“Okay,” Lincoln said, “Three empty bags, five people, and one drone. Choose your partner.” He took Skyra’s hand and pulled her to his side. “I’ve got mine.”
“Oooooh, damn, you guys,” Jazzlyn said. “Our boss found himself a girlfriend.”
Derek and Virgil looked at their feet, obviously not feeling like joking at this moment. Virgil stepped closer to Jazzlyn. “I’ll be with you. I mean, if you don’t mind.”
She smiled. “I’d be honored, good sir.”
“Well, shit,” Derek said. He stepped over and picked up the dormant drone. “Let’s get this over with. I’m freaking starving.”
Within two minutes, Lincoln had zipped Derek and Ripple into one bag and Jazzlyn and Virgil into the other. Skyra had watched the process without speaking.
He pointed to the last bag. “This one’s ours. Are you ready?”
“I do not understand.”
“Do you trust me?”
She looked at him without answering.
“Okay, I know this seems strange, but I need for you to trust me. We will get inside this bag together, then the T3 will send us to the place I am from.”
Again, she looked at him without speaking.
He sighed. “Just get inside with me, okay?” He sat down in the bag and extended a hand to her.
She took it and squeezed so hard that he winced. Was she frightened? Excited? Angry? He had no way of knowing. She sat beside him. He pulled the zipper up to their waists then reclined onto his back. She positioned herself beside him, and he zipped the bag shut.
“This won’t take long,” he said as he tapped his watch, working through the menus until the green button appeared, labeled No Time Like the Present. He turned to Skyra. She was barely visible in the darkness of the bag, but he could see that she was watching his face. “Are you ready?”
“I do not understand,” she said again. This time her voice wavered with what he thought might be fear—from this woman who had been fearless. She moved closer, forcing him to put his arm around her. As he pushed his hand around behind her back, he realized she still had two khuls in her sling. She put her arm across his chest.
Lincoln had to pull her closer to reach his watch with his other hand. He stared at the button, trying to control his rapid breathing. After hovering his finger over the screen for a moment, he tapped.
19
Arizona
47,659 years later - Day 1
Skyra felt the ground give way, and for an instant she was falling. She landed on something hard, which drove the two khuls in her sling painfully into her shoulder blade. Lincoln grunted in her ear with the impact.
Skyra raised her head. She and Lincoln were on the ground but were no longer inside the bag. They were in a different place. The jagged rocks were gone. The river was gone. Instead of scattered scrub trees, she was now looking at taller trees with spreading trunks and thin, pale leaves. Standing tall among the trees were strange posts with no leaves at all, but the posts were covered in spines, like tall, green hedgehogs.
The sun was almost directly above, but she could barely see it through a layer of brown haze that seemed to spread from one end of the sky to the other. Skyra sniffed the air and coughed. The air was tainted with some kind of smoke—not pleasant like the smoke from a campfire, but foul like burning hair.
Derek’s voice broke the silence. “Where are we? Where’s the lab?”
Skyra pulled away from Lincoln and sat up. Lincoln’s tribemates were all here, Ripple was here, even the strange boulder was here. She ran her hand over the ground at her side and scooped up a handful of dirt. It was a strange mixture of sand, black soil, and bits of dead leaves.
“Ow,” Jazzlyn said. “Damn. They’re biting!” She and Virgil were squirming and slapping their legs. They jumped to their feet, still brushing away whatever was crawling under the blue skins covering their bodies. They moved away from the spot and slapped the last of the creatures. “Fire ants,” Jazzlyn said. “Lincoln, I think we’ve had a placement error. I’ve never seen fire ants near the lab, and the vegetation here is wrong. I’m not sure we’re even in Arizona.”
Lincoln was now sitting up beside Skyra, scanning the ground as if looking for more ants. “I wish it was only a placement error, but I think we all know better.”
“No!” Derek said, getting to his feet. “This is all wrong. There’s nothing here!”
Skyra felt sick, and she put her hands on her belly. She hadn’t eaten much in the last few days, but her stomach was churning like it wanted to force out its contents. She swallowed, trying to make the feeling go away. “Lincoln, I don’t understand. How can we be in this place? We did not walk here.” The feeling in her belly surged again, and this time she couldn’t stop it. She lunged to the side and retched. Nothing came up from her empty belly but sour-tasting fluid. She retched again, her fingers digging into the dirt that was so different from the dirt she had always known.
Lincoln put a hand on her back. He and the others remained silent until her belly finally decided it had nothing to give up. She got to her feet, feeling unsteady, and Lincoln got up beside her.
“The T3 sent us here, Skyra,” he said. “That’s what the T3 does. It sends people and things to a different place—and to a different time, if that makes any sense at all. The T3 has sent us to the place I am from.”
She looked out at the strange landscape. “This is the place you are from?”
He sighed. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it is. It just looks very different now.”
She wiped the sour fluid from her chin. “I don’t understand.”
Virgil said, “This is disappointing, but it shouldn’t be surprising. We all suspected this would happen. We knew Lincoln’s Temporal Bridge Theorem was correct—you can’t jump back in time without creating a new timeline.”
“There’s nothing here!” Derek shouted in his booming voice. He pointed to the brown sky. “Except smog. Why is there even smog here? There are no signs of humans—no power lines, no buildings, no roads, none of that shit.”
“Those things may very well exist here,” Jazzlyn said. “Remember, we’re on Lincoln’s property. There could be a city just beyond the horizon.”
Virgil said, “This place has been in its own timeline for forty-seven thousand years. You guys know this. We volunteered for the jump knowing we were giving up our lives for whatever cause the sacrifice was supposed to represent.” He looked at Derek. “Why are you so surprised?”
For a few breaths, Derek looked as if he wanted to attack someone. He shook his head. “I was hoping for the best, dammit.”
“I warned you not to do this, and you did not heed my advice.”
Skyra looked over at Ripple. The creature’s legs were emerging from its shell. It kicked several times before rolling first to its belly then to its feet.
“I told you to power down,” Lincoln said. “I didn’t say anything about setting an auto-reboot.”
Ripple turned to face Lincoln. “I see that we are back in Arizona, and I assume we have jumped back to your own time. In doing so, you have negated my plan.”
Derek said, “What plan?”
“It’s a long, screwed-up story,” Lincoln said.
Ripple went on. “My plan could have resulted in a global civilization that at this current point in time would have been most impressive. The plan was rather brilliant. Now, in this current setting, the cultural, climatic, and species diversity parameters are almost certainly not suitable for producing the desired civilization, even in the future. You squandered the opportunity due to your misguided desire to return to the comforts of your previous timeline. Of course, that world does not exist in this timeline, does it?”
Everyone remained silent for several long breaths.
“I apologize for such an outburst,” Ripple said. “My disappointment must have outweighed my amicability coding.”
“What the hell kind of drone is that thing?” Derek asked.
“That�
��s a good question,” Lincoln said. He stepped over and kneeled in front of Ripple. “There’s something I need to know, and I need a straight answer.”
“I agree to be forthcoming,” Ripple said.
Skyra was tired of listening to words she did not know, so she turned her back on Ripple and the bolups to gaze at the strange landscape. The trees and shrubs here were not like any she had seen before.
She moved away from the others to take a closer look at one of the tall, prickly posts. It was some kind of tree, she was sure of that, but it had no leaves. Its green trunk was thicker than Skyra’s body and even taller than the munopo trees that grew beside the Yagua river.
She carefully touched the tips of several of the spines covering the tree’s surface. The spines were stiff and very sharp.
A movement on the tree’s trunk caught her eye. It was a brown lizard, the length of Skyra’s hand. The creature was somehow crawling across the spines without stabbing its own feet or belly. The lizard jerked its head up and down several times as it stared at her. Skyra shot her hand out to grab the creature but only managed to puncture two of her fingers as it scuttled out of reach. She put her fingers in her mouth one at a time, sucking the droplets of blood.
“You are either very smart or very stupid to live among those spines,” she said to the lizard, speaking in the Una-Loto language. She found a fist-sized rock and threw it at the lizard, intending to knock it from the tree. Again, the lizard scuttled to the side before getting hit. “You do not easily give up your meat and blood for my hungry belly,” she said then decided the small creature was not worth the effort.
She moved away from the spiny tree to where the ground began to slope downward toward a dry river bed stretching into the distance between low hills. Even though the brown haze partially blocked the sun’s light, the plants here were thriving. The hillsides were green—even greener than the Kapolsek foothills during the first days of the wet, warm season. At several spots on the dry river bed, swarms of yellow butterflies flittered, alighting briefly on the sand then spiraling upward again as if they could not decide what they wanted to do.
The air smelled strange, but the sun’s light penetrated the haze enough to warm Skyra’s skin. If Lincoln’s words were true—if she need not fear being killed by predators or taken by bolup tribes—then Skyra was sure she was going to like this place. She didn’t understand how she got here, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was here, and that Lincoln was here with her.
Lincoln stared at Ripple. Every time he thought he was starting to understand the drone, Ripple surprised him all over again. Maddy’s general appearance had been similar to Ripple’s, but apparently that’s where the similarity ended. “How did your remains—your other self—how did it end up in the same timeline it had jumped from?” he asked the drone. “That defies the Temporal Bridge Theorem, and it defies logic.”
Ripple’s red LEDs pulsed twice. “Lincoln, your Temporal Bridge Theorem is not flawed. It is perfect.”
“Then why did you tell me a few days ago that the theorem was flawed?”
“I was not being honest with you. I thought if I could convince you it was within your power to prevent the demise of your original civilization, you would join me in trying to save Skyra and Veenah. After all, you jumped to the past with the intention of saving your own civilization. I needed to convince you it was actually possible.”
Lincoln inhaled deeply and let it out slowly. “So, if my theorem is perfect, how did your remains end up in the same timeline? That should not have been possible.”
“You constantly underestimate your own abilities, Lincoln. You and Skyra are far more extraordinary than either of you know.”
“You’re not answering the question.”
Ripple waited a few seconds before speaking. “We know jumping back in time creates a new timeline. Your theorem proves that, and empirical evidence confirms it. By its very nature, the process of jumping back in time is intricately tied to the concept of jumping between universes. They are two sides of the same coin, as you are fond of saying. You, Lincoln, knew this, and you figured out a way to give your drones the ability to jump between existing universes.”
Lincoln’s gut tightened to the point where he actually winced. “I did what?”
“You should not be so surprised. It was a logical connection. Now, to answer your question. You sent me back in time to gather environmental data, just as you had done with hundreds of other drones. I carried out my duty, and the portal closed. As I have said, I eventually befriended Skyra and determined she was genetically extraordinary. That is when I devised my plan. I must have determined at some point that Skyra’s life was in jeopardy, and I created a message that survived through the millennia—the very message to which you responded.”
Ripple paused and turned slightly as if looking beyond Lincoln. Lincoln turned and saw that Skyra had wandered off and was examining a massive saguaro-like cactus.
“We do not know what dangers Skyra may encounter in this place,” Ripple said. “Perhaps she should not explore on her own.”
Lincoln turned back to Ripple. “Skyra can take care of herself. Keep talking.”
The drone shifted again. “You already know that before powering down for the last time, I set my clock to activate my location beacon on a specific date, but here is the portion of my story you may find most interesting. I set my clock to activate a second function as well. Just before activating my location beacon, I activated my u-jump module, as you liked to call it. This instantaneously transferred me and most of Skyra’s remains between timelines, back to the timeline I had originally jumped from. Back to your own timeline, Lincoln.”
Lincoln sat back on his heels, frowning.
“Wait,” Virgil said. “Are you saying you could jump back to our original universe right now?”
Ripple turned to face him. “Yes, if I wanted to do that.”
Virgil clapped his hands together once. “And you can take us with you?”
“I could take a portion of you with me, but that would likely kill you. The process transfers matter within a sixty-four-centimeter radius of my u-jump module. Your body would not fit within that space.”
“Goddammit!” Derek grunted, rubbing his forehead in frustration.
“That’s why Skyra’s lower leg bones were never found,” Lincoln said.
“Yes, that makes sense,” Ripple said. “Logically, I would have positioned myself so Skyra’s skull and the femur on which I etched the message would be within the u-jump module’s effective radius. It was not possible to transfer her entire body.”
“Why would I ever equip drones with something like this u-jump module? What’s the point?”
“You designed the module in case one of your drones were to discover something so important that it would need to be communicated back to you after the portal had already closed. It appears that is exactly what I have done.”
“So, you can’t transfer us to our own timeline,” Jazzlyn said. “We’re stuck here?”
Ripple turned toward Jazzlyn. “You are not stuck here if you still have the equipment for making another jump. If so, I recommend jumping back to Skyra’s time.”
“I’m not going back there,” Derek said.
“Hell, neither am I,” Jazzlyn added.
“It matters little whether you do or do not. What matters is that Lincoln and Skyra jump back to Skyra’s time. Then my original plan may still come to fruition.”
Lincoln got to his feet. He was tired of feeling overwhelmed by mind-blowing revelations. He looked around at the surrounding landscape. Skyra was now nowhere to be seen, which added to his jangled nerves—he had grown accustomed to being near her during the last several days. He sighed and turned back to his team. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay? We don’t know anything about where we are now. It seems obvious we can never return to our home timeline, and we’re only capable of two more jumps. Before we make any decisions, we sh
ould at least check this place out beyond what we can see from here. Can we all agree on that?”
The others nodded, but they didn’t look happy.
Skyra’s mind was made up—she definitely liked the landscape of this new place. She could even get used to the strange smell. The land was made up of one rolling hill after another, but the hills were hardly noticeable because they were covered with brush and trees, including the green, spiny trees Lincoln had called cactuses, as well as trees with white, spreading trunks.
Lincoln’s tribemates had gone in another direction to explore the land. Skyra had told Ripple to stay behind at the T3. She and Lincoln had walked over three hills toward where the sun would set at the end of the day. They had not seen any large animals, only small birds and lizards. Skyra needed to fill her belly with water, but they had only come across dry river beds. She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like the strange smell was becoming stronger as they walked farther from the T3.
“I like this place, Lincoln,” she said as they came to a low area between hills. “It is not like the lands I have seen.”
He looked back the way they had come. “Yeah. I recognize certain things about it, but it’s so different now.”
“Is this the place where we will not be afraid of predators, and where I will not have to kill men who come to take me?”
He twisted his mouth to one side. “I honestly don’t know yet. Um, I was thinking about that. I owe you an apology.”
“What is apology?”
“It’s when someone says I’m sorry. I know you think saying I’m sorry doesn’t make sense, but I really need to apologize. I told you I’d take you to the place I am from, but this place is very different from where I came from. It’s the same location, but it’s different now.”
She pulled several tiny leaves from a low bush beside her, crushed them between her fingers, then smelled the juices. The leaves smelled sweet, reminding her of the grapes that grew beside streams at the base of the Kapolsek mountains. “Maybe different is not bad. I like this place.”
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