Time Bomb

by Penelope Wright

  “Your grandmother said when the time was right to tell you, I’d know.” Dad smiles again. “Like with so many other things, she was correct.”

  “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Your grandmother raised me to lead the Towers when she was gone. I suspect she didn’t want there to be any issue with succession when she died,” Dad says. “And there wasn’t. It was a peaceful transfer of power, and I’ve been in command for nearly seventeen years. Now that I’ve told you, it’s no longer a secret. Tell whomever you want.”

  I sigh. “Nobody seems very interested in talking to me right now.”

  Dad waves his hand dismissively. “They’ll get over it. Maybe a new mission will help them forget all about it.”

  I snap to attention. “I’m traveling? When?”

  “Today.” Dad pulls out a pad of paper. In 2074, we rarely use paper; it’s a finite resource. We have no means to produce it, so all we have is what happened to be in the Towers on the day of the Collapse. In the early days, stupid people with no foresight would defy my grandmother’s rules and burn anything papery for warmth. After several Towers burned like matchsticks, fire was completely outlawed, but by that time paper was already scarce.

  I’ve brought back a few pads of paper from the past, and they’re worth their weight in Vitamin D liquid gels. Dad always writes my travel plan down right before I leave. I know I’ll be headed straight to the prep room from here.

  “What’s the objective?” I ask.

  “A few different tasks. Important, obviously, but they shouldn’t be difficult. You’ll be going to 2007. We need tetanus boosters. As many as you can carry in your shield sack.”

  “What’s my target amount?”

  “Whatever you can get your hands on. I’d call a thousand or more success.”

  I nod. If Dad wants a thousand, I’ll bring him double that.

  Dad goes on. “The Seattle Muni Tower will only be a few years old. I need you to conceal a lockbox within an interior wall. You choose the location. You can tell me where you placed it when you return. Of course, it needs to be away from elevator shafts, and remember, twentieth floor or higher.”

  Seattle Muni. The tower right next door. Fifty-seven stories, office layout. It would have been a great place if it weren’t for its stupid rounded roof that you couldn’t land a helicopter on. It wasn’t like the architects had designed it to survive the end of the world, so it wasn’t their fault that it had, and that its dumb roof made it so impractical. Muni’s proximity to Columbia was its saving grace. We had rappelling lines strung between our sixtieth floor and its fifty-fifth. We could zip people down quick – the lines were higher on our side – to make it easier for us to get there if we needed to. Anyone who needed to get from Muni to Columbia had to have our permission, and be winched up by someone on our side. Fifty-five years since The Collapse, it was unlikely anybody from another tower would try to invade us, but that hadn’t been true in the beginning.

  “Like I’d forget about the twentieth floor or the elevator shafts.”

  Dad squints his eyes. “Did you get a good look at General Enrique Safeco when you wound up in his tower after your last mission?”

  I shake my head. I hadn’t. I’d only taken my helmet off just before boarding my dad’s helicopter, and then I’d only glanced back to wave at him and utter my appallingly inappropriate ‘see ya.’ He’d looked the same to me. Ancient. He’s one of the few people alive who actually remembers The Collapse. He was a teenager when it happened, so he had to be like seventy-something now. He’s old, important, and definitely not part of my social circle.

  “Well, when you do, you might notice he’s aged a bit. We believe his helmet shifted in transit on his last trip. He arrived in 2014 with no memory of who he was or why he was there. He spent years living on the streets and in various institutions before something sparked his memory and he used his chemicals to recall himself to our time.”

  My eyes popped wide open. “General Safeco’s a time traveler?” I blink in surprise. It’s incredibly weird to me that Dad had just casually outed General Safeco as a chrononaut. Until now, I’d thought Dad and I were the only ones.

  Storing that thought away to examine later, I try to wrap my mind around what Dad just said about Safeco’s trip. “Whoa. So if he spent years in the past, he’s been gone from Safeco Tower for that long?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You know how it works. Only three people realized he was gone the entire time. Myself, and the two prep technicians who helped send him. If you’d been in the planning room with us when we outlined his trip, you would have known too.”

  “Did you send him back to whatever date he departed, to repeat the time here, so no one missed him?”

  “I must have at some point in the future, though I don’t remember doing it yet. The Safeco you know, the one you met in his tower, is from the future. He’s here, making up those lost years now.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yes. Safeco has relayed very little of the details to me; you know it’s not safe to talk about things that might be, or anything that occurs in an alternate timeline.” Dad cocks his head. “There’s no manual for time travel. We’re learning as we go. Maybe all I need to do is say I plan to send him to make up the time – and mean it – in order for it to be as true as it needs to be for our purposes.”

  I shake my head. “Well, he can’t possibly have many more years left in him. How much time can he spend traveling and then redoing the years? Couldn’t you could send someone back to find him in 2014 and activate his chemicals for him and get him back to…when did he leave in the first place?”

  “2070. And no.” Dad shakes his head. “We don’t have the resources to attempt a rescue mission. I thought he was lost forever. When he returned, he was very much alive and fully coherent. If, say, I sent you back to intercept him and return him to 2070 in his addled condition, I doubt he could seamlessly take control of his tower again. We don’t know what jogged his memory and snapped him out of his fugue state, but he’s fine now so I have no desire to risk his mental or physical health with a rescue mission. The General knows the risks associated with time travel, and he’s fine with it.” Dad grins. “Besides, after a few years in the twenty-teens, he came back to us with a fantastic tan.”

  I laugh, a short bark. Dad’s sense of humor is wicked, and it comes out when I’m least expecting it.

  He rearranges his face back to its typical somber expression. “So yes, Rosie, to get back to the point at hand, you might forget about the twentieth-floor requirement, so I’ve written it down on your plan sheet. And we’ll be double-checking the security of your helmet before you depart, that’s for sure.”

  Dad’s office door swings open, and we both jump in our chairs. Dad slides the paper pad off the surface of his desk and onto the floor, but Sarah’s probably already seen it with her round, shiny eyes. She tightens the knot on her bathrobe and slips into the room.

  “What are you doing here?” Dad fumes. “You know you’re not to come in when I’m in a planning session.”

  Sarah glides across the room and kneels on the beige carpet next to him, tucking her feet under her butt and looking up at him. “It’s not a planning session – it’s just Rosie.” She picks up the pad of paper and sets it on the top of the desk. Dad grits his teeth, snatches it off the tabletop and slams it into a desk drawer.

  Two veins have popped out on Dad’s forehead and it looks like he’s trying not to scream at her. Since it’s time travel related, he can’t correct Sarah and explain what I’m actually doing here.

  “I had to pass through security on seventy to get up here. Maybe you should put some guards outside your bedroom door, Dad, to keep unwanted people from coming down the hall,” I say snarkily.

  Dad and Sarah both ignore me.

  She sticks out her lower lip petulantly. “I knocked.”

  “No, you didn’t. We
’re not deaf,” I snap.

  Dad must be thinking the same thing, because he’s not putting up with any of Sarah’s nonsense today. He stands up and hauls her to her feet. She unties the knot on her bathrobe and wiggles it off her shoulders and lets it drop to the floor. She stands defiantly, clad in tall black boots and a red dress that barely skims the tops of her thighs. Not just any red dress. My red dress. The one I bought before my last mission, with the credits I’d saved for six months. The one I haven’t even had a chance to wear yet.

  “That’s my dress,” I whisper.

  “Oh, please, Rosarita, this would never fit you.” Sarah sneers. “I got it from a picker two days ago.”

  “You didn’t get that from a picker, you got it from my closet. I spent six months of credits on that.”

  “My word, Rosie, six months of credits for a dress? That’s a lie and it’s absurd. David, you really need to teach your daughter the value of money.”

  “Watch your tone, Sarah,” David warns, his voice tightly controlled.

  On the wall to Dad’s left, a computer screen blinks to life, one of the few in the towers that still functions. It displays a wall of bright red pixels, interrupted by one black word in foot-high capital letters. ACHTUNG.

  The emergency signal.

  “Frack! Now?” Dad loses his grip on his anger and slams his fist to his desktop. “I have to go.” He pulls the pad of paper out of the drawer and rips off the top sheet, folding it hurriedly, then handing it to me along with a stubby pencil. “Your list,” he says to me. “And one more thing. I need you to paint the west wall on the fortieth floor blue.”

  “The mural?” I ask, shocked.

  “No, god no. Leave that as is.” Now the look in Dad’s eyes is haunted, and a bit wild. “I’m talking about the wall next to it. Now go. They’re waiting for you on twenty-one.”

  Sarah, standing and twisting her toe into the carpet, glares malevolently at me. “David, I came in here for a reason,” she says.

  My dad interrupts her. “To start a fight? Because that’s what happened.”

  I know I need to leave now to complete the mission, but I feel like I’m stuck and I want to scream. Sarah stole my dress. After accusing me of being a thief, she stole the one beautiful extravagance I’d ever allowed myself.

  And then there was the whole issue of my time travel. This was not the way my mission should start, with hurried orders and a verbal shove out the door. Should I stay and get more instructions from Dad? No, he’s already written them down. And if I stay here, I’ll have to witness the rest of Dad and Sarah’s fight, and – god forbid – a hurried make-up kiss before he dashes to the helipad. I shudder involuntarily at the thought. Dad notices. “Go, Rosie,” he says gently. “I love you.”

  I drag my RFID chip necklace over my head and drop it on Dad’s desk, then I spin on my heel and rush out of the office, but not before I’m speared by a look of pure hatred from Sarah.

  “This room is off-limits,” I hear Dad yell before I enter the stairwell and the door clangs shut behind me. Dad won’t be following me. I’m going downstairs, to the lowest level we can safely occupy year-round, the twenty-first floor. Dad will be taking a helicopter to Smith Tower to pick up his Achtung. Not much of Smith Tower is above the water line. It has a pointy roof and you need a grappling hook and a zip line to get in. I’ve never been there.

  I shake my head. Someplace else I’ve never been is 2007, but that’s going to change as soon as I’m suited up, prepped, and ready. I have almost sixty flights of stairs between me and the travel center. I’d better get a move on.

  Chapter Four

  March 21, 2074

  Twenty minutes later, I’m on the lowest useable floor in our tower and I’ve put in the daily code as the first step in the clearance process. Beverly, the guard at the door, knows me well by now – this will be my seventh trip – but she still has to run my fingerprints.

  I press them against her glass pad.

  She squints at the readout and sighs. “Prints are too faint, as usual.” She smears mineral oil all over my fingertips to get the images to show up cleanly enough to match a dozen points of comparison. She gives me a baby wipe to clean up with. I notice the package is getting low. I brought two packs of baby wipes back with me on my third trip. Maybe I should score some more this time.

  Beverly’s eyes flash back and forth, scanning the screen, then she sits back and nods to her partner, who’s been holding me at gunpoint until my identity is confirmed. He shoulders the weapon and steps aside to let me pass.

  I wonder if he or Beverly knows what’s beyond this door. Probably not.

  I walk into an innocuous-looking hallway, nod goodbye to the guards, and shut the door behind me. I walk to the end of the hallway, open the far door, and step into the travel prep room, where Lisa greets me.

  Lisa has short brown hair like I do, and the lines around her eyes and mouth make me guess that she’s probably close to my dad’s age. I’ve never seen her anywhere else in the tower but this prep room, so she might be a bit older than I think she is. If she never leaves the center of the building, her radiation exposure is lower than everyone else’s.

  She’s always been the person who preps me for travel. The outbound leg of time travel is way harder on your body than the return, so it takes longer to get ready when I’m leaving on a trip. When I’ve finished my work in the past, all I need to do is get to a safe spot and plunge, but traveling to the past requires more safeguards and special equipment. I can’t just go in my regular clothes. I slip behind a privacy screen to undress, which is kind of silly, because when I’m ready, I step back into the room, wearing nothing and holding only the piece of paper with Dad’s list.

  I lift my arms over my head and try not to be self-conscious as Lisa slides the vest portion of my suit down over my torso. She pulls a baby wipe out of a pack – also running low – and scrubs my armpits. I waffle with indecision. Baby wipes were not on my list. If Dad wanted me to get baby wipes, he would have told me. Maybe we don’t need them as bad as I think. We had an especially violent storm last week. Maybe the storm unearthed a whole case of them, flinging them against the side of the building, and then they sailed through a twentieth-story window. Maybe a flotsam picker found them and exchanged them for a bottle of iodine pills and a gallon of fresh water. Maybe I should quit overthinking it and stop trying to second-guess my dad.

  “We’re nearly out of baby wipes,” Lisa says. “Picking any up this mission?”

  Was she reading my mind? I don’t think they can do that, but hey, time travel exists. I guess anything is possible.

  “Dad didn’t tell me to get any. But he was kind of rushed; he got an Achtung before we were finished talking. Do you think I should?”

  Lisa stares at me levelly. “I think you should do exactly what your father instructed you to do and nothing else.”

  A very legit response from someone who knows how lucky she is to live in Columbia Tower.

  Lisa helps me into my outer jacket. The suit I travel in is light and flexible here in 2074, but in the void of time it becomes unimaginably heavy. Time travel doesn’t take long, thankfully, but once you’re in the void, you can’t breathe from the pressure and the weight of inorganic material. When I travel, I bring nothing but the clothing on my back, my mission list and a shield sack tucked into a zippered inside pocket, and the port-a-cath implant necessary to make time travel work in the first place. When I return to the present I can wear regular clothes if I’ve lost my travel suit, but the only stuff I can bring with me is whatever I can hold or fit into the shield sack. I bet General Safeco can carry a much bigger sack than me. He’s probably never screwed up the way I did on my second trip. In the void of time, those sacks full of inorganic material feel like they weigh about sixteen million pounds. You have to strap the sack snug to your body before you plunge your return chemicals or you’ll lose it. I forgot to do that. God only knows where the sack with thousands of water purification t
ablets ended up when I lost my grip on it. Probably stomped on by a dinosaur or hurled so far into the future they’ve been swallowed by the sun. What a wasted trip. Dad was so disappointed in me.

  I haven’t messed up like that since, but I still haven’t earned the right to carry a larger bag. The stuff I bring back is important, though. Bottles of multivitamins. Toothpaste. Contact lenses. I stole about two hundred pairs in all different prescriptions from an optometrist on my fifth trip. That made a lot of people very happy. They think our scientists are making big strides in providing the things we need to survive and keep humanity going until the planet heals itself and we can settle it again. And ultimately, we are. I mean, sure, we can’t make contact lenses ourselves, but we figured out how to travel back in time to get them, which is pretty impressive.

  People in the other towers don’t need to know that the vitamin D liquid gels they take once a week came from 1998. They can just be happy that they don’t have rickets anymore.

  Lisa holds my pants out for me and I slide a leg into the loose, slippery material. Lisa wears purple nitrile gloves. I’ve rarely seen her without a pair covering her hands. She probably sleeps with them on. A box of those might fit in my shield sack. My list is short this time, I checked it on the way downstairs, to see if there was anything on there that Dad hadn’t mentioned verbally. I’m supposed to get ten packages of sanitary napkins – I’m sure I know who requested those – and a thousand tetanus boosters. I don’t know how big those will be, or how to get them. I’ll be able to Google it in 2007. I’ll have to go to a library and use their computer, then I’ll have to figure out if I need to steal them from somewhere or if I can pick someone’s pocket and buy them with cash at a store. Between research and on-the-ground planning and execution, this trip could take a lot of time. I might spend days in the past, maybe even a week or two. Luckily, no matter how long it takes, even years apparently, no one will miss me while I’m gone. That seems to be a pretty solid rule.