into your closet.)

  Finally Elise brought in dinner, and then afterward the wordsmiths helped Sheridan and Taylor dye their hair and faces. At first, Sheridan was surprised that the men stuck around for this job, but since hair and makeup were was no longer a girl thing, it made sense. Jeth and Echo were as expert at the practice as Elise.

  Taylor chose white as her new hair color. She said she’d always wondered what it would be like to be a platinum blonde. She also added six inches to her hair length. Not only could people change their hair follicles to produce different colors, they could brush on a synthetic goo that, when dry, was indistinguishable from the natural hair strand. Sheridan added two inches to her already long hair and wanted to dye it bright red. It was her own private joke—she really would be a redhead. Echo convinced her to dye it gold with a few red stripes. He said that pure red was no longer in style.

  Since when did primary colors go out of style?

  When it came to dying their faces, Taylor covered her cheeks and eyelids with blue-and-white swirls that looked like spinning wheels. Sheridan went with a flesh-tone face dye to erase her freckles; then Echo painted a succession of gold stars that dripped around one eyebrow and down onto her cheek. Elise applied lip and eyeliner dye, then transformed Sheridan’s eyelids into two golden patches.

  When her face was finished, Sheridan looked in a mirror. The hazel eyes that stared back at her were familiar, but nothing else was. She felt like a Las Vegas showgirl.

  “You’re beautiful,” Echo said.

  Did he mean it? Did he really think this sort of glitter was attractive? Perhaps it was his way of telling her he was still interested in her even though he’d spent half the day on the computer with Taylor.

  Well, it wasn’t going to work.

  His voice turned silky. “Although you’d be beautiful no matter what sort of dyes you used.”

  It still wasn’t working.

  He tilted his head, appraising her, then grinned.

  Okay, it was working just a little bit. But only for the moment. Once he stopped giving her that intimate smile, she would regain her senses. By bedtime, she would be completely over Echo.

  chapter

  18

  At bedtime, Sheridan was not completely over Echo. As she sank into the soft warmth of her gel bed, she told herself that he wasn’t really that attractive, that there wasn’t a sort of calm strength about him. He was a spinning womanizer.

  Taylor went over to the computer in the corner of the room and turned off the record function. “Echo taught me a ton about programming and splicing,” she said, and walked back to her bed. “He really is smart. You ought to see what he can do to get around encryption.”

  “How romantic.”

  “Romantic?” Taylor crawled into her bed. “Are you jealous because Echo spent the afternoon helping me on the computer?”

  “Of course not. And he spent the afternoon and most of the evening helping you.”

  Taylor rolled her eyes. “You are jealous. I can’t believe you, Sheridan. The guy is part of the Dakine. That’s like having a thing for someone in the Mafia.” She tilted her chin down. “If you’re not careful, you’ll end up doing something stupid to endanger us.”

  “Something stupid?” Sheridan turned over on her side to better see her sister. “You mean like pretending to be a man and publishing papers that have future scientists dredging the past to find you?”

  Taylor flinched, then stuck her chin out defiantly. “I couldn’t have known what people four centuries later were going to do. Besides, I had to create another persona. No one would have taken a fifteen-year-old girl seriously.”

  Sheridan propped herself up on her elbows. “Wait a second—Sherwood was my screen name when we were fifteen. Why did you use it as your last name?”

  Taylor shrugged. “Sherwood Forest was a hidden place that kept Robin Hood safe. It just seemed fitting.”

  “Right. You go on and on about wanting your own identity, but you take my stuff easily enough.”

  Taylor ignored the accusation. “The Time Strainer apparently retrieves everyone with the DNA it’s looking for. In our case, that meant both of us. I’m sorry you got dragged into this too.”

  Sheridan shifted her pillow. “So why did you use Tyler for your first name?”

  Taylor turned on her back, one hand twisting through her newly whitened hair. “I didn’t. They’re pronouncing Taylor wrong.”

  “Well, they’ll figure it out eventually, so we’ve got to leave soon. What plan did you and Elise come up with?”

  Taylor continued to stare at the ceiling. The only sound in the room was an electrical hum from the computer. “With the passwords Echo hacked from the Scicenter today, he was able to remotely link into the Time Strainer research site. I found a lot of interesting data. I’m still absorbing it.”

  Sheridan watched her sister, waited. “Is it possible to get the Strainer to send us back to the past?”

  “Not with their design, although theoretically time travel to the past is possible. I might be able to come up with a design that would work—but I still think it’s too dangerous. I wouldn’t want something like that to fall into the wrong hands.” Taylor turned over on her side, and the gel bed conformed to her shape so she looked like a magician’s assistant who’d been cut in two. “Speaking of theories, get this: they used my theories on the structure of matter to make the Time Strainer. Talk about your work coming back to bite you.” Her lips drew together in determination. “Whatever else happens, I’m not helping them. I don’t know why they thought I would. If anything, I’ll think of a way to stop their Time Strainer so they can’t kidnap anyone else. I just need to figure out how.”

  “You said you wanted to go shopping tomorrow. Didn’t that mean we’re escaping then?”

  Taylor put her hands underneath her head and shut her eyes in thought. “The Time Strainer converts matter into energy and preserves it in the form of an energy flux wave. Energy flux waves are timeless—without the constraints of existing in a certain time period—so the scientists here bring that energy to their coordinates and reconvert it back to matter....”

  Sheridan tapped her fingers against the top of her mattress. “We need to think of something to tell Echo about leaving.”

  “The Time Strainer uses energy signals from DNA to find its victims. It searches with the same accuracy as the Find function of a computer.”

  “Did I mention Echo asked me if we had talked to Elise yet?”

  “With Echo’s help, I might be able to hack into the Time Strainer’s mainframe and create a program to shut it down, but what’s to stop them from building a new one? They might even be able to overcome the repulsive field from the dark energy next time.”

  “What?”

  “Dark energy. Space is filled with low-grade energy created when virtual particles and their antimatter partners momentarily pop into and out of existence. It leaves a tiny field called vacuum energy, which produces a negative pressure, or repulsive field.”

  Sheridan turned onto her back. “You know, this made more sense when the Time Strainer was a freezer and I was an ear
of corn.”

  Taylor’s gaze flashed over to Sheridan, shocked, and then pleased. “A freezer, yes—you’re brilliant.” Taylor sat up, cross-legged, and held her hands in front of her. “I’ve been looking at it from the wrong end. That’s why it didn’t make sense. I was only looking at what the scientists were working on, but I should have paid attention to what they weren’t working on.”

  Sheridan stared at the ceiling. “Are you ever going to explain this so it makes sense?”

  “Think of the freezer in our house and pretend you found an ear of corn in it. The corn could have been from last year’s crop, or a crop ten years ago—maybe even thirty years ago, but it couldn’t have been from two hundred years ago. Why is that?”

  “Because Mom would have noticed a two-hundred-year-old ear of corn in our freezer and thrown it away. And besides, they didn’t have freezers back then.”

  “Right,” Taylor said, gaining momentum. “To freeze something, you need a freezer, and to change something from matter into energy, you need a machine with that capability. Not now, but back then. Back in our time period. Then you send signals to it from this time period, telling it what to put in the freezer.” Taylor placed one hand across her eyes and let out a groan. “The horrible part is that I know what machine they’re using. I helped invent it.”

  Sheridan turned onto her side to better glare at Taylor. “You invented a time freezer?”

  Taylor let out an offended huff. “It wasn’t supposed to be a time freezer. I just wanted to prove you could transport matter from one location to another by changing it to an energy flux wave first.”

  Sheridan rubbed her forehead, trying to ward off the beginnings of a headache. “Couldn’t you have done that without inventing a machine that zaps people into the future?”

  “It’s a quark-gluon plasma converter—a QGP.” Her voice took on the patient tone she used for explaining science to Sheridan. “At high enough temperatures and densities, atoms come completely unglued from one another, forming a plasma of quarks and the energy that binds quarks together. At even higher energies, the plasma transmutes into an energy flux.

  “The QGP was my doctoral experiment. Dr. Branscomb got the funding for it and was helping me keep it secret until we’d worked out the bugs.” Taylor flung her hands upward. “It was only supposed to be for testing. What in the world did he do to it?”

  She pushed herself off her bed and stomped back over to the computer, tossing her hair off her shoulder as though the new length annoyed her. She sat down with a thud and typed on the keyboard.

  “What are you doing?” Sheridan called.

  “I’m checking the history logs for information on Branscomb, to see if anyone ever recorded where he got his funding from.” She stopped for a moment and muttered, “Everything before 2200 is encrypted, but if I could access … How did Echo get around that again …?”

  “Should we call Echo and ask for his help?”

  “I’ll figure it out. If Echo can do it, so can I. I’m not about to be shown up on a computer by some glorified English researcher.”

  “Wordsmith,” Sheridan said, “and your disdain for people outside the science field is irritating.”

  Taylor didn’t answer, and it was pointless to say anything else. Taylor wouldn’t turn her mind to tomorrow until it was finished with the past. Sheridan lay back down on her bed and closed her eyes while she listened to the hum of the computer and the tap of Taylor’s fingers against the keyboard.

  Finally the tapping stopped. “He died.”

  “Well, obviously.”

  “No, Branscomb died three days after we left. His obit record says he died in an accidental lab fire.” Taylor sat back in her chair, still staring at the screen. “Three days after we were taken.”

  An obit record? If Taylor could access those, that meant they might be able to find their family’s records. She could learn how long each had lived, who their brothers had married, and how many children they’d had.

  She opened her mouth to ask, then shut it. She didn’t want to know. Not yet. Right now she wanted to remember them as she had left them. Young, happy, and only a little bit out of her reach. She wanted to believe that after she and Taylor left Traventon, Taylor would build a time machine that would take them back.

  Taylor stared at the screen. “Something must have gone wrong with the QGP. If I had been there, Professor Branscomb might not have died.” Then Taylor put her hand to her mouth, her finger crisscrossing against her lips. “Or maybe I would have died too. Maybe that’s how I was going to die, and I should be grateful that I got time strained out of there.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sheridan said. “If the QGP was what turned us into energy waves, it had to be working before we were strained, didn’t it? Why would it not be working three days later?”

  “You’re right. It had to be working.” Taylor turned back to the computer, and her fingers tapped against the keyboard once again. After a few minutes, she said, “Listen to this: Dr. Don Reilly, Professor Branscomb’s partner, gave a eulogy at the university. ‘Dr. Branscomb’s sacrifice in the quest for knowledge will not be in vain. I will continue my work and my experiments on the quark-gluon plasma converter in the hope that I can unlock the secrets of mass and energy we have so long sought after.’”

  Taylor sat back in her chair openmouthed. “His work? I can’t believe this. I never even spoke to the guy, and he took credit for my ideas. He stole my QGP.”

  “And may have killed your professor.” As soon as Sheridan said it, she dismissed the idea. She had read too many spy thrillers. Professors didn’t go around killing one another. She waited for Taylor to refute the notion, but Taylor didn’t.

  Which told Sheridan that there was money to be made with the QGP.

  “How did he even know about it?” Taylor asked. “It was a secret.”

  “Dr. Branscomb must have told him.”

  “Branscomb was the one who insisted I keep everything a secret.”

  “Of course he did. He wanted to make sure he could take credit for your idea. What was the patent worth?”

  Taylor’s eyes narrowed at something on the screen, and Sheridan got up and went over to see what it was. A grainy picture of Don Reilly stared back at her. He would have looked like any other balding middle-aged man, but his expression, even in picture form, had an air of self-importance about it. His lips were slightly pursed, disdainful of something—perhaps humanity in general. He had bushy, unkempt eyebrows and a long thin nose, but his most noticeable features were jowls that hung down, making his face blend into his neck.

  “If Reilly did kill Branscomb,” Taylor said, “he had to have known the QGP was working. But I wasn’t done with the programming.”

  “So Branscomb sold you out and finished the machine on his own. Maybe he needed Reilly’s help. Whatever happened, before he could steal the credit from you, Reilly stole it from him.”

  Taylor glowered at the screen. “The love of physics. That’s what Branscomb always said motivated him. Right. I’m glad he’s dead. He deserved it.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  Taylor shot Sheridan a look that indicated she did indeed mean it.

  Sheridan decided to change the subject. “Do you think Reilly knew about you?”

  Taylor leaned back in her chair. “I guess it doesn’t matter. I disappeared three days before the accident. Must have been awfully convenient for him.”

  “But someone knew about your involvement. Scientists wouldn’t be searching for you four hundred years later if you hadn’t gotten credit somewhere along the line.”

  “They aren’t searching for me—they’re searching for Taylor Sherwood, the pen name I used on papers in science periodicals.” Taylor leaned forward again, her hands busy on the control panels.

  An obit picture of Reilly came up. It looked about the same as the last picture they’d seen, except that he was smiling. It didn’t improve his looks that much.

  “Wh
at do you know?” Taylor said. “Reilly had an early demise too. He disappeared two months later.”

  “Disappeared?”

  Taylor scanned the article. “He went to work and never came home again.”

  “You worked on the machine and disappeared, then he took credit for it and disappeared. Do you think the scientists used the Time Strainer on him?”

  “I hope they did.” Taylor scowled at his picture. “It would serve them both right. Reilly will realize he missed out on his ill-gotten gains, and the scientists here will have someone who probably never conceived an original idea in his entire life. A perfect match.”

  But not so perfect if he knew too much. “Taylor, did Branscomb know you’d published as Taylor Sherwood?”

  Taylor exited out of the obit record. “Yes, but Branscomb wouldn’t have told Reilly about me. Not when he didn’t want to share the credit.” She pushed away from the desk, stood up, paused, then sat back down on the chair. She put her hands on the desk, then two seconds later raked them through her hair. “Do I leave before the scientists find out who I am, or do I stay and figure out a way to keep them from taking anyone else?”

  Sheridan didn’t answer.

  “If I stay,” Taylor went on, “I put my life and my sister’s life in danger. If I go, they’ll keep using the Time Strainer to take anyone who’ll give them an advantage in the present. Scientists, leaders, enemies. Who knows how much damage they’ll do?” Taylor swiveled in her chair to face Sheridan. “But Elise said she could take us to meet her contact tomorrow—as soon as we can get away.”

  Sheridan still didn’t say anything. The two options struggled against one another in her mind. Which was better?

  Softly, Taylor said, “Maybe you should go with Elise and leave me here.”

  Sheridan shook her head. “How would you ever get out of the city? How would we find each other again?”

  Taylor lifted her hands, then let them fall back into her lap. “All right, then tell me what to do. You decide if we stay or leave in the morning.”