by Kelly Robson
Minh thought Kiki wouldn’t last long working out of her little studio, but it was fine. Kiki left whenever she got restless, and Minh was in and out too. But on the second evening, Minh came home late from a friend’s centenary to find Kiki on her sofa. She hadn’t bothered to slide it into sleep config. When Minh nudged her elbow with a toe, Kiki didn’t even move.
Minh borrowed a hammock from her neighbor and slung it in front of her window. Kiki slept through the whole noisy operation.
The next morning, Minh woke with her nose grazing the glass, drinking in a two-hundred-degree panorama of bright late-winter morning, brown hills in the distance and blue sky above framing the high front ranges of the Rockies, the half-frozen Bow River snaking toward Calgary. A familiar view, but its beauty could still put a crack in her heart.
Minh stayed in the hammock all morning, throwing the West Asian climate data into a key-value database, then painting the mountains with data, using the view for a playground as she ingested enough data to fake an expertise in the ecology and geology of West Asia.
Kiki’s feet bumped the wall as she stretched out on the sofa.
“Sorry.” Kiki gathered up her clothes and began stuffing them into her backpack. “I couldn’t get a sleep stack. Tonight, I’ll find a lolly and double up.”
Kiki kept her head down, braids veiling her expression.
Why would Kiki insist on staying in Calgary? Jasper must be full of friends, lovers, crèche-mates. Once the proposal was submitted, Kiki would drop back to quarter time. It could take months to replace the billable hours she’d dropped to work with Minh.
But if she wanted to be in Calgary, it must be important. The reasons were none of Minh’s business.
“It’s okay,” Minh said. “You can have the sofa.”
“Really?” Kiki’s grin shone brighter than the sun coming through the windows. She trotted into the bathroom. Her voice echoed off the tiles. “Thanks, Minh. I don’t like to fuck strangers, actually. Or anyone, really. I don’t get much out of it.”
Minh’s eyebrows rose. Maybe that was why Kiki was in Calgary. Taking a break from the hormonal atmosphere at home.
“That must be hard in Jasper. You’d be odd person out.”
“Yeah, Jasper’s pretty sticky.”
“So, what do you do? Dial up the oxytocin and join the crowd, or hibernate and avoid it?”
Kiki stuck her head out of the bathroom. The beads on her braids clicked against the doorjamb.
“Don’t you know? Jasper doesn’t offer full biom control. We can’t float the license fees.”
Minh gritted her teeth. “Oh, right. I forgot.”
Personal autonomy was a central tenet of the aboveground movement. When the plague babies ascended from the hells, they’d spent years in clinics and hospitals, poked and prodded by surgeons and physical therapists. Escaping that life was one of the reasons they’d moved to the surface in the first place. The habs offered their people complete power over their own bodies. Minh had managed her own health since she was twenty.
Trust the fat babies to throw that freedom away.
“I tried joining in the sex games a couple of times, but I don’t see the point. I’d rather spend my time doing useful work, you know?”
Minh nodded. “Doing important work is all that matters.”
Kiki grinned. “No wonder you and I get along so well.” She disappeared into the bathroom again.
“Do we?” Minh muttered, scowling.
Maybe they did. Kiki approached time travel research with energy and determination, quickly accumulating a pile of annotated bookmarks for a solid and substantial literature search report. Minh was making progress too, soaking up old West Asian ecological research papers.
She was itching to dive into a work plan draft, but her project deadlines loomed. Mesopotamia would have to wait. Minh put the research aside and tried to drum up enthusiasm for yet another Icelandic adaptive management review. But that evening, Calgary’s water recirculation system blew. All available residents were pulled into the refit. Minh spent an eighteen-hour shift crawling up and down pipe shafts, troubleshooting the repair bots.
When Minh dragged herself home from her first shift, Kiki was waiting.
“I’m still researching time travel,” Kiki said. “If you want, I can pull work plans from old proposals so you don’t have to face a blank page when the refit is done. Just point me in the right direction.”
Minh peeled off her wet coverall. “Dig out the proposal for the Colorado River current-state assessment. The target area is about the same size.”
“Which bank is remediating the Colorado River?”
Minh shut herself in the bathroom and threw her clothes in the sink.
None of them, she whispered. They yanked the funding ten years ago. Make a list of all the data-gathering tech we used in Colorado. Satellites, cameras, sampling, and so on. We’ll have to take all the infrastructure back in time with us.
You’ll be launching satellites?
Of course. I’m not going to measure river flow with a handheld doppler.
No water in the shower, not until the refit was done. Minh slathered herself with cleanser and toweled herself dry. Then she gripped the shower walls with her three right legs and hung upside down. She loosened her left legs and slid open the shield protecting the teratoma on her lower hip. After cleaning it thoroughly, she slathered the prosthesis socket with lubricant gel. Then she repeated the process on her right side. When she was done, she hung from the wall and let her arms hang, stretching the kinks out of her back and shoulders.
Careful curation of her glucose and blood oxygen levels had kept her alert through the whole long shift, but now she needed rest. Her body thrummed with exhaustion.
If she couldn’t fall asleep naturally, she’d ping her medtech. In the past, she would have tweaked herself asleep. No more, though. She’d done enough damage. Standard hormonal protocols only from now on.
Which gave Minh the glimmer of an idea.
She wrapped herself in a soft jumper and opened the bathroom door.
“TERN must have a standard project protocol. They take tourists to the past. No way they do it without power and tech.”
Kiki nodded. “The only official information is from the marketing for TERN’s package tours. They claim ambient power is fully available in the past. I’ve tried to get more specifics, but I get canned replies saying TERN’s intellectual property rights are ratified by the World Economic Commission.”
Minh snorted. “CEERD and all its rotten think tanks believe if they game the system enough, the World Economic Commission will turn them all into private banks and then they can roll around in their credit.”
Kiki laughed. “You really hate them.”
“They’re greedy. But maybe we can make it work for us.” Minh hooked a leg on the hammock and hauled herself up. “What have you found out about the client?”
Kiki sat cross-legged on the sofa, in a nest of quilts.
“The Mesopotamian Development Bank was created last year. Their identity isn’t public yet, so all I have are rumors. They might be a mechanical engineer from one of the Siberian hives who developed a way to tunnel through burning peat, or a neurosurgical engineer from Bangladesh who found a new way to splice neurons.”
“The World Economic Commission loves engineers.”
Minh dimmed the lights and closed her eyes. Maintenance bots danced in patterns behind her eyelids. She’d never get to sleep.
“The client only just became a private bank, but they’re already investigating a massive project. That’s quick,” Minh said.
“I guess they like Mesopotamia a lot.”
“So it’s a passion project.”
Minh squirmed, trying to get comfortable. She slipped one leg out of the hammock and pushed against the window, rocking herself back and forth. Maybe it would help her get to sleep. She hated bothering her tech.
“A passion project,” Minh repeated. “Which
means . . .” Her biom nagged her, flashing unusually strident cortisol alerts and demanding rest. “I’m too tired to figure it out. Remind me about it tomorrow.”
“Okay. And what about the project team?”
Minh hadn’t even thought about team members yet.
“I’m working on it,” she said.
-4-
SHULGI TRUSTED SUSA BECAUSE she never told him what he wanted to hear. She didn’t care for his good opinion and never made any effort to gain his favor. In fact, she hated him. The moment she got within ten steps of him, her nose would wrinkle up as though he smelled foul. It made no difference whether he were stewing in training-pit sweat or fresh and oiled from a bath. Shulgi never smelled sweet to her.
When Shulgi had become king, Susa ascended the dais of the moon. Her duty was to oppose him. As woman opposes man, as humans strain against the gods, as children defy their parents, Susa’s right and duty was to say yes when he said no and argue against his every decision.
But she didn’t have to take such pleasure in it.
* * *
By the time Calgary’s refit was done, the Bank of Calgary was nagging Minh for a draft budget. The submission deadline was only a few days away, and Minh still hadn’t done anything about her project team.
Ten years back, when news of the first time travel project hit, she’d been wrapping up the Colorado River current-state assessment. Her entire thirty-person multidisciplinary team camped on the edge of the Grand Canyon, accompanied by a professional media crew and a dozen cameras, exploiting the canyon’s spectacular visuals as they trapped the documentary data for the final report. It was a waste of billable hours, but banks liked grand gestures and mediagenic visuals. The funding had been available back then.
The Colorado River was envisioned as the largest riverine restoration project ever undertaken, extending from La Poudre Pass to the gulf, supporting a string of habs—eight glistening green pearls along the great river from mountains to sea, providing habitat for a hundred million people within four centuries.
Minh had been skeptical. But there was no reason they couldn’t remediate the first few reaches, support a few new habs. Even one would benefit the funding consortium eventually. She had planned to plant the first glacier seed herself. Maybe she would have even seen a little streamflow before she died.
Then the time travel news hit and all work stopped.
At first, the whole Colorado team was transfixed by the news docs. When they began arguing over the implications of time travel, some predicted disaster—temporal disturbances and out-of-control paradoxes. Most were enchanted by the possibility of restoring extinct species—rewilding on a scale they’d never dreamed of. Personally, Minh was excited by the idea of time-traveling adaptive management projects. She could initiate a restoration initiative, visit the future to see the results, then come back to the present day and fine-tune the approach. But her excitement was short-lived; time travel could only be used to visit the past.
Not even Minh foresaw what actually happened: the banks lost interest in everything aboveground, and especially in long-term ecological restoration projects.
People—especially bankers—had trouble thinking long-term, and nothing was more long-term than ecological restoration. Results took decades, even with soil printers, glacier seeds, climatic baffles, wind chutes—all the tech they’d developed. Even when harnessing the wind-sculpting and rain-generating power of the great mountain ranges of the globe, restoring natural habitats took vision, determination, and, most importantly, glacial patience.
Banks were not patient. When they saw a shortcut, they lunged for it. No matter if the shortcut was an illusion. No matter that time travel couldn’t be used to change anything.
The funding pool dried up. Ambitious new restoration projects died in the planning phase, never to be resurrected. The habs formed desperate consortiums to keep their projects afloat, fees plunged in all related disciplines, and the few surviving projects operated on shallow budgets with skeleton teams.
After a long, dry decade, interest in ecological restoration was starting to trickle back, but the damage was done. The Colorado River would stay dry. Probably forever.
Kiki passed a mug of tea up to Minh as she lay in her hammock. She’d slept ten hours straight. Probably snoring openmouthed the whole time, judging by her throbbing headache.
“I’m looking through TERN’s earliest docs,” said Kiki. “Why were they so concerned with proving time travel can’t affect anything? Wasn’t it obvious? Time travel happened. Nothing changed.”
Minh swished the tea around her parched mouth and swallowed.
“No, it wasn’t obvious at all. You were still in the crèche, right? How old?”
“Thirteen.”
“Easy to take things on faith at that age. I was seventy-three. TERN wouldn’t share their research. No open peer review process, no repeatable results. Plus, their public relations department was releasing disinformation to keep critics confused. Everyone I knew was suspicious. How could we trust them not to mess with history?”
“TERN says that when they time travel, a separate timeline is spun off from ours, and when the time travelers leave, the timeline collapses.”
Minh shrugged. “TERN can say anything they want. They have a monopoly. Nobody can prove them wrong, because nobody outside TERN knows how it works.”
“Have you seen this?”
Kiki shot a doc into the middle of the room. The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan bloomed across the floor and stretched up to the ceiling.
Minh winced. Her headache pounded. She shot the doc out the window. The pyramid grew to full size over the river valley.
Sunlight bounced off the back of Minh’s skull. She lifted a leg to her forehead and squeezed her temples. Her biom blinked a low-priority dehydration alert.
A hundred puffs of dust pocked the surface of the pyramid. The stones shuddered and slipped, then the whole huge structure disappeared behind a cloud of dust. When it cleared, the pyramid lay like a corpse, a pile of cold rubble across the Avenue of the Dead.
The doc overlaid the rubble with a dozen time-stamped satellite images of the pyramid in real time, here and now, whole and undamaged. Kiki killed the doc.
“Yeah, I’ve seen it.” Minh clambered out of the hammock and grabbed a bottle of water. “When TERN finally proved time travel was effectively useless, I figured everything would go back to normal and the banks would get interested in us again. I was wrong.”
“That’s why you hate CEERD and TERN.”
“One of the reasons.” Minh drained the water bottle and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “What have you found out about the project’s restrictive parameters?”
“Payload,” Kiki said. “That’s the big one.”
Kiki took her through a stack of bookmarks. She’d analyzed hundreds of time travel docs, estimating the mass and volume of the cast, crew, and equipment. Her analysis was confirmed by a stack of other calculations, including the capacity of time travel tourist groups, and details of all known artifacts retrieved from the past.
Kiki sat cross-legged on the sofa, pulled her braids back, and knotted them at the nape of her neck.
“TERN’s maximum payload seems to be restricted by volume, not mass. The single heaviest item brought from the past is the Golden Buddha from ancient Thailand. It weighs over five thousand kilograms.”
Minh flipped through the bookmarks and scanned the attached notes. Kiki’s analysis was solid, her conclusions well supported. Impressive.
“You should publish these results,” she said.
Kiki grinned. “I can’t. It’s TERN’s intellectual property.”
Then she whispered, I bet I’m not the first person to figure this out. Every time someone tries to publish results like this, using open and available information, TERN shuts them down. I’ve been whispering with a plague baby in Sudbury Hell who hates TERN even more than you do.
Okay, I get it. No
more bad-mouthing TERN if we want to win this work.
Minh plucked at her temples with her suckers. The headache was easing off. Time to get to work.
Minh used Kiki’s numbers to mock up the payload dimensions. The volume amounted to a little more than half her studio.
“This can’t be right. There’s no room for equipment.”
“There is, actually. Almost everything can be fabbed.” Kiki shot an array of color-coded rectangles into the mock-up, stacking them like crèche blocks. A large yellow cube flashed. “That’s the fab, and the layer on the bottom is super-dense feedstock. You can even bring a skip along for transportation. All you need are the skip drives, sensory array, and safety-foam canisters.” A dozen shoe-sized pink boxes stacked on top of the yellow cube. “If you want to bring lots of satellites, it’s easy. They’re small. You can take plenty.”
Minh paced the edges of the mock-up, thinking.
“People take up a lot of space. They can’t be compressed.”
Minh added blocks to represent monitoring and sampling equipment. She threw in a few placeholders for the team’s personal effects, water treatment system, and a nutritional extruder. A third of the payload was still empty.
Minh’s aches and pains faded into the background, overwhelmed by the electric thrill jolting from fingers to the tips of her legs.
“I got it,” Minh shouted. Kiki jumped, startled.
Minh lowered her voice to a reasonable level. “This is how I’ll win the project.”
“You’re sure?” Kiki asked. “You sound pretty sure.”
Minh laughed. “No, but it’s not impossible.”
Kiki beamed. “How?”
“The client is asking for a multidisciplinary team. That’s old lingo, from the big-budget days. Our competitors will stack their proposals with consultants—everything from fisheries biologists to fluvial engineers to statisticians. Big teams, lots of billable hours, like the old days.”
“And our team—your team, I mean?”