by Mike Chen
Their first date. And his first day back. Penny still felt like a silhouette in his mind, as if someone had copied and pasted another person’s instincts onto his body.
Perhaps the mystery of the present simply needed more of the past to fill in the blanks. On that first date, they’d kissed by the stove. In this moment, Kin leaned over and did the same thing. They remained in each other’s arms until it was time to stir the onions.
The next morning, Kin had to remind himself to play dumb, at least when it came to cooking. And while he could whip up an impressive eggs Benedict, with a rich handmade hollandaise sauce atop perfectly poached eggs, he opted for a much more basic dish of buttered toast and sunny-side up eggs, all delivered to Penny in bed.
“Aren’t you the injured one?” she said, wiping her eyes. Akasha jumped up onto the sheets, suddenly eager at the smell of the eggs. “You should be letting me cook.”
“My job starts way before yours. Government hours, not chef’s. Thought I’d try to return last night’s favor.”
Penny took the fork off the tray and gently stabbed the egg yolk, a pool of yellow oozing out, an impressed “mmm” coming from her. She blinked sleep out of her eyes, and the morning hour probably stole the real meaning of the gesture from her.
He’d done this years ago, not after their first date but about two weeks later following the first full night at her apartment. Back then, the drive to impress her ran so high that he’d spent the prior three days, along with twenty-six eggs, trying to teach himself how to make sunny-side up with runny yolk. This time, he only needed four—the two on Penny’s plate, and the two he’d tossed out because his use of spices would have given him away. And like then, Penny offered a smile, one that seemed to marvel more at the gesture than the content.
“I wish I could stay but I need to get to work,” he said, both years ago and now.
The reactions in return split directions: past Penny playfully pouted before thanking him while present Penny reached over for his hand, eyes bright and smile beaming, then said, “I love you.”
But the idea hadn’t worked. He’d have to try again. He’d expected a burst of nostalgia or a surge of affection or something tangible from dipping into their past once more. Instead, all he got were memories as pure data, facts and figures and images to be mined for information but devoid of emotion.
The counselors had told him that he may not feel an immediate return of deep love for Penny, not after a lifetime with Heather. But the gap between the quiet affection he felt and the deep adoration and love that should have been there stretched to an endless, impossible distance.
CHAPTER 11
During the next two weeks, things reached a kind of equilibrium with Penny, a cautious affection that felt like muscle memory following physical therapy. He’d done this before, living under a cover story. In private, he cooked himself lunch and listened to classical music. Around her, he acted inept in the kitchen and still played his supposed favorite bands in the skycar. On two occasions, he’d even tried more of his reenactment experiments, to varying degrees of success.
The rhythm of their daily lives became familiar again, even if that deeper connection remained elusive.
At Kin’s Research job, Markus was right: all of the targets were glorified bank robbers. The TCB’s tentpole protection plan kept history safely static and bland from ideologues and idealists, leaving only those ambitious enough to fill their wallets by hiring known temporal mercs and fugitives. Information requests came, but rarely with the urgency of the Sydney incident. Instead, Mission Control and Resources asked for information on people, places, and events, some specifying the exact minute and location and others requiring drawn-out reports mining social media and news archives to pinpoint potential temporary safe house locations. Each call focused on planning, not reacting.
It was, in the truest sense, a job.
Then a single message changed everything.
The message’s subject line didn’t register right away. Using the research portal to view past websites seemed benign at first, especially since he’d spent his days looking at archived versions of websites across the first quarter of the twenty-first century, or twenty-one-A as the TCB code-named Kin’s old home. However, opening the message revealed a new horizon.
Now that you’ve got the basics of the job, it said, you’ll also need to dig deeper from time to time. Our digital archives are large, but they can’t beat the real thing. See the following instructions to access the digital-temporal portal (DTP) for live snapshots of the internet from your designated period.
Digital-temporal portal. A fancy way of saying viewing the web across time—not an archive, but the actual websites that Kin used. Markus had said something about how electronic signals traveled temporally without impacting the timeline, and now a new idea stared him in the face. A way to look into the past, as it was happening, to find his family.
A different kind of time travel—a path to reach Heather and Miranda.
He’d been aching to discover Heather’s fate after he’d disappeared on them. She was the capable one, the practical one, the steady one; every fiber of his being knew that Heather would weather the storm and come out of it. And if she landed on her feet, that meant Miranda was safe. Heather would battle tooth and nail to make sure it happened.
He just needed to see it for himself.
Kin’s hands hovered over the physical keys—a special request he’d made because modern floating holo keyboards didn’t feel quite right—forefinger waiting for the signals from his brain to execute pressing down on the letter H. They fumbled over the rest of the keys, nerves shooting up and down despite his confidence that Heather would emerge from this experience stronger, smarter, better. That’s what she always did.
Though maybe the possibility of her happiness without him was the true root of his hesitation.
He shook his head, cursing to himself, then typed out the rest of her name.
But nothing came up. Not for his Heather Stewart, anyway. Kin tried all the different ways to identify her—job, alma mater, friends, even using Star Trek as a cross-reference—all across different years. He backed up the dates, year by year until something finally hit in early 2014, mere months after his departure.
Obituary: Heather Jodie Stewart (Rivers)—Heather Stewart, age 39, passed away peacefully yesterday from complications related to brain cancer at Oakland General Hospital. She is survived by her daughter Miranda Elizabeth Stewart.
Born in San Diego, Ms. Stewart was an enthusiastic and kind soul who loved the outdoors, animals, and science fiction. In high school, she was an all-American volleyball player and received a scholarship to UC Berkeley, where she eventually earned a BA in economics and graduated from their law program. She practiced tax law at the firm of Newman & Lambert until her final days. A memorial service will be held at Oakland Memorial District and Cemetery.
The words petrified Kin, leaving him staring at the text in front of him as it lost focus and meaning. He forced himself to read the words again, then a third and fourth time before getting stuck on the phrase, “passed away peacefully.”
Her headaches. In the garage, she’d said it was just stress. She probably didn’t want to worry him, not with his blackouts at the time and Miranda’s growing disconnect. She took it all on herself rather than take the time to get it checked out.
The needs of the many. That’s what she’d said.
No amount of metabolizers or 2142-era medical advances could have curbed the sickening pit growing in his stomach. He needed to cry, scream, disappear, all of it at once. But he couldn’t. Not here, not at work. And not at home, not with Penny.
Everything had to be buried underneath the surface. He’d done it before. He’d do it again. Kin steadied himself, palms flat on the arms of his chair, his breath even. Minutes passed, some undetermined time that somehow allowed him to step back
into reality—a reality where a tumor had been growing inside Heather’s body while he’d simply disappeared. He looked again at the date, overcome with the sinking realization that Heather would have died whether he was by her side or not. The only difference was in who remained to watch over Miranda.
A wave of nausea returned as the final thought hammered home: a life where Miranda didn’t have either parent during her fragile teenage years.
Kin’s fingers flew over the keys. While Heather’s name proved difficult to type, Miranda’s came aboard with an urgency that shoved aside the tremble in his hands.
Through the DTP’s timeline feature, he zeroed in on a date about two years after his departure, then opened a normal search engine window and punched in Miranda’s name and her high school.
No varsity soccer results arrived. Or student projects or any other results of note. Tension gripped Kin, his shoulders tight and breath short as he submitted query after query, inching forward in time. Finally, the first result appeared just past Miranda’s eighteenth birthday—not from the website of a university, but a legal document that used an odd formal diction:
Incident 2093959: STEWART, MIRANDA E (F) DOB 8/28/2000
Call Type: TRAFFIC VIOLATION, DUI, POSSESSION (MARIJUANA)
Result: CITATION, APPREHENSION (RESISTED)
Location: University/Bryant
Kin double-checked the webpage title, his heart sinking as he read the words Palo Alto Police Department Report Log. He stared, reading and rereading the words without blinking, leaning forward to the edge of his chair.
He didn’t recognize the world anymore. Not this world.
The DTP refreshed, as Kin skipped ahead further. This time, the first result was a photo. Though he knew the woman in it was Miranda, she appeared unrecognizable: sullen bags under her eyes, a damaged posture loaded on her shoulders, eyes glued to the floor. She wore an orange jumpsuit, and behind her, a court bailiff stood at attention. Kin’s fingers reached out and penetrated the holographic photo caption, as if that would make the scenario go away.
Miranda Stewart, 24, of South San Francisco listens to Judge William Hornby. Stewart pleaded no contest to the DUI crash that killed two people on September 16, 2024.
He skimmed the rest of the article, words unable to form into coherent sentences. “Third offense” and “blood alcohol content” and “second-degree murder” and “vehicular manslaughter” told enough of the story, the phrases stirring a nausea and light-headedness that had nothing to do with metabolizers or memories.
He tried more searches in between, pulling up loads of social media posts and photos, each showcasing a life, a person, that he didn’t recognize. Images and videos of dilated pupils and slurred speech, of unsavory types and terrible friends, of half-empty cocktail glasses and not enough clothes. Gone was the bright student who talked about programming projects and Doctor Who. In her place was someone who represented the total opposite of the values he and Heather had tried to instill. Where did all the lessons of a young lifetime go?
Except Kin knew. Half of them vanished without explanation. Half of them died of brain cancer.
Kin told himself to focus, shaking his head out of his stupor and performing one more search, this time right around Miranda’s thirtieth birthday. The top result read: Why PTSD is a Family Issue.
The web page loaded up an essay by Miranda hosted on Prison Voices Journal, apparently an online magazine featuring articles written by convicts. His head already swirling, the paragraphs seemed a jumble of vowels and consonants, an incomprehensible wall representing a future that never should have happened. When it came to her final few sentences, Kin forced himself to read every single word, slowly and clearly.
My father’s PTSD went untreated. It went beyond his fainting and dizzy spells, it cast a dark cloud over our family for six months before he left a farewell note and was gone. Anxiety built a wall between my parents during those months, and it drove fear into my sophomore year of high school. It bent our family to the limit, and when my mother passed away, all I did was ask myself “Why?” over and over—there was no one else to ask. If my father had received proper counseling, if he’d modeled the behavior of accepting help instead of putting it off and fighting it, maybe things would have been better for him—maybe my mother would have taken his lead and gotten her headaches checked out much earlier. At the very least, maybe I would have made smarter decisions. But treatment starts at the top and trickles all the way down. Anything less and the system has failed us.
This was all wrong. A clean handoff—that’s what the TCB promised. How could anything “clean” create such a downward spiral?
The shocking numb began to wear off, replaced with an imagined horror show of what Miranda might have gone through after he left them. A farewell note—that was all they did? And the burden of burying her mother on top of that?
A torrent of emotions coursed through him. Anger. Frustration. Despair. Many wrong choices. Or perhaps just one wrong choice.
In the end, it all led to guilt. The unending gnaw of guilt. If Kin felt that, Miranda must have experienced it a hundred times over.
Cancer took Heather. He couldn’t change that. But Miranda fell victim to the gaping wound left by her vanished father. He reread the paragraph, her cohesive and sensitive thoughts composed under the most dire of circumstances while in the worst of places. Somewhere beneath sixteen years of absent parents and bad choices stirred the soul of the daughter he used to know.
A few days ago, he’d spent his time wondering about his life with Penny, the ins and outs of his job, and just possibly finding a way to check in on his daughter. Now, much more was at stake than peace of mind. There had to be some way, any way to contact her, to nudge her back on the right path, to course-correct her destiny into who she was supposed to be.
The pounding in Kin’s chest seemed more suitable to running five miles on his recovering knees. He clicked down on the keyboard and scrolled down while reminding himself to stay calm. Viewing the web across time—in time—meant that he could establish a webmail account and contact Miranda. He saw no reason why it couldn’t technically work, though doing so broke every rule in the TCB’s book.
But would they catch him?
It took a good few breaths to drain the nervous energy out and assess the technical specifics: the portal gave access to a virtual computer, one that ran an emulated version of the era’s popular operating system: same applications, same speed, same web browsers, and even preloaded with standard office software. The only difference was that the virtual computer was merely modern software pretending to be an ancient system.
That, and the TCB’s monitoring. The change in Miranda’s life would be a subtle civilian shift, not a documented financial boon or governmental coup. And there would be no time jump associated with it, no temporal frequencies for the Security Overwatch group to detect and begin investigating.
That only left one thing. He loaded up the message about the DTP:
As our goal is to minimize corruption, that means communication with the past is prohibited. Gambling, message forums, email, and any other type of direct interaction is strictly forbidden. Your browser’s history and data cache will be transmitted in real time to our IT staff for verification. Failure to comply will result in appropriate TCB management actions. Any abuse of the DTP for personal reasons or attempts to reverse engineer its technology will result in immediate termination, potential apprehension, and/or elimination. For more information, please reference section 9.2 of the TCB Research Handbook, revision 18C.2.
Reverse engineering. The term lingered in Kin’s mind, connecting dots between his past and present. When he’d told Markus about his old job, he mentioned reverse engineering the hacker attack to determine how they infiltrated the servers without leaving any tracks.
That applied here, too.
The TCB’s system was a me
re emulation of computers from his era. All those hours spent reverse engineering hacker damage to the Gold Free Games servers, figuring out how they broke in and erased their digital breadcrumbs, suddenly became Kin’s training ground for rescuing his daughter from a damaged life.
Reverse engineer. Remove his tracks. Leave no trace behind. He couldn’t bring back her mother, but he could at least somehow guide her from the future.
Back in the café, Markus said that thinking about server hacks was no longer his job. But he was wrong. It was just the start—and quite possibly the only way to reset Miranda’s destiny.
CHAPTER 12
It worked.
Or at least the technical part did. Over two days, he’d put aside everything else and focused on writing computer code that hadn’t been used in more than a century. It wasn’t a matter of life and death, but it was the closest thing. Thanks to the DTP, he accessed and tested the coding on IT sites from his old era—sites that easily doubled as “research” on era-specific tech trends should anyone ask—and the results proved interesting.
It seemed simple enough: the code allowed him to view whatever he wanted through the DTP browser while instantly rewriting the recorded history that the TCB’s staff downloaded and reviewed.
Email was accessible. His tracks were covered. Consequences would be avoided.
His tests proved it.
Only four quick steps existed between him and Miranda: log in. Activate DTP. Run the scripts. Make contact.
That still didn’t give him any guidelines for telling Miranda how to stop her downward spiral. He’d pondered other ways to try to rescue her from the brink; those all depended on influencing other people, counselors or lawyers or whoever. That potentially created a footprint of timeline corruption spread far too wide.
