The diamond box cost four times the price of the next package down and was Marisa’s brainchild after listening carefully to conversations at these soirées for some months.
“Why wouldn’t they just buy sixty four-hour slips for less?” Varya had been sceptical.
“Prestige. And purpose,” Marisa had replied. “To show they can afford to control their lives as closely as they choose.”
The diamond boxes had quickly become their best seller.
Marisa pushed the glittering cube gently on the golden silk cloth so that it sat slightly out of alignment with the row of lesser boxes. Then she stood and waited. It was a dance of status, this waiting. The host would eventually look up and nod to her, indicating that she had seen that Marisa was ready to begin. This bestowed upon her a respect not given to the ordinary servants.
Marisa would then have to wait a while longer. It was usually between five and ten minutes. Long enough to put her in her place, short enough to avoid angering her. After all, the women in this room needed her. She was the only dealer of time tabs. If they lost her, they would lose their connection to a status symbol that had become integral to their social existence.
And they might have to start leaving parties before midnight.
The host had installed new chandeliers, Marisa noticed, since she’d last been here, perhaps six months ago. Six electric candles and twenty crystal teardrop pendants. Twenty-one if you counted the central ball which hung a couple of inches below the rest. It lit the moulded plaster ceiling beautifully, with soft roses intertwined and reflected across the room. The same old painting hung from the back wall; a mass of coloured flecks from orange and brown rising upwards to merge with blues and greys and eventually ending in white. Marisa could never quite decide whether it was actually the work of a famous artist or simply a framed version of something one of their kids had brought home from kindergarten.
Eventually the host started to tap her guests on the shoulder, one by one, and murmured their approval for them to approach the marble table and select their products. In low voices they asked Marisa the same questions they’d asked last time and she gave them the same answers. It was a ritual to fill their days, this hushed presenting and purchasing. In truth, they could have placed their orders electronically and she would have left them at the door. But how else were idle, wealthy women to fill their days?
“Do you ever sample the wares yourself?” asked one woman, a short, mousey thing, probably around twenty-five, though it was hard to tell underneath all that make-up and plastic surgery.
Marisa shook her head slightly. “No.”
The woman wrinkled her nose, offended to feel she’d been rebuffed in a moment of attempted comradery.
“Well. Perhaps you should,” she said tersely. “You look like you could do with a little more sleep.” She ordered two purple boxes. Marisa held up the invoice on her screen—donation to the Minor Miracles Foundation. The woman nodded and hovered her screen close to Marisa’s until it buzzed.
“May your time be plentiful,” she said, bowing almost imperceptibly. It was a phrase and gesture she’d added to the ritual early on.
It worked. The woman’s icy demeanour melted, and she bobbed a little in return, then giggled and turned away to re-join her coterie. Marisa struggled to avoid an eye roll, blinking slowly instead. When she opened her eyes again, she was confronted by a sharp-faced woman wearing a long, scarlet duster jacket. Marisa frowned slightly. She didn’t remember seeing this particular customer before. The woman pointed to the jade boxes.
“Three of them,’’ she ordered.
Marisa bit her tongue and bent down to pick and pack the stock. She felt, rather than saw, the woman attempt to peer over the table at her.
“How do they work, anyway?”
“I’m afraid I can’t divulge that, ma’am,” said Marisa, staring off towards a side window as she held out the bag in one hand and her screen in the other.
The woman hesitated. “I don’t particularly fancy putting anything in my body when I don’t know what it’ll do.”
“It’s very complicated technology, but it’s perfectly safe. I’m sure your friends would tell you, if you care to ask them.’’
“As it happens, I have a PhD in complicated technology. Maybe you could give me a basic rundown? Will it interfere with my Time Chip, for starters?”
Marisa regarded her directly. The woman’s eyes were almost the same jade as the time tab boxes, maybe a shade or two further towards blue.
“They speed up your bodily functions, including your brain’s perception of time. You’ll feel normal, but everything around you will appear as though it’s in slow motion. Anyone watching you will see mostly just a blur. It’s why we recommend you partake of your time tabs in a secluded, secure area.”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “But it won’t deduct extra time from my Time Chip?”
Marisa shook her head slightly. “No, you’ll move through time itself at the same pace.”
The woman tapped Marisa’s screen with her own and took the bag.
“I had to be sure. Marguerite over there was trying to tell me that they slow down time. They thought maybe it put you in a bubble.”
It was Marisa’s turn to peer around the stranger at the gaggle of women behind her.
“Yes. They don’t have PhDs in complicated technology though, do they?” she murmured.
The woman snorted, gave her a half-smile, and stalked away.
Half an hour later Marisa had packed up her wares, walked briskly down the terraced front stairs, and sank into the front seat of her car. She deposited her briefcase onto the floor of the passenger side. Then she called Varya.
“All done. Made enough to keep the Cure Factory running for another couple of months. Tomorrow morning I’m going to the shelter to hand out a few tabs to cleanse my psyche.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Marisa noticed that Varya didn’t laugh, as she usually did at this point in their monthly soirée ritual.
Marisa’s finger wavered over the ‘call end’ icon. “How’re you travelling?”
Silence.
“Need me to do anything to prepare for Daniel?”
“No, thanks,” said Varya. “It’s under control. Just waiting now.”
Chapter twenty-three
Varya
Time seemed to slow exponentially as Varya paced back and forth in Zoe’s apartment. Her friend sat and sobbed while they both waited.
It took thirty-six hours for Daniel to reappear. They spent the first hour waiting for the police to arrive. The second and third hours consisted of answering the detective’s questions. Yes, he went to school this morning. No, they hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. No, there had been no troubles at home. Yes, he was in good health and of sound mind.
Then came thirty-three hours of trying not to check the news media, pretending there weren’t journalists waiting outside the apartment block, preparing food only to pick at it rather than eat it. Thirty-three hours of waiting for the police to call. Thirty-three hours of waiting for Daniel to come home, to tell them he’d just gone to a friend’s house and forgotten to tell them.
During those long hours, Varya and Zoe made plans. Zoe called her most trusted colleagues at the hospital and asked for their cooperation and silence. Varya ensured ongoing access to discreet transport for Daniel between Zoe’s home, the hospital, and her own apartment.
Daniel knocked on the door of his home at five minutes past four o’clock in the morning. The street was quiet, the journalists had gone home or were sleeping in their cars on the street.
Varya shook Zoe awake when she saw his face on the building’s front door monitor. She opened the apartment door before he could knock and stepped aside so Zoe could wrap her arms around him. The pale colour of his face, the haunted look in his eyes, and the nature of his return told them everything they needed to know.
“We’re taking you to the hospital,” Varya whispe
red.
Daniel stared blankly at her over his mother’s shoulder.
Thirteen minutes later they walked through the hospital’s staff entry and were greeted by Dr Falk, a short, dark man who was naturally inclined to silence and seriousness. He ushered them through to the same examination room Ben Williams had sat in only a few days earlier. They all held their breath as he scanned Daniel’s Chip.
Zoe turned her face from the machine to Dr Falk, her expression a question mark.
“Seven hours,” he proclaimed softly. “He has seven hours left. I’m so sorry.”
Varya nodded. “We’ll take him with us now. You’ll sort out the paperwork for us, as we discussed?”
Dr Falk had already turned away to tap at the screen receiving data from the scanner.
“Yes, of course.” He turned and looked directly at Varya. “I wish you all the best. I don’t want to have to use this again any time soon,” he said, weighing the scanner in his hand before placing it back in the drawer.
“And you’ll call me if there are any other children. Anyone else who is returned and needs help?”
He nodded. “I have your number.”
They bundled Daniel back into Zoe’s car and drove straight to Varya’s apartment. With six hours and twenty-three minutes of life left, he stood at the shimmering threshold into the Time Lock.
Varya had explained as best she could as she drove the quiet, dark roads that led from the hospital to her home. Daniel would step through a portal into a world where time was frozen in a single moment five years ago. Inside that world was Varya’s mother, Elena. She would look after him and Kir—Varya’s son, who was already there—until the technology to reverse the time drain was found.
“I’m not going to die?” he asked in a small voice.
Zoe squeezed his hand and started to cry. “No, sweetheart, you’re not going to die. I promise.”
Varya glanced in the rear-view mirror as Daniel buried his head in his mother’s chest and sobbed against her. She fought the urge to release her own tears. Tears of anger and frustration. This shouldn’t be happening again. The time transfer technology, though it wasn’t destroyed, was well secured. She’d watched with her own eyes as it was placed in a vault deep underground. Could somebody really have re-invented it? Only a person with access to the complete body of time engineering knowledge and a few strokes of good luck could possibly have achieved such a feat. After all, that was how they’d developed the technology in the first place.
The aim of the research project had been to develop a new, more reliable calibration test for the Time Chips, to make sure they would only fire as programmed. There had been a small but problematic number of Chips which had misfired, causing the death of the host a few months earlier than their allocated sixty-five years. During trials of the calibration tests, one of the lab techs had fiddled with some of the specs, mostly out of pure boredom, and discovered the Chip could be rewound, sort of like putting an old car in reverse to make the odometer tick backwards. The problem was, once rewound, it wouldn’t go forward any further than it had previously been programmed to and seemed to then lose more time. If you took a twenty-minute Chip that had already run ten minutes, and rewound it back to five minutes, it would trigger five minutes later. It made no sense—it simply didn’t add up.
The trials were paused while the mechanism that enabled the rewinding was encrypted more securely.
But, of course, scientists being the insatiably curious creatures that they are, Varya and a few others set about trying to find out where the time went. They hypothesised that the Chip hadn’t actually been rewound, but drained of time, which was why the twenty-minute Chip didn’t give the host extra time after being ‘rewound’. The time had to go somewhere. They eventually figured out that the time could be syphoned and captured in a partially full Chip using a transfer device. A neat trick, but not one they thought would ever be particularly useful. After all, nobody would ever want to lose time. They filed a report, locked away the transfer device prototypes and forgot about it.
When one of the more troublesome lab techs left the project a few months later, everybody breathed a sigh of relief. Lance was the kind of guy who argued the point with people who had years more experience than he did and whined when his breaks were three minutes shorter than the statutory minimum. He was also caught taking chocolate from the charity box without paying, on more than one occasion.
What nobody realised was that Lance was also the kind of guy to take the time transfer technology and Time Chip encryption codes and sell them on the black market to the kinds of people who could definitely benefit from the ability to take time. Especially if those years could be transferred to somebody else for profit.
Varya and Zoe sat on the bed in Varya’s spare room with Daniel between them. Varya caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored wardrobe doors. Guilt seemed etched into her tired face. Was history repeating itself? Was this all her fault, again? She looked away quickly. There would be time for self-flagellation and blame allocation later.
“When I press this button, the portal to the Time Lock will appear. Once you step through it your Time Chip will pause. It won’t re-start until you come back through.” Varya held up the black box to show Daniel.
“Does it hurt?”
“No. It feels a little like walking through a cool, gentle waterfall, except you won’t get wet.”
“Why can’t Mum come with me?”
The corners of Zoe’s mouth twitched again.
Varya touched Daniel’s shoulder and she steered him back to meet her eyes.
“The Time Lock is not legal,” she said plainly. “It’s not that it’s illegal, technically, but it exists outside of the law. I’m afraid that if it’s discovered the authorities will shut it down. It’s possible they would eventually decide it’s not dangerous and allow it to be in use again, but that would take a lot longer than six hours and…” She paused to consult her screen, on which she’d set a countdown timer. “… sixteen minutes.”
Zoe recovered herself enough to take back the narrative. “I have to stay here and pretend that everything has happened as the authorities expect.”
Daniel frowned. “You have to stay here and pretend I’m dead.”
Zoe bit her lip and nodded sadly. “Yes.”
“But you’re going to figure out how to reverse the drain and you’ll come and get me when you have?”
“Yes,” said Varya.
“But I’ll visit you,” said Zoe. “Every day.”
Daniel stood up. “Alright. What do I do now? Just walk into it?”
“I’ll go first, just follow me,” said Varya, standing up and taking Daniel’s hand to lead him through. She braced herself for the sudden, brief plunge in temperature, and then felt Daniel shudder as he failed to brace for the same.
Chapter twenty-four
Elena
It was my idea, you must understand, to come in here with Kir. Four years of age, he was, so full of life and then to be told there’s nothing more they can do. It just wasn’t true.
“You go. Go and find out what more can be done,” I told my Varya. She held our little boy’s hand and looked into his face. His eyes were dark smudges above his pale little cheeks.
“I can’t, Mama. I don’t know what else to do, either.”
“You’re a scientist,” I told her. “You will find the answers.”
“Mama, shush. Enough.” She said it so gently, my Varya, though I heard the catch in her voice. She had given up all hope, you see. That monstrous excuse of a husband and father had left and taken it all with him. I’ll never forgive him for that. I sat down on the bed then, on the same side as her, jolting Kir slightly as I came to rest. I took her hand. I made her look at me.
“You are a magician scientist who discovered how to bend the laws of time itself and alter the course of a person’s life. This…” I waved my hand theatrically at the bed, the boy and everything that was attached to him. “This is ea
sy. All you need is time and money.”
She looked at me then. I wanted to make her angry, I wanted to fire up the girl I had fought with for so long. But I saw only despair, incredulity. And pity.
“Mama, I’m a physicist. Was a physicist. I don’t know anything about medical science. All the money in the world is useless without time and expertise. I don’t have the expertise and Kir…” She trailed off and her eyes drifted back to her little boy. It seemed as though the minutes were draining out of him as we watched.
“You know how to make time.” My Varya, she didn’t move. She didn’t look at me, but she didn’t dismiss me. I knew, then, that I would win the day. I chose my words carefully. “So, go now - make the time. For Kir, and for me. Then I will care for him while you find a way to make the money and the expertise happen.”
“I don’t know how long it will take,” she whispered, not moving.
“I will care for our little boy. For however long it takes,” I told her firmly. “Go. Find a way to make him live.”
My Varya reached out her hand to that pale little boy and brushed the fragile strands back from his forehead. Then she bent her forefinger and ran the soft skin of the middle section down his soft, cool cheek.
My Varya nodded. “Okay. Okay, I will go and make the time.” She looked up at me with dry eyes then, and stood. She kissed me lightly on the cheek and almost floated out the door. I sat down and took her place on the chair, warmed by her. I took our Kir’s cool, unmoving hand. And I waited.
I chose the place, that was my one condition. If I was going to be spending months—and we had thought it would only be months when we first started—I wanted to make sure it was in a place that I knew and loved. It’s the place where I grew up, and where I would have moved back to had I had the chance. It was never an option though, not really. I would follow that little boy to the ends of the earth.
I was happy to let Varya go, back when she was a baby-faced university graduate and she decided she needed to move cities to do her studies. To learn about time and how to bend it. Children need time away from their parent, to grow and find out that they really can stand on their own two feet. And so, she went, flying on an airplane, north to Sydney, to the University of New South Wales, where they teach them these things of national importance. Of course, back then it was all so new, just an idea thought of by the National Committee that the scientists were scratching their heads to see if they could make a reality. That took priority for the whole faculty, creating the Time Chips. Her bending-of-time research project would have to wait. Policy before pleasure.
Stealing Time Page 10