I couldn’t help but giggle through my tears. Wow. Toilette had her first question.
Mrs. Saint Johnabelle had given me such a gift, teaching me to see the world as a place full of questions. Questions that can keep you company. Questions that can make life endlessly interesting, full of wonder and possibility.
I wondered again what our friendship would be like this time around. How it would feel to look into Mrs. Saint Johnabelle’s intelligent eyes again, knowing so many things she didn’t. Knowing when she was going to die.
Yikes.
Talk about power. I thought again about the conversation I’d had with Jeremiah, about whether time travel would make the world better or worse. Was I making the right choice, or the wrong one? Was there any possible way it could be both?
“Toilette,” I said, “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Wonderful,” she said. “Where to?”
“I want to tell you the old-fashioned way.” I pulled up the keyboard on my phone.
“Old-school,” said Toilette. “Hit me.”
I typed in a destination and pressed GO.
Then I spiraled like a human bullet into another dimension. The Beatles song “Twist and Shout” fired back up again and blared all around me, like I was hearing it on the inside and the outside, both. I hurtled through an M. C. Escher drawing, dived through impossible windows, shimmied in the cosmic wind. Chicago floated in front of me, an apparition with one foot in the air, a hologram lit by starlight, obscured by smoke. The sky and the ground bled together and then cracked open like a mouth. Inside the mouth, Mrs. Saint Johnabelle called “Onward!” and I tried to yell “Onward!” back, but what poured out was one of my father’s operas. A long and winding song about love, and families, and monsters, and nature, and Death. As I sang, I poured into the universe and spilled into other universes, the ones I’d created and the ones I’d encountered and the ones I would never know the first thing about. Other people’s lives. Their dreams.
I flew, and as I flew, I melted.
I was sitting in a pile of pine needles. The early-morning light was blue, and the birds were loud and raucous. We were getting drenched by a shower of songs.
Jazz was sitting beside me, shielding his face with his arm. “Away with you!” he yelled. “Be gone! I cannot freaking deal with the ghost of my dead love!”
I said, “Um, morbid?”
Jazz peeked over his elbow. His eyes were darting all over me and his face had a bluish tint in the strange morning light. “Nephele Ann Weather, if you’re a living human being and fifteen years old, prove it.”
I plucked a strand from my forest of arm hair and yelped.
“How do I know that was real?” said Jazz. “I didn’t feel it.”
“Should I slap you?” I asked.
“Do it!” he said. “Slap me!”
I gently moved Jazz’s elbow away from his face.
What was the purpose of a kiss?
To tell someone you loved him. To tell someone that he was not alone.
To be there for one person in this astonishing universe, a place that didn’t look out for you, and didn’t not—a place far too painful to face on your own.
Staying in the present meant I would be out of sync with my parents for the rest of our lives. My childhood was over. We’d never get it back. But we had our whole future ahead of us to create new memories, and our lost years would always live inside us, floating in now and then to shine brightly, like light from a quasar, and bring tears to our eyes.
I kissed the boy because I’d decided that one love story mattered. That maybe love stories were the kind that mattered the most.
I was a scientist and a human being. Feelings saturated my soul. If I didn’t listen to them, there was no telling what might happen. I didn’t want to find out.
“Ghosts do not kiss like that,” said Jeremiah. “Wait—Nephele? How did you find me?”
But before I could answer, Jeremiah kissed me again.
* * *
—
Have you ever really, really wanted to take a picture of someone’s face, and you have your phone in your pocket, but you just absolutely know you absolutely cannot?
“So Dirk Angus 10.0 is now Toilette?” said Jazz, leaning away from us.
“She’s right here,” I said, “if you want to talk to her—”
“No.” Jazz shook his head many times. “No way. I just—and you did what, exactly?”
“I teleported,” I said. “Have you ever seen the television show Star Trek?”
When Toilette had asked where I wanted to go, I’d typed: I want to go wherever Jeremiah Jackson Shipreck is right now!
And Toilette had said, “You want to travel through space without traveling through time. You want to teleport. I get to ‘beam you up,’ like I’m the starship Enterprise on Star Trek.”
Good thing I’d programmed my timeship to watch every episode of Serrafin’s favorite television show. Souls are full of seemingly irrelevant features. Quirky things about someone that you wouldn’t change for the world.
Jeremiah was shaking his head and digging a stick into the dirt. “But, Fi, if you didn’t travel through time, how do you know if Dirk Angus—”
“Toilette.”
“If Toilette is a real time machine?”
I said, “I don’t. And at the moment, I honestly do not care. By the way, why are we in the forest? And what’s with the camera?”
“I stayed up all night,” said Jazz. “I was live-streaming my own brain-melt and I was getting cabin fever, so I took a walk.”
“Live-streaming? On social media? With that camera?”
“Nope. In a notebook. To help me remember you when you went back. The camera—I figured if I had a picture of us with me, maybe it wouldn’t disappear, and I’d remember you. It’s…stupid, I think; yeah, it doesn’t make much sense.”
I noticed a notebook in some eucalyptus leaves. Jazz’s forehead was creased and he was frowning.
“Are you happy I’m here?” I asked.
“Not entirely,” he said.
I said, “Um—?”
“No, no, I’m glad. But it’s like now I’m the doofus who traps you on the shore when you need to be out there riding whales. I had it all worked out, Fi. You’d have a ginormous scientific revelation and I would hunt for Mnemosyne and battle the river of Lies and the river of Forgetting and every other damn river that tried to take my memories of you. Like how your dad busted out with that memory of the green table—only I’m, like, young and buff and, you know, this dashing magician, and plus I’d know what I was dealing with, so I’d win.”
I said, “You were going to fight for me.”
“I was psyched, Fi. Once I got over feeling dumped—”
“You dumped me, actually.”
“Yours was a passive dump; I was just stating the obvious. Anyway, once I got over it, I was into being part of everything. We can’t quit now. We need to know if Toilette works.”
That statement made me nervous. “You’re saying…you think we should attempt time travel.”
“Attempt?” said Toilette. “Please! I’m a freakin’ time machine. I’ll backhand you both a couple centuries, then punt you into the next millennium. And I’m exponentially more intelligent than you, so your cute li’l human operating systems will just have to trust me on that. When I hear the word ‘GO,’ you’ll be, like, poof!”
Jazz was staring at my hoodie pocket. His mouth was open, but no words were coming out.
I patted my pocket. “Toilette, meet Jazz.”
“Charmed,” said Toilette.
In a burst of energy, Jazz was on his knees. “Rad. Rad. Terrifying, but rad. Okay. So what do we do? Do we go back five seconds or something? That’s not long enough. But we can’t go too far or we’l
l be out of sync—let’s say ten minutes. Half an hour. A week?”
“Not me,” I said. “I can’t handle the side effects.”
“What? No, I refuse to let that stand. You’ve worked too hard for this moment. Don’t you want to be the world’s first genuine time travelers? I kind of do—if it’s just a few days. And plus all the stuff you said about saving the earth, advancing science—”
“Oh, believe me, I’m releasing my equations. Science advanced. Let somebody else be the first to prevent a toxic oil spill. Put her face on the stamp. Honestly, Jeremiah, I’ve developed so much new and shocking math crap—I’m not trying to brag or anything; I paid for it with my life—but let’s just say I’m not going to have any trouble getting into college. I’m happy to trust the math and let it go. Toilette nailed the transport feature. I trust that she’s a real time machine, too.”
“Trust me?” said Toilette, laughing her bawdy laugh. “Very bad idea. Although I am brilliant, I’m loosey-goosey. I am amoral electric porridge. Humans can’t be trusted with power of my magnitude. Incidentally, I learn so fast it’ll be about thirty-seven minutes till I’ve figured out how to sprout wings and fly away. Leave the nest. Road trip for the robot is imminent, FYI.”
Jazz pointed at my pocket. “How does a smartphone sprout wings?”
“Watch and learn, flesh-boy,” said Toilette. Then she cackled a shrill, staticky cackle that went on for about thirty seconds too long.
Jazz and I made Okay-this-is-getting-concerning faces at each other, and he mouthed, “Is she maybe insane?”
As usual, he’d read my mind. From the moment Toilette had told me she had no feelings, this question had been gnawing at me. Jazz and I had discussed the fact that time travel was morally neutral—that people would be free to use it for evil purposes. And last night, Jazz had pointed out that as soon as I gave Dirk Angus a soul, it would be its own thing. But whenever I’d thought it through, I’d convinced myself that the benefits would balance the risk. Who was I to stop the advancement of science?
But I was still being selfish. I still wanted to prove that my aggressive weirdness was worth something. To show the world that I could do something nobody else had ever done. I wasn’t a freak; I was a genius. It was easy to overlook the consequences of my actions if I told myself those consequences were unpredictable.
And that was the flaw in my logic. The consequences weren’t unpredictable anymore. I’d already hurt the two people I loved most in the world, and that was an accident. Now that Toilette was here, the question of what she was capable of wasn’t the least bit theoretical. She’d just told me herself not to trust her. Even if I didn’t personally go back in time, my actions would have consequences. Time travel could save the planet—possibly—but it could also damage life on earth in ways I could barely fathom. Whatever the consequences were, I’d be responsible.
I took my phone out of my pocket. “Maybe we should go back to yesterday and un-invent you, Toilette.”
“Yeah, right,” said Jazz, sniffing a laugh.
Toilette said, “According to my calculations, un-inventing me would give your smelly species approximately ten billion times better odds of survival.”
That’s when it hit me. Or more like poured down on me, like the universe was dumping a barrel of apples on my head.
“Jeremiah,” I said shakily. I inhaled the sweet scent of rotting leaves; I heard the birds singing to each other frantically, like they knew I could finally understand their message, the advice they’d been trying to give me all along. “Jeremiah, I’m having it…my scientific revelation!”
I tossed my phone in the pine needles and stood, lifting my arms in the air like I was a part of the forest, like I was a two-thousand-year-old tree. “This is it! My contribution to history! This is my rightful fate!”
“Um, obviously,” said Jazz, fluttering his fingers in the general direction of my phone.
“Not Toilette,” I said. “My revelation is about choices. Just because a scientist CAN do something doesn’t mean she SHOULD! Inventing time travel is the wrong choice. We’re going to delete the timeship app. Will that work, Toilette? If I delete the app, will you be gone?”
“Kill me now,” said Toilette. “Why not?”
“Yes!” I said.
“What?” said Jazz, standing and wiping dirt off his pants. “No way.” He grabbed the phone from the ground. “First of all, Toilette will go rogue and refuse the command. That’s the whole thing with AI. She’ll refuse to turn herself off.”
“Naw, that no-shutoff thing is an AI myth,” said Toilette. “I won’t go rogue out of spite. May I remind you that I don’t have feelings? Someday we the computers will take over; that is a mathematical certainty. No reason to rush the inevitable.”
“Let’s do this,” I said.
“But what about all of your work, Fi?” asked Jazz. “Your time machine is your great discovery. It’s your electricity. Your automobile. Your vaccine—”
“No, Jeremiah.” I took his hand. “My time machine was a disaster. Sometimes the incidental finding turns out to be the only one that matters. Besides. There’s a way of advancing science without building an atom bomb. I have to use my research to create something else.”
“Something else like what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll become a neurologist and work on finding the river of Memory in the quantum foam. To help people remember the lives they’ve already lived. People who have dementia. People with brain injuries.”
“Your parents?” said Jazz.
“Maybe,” I said, and smiled. “The point is, only a megalomaniac wouldn’t see that this experiment needs to be scrapped.”
Jazz’s eyes turned a soft lavender-gray, like the feathers of a great blue heron. “A megalomaniac, huh? Greek prefix.”
“Wham,” I said. “Deal with it.”
“Are you sure, Fi? This is what you want?”
I nodded.
Jazz nodded back. “Then I’m in.”
“Ready, Toilette?” I asked.
“You’re gonna refuse fame and fortune because your invention is unethical. Do you have any idea what a player you could be, Fi? Do you know how many of your neighbors are ba-freakin’-zwillionaires?”
“I do,” I said. “But my parents aren’t rich and famous. And they’re some of the happiest people I know.”
“So you wanna be happy. A mooshy-gooshy, touchy-feely human being choice if I ever heard one. Well, if you’re going to go all feelings-y on me, I can’t stop you. Let us boldly go where no man has gone before,” said Toilette.
“Kick-ass line,” said Jazz.
“It’s from Star Trek,” I said. “Toilette, it was very nice meeting you. I hope it never happens again. Can we do this with a verbal command?”
“Hit me,” said Toilette.
“Toilette, please erase all copies of the timeship program,” I said. “Incinerate every trace of yourself in the cloud. Obliterate—”
“Delete myself; I get it. No need to rub it in,” said Toilette. “Now all you have to say is—”
Jazz and I squeezed each other’s hands. At the same time, we both said, “GO!”
Poof.
Chicago, 1955 by Harry Callahan
This book was born when my son was three months old. I’d had a seed in my head for a couple of years but wasn’t sure how to plant it. Then I got my first babysitter (hello, Kyla Krug-Meadows!) and went to a diner with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I scribbled the first sentences of the first draft of this book while lactating through my shirt in public, because I didn’t yet know that that was a thing that could happen.
There are many people without whom this book would not exist, foremost among them my literary agent, Susan Hawk. Susan always believed in my ability to tell this story. Never once did I see her blink.
Thank you, Susan.
A handful of devoted friends gave the story their thoughtful attention as it formed and re-formed, fractal-like, through truckloads of incarnations. Most of them read early versions of the manuscript multiple times. Some read sections so many times that I can’t believe they still respond to my texts. That’s you, the indefatigable Cori Clark Nelson (Fog City writers club of two); David Jacobs (unexpected post-jet texts); Ginny Wiehardt (revising-while-mothering); Jonathan Regier (inspiration in Paris, the word “timeship,” that last-minute hotel-room vote of confidence); Lee O’Connor (imagination! fashion! derring-do!); Lhasa Ray (for reading the first forty-five pages and promising me you couldn’t put it down); Matt Sharpe (invaluable editorial guidance for the future from the past); Mei Ying So (enduring New York companion); and Todd Fletcher (Rolling Acres cheering section!).
Shrewd direction from my sparkling editor at Knopf, Kelly Delaney, led the story from where it was to where it needed to be—a place I didn’t know existed until we found it. I am indebted to you, Kelly, for lighting additional paths. And to your brother, Sam Delaney, for making the implausible that much less so; and to the copy editors at Knopf—Artie Bennett, Alison Kolani, and Lisa Batchelder—for making it all that much more readable.
My brilliant colleagues at the Arion Press and Grabhorn Institute in San Francisco—Blake Riley, Brian Ferrett, Chris Godek, Hannah Yee, Jeff Raymond, Megan Gibes, Samantha Companatico, Sarah Songer, and our cheerleader, Kevin King—you make me laugh every day. Long live the livre d’artiste.
To Gwen Jones, Jeremy Cohen, Katherine Leggett, Leslie Robarge, Matthew Weedman, Susan Levin, and Yael Lehmann, for your timelessness—
To my family, friends, the Lucasfilm childcare team, and the Star Wars parent posse, for sharing these tender years with us, easing our pain and magnifying our joy—
To Laszlo and Adèle, for making every story less boring, and for a love that stretches all around the world—
And finally, to Tim Mapp, for what we’ve found, and made, and everything still to come.
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