Eternity's Echo

by H. C. Southwark

Ellie did not say anything, but moved with them to the couch Shawn had occupied. Jude startled at the look of the man’s body on the ground, and moved around it to observe from all angles. It did look oddly artificial, Ellie thought, as she and Cookie sat.

  “Weird,” Jude said, nudging the body with his foot.

  Then he turned worried. “Hey, you two. When you remove people’s souls, where do they go? You mentioned something about upstairs?”

  “They go to a holding room,” said Cookie. “They will be processed later and sent to their respective afterlives. Don’t worry, I’m sure your mom’s okay.”

  “But she’s already been reaped, or whatever,” Jude said. “If we stop the world from ending, will those reaped in this be returned to their bodies?”

  I have no idea, the words were on Ellie’s tongue, but she held back. Jude’s words—How would you like if someone reaped your parents?—came back to her.

  She found herself saying, “Before, there was a file system. Everyone’s death appeared in a file assigned to reapers. We collect people, we don’t kill them. So I think your mom probably had a file, same as everyone. The world ending’s a special circumstance—I think they’ll be put back in their bodies. I mean, less work that way.”

  She was just babbling. There was no concrete evidence for such a conclusion—if anything, it was possible that the mentors would regard putting the souls back as more work, or perhaps returning a soul was impossible. Ellie did not know.

  But Jude did not know that she did not know. He looked relieved.

  Sitting beside her, Ellie could see Cookie staring at her, and she turned to give the other reaper a confused look. As Jude returned to poking the body, she whispered, “What?”

  “It’s just weird, is all,” said Cookie, softly. “To see you so optimistic.”

  Ellie opened her mouth, did not have anything to say, shut it. She shrugged.

  Cookie’s grin was back. That was progress, at least.

  A thunking sound, down the hall where they had first met Jude. Shawn’s voice: “Well, that was a bust.” And a pause—“Wait. Where are you guys?”

  “Down here,” Jude called, and there was the clink-thunk of the ball-and-chain as Shawn left the stacks and approached. His face looked ready for a fight, but his shoulders were hunched, the flight half of the fight-or-flight response. Although he wouldn’t get very far with that ball-and-chain weighing him down.

  “Well?” said Jude. “Where’s this rulebook?”

  “I tried,” Shawn said. There was just a hint of a whine in his voice. “But it was weird. I couldn’t get close. It was like some kind of bad dream where you can’t move.”

  He turned to Ellie. “If this is what you mean by time travel, you’re crazy. I had some serious claustrophobia even in the open air. Nobody could do that for long.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Cookie. “What are you saying?”

  Shawn worked his mouth, said, “I can’t describe it any better.”

  Ellie broke in. “Time travel doesn’t always do that. I think you were in an observing the observer situation.” Every head swiveled to her, and she felt defensiveness rise up.

  “Look, I don’t know much about it, okay? Just that when you’re dead, you can’t see or meet your dead self. I think it has to do with no time loops. Niles told me that ‘You can’t observe the observer’—that’s how he described it.”

  “Oh, snap,” Jude said. “That sounds like... that almost sounds like something from quantum physics. Like, once removed from the double slit experiment.”

  “The what?” said Cookie.

  “The double slit experiment,” said Jude. “Basically, scientists wanted to know, is light a wave or a particle? So they sent beams of light through slits in paper to test what pattern appeared on the wall. Waves and particles would create different patterns. Long story short, light is both a wave and a particle. But the difference between the two, is whether or not the light is being observed. It’s the Schrodinger Cat.”

  The reapers stared at him. Ellie found vague memories of this, but not complete ones.

  “Schrodinger’s Cat,” Jude said. He looked sheepish. “It’s a thought experiment?”

  Cookie sighed. “Okay. Explain that one, too.”

  “Let’s say you’ve got a cat in a box. In the box is a device that when you press a button, has a 50/50 chance of releasing poison that would kill the cat. You press the button. Is the cat alive or dead?”

  “Depends whether the poison was released, or not,” Cookie said. “Also, poor kitty.”

  “That’s a logical response,” said Jude. “But not in this case. This is about what the quantum realm is like. In normal reality, yeah, the cat has to be one or the other. But in the quantum realm, unless the cat has been observed, it is both possibilities at once. In other words, the cat is both alive and dead, until you open the box. Then you force the quantum cat to resolve into one or the other. Observation determines reality.”

  “Right,” said Shawn, sounding entirely unconvinced of everything. “Tell me what it means in plain English.”

  Before Jude could bring up another confusing experiment, Ellie broke in, “I think it’s the same as the ‘no changing the past’ principle. When the past is done, you can’t alter it. So, in the past, someone was in a room and he didn’t see you. So when you went back, you couldn’t be seen, ‘cause that would change the past.”

  “Well, that I get,” said Cookie. She turned to Shawn. “What specifically happened?”

  “Like I said,” said Shawn, “I got up there, but I appeared in a weird spot. Behind a potted plant. I could see Susan between the leaves. But then when I tried to go around the plant, I couldn’t move. Like I was stuck. A force field or something.”

  Understanding dawned on Ellie. “Susan. She was there. You couldn’t interact with her because she counted as an observer.”

  Shawn threw up his hands. “Well, then we’re screwed! Susan is always up there.”

  Cookie looked contemplative. “I wonder if one reason she’s up there is to stop things like this. I imagine that they don’t want the rulebook to be stolen.”

  Shawn kicked out with his chained leg—the ball rolled a little forward, as the links clinked and clanged with his frustration. “Whatever—the plan is a bust!”

  But the sound of clinking filtered through Ellie’s consciousness. She said, “Wait.”

  Lifting a hand to point at Shawn’s ball-and-chain, she asked, “When did you get that?”

  “Just before the announcement about the world ending,” Shawn said.

  “And what time in the past did you go back to get the rulebook?”

  “Like a week ago,” Shawn said.

  “Oh,” said Jude, who had clearly caught on.

  Cookie realized, too, though she took a moment longer. “Yeah,” she said. “Oops.”

  “What?” said Shawn, crossly.

  “The ball-and-chain,” said Ellie. “It marks you as your future self. If Susan saw it on you a week ago, it would tell her about the future you, before the future you happened.”

  “And you know what Susan is like,” added Cookie. “She would ask where you got it and what happened. And then when your old self got back up there, she would mention it to him. But your old self doesn’t know about it because it hasn’t happened yet.”

  “So it would create a time loop,” said Jude, thoughtfully.

  “Information passed from the new self to the old self,” Ellie said.

  Shawn was looking at them from one to the other, and sighed in defeat. “So someone else has to go up there and get it. If wWe can get it. Volunteers?”

  Cookie reached for her compass, but Ellie felt a dawning horror and said, “Wait.”

  “What?” asked Cookie, and at the same time Shawn said, “What now?”

  “Think about what you just said,” Ellie said. “You said, ‘go up there and get it.’ As if we should grab the
book and bring it here. But think. If we tried to do that, would we succeed? We know the book remained up there because it was there for Susan to read our demolition orders from it after the announcement.”

  “So we just return it, after we read it,” said Shawn. “Big deal.”

  But Cookie also caught on. “But what if anything could stop us, even hypothetically?”

  “Then maybe it won’t be possible to grab the book,” Ellie finished.

  “You guys have to read it while keeping it in place,” Jude mused. “Just in case.”

  “Tag team,” said Cookie. “Someone looks out for Susan, the other reads the book. That also might not work, but it seems better than taking the book and having to return it.”

  “Who reads fastest?” Shawn asked, peering between Ellie and Cookie.

  Snorting, Ellie gestured to Cookie, who raised her hand.

  “I’m the lookout, then,” said Ellie.

  Cookie nodded. “When’s a time when neither of us were upstairs?”

  “The layover,” said Ellie. “I had a six hour layover just before time stopped, remember? Murder mystery?”

  “Right,” said Cookie. “And I had my little old lady.”

  They turned the dials of their reaper’s tools, but then Cookie said, “Wait.”

  Ellie glanced up at her, questioning, as she said, “You made that emergency call for Niles, remember? When did you make that? Wouldn’t it be weird for you to make a call on Earth when we’re up there upstairs?”

  “Right,” said Ellie, paging back in her mind. “So... previous guy before the layover was an environmentalist. I had a three hour wait for him. Didn’t go upstairs or anything.”

  “I was with an old guy who had a memory about a grizzly bear,” said Cookie. “It was a long session. Maybe I wouldn’t even be in the same time as you right then.”

  “Wait,” said Jude. “Why wouldn’t you be in the same time as her? Even if you were time traveling, don’t you just pop in and out of time? Like, it’s noon, you pop back two hours, and then when you pop back to the present it’s noon and one second later?”

  “No,” said Cookie. “Weighting of the heart sessions take the same time as if you were in the present. So if it’s noon, and I go back in time with my assignment, we spend three hours in the past, when I get back to the present it’s three P.M.”

  “That literally makes no sense,” said Jude. “That makes everything more confusing.”

  “Time is stopped, and yet we’re moving and talking,” said Ellie. “I think weird is normal.”

  “But it does mean we’re on a time limit, guys,” said Shawn, impatient. “The stars start falling sometime soon. No matter whether we’re in the past or present, we only have until they hit the ground to fix everything.”

  He’s right, Ellie thought, with dawning horror. She glanced at Cookie, who nodded.

  They spun their dials, clicked the knobs.

  * * *

  In the end, the problem must have been Shawn’s ball-and-chain.

  Or perhaps Shawn himself. Some other factor they were not considering.

  But Ellie and Cookie encountered no resistance as they appeared upstairs, in the usual spot for reapers, which was where the door of the lobby would be—and there was a door behind them, that led to earth, but did not open. They walked down the hall to Susan’s desk, and found Susan busy with John, who had brought a soul.

  “Good distraction,” whispered Cookie, but Ellie paused, slightly—

  For the soul was standing in front of Heaven’s gate.

  Normally souls were hesitant, stopping short at their respective doors, afraid. Ellie did not normally have people go to Heaven, but she was always fascinated when they did, because they did not look the same. Instead, they leaned toward the door, not away.

  This soul was no exception. Susan and John were talking to him, and he was already like a dog on a leash, pulled as far forward to the doorway as he could. The moment they let him go, he was scrambling through, limbs a flurry of movement.

  Ellie nodded to John, who passed by on his walk to the Earth’s door, his squinty eye looking as though he was suspicious of her. But that was just the way John looked.

  Susan came bustling up behind, and Ellie nudged Cookie on the shoulder before Susan got too close, so Cookie could back away from behind the desk and stand next to her. This will work, Ellie thought—if it was just me, I’d look suspicious. But nobody suspects Cookie of anything because Cookie is never up to anything shady.

  A brief moment of chitchat. Cookie handled everything. Ellie just smiled a bit and nodded, then they moved to the doorway. Ellie felt her heartbeat in rapid tempo, her mind incredulous: Is this going to be that easy? We got it just like that?

  Then they clicked their knobs and were back in the library, in the present.

  Cookie looked one moment away from laughing. She said, “You won’t believe this.”

  Chapter Sixteen: The Navel of the World.

  “Wait,” said Shawn, eyebrows at his hairline. “So the location code is literally 0,0,0?”

  “That’s what it said,” Cookie replied. “It read, ‘Upon hearing the chime, officials in Jerusalem Headquarters must check the Spindle of Necessity at location 0,0,0.’”

  She paused, then blurted: “And the book—it was handwritten. Not mass produced.” Cookie’s grin was back. Ellie supposed reading the rulebook had cheered her.

  “I’m surprised a reaper hasn’t shown up there just as a joke,” said Ellie. “Some idiot saying, Haha, I’ll put in all zeroes and see what happens. It’s like setting your passwords to ‘password.’ Eventually someone will break in just by accident.”

  “Maybe someone has,” Cookie said. “We just didn’t hear about it. And as for the obvious code, I mean, why should they need to stop people from finding this Spindle thing?”

  “Because this Spindle of Necessity thing can be broken, obviously,” said Ellie. “And because it could stop time if it does. Unless they wanted the world to end?”

  “You both are assuming that there’s someone in charge assigning codes,” said Jude.

  The three reapers looked at him, considering. Jude held up his hands, defensively.

  “It’s just weird. How are there codes for reapers in the first place? You have these tools; the watch and compass were invented less than a thousand years ago. But humans have been living and dying way before that, and there must’ve been reapers then, too. They couldn’t have had codes or watches. So how come you guys have them?”

  Ellie considered, shrugged. “Progress?”

  “There aren’t usually reapers older than a couple hundred years,” mused Cookie. “But I always assumed that was because this is America and the country isn’t that old.”

  “Josephina was Puebloan,” Shawn piped up. “She lived at Mesa Verde.”

  Cookie’s surprise was audible. “You mean, living-on-a-mountain, Anasazi?”

  “Yeah,” said Shawn. “But they don’t like the word Anasazi, apparently. I dunno why.”

  “So this woman could be like a thousand years old?” Jude asked. “Josephina... that’s a Spanish name, not a native name. Did she change her name?”

  “I dunno, she didn’t say,” said Shawn, shifting his weight and making the chains clink.

  “Niles,” muttered Ellie. “I think he’s older. Don’t you guys notice the way the other mentors refer to him all the time? They expect him to know things even when they don’t. Like he’s experienced. But if he’s really old, he couldn’t have the name Niles Hepburn. That name sounds like an actor from the twenties or something.”

  “Niles?” said Jude. “Like, the river?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ellie. “I mean, Egypt is in Africa, right? So he can’t be from there.”

  “Plus, how would an Ancient Egyptian end up in Colorado Springs?” Cookie said.

  “Right,” said Ellie, losing interest in the conversation. It was
not as though this was all that important right now. She lifted her pocket-watch. “Enough debating names. Everybody ready?”

  She thought they would say yes, but Shawn of all people was hesitant.

  They decided not to go directly to 0,0,0—on account that they had no idea where this place was. Shawn in particular thought they might end up somewhere bad. Look at the height, he said, it’s zero. Anybody seen a zero height before?

  “No,” Cookie had answered, “but Colorado Springs is a mile above sea level.”

  “That’s just it,” Shawn argued. “We could be going below sea level.”

  “You guys realize that our reaper’s tools already adjust for things like this, right?” said Ellie. “I mean, we never appear inside a wall or tree.” As she spoke, she realized this must be more of what Cookie had been talking about—equalization. The reaper’s tools were not exact, but rather they delivered results that were close enough.

  In the end, they agreed upon some coordinates offset from absolute zero. Cookie took Jude by the sleeve, and they were off.

  * * *

  The first thing Ellie noticed was that it was night. Disoriented, she held still and waited for her eyes to acclimate. There was a half-moon out, which gave barely any light to see, and a few spare streetlamps, but in odd places, irregular intervals.

  When her sight cleared, Ellie saw they were standing in the middle of a cobblestone street, surrounded by buildings far older than anything she knew. Their shapes were odd, jammed and cramped, like every square foot of space was being put to use, sharing walls, jagged and fitting together like the teeth of puzzles.

  “Not in Kansas anymore,” Ellie said, and Jude let out an amused snort.

  “This is old world,” said Cookie, hushed. “Are we in Europe?”

  “Why would the middle of the world be in Europe?” asked Shawn. “0,0,0?”

  “The world is a sphere,” Jude corrected. “The middle is underground.”

  “All right, Mr. Literal,” said Ellie. “Where are we?”

  Jude did not have any answer, but as they were facing an archway Ellie could see writing above, faint in the darkness, and she squinted to read: HOLY SEPULCHRE.