Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “Terence. Hey Terence. Put down that book.”

  Terence closed the book. “What.”

  “Look,” said Spivey. “Someone’s here.”

  Terence turned to see the two women through the glass doors of the building’s entrance; the taller one of the two had pulled a wallet out of her purse and was fumbling through it. “Do they look a little drunk to you?”

  “Yes,” said Spivey, as the woman picked a keycard out of her wallet and waved it in front of the door’s reader. With a heavy, hydraulic sigh, the door swung open.

  “I don’t recognize them right off the bat.”

  “One is that girl who showed up with my man Carlton a while back. The other: I don’t know.”

  “Well, she’s got a card to the lab, whoever she is,” said Terence. “Shh-shh-shh.”

  The two women approached the security desk, and it did seem to Terence as if they were on the tail end of a long, long night on the town, one that by all appearances must have started that afternoon. “Hey, guys,” the shorter one of the two said, and yeah, that was definitely the lady who’d come in with Carson to get the tour of the lab. “It’s nice to see you again,” she said, making eyes at Spivey of all people, but damned if Spivey’s face didn’t light up like he was a kid finding a PlayStation 5 under the tree on Christmas morning.

  “This is Rebecca,” said the woman—Kathryn? Katie? No: Kate. “Philip Steiner’s wife.”

  Rebecca, the other one, was doing that thing drunk people do when they’re trying to sell themselves as sober to someone with a badge: standing up super straight, talking like she was on the radio. “Philip is under the weather,” she said, “and I am coming in to check on something in his absence. I’m reading the causality violation accuracy index. It’ll just take a couple of minutes.” She brandished the keycard before her.

  Something about this was a little off. Spivey, who was closer, plucked the card from Rebecca’s hand and squinted at it; then he ran it through the scanner at his desk. It came up legit: sure, it was an old card, and she’d only been in twice, and for some reason the data encoded in the card’s magnetic strip identified her as Rebecca Steiner instead of Rebecca Wright, as was written on the card’s face. But everything else checked out: no red alerts or anything.

  “So you’re checking the causality violation index?” Spivey said, still holding the card.

  “The causality violation accuracy index,” Rebecca said. “Philip wrote down the instructions for me, for how to do it.” She patted her purse. “I’ll be in and out in five minutes.” She held out her hand peremptorily: now give it back.

  What else to do? At the end of the day she was still the boss’s wife. “Don’t get up to too much trouble in there,” Spivey said with a wariness that he passed off as a joke, handing back the card. “And her,” he continued, pointing at Kate, “she’s got no clearance, and you aren’t authorized to bring in anyone else with you, so she’ll have to stay here and wait for you. I told you we didn’t want to see you around here anymore,” he said, his voice suddenly shifting to that of a man who’d only consider a freshly picked carnation for the buttonhole of his jacket.

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” Kate said. “I’ll be happy keeping company with you guys. You’ll be alright, Rebecca?”

  “Sure, Kate,” Rebecca said, heading toward the doors to the lab. “Back in a few.”

  Rebecca disappeared down the hallway beyond, leaving Kate alone with the two guards.

  Spivey pulled his chair closer to Kate, looking up at her conspiratorially. “You saw what they were building in there, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I saw it,” Kate said. “Ridiculous, the things people spend their time and money on.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Spivey said. “But one thing’s for certain: they haven’t gotten it to work yet, and they won’t unless they figure out how time travel works. They don’t know.” Spivey tapped his forehead with an index finger. “But I know. I sat here, watching these people go in and out, listening to what they say to each other, and I figured it out.”

  “No way!” Kate cooed.

  “Do you wanna hear how time travel works? I’ll warn you: it’s gonna blow your mind. I haven’t even told any of the geniuses working on that thing yet, because I don’t think they’re ready to handle it. But are you ready?”

  “Sure!”

  “Okay. Then listen.”

  Were those guys at the desk watching Rebecca through some sort of camera mounted on the ceiling? It was hard to say, but Rebecca figured it would be a good idea to leave the lights in the lab down just in case—the streetlamps that illuminated the parking lot outside were bright enough to let her see, once her eyes adjusted. Just in case they were keeping an eye on her, she turned on one desk lamp next to a computer and hit a keyboard’s space bar to wake up a monitor, feeling all spy-like.

  The central cylindrical chamber of the causality violation device rose above Rebecca. But the hair on her arms did not stand on end; she did not experience any strange instances of déjà vu; she did not see the ghosts of future selves shimmering before her, shouting stock picks back through time.

  It should have all been better; it should have all been great. She thought back to the first time she had entered this room eight years ago, at the establishment of Point Zero. There had been so much promise in the air then. Her husband had been ambitious, and she’d been certain that ambition would pay off; she’d held a child in her arms that she was sure would grow into someone wonderful. Not everyone had believed in Philip at the time, but back then, that didn’t matter. She could see the brightly lit path that led to the best of all imaginable outcomes, not thinking about the infinity of dimly lit byways that led to futures full of mediocrity or, worse, catastrophe.

  She stood before the dead column of metal in the darkness, and she realized, perhaps too late, that the reason people so often condemn reckless ambition is out of a sense of self-preservation. Ambitious people who fail at their great endeavors destroy not just themselves, but those unwise enough to love them. The ambitious failure either becomes a shell of what he once was, having fallen victim to the peculiar and powerful brand of self-doubt known only to those whose slightly too-long reach had exceeded their not-quite-long-enough grasp; or, as Philip had, he retreats into himself and constructs a personal version of history in which, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he is the one who is headed toward success, while all others who disagree with him will eventually fail. If you chose to love a person like that, it meant accepting, and believing in, their causes and their dreams; if those dreams caused the world to break them, then the world would break you as well.

  Rebecca approached the causality violation chamber (too grand a name for such a faulty thing), placed her hand against its door, and closed her eyes, much as Philip had during its christening, years ago. There was no response from the machine; no prophecy; no apology; no advice. It did not relay the news from other, brighter timelines. It did not tell her what would have transpired had she returned from yesterday’s shopping trip a few hours later, or had she turned the steering wheel left instead of right two years ago, or had she not taken that first drink, or had she turned down any one of the thousands of drinks that had followed, or had she chosen not to respond to Philip’s insistent and perhaps deliberately oblivious messages during the early days of their online courtship, or had her parents or her grandparents or her great-grandparents never met. The machine’s obstinate silence was all it had to offer; the message of that silence was that she had made her choices in life, and her choices had made her in return.

  Even with her head full of boozy fog and the depression of the past thirty-six hours weighing her down, she was glad, in the end, that Kate had suggested she come in here, though not for the reason that Kate suggested. Sure, she could flip the bird to the machine, or deface it, or whisper obscenities to it, but those would be empty gestures, signs of a futile attempt to struggle against fate. And she was so tired, too tired for t
hat, and the right symbolic action to take at this moment was completely plain to see.

  She slid her hand across the touchscreen next to the chamber’s entrance, and the door swung open (the chamber’s interior somehow blacker than black, a trick of the lab’s dim light). She stepped inside, and the door shut behind her, and she sank to the floor, and she interred herself, for a short time, in her husband’s dark monument to his own grand failure.

  PART II

  THE SHADOW BROUGHT BACKWARD

  19

  LATE RETURN

  When thinking back on it later, Rebecca wouldn’t be able to recall exactly how long she had spent in the causality violation chamber. It had to have been…not even a minute. Less than that. She clearly remembered thinking that she could feel the darkness inside clinging to her hair, and her skin, and the surfaces of her eyeballs. She wanted to leave as soon as she entered. She couldn’t have been in there for more than thirty seconds.

  But she felt a lot better after she left, as if a great weight had been lifted off her. Her decision to enter the chamber had only been a symbolic gesture, but history showed that gestures actually mattered to people. Whether or not it was because of some kind of placebo effect, the fact was that she’d gone into the lab feeling like a wad of chewed-up gum stuck to the sole of the world’s shoe—dirty, used, and stretched—and just the act of entering the machine that Philip had built had made that dark mood disappear. She didn’t exactly feel like a princess or a heavyweight champ, but her spirit was lighter, as if she’d shed a dead skin while huddling in the chamber’s darker-than-darkness: in fact, it was the first time in a while that she’d felt anything even close to optimism.

  The chamber’s door shut behind her as she climbed out. She quietly made her way out of the lab, turning off the desk lamp she’d turned on when she entered, and putting the computer she’d fiddled with back to sleep.

  Kathryn was still waiting at the security desk when Rebecca exited the lab. It looked like she’d gotten into some kind of debate with one of the security guards. “But that’s not how it’d work at all; that can’t be how it’d work,” Kathryn was saying, while the guard repeatedly spoke over her: “I’m telling you. I’m telling you.”

  “What are you two having it out about?” Rebecca asked, approaching the security desk.

  “I’m trying to explain to this woman how time travel works,” the guard said, “but she doesn’t want to hear it! She is having trouble coping with the truth.”

  “Because it’s not the truth: that’s not how it would work! If I went back in time, I’d still be me, because I would have my experiences and my memories and that’s what makes you what you are: not history. And I’d use what I learned from my experiences and my memories to make things better for people: I wouldn’t become a worse person, or a dumber person, or an animal, just because I went back in time.”

  “Oh, sure, that’s what all the badass big-timing wannabe time travelers say, everybody who thinks going back in time is such a great idea. You read a couple of books in school and now you’re the queen of history: leave it to you, you’ll make everything better for everybody.”

  “Well, thinking that way is better than thinking that everyone who jumps into a time machine turns into an ape or an asshole!”

  “Not that you asked me, but the way I see it from over here,” said the other guard, who was leaning backward in his chair with its back propped against the wall, “is that both of you know roughly the same amount about time travel, which is nothing. You’re both just speculating.”

  “I’m telling you I’m right,” the first guard said sulkily, looking away from them both.

  “Hey,” said Rebecca to Kathryn, “if you guys are through with the stoner arguments, can we go?”

  Terence waited until the two women left and then asked Spivey, “Look. Don’t you think it’s weird that Dr. Steiner’s wife came in this evening? Doesn’t that seem really weird to you?”

  “She still had a card, and the card still checked out,” Spivey said. “I don’t know why she still had the card: it’s not my business. But I wasn’t about to catch hell by getting mixed up in it. If her card had scanned red, sure, we would’ve stopped her. But the card scanned green, so my name’s Bennett and I ain’t in it.”

  “Well okay. But don’t you think we ought to mention it to the boss, just as a CYA, even if it’s after the fact?”

  Spivey thought about it. “Yeah. We probably ought to.”

  “All I’m saying,” said Terence, “is that we should just flag that entry in the log, so the boss’ll see it the next time she checks it, if she ever looks at the thing.”

  “Yeah,” Spivey said. “Just as a CYA.”

  Kathryn and Rebecca got into the backseat of Kathryn’s car; she told it to drop Rebecca off at her place first, and then to head home. “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “It sounds crazy, but I feel a lot better,” Rebecca said. “I mean, we’ll see how I feel tomorrow.” She laughed a little. “But for now: pretty good. Going in there to see the machine: you were right. It helped.”

  “I knew it would,” Kathryn said.

  Their car merged seamlessly onto Route 1, whose traffic at this time of night was mostly made up of autonomous tractor trailers delivering the groceries and fashions that late-night stock boys would place on shelves in time for tomorrow morning’s opening. The giant AI-piloted trucks in adjacent lanes towered over Kathryn’s tiny vehicle, casting long shadows and shutting out the streetlamps and starlight.

  “This was a hell of a day,” Kathryn said.

  “It surely was.”

  “We needed this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You needed this.” Kathryn reached over and patted Rebecca’s hand.

  “Yeah: I guess I did.”

  Kathryn slouched in her seat and sighed. “I haven’t cut loose like this in years. And it might be the last time for years more. I am going to be hung the hell over tomorrow. I don’t bounce back from drinking like I used to.”

  “Me either,” Rebecca said.

  Kathryn pulled her phone out of her purse and checked her messages. “And Carson’s worried sick. Three messages tonight, while I haven’t been paying a bit of attention to this thing. He’s probably called the cops by now.”

  Rebecca looked out the window of the car at the trailer rising above them, its side displaying an enormous stylized drawing of a woman whose body was all short-skirted legs and whose face was all lips and lashes.

  “Becca,” Kathryn said, reaching out and grasping Rebecca’s hand. “Remember what I said. You’re a survivor. It’s true.”

  Still looking out the window, Rebecca gave Kathryn’s hand a slight, tentative squeeze. “Thanks,” she said. “I know.”

  When Kathryn’s car pulled up to Rebecca’s house, the lights in the living room were on, and Rebecca could see the silhouette of a person moving around behind the drawn curtains.

  “You’ll get in touch?” Kathryn said as Rebecca unlatched her car door. “Coffee or something in a couple of days?”

  “Sounds good.” Rebecca got out of the car and hesitated, holding its door half open. “Or what about brunch, maybe? Sunday.”

  “If we don’t sleep in,” Kathryn said, in a slightly distant way that implied that she was already planning to sleep in. “Play it by ear?”

  “Will do,” said Rebecca. She shut the car door and the vehicle pulled away, sharply accelerating as soon as it left the driveway, its engine barely audible.

  Rebecca turned to head up the walk to her front door. Her throat felt raw from the day’s drinking; she suddenly became aware of how desperately she wanted to sleep. But she felt okay. She knew she’d wake up in the morning and feel better still. Even if it wasn’t full of promise, the future before her at least looked manageable.

  The front door of her house banged open before she had gotten even halfway up the walk, and out of it ran her strange and beautiful boy, his father’s eyes staring out of his
mother’s face. His babysitter, a nineteen-year-old girl who’d done up her blond hair in a pair of pigtails, followed just behind. She stopped in the doorframe, full of concern; it was then that Rebecca saw the smear of blood on her son’s mouth, and knew that this was yet another sitter with whom she wouldn’t be doing repeat business.

  Rebecca bent as Sean feverishly clasped his arms around her neck. “You’re late,” he accused her. “I thought you were never coming back.”

  “I’m sorry I’m late. But here I am.” She felt the warmth of his embrace and buried her nose in the crook of his neck, taking in the slightly sour smell of a child in need of a bath.

  “I was supposed to see my boyfriend at ten thirty,” the sitter said, still standing in the door. “I was supposed to leave here at nine, and see my boyfriend at ten thirty, and now it’s after twelve. Overtime is time and a half.”

  “You’re late,” Sean said again.

  “I tried to put him to bed at nine,” the sitter said, “but—”

  “But I told her I wasn’t going to sleep until you came back home. I told her that if I bit my tongue hard you’d know about it and you’d come back. You’d run back. And now you’re here.”

  “I was always going to come back,” Rebecca said tenderly. “I’m just a little late. Biting your tongue didn’t help, and you didn’t need to do it. Please don’t do it again.”

  “Overtime is time and a half,” the babysitter said again, tapping the place on her wrist where a watch would have been in an earlier century. “Three hours: time and a half.”

  “But you’re here,” Sean said, still believing in his own boundless power to steer the path of the world.

  “Yes,” Rebecca said, not inclined to argue the point right now when all she wanted to do was pay off the sitter, get out of her clothes, climb into bed, and sleep for days. “Yes, Sean. I’m here.”

  20

  MORNING ROUTINE