Here and Now and Then

by Mike Chen

  “What’s that?” Kin asked, his hands propping himself up on the desk.

  Edgar turned the holo screen, and Kin blinked several times to make sure that his vision didn’t cheat him. “That’s her,” he whispered.

  “Let’s get a better look.” The holo in front of him fizzled, and the room’s lights dimmed. The source—an archived web page from the San Francisco Globe—appeared on the giant wall screen. Edgar tapped the air a few more times, and the image extracted into a solid 3-D hologram of a black-and-white Miranda standing at a podium, with an apparent stuffed owl sewn onto her coat’s shoulder and a long striped scarf around her neck.

  Probably not a soccer scarf.

  “The article was titled Local Sci-Fi Con Draws Budding Talent. ‘High schooler Miranda Stewart, 17, demonstrates her work in the Junior Game Developer Contest.’ Looks like your Miranda knew what she wanted from a young age.”

  Kin circled the hologram, walking through the foreground to get a close-up look. The holo was probably put together from some sort of algorithm that mashed together facial recognition and average sizes and heights and weights for an interpolated re-creation of whoever was in the image.

  For Kin, none of that mattered. He’d never seen this Miranda before. He’d brought dozens, hundreds of digital photos with him, photos he’d taken at her soccer events or just being silly with Tanya and her friends. But this Miranda, showing something she’d created in public while wearing some sort of costume, might as well have been a complete stranger.

  Those final days, with him insisting on watching the Arsenal match, defaulting back to the image he’d projected of her. He’d raised her. He’d parented her. He’d shown her things that seemed fun and interesting.

  But maybe he’d never truly listened to her.

  That had to be it. How else could the girl in the photo be a complete stranger to her own father? And with his actions, his own illegal attempts at parenting across time, everything had come undone.

  Kin lost his daughter without ever finding out who she really was. And now, he never would.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Unfortunately, that’s all I can pull up. Technically this isn’t even supposed to be here.”

  “What?”

  “You see this?” Edgar turned a smaller screen of logistical data to him. He pointed at static digits that looked like a time stamp from an hour ago. “This is a backup cache from this morning. We keep a complete backup archive for redundancy. Everything refreshes hourly. Except this Miranda Stewart, her info doesn’t exist in our live data. She’s only got this one image, and it’s from this morning’s backup. The backup and the live data should be exactly the same, but they’re not.”

  No headaches came. No pounding on his temples, no stinging right above his cheekbones. Inside, his chest clenched with the force of a thousand fists tightening at once. It sucked the air from his lungs, and his head dropped, neck muscles unable to prop it up.

  “It’s like something erased her digital footprint in the past hour.” The lights came up, and Edgar organized the screens in front of him. “Like it reached into history and plucked her straight out of it. Weird, huh?” Edgar started saying something about possible hardware hiccups and opening a support ticket with the data team, only Kin had already gotten up to leave at that point. Rage welled inside him, reaching out to the very tips of his fingers and toes, creating a momentum that carried him away from Edgar’s desk, out of the MOME, and to his skycar. With each step forward, details stapled onto the plan already forming in his mind, words upon lists upon choices and options building into a matrix of possibilities and worries.

  And it all started with one man.

  CHAPTER 19

  The startled voice echoed through the hills and into the dusk sky, sending nearby birds into flight.

  “Jesus, Kin,” Markus said, picking up his dropped bag. The surprise on Markus’s face was replaced almost immediately with a sympathetic wrinkled brow. “You’re okay?”

  “Yeah,” Kin replied. He knew to approach Markus with a semblance of calm, despite the rage that remained at a steady burn in his gut. Markus wasn’t the enemy here. “I got a good severance package. Won’t have to work for a while.” After the MOME visit, a geyser of what-ifs stirred around inside Kin, building a pressure that rumbled his very core. Before he could move on in any fashion, it had to be released, and the only person in the world who might possibly understand was Markus. “Thanks for coming.”

  “It’s rush hour. Why are we standing at the top of San Bruno Mountain? I think we’re both illegally parked on the hillside.”

  “Miranda loves hiking here with Bamford. It’s peaceful but tough terrain.” Miranda had been dead for decades, regardless of whether she lived a full life or the TCB ended it. But for Kin, she lived in parallel to him, and speaking of her, even thinking about her in the past tense seemed wrong. “They got her, Markus. They’ve done something with her. I couldn’t meet you to discuss it at the office. And I didn’t want to do it around Enoch and Benjamin. Or Penny. That’s why I wanted to meet here.”

  Markus’s hands landed heavily on Kin’s shoulders. He spoke slowly, every single word drawn out enough to linger far longer than it should have. “I’m really sorry, Kin. But remember, we knew this might happen. We knew that was the risk.”

  Kin couldn’t tell if Markus was being pragmatic or sympathetic or some combination of both. “I went to the MOME,” Kin said. “To check out her digital footprint. They’re erasing her. They’re removing her from history as we speak. In their backup archive from this morning, she was there. Somehow in their live database, she was gone. Sometime between this morning and this afternoon, they erased her. She’s...” Dusk turned the sky into a burning mix of purple and pink, and in the distance, skycar headlights began to snap on, dotting the horizon with little glowing bulbs traveling by. “She’s gone.”

  “Her footprint is being deleted.” Markus turned, arms crossed and locked into each other. “Sometimes I forget that field agents probably don’t know the whole protocol. You guys are too busy climbing up buildings and dodging bullets. In a case where an anomaly is created, the first step is to erase the digital footprint. That’s what the Digital Security group does.”

  “And I thought they were just dirty players on the field.”

  “That, too.”

  “If that’s the first step—” the black-and-white holo of Miranda from the MOME planted itself in his mind’s eye, taking root and becoming his only focus “—what do they do next?”

  Markus stood, stone-faced. The toes of his boots dug into the dirt, and his weight shifted back and forth. He looked off to the side, somewhere over Kin’s shoulder and into the infinite sky. “You know what they do.”

  The muscles in Kin’s neck stiffened, turning his posture into a wooden board ready to snap into pieces. “I’m an agent. They send me somewhere, some time. I do the job. No one tells me the how or why.”

  Markus’s sigh projected over the mountaintop winds. “They identify the point of corruption. The assignment gets built around that.”

  “I chased the bad guys. Miranda isn’t that. She’s just a girl.”

  “She is the ‘bad guy’ in this case, Kin. No matter how smart or talented or great she is, she is the corruption. She shouldn’t even exist. They’re not going to give that type of person too many second chances. The longer this goes, the greater her sphere of influence becomes. They’ll be monitoring her timeline continuously now.” Markus hesitated, looking up as if he stood in the Mission Control war room. “She’s on the big board now.”

  Lines and lines of emails whizzed through Kin’s memory. All of those nuggets about handling classes, asking about soccer tournament scores, even supporting her during the immediate days following Heather’s death—they seemed inconsequential now in the big scheme of things. The only thing that mattered was one
email of encouragement, a short collection of text characters that pointed her down the path to posting her project. “They couldn’t get to her before she’s even developed it. This project would need to exist for them to detect the timeline ripples, even before it propagates onto other servers.”

  “Kin,” Markus said, putting his arm around him. “We knew this was a risk. I talked with you about it.”

  Kin’s thoughts carried too much momentum now, piecing together his personal mission experience with the possibilities created by Miranda’s actions. “And they couldn’t get her way earlier. That would grandfather the situation. It’s gotta be right after she uploads it. The instant the file finishes transmitting.” He turned and grabbed Markus, pulling him toward their parked cars. “I have to warn her. I need your access.”

  “Stop.” Markus pushed away from him and held his ground. “We can’t do that. These are the rules—”

  “Rules? Break them for once!” Fingers curled into trembling fists. “Give me one email. That’s all I have to do. I know you retrievers have access—”

  “Kin. Stop. We shouldn’t do this. This is our job. You know better.”

  “A single email.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Fine. Give me your accelerator. I’ll jump myself—”

  “I’m not going to do that. Even if I wanted to give it to you, I wouldn’t. One more jump could kill you. Look, the decision has been made. After next week it’ll be finished. Let it go. You have to move forward. You have a life here. I’m saying this to you as a friend. Not an agent. Not as our soccer team captain. Your friend.” Markus rested his arm around Kin’s shoulders. “Okay?”

  Kin considered the decision points that led to this moment: telling Miranda to follow her dreams, contacting her when Heather died, his disappearance. Even before that, giving up hope of rescue and settling into 1996, approaching Heather, even all the way back to the moment the TCB recruited him with a cryptic statement at his door. Every twist and turn throughout the course of his life throttled cause-and-effect forward, events rushing and being compiled through time until culminating in one thing.

  His daughter’s execution.

  Suddenly, Kin felt small, microscopic, and it wasn’t from the vast sky of emerging dusk stars above them.

  “Go home. Get some rest.”

  Markus’s words made sense. He took them in, thinking them over and processing them, including his sentiments about Miranda. Except his mind got hung up on one thing, one particular detail that stood out.

  Next week?

  “How do you know it’ll be over by next week?” Kin shot out in a single huff.

  Sometimes Markus and Penny seemed like complete opposites. Other times their familial quirks offered a striking similarity. Markus bit down on his lip, avoiding Kin’s glare and looking up and to the left. “It’s, you know, standard protocol.”

  “Markus, we’re on the side of San Bruno Mountain. No Security guards are going to sweep down and stop you. What do you know?”

  “I told you, it’s standard planning.”

  “No, it’s not. Standard mission lengths are two weeks. Don’t bullshit me. You’re doing that thing that your sister does. The lip-bite-and-look-up thing.”

  The skycar sat about thirty feet away. Markus turned to it, probably contemplating sprinting to it and taking off. He faced Kin, his mouth ajar, and he took in short staccato breaths. In and out, starting and stopping; maybe his thoughts tried to form into something audible and tangible. “I’m the retriever for the assignment,” he said. Kin angled to look him in the eye, though the connection couldn’t be made. “I’m sorry—”

  Before Markus could finish, Kin’s fist flew into the jaw of his longtime friend. The sudden impact caught Markus off guard, and he dropped to the ground, lost somewhere in the weeds and grass. “How could you?” His yell echoed through the hills. “You killed her!”

  Their relationship in all its forms—friends, coworkers, in-laws—was obliterated across San Bruno Mountain. A primal roar flew out, one that was meant to bend time and space itself. In reality it only caused Markus to stare up at him with wide-eyed terror.

  “Kin! Stop!” Markus pushed himself up to his knees and then put his hands up. “It’s me. It’s Markus. I am your friend. Please, listen.”

  Adrenaline ramped down, leaving Kin with feet planted into the ground and shoulders heaving. He remained, glaring at Markus on the ground.

  “I don’t take this responsibility lightly. There’s no choice here! There’s no happy ending. There’s no way to save her. They told you the rules, and you broke them. You broke them when you ignored Protocol Eleven Twenty-Three then, when you decided to contact her once you were back. These are the consequences. We knew this when we signed up for it. You knew this when you returned.”

  “I can’t believe you’ve given up so easily.” Feelings suppressed for months suddenly broke loose, faster and heavier than he could have anticipated. “You don’t care about her. You’ve never cared about her. You just brush her off, like all that matters is coming home to Penny, to this life. Did it ever occur to you that my life then matters just as much as my life now?”

  A different type of stunned look took over Markus’s expression, one that told Kin an epiphany just went off in his friend’s head. Kin exhaled, the burning rage giving way to the simpler urges of desperation. “We can still save her. Please.”

  “How?” The brush rustled as Markus got back on his feet and dusted himself off. “How could you possibly save her now?”

  “Email her a warning.”

  “They’re monitoring her communications.”

  “I’ll jump back and protect her.”

  “Without any medical support? You’ll be dead if you try—or arrive unresponsive and stranded in the past again at best.”

  “Then you jump back and save her.”

  Markus put his hands to his head, fingers pushing back hair to spotlight his creased mouth and squeezed eyes. “Okay. Let’s play this out. Say I jump back and save her for this moment. That’s a secondary detectable corruption. Then they’ll send another agent back, kill me, and then kill Miranda. And we can continue this cycle indefinitely. A whole line of corpses trying to protect Miranda because you couldn’t follow the rules.” He paced back and forth, his radius starting out small before sweeping back and forth a good five feet on either side. “We can’t win. So I’m trying everything in my power to do right by her. Because you’re my friend.”

  Despite the cold evening wind picking up to harsh speeds, beads of sweat crept down Kin’s face. “Killing her is not doing right by her.”

  “Have you heard anything I said? She’s dead. She will die. None of us can stop that. So I’m trying to save her from the worst part—the fear of dying.”

  In all their years together, Kin had never known Markus to lie. Even practical jokes were hard for his friend to pull off. The somber lines on his face told him that this, too, was genuine.

  “They gave me this assignment a few hours ago. I almost quit on the spot. Then I read the plan.”

  Kin recalled the AD’s words: Miranda Stewart is a variable that must be controlled. The knowledge in her mind represents the greatest threat we have ever encountered. “What are they going to do, send ten agents to surround her? Since it’s such a big ‘threat.’”

  “This isn’t a normal target. Most temporal criminals, they’re mercs handling a job or someone with grand designs and black-market equipment or fugitives in hiding. We’ve even had a few former agents who went rogue for personal gain. This is unique. Her knowledge is the threat. She’s a civilian. That’s the difference. The mission plan doesn’t have to worry about a shoot-out or physical confrontation. The job simply has to be done. So they’re not sending in an army after her, they’re sending an agent. And a retriever. The only difference is that the retriever, me, stays in
the era and monitors the whole thing as a safety net. This isn’t about apprehension or even timing. It’s more about keeping it clean.”

  “Clean.” Kin scoffed as he shook his head. “I’ve heard that before. Didn’t quite work.”

  “You know what they wanted to do? Car accident. She uploads the project on August 28, 2030, then goes out to dinner. They know where she’s going to be. A brutal, violent car accident that creates an easy cover-up for the Logistics department.” The tension in his face released, visible even in the dim light. “If I knew Benjamin was going to die in a car accident, it would burn me forever knowing he had those few fleeting seconds of realization and terror. Those last frozen moments comprehending that that was it. I wish that on no one. No one should have to feel fear in their last seconds. So I accepted. I insisted that we alter the plan. The field agent will put a functional sedative in her drink. We’ll activate it as soon as she gets in her car, and then we’ll commandeer her vehicle.” Markus’s voice dropped, the following words coming with a fragile crackle. “At that point, she will be euthanized. Then we’ll stage the car accident for clean paperwork with local authorities. She’ll never have known fear or pain or violence. She’ll just go to sleep before she starts the car. To take away those horrible final moments, that’s doing right by her. At least if I go—” He stopped, blowing out a heavy exhale. “At least if I go,” he repeated, his voice quieter, calmer, “I can oversee it. I’ll know that it was done as quickly and painlessly as possible. Clean and controlled so that she doesn’t suffer and it disappears into the assignment archives and doesn’t become an asterisk in the record book or a case used for training. Okay?”

  Markus’s clinical description of Miranda’s murder created a nauseating dizziness, and Kin had to lean on a nearby tree to steady himself. He reminded himself that Markus wasn’t the bad guy here, and his twisted logic was a horrible yet somewhat sensible means to fight for the best in a worst-case situation.