In Times Like These Boxed Set

by Nathan Van Coops

  I scan the tablet around again. “So how come we can see it all? If it’s all fake, why build it on the real site?”

  “That’s how the metaspace works. They mapped the surface of the earth and put it into a digital skin. Then designers started augmenting the spaces with meta-features that you could interact with. In some cases, like here, it worked so well that they basically stopped using the physical spaces. Most of the students here were commuters anyway, so it wasn’t hard for them to let it go.”

  “So these people I see walking around, where are their physical bodies right now?”

  “Home. Wherever home is for them. Or in a class, maybe. They’re in what they call ‘ranging mode,’ where the mind is able to range free of the body. That way their bodies aren’t walking around bumping into things while they are experiencing this place.”

  “That’s so bizarre. It’s pretty cool but—hey. Wait a minute—” I scan the tablet past where Mym is standing. The view through the screen shows nothing where she ought to be. “Where are you?” I lower the tablet again and she holds up a hand and waves her gloved fingers at me.

  “Right here.”

  “But you don’t show up!”

  Mym steps closer and runs her fingers down my chest. “You miss me?”

  I get a chill up my neck and smile. “So you really are a ninja.”

  Mym is smiling again from under her hooded veil. Up close, the black material has a slight shimmering quality. “Sometimes I don’t feel like being looked at.” She turns and starts walking toward the woods. “Like anytime in this century.”

  I follow her shadowy figure under the trees, and she guides me down a dirt path. I’m reminded of our trek through the Amazon where all of this started. This time she leads me to a building that is even more dilapidated than the others, but today there is no sign of Dr. Quickly. The building is constructed into a hillside and has only one entrance; a wide, rolling gate on rusty rails.

  I help Mym roll the door open and close it again once we enter. We are blanketed in darkness as soon as it’s closed. I can barely see my own body and Mym has completely vanished. I’ve just begun regretting not bringing my flashlight when a dim light flickers on above us. Mym is standing by a switch along the left wall. She’s pulled her hood back and I finally have an unobstructed view of her face.

  “Batteries are getting low. Come on. I’ve got to start the generators.”

  I follow her through a metal doorframe and we make a right into a workshop of some kind. The generators are old but seem to be well maintained because they both fire right up. She double-checks that the vent tubes are properly secured to the exhaust ports and directs me back to the hallway. “The rest of our equipment is this way.”

  The room she leads me to appears to be a type of control center with digital screens on the walls. A large one dominates the center of the room. She flips a switch at a master console and the screen buzzes to life. The image that appears is a rotating view of the earth. The planet has a green glow around it that I guess signifies the grid.

  “Where do they have you going?” Mym asks.

  “It’s a particle physics lab in Northern France.” I reach into my bag for my tablet to get the details. “What is this place?”

  “It was a mineral mine for a while. But it was depleted quickly, so when the Academy bought it, they closed it up. Dad and I debugged it and took it off the grid. Now it just shows up like a hill in a forest. He wanted a place where he could show up in this century without being tracked, and since most of the Academy campuses are in Europe or the U.S., Australia turned out to be just the spot for it.”

  “How come?”

  “Oh, you know us. We’re shy.” Mym punches a few more buttons on the console. “Dad’s always been big on privacy. He has good reason, though. Lots of people want to meet the father of time travel. Problem is, they’re not all people he wants to meet, and I think he’d be happier if nobody even knew I existed.”

  “Over-protective?”

  “He just wants to keep me safe. So, protective. ‘Over’ would be a matter for debate.” She pulls up a map of Northern France and zooms in on the city of Calais. After a quick survey of the city, she narrows the search to one building. “Is that it?”

  I study the image on the screen. “Yeah. The particle physics lab is on the 118th floor.”

  She zooms in on the windows of the lab. “How close did you get?”

  “I was on the 117th floor briefly.” I get out my journal and consult my jump times. “The last point I was in the building was around 12:35 local time. I had some security on me though, so it wasn’t going great.”

  “Okay. We can figure something out.” She unlocks a cabinet and returns to the center table with a large fishing tackle box. When she flips open the lid I see a bunch of electronic devices and what I guess to be anchors. “What do you have to work with?”

  I open my bag and lay Dr. Quickly’s journal on the table, followed by Abe’s tool kit and the degravitizer. I also extract Milo’s power supply and use the opportunity to plug in my chronometer. “I have this stuff, and I did have a Frisbee, but I lost it.”

  “A Frisbee?”

  “Yeah, it was one of those long-range ones with the hole in the middle. I was going to use it to slide under doors and maybe throw it if I had to get past any kind of laser beams or anything like that.”

  Mym is watching me with an amused smile on her face. “That’s why I like you, Ben. You’re so optimistic.”

  I smile back. “You like that idea?”

  “No. I think it’s a terrible idea, but I like that you thought it would work. Having a positive attitude is important.” She smirks and goes back to her box of accessories.

  “You’ve clearly never seen me throw a Frisbee. It’s one of my many talents.” I slide over next to her and brush my hand across the small of her back. “Many talents.”

  Mym turns to face me and is trying hard to keep her face serious, but her eyes are laughing. “I’m sure you do have lots of talents, but right now we’re trying to get you into this building.”

  I slip my other hand to her waist. “Yeah, but we’re time travelers. It’s not like we have to go right this second.” I incline my head closer to hers, moving slowly toward her lips. She laces the fingers of her left hand through my right and raises our hands up. She inclines her head toward my wrist and the metal bracelet. “You forgetting about this little thing, sweetie?”

  I look at the bracelet and frown at its oppressive counting as the seconds tick by on the timer. “Well there is that. But let’s talk more about the fact that you just called me sweetie. That seems interesting.” I lean toward her again.

  “You are impossible.” Mym shakes her head but she doesn’t shrink away. Our lips are only centimeters apart now. Her voice comes out softer. “I’m trying to help you.”

  “You are helping me.” I close the gap and our lips meet, softly at first and then firmer. Mym’s right hand moves to the back of my head and gently entwines in my hair. I wrap my arms around her, lifting her up to her tiptoes and then up onto the table. She slides back on the smooth surface and pulls me closer to her, wrapping her legs around me again.

  “You seem to like putting me on top of things.”

  “That’s what happens when short people try to kiss regular-sized people.”

  “Hey!” She holds up a finger. “I’m not short, I’m—”

  “Perfect,” I finish the sentence for her.

  She smiles. “Okay, I was going to say petite, but I’m not going to argue with perfect, if that’s the word you really want to use.”

  The compliment buys me another few minutes of kissing, but eventually she pulls away. “Seriously. We have work to do.”

  “Fine.” I release her from my arms and slide my hands back to her knees.

  “When you finish this stupid race of yours, we can take a break. We’ll go somewhere nicer than this.” Mym gestures to the dim control center.

  “Yo
u picked it. I figured this was just your idea of a romantic make-out spot. I think it’s pretty cool.”

  “If this is your idea of romantic, we may have more work to do than I thought.” Mym slides off the table.

  “If you want to go practice some romance in Hawaii or something, I’m all for it.”

  “First things first.” She points to the image of the building on the screen. “Tell me the situation.”

  I recount my attempt to make it up the staircase and describe the guards who accosted me in as much detail as I can remember. Using the grid, she’s able to locate the room we’re trying to get to. She zooms around the room, looking at all the scientists and suddenly freezes on one. “Wait, I know that guy.”

  “The one with the hairy ears?”

  “Yeah. That’s Dr. Franklin. He could be our way in.” She moves to the tackle box and rifles through the various compartments, finally selecting a tiny round device about the size of a dime. She walks away and I follow her down the hallway to a locked metal door. She unlocks it and walks to the center of what I recognize as a jump room. Like the initial classrooms I used in training with Dr. Quickly, this room is empty with the exception of a waist-high anchor stand to allow for a level surface for a jump. Mym foregoes the stand and sets the tiny anchor on the floor. When she straightens up she motions me back to the hall. We close the door and wait.

  “What is that thing?”

  “It’s a magnetic anchor that I can remotely control to attach or detach from things. They come in handy.” Mym records the time into her handheld multi-function device. Unlike my tablet, hers is only the size of a phone.

  When enough time has elapsed, she reenters the jump room and retrieves the anchor, then guides me back to the control room. She draws her pendant chronometer from the front of her shirt and dials in a time. “Just stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Paying Dr. Franklin a house call.”

  The next moment, she’s gone. I study the image of the laboratory, noting the locations of the different machines till I spot the one I want. A moment later, Mym is back.

  She returns to the view of Dr. Franklin walking around the lab. She watches his every move until finally she smiles. “Ah, here we go.” Dr. Franklin has walked into a supply closet of some kind and is rummaging around on the shelf between crates of supplies. Mym is holding a button about the size of an automatic car key and waits till the doctor turns to leave the closet before pressing it. I don’t see anything happen but Mym seems pleased with the results.

  “What did you do?”

  She gestures to the screen and zooms in on the floor where the scientist had been standing. “It’s right . . . there.” The magnetic anchor is now lying on the floor near the leg of the stainless steel shelving. She makes a couple more movements with the button in her hand and the anchor rolls over a few times, hiding it from any passing viewers.

  “That’s awesome. How did you get it on the scientist?”

  “Since I already knew what he was wearing, I broke into his bedroom this morning and clipped it inside his pant leg. He was nice enough to carry it to the 118th floor for us. He snores, in case you were wondering.” She sets the button down and goes back to the control panel. “And here’s where we can get really fancy.”

  She flips a few switches and checks a readout on the display, then moves a dial on the console. The image on the screen starts to move in fast forward. The scientists are bustling around at super speed, having rapid conversations and whizzing about the room.

  “Whoa, what is that? Are you fast forwarding through time?”

  “Yep.” Mym smiles. “Not even the academy can do this, but Dad and Abraham figured out a way to hotwire the metaspace with the TPT. It actually relays it’s own recorded images from the future. Saves the trouble of waiting around to see what happens.”

  I watch with fascination as the sun moves shadows across the desks in the lab and finally people start leaving. We watch until the last person has cleared out of the space. Mym slows the image back to normal speed. “That’s our spot. I’m going to jump forward to that time so I can move the anchor into the open. Don’t move.” She places her hand on the side of the console, dials her chronometer and disappears. I observe the screen and marvel as the little anchor begins to roll itself back into the center of the closet. It sits undisturbed for a few seconds then a brown-haired man in jeans suddenly appears squatting above it, his fingertip pressed to its top.

  Mym reappears in the control room next to me.

  “Hey is that—”

  “Oops.” She smacks a button on the console and the image freezes. “You shouldn’t watch that.” She backs the image up until the image of me disappears and notes the time.

  “That was me in the future?

  “That was us in the future. Or will be soon.”

  “Should we watch more and see what happens?”

  “You wanted to stay paradox free, didn’t you? You think you could watch us do everything we’re going to do and then duplicate it exactly, without overthinking it and screwing it up?”

  “Oh. Right. That would be tough.”

  “Impossible tough. Come on, we’ve got work to do.” Mym leads us back into the jump room and we set our chronometers to the window of time we allowed for ourselves before. When we arrive, the magnetic anchor is sitting on the floor, just where Mym left it. She tells me the time to set and I dial it into my chronometer.

  “We’re going to use the same chronometer?”

  “Yeah, wrist mounted chronometers get a little better contact for this sort of thing. Just get a finger on it.”

  I squat and place my fingertip on the anchor. Mym squats next to me and laces the fingers of her left hand through my right. She pulls her hood back over her head then leans into me and I get a lingering scent of her hair as she activates my chronometer. The jump room vanishes and is replaced by the physics lab closet. Mym points to the anchor. “Take this with you and take it apart later. We need to destroy the evidence.” She stands slowly, still holding my hand, then lets it go as she moves to the door. “Will you recognize this thing when you see it?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Good, let’s make this quick and get out. Remember, I’m not here.” She swings the door open and lets me lead the way. I scan the laboratory and work from memory of the diagrams.

  “It’s this way,” I whisper.

  I work my way to the corner of the room and point out the machine with the odd little ball mounted to the side. Now that I see it in person, it has a green tint to it and I can make out fluid inside. It has two fittings attached to it that resemble quick-disconnects from an air compressor line. Good. It won’t leak all over when I take it off. I get one of the lines off and am working on the second, when I notice Mym has gone oddly rigid. She’s staring at the machine intently, and even though I can barely make out her features under her hood, her body is tense.

  “Ben, what is this?” Her voice quivers.

  I pause with my hands still on the fitting. “The description called it a gravitan stabilizer.”

  “Gravitan? You’re sure it said gravitan?” She scans the room and starts reading the labels on other machines, moving between them and running her gloved fingertips over their controls.

  “Yeah. You know what they are?”

  “Shh. Get it off there and let’s go.” She gestures toward the door. I quickly remove the second fitting and stuff the gravitan stabilizer into my bag. It’s heavier than I expected. I adjust the strap on my shoulder and lead the way out the door. I can see a dull glow of Mym’s MFD through her pocket as she does something to summon the elevator. Instead of going down, once we’re in, the elevator starts to climb. When we reach the top floor, she guides me through a doorway onto the roof. I shiver in the chill of the sudden blast of air. The stars are out, but occasional wisps of cloud are blackening them in intervals as they flee in the wind.

  “There shou
ldn’t be any audio up here. We can talk.”

  I nod and wrap my arms across my chest. “So what happened down there? You know what this thing is? The gravitan stabilizer?”

  “Gravitans are what my dad was searching for. The naturally occurring gravitite particles.” The rush of the wind almost carries her words away.

  “What he and Abe were trying to find in the river. That’s good then, right? This must mean he succeeds, doesn’t it?” I avert my eyes from her when I realize I’ve been staring. If there are cameras up here, I ought to be pretending she’s not here.

  Mym crosses her arms. The motion is idle, her mind clearly somewhere else.

  “Dad wouldn’t have given his research to the Academy of Temporal Sciences. They’ve always wanted his original research but he didn’t trust them with it. He said there are too many variables. Too many people he thought were unethical.”

  “So maybe someone else did the same research, or maybe made a deal with him later after we last saw him? He does have some kind of relationship with the Academy, right? They all seem to know about him.”

  “He’s done talks here via telecommunications links. He did a debate once, early in his career, but some of the professors he debated didn’t take well to losing. One in particular. He made enemies. I can’t see him ever making a deal with them for this. This was his dream. Gravitans are the evidence that he has always searched for.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “That time travel was natural? That he didn’t necessarily cause the rifts in the universe when he synthesized the gravitite particles.”

  “He worried he damaged the universe?”

  Mym looks up at me and I can see the concern in her face. “Wouldn’t you? He turned the laws of physics on their head, just because he theorized that the particle could exist. But when he made it, it caused paradoxes and alternate timestreams and God knows how many realities. Some time travelers have used his research to commit atrocities and change the whole order of the universe. How could he not feel responsible for that?”

  “But if the gravitans already existed, then he didn’t necessarily cause the rifts, he just discovered them?”