The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  Anita looked up from the tablet where she kept our change log and spoke. “Let’s continue the circle.” She paused. “I remember abortion being legal in the United States.”

  There were a couple murmurs of “me too.” It was unusual for multiple people to remember a deleted event. Anita thought this meant the change to abortion’s legal status was the product of multiple edits and reversions, its effects felt by many travelers exposed to various edits as they took. I wasn’t one of them. Like nearly everyone on the planet, I had no memories of legal abortion in the United States.

  Back when I was training at Flin Flon, I’d promised myself I was going to revert that edit if I got my credentials. That’s what pulled me back to the nineteenth century again and again, to haunt the edges of Comstock’s influence, seeking cracks where an edit might take. It was an intriguing historical problem, but my interest wasn’t purely academic. I had other reasons, their roots tangled up in old feelings. Until I saw Grape Ape again, I thought I’d managed to replace those messy personal desires with clean political aspirations. Now I had to admit it was impossible for me to tell them apart. And maybe, with the right strategy, I didn’t have to.

  “I think I’ve found hard evidence that we’re in an edit war with anti-travel activists.” My announcement got everybody’s attention. “I was in 1992, at a Grape Ape show.” I filled them in about the Comstocker. “Seems like he and his buddies are trying to make some final edits before trying to shut down the Machines. The question is—”

  Anita cut me off. “Wait, why were you in 1992? Your period is the nineteenth century.”

  I was confused. “Berenice told me to go. She had evidence that anti-travel activists were hanging around the indie rock scene. Grape Ape caused a huge controversy around this time—the Vice Fighters kept going on TV calling them obscene feminazis, so they became punk heroes. This concert would have been catnip for Comstockers trying to target young women with one last reversion.”

  I remembered the conversation clearly, at our last meeting. Berenice wanted to go herself, but she’d burned out of most of the 1990s. One of the hazards of studying a specific period was that the Machine would not open its wormhole for people tapping back to a time they’d visited before. We called those times “burned”; it was annoying, but it also prevented people from returning to the same moment over and over, destructively reliving or reediting a targeted stretch.

  “Berenice?” C.L. was playing nervously with their phone. “Who’s that? Does she study the 1990s?”

  “What do you mean? Berenice! Our friend? She published a huge book about the origins of trans activism in the 1990s. UC Press made it one of their featured titles in the fall catalogue.”

  “No … I don’t know her…” Shweta, one of the most tough-minded scientists I knew, was at a loss for words.

  “Does anyone remember Berenice?” Fear was crawling along my spine.

  Everyone was shaking their heads. C.L. poked their phone again. “What was Berenice’s last name?”

  “Ciccione. She was … shit … she’s been coming to these meetings for years.” I spluttered to a stop as the reality sank in. Berenice had been edited. And then I looked at Enid and realized something horrifying. “Enid, you and Berenice were partners … you were about to move in together…”

  Enid drew in a sharp breath. “What? That can’t be. I can’t have lost…” She trailed off, her eyes searching our faces. But there was nothing we could do. How do you help someone mourn a lover they don’t remember?

  Shweta spoke gently. “Tess. You said she was researching trans activism?”

  “Yes.”

  She held out her phone, its screen illuminated by a 1992 AP article dredged from the Nexis database. It was about a person police described as “a man in a dress,” murdered outside a gay bar in Raleigh. There was a grainy picture of Berenice, unmistakable mop of curls forming a crazy halo around her much younger face. My throat constricted. “They’ve misgendered and deadnamed her, but that’s definitely Berenice.”

  Nothing like this had ever happened before. At least, not that we knew of. I looked around the room. Was it possible that more of us had been edited out of the timeline, and we didn’t remember? I spoke without thinking. “We have to go back there and revert that edit.”

  Enid shook her head slowly, eyes reddening. “We need to do a lot more than that.”

  Foreboding settled over the room.

  “Who would make edits like this? By literally killing travelers?” This time, C.L.’s question didn’t seem naïve. We were all wondering the same thing.

  “Do you think this has anything to do with the man from the concert, the Comstocker?” Anita mused. “Berenice sent you to look for him, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s possible these guys saw Berenice as a threat to their cause. Especially if they knew she was onto them. So they murdered her younger self.”

  C.L. blinked in shock, and accidentally popped a rhinestone off their thumbnail. For once, they had no questions.

  Anita coped with the stress by going into analysis mode. “So let’s assume there’s a group of travelers working with Comstock, who are reverting some of our edits. And some of us.” Her voice cracked. “If this is part of a larger plan to lock us into a timeline that can’t be changed, what is their goal with these edits? Is it something about Comstock?”

  “I don’t think it’s Comstock himself.” I fought to stay focused, despite my rising panic. Who else had those men erased from our memories? “Their zine was all about why women shouldn’t go to college. And the guy who talked to me—he sounded like some mashup of a Comstock speech and the Celibate4Life forums we see today. They could be infiltrating different movements over centuries. Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice successfully eliminated abortion and access to birth control, so it would appeal to anyone who wanted a timeline where women’s rights are restricted. I think they must be coordinating a much bigger edit across several time periods.”

  “What else do we know?” Anita was typing on her tablet.

  Enid cleared her throat. “If you’re wondering why they were in 1992, there was a huge backlash against feminism at that time. It probably started with obscenity law reforms—specifically, reforms of the Comstock Laws.”

  “So could they be C4L types from our present, going back to key periods for women’s rights?” C.L. asked.

  I had a more urgent question. “What if they’re from the future?”

  Anita gave me a sharp look. “What difference would that make?”

  “It could mean that they know something we don’t. They might be responding to a future feminist revolution.”

  “Future feminist revolution. Give me a break.” Shweta snorted. “That’s not how history works. Every so-called revolution is simply a long, drawn-out series of profound compromises and co-optations.”

  “There are revolutions. Maybe they take time, but there are huge changes.” I felt my cheeks getting hot. “Sometimes we don’t compromise. Sometimes we do things like abolish slavery and declare universal suffrage.”

  “And then spend the next century and a half trying to make brown people into slaves again.”

  “We’re derailing here.” Anita was always the voice of reason. “The fact is that we don’t have enough data to know when these dudes are from, and we can’t go to the future. Still, we know they’re out there now. It’s possible that they’re working directly against the Daughters of Harriet, or maybe against women’s rights more generally. Either way, it’s probably related to why our memories are so divided on reproductive rights.”

  “So what should we do about it?” Shweta folded her arms.

  “I’m going to 1992 to stop those fuckers from murdering Berenice.” Enid was shaking with a determination that wavered between sadness and fury.

  Shweta was nodding. “You’re pretty familiar with the time period from traveling to the eighties, so that’s not a bad plan.” Then she touched Enid’s arm, and spoke wi
thout any of her usual impatience. “But be careful.”

  As I pondered Enid jumping from the eighties to the nineties, I suddenly had an idea. “I’ve been researching Comstock in the 1880s, but maybe I should skip forward. He scored a major political victory for his cause in 1893, at the World’s Fair in Chicago. My guess is our Comstockers had something to do with it. I think if I could edit that moment it might turn the tide.” I didn’t mention that there was another advantage to being in the nineteenth century. Record-keeping at the Flin Flon Machine was terrible until the 1920s. It would be easy to sneak from 1893 up to 1992 again, where I had already left a paper trail proving I was observing the music of temporal locals. With a little subterfuge, I still had a chance to prevent the next murder. Or maybe the next after that.

  Anita nodded and made a note. “Our current grant will cover several more trips back to the late nineteenth, so that’s a good idea. Anyone else?”

  “I’m researching Ordovician ocean sediments and the origin of the Machine at Raqmu,” C.L. piped up. “Can this grant cover my expenses in Jordan? Raqmu is right by the airport there.”

  I was dubious until C.L. explained a few odd properties of the Machine at Raqmu. It was the first described in recorded history, found by ancient Nabataeans in a city they carved into the sandstone walls of a valley in Jordan. C.L. had read some papers about new evidence showing the Raqmu Machine could affect the other Machines’ behavior. If a group of crazy extremists wanted to lock the timeline, they would probably focus their sabotage efforts on Raqmu.

  “All right, C.L., why don’t you work up a protocol that will allow us to check for people tinkering with the Machine.” Anita made another note.

  The meeting wound down after that, and we all promised to report back when we had new information.

  I gave Enid a long hug before she left. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I miss her, even though I don’t know her.” Her face reminded me of shattered safety glass, utterly broken but still somehow holding its shape.

  “You’re going to fix this. I know you will.”

  Enid cocked her head, and ran a hand over the freshly shaved hairs on the back of her neck. “I know you will too. Safe travels.” That simple pleasantry suddenly felt like a powerful talisman.

  “Safe travels,” I replied.

  My anxiety hardened into a new sense of purpose. After years of work in the 1880s, I’d changed nothing. But now, at last, I had hope.

  FOUR

  BETH

  Irvine, Alta California (1992 C.E.)

  For over a week, we’d been referring to it as “the thing that happened.” We acted normal, following our usual routine, taking advantage of open campus at lunch. Kids could leave school grounds at noon, as long as they came back for fifth period. But it was Friday, so fuck fifth period. Lizzy, Heather, Soojin, and I went to the mall down the street from Irvine High, stopping in at the pizza place, not even bothering to pretend we weren’t ditching class.

  “Wanna go to Peer Records?” Soojin didn’t need to ask. We always went there after pizza, following an unblemished sidewalk that divided the parking lot from a monumental Ralph’s supermarket. A nondescript storefront in a jumbled row of shops, Peer Records was our gateway to the world beyond aerobics studios and lawn furniture. Long and narrow, its walls were plastered with posters, T-shirts, and bumper stickers. Rows of record bins turned the tiny space into a maze. When I bent down to check out the overflow boxes on the floor, hunting first for an Alley Cats album, then X-Ray Spex, I blocked the entire aisle.

  Heather kicked me lightly with her taped-up boot. “Get out of the way, girlie. I want to check out what they have by The Selecter.”

  “I love their song ‘Murder.’” I bit my tongue way too late. Now Soojin and Lizzy were giving me the bug eye. I hadn’t meant it that way. But maybe I had.

  “Have you guys heard anything about…” Heather trailed off awkwardly.

  “Nope.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe we should take a walk.” Lizzy tilted her head at the door.

  We wandered in silence until we found one of those ornamental lozenges of grass between housing tracts that the Irvine Company called “greenbelt.” We were sitting next to a large intersection, but nobody glanced at us. Just a group of invisible girls on a Friday afternoon.

  Lizzy broke the silence. “Do you think anybody found him yet?”

  “They must have.” Heather’s cheeks flushed a deep red, her eyes full of outrage and tears.

  “Did your parents ask you anything?” I was talking to the group, but looked at Lizzy.

  “They thought it was very nice that I volunteered to clean the whole car after somebody, uh, barfed in the back. Luckily all that shit hosed right off.”

  None of us really understood Lizzy’s relationship with her parents. They were almost never around, and her brother was already off at college. When I went to her place for sleepovers, her parents would say hi then go back to work on whatever it was they did. Something to do with engineering. They seemed benignly neglectful, which was definitely better than my parents, who demanded to know everything I did in minute detail. Heather’s parents were similarly watchful. Soojin had three loud sisters, so she was able to evade parental surveillance most of the time. None of our parents had said anything about what we did that night. At least, not yet.

  “I guess we’ll see something on the news when they find him, right?” Heather sounded almost hopeful.

  “Maybe,” Soojin cautioned. “But the police might want to keep it secret if they’re looking for suspects.”

  “People will notice that he’s not at school. They’ll have to say something.” As I spoke, I realized how wrong I was. Last year, a guy in eleventh grade had killed himself and the school administration never said anything official about it at all. We only knew about it through rumors from other kids.

  Soojin added another barrette to her hair, which did nothing to hold it in place. “I dunno, Beth. We might never know what happened to Scott.”

  “I know what happened to him.” Lizzy narrowed her eyes. “He was a fucking asshole who tried to kill Heather and we fucking killed him first.”

  We all sat frozen, shocked. Was that really what had happened? The more I thought about it, the more I realized Lizzy was right. It made me feel dizzy and powerful, like a superhero that nobody had a name for yet.

  “Yeah, fuck that guy.” Heather ripped a hunk of grass out of the ground, its roots still clotted with soil. Then she threw it as hard as she could into the street. It landed with a sound that nobody heard.

  * * *

  The news finally got out a month later. There was a short blurb in The Orange County Register about a high school boy murdered by “transients, probably from the Los Angeles area.” And then some group of parents, or maybe teachers, decided to turn Scott’s death into a lesson. There was a school assembly in the gym. A cop came to show us a movie about the horrors of “weed and speed.” The school counselor waved around some tattered Just Say No to Drugs paraphernalia left over from the eighties. Then the principal talked about the great tragedy of a promising young man’s life cut short, and how drug use is a cry for help, and we should all report our friends if they were using drugs. Lizzy nudged me and rolled her eyes.

  I could see some of Scott’s friends off in the corner of the bleachers. They were uncharacteristically silent, their backs stiff. I only knew one of them by name—Mark—because a few months ago he tried to carve the word “PUNK” into his narrow, pimply chest with a razor blade during open lunch. We’d driven to the park to feed some ducks, but somehow the trip turned into the boys impressing each other. Mark’s stunt was a sad imitation of something he’d seen in a movie about Sid Vicious, but Scott thought it was awesome. He kept talking about the dirtiness of the razor, and the amazingness of Mark’s stalwart efforts, until Lizzy told him to shut up or she wouldn’t give either of them a ride back to school.

  Flashes of that long-ago conver
sation kept interrupting today’s anti-drug lecture. As we filed out of the gym and back to third period, I thought about the principal praising Scott’s ability to absorb dozens of knife blows in the spirit of punk rock. It made way more sense than what the principal had actually said, about how Scott had been such a promising boy. Our teachers really thought we’d believe that the cruel authors of Scott’s tragedy—anonymous except for those male pronouns—had forced him into some kind of drug orgy, then killed him when he tried to resist.

  * * *

  Lizzy and I walked home from school along the railroad tracks that cut between two mirror-image housing tracts sealed behind cinderblock sound barriers. When we were kids, we used to leave pennies on these same tracks and wait for the train, expecting the coins to shoot upward in an arc of fire, or be flattened beyond all recognition. Maybe the cars would be derailed. No matter how many times we did it, we never found the pennies again. The train continued dragging its freight, oblivious to our violent intentions.

  “Want a cigarette?” Lizzy pulled a Marlboro hard pack out of her battered denim jacket. Our friend worked at the local gas station, and sold us cigarettes sometimes when he felt generous. We sat on the tracks and shared one, passing it back and forth until the nicotine made me dizzy.

  “Do you feel weird? Different? Like we’re evil now or something?” I looked over at Lizzy.

  She cocked her head, the mesh of her earrings catching the light. Her platinum hair was like a crushed dandelion today, soaped and dried into stiff, crazy angles. “No. I feel exactly the same. I mean, maybe that’s weird.”

  “I don’t know.” I could see the roofs of my housing tract peeking over the wall fifty yards from us. Each one was exactly the same, their shingles kept in perfect order by the Irvine Company. “Everything is fucking weird.” I rested my head on my knees and thought about how there was only one more year until I’d be in college.