by Edward Aubry
At one point in our quest, I asked Athena if the AIs in our module implants were vulnerable to the virus.
“The modules are loyal,” was all she said. Creepy, but sufficiently reassuring.
We returned to 2146, ragged and exhausted. I placed myself back in the Hawaiian hotel, minutes after my departure, because I didn’t want Helen to fly home alone.
“Oh my God! Stingrays!” was her greeting, unprompted. I must have looked severely time lagged, but I didn’t get the chance to ask her, because that’s when the bombs started falling.
e didn’t actually see the bombs, which was a pretty good deal for us considering how many people were blinded that day. But we heard them. And even at more than two hundred kilometers away, we felt rumblings of the shockwave. We found out later that day that Oahu had been completely destroyed. Ground Zero was at Pearl Harbor.
We stayed at the hotel as news trickled in. The US and the EU were both decimated, and retaliation against Korea had been swift but truncated. They hit us early enough to knock out most of our defenses. There was talk of a ground invasion, but with Korea currently occupying more than sixty percent of the Asian mainland, that was more ground than the combined militaries would be able to cover any time soon.
“Is this supposed to happen?” asked Helen quietly, as we sat huddled in the lobby with hundreds of other tourists in front of a bank of screens.
“No,” I said. “The real Korea is much smaller than that.”
Athena flashed in that evening.
“Have you had any time to rest?” I asked.
“Two days,” she said bitterly. Two days more than I got, but I didn’t dare point that out, considering this was all still arguably my fault.
hat one took eleven months to fix, and it cost a great deal more than the careers of a few AI engineers. Giant Korea was the dead giveaway, and we started with their history over the previous half century. A politically and economically weakened Russia had ceded several of its westernmost oblasts and krais to North Korea over the course of twenty years and five wars, leaving the peninsular territory an exclave of the newly expanded nation. An alliance was formed with Mongolia, chiefly preemptive on their part.
Shortly thereafter, a conveniently timed, absurdly successful Chinese revolution was launched. Rather than replace the previous oppressive regime with a democracy, as had been the hope of the rest of the developed world for centuries, the new government merged with North Korea, having received substantial aid from them during the civil war. When they finally rolled unopposed into South Korea, it was almost entirely symbolic.
Athena and I infiltrated five governments, with a mixture of conventional lobbying and shameless bribery. Over the course of eighteen years for everyone else, we slowly gathered hundreds of politicians and put them in our pockets. Meanwhile, we were also staging various insurrections and border wars with two separate mercenary armies. At one point we even had them fighting each other.
And of course, we staged the assassinations of four consecutive North Korean heads of state.
The net result of all of this was that by 2143, the entire Korean peninsula was a fully integrated part of The Peoples Republic of China. Not an ideal solution for anyone in the world, but given a choice between an Asia that was a unified isolationist dictatorship, or an unspeakably powerful mad dog, we chose the lesser, by far, of the two evils.
We saved billions of lives, and ended hundreds of thousands.
When I returned to the hotel once more, after nearly a subjective year, I collapsed into Helen’s arms, and sobbed into her shoulder for what must have been hours.
For much of that time, I heard her softly saying, “Shhhh. Stingrays.”
e made it home from our amazing vacation, quite unrested. Helen returned to work, but only stayed for one more week before resigning without notice. I did not ask her reasons for doing so, and it was never a conversation.
My work on the standing wave became obsessive. At any moment, I could be yanked away from it for months, so every minute advance was a monumental victory. Helen stayed home with me most days, and tried to get me out of the house at least four times a week. Sometimes she succeeded, most times she did not.
This went on for all of 2147, and into 2148. During that time, Athena and I were confronted with—and successfully corrected—three more horrific end-of-world scenarios. Each one was as bleak as the one before, and each one took a very long time to restore. Over the course of that year of Helen’s life, I aged four.
Every time I disappeared from the house to save the world, I returned that same day. Helen had only my word and rapidly changing appearance to verify that I had been gone as long as I had. And every time, her world went from being pleasantly domestic to some slightly altered version of pleasantly domestic, while I dealt with crisis after crisis.
One evening over dinner, she finally broached a topic that came as no real surprise to me.
“I think you should consider seeing someone for your depression.”
“I am seeing someone for that,” I said. “I’m seeing you.”
She returned my weak smile. “You know what I mean.”
“I tried that once,” I said. “When I was in college. It didn’t work out so well.”
“What happened?”
I shrugged, had another bite of potato.
“What do you think? I tried to talk about what was really happening, and the next time I showed up for an appointment, I had never been a patient there. Probably just as well. I think if I ever had the chance to fully open up to a shrink, I’d end up committed as delusional.”
I waited for a response, either supportive or flippant. And waited some more.
“You think I’m crazy,” I said calmly.
“I didn’t say that.” She was looking at her food.
“How long have we known each other?”
That made her look at me.
“Stingrays,” she said solidly. “Nigel, I believe you really are a time traveler, and that you really do go away for days, sometimes months when it’s only been minutes for me.” She paused.
“Am I waiting for a ‘but’?” I asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever had to do that before. You are the straightest shooter I’ve ever known, Helen. Don’t sugarcoat this.”
“It’s hard,” she said.
“It must be pretty bad, then.”
She gripped the edge of the table with both hands to steady herself.
“Where do you go?” she asked.
That was unexpected. “What do you mean?”
“When you disappear. Where do you go?”
I scratched my head.
“It varies. I go wherever I need to, and whenever I need to, to make things right. Some of the details would bore you. Some of them would upset you. Do you really want to know?”
She looked down. Said nothing.
“Oh,” I said. “Wow. You think I’m not really saving the world. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Still looking down, she shrugged.
I came around to her side of the table and crouched down next to her.
“Hey. It’s okay. We can talk about this.”
She looked away.
“I don’t know how.”
“Let me help, then. You’re afraid that when I time travel, I come back with stories that aren’t really true. That maybe I’m just making them up to seem dangerous and exciting, or maybe I’m actually crazy and think I’m fighting monsters, when I’m really just at the zoo or something. Am I close?”
“Kind of,” she admitted. “It’s just hard. You go from having lunch to looking like you’ve been through hell in the blink of an eye, with these stories about the zombie apocalypse or whatever, and I have to nod and support you, and I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, or just enabling an illness.”
“It’s never been zombies,” I said softly.
She whirled on me, covered in tears.
“Oh, God, Nigel!” Then she started heaving with so
bs. I tried to hold her, but she lurched away from me and tore into the next room, where she collapsed on the couch. I followed her, and sat on the floor beside her.
“I love you so much,” she sobbed into her elbow. I put my hand on her arm, and she did not flinch away.
“Shhh,” I said, as helpfully as I could manage. She sniffed a little, then sat up, her eyes a bloodshot mess.
“I’m okay,” she whispered.
Cautiously, I asked, “Do you think Athena is crazy, too?”
This seemed a logical avenue to reassurance. She loved Athena, and Athena always corroborated my tales. It did not have the desired effect. Helen’s lip began to tremble, and she was barely able to squeak, “She scares me,” before burying her face in a throw pillow for another round of sobbing.
I sat with her like that for a very long time, speechless. The sobbing eventually stopped, and I stroked her back until I realized she had exhausted herself to sleep.
ur discussion of my possible mental illness largely unresolved, Helen and I began to see less of each other during the day. She would go out most mornings to run errands, or get some exercise, or just get away from me, I guess. But she always came back. We continued to have pleasant evenings together, and the physical component of our relationship did not really change. But somewhere in there, the conversations about setting a wedding date tapered off to nothing.
It was during one of these daily absences of hers that Athena flashed into my workroom.
“Is it finally zombies?” I asked.
“No crisis today,” she said. “Just checking in on my pop.”
“You missed Helen.”
“Yeah, well,” said Athena, “I don’t think she’ll be too upset about that.” As usual, Athena and Helen were on the same page while I was somewhere else. I wondered how long it had been since the last time I saw them hug, and realized I had no idea.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Thirty-six,” she said. After a few seconds, she added, “You’re thirty-three.”
“Thank you,” I nodded. “I honestly had no idea. Does this mean we are out of sync now? I seem to recall you being younger than me.”
“Out of strict sync, yes,” she said. “That’s been true for years. Chronologically, we are still seeing each other in the same order. Not counting my occasional visits to your undergrad self.”
“How’s he doing?” I asked nostalgically.
“Adorable, as always,” she said.
I laughed. The small talk phase of the visit fizzled out.
“Are we going to get a kill order? I need this to end.”
“We all do. But no, I’m still on strict orders not to execute him. More and more models are showing that making things worse.”
I laughed again, quite a bit less lightly.
“Tell me again how it can be worse?”
She shrugged. “Zombies? I don’t know. I’m tempted to put a bullet in his head right now just out of curiosity.”
By this point, I had seen Athena personally put bullets into the heads or bodies of more than two dozen people, some of them quite a bit less dangerous than Carlton. At least of half of those people were only dead until the next timeline revision. The temporary nature of their executions did not make them easier to watch. Or commit, I imagine. Helen knew none of this, and still she feared our daughter. She was the most insightful person I have ever known. Maybe I should have paid better attention to her instincts.
ne morning I came downstairs for breakfast to find Helen in the kitchen wearing both of the wrist modules, one on each arm. She held them up.
“Show me. What do I do?”
“For starters, you should probably take one of those off before you send yourself in two directions at once.”
“Oh, shit!” She hastily unbuckled the one on her left arm and let it drop to the floor, which it did with an unpleasant thud. She looked at her remaining wrist, panting, and started giggling uncontrollably. She flopped down in a kitchen chair.
“I was going to be so awesome,” she said. Then, lowering her voice and putting on a serious face, repeated, “Show me.” More laughter. “God, I am an idiot.”
As much as the vision of her wearing those tools of damnation struck me with apprehension, I could not help but laugh with her. It had been too long since I had seen this Helen.
“You’re not an idiot.”
Her laughter turned to tears, which she quickly and decisively stifled.
“I’m not kidding, Nigel. Show me. Stop trying to change my world, and let me into yours.” She stood, and grabbed my face with both hands to kiss me, hard. I could feel the cold palladium-copper alloy against my cheek. “I love you. Please let me be with you.”
I took both her hands and squeezed them. Then I unbuckled the other module. She did not resist.
“I love you too. That’s why I can’t let you do this. We can be together. Just give me some more time.”
She laughed bitterly at that.
“How much more time do you need?” She made air quotes around the word “time.”
“I don’t know. This standing wave thing is trickier than I thought it would be, and I’ve had interruptions.” As soon as that was out of my mouth, I knew it was a mistake.
“Then kill him,” she said.
I did not know how to respond.
“That’s what you do, isn’t it? Maybe not you, exactly, but she does. I can see it in her eyes. So do it. Kill him. I won’t even remember, right?”
“No,” I admitted. “You would not remember. We would do it before you ever meet him.” I did not say just how much before.
“Well, then, do it,” she said. “Do it, or teach me how to use that.” She pointed at the module still in my hand. “Take me a thousand years into the future, or a thousand years into the past.” She moved closer, and added softly, “or five seconds either way. Make me like you. Make me a traveler. Let me share your load.”
I felt my throat constrict. It would be so easy. Right then and there. Five seconds and we could be together for the rest of lives. Together in purgatory.
“No,” I whispered.
She stood there in silence for a very long time. Then she gently removed the module from my hand and put it on the table. She took my face in her hands and kissed me. It reminded me very much of our first kiss. No desperation, no passion, just simple, warm love.
Then she quietly walked out the door, got in her car, and drove away.
or an hour, I allowed myself to believe she was just giving herself some space. She rarely stayed home during the day as it was. Nothing out of the ordinary here. Eventually I went into the bedroom to confirm a substantial amount of her clothing was gone, along with other personal items. Sitting on her dresser was the box her engagement ring had come in. I did not recall it being there before. Sick to my stomach, I took it and opened it to get it over with. It was empty. I took that for the mixed message it was obviously intended to be, and chose to call it hope.
And then, at the single least considerate possible moment, Carlton destroyed the world again.
he first thing I noticed was the lights going out. In itself, not a harbinger of doom. It took about two seconds for my brain to register the cold. My winter coats were all where they belonged, and I grabbed one, but it was just as cold as everything else, so it took a while before my accumulated and insulated body heat brought me back to a comfortable temperature.
Outside, the ground was covered in a layer of snow and ice several centimeters thick. Given that I had never, to the best of my knowledge, been shunted through time as part of an unhappening, this was a major problem. It was early September.
I explored the immediate area, and found signs of human life, although sparse ones. There were no vehicles on the road, itself covered in uncleared ice. There were, however, footprints, ski tracks and snow shoe impressions dotting the landscape, and a few chimneys were putting out smoke. Whatever natural disaster had occurred, humanity was determined to s
urvive it.
Returning to my home, I started a fire and shut the seals on the fireplace to heat the house, something I had never used it for before. I also went back to the bedroom to double check my status with Helen. Everything she had taken was still gone. Even in these conditions I had upset her so much she couldn’t bear to stay with me.
I considered tracking back through time to find the source, or at least year, of the event that created this frozen wasteland, but recalled that the last time I did that, for even a few minutes, it had made it nearly impossible for Athena to find me. So I hunkered down to wait it out. A few minutes later she did in fact appear.
“Yellowstone,” was all she said.
“That’s insane. He can’t possibility have caused that, can he? Even a nuclear bomb—”
“Which is why he kept dropping them until he found the sweet spot,” she said. “Seven bombardments. He was halfway through the Ross Ice Shelf, too. Hedging his bets. He just happened to hit pay dirt in Wyoming first.”
“Helen left me.”
In the face of this nightmare, I probably should have held off on that announcement. Athena showed no sign of finding it inappropriate.
“I know. I’m sorry. We need to address this first.”
Considering Helen leaving me might actually result in Athena never being born, I found it extraordinary that she would soldier on so seamlessly. I knew as a traveler she could never actually be negated, but I also knew there would be some kind of consequence to this version of her if the baby Athena were never born. She knew what that was. I was in no hurry to find out.
“Of course,” I said. “Where do we start?”
arlton had spent twenty years of real time (and probably months of his own subjective time) accumulating enough fissionable material to build an arsenal of more than forty nuclear warheads. He could have used them to destroy cities, or start a global war that would leave the Earth a radioactive wasteland. Instead, he chose to use them in the most dramatic possible way, by goading the Earth into destroying herself. Had he succeeded in cutting through the Ross Ice Shelf, the subsequent rush of glaciers into the sea would bring sweeping destruction to every coastline on Earth with rising sea levels. But that was a long view plan in case his attempt to puncture the Yellowstone Caldera failed. Which it didn’t.
