Mom was washing berries and humming. Dad was shaking coffee beans into the grinder. They seemed to be back to normal. Shiny and morning-y and breathing in regular rhythms.
I, on the other hand, was anything but normal. I was wrecked. I’d shot through the quantum wormhole and slammed into a brick wall. How old was I supposed to be now? Sixteen?
Sixteen, halfway to seventeen.
I definitely did not feel sixteen. I still felt fourteen, halfway to fifteen. What did that even mean? Did I look sixteen? I needed to check. But first I needed to collapse against the kitchen wall below our cuckoo clock, which had been broken forever, a fact that now felt like an omen or a curse. I looked up at the clock and resisted the urge to gesticulate rudely in its general direction.
Dad noticed me looking and nodded at the clock. “Gotta figure out how to fix that thing. Clocks have their own whole deal. Right now I need a record.” He cut through the kitchen into the living room. “What do we feel like listening to?” he asked.
I closed my eyes and said, “Something tragic.”
“Ah,” said Mom. “To be a freshman.”
* * *
—
After breakfast I went upstairs to take a hot shower. There was sand in my fingernails and I smelled like seaweed and salt.
The scalding water felt good on my skin. It reminded me that I was real. Dirk Angus 2.0 hadn’t taken me where I wanted to go, but it hadn’t killed me. And if I was still alive, I could still fix this.
I had to fix this.
But first, the question that had occurred to me downstairs was nagging at me. Was I aging? I dried off and confronted my naked self in the full-length mirror.
My face was still round, and so was the rest of the round stuff, like my boobs and my butt and all that. My eyes were still the same nefarious gold, and I had my same pointy chin. Hair galore, I still had: the black mane down my back, plus the fur on my arms and the shadow above my upper lip that I have always liked because it makes me look like a gentleman who smokes a pipe while wearing a paisley silk jacket and sitting in a leather armchair, which probably makes sense to nobody except me. My legs, which I shaved sporadically, were spiky, which made me think of a ghost spider grossly inflated by a scientific experiment gone awry.
Awry. Like a goofball plan in a romantic comedy.
If only. What I would’ve given for my world to be resolved in ninety minutes or less and fade out on an epic first kiss.
My point is that standing there naked, inspecting myself, I had many thoughts, but it was difficult to detect from the outside whether or not I was aging.
But on the inside? I really, truly felt like I totally wasn’t. I just didn’t feel older. Like, at all. On my second fifteenth birthday, last March 11, I’d felt like a deceptive creep.
Sure, I fantasized about kissing boys, which was mature, I guess. I’d even tried to imagine myself kissing a girl. Both years during our unit on biological reproduction, Mrs. Saint Johnabelle had said, “I stand in awe of the beauty of the spectrum of sexuality across species,” and I’d loved how that sounded, and had tried to figure out where I fit into that spectrum, but how would I know for sure until I actually got kissed? And I wasn’t making any progress in the kissing department, or any other department. I wasn’t growing up.
“You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?” I said to the naked, forever-young version of myself in the mirror, and the girl looked like she wasn’t sure. “What are you going to do now, clever girl?” I leaned forward and peered into her eerie yellow eyes. As we inspected each other, we both looked highly suspicious.
* * *
—
Standing outside the school before the morning bell rang, I bounced on my toes to keep warm. A few seagulls fluttered near the forest’s edge, collecting the muffin chunks some boys were tossing that way. Eat up, scavengers, I thought. The universe will spoil you today and starve you tomorrow. I should’ve been thinking about where I’d gone wrong with Dirk Angus, but I was still preoccupied with the aging question. Last year’s freshmen would be sophomores now, and the freshmen from my first year would be juniors. Some girls from my first freshman year—juniors now—were huddled in a circle. Were they older than last year? Presumably. How would I know that if I didn’t know them? I didn’t know.
When I spotted this boy named Terrence Jack, I swooned internally. I’d developed a huge crush on him during my second freshman year. Terrence Jack had a lip ring and a nose ring, and he was pretty much always snarling. He’d looked about thirty to me even when he was a freshman. But he’d definitely grown over the summer. He was thicker around the neck, or something. I was launching my Terrence Jack fantasy, wherein we save each other from a hungry pack of turkey vultures on a moonlit night by hiding together in the back seat of someone’s car, when I noticed Vera standing near the dumpsters.
She’d cut her hair short, which looked sophisticated. And she was holding hands with Youki, who was…Okay, Youki was extra tall, no doubt…and he was wearing glasses. The glasses were new.
Then I noticed Marla the misanthropic read-walker near the school’s front doors, leaning back to back with a girl with a single blue hair extension. They looked genuinely bored with the world—the look I’d once imagined New Nephele cultivating. I sighed. I would never have pulled that look off.
Serrafin was milling around the crowd in a cream-colored suit, keeping an eye on things. She looked extra old. But she’d always looked extra old, with her white hair and her wrinkles. Unlike my mother, whose mermaid hair seemed to have sprouted silver stripes overnight. I mean, it must’ve been silver before. I was just hypersensitive today.
I headed for Serrafin. At least now that we were friends, I’d be important enough in her brain for her to remember me. Like my parents, she’d remember me and forget my first two freshman years.
True: Vera hadn’t remembered me, and we’d been best friends forever. But last year I’d read that humans’ brains aren’t fully developed until they’re, like, twenty-five years old. Vera’s brain was still forming; it needed all its energy for that. She’d forgotten me because it took less juice to autocorrect me out of existence than to remember me and forget the previous year. Serrafin’s brain had been fully developed for decades; she wouldn’t have that problem. As long as my teacher remembered me, I could live with her forgetting our theoretical physics research. I just needed her to see me, to show me the secret smile hiding in her eyes—and possibly I needed to collapse, sobbing, in her arms.
When I reached her, I said, “Serrafi—I mean, Mrs. Saint Johnabelle?”
Serrafin looked at me over her eyeglasses. “Good morning, young lady. May I help you find something?”
Young lady? That wasn’t promising. “It’s me,” I said. “Nephele Weather. From your homeroom.”
Serrafin nodded in a formal way and looked over the crowd. “Welcome to Redwood Cove High School, Nephele. What a unique name. Might it be Greek?”
My heart collapsed like a parachute, crash-landing. Serrafin didn’t remember me. Which meant…I wasn’t as important to my teacher as she was to me. I was one of thousands of students she’d taught in her long career. Just another utterly replaceable freshman.
“I look forward to making your acquaintance,” said Serrafin. Then she hurried away, yelling, “Excuse me? Excuse me, you there: students are not to ride electric scooters in the schoolyard.”
I was about to unleash a primal scream to call forth my Greek ancestors from the sea—Stheno and Euryale and Medusa, the shrieking semi-immortals with hair made of serpents that had totally refused to swallow themselves—when I noticed a cluster of upperclassmen standing near the redwood stump and did a double take.
One of them was Wylie. His reddish-brown hair was chin-length, and he was wearing a T-shirt with a skull on it with a bloody knife going through it. Beside him, a guy wearing a black cape was telling a st
ory with his whole body.
And then I noticed the girl in the combat boots.
She had super-short bleached curly hair and bright amber-brown skin and chunky gold earrings that dangled to her shoulders. She was laughing. They were all holding paper coffee cups.
I just stood there watching them. At one point, the girl in the combat boots poked Wylie in the belly, which made him giggle like…I didn’t know what. A rubber duckie? I doubted ducks giggled. He was still Wylie, though. That’s what I mean. Something had happened to him over the summer, but he was still Wylie. He was in there.
The bell rang, and Wylie and his friends went inside. I felt fragile, standing on the blacktop alone, like a sand dollar exposed to the tourists on a busy stretch of beach. I could not fathom getting through that day.
* * *
—
After school, at the Big Blue Wave, I made my cup of tea in silence. The opera Dad was spinning was working its way into my soul, and I felt the tears coming. Mrs. Saint Johnabelle didn’t remember me, and there was a whole new class of freshmen I couldn’t begin to deal with. I was genuinely hurting my parents. And I’d never been lonelier in my life. I was doing everything wrong.
“Maybe it’s time to give up on time travel,” said Chicago.
“And leave my parents like this? Like short-circuiting robots? No way. The only solution is to upgrade Dirk Angus, stat. Dirk Angus 3.0 has to be flawless.”
“Where are you going to start?” Chicago asked.
“How should I know?” I clutched my mug and let the warmth seep into my hands. I wished it could make me feel better.
Chicago almost looked at me, but didn’t quite. “And you’re sure you don’t want to practice New Nephele while you try to figure out what happened? If you get stuck here in the wrong future, you may need to crank up the sass.”
“Are you kidding? New Nephele is dead. All I care about now is fixing Mom and Dad. And, you know. When my scientific revelation saves the earth too, I mean, yeah. I’ll take it. Anyway, I’m an idiot, Chicago. I should’ve been Wylie’s friend when I had the chance. I should be the girl in the combat boots.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. When I go back in time, I’m not going to save Wylie from Outcast Island. Hopefully, Wylie will save me by being my friend, even though I am a colossal idiot. Until then, Chicago, I have you.”
“But I’m imaginary, aren’t I?”
She was. I mean—she was and she wasn’t. I couldn’t review my equations yet; my brain was still too mealy from last night’s time travel. However, I needed something to distract me from the mess I was making, so I decided to conduct a new investigation.
I’d always wondered if Chicago had a soul. Her own soul, separate from mine. If a photograph could have a soul, maybe I could figure out how it got there.
Yes, it was a bizarre idea, and no, it had nothing to do with time travel. Which was exactly why I felt like thinking about it. I took my tea and headed for Photography.
* * *
—
Harry Callahan made Chicago, 1955 before digital cameras existed. He used film. With film, you can create the illusion that two things are happening in the same place at the same time by taking a photograph, rewinding the film and taking another photograph on top of it. It’s called a double exposure. In theory, there’s no limit to the number of exposures you can make, but if you aren’t careful, you’ll cram so many pictures on top of one another that the final result looks like mud. That idea got me thinking.
The next day, I asked to have lunch with Serrafin, and when she said yes, I dived right into my “thought experiment.” After I brought her up to speed, I posed my new theory.
“What if it isn’t just the universe and me who need to pass through the wormhole in time?” I asked. “What if I need every version of myself that could ever exist to pass through the hole? All of the choices I could ever have made, or could ever make.”
“The set of all possible Nepheles?” asked Serrafin as she munched her chips.
“Exactly. Any and every Nephele I could possibly be.”
Serrafin crumpled her chip bag and tossed it toward the garbage can. It landed a few feet away on the floor. “Shoot,” she said, standing. “So you want to combine all possible outcomes in a single superposed state. A single wave that’s a collection of all the possible waves that describe Nephele Weather.”
“Precisely,” I said.
“Fascinating, Ms. Weather. Where did you get that idea?” she asked.
I told her about my research into old-fashioned photography. “I think I rewound the film of my life and am imprinting myself on a universe that keeps moving forward. Like I’m a multiple exposure of a photograph. And every time I go back, the universe gets blurrier. If I send back every version of myself that could ever exist, maybe I’ll solve the problem.”
“Intriguing concept, Ms. Weather. This conversation brings me back to my days as a graduate student.” Mrs. Saint Johnabelle held a hand on her lower back to brace it as she bent to grab the chip bag from the floor.
I jumped up to get it for her. “Graduate school,” I said. “You mean, to become a teacher?”
“No. To become a physicist. I only teach because—well. Being a woman scientist when I was young was certainly possible. But I didn’t like being around all those men. They were bullies, Nephele. Don’t fret, however; thanks to girls like you, things are changing and will continue to. I do miss having this kind of conversation with my peers. For me, science is the skeleton of the universe. It is a profound way of making sense of the world.”
“I wish my thought experiment made more sense. Sometimes I feel like my ideas are all over the place,” I said. “And I keep failing. It scares me, how wrong I can be. And it’s like, why am I even doing this in the first place? Honestly, Serra—Mrs. Saint Johnabelle—I’m feeling like…not like giving up; I mean, I can’t give up now. It’s just, I’m like, so like…I don’t know.”
“Overwhelmed?” Serrafin sat again and looked out the window. Pine needles whirled across the blacktop. “In graduate school, I sometimes felt that way. And when I did, I made sure to tightly control every variable in my experimental model except the one I wanted to modify. Right down to the seemingly extraneous details.”
“Extraneous like what?”
“For instance, I’d eat exactly the same breakfast every morning. Wear exactly the same outfit. Listen to the same music on my way to the lab, et cetera.”
“Those are extraneous details,” I said. “You’re superstitious?”
Serrafin shrugged. “I liked the idea that nothing would change except what I wanted to change. Then, when I ran the experiment again, I felt clear-headed, as if I were controlling the chaos.”
“Hey, is that why you eat the same lunch every day? To control the chaos of us? Your students?”
Mrs. Saint Johnabelle swept sour-cream-and-onion dust off her desk into her napkin. “I don’t eat the same lunch every day.”
I tried not to smile.
“But that’s beside the point,” she said. Then she leaned back in her chair and looked at me like she was considering whether or not she should tell me something. I was starting to feel fidgety—the woman’s glare could make you confess to sins you didn’t even want to commit—when she said, “You mustn’t give up, Ms. Weather. Remain confident and persist. Science needs women like you.”
Her voice sounded a little different than usual. It wasn’t friendly or unfriendly. It was reaching for me. Asking for a promise.
“I won’t give up,” I said.
Serrafin nodded. “So. How will you create the universal wave function for your timeship?”
“Well, I was thinking I could teach Dirk Angus 3.0 to predict what choices I would make in any given situation,” I said. “Although there’s a bunch of AI stuff I’ll h
ave to learn….”
“Artificial intelligence,” said Serrafin. “Wonderful. I’ve been considering taking an online course on the subject. This gives me the kick I need to go for it. We can tutor each other. Have you ever seen the television program Star Trek?”
I said, “Yup.”
She lowered her voice and smiled like we were breaking the law together. “Don’t you just love it?”
I believe it is wrong to lie—and I felt evil enough already. But it would’ve felt even crueler to tell Serrafin my true feelings about Star Trek.
“I sure do,” I said. “I really do love Star Trek.”
Serrafin laughed a scruffy laugh and nodded.
* * *
—
My third freshman year passed in the usual way. I ignored my peers before they could reject me, spending lunchtimes doing theoretical physics with Serrafin and my free time at the bookshop or in my bedroom, learning everything I could about artificial intelligence and developing Dirk Angus 3.0. By mid-July, the code was finished and I was ready to run the experiment again.
But I was inspired by what Serrafin had told me about controlling all of the variables except the one that she had to change. My life felt out of control. Serrafin had said that a routine had helped her stay focused, and I wanted to try it. So I decided to leave on precisely the same day I’d run my previous time-travel experiments: the night before the first day of the school year.
To kill time until my departure, I programmed a simple animation for a cute screen that would pop up when I opened the Dirk Angus app. It looked like you were shooting through a black-and-magenta galaxy, dodging asteroids and comets, and the soundtrack was “Twist and Shout” from one of Dad’s Beatles albums. Something about the song’s dips and swings reminded me of how I felt when I torpedoed through the wormhole. Strong and weightless and happy and free. Should it feel phenomenal to dive into the quantum bubble bath? I didn’t know. But I found myself looking forward to it.
Time Travel for Love and Profit Page 8