She imagined him knowing her locker number in high school or some other obscure but obtainable fact. “Dazzle me,” she called down.
“That tiny broken heart you have tattooed on your ankle? You told your friends it was because of Manny Rider. But it was really because of your dad.”
“Yeah? What do you know about it?”
“You were twelve the last time he hugged you, then he shipped out to the Middle East. He did three tours back to back, and when he came home, he was a different man. They took your dad from you, and it broke your heart.”
“Whoa. How could you know that?” Her hands went to her stomach as her gut wrenched from the memory.
“Please let me get my clothes on, then I’ll tell you everything.”
“Okay, but leave the door open. And I want to know exactly how you know that.”
When she heard the connecting door open, she descended halfway down the stairs. She remained standing, ready to run should the need arise. Her heart raced, and she took deep breaths to try to restore her calm. It didn’t work, though, because her brain knew that none of this made sense.
She heard him rummage around for a bit, then he asked, “Would you have any guidance on the whereabouts of that box from Rocky West Clothing?”
“Over here, close to the door.”
“Ah, good.”
She waited for the rustling sounds to diminish, then said through the door, “I have never told anyone that, drunk or sober. The fact that you know it is alarming to me.” She bit her lip. “The fact that you’re here at all is freaking me out. What’s going on?”
He stepped back into the room, and she brought her hand to her throat, unprepared for how handsome he looked in clothes. He cast an understated presence in blue jeans and a gray T-shirt, yet his smile dominated the room.
“My task is to upgrade the super AI. Before I start, I need your permission, and once I start, I’ll need your help. So I ask myself, how can I gain your permission and help?”
“By telling me how you know my secret.” She heard the impatience in her voice.
“That’s what I think, too. But when I explain how I know what I know, you won’t like what you hear.”
“Tell me.”
“Okay.” He shrugged. “You told me.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’re right. This happened ten years ago for me. And when you told me then, you were the same age as you are now. That means that it was a different Lilah. It also means that right now in Berkeley, there’s an almost-twenty-five-year-old Diesel, and in about three weeks, he will be on his way here.” He pointed to the ground.
“He’s coming here? Why?”
“You’re going to invite him. When you do, he’ll come. And in a moment of sharing, you’ll tell him that secret about your dad. Ten years from now, he’ll travel back in time and have this same conversation with a different Lilah, who is just like you are now.”
While she tried to make sense of his words, he turned, walked to the T-box, and started a detailed inspection. He spoke without breaking from his work. “Have you noticed that Ciopova knows things, things no one should know?”
Lilah reflected on the growing list of impressive coincidences.
“How much time passed from when you finished building the T-box until when it activated for me?”
“About ten minutes.”
“And that’s after you worked on it for days and days.” He ended his thought there, letting her draw the conclusion. He glanced over at her on the steps, and the glance turned into a stare.
“Lilah, you are beautiful. All this time I thought I had been embellishing my memory of you, but as it turns out, I have not done you justice.”
“You’re revealing that you never knew me, because if you had, you’d know I don’t go for suck-ups.”
“No, you don’t. But after you know a guy awhile, you like it when he appreciates you. At least, that’s how you are with me.”
“Are you saying we’re together together?”
“Not you and me, but in a parallel timeline, me and a version of you from ten years ago.”
“No way. For how long?”
“Long enough for you to tell me the story about your dad and your tattoo.”
“Tell me the story about my mom and the tattoo I got for her.”
“You didn’t. Your mom still lives in Andover, Mass, and you and she get along great. In fact, you go home for Christmas if you’re not in a relationship, which has been every year for the last three years.”
“Holy hell, a supercomputer sends a man back through time to tell me my life is pathetic. I’m actually starting to believe you.”
5. Twenty-Four and ten months
“Your life is about to get exciting, Lilah,” said the man calling himself Thirty-Five. “It starts with a software upgrade.”
“What is it you want to do?”
“You know how your AI has grown from a single entity to three layers in a pyramid shape?”
She nodded.
“I want to make it a four-layer pyramid.”
“C’mon,” said Lilah. “In three months, I’ve made my AI a thousand times more powerful than it was. What more does this Ciopova want?”
“There is no upper limit,” said Thirty-Five. “That’s her game. Always more and faster and better. And we can start impressing her with the four-layer build. If we start now, we can have it done by tomorrow, and we’ll increase the power of your AI by a thousand-fold more.”
His words gave her pause. A thousand-fold increase on top of her previous thousand meant the AI would be a million times more powerful than her original. Then her brain made a connection.
“Ciopova is a her? For some reason I was thinking it was the name of a company.” She took one step down the stairs. “When do I meet her?”
“Very soon.” He turned to survey the office space in the basement and pointed to the far work cubicle. “We need to bring your workstation down and set up shop there. It’s useful to have the displays right here next to the T-box. And you’ll need to free the room upstairs for meetings, anyway.”
The display on the front of the T-box lit up, and Lilah came down the stairs and crossed the floor to read the message: “Thirty-Four Incoming in 9:56.”
“How did the machine act during my jump?” he asked. “Any rattles, shaking, anything like that?”
“Lots of whining and buzzing, but no shaking that I could see.” She pointed to the display. “What does this mean?”
“It means Thirty-Four is about to join us.”
“Thirty-four what?”
“Oh, sorry. I’m called Thirty-Five. That’s because I live in a future timeline where Diesel is thirty-five years old. And as you can see,” he waved his hand up his body, stopping at his face, “I’m thirty-five when I visit other timelines. Anyway, the guy who is coming back now is the same, only he’s the thirty-four-year-old version.”
“How many are you?”
“There’s thirty-five of us, from age twenty-five up to fifty-nine. But not all of us will come through here. Not all at once, anyway.”
He checked the display on the front of the T-box, which showed about eight minutes remaining in the countdown.
“He’s going to be as naked as I was,” said Thirty-Five. “Do you mind if I get him some clothes?”
“Please.” She gestured to the connecting door between basements. “Get what you need.”
“Thanks. Oh, I saw rope and blankets in there. We should string a rope from here to here.” He indicated a line about three feet away from the basement wall that was common to the two units. “And then out to there.” He pointed from the wall out to the end of the T-box. “We can make temporary walls by hanging blankets over the rope. That gives us a private corridor where we can walk to get clothes without exposing ourselves.”
Lilah kept her distance when Thirty-Four arrived, watching both of them from the far cubicle while he dressed. They looked like twins—handsome, charmi
ng identical twins. When Thirty-Four finished dressing, the two stood side by side, passive, patient, waiting for her to engage them.
“How do I know you guys aren’t space aliens or invaders from the future?” She asked her toughest question: “What if by helping you, I’m betraying humanity?”
“The heart knows what the head never can,” said Thirty-Four.
Thirty-Five nodded.
“That’s from my Grandma Newton,” said Lilah, thinking of the pillow in her nana’s living room that had that saying written in needlepoint.
She felt her choices were to either help them with the AI or call the authorities and have them arrested, and she wasn’t going to do that. “Okay, my heart says to get on with it. What happens next?”
“Excellent,” said Thirty-Five. “Those last boxes of equipment in your basement will make the T-box faster and safer, but it’s delicate stuff, so we didn’t want Duffy to mess with it. We’ll install that before working on the AI.”
They brought out the boxes and unpacked the contents. As Thirty-Four organized the items on the floor, he said, “I’m hungry. Are you?”
“Carlucci’s is in this timeline,” said Thirty-Five. “I love their four-cheese pizza.”
“I get mine with extra cheese.”
“Me too,” said Thirty-Five. “They don’t deliver, though, remember?”
“Damn, that’s right.”
They both looked at Lilah.
“Would you please get us Carlucci’s?”
“Yeah, please? It’s close. Turn right on Ellis, then right on Fourteenth, and go two lights.”
“We don’t have any money.”
“Obviously.”
“But keep track and your Diesel will make good on it.”
“Every penny.”
She looked back and forth from one to other. “I can see this becoming annoying.” Standing, she asked, “Anything to drink?”
“Do you want to bring your phone?” asked Thirty-Five.
She felt her pocket. “That’s right. Did you see where it went?”
“No. But I know where it is.” He stood and struck a theatrical pose. “Lady and gent, I will now find the phone without seeing where it fell or checking in advance that it is there.”
He walked to the stack of boxes Lilah had collected when cleaning, reached to the ground behind them, and rose with her phone in hand. “Ta-da.”
“So that’s the script,” he said to Thirty-Four as he handed the phone to Lilah.
“That didn’t seem like much of a trick,” she said, slipping the device into her pocket.
“Let me tell you how it’s done, and then tell us again what you think. Thirty-Four just saw where the phone was and now knows you had lost it. In a year, he’ll be Thirty-Five, my role, so he’ll be back in this same scene a second time. And because he lived through it once, he’ll know to look behind the boxes, just as I saw last year when I was Thirty-Four.”
“The hardest part is keeping track of it all,” said Thirty-Four, “because someone is always telling me to be sure to remember this or that for some time in the future.”
Lilah nodded. “I concede. Time travel makes it a very cool trick.”
She took their food order after that—two large four-cheese pizzas with extra cheese—and followed their directions to Carlucci’s. By the time she got back to the row house, the two Diesels had built the rope-and-blanket privacy walls and had moved her workstation to the far cubicle.
They’d also set the worktable in the near cubicle for dinner, having scrounged some bottled water, napkins, paper plates, and plastic utensils. A fern frond, likely from the patch near the front steps, sat in the middle of the table, giving a dash of class to the arrangement.
The napkins were folded the way she always folded them, and they’d brought down cups so they wouldn’t have to drink out of the bottles. As she took a moment to admire their efforts, they started eating without making a fuss about whether she was seated.
Impressed, her first impulse was to give kudos to her parallel-world sisters. But the idea of there being thirty-five Lilahs out there, each paired with her own Diesel, suddenly seemed harder to accept than the two actual time travelers eating at her table.
After some chitchat, Lilah started asking the questions that had bothered her during her trip to fetch pizzas.
“Who is Ciopova, and how does she work into all this?”
“After we finish the upgrade,” said Thirty-Five, “all will be revealed.”
“Really?” They seemed committed to that progression, so rather than fight it, she moved on. “How come there is only one of you per year? Why aren’t there, say, three hundred and sixty-five Thirty-Fives? Or a million, for that matter?”
“At a practical level,” replied Thirty-Five, “the machine works like an elevator, but instead of stopping at different floors, it stops at different years. As for the physics, I’ve been toying with two theories. Tell me which one makes more sense to you at a gut level.”
She sat back. “Go for it.”
“Okay, one theory is to visualize it like the ocean on a quiet day. Looking out from the beach, you see a series of waves. The surface is continuous all the way out, but it undulates from crest to trough to crest.”
Thirty-Five waved his hand up and down to illustrate waves. “So in this theory, time travels in those undulating waves. But the machine takes us in a straight line, one that goes horizontal from one crest to the next while passing above the trough. That gives just one intersection point for each wave, which is one year apart in this theory. One intersection gives one Diesel each year.”
He took a bite and chewed. “So that’s called the wave theory, where the machine hits the top of each time wave spaced one year apart.”
She nodded and he continued. “The second theory is to visualize it like a big spiral graph. Say we’re here right now.” He plopped an imaginary dot in the air in front of him. “Time is continuous, but it spirals out from there in ever-growing loops.” With his index finger, he started at his imaginary dot and drew a small circle in front of him that continued around with a larger circle, then again into an even larger circle to illustrate his spiral.
“Okay, so time flows like that. But the machine takes us in a line that starts at the center and goes straight out.” He drew a straight line with his finger. “The straight line crosses the time spiral just once per cycle, which is every year. So again, the machine moves us in a straight line, only in this theory, time spirals out. That gives only one intersection per year, and only one Diesel.”
“Is that called the spiral theory?” said Lilah, teasing him for being so serious.
“That’s right. So what do you think? Does one theory make more sense to you?”
“I’m having trouble seeing time as a spiral. Light travels in waves. Gravity does, too.”
“So you pick…”
“Waves. Do I win a prize?”
Thirty-Four stood up and started duckwalking around the room, flapping his folded arms, and saying, “Yeah, baby.”
“I take it you had spirals?” said Lilah, figuring she’d just stepped into the middle of something.
He nodded. “Every year we have the new Lilah choose from the two theories. All of us are on one team or the other. If your theory wins, like his did this year,” he tilted his head toward Thirty-Four, “you win bragging rights until next year. I have to fetch him a drink at the Big Meeting. Silly stuff of no consequence. And by definition, one of us was going to lose, so don’t feel bad about it.”
“Sorry,” she said, apologizing anyway. Then, after a pause: “How did you get on the spiral team?”
“Whatever our Lilah’s picked, that’s what we are for life. Your Diesel is forever a wave.”
She laughed, but in her head she started thinking about the reference implying she’d be with some guy she’d never even met. He’d phrased it as “our Lilah” and “your Diesel.” She found it creepy and offensive.
She alm
ost asked when this was supposed to happen; when she would meet her Diesel. But since she didn’t plan to play along, she decided to leave them to their delusions and disappoint them later.
Her priority now was to learn how they would supercharge her AI. Then she made a realization. “You didn’t bring any storage device with you. Where’s the code for the upgrade?”
They both brought an index finger to their right temple and said, “In here.”
Her forehead scrunched. “Is it really just some simple trick?”
“No.” Thirty-Five shook his head. “Each of us has memorized the code for about forty procedures. It’s a lot of work, but we’ve had a full year to practice.”
“How long is a procedure?”
“My shortest is twenty-three lines of code. My longest is two hundred and fifty-four.”
“Wow.”
“We don’t memorize it as a thousand lines to be typed. Think of it more like a musical piece. When you played piano as a kid, you didn’t remember a song as this note, then that note. It was more about memorizing chords, passages, and pieces. With practice, we learned to do the same for transcription.”
“What do you need me for?”
Thirty-Five went to her cubicle and powered up the workstation display. The pyramid of jellyfish swayed on the big screen on the back wall. “You could offer ideas, keep us company, proofread our work, whatever you feel like.”
“That’s remarkably vague.”
“And access your software for us,” said Thirty-Four, walking over to join Thirty-Five. “We’re primed for data entry. But we appreciate that this is your baby. So if you could log in, open the files, and give us the chair, we can be done before you know it.”
Lilah felt her cheeks flush. “No Lilah in any timeline in a hundred years would say, ‘Oh here, let me give you open access to start messing with my life’s work, Mister Person I Just Met.’ The fact that you asked makes me suspicious.”
“Okay, you got us. No Lilah has ever gone for it, yet we still wanted to try.”
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