Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins)

by Rysa Walker

  All of this makes my head hurt, so I shake it off and lean against one of the trees at the edge of the parking lot, about twenty yards from the path leading to the stable point I arrived at, which is tucked away inside a small utility building. About ten minutes later, people start to drift toward their cars. It takes another five minutes for me to spot the Robinson family. The older sister, Opal, is with them now, clutching her diploma and wearing a graduation gown. The cap, however, rests on her youngest sister’s head.

  I spot Dr. King around the same time. He and his wife are headed toward a cluster of vehicles parked near the sidewalk. Two bodyguards accompany them, along with the college president and a few other people in academic regalia. The security guards on the roof are also drifting in this direction.

  Coretta King looks up as the Robinsons approach the lot. While there are more black students in 1965 than there were when she attended Antioch, they’re still far from the majority. Her smile widens and she tugs on Dr. King’s sleeve. He follows her gaze and holds up a hand like he’s telling the men he’ll be right back, and then he and his wife—along with the bodyguards—make their way toward Opal.

  “Congratulations,” Mrs. King says, extending her hand first to Opal and then to the others. A small crowd begins to gather, and the bodyguards look around nervously. One of them glances at me, but his eyes keep moving. I don’t fit the profile he’s looking for today, although I can’t help but wonder how he’d react if he saw the barely different version of me that attended the Klan rally.

  Antoinette takes a few steps back to make room for the bodyguards. The group is directly in front of me now, so close that the hem of Toni’s yellow dress brushes briefly against the leg of my trousers.

  “And what are you planning to do with your degree?” Dr. King asks after offering his own congratulations.

  “I’m going to teach,” Opal replies, in a voice so low that I almost miss it over the sound of cars cranking at the far end of the parking lot. “Back home in Memphis.”

  “Good for you! The world can always use more good teachers.” King then puts one arm around his wife and leads her back toward the school officials in front of their vehicle.

  That’s when I see the purple light. Not just one flash but four, maybe even five, in the crowd approaching the parking lot.

  I remind myself that it’s possible these are just agents from a future cohort. Maybe my report on King’s speech convinces the next batch of historians that this really is a major speech that marks a turning point in King’s legacy, and four—no, I can now see that it is actually five—historians decide they need to witness the event in person.

  I’d really like to believe that. Because the only other explanation is that I’ve fucked something up so royally that CHRONOS had to send an extraction team.

  FROM THE DIARY OF KATE PIERCE-KELLER

  January 26, 2024

  When I handed the keys over to President Patterson, I suspected that at some point I was going to regret it, but I thought there would be a bit of a buffer. That she’d be a decent human being at least for a little while. Maybe long enough for me to finish high school, make it through my college applications. Just a short breather where I could focus without thinking about whether I’d made a mistake.

  Just a little time to mourn Katherine.

  But no. Less than a month after Katherine died, Patterson’s allies in Congress began pushing for a constitutional amendment to remove the two-term restriction on the presidency. Non-Cyrists in Congress tried to insert a clause that would have restricted it to future presidents, but they failed. The states ratified it within two months, and Patterson immediately tossed her hat into the ring for a third term. And she won, although I’ll confess that I’m not convinced it was a free or fair election.

  My dad says that the laws being passed really aren’t all that different from the ones passed during her first two terms. Maybe that’s true. I wasn’t especially political before the time shifts. All I know is that the environmental protections, as well as press freedom, are facing death by a thousand tiny cuts.

  The irony is that I’m pretty sure these crackdowns are because they’re losing members. When your religion is mostly based on greed, you need something to keep the faithful faithful. You can’t fully trust the government statistics, but Charlayne claims that many Cyrists, especially in the Orthodox group, have become disillusioned with the fact that stock tips from the Book of Prophecy simply aren’t what they used to be. That’s really no surprise, since the Cyrists don’t have time travelers interfering in the markets now. Without the cash incentive, the religion seems to be losing its appeal, and the mandatory tithe is causing members to leave the fold in droves.

  In one sense, that makes me happy.

  But it also has me wondering what kinds of oppressive policies they’ll resort to in order to stay in power.

  ∞12∞

  MADI

  BETHESDA, MARYLAND

  NOVEMBER 11, 2136

  Jack bends back the top of one of the interior pages of the 1780s diary, which apparently belonged to Katherine Shaw.

  “See? The paper is too thick, and the texture is wrong. It might fool a casual observer, but . . .” Jack fishes around in the bag for the tiny pencil and then tries to draw a line in the margin. It doesn’t leave a mark, but as he drags the tip along the edge of the book, the text begins to scroll downward, revealing page after page of handwritten text.

  “Hold up,” I say when something interesting comes into view.

  Personal file KS05092304_05181780_1 saved.

  “That looks like a date to me. May 18, 1780.”

  “Or possibly two dates,” Jack says. “If KS is for Katherine Shaw, then we have May 9, 2304, and May 18, 1780.”

  It looks like it should link to more information, but when I tap the screen nothing happens. Jack tries it with the little stick, and still nothing. The page kind of flickers when you tap the underlined section, but that’s it.

  We play around with it for a bit and make a few minor discoveries. There are small hand-sketched stars jotted in the margins. If you tap one of those with the pencil thingy, an information window pops up on top of the text, which makes me think the diaries functioned as rudimentary computer tablets. Sliding the pencil along the edge, like Jack did earlier, reveals what appear to be links to files at the end of entries, but none of the links are functional.

  Another thing we learn is that the equipment seems to work much better for me than it does for Jack. His reaction to this fact is almost comical—he nearly drops the book he’s so eager to get it out of his hands. He’s not the competitive type, so I don’t think that it’s because he feels like I’m one-upping him. It’s almost like he’s decided the thing is some sort of sorcery.

  The little vial inside the packet contains four clear, rubbery stickers about the size and shape of the tip of my forefinger.

  “They look like the lenses people use to change their eye color,” Jack says.

  I look at the tiny sticker for a moment. “I don’t know. The shape seems a little off, don’t you think? More oval than round. And they’re a bit too cloudy to see through effectively.”

  “We could ask Alex,” he suggests, “if you want to conference him in. He’s usually back at the apartment by now.”

  I ask Jarvis to place the call. When Alex pops up on the screen, he’s on the sidewalk approaching the old house in Arlington where they live. It was once a single-family dwelling but has now been divided up into six small apartments, most of them leased to graduate students at Georgetown.

  “Wait,” Alex says. “Let me get inside so that we can talk.”

  We watch as Alex hurries up the stairs to the top floor. Once inside, he tosses his bag onto the counter and then barks a couple of commands at his own virtual assistant. A dull humming noise fills the room.

  “Okay,” he says. “That should block anyone who might be listening.”

  His words worry me. I haven’t really thoug
ht much about the whole security side of things. This house sat empty for months, and while we do have a decent security system, it’s really more designed to prevent robbery than spying.

  There’s not much that I can do at this point, however. If someone has been listening over the last few days, they know pretty much everything already.

  We bring Alex up to speed on Lorena’s visit. He looks a bit ill when I tell him about the enhancements. “I didn’t want to say anything yesterday, but I was worried about something like this. I mean, barring a truly unlikely set of genetic coincidences, you’d need some serious enhancement to use the key. And then there’s the various tweaks you might need to be effective as a historian. But yes, this puts a kink in things. Are you still . . . um . . .”

  Alex trails off, trying to keep his voice nonchalant. It’s still painfully obvious how very much he wants this project to move forward.

  “I’m weighing my options. But . . . we do have some good news.”

  I explain about the second key inside the pool and the diaries, and then we show him the small rubbery sticker. He peers into the camera and shakes his head. “Can you increase the lighting in there? I can’t see a damn thing. Seriously, it’s like the two of you are inside a torch-lit cave.”

  Jarvis increases the lights to maximum, but Alex still can’t make any guesses about the little sticker. “It could be anything really. I’d need to magnify it a lot more than what’s possible with my comm-band in order to tell if there’s a power source or any sort of circuitry inside the thing. At some point, I’m going to need to examine one of the medallions, too. I mean, assuming . . .” He trails off again, bringing me back to the dilemma that’s been making me crazy all day.

  “There’s no easy choice,” I say. “Leaving aside the whole issue of someone finding out I’m enhanced, I was having some second thoughts last night. So much could be learned with one of these devices. But I might end up changing something and have no idea how to fix it.”

  “Are we even sure that you can change anything?” Jack asks.

  “I went back and got my shoes, remember? Created a spare Madi who disappeared. Screwed with everyone’s memory? That was definitely changing something.”

  “But . . . did it change history? The other you disappeared. You have your shoes. And yeah, we have dueling memories, but it’s not like that really changed anything. Alex and I were talking about that this morning. There are a multitude of theories about time travel, but most of them hold that you can’t actually rewrite history, at least not on a large scale. You might be able to change some smaller events, make some alterations around the edges, but—”

  “Yeah,” Alex says, interrupting him. “About that. We probably need to reassess. I still think it’s hard to change history on a large scale. It’s unlikely that Madi leaving those joggers in 1906 would have changed anything in our time, for example. But someone in Madi’s family seems to have been a time traveler. Possibly more than one person, if Lorena is right about the genetic alterations being from both parents. And now we have Madi, in the past, able to use this equipment from the future. If we’re planning to replicate and market that technology, possibly years before it would have otherwise been invented, I think that qualifies as changing history.”

  “Maybe . . .” I stop for a moment, trying to think all of this through. “Maybe it’s not a member of my family who left these clues. What if it’s us? Future us, and we’re just trying to expedite things.”

  I like this idea a lot. The notion that someone, even someone in my family, left this information for me to find feels like cheating. It feels like plagiarism. I still don’t know if James Coleman was guilty of that offense, but I do know that I have no wish to steal the intellectual property of anyone else.

  Alex considers this and then nods. “It still could change a lot to have this technology appear years before it would have otherwise. But it makes as much sense as anything else. Maybe someone got the jump on us in terms of patenting the device or figuring out the genetic changes necessary in order to use it. Or maybe there’s a reason technology like this is needed earlier than we actually perfect it.”

  “That seems more credible than it being a family member,” Jack says. “They’d be taking a leap of faith that someone in their gene pool with the ability to use the key would find it. But we’d know that Madi could use it. We’d know that she’d be here, in this house. That she used the swimming pool. So if there was some reason, some world crisis we needed to change . . .”

  “That’s part of what scares the hell out of me, though,” I say. “Who are we to make that decision? Something like this in the wrong hands could be very dangerous.”

  “True,” Jack admits. “But in the right hands . . . you might change some really awful stuff, too. What if you could stop a major war, a potential World War Three, before it ever began? How many lives might be saved by something like that?”

  The number is in the tens of millions, and I know that Jack’s point is valid. What really bothers me is the idea that I might play a role in making a decision that momentous. I feel woefully unqualified for that kind of responsibility.

  “Maybe we’re in some sort of dystopian hellscape in the future and speeding up our research is the last best chance to save the world?” Alex is clearly joking with that last part, but I’m not finding any of this amusing.

  “If that’s the case, though, you’d think we’d have had the common sense to send back—”

  I was about to say a message or instructions, but then I realize that whoever hid the key for me to find may well have done precisely that. “We need to comb through those two diaries for information. And I think we need to do a more thorough search of the books in the library. I’m more convinced than ever that there’s something odd going on with them. Otherwise, why would they be encased in those cabinets with that orange light?”

  Alex repeats his theory that it’s a protective field. “It keeps the item or the individual within sort of a buffer zone. I spent most of the day going through that research I mentioned yesterday. One of my professors, Dr. Bhatt, was an assistant on the project back in the early 2090s. I’ve never spoken to him directly about it, but a postdoc student who’s been here longer than I have said that Bhatt had a few tokes too many at the departmental picnic a few years back and mentioned that the project had government funding at one point. He told her they had a teenage boy who could go backward or forward a couple hours. There was an experiment where the kid would go back and change some minor thing. Everyone outside the field remembered only the changed reality, but everyone inside the field remembered the old version. That kid and also the primary researcher were killed during the 2092 attacks. The boy’s body wasn’t identified, but the security cameras at the main entrance showed that he was there. And the lab took a direct hit. Everyone inside was killed.”

  “What happened to this research after the attacks?” I ask.

  Alex shrugs. “It fizzled. There were a couple of research papers talking about chronotron fields, but nothing mentioning human research after that point. That’s one reason I assumed it was either a bogus story they tell new students just for the hell of it, or, at the very least, there were no actual breakthroughs. If there had been anything substantive, even with the lead researcher and subject gone, somebody would have restarted the program after the dust settled. This isn’t the kind of thing you abandon if you’ve seen results. And . . . as I’ve said before, our current research is nowhere near the point of being able to send people through time. I can’t say much more than that because I signed nondisclosure forms, but really, we have nothing even close to this. Only now I’m starting to wonder if maybe . . .”

  “If maybe the researcher had one of these little gadgets?” Jack asks.

  Alex nods. “And also someone with Madi’s genetic ability. But . . . there weren’t many deaths in the US from those bombings. Just a lot of big-ticket property damage. What are the odds that both the subject and the researc
her just happened to get killed in the attacks? Seems like a rather odd coincidence, even if they were in the same place. Unless . . .”

  He and Jack exchange a look.

  It takes me a second longer, but then I get it.

  Unless they were the targets.

  That thought keeps circling in my head long after Jack leaves for the evening. I’m not sure I really believe that a worldwide terror attack was planned solely to destroy time-travel technology, but Alex is right. It is an odd coincidence. And I now have two diaries that might have answers, not just to that question, but to my family’s role in all of this.

  But it’s a massive amount of information. After a half hour of poking around, I finally figure out how to use the diary’s search feature. I run a query on the term 2092, but there’s nothing about that year in Katherine Shaw’s diary. Her granddaughter’s diary mentions the date several times, but there’s nothing useful. I try a few other search terms, but eventually realize that the only way I’m going to learn anything from these diaries is to simply read them, because context is important.

  And since I can’t sleep anyway, I prop a few extra pillows behind my back and settle in. I’m torn over which to read first. It would probably make more sense to start with Katherine’s, but when I thumb through, it feels a bit like a travelogue, interspersed with a few personal observations. While that might normally be interesting, I need answers, not descriptions of the 1893 World’s Fair. So I put Katherine’s book aside and pick up Kate’s.

  I start at the beginning. April 9, 2022.

  It’s basically a rant. About the environment, about the Cyrists, about the president at the time. The anger goes beyond that of a mere concerned citizen. To be honest, she seems a little obsessed. It’s like she takes every bit of government malfeasance, every breach of faith by certain members of the legislature, as a personal affront.