“Grey Dove, please dim the lights,” I said.
The cockpit lights go dark, and the heads-up display vanishes, and far above any cloud cover or light pollution the stars reveal themselves, countless points of brilliance. Overwhelming beauty.
“Bird in flight’s looking good, all systems go,” from the Apollo Soucek tower, and the Grey Dove climbs ever steeper, and I’m soon facing upward, on my back, the Earth directly beneath me. The nuclear thrusters fire, and the sudden force crushes me, difficult to draw breath, but the pain lasts only a few seconds, thirty seconds at most before Grey Dove escapes Earth’s clutching gravity and I’m weightless. The Earth dwindles beneath me, behind me. I feel the rumble of the firing thrusters vibrate through the ship, and I feel like I’m falling, like everything’s floating and falling.
The lunar approach was a trip of only a few hours, but I didn’t dock at the Black Vale; I accelerated past the moon. And as the moon’s silver face diminished, darkening, the Black Vale’s Lighthouse tower locked into the Grey Dove’s computer and performed a final check of the Brandt-Lomonaco Quantum-Foam Macro-Field Generator. The Grey Dove entered the area of space NSC called “Danger Sector,” as it was pocked with B-L space-time knots, points of instability created by B-L engines as we sail Deep Waters.
The B-L drive switch lit green.
I peered through the Grey Dove’s cockpit glass back toward Earth like a sailor stealing her final glimpse of shore. Earth in the ocean of space, a tearful rush, a vast sense of the fragility of life—these were the rare moments I felt a spiritual swell.
“March 1997,” I said, reminding myself of what I was soon to leave, and flipped the switch.
The B-L drive fired, creating a quantum-foam macro-field. For a brief moment, I felt as if all future possibilities existed with me, a melancholy sweetness that dissipated. A q-foam macro-field was nothing I’d ever see, even if the Grey Dove had been enveloped within one, a roiling system of wormholes flashing into existence and collapsing out of existence, all in just a Planck unit of time. The Earth, moon, and stars were blacked out. I sailed a wormhole. Which wormhole out of that turbulent foam the Grey Dove penetrated was just a matter of chance, each a tunnel to a distinct tine of the future multiverse.
I would sail three months through the quantum foam, the only light the Grey Dove’s cabin lights. Outside was depthless darkness, void. I unstrapped from the cockpit, the sounds I made strange in that eerie silence. I floated into the larger section of the ship, the interior curvilinear, white. A solitary passage. I read my case notes, reread them, and as days passed, I cycled through the ship’s library of films—Jean Seberg, Bardot, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg—and listened to the Cure and Shania Twain and Nirvana, long stretches of classical music—Rachmaninoff, Ravel. Diminishing muscle and bone mass a constant concern without gravity, so my daily routine was to exercise, fastening myself to the treadmill with broad shoulder straps, jogging with my prosthesis. Elastic bands and vacuum resistance. Miles of stairs climbed on the elliptical.
A three-month journey to travel nineteen years.
I was startled when the Grey Dove’s alarm sounded, alerting me that she had made contact with the Black Vale’s Lighthouse, that a new existence had coalesced around me. I dressed in my flight suit and floated to the cockpit, buckling myself in. Earth had reappeared in the void as if a blue light had been switched on. I checked the heads-up display: SEPTEMBER 2015. Relieved that my voyage was closing, but arrivals were different from departures, no exhilaration at seeing home after so long an absence; Rather, seeing this future-Earth was like staring into a mirror and discovering someone else’s face.
Approaching Naval Air Station Oceana from the Atlantic, 2:00 a.m., the Grey Dove a needle passing over the black fabric of ocean. Rain-swept cockpit windows, lights of distant ships bobbing in the breakers, the coastline of Virginia much brighter than I remembered, even in this dismal weather.
“Oceana Approach,” I said, calling to the airfield, “Cormorant Seven Zero Seven Golf Delta, level fifteen thousand with information Kilo—”
A blast of static, a woman’s voice: “Cormorant Seven Zero Seven Golf Delta, Oceana Approach, turn left heading three two zero, descend and maintain nine thousand.”
First voices on arrival were always eerie, echoes of sounds that hadn’t yet been struck. The woman on the comm might have been only a child in 1997, or if she was young enough here, might not have been born, might not ever be born. Her entire life was only a possibility of the conditions of 1997, nothing more—brought into existence by my arrival, blinking out when I leave. She was a ghost, haunting her own potential.
Before experiencing IFTs, I imagined time travel as something concrete, that knowing the future would be as certain as knowing the past. I imagined that knowing the future might help me cheat at something like the lottery, seeing winning numbers before the numbers were ever pulled. This was before attending lectures at the Black Vale, before struggling through the mathematics-laden booklet explaining the physics of the Brandt-Lomonaco Quantum-Foam Macro-Field Generator. When I mentioned the lottery to our instructor, he’d said that every lottery number existed as a possible winning number until the moment when the winning numbers were observably pulled. What I would experience when traveling to an IFT, he’d said, wouldn’t be the actual observed outcome of the lottery but only a possibility of the winning numbers. “In other words,” he’d said, “don’t place your bets.”
“Cormorant Seven Golf Delta,” said the flight controller, “intercept the localizer runway two eight right, cleared ILS two eight right.”
Reflections of raindrops were like shadows boiling on my flight suit. I followed the ramp handlers’ neon batons, taxiing. What would one day be real? IFTs felt like being lost in a house with a floor plan similar to your own, returning and returning to not-quite-familiar corridors, not-quite-familiar rooms. A team of engineers surrounded the Grey Dove once she was through the hangar doors—they wore reflective vests marked NETWARCOM and tended to the B-L drive, housed in the ship’s engine room, astern.
A ladder rig to the cockpit. One of the engineers knocked on the canopy of glass.
“Welcome to Apollo Soucek,” he shouted. “Naval Air Station Oceana.”
I unlocked and lifted the canopy—an irrational panic at the prospect of breathing hypothetical air, holding my breath as I removed my breathing mask, savoring my last breath from the oxygen tank until I couldn’t hold out any longer and filled my lungs with the place. Unused to the pull of gravity as I tried to unbuckle and climb from the cockpit, gravity like hooks tugging downward. The NETWARCOM engineer draped my arm over his shoulder, assisted me from the flight chair, down the ladder rig. I’d lost weight in my three months aboard the Grey Dove, my prosthesis had lost its proper fit. The engineer eased me into a waiting wheelchair.
I felt like I’d only closed my eyes, but when lights swarmed back, I’d already been moved from the hangar and hooked up to an IV for hydration. A medical facility, a hospital room. A team of nurses, two men, transferred me from the wheelchair to a firm mattress, handling me like I weighed little more than a husk. Weary—my body felt like it was shutting down. A blush of modesty as they undressed me, removing my sweat-sodden flight suit, my underclothes. The last thing I remember before depths of sleep swallowed me was saying, “At least change the channel”—the flat television tuned to The X-Files, an episode I’d never seen.
—
Two weeks shy of six when my father left us. Mom moved her rocker into my room and sat with me until I fell asleep, each night saying the Sandman would come and sprinkle dreams in my eyes. When once I asked who the Sandman was, she told me he was a shadow who crept into rooms where children slept, bringing dreams to kind children, removing the eyes from children who were rotten. When I asked what the Sandman did with those eyes, she said he passed them on to children waiting to be born so they would have eyes to see. Every night when I closed my eyes, I heard Mom rocking in her chair and feared th
e Sandman would come for my eyes, and although I was used to falling asleep with the thought of the Sandman approaching, every night the fear was new.
Time travel evoked similar anxieties. I had traveled to IFTs seven times before but never grew used to the dread of existing in a future; I was a splinter of the real that had pierced the membrane of a dream. Everything that followed my induction into NCIS had felt dreamlike, following that first moment in the Cormorant when my recruitment class had experienced weightlessness. While we were at the Black Vale, our instructors taught us the riddles of Deep Time—how we couldn’t effectively travel to the past except for those rare occurrences called space-time knots and closed timelike curves, how we can travel to the future, but only possible futures. Only the Present is real, only the Present is terra firma. We were warned that no time passes in terra firma while we lived lives in IFTs—and yet IFTs weren’t real, not “objectively” so. We were told that we affected IFTs even as we observed them—that they would bend around our psyches in subtle ways, but as surely as intense gravity bends light. The effect was called lensing, the sensation bizarre, our instructor saying that IFTs could feel like dreams within dreams. One session our instructor had asked us, “What would happen if you met someone in the future and brought him home with you to live in terra firma? What would happen if that person already exists in the present?” Another man had entered the classroom, an exact duplicate of our instructor, a double, a doppelgänger. “You would have what we call an echo,” the double had said.
—
I woke in the hospital room.
“What year is it?” I asked the technician who came to take blood.
“2015,” she said.
“September?”
“You haven’t been asleep that long. Yeah, it’s still September.”
Bone-density tests, eyesight tests, MRIs. A physical-therapy regimen to recover from three months without gravity, but I’m a quick study, my body accomplished in adapting to new movement. The routine to manage the effects of gravity was not unlike the physical-therapy routine following my amputation, the hours of rehabilitation when teams of physical and occupational therapists taught me how to live with a missing limb. Severe weight loss aboard the Grey Dove—I hadn’t realized just how many pounds I’d shed, but my facial features were drawn, my ribs and the points of my hip bone visible, my figure diminished in the full-length mirror. An enormous appetite—daily protein shakes, sometimes twice daily, easy to exceed the recommended caloric intake, the past three months nothing but Protein Fillets, Russian Vita-Sticks, foil envelopes of fruit paste. I’d need to bulk up to endure the return trip home.
A soft knock at the room door the afternoon of my fifth day. I thought maybe one of the lab techs for another round of blood work, but when I opened the door, I found a hulking man, slightly stooped with age, bald except for a cottony tonsure and a flowing white beard. He wore a brown suit and a robin’s-egg pocket handkerchief that matched the vivid blue of his shirt. When he saw me, a grin spread warmly across his face, like the sun revealed from behind clouds.
“Ah, there you are,” he said. “I’ve been waiting nearly twenty years to meet you.”
I recognized him, remembered him when he was middle-aged, a six-and-a-half-foot physicist with a startling Mohawk, reed thin back then in a cardigan and large black-framed glasses, now hunched and thicker, the top of his head as smooth as a river stone. Dr. Njoku had already been a star investigator by the time I saw him speak at a training session in Savannah because of his work on the Faragher case, a policy setter for investigations involving echoes, those individuals brought from IFTs, doubling someone already living.
Cases of misconduct among NSC sailors were common, an epidemic of drugs and money stolen from IFTs and distributed in terra firma. While fallout from Tailhook reverberated through the Navy, however, NSC sailors went without reform because actions committed in Inadmissible Future Trajectories had always been considered inadmissible, as if those actions had never occurred. Njoku’s work had helped change the culture. He had spent years investigating Petty Officer Jack John Faragher, a sailor authorized to travel solo missions to Deep Waters but who had instead made several runs to near futures to kidnap the wives of friends, to bring these doubled women back to terra firma to defile and eventually murder. Faragher had pleaded innocent—but the court found, based on Njoku’s work, that echoes brought to terra firma should be considered “alive” in every sense, afforded the rights of nonresident aliens. The charges against Faragher stuck, resulting in court-martial—and, after a series of appeals, the death sentence.
“Dr. Njoku,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’m honored—I heard you speak in Savannah.”
A summery vitality percolated in his eyes even though he moved with difficulty. Stiff knees, orthopedic shoes. He held a slim silver laptop, manila envelopes.
“The honor’s mine,” he said. “You’re a bird in flight, a time traveler—the rest of us are just ghosts. Here, I brought you some housewarming gifts.” Njoku handed me an envelope. “O’Connor wanted to bring these to you himself, but he just couldn’t make the trip. Some health issues.”
Mortal revelations were common in IFTs, but always jarring. “I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say—I tried not to imagine O’Connor suffering, told myself that whatever the circumstances here, he was still healthy in 1997.
“He has his good days and his bad days,” said Njoku. “He lives out in Arizona, says the dry air helps. He so wanted to see you again, but some days he . . . he can’t even speak some days. He endured a series of heart attacks a few years back. He had to send me in his place.”
We were trained not to take personal revelations like these as fact, not to let ourselves be snagged with worry over the possibilities we see unspooled. O’Connor’s series of heart attacks might not ever occur. I opened the envelope he’d left for me: a Visa, a bank card, driver’s insurance, and a license. Five hundred dollars in twenties. A slim-profile cellular phone that looked like a handheld television.
“Ever use an ATM?” Njoku asked.
“Sure, but we travel with cash. I brought enough to last.”
“Use the debit card, you’ll have an endless supply—save you some paperwork when you return home. Your PIN is 1234. Everything’s registered under the name you provided us with.”
State of Virginia license, my photograph taken from my NCIS ID card, altered so that I was a brunette. Courtney Gimm. I’d asked O’Connor before I left to have this identification ready, knowing I’d be traveling under a different name. Almost twenty years after I’d filled out the paperwork, here it was.
“That one’s a burner phone,” said Njoku. “Disposable, biodegradable.”
“You don’t have Ambient Systems here?” I asked, thinking of other IFTs I’d visited, futures misty with nanotech, the air shimmering gold like fairy dust, hallucinatory images, illusions, voices that answered when you spoke their names. Cellular phones were obsolete in other futures.
“No, nothing like that here,” said Njoku.
We shared a pot of oolong tea, watched a video montage on his laptop of what I’d missed in the intervening years, Highlights of the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries, the death of Diana and the semen-stained dress, the thousand dead at the terror attack on the CJIS FBI facility—a bitter jolt seeing images of the office where I worked engulfed in flames, the dead draped in sheets. The election of Gore, the towers falling. An Iraq treaty, the invasions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some of these images were familiar from other IFTs, but in other IFTs history had played out differently.
“What about the Terminus?” I asked.
“Recorded at the year 2067 by the crew of the USS James Garfield.”
Within a lifetime.
“Show me that part about CJIS again,” I said.
“The largest act of domestic terror since the Oklahoma City bombing,” said Njoku. “Over a thousand casualties. A sad, terrible day.”
&nbs
p; Internet images of the immediate aftermath, the dead laid in the fields surrounding the CJIS facility and in the vast parking lot. I wondered who I’d known that would be among the dead. Rashonda Brock, it occurred to me, and the kids, Brianna and Jasmine—I wondered if they would have died in the CJIS attack, thought of Brock just before he’d opened the door to Courtney’s old bedroom. “I have two beautiful girls,” he’d said. His entire family might have been stricken from him in a single morning.
“My office is in one of the burning sections,” I said, my corner of the building obscured by smoke in nearly every image—the sensation was like seeing a house you’d once lived in burn to cinders. I thought of the faces I would have recognized. Rashonda Brock running through corridors opaque with smoke, searching for her children. “Was,” I corrected. “I might die in this attack. Or I might have died, except I know—”
“A suicide bomber, an individual who worked for the FBI, his office was in the CJIS building,” said Njoku. “He had security clearance.”
Then the bomber is employed at CJIS now, I thought. I might have passed him in the hallways, might have interacted with him. I didn’t recognize the photographs of the suicide bomber or his name: Ryan Wrigley Torgersen. “What happened?”
“April nineteenth, 1998,” he said. “Torgersen reported to work like any ordinary day, breezed through security—he had a bomb sewn inside his body, nasty stuff—and he’d spent some time planting other bombs in the building. The explosions themselves caused some damage, but he’d rigged the fire-suppression system with sarin.”
Sarin. Even a whiff of sarin gas was lethal within seconds. Imagining my colleagues in those narrow corridors, sarin spraying from ceiling sprinklers.
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