Stealing Time

by Rebecca Bowyer

  The Time Lock itself was what had him absolutely fascinated. He’d always got the sense there was more to Aunt Varya, tried to pick her brains about what he knew was her specialty, but she’d always pushed him away. In every other subject she was generous with her knowledge, but when it came to Rest Time Chips, she treated him like a kid who was too young to know.

  Now it all made sense. She’d had Kir stashed away, in suspended animation, for all this time. His old playmate—who he did kind of vaguely remember. Yappy Dog was what had done it for him. He was sure Kir used to drag the stuffed toy to kindergarten with him every day. He remembered a kid with hair about the same colour as Kir’s, and the voice—the voice was the same too. But mostly it was that stuffed dog that he remembered, its droopy ears and chewed up tail.

  He tried to focus on the cartoon in front of him, but it was such babyish stuff. Maybe he could ask Elena for some of that Entiac draught that Kir had. He sighed, closed the DVD player, and put it on the bedside table. Whose apartment was this, anyway? He didn’t recognise it and thought he probably would have if it was Kir and Aunt Varya’s old place. Maybe it was Elena’s. The bedroom he’d been allocated definitely had a ‘guest room’ vibe to it. There were piles of old magazines in one corner, a cream-coloured box with the word ‘Singer’ on the side, and half a dozen framed pictures pushed against the wall. Apart from the single bed and bedside table, it looked pretty much like the dumping ground for everything else in this otherwise neat home.

  Daniel went to the door of the room, pressed his ear against it, and listened. Elena had told him to stay here until she told him it was morning, time to come out. She didn’t seem like the kind of person you’d want to cross; an old-fashioned parent-type who would probably actually yell at you if you disobeyed her. Not like the parents he knew, who all wanted to sit down and have discussions about your feelings. Like the old TV shows he’d seen where the parents—usually the father—laid down the rules and everyone had to follow them. Or else. The ‘or else’ part was always a bit vague, but Varya told him (out of his mother’s ear shot) that kids used to get hit if they misbehaved.

  He didn’t think Elena would hit him, but what if he needed to go to the toilet? That was a legitimate reason to leave his room, surely? Maybe she’d have some other DVDs he could borrow that were a bit more interesting. Even some documentaries, maybe, or he could ask to have a look at the books on the bookshelf in the living room.

  There was that smell again, the burning. What if there was a fire? Another legitimate reason to leave the room. He looked down at the gap underneath the door. No smoke. He touched the door. It wasn’t hot. He pressed down the long door handle slowly, bracing for a squeak, and pulled at the door. He took a deep breath and peered through the small gap he’d made, his heart thumping. Then he jumped back and slammed the door. Elena was out there, in the hallway.

  “Daniel? Are you okay in there?” Her voice came muffled through the door.

  He held his breath and listened to the soft fall of her footsteps as they came closer. At the sound of her knock he took a step backwards. The door opened slowly. His eyes were wide.

  “Daniel.” She smiled at him and his heart started to slow to its normal pace. He was being a stupid kid, jumping at shadows. This was Kir’s grandma, she wasn’t going to hurt him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, dear. Why don’t you come out to the living room and I’ll make you some hot cocoa?” She left the door open and beckoned for him to follow her. He hesitated then took slow steps behind her. “I’m sorry, dear, I realise now it was too much to ask of you to simply shut yourself away and wait out the night. You’re probably used to constant action where you come from. Kir and I have grown so used to making the hours stretch, amusing ourselves with small things.”

  Daniel stood in the living room doorway and watched as she bustled about, collecting mugs from this cupboard and chocolate powder from that one.

  Elena turned. “Sit, dear, sit.”

  Daniel did as he was told and sat, placing his hands on the table. It seemed the polite thing to do.

  “I haven’t even asked you, have I?” she said.

  “Asked me?” said Daniel.

  “What illness you’ve been suffering.” She looked at him expectantly, teaspoon raised in one hand, powdered chocolate tin in the other. He examined her face and thought he saw pity, but it was always hard to tell with adults, especially older ones.

  “I’m not sick.”

  Elena’s face darkened a moment but then she seemed to change her mind. “I’m sorry to pry, I was just looking to make some conversation. Why don’t you tell me about your life out there instead?” She waved her spoon in the general direction of the hallway and the Time Lock’s portal. “What do you do with your time? What do other kids your age do with their time? Are they still into the same computer games?”

  Daniel stared at her as realisation dawned. Varya hadn’t told Elena about the time thieves. Elena must think he had cancer or something, like Kir. He opened his mouth to explain to her. Maybe Varya just hadn’t had the time. But the moment had passed, and she was now saying something about Sonic the Hedgehog and arcade games, back in her own childhood. He peered over his shoulder and down the hallway, hoping his mum would return soon.

  Chapter thirty-five

  Varya

  Varya stood at the front of the largest laboratory at the Minor Miracles Foundation, seven scientists seated at scattered benches around the room.

  “This is a paper-only project,” she said. “No digital note-taking, no emailing, no online databases. We’ve been entrusted with this material by the Rest Time Corps and we will ensure that nothing related to this leaves this room. Is that clear?”

  Connor weaved his way slowly around the room, distributing manila folders of photocopied material. Inside each folder were copies of the notes Varya had obtained from the Rest Time Corps archive alongside a summary of everything she remembered about the time transfer tech.

  “In your hands you now have everything that’s known about how to create a device which is capable of transferring blocks of time from one Rest Time Chip to another. We’re going to use it to recreate the device. Once we have a prototype, we’ll turn it over to the Rest Time Corps to enable them to assist any others who fall victim to the time thieves.” Varya’s voice wavered slightly as she clasped her hands together.

  A scientist shot his hand into the air, eyes on the sheet of paper in front of him. “This is kind of outside of our usual area of expertise. Isn’t there someone else who could do this?” Varya saw genuine concern on his face.

  Her initial revelation that she was taking on a senior management role at the facility, effective immediately, hadn’t seemed to bother anyone very much. It wasn’t like she was taking on the CEO role, and she’d been there long enough, working long enough hours, that questions had started to be asked about why her career appeared to have stalled. She’d shrugged off Marisa’s urging to tell the entire truth of her background and her role in setting up the charity in the first place. Marisa wanted her to step out from behind the curtain completely. Varya wasn’t ready to go that far just yet.

  She had, however, agreed that imparting some information about her career path was probably necessary. She dug a fingernail into her palm and forced a smile.

  “At heart, you’re all scientists. Granted, you don’t have doctorates in temporal physics, but that’s not what this requires. Think of this as more of a scientific problem-solving exercise. The answers are already there, they’ve been found before. Your role is to figure out how to put the pieces of the puzzle back together again.” She took a deep breath. “My role is to identify, and fill in, the missing pieces.” There was some murmuring to her left. She fought the urge to look or try to listen to what they were saying. “You know that I have worked here for the past four-and-a-half years, as a lab tech. You know that I went to UNSW and completed my doctorate there. What you don’t know is that I did a stint attached to the Rest Time
Corps after I graduated.”

  “I knew it! I told you so!” A scientist to her left clapped in excitement and nudged the older man next to her. Then she pointed at Varya. “You’ve cut your hair. And dyed it. But I knew it was you. I watched all the news items back then.”

  “What news items?” called out another voice.

  “She invented the time transfer tech,” she said, in an awed, hushed tone.

  Varya nodded. “I was on the team that invented the time transfer tech, yes.”

  “Hey, something I never really understood. We can add bonus years to Time Chips, yeah? So, how come they couldn’t just add years back to the kids’ Chips when they returned?” The woman leaned forward eagerly, as though Varya was an oracle who was about to provide an answer to her most burning question.

  “We did think of trying that on the first few kids that were returned, but the tech doesn’t work like that.” She turned and started to draw on the whiteboard behind her. “Each person gets a limit of sixty-five years programmed into their Chip at birth.” She wrote ‘65’ at the end of the straight line she’d drawn. “It’s not a quota so much as a limitation. There’s no guarantee you’ll make it to sixty-five. That’s up to your life span, which might be fifty-five, thirty or even two.” She spoke slowly and emphasised the keywords. After pausing briefly, she drew a small vertical slash across the line approximately two-thirds from the start. “But there’s a blocker artificially programmed in at forty years. If you meet the requirements of the time extension—work extra hours, produce a child, steer clear of trouble with the law—the blocker will be deactivated, and you can push past it.” She paused to gather her thoughts. Trying to explain complex temporal concepts to scientists who studied a completely different branch was not easy. Every eye in the room was studying either the notes in front of them or squinting at the board. Connor caught her eye and smiled encouragingly. She’d already practised on him that morning, answering much the same questions then.

  Varya turned and started to point at the earlier vertical slashes. “The time transfer tech works on this life span section. The unknown quantity. The returned children had been drained of their life span and it had already been inserted into someone else. The time thieves didn’t know whether they were going to be able to extract sixty years, or six, of the children’s life span. The time transfer tech can also measure a person’s life span. It can tell you when you’re going to die, barring a catastrophic incident such as car accident or gunshot wound.” She started to draw a long arrow from one of the slashes back to the start of the timeline, then pointed to it. “The only way to get this life span back is to either retrieve their original life span or take a life span from somebody else.”

  “Wouldn’t the parents have volunteered to donate life span?” asked a woman in the back row, rubbing her pregnant belly.

  Varya nodded and felt her face grow hot. “Yes, they did. Of course, they did. But the Rest Time Authority wouldn’t allow it.” She left it at that.

  The older man at the front frowned. Varya glanced at him and thought she could see his thought processes as his facial expressions changed. Her stomach flipped. This was exactly what she’d feared, exactly why she’d kept a low profile all these years.

  “So, it’s your fault they’re in this mess,” he said eventually.

  “Simon!” The woman pushed him again, not so gently this time.

  Varya looked at him levelly, her old friend, guilt, threatening to drown her. “In a sense, yes. As a scientist yourself, I’m sure you can appreciate the excitement that comes with the discovery of a new technology. Life span isn’t something we ever thought we could even quantify, hold on to, let alone transfer from one human being to another.”

  “But you did,” he said.

  “Yes, we did. And we have paid for that naïve excitement dearly, I assure you. Which is why the technology and most of the instructions on how to build it were destroyed.”

  “Except somebody’s figured it out again.”

  “Yes, it appears that way.”

  Silence filled the room. The man looked smug and satisfied.

  “This morning, please read through the folders and have a think about how you want to approach the problem. We’ll reconvene in two hours.” Varya turned her back on the room, signalling an end to the presentation. She picked up the whiteboard eraser and started to rub at her diagrams. It occurred to her as she rubbed out the final arrow that it might have been helpful to leave it there. Too late now.

  “You okay?” Connor murmured at her side. Varya took an involuntary step sideways. He was too close, far too close, and speaking too softly. It was all just too intimate for her, and after her meeting with Sebastian she found her faith in her own perceptions starting to slip again. He’d always had that effect on her, as though he carried some magnetic field around him that messed with her own radar signals. When she was with Sebastian, she always felt as though she was fighting through a constant fog. In the past it had been a happy fog, mostly. But still a fog. She shook her head slightly.

  “I’m fine.” She looked up, tried to smile a little to give support to the lie. “Little tired, maybe.”

  “You know, I was thinking. About how I could be useful in all of this. I was wondering if you’d like me to be the liaison between us and Rest Time Corps? I know how they work; I know how we work, and you’d be free to focus on the research. It would also mean you wouldn’t have to…” He trailed off deliberately.

  “I don’t need… I mean, thanks, yes. That would be great, actually.” Varya remembered her promise to Marisa, to try to share the burden around, to stop trying to take it all on her own shoulders. She sat down at the presentation bench at the front of the room and shuffled her own papers, trying to gather her thoughts enough to start work herself. She was just wondering whether it might not be a bad idea to find another room, away from people, when the pregnant scientist pulled a chair over and sat down beside her.

  “Hi, it’s Kayla, isn’t it?”

  Kayla beamed. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “And… how far along are you?” Varya mentally kicked herself at the inane question. How many times had she been asked the same question herself during her pregnancy, and how annoying had it become?

  “Twenty-six weeks. We’re so excited.”

  “You’re not worried about still working? I mean, the chemicals in the labs…” Varya projected her own concerns onto Kayla, remembering her complete refusal to give up work before she went into labour. Looking back, she was horrified that she hadn’t given any thought to her working conditions. Kayla waved a dismissive hand.

  “No, it’s fine. I’m on a project where I’ve already checked out all the substances we’re working with and they’re all totally safe.” There was a brief pause, enough time for Kayla to rearrange her excited expectant-mum face into an altogether more serious one.

  “This time transfer tech. It can tell you when you’re going to die, can’t it?”

  “Not quite. It can tell you the maximum amount of time you have left. This could be superseded by either a Rest Time Chip’s initiation, or another catastrophic but unforeseen event.”

  “My friend’s sister, when she was thirteen, just passed away in her sleep. Nobody had any idea why, there was no medical reason. Her heart just… stopped.”

  Varya nodded thoughtfully.

  “Do you think it could have been the end of her life span?”

  “Maybe,” said Varya. “But I don’t really know a lot about how it works, I’m sorry. I’ve told you as much as I know. We were able to discover how to transfer it, but you’ve seen how that worked out. No further research has been done on life spans and any information about it has been suppressed by the government. You could only imagine the general panic if word got out. Some people would demand the technology to measure their life spans. The repercussions from knowing the date of your premature death were deemed too great.”

  Kayla snorted. “We already know the date of
our premature death,” she said bitterly. “It’s sixty-five.” She rubbed her belly and admired it for a moment. “Then again, if this little one was only meant for a short time in this world, I don’t think I’d want to know.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean… I didn’t think.”

  Varya closed her eyes, took a quiet breath, and opened them again. “It’s okay.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss. I read about what happened to your son. It’s so unfair.”

  “Thank you.” Varya picked up a sheaf of papers and held them in front of herself.

  “I should probably get back to work,” said Kayla. “Time is ticking.”

  “Yes,” said Varya. “It certainly is.”

  Chapter thirty-six

  Varya had just managed to get her mind focused on the task at hand and was jotting down notes furiously as she remembered fragments of the solution from the past. She almost didn’t hear her screen vibrating. Annoyed, she picked it up and was planning to cancel the call, until she saw the caller ID.

  “Connor is supposed to call you.” Varya made no effort to hide her irritation. “He’s going to be the liaison between our organisations for this project.” She frowned into the silence. “Hello?”

  A soft laugh. “I was calling to see if you wanted to meet up for lunch,” said Sebastian. “I can hear you’re well into research mode, though, so…”

  “I’m sorry, I just…” She wasn’t really sorry.

  “It’s okay. That tone of yours, just brings back the memories, that’s all.”

  Damn him. Damn him and his memories. She bit her tongue and held her breath, willing herself to stay silent.

  “How about dinner? I’ll leave here around six.” She mentally kicked herself. “I could meet you at that Mexican place we used to take Kir to. It’s on my way home.” It was his voice, that hypnotic voice. Not the law enforcement one. That had never gotten him anywhere with her, which had taken him a while to figure out. It was the perceptive I-can-see-right-through-you warm tone that sent shivers down her spine.