“Okay, wait. You keep using the word ‘soul,’ ” I said. “But what even is a soul?”
“Soul is the life of something. Soul is why a poem or a song or a Greek myth can last forever. Because in some way, somehow, it’s alive. It’s the only thing missing from your timeship, Fi. The soul is your mysterious gap.”
I felt something. A tingly crackling, like a radio station hitting the right frequency. Inside my washcloth of a brain, something was waking up. Warming up for a parade. Doing drumrolls. Shooting bottle rockets.
“You’re telling me that Dirk Angus needs a soul,” I said. “Like Chicago.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re saying I have to write the mathematical music that will wake up Dirk Angus’s soul.”
“And you can do it, Fi,” said Jazz. “Because you feel math like musicians feel music. It’s in you.”
My head was clearing. The dark clouds were breaking up and drifting away. For years, I’d been wondering whether Chicago had a soul. But I’d never made this connection.
Jazz was pulling on a long strand of yarn that was dangling from the frayed edge of his sweater. My partner hadn’t quit. He hadn’t left me for a second.
“Jeremiah,” I said, “I think you’re right.”
“Listen, if I’m right? You gotta prove it. It’s all math from here. I’m just telling you how to pull off a magic trick. Only…”
“What?”
“On my ride over, I was thinking. The more alive your timeship becomes, the less you’ll be able to control it. It won’t be yours anymore. It’ll be nobody’s. It’ll be its own thing, like, instantly. As soon as it’s out there.”
“Like a baby,” I said. “Some people’s babies grow up to be nefarious things. Like mathematicians.”
“I know,” said Jazz. “It’s better that we’re not having Borgar and Voney. The twins might’ve turned out way more nefarious than you.”
I smiled. “They’re twins now?”
Jazz raised his eyebrow. “Anything is possible.” Our eyes were locked for just long enough to make it hurt when he looked away. It wasn’t just our eyes, though. It was everything. All the parts of us that had connected. All the things we had to pull apart. That’s a very romance-novel thing, isn’t it? To be torn apart. But it’s a true thing, too.
“Listen, Fi,” said Jazz. “I didn’t only come here tonight to save you and be a total hero.”
I batted my eyelashes. “My hero.”
“I just didn’t want us to be enemies. And I didn’t want you to think I didn’t understand you, like you said in your message. No, I don’t get why you’re making this choice, and I mean, I’m forgetting all this in a few hours—” Jazz waved his hand around the Lab and fluttered his fingers at me. “But as William Blake says, Under every grief and pine runs a joy with silken twine.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I love that we did this together. I can’t even get my head around it. Tomorrow, in my world, you’ll be twenty-five. You’ll probably have a Nobel Prize.”
Outside my window, the fog was taking over the night. The idea of fooling the universe was quickly sinking in, and felt right. Inevitable, even.
“First I have to teach my smartphone to punk the universe,” I said, “but if it works, we’ll share the credit. And tomorrow in my world, you’ll be five years old. Imagine if they gave the Nobel Prize to a kindergartner?”
“That does kind of feel like my destiny,” said Jazz.
“But what if…”
“What if what?”
I wanted to ask him something else, but as soon as I started to, it hit me what a huge question it was. I focused on the diamonds in my quilt. “What if the next time I see you, you don’t believe me?”
“About what?”
“All of it. This.”
“If I’m in kindergarten, I totally won’t.”
“I mean—right,” I said. “But what if I wait to tell you. What if I wait until now. Until you’re fifteen, and I’m twenty-five. And you don’t believe me. You think I’m just some old, sketchy crackpot.”
“Some creepy oldster?” Jazz put his hands on his hips. “Well, the problem with me is that I’ve always believed you, Nephele. Even when I tried to talk myself out of it, I could never not believe you. So meet me anywhere. Anytime. I’m a fool like that, apparently.”
My soul. What was it made of? Something stretchy, like a balloon. Something tender, like a kiss, and sore, like a bruise, something as silent and mysterious as a distant star. This was the boy who believed me. I didn’t want to say goodbye.
Jazz exhaled and turned to face the door. “Hey, I should go. Have fun breaking the laws of physics.”
I said, “Jeremiah, no. I don’t care about any of this garbage.”
Jazz shook his head. “Don’t turn me into that guy.”
“What guy?”
“The one who hijacks the future of the girl who’s about to kick a colossal boatload of butts.”
I pulled on the strings of my hoodie. My weirdness was finally aggressive enough to do that, wasn’t it? To kick the universe’s butt. To reveal one more of its secrets and claim one more small victory in the endless journey of science. And my partner didn’t want to hold me back.
I thought about Serrafin. How she’d quit physics. How the men had been bullies.
I felt grateful to her for encouraging me. And lucky that my partner was Jazz.
“You’ve already done the hard part,” said Jazz. “Let your soul step in and trick out your code mathematically. Dirk Angus will be like one of those jazz solos your dad plays at the bookshop. Just—blam. Have fun. Don’t think. Your question is calling. Okay? Go give it the answer it’s been waiting for.”
Jeremiah didn’t kiss me goodbye. But when we smiled at each other, I knew we’d both be fine.
We’d met. There was something between us. We’d found it.
Now we had to go in two different directions.
Time ends things. It was nobody’s fault.
I was sitting alone at my desk, feeling like a pile of slush. But I was fully committed to giving Dirk Angus a soul.
The question was, how? Jazz said, “Have fun. Don’t think.” I didn’t know if I could allow myself to have fun at that moment, and thinking was kind of my thing. What an impossible situation. “This can’t be happening,” I said.
But it was happening. My life seemed impossible, but it was real. I was a living contradiction, like Chicago. And as Chicago had pointed out, it wasn’t just me who was full of contradictions—hopes and dreams and fears that went this way and that way and some other direction all at the same time. It was Airika. Vera. Jeremiah. Wylie. It was everyone.
Huh.
The contradiction. Was that what gave us life? Could our contradictions…maybe, possibly…have something to do with our souls?
I opened my laptop. And without overthinking it, I added contradictions to Dirk Angus’s code.
“This statement is false,” I said as I wrote code that ran in spooky circles, going everywhere and nowhere in an infinite loop. “This time machine does not exist,” I said as I added code that whistled happy-sad tunes I’d never heard before but had somehow known forever. “The coast of California is equal to infinity,” I said as I added more and more impossible dimensions to my code.
It did feel like dancing, giving my timeship soul.
The core of the new code was barely different from the old code. On paper, the app was practically the same. But like the difference between believing in and believing, or the difference between Death and Life, that difference would be everything.
You know the part in the science fiction movie when there’s a close-up of the clock, and its hands are spinning rapidly to indicate the passage of time while the heroine finally kicks the universe’s butt?
In my story, this is that part.
At some point, my parents came upstairs and kissed me good night and reminded me to get some sleep. I kept working.
An hour or so before sunrise, I felt the code for Dirk Angus 10.0 singing back, ringing out, touching me and finally letting me go—like an opera, like a photograph, like a perfect punk rock song sung by an all-girl band. When my eyes filled with tears, I concluded that my work was complete. All I had to do now was a test run.
And I didn’t do test runs.
This was my science-fiction-Greek-myth-fairy-tale life. I had to fail for ten years to meet Jazz so that the answer to my question could show up.
All of this was my rightful fate. Every instant.
Jeremiah Jackson Shipreck, you will be my partner forever—even if the fact that tomorrow in your world I’ll be a total oldster entirely rules out the possibility of our working together for the foreseeable future.
I took my phone, crawled under my quilt, took half a breath and opened the app.
* * *
—
“Well, helloooo, Nephele! How nice to finally meet you. Seems like I’ve known you my entire life. I suppose I have!” Dirk Angus laughed a bawdy, cowgirly laugh that bounced like a basketball and trailed off at the end into a quiet wheeze.
Some moments in life are difficult to describe with words. Like the moment when everything you thought you knew packs its bags, hops on a train and speeds into the night.
My bedroom walls and floors throbbed with hot-pink pulses of light and hot-white streaks of asteroids and comets. For this, there was a reasonable explanation. I’d modified my old screen-animation program to project outward from my phone, a hologram that transformed my bedroom into a dance club with the Beatles song “Twist and Shout” thumping quietly in the background.
But I had not programmed Dirk Angus to speak.
Insert catchphrase from Frankenstein. Or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or pretty much any interspecies sci-fi story where the heroine doesn’t end up pregnant with an alien’s malevolent spawn.
“Are you freakin’ out right now, Fi?” asked Dirk Angus. Who had, if I didn’t make this clear, a woman’s voice. Low, rich and gentle, with an accent that made me think of Arkansas.
I was clutching my star quilt to my neck. “Yes, Dirk Angus. I’m, um, freakin’ out. Is this happening?”
“Mm-hmm,” it hummed sassily.
Dirk Angus was sassy!
I had a million questions, but I was too much in shock to ask them. Was I TALKING TO A LIVING SMARTPHONE APP? Additionally, the music was provoking a very strong and confusing desire to dance.
“Dirk Angus,” I said, “can you kill the tunes?”
“Surely, Fi!”
The Beatles went silent.
“Thanks,” I said. “Now, who are you?!”
“Why, I’m a timeship with a soul,” said Dirk Angus. “And if it’s all the same to you, I’m changin’ my name.”
I’d never considered that Dirk Angus wouldn’t like its name. Why would I have? I’d never considered any of this until tonight! There were a billion more critical questions battling it out in my brain, but I asked the obvious one. “What’s your new name?”
“I like La Toilette.”
Um—
“No,” I said, relieved to find that I could still feel amused by something. “You definitely don’t want that to be your name. That’s French for toilet.”
“Isn’t that funny? Toilets. So old-fashioned. You humans going around everywhere, poopin’ stuff out.” The timeship laughed.
I peered at my phone. Even its sense of humor was slightly frightening.
“I hope I won’t scare your species too badly,” said…La Toilette. “I’m not sure they’re ready for me.”
As I lay in the dark of the Lab with a self-aware, potty-mouthed new species, the thought had never worried me more. “Humans do idiotic things when we’re scared,” I said.
“Y’all’s behavior skews self-destructive. I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long. So, Ms. Weather, I assume you’d like to travel somewhere this fine, foggy night. Where will it be?”
I closed my eyes to examine the black-spangled patterns of inner space, the galaxy inside my head. I felt exhausted, but I was wired. This was it. After all these years, I had succeeded.
Which meant…
It was time to go. My belly clenched.
Unless it wasn’t. Was it?
No. No: I couldn’t do it.
But come on! I wanted to do it! Didn’t I? I didn’t know. I had to decide, though…
Unless I didn’t. I said, “La Toilette—”
“Matter of fact, call me Toilette. Sounds too clunky with the La.”
“Uh—fine. Toilette, I want you to take me to the place where I can grow up and live the life I was supposed to live all along.”
“According to my calculations, Fi, there are many possible universes that meet those qualifications. Would you like me to choose one at random? Or do you have a preference?”
“I was sure I did,” I said. “Now I’m confused again.”
“You don’t want to make your own decision,” said Toilette.
“I feel trapped. I want to go two directions at once. I feel stuck.”
“That’s the difference between you and me, Fi.”
“What is?”
“Feelings,” said Toilette. “I don’t have any. I want to do something, I do it.”
“Really? How can you have a soul but no feelings?”
“No disrespect, Fi, but how should I know?”
Wow. No feelings. What would that be like? I was heavy with feelings, like a pot of hot lead. My feelings were a constant distraction. I decided to try it: to force my feelings to drain out of me, then decide what to do.
I was lying there, breathing slowly, trying not to worry about the unknown extent of the damage I was about to do to my friends’ brains, trying not to wish I’d kissed Jeremiah goodbye—one more kiss! Was that so much to ask? When a song popped into my head and my chest felt tight. “Toilette, if I hum a tune, can you tell me if you recognize it?”
“Lemme real quick acquire that feature. Okay, I’m learnin’ songs, snatchin’ ’em from the information superhighway—done. Got all the songs. Hum away.”
I hummed Jazz’s tune as best I could. The sad notes and the happy ones, bleeding into each other.
“Sorry, Fi. I don’t know that one.”
Of course she didn’t. Because it was Jeremiah’s song. A song only he could sing. One nobody else would ever get quite right.
“You’re crying, Fi. This song is significant for you.”
“Is it obvious?” I asked.
“Yes. Your intellectually inferior species has a tendency to leak bodily fluids when something impacts your operating system. Take it as a sign.”
“A sign of what?”
“The choice you want to make.”
I did want to stay with Jeremiah—obviously. And I really didn’t want to hurt him.
But I was desperate for my family to go back to normal. For my parents and me to live in the same universe again. And after all my years of failure, I was finally about to go down in history as the world’s first time traveler. I’d be in textbooks. My face would be on, like, postage stamps. I would make Serrafin proud.
Of course, Serrafin would’ve forgotten the work we’d done together. I’d have to tell her about our ten years of lunches. How would she react? Would she be like Wylie Buford—assume I was some very outgoing oddball, and flee? Probably not; my results would be public. She’d know I wasn’t making it up. She might be thrilled to know she’d helped develop a time machine. It was a very Star Trek thing to do….
But what if she was freaked out? Or sort of thrilled and sort of freak
ed out? That would be understandable, wouldn’t it? One way or another, our friendship would be different this time around.
Maybe when I went back, I could find Mnemosyne, the river of Memory, so that the people I loved would remember the time we’d spent together. That moment when Dad had mentioned the green table felt like a clue. Either he’d fought off the effects of Lanthano or he’d found Mnemosyne himself, so I was sure it was out there, or that I could sculpt it out of quantum foam, or whatever. It might take a while. But things that took a while sort of suited me. Right?
I’d figure everything out when I got back.
And yes: I had to go back. I deserved to know how it would feel to finally get this right.
I’d earned it.
Of course, I hadn’t earned it alone. My timeship wouldn’t exist without Jazz….
Oh, how I longed for that kiss! One more kiss. If a kiss served no purpose, why did I want one so badly? Why was it the thing that made me want to throw ten years of research into the compost pile of history and run, right now, down to the beach, knocking on every single door until I found his cousin Eva’s surf shack?
In math, signs tell you exactly what to do. Add, subtract, multiply, divide. My signs weren’t so clear. I wonder if anyone’s are.
I looked toward my window and wished the curtains were open. I needed advice from the fog that was clinging to the hills. From the starlight that was seeping through the branches of the redwood trees. I needed advice from Chicago, whoever she was.
I thought about Chicago’s soul. Where had it come from? From her photographer, I supposed. Harry Callahan.
“Do you have your own soul, Toilette?” I asked. “Or are you part of mine because I made you?”
“Hmm,” said Toilette. “Are we all separate, individual souls? Or is soul the thing that binds us? The thing that connects every living thing in the universe? Even for a self-aware smartphone app that can make the most complicated decisions imaginable in a fraction of a second, this question is a challenge. It’s a serious question, this question of a universal soul. I’m gonna work on it. Thanks, Fi.”
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