In Rebecca’s arms, Sean stirred and woke. His eyelids fluttered as if he were trying to clear his head of a troubling dream; then they sprang open as his mouth widened in what Rebecca hoped was joy and not the precursor to a tantrum. He was not yet a year old, and so he still seemed startled to be in the world instead of the womb (and Rebecca herself had just begun to feel that her internal organs had settled back to where they used to be, though it looked to her as if there were some parts of her that would be forever stretched and displaced). With one hand Sean stretched up toward the roof of the limousine; with the other he clumsily grabbed at Rebecca’s breast, his doughy little hand already strong enough to pinch.
“So here’s what we did,” Edmund continued, rocking back and forth in his seat. “We got their ten best guys, the ones who’d been at this for decades, they damn near had images of baseballs burned into their retinas. And we got them to wear these gloves—very light, very unobtrusive, designed to impair motor control as little as possible. Specially fitted for each person. And these gloves had motion-capture sensors in them! We mo-capped these guys as they stitched about five hundred baseballs. And we took that data and fed it to this software that drives a pair of robotic arms—there’s some fuzzy logic in there; there’s some AI. And that’s enough to get these arms to start learning how to make baseballs themselves. At first their failure rate was greater than ninety percent—we’d be lucky if what they turned out was even round, never mind it being something a major leaguer would want to touch. But that artificial intelligence, right? If you give it a chance and you program it right, it can simulate that knowing without knowing. Knowing in the muscle instead of the brain. The arms learned from experience; they got better. After a few weeks we had the failure rate down to thirty-five percent, which still sounds like a lot, but get this—while ninety percent of the handmade balls met specs at six balls an hour, sixty-five percent of the machine-made balls were perfect at sixty balls an hour. Do the math! It was worth it to Rawlings to license that tech from us, even with the increase in spoiled materials from the balls that didn’t turn out right. And those poor Costa Ricans motion-captured themselves out of a job, but science marches on, right? You’d think hardcore baseball fans would have been up in arms—you know how they are, the stat junkies and the guys who get dewy-eyed whenever they hear ‘Sweet Caroline’—but it turns out most people thought baseballs were already machine-made anyway. Fans couldn’t have cared less! Everybody was happy, Taligent Industries killed it, I got some respect for once, and I got a little mad money to play with, to fund the kind of stuff I like to fund. Like this,” he said to Philip. “Figuring out how to get a robot to stitch seams in a baseball—that’s small-time stuff. But you? You are on the bleeding edge. Time travel! I cannot believe that in an hour, time travel is going to be real.”
“I’m not building a time machine,” Philip said evenly, though Rebecca thought his voice carried an undertone of alarm.
“Time travel,” Edmund said distantly, shaking his head in bemusement and wonder. “In-freakin’-credible.”
“Bluh-gah?” said Sean.
Strange how fast one’s life could change—a little over a year ago Rebecca had been dating an older guy she’d gotten reasonably comfortable with, even though she didn’t really see marriage in the cards. Now she was in fact married to that guy, with a newborn kid to boot. It was as if the nuptials had imbued her with something of Philip’s inexorable sense of purpose: once hitched they (or perhaps he) saw a goal, the life they (or, perhaps, he) wanted to live, and progressed toward it with dogged efficiency.
No, it wasn’t just Philip who seemed in a hurry—she was fast approaching thirty, and with that impending birthday the way she thought of her own life was beginning to change. When she was twenty, she thought of people in their thirties as, well, old: after all, they had lived as long as she had and half as long again, and so they must have been tired, with the beginnings of aches in their bones and the first intimations of their own mortality.
But the peculiar horror of growing older was not what she expected. In fact, she felt the same age as she had eight years ago, and twenty-eight years of life had managed to compress themselves into a life-span that once comfortably held twenty. It wasn’t that she was getting older, but that the years were getting shorter, and were therefore more precious. You had to use them sparingly.
So you got married: you trusted your gut, and you didn’t meditate on it much. The ceremony took place in your father’s church: he performed it himself, spiking the plainspoken ritual with sideways winks and subversive flashes of wit. The reception afterward had an open bar, against your new husband’s wishes, but damned if your parents were going to stay dry when they married you off. (Though your mother, who you expected would be the wild card in the evening’s proceedings, was surprisingly well behaved: it turned out that the wife of one of Philip’s groomsmen was a rare-books archivist, and once the two of them began to discuss strategies for the proper preservation of digital media, they were dead to the rest of the world.)
But near the end of the evening, Kate, your maid of honor, pulled you away from a tedious conversation with one of Philip’s brothers to usher you to the men’s bathroom: she assured you that the girls were on guard, and that while you were in there, no one else would enter.
The only occupied stall was carelessly left unlocked, so you slowly pushed its door inward and entered, careful not to trail the hem of your wedding dress on the tile floor. Your father was kneeling before the toilet in bleary-eyed communion; the acidic stink of vomit rose from the bowl. He wiped a rope of snot away from his nose as he turned toward you. “He’s a good man,” he said. “He came to me and asked for your hand, like a man out of another time. I appreciated that. I look forward to engaging him in single combat. I look forward to convincing him to think as I do.
“I’m glad you’re happy. I’m really happy for you.
“But he’s so fucking weird, honey. He’s so fucking weird.”
And you had a kid, because if the years continued to compress themselves and fly by faster still, you’d soon be forty and telling yourself you never wanted kids anyway, that you liked the independence, that there were already too many people on this earth, that egotism was the only thing that made people want to pass on their genetic code. You caught quickly, maybe a few weeks after you started trying: your marriage practically began with pregnancy, not the few years of hedonistic idyll and Saturday-afternoon sex that the twenty-one-year-old version of you imagined you’d have with a new husband. Time, as they say, flew—there were mere eyeblinks between the first missed period and the morning sickness, between the swelling of the stomach, the fluid in the feet, the water breaking, the rush to the hospital, the command to push, the pain so profound in spite of the drugs that it cast you back to a primal state of mind. Then you heard the boy’s first panicked cry as instincts told him what his lungs were meant for—just breathe, damn it, and we’ll figure out the rest later.
Then you looked up from your haze to see that father and son had the same startled expression on their faces. Would you look at this, they both seemed to be thinking as they gazed into each other’s eyes. This is what it is like, to be here in the world.
When the limousine arrived at Philip’s laboratory, there was little of the hustle and bustle that Rebecca would have expected: the odd grad student came and went through the doors of the building, but nothing more.
“There should be more people around,” Edmund Taligent said as he emerged from the car. “Some fans or some protesters or something. I should have brought in some people to stand around with signs, and some other people to take pictures of those people: you know, for the optics. You’d think people would be more excited about time travel.”
“I feel as if I should clarify that I’m not really interested in the possibility of human beings traveling through time,” said Philip.
“Time travel is awesome!” Edmund said. “Just the idea of it blows your mind
. Pow!”
There were eight people milling around in the lab when Philip, Edmund, and Rebecca entered, with Rebecca pushing the dozing Sean along in a stroller. A few were curious physicists from other labs who had come by just to watch—they were standing near a folding table that held a couple of boxes of donuts and a warm bottle of orange juice. Two of them recognized Rebecca and raised their hands in greeting before they went back to talking among themselves.
Edmund Taligent’s personal assistant, a woman named Sinclair, had arrived at the lab in advance to make preparations. (Rebecca couldn’t tell if Sinclair was her first or last name.) Sinclair’s job had been to provide the donuts and set up a velvet rope that enclosed the causality violation chamber, but she had underestimated the circumference of the giant cylinder that squatted in the middle of the room, and so the assemblage of rope and stanchions only led a third of the way around it. (Fortunately, Edmund had either dispensed with or forgotten about the idea of a bouncer: that would have made the whole scene look even more pathetic.)
Besides Rebecca and Sinclair, there was only one other woman in the room: Alicia Merrill, a graduate student whom Rebecca had heard Philip mention once or twice, but whom she hadn’t actually met. Alicia had walked around the stanchions with a complete disregard for the barrier they implied, and was keying in a series of codes on a panel attached to the chamber’s side. Sinclair had produced a phone and was snapping shot after shot of her, the device repeatedly emitting the snick of a twentieth-century shutter. “Sinclair,” the woman at the panel said, her fingers still flying over the keys. “Do you like the taste of apple? Because if you don’t get that iPhone out of my face I’m going to make you eat it.”
“Who’s the little firecracker?” Edmund said to Philip.
“I think you’re talking about Alicia Merrill, who had a sole-author credit on a paper in Science at the age of twenty-three. It was a revision of her senior thesis.”
“Aw snap.”
Alicia finished typing on the panel and closed its transparent cover; then she walked over to Philip, accidentally but probably-not-actually-accidentally knocking over one of the velvet-rope stanchions, leaving Sinclair to set it right again. “Philip,” she said, “we’re ready.”
“Hello,” Edmund said, stepping forward and offering his hand. “I’m Edmund Taligent, an executive director in the research and development division of Taligent Industries.”
“That’s nice,” Alicia replied, leaving Edmund’s hand hanging in the air.
“Alicia,” said Philip, “I want you to meet my wife, Rebecca Wright.”
“Hi!” said Rebecca. “And this is Sean.” She pushed his stroller forward in greeting, though he still lay in an intense and deeply pleasurable slumber.
Alicia involuntarily took a step backward. “I’m sure he’s a lovely baby. Philip, if we’re going to do this whole ceremonial thing, you should get ready. It’s eleven fifty-seven.”
There was a moment, just after Philip walked past the velvet rope to approach the causality violation device but just before he turned to face his small audience, when Rebecca saw that he felt himself to be alone with the machine that he’d designed. With a tenderness that Rebecca found unexpectedly paternal, he quietly placed his palm against the cool steel wall of the giant cylinder. Rebecca felt a sudden surge of vicarious pride. This was the beginning of what was sure to be an arduous project, but for now, the future seemed full of promise. And the man she’d married was a doer. He’d actually built this damn thing. She’d married someone who wanted to change history, not someone who was content to sit still and let history change him.
In the stroller, Sean kicked his feet in sleep, his face pinched as if he’d sniffed something bad. If it was not wrong for her husband to respond to the machine he had designed as if it were a son of some kind, it could also not be wrong that she felt, at least in part, the same way about Sean that Philip felt about his machine. It was not just that Rebecca had been granted the precious charge of another human life, but that that life, or any human life, had so much potential. Her child made her feel like a doer as well—the first time, really, that she’d felt that way in her life.
After his quiet communion, Philip turned to face the assembly, standing on the other side of the rope. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I feel…I feel very optimistic about this. I feel like this is a good beginning.”
“It’s eleven fifty-nine,” Alicia said.
Philip glanced at Alicia, who made a quick circular gesture with her hand: Hurry it up. “Okay, then,” he said. “Without further ado.” He checked his watch (the watch Rebecca had given him, which she knew was not even close to accurate: though he wore it every day he never corrected its time, and it was running ridiculously slow by now). Then, after a suitable pause, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now establishing Point Zero.” And he pressed the bright red button displayed on a touchscreen attached to the side of the causality violation device.
The button didn’t do anything functional—Philip had said before that he’d be crazy to trust such a crucial function as the activation of the Planck-Wheeler clock and the establishment of Point Zero to humans instead of electronics. The Planck-Wheeler clock was programmed to begin taking measurements of its own movements through spacetime automatically when the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, read twelve noon; the clock would have activated on its own even if no one had been in the room to observe it (and, in fact, it had quietly started working at around the time Philip had said, “I feel like this is a good beginning”). But Philip was not unaware of what Edmund Taligent called the “optics”: he saw the need to make the abstractions of the science visual for those who didn’t have the understanding that he did. So he and Alicia had spent a few hours the day before rigging up this little display: a red button on a touchscreen that would give the impression that something important was happening, and an array of LEDs that would illuminate when Philip pressed the button. The LEDs would, of course, communicate no other information of value besides the fact that they were functioning.
So Philip ceremoniously tapped the touchscreen, the LEDs began to twinkle in shades of red and green, and the group of people assembled outside of the rope applauded. (Edmund Taligent and his assistant were the only ones not in on the joke: Philip had told Rebecca about the LED panel the night before, and Philip’s colleagues recognized it as a playful fraud on sight.) The rest of the physicists stood around for a few more minutes, chatting and eating the rest of the donuts; then, one at a time, they shook Philip’s hand, congratulated him, and left the lab to return to their own work.
Meanwhile, Edmund stared intently at the causality violation chamber as if he were waiting for something, or willing some serious science to be done. After about ten minutes that yielded nothing more interesting than some blinking LEDs, he turned to Rebecca, his face downcast. Rebecca had lifted Sean from the stroller and was quietly dandling him: she had the sense that he was on the edge of a fit of temper for some reason, but she still had hope that enough rocking and cooing would bring him back.
“It’s too bad,” Edmund said. “I really believed in this. I really felt like it was going to work.”
Twenty minutes later, when everyone had cleared out of the lab but Philip, Alicia, Rebecca, and Sean, Edmund approached Philip and sat down on his desk. Philip was staring intently at a laptop whose screen was displaying the initial data yielded from the Planck-Wheeler clock. “I haven’t run a serious analysis,” he said. “I’m just eyeballing it right now. But it looks good.”
Philip looked up at Edmund, who was gazing down at him with inexplicable sadness. “It looks good!” he repeated.
“Philip,” Edmund said, “I wanted to wait until everyone else was out of the room before I dropped this on you. But I’m afraid I’m going to pull the funding for this project. I’m really sorry about this.”
Philip looked at him in utter confusion, tongue-tied.
“I’m pulling the funding,” Edmu
nd said, a little louder, as if Philip hadn’t heard the first time.
“I heard what the—I heard what you said. I just don’t understand it. I—this doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I just don’t see the point in pouring my company’s money into a project that’s clearly doomed to failure. It’s better for me to cut my losses now.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Philip fairly shouted as Alicia came over to join the two of them. “Twenty-five minutes ago you were as optimistic about this project as I was! As I am now! Look at this,” he said, indicating the screen of the laptop in front of him. “We’re only just starting to get data! It’s a massive, massive understatement to say that you’re being really impatient here. Don’t you understand how science works? This is an experiment that won’t yield results for years, or maybe even decades! Certainly not in minutes!”
“I don’t appreciate your tone. I know you’re angry, but that kind of condescension just isn’t called for. I may not be a scientist like you, but I know how time travel works.”
“You know how time travel works,” Alicia said.
“Look,” Edmund continued, “here’s what was supposed to happen. You established Point Zero, which is a fixed point in spacetime, like a beacon. And the Planck-Wheeler clock allows you to track the movement of the causality violation device through spacetime relative to that point.”
“Right,” Philip said.
“And at some point in the future, you were supposed to figure out how to make a wormhole with a moving end, attached to the causality violation device as it traveled along with you, and a fixed end, anchored at Point Zero. The experiment would have been proven a success if you were able to move an object, like I don’t know, a robot or something, through the moving end of the wormhole to Point Zero—which now, as we sit here talking, exists about thirty minutes in the past—and have that object return to the present with some kind of evidence that it had been in the past.”
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