Here and Now and Then

by Mike Chen

  “That’s impossible. She’s younger than me.”

  “This is reality. It’s like...” Kin gulped in air, his mind racing to find something to bridge her understanding. Lists visualized in his mind, running through anything and everything he knew about Miranda until landing on something so obvious he grinned in the empty car. “It’s like that show you like. Doctor Who.”

  “But that...” Miranda’s voice lowered enough that it nearly matched Kin’s. “That show...” Her voice trailed off, creating a vacuum long enough to make Kin check the comm.

  “Miranda?”

  “That show is about time travel.”

  Father and daughter remained silent, and buried somewhere in between came an unspoken acknowledgment, one that was finally broken by a realization from Miranda.

  “Dad. Your journal.”

  “You need to go now. Tell your friends that—”

  “It was so detailed. I wondered how it was so detailed if you’d never written anything before. You couldn’t make that stuff up.” She paused, taking in a sharp breath loud enough for him to hear. “You didn’t make that stuff up.”

  A quick look at the time prompted Kin’s agent sensibilities to resume control, despite Miranda’s giant epiphany. “Miranda, listen. Tell your friends that you’re going home to get cleaned up, and then follow Penny’s lead. Don’t make eye contact with the lone guy sitting at the bar.”

  “Is that... I mean, is he here to—”

  “Yes and no. He’s on our side. You still need to go. Now. Act casual. If someone asks if anything’s bothering you, tell them that the spilled drink broke your phone, and you lost your photos.” It was all reflex, finding logical excuses and projecting forward like an agent. It didn’t matter that this was his daughter or that he was trying to save her; the thoughts and ideas sparked with an effervescence that always made his superiors happy. “Use that excuse, meet Penny outside the restaurant, and she’ll take you to where I am. Then you’ll get the full story. You need to be discreet.”

  “Okay,” Miranda said. “Okay.”

  “Stay calm, and you’ll be fine.”

  “Okay,” she repeated again. The comm earpiece flooded with muffled noise and scratches as she presumably returned it to Penny. “Dad?” she called out again, her voice tinier and more distant.

  “Yes?”

  Penny spoke as the intermediary. “He can hear you.”

  “I used your journal. I’m sorry.”

  “Tell her,” Kin said with one eye on the car’s dashboard clock, “tell her that I can’t wait to see her.”

  With that, Kin removed the mic from his collar. Giving her instructions as an agent was easy. Emailing the teenager he’d just left wasn’t that different from talking with her in her bedroom. For now, a good fifteen or so years had passed for Miranda—half her life—and as he sat in the car, the path ahead seemed foggier than ever.

  All that time planning, pining, focusing on trying to make things right. With the finish line in sight, he realized that after getting so far, he had no plan, no list, no idea about what to say to the adult he was going to meet.

  CHAPTER 30

  Two silhouettes appeared in the rearview mirror. They walked with hurried steps past the parking structure entrance: Penny, her face tensed with a surprising determination, and Miranda, who moved with a youthful uncertainty despite the new adult contours on her cheekbones.

  New to Kin, anyway.

  The engine fired up as Kin tracked their approach. He rolled the window down, and the doors clicked as he unlocked them. “Get in,” he called out.

  From the side mirror, he saw Penny’s expression break into a puzzled frown. “What?”

  “We need to move,” he said, staying locked on to the RPM gauge on the dashboard. “We have seventeen minutes until Markus takes her car. We should be out of the area before then.”

  Not that he wasn’t happy to see Miranda—his heart had sprinted at the mere notion for minutes now—but he was fully immersed in the mission at this moment. Saving her being the top priority.

  The only priority. Deep down, an agent reflex kicked in, his emotions shutting down to focus on the task.

  At least until Penny chimed in.

  “Kin,” Penny said, leaning into the window, “this is your daughter. She hasn’t seen you in years. You’ve jumped across time to save her. Don’t you want to say hello?”

  “We can do that when we’re safely away from here.” The engine ramped up from a hum to a low roar, and it took Kin a moment to realize that the weight of his foot had caused it. He eased up and exhaled, although nothing cleared the tightness in his shoulders. “We can’t take any risks.”

  “Don’t you trust Markus?”

  “Of course.”

  “And if they sent someone else after us, wouldn’t they have gotten to us by now?”

  “Yes, but the security cameras. The TCB has facial recognition technology—”

  “You’ve got a hat on. Look down, and you’ll be fine. You said it yourself, seventeen minutes. Come on.” Penny turned around and nodded to Miranda.

  The drone of the car died to silence, only an echo through the concrete structure remaining. Words dried up in his mouth, unable to take shape or form. He should have planned for this moment. It was inevitable, but the uncertainty of her reaction petrified him, and for all the mission prep he’d done, anxiety kept pushing his thoughts out of reach. “I don’t know what to say,” he finally let out.

  “Dad?” Miranda’s voice trembled through the short burst of a single syllable, and Kin felt his fingers loosen. The voice sounded like her, more so than the one over the comm. Except even in the nervous timbre of one word, a richness and confidence came through, something that didn’t exist in the Miranda he once knew. “I’m right here.”

  Penny stepped away from the door and craned her neck to look around. “I’ll keep an eye out.” As he nodded, his hand pushed the door open and he got out. “You two take your time.”

  He’d seen Miranda through the distorted view of a restaurant window earlier, with reflections and smudges and mood lighting obscuring the details.

  Now she stood in front of him, clear as day for the first time. Gone were the rounded nuances of childhood, replaced by stronger angles and a depth of maturity in her face that only came from experience and time. Her hair fell shorter than before, neatly cropped at the shoulder line, and tiny hints of age had crept onto her face, from the delicate crease between her brows to the faint lines that framed her mouth.

  They stood together in the shadows, harsh industrial lighting and stale air filling the few feet of space, although it may as well have been a vacuum between them. Neither inhaled or moved a muscle; Kin’s brain was too busy processing that the woman before him was Miranda—his Miranda—at twice the age he’d known her last. He was pretty sure her mind ran through something similar.

  She broke first.

  “I... I can’t believe it,” she said. Her eyes welled with tears that reflected the fluorescent lighting. “It’s so good to see you.”

  Kin wanted to say something, though no words came out. Instead, he pulled Miranda in, hugging her with all the strength he could muster. The top of her head rested against his cheek—an unfamiliar feeling thanks to a growth spurt that had occurred after he left. They’d always figured she’d be tall, given that both he and Heather stood about six feet. Now he knew.

  A flood of memories whirled through Kin’s mind. Her first bath. Her first bike. Her first day of school. And now everything fast-forwarded, all the years between then and now lost to hope and the imagination.

  He’d missed much more than growth spurts.

  “I’m so sorry I left you,” he whispered into her ear.

  “You came back.” A quick laugh escaped, brightening the thick concrete of the parking structure. “This is really rea
l. I can’t quite believe—” She pulled back, nose wrinkled as she studied him. “Wait a minute. You haven’t aged at all. You look younger than I remember.”

  “Like I said—” Kin placed his hands on her shoulders and nodded for Penny to come over. “It’s like that TV show you used to watch.”

  “Still watch, Dad.” Her cheeks rose and eyes crinkled with an overwhelming smile. “It’s still on. But it’s not quite as good as what I found in your journal.”

  “Which you’re turning into a video game.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Let’s just say,” he said, opening the car door for her, “that in about a hundred years, some very powerful people will be upset about that.”

  * * *

  Over the next thirty minutes, Kin gave his daughter the complicated zigs and zags of his own personal journey. In doing so he realized that he’d never told her about himself in this much detail before. His cover story had worked well enough years ago, leaving it so that his daughter didn’t really know him. She only knew of him.

  Life in 2142. The TCB academy. How time jumps feel. The lucky penny and the real Penny. Getting stuck and meeting Heather. Metabolizers and the human life span. Missing memory and the headaches. Classical music, cooking, planning, how it all was a reaction to his old life in some way. Why he wrote the journal, and why the TCB faked his disappearing act. Information spilled out of him, some textbook and some personal anecdotes, it all colored the details in a way that made Miranda stare wide-eyed in the rearview mirror while he drove and talked.

  “And that’s why I got pulled back. That guy you saw in the backyard that one time, that’s Markus. I actually play soccer with him every week.”

  “I thought you couldn’t run.”

  “The metabolizers, they healed my knees.”

  “Please don’t get him started on soccer,” Penny said from the passenger side. “That’s all he and Markus talk about. If I never have to hear about Arsenal again...” She leaned over to look in the back seat, and from the corner of his eye, Kin saw the two women grin at each other.

  “So, Dad, I gotta ask.”

  “Yeah?” Kin braced himself for some sort of difficult, squirm-inducing question.

  “Why haven’t you killed Hitler?” Miranda asked.

  Penny faced Kin, leaning in with the most curiosity she’d shown since they’d started this whole thing.

  “We can’t go that far back,” he said with a laugh. “But even if we could, the TCB protects tentpole historical events and figures, good and evil. The sphere of influence for those events is too catastrophic.”

  Miranda nodded in the rearview mirror, and she suddenly lit up with a beaming grin. “I remember those terms in your journal. You know, I’d sneak down late at night to look at it. I’d write down details so I could have my own copy of them. Then it just disappeared one day, along with you.” Her energetic expression quickly dropped, and a seriousness took over. “In terms of life-changing discoveries, I think I can handle this whole time-travel thing. But you still haven’t explained why you’re here now. And where we’re going.”

  She was right. Maybe it was the sudden urge to reconnect with his daughter. Or maybe he’d just been avoiding the whole life-or-death topic.

  Whatever the reason, that particular spot on Highway 80 marked the turning point in all of their lives.

  “I came to save you,” Kin quietly said.

  Opposing headlights flashed on Miranda’s face in the rearview mirror. Even in those brief images, the mix of confusion and worry stood out. Kin’s pulse quickened, even as he tried breathing techniques to steady himself. “Save me?”

  “If we hadn’t come, a TCB agent would have drugged and killed you tonight, then covered it up as a car crash.” Kin selectively omitted Markus’s involvement, and from Penny’s solemn nod, she seemed to agree with the decision.

  “But...why me? What did I do?”

  “It’s not what you did. It’s what I gave you.” Kin told himself to focus on the road, on the strict lines and lights in front of him. If he hadn’t, the admission might have been too much for him.

  “After I returned, the TCB recognized you—your existence—as a timeline corruption. You didn’t originally exist in this era. You’re only here because I got stranded, because I met your mother when I never should have and.... Even though they pulled me back, they agreed to let you be. But I couldn’t just leave you here alone. I was never supposed to contact you, but I found a way and set up a system to cover my tracks. It was perfect, almost. I got sloppy. They found our emails. The last one you got from me—the one that encouraged you to quit soccer and focus on what you love—that moment is apparently what propagated you into creating a video game for your portfolio. It doesn’t matter who sees it or how big it gets. The information in that game—the information in you—is a threat to TCB Security.”

  The back seat squeaked as Miranda sank into it. “I just uploaded it. Like, an hour ago. You’re here today because of my game? What if I just delete it?”

  “That’s not good enough, unfortunately. They were willing to ignore your existence when they saw you as harmless to them and to the timeline. But now that they know you’ve read my journal, that you have knowledge of the future and of the TCB—they refuse to take any risks. That’s why they’re coming for you. To make sure that knowledge never gets out.”

  “Why not prevent me from getting that knowledge in the first place? Couldn’t they go back to when I was fourteen and steal the journal from the garage before I saw it?”

  “Point of detection. The TCB reacts to the point of detection to avoid grandfathering the situation. Um,” Kin said, realizing he was using company lingo among the uninitiated, “what I mean is that it creates a thing called—”

  “The grandfather paradox,” Miranda said.

  She knew. Of course she knew. This was the girl who would rather go to a science fiction convention than a school dance. “What does your grandfather have to do with this?” Penny asked.

  “The grandfather paradox goes like this,” Miranda offered without skipping a beat. “If I went back in time and killed my grandfather, it creates a paradox. Because how could I—the grandchild—exist without my grandfather? A paradox exists when you remove the thing that caused the event or the event happens before you caused it. It’s very—” she paused to let out a quick chuckle “—timey-wimey.”

  Penny frowned, a rugged crinkle taking over her mouth. “This time travel stuff gives me a headache.”

  “Yeah,” Kin said. “It does that.”

  As the car rumbled down the highway in silence, Kin glanced at both of the passengers. Each held the same pensive look: lips pursed, eyes narrowed and unblinking. He probably wore it, too. “What about the people that download my game?”

  “The TCB will corrupt the source file so that it can never be opened. They may have done that already. You are the concern because you’ve created it.” Kin’s bottom lip stung from his teeth digging into it. “You know it. That’s what scares them.”

  In the rearview, Kin watched Miranda start to respond and then hesitate. She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply, like she always did when forming big definitive statements.

  “Pull over,” she finally said. “Pull the car over, please. Before we get any further, I need the whole truth.” Kin glanced at Penny, who gave a simple affirmative nod. The car swerved to the shoulder, kicking up dust and gravel until it slowed to a halt. “Dad, where are we going?”

  The answer to Miranda’s question was simple, probably one of the simplest answers he’d give during this whole journey. Yet the battle to transform air and sound into words caused Kin to grip the steering wheel until his palms stung. “San Francisco airport.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have to disappear,” he said, his voice dry and low. Regret knocked him off balance desp
ite being seated. “You have to fly to somewhere, anywhere, under a new identity and go.” He pulled out the passport with Miranda’s new identity and a large wad of cash. “And I can’t know where. Or who you become. No one can. You have to start over in order to live.”

  “This is wrong. I have friends, a life. A boyfriend. Family.” The last word jabbed at Kin, causing him to wince. “You’re telling me to get on a plane, erase all of that, and...reset somewhere? Like it’s moving apartments? I’m not doing that.”

  “You have to.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Blood rushed to Kin’s face, although the veil of night hid it from the darkened vehicle’s passengers. His hand trembled as it rested on the gearshift, and he squeezed the knob to steady himself. “Miranda, I do know that.”

  “I’ll fight back.”

  “It wouldn’t work. Even though you’ve escaped this particular attempt, they’ll just reorganize and come back for you. They know who you are and where you live, so staying here—being you—they’ll find you. If not today, tomorrow, or next week, next month. The only way this stops is if they believe you’re dead. Then the mission is accomplished and archived as a success.” The seat belt dug into his neck as he twisted to face Miranda. “You can’t stop this. You can’t fight it. The only thing you can do is to sneak away, undetected, and begin again.”

  “My life!” she said with a ferocity that eclipsed any teenage meltdown he’d witnessed before. “Daniel. We wanted to get married. We wanted to have kids. I’m finishing grad school. I’m trying to get a job. I have friends. This is my life. These things, these people, they are my life. I refuse to give it up. I am not disappearing on Daniel. Or anyone else. I’m just not. Because I know how terrible that is.”

  “But you will, Miranda. You have to see that it’s inevitable. All of those people? Tomorrow they’ll get the news that you are dead. Because, really, you’re dead to them either way. There’s no alternative where you get to stay here with them. If you don’t leave with us, the TCB will kill you.” Kin nearly choked while swallowing hard at the next thought. “It’s what they do. It’s what I used to do. It’s the same reason I had to leave you all those years ago.” Despite the gravity of the situation, Miranda’s tenacity caused a blip of satisfaction. He supposed if she simply rolled over and took this life-shattering event without any kicking, he would have been a tiny bit disappointed.