Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “Did he explain this…interpretation to you?”

  “Well, no, obviously, but it’s easy to see what you’re looking at if you pay attention. Look: there are some things I haven’t pointed out yet, but it’d probably take you a day to see everything, and we don’t have much time.”

  Alicia yawned. Don’t have much time? What was the hurry?

  “Okay,” Rebecca said. “See all these men here who are building these machines? These are all representations of Philip. He’s been drawing Philip over and over again, in different shapes. You can see that if you look up close. But from where you’re sitting, if you take in the whole thing at once, you’ll see something else entirely. Look: see it?”

  Alicia gazed at the drawings before her and, despite Rebecca’s mounting excitement, she quietly, almost imperceptibly, shook her head.

  “It’s my face!” Rebecca said. “Sean made a portrait of me!” She walked down the central aisle toward Alicia, gesturing at one part of the mural, then another. “See that image of Philip entering the dark cave, in the earth section? The entrance to the cave is the pupil of my left eye. And this part in the air section, where the spaceship that’s crewed by a bunch of Philips is observing a black hole: that’s the pupil of my right eye. And near where you’re sitting, where those six Philips have joined hands and they’re singing a hymn to a steam engine: they make up an outline of my lower lip. Focus on those details and the rest will snap into place. I screamed when I saw it.”

  “Rebecca,” Alicia said. “This is…something.”

  “It is!”

  “But…I have to be honest,” Alicia continued. “I…I am really not seeing what you’re talking about here. These people that Sean drew are all supposed to be Philip…but they all look like stick figures to me. I mean, they’ve got eyes and noses sure, but there’s nothing about them that says Philip so much as just vertebrate. And I don’t really see a larger pattern in all this, either. I certainly don’t see your face.”

  Alicia paused for a moment. “Though I guess I can see how different parts of the room are decorated in different colors,” she said. “I can give you that. But even that might be because he used a marker until it ran dry, and then switched to another. Are you sure that all that ‘negative space’ in what you’re calling the ‘air section’ isn’t just because he didn’t have any more ink?”

  “I think you should keep looking,” Rebecca said, backing away from Alicia to lean against the door.

  Then, as Alicia’s eyelids fluttered, the pattern began to reveal itself; the more she looked, the more details she saw, and the grander the design became. She saw a Homo erectus version of Philip learning to control fire, the sparks flying from the stones he struck together doubling as a gleam in Rebecca’s eye. She saw Philip as Galileo, on trial for his heliocentric heresies; as Darwin on the deck of the HMS Beagle; as some other future scientist, answering questions about the nature of the universe that were as yet unasked. The arc of a boulder thrown by a catapult followed the helix of Rebecca’s ear; the miniature globe that floated in the outstretched hand of Philip-as-Pythagoras was also a dimple of Rebecca’s cheek.

  Alicia saw all this, but doubted her seeing: she saw her eyes and mind not as purveyors of fact but as instruments of observation, instruments that might be in error, might even be inexplicably failing. How could a child Sean’s age have done this? What would he know about the designs in Da Vinci’s notebooks, or the Roman Inquisition’s hostility to Copernican theory? Why, suddenly, was she having so much trouble staying awake?

  And then the drawings before her began, in subtle ways, to move, the water before the prow of the Beagle rippling as it parted, the wheels of the difference engine spinning as Philip-as-Charles-Babbage turned its crank, and she knew. She rose, unsteady on her feet. “What have you done?” she asked. Then: “The smoothie?”

  “Siestalert,” Rebecca said. “I ground up three pills and put them in, along with the cricket powder. You’re tripping because you’re fighting them. Sit down and go to sleep: you’ll probably be out for an hour and a half or so.”

  Alicia’s knees began to give out, and she plopped back down onto the footstool. “But!” she cried.

  “Look,” Rebecca said, crossing the room again to sit down next to Alicia. “There’s something I have to do. And I’d ask your permission for it, but I figured when I told you what it was you’d want to have a big debate about it, and you’re really good at arguments and I don’t want to deal with all that. I need to go back into the time machine. And the easiest way I could think of to do that was to drug you and borrow your keycard so I could get back into the lab.”

  Alicia shook her head. The half-dozen Philips that were praying to the steam engine were singing now, and it was becoming difficult to hear Rebecca’s voice over the harmonies of their hymn.

  “There are two possibilities here,” said Rebecca, placing her hand on Alicia’s. “Either the machine works, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, I step in and step right out again, and the world is the same as it ever was, except I guess you’re going to be super pissed at me now. But if it does work, then I have the chance to correct history. Because it’s all wrong here. This is what Sean is telling you. That it’s wrong and it needs to be made right.”

  Alicia waved her arm before her. “But it’s just scribbles! Nothing! No.” Her head bobbing around on her shoulders, she fumbled at Rebecca as if she meant to push her over. “You don’t have the right.”

  “I do,” Rebecca replied calmly. “I didn’t ask for it, but it was given to me by accident when I stepped inside the machine the first time. And if I’ve already gone back into the past once, the history we’re living shows that I failed to do the thing I must have intended to. I failed to save my husband’s life. And I have the right to correct that error. I have the right to replace this history with a better one.”

  “You do not,” Alicia said. “You…do not.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rebecca said then as Alicia tipped over, her head resting in the crook of Rebecca’s neck as she went under.

  Terence was about to end his shift when Alicia Merrill’s car pulled up, right at the door to the building. He figured that maybe Alicia needed to offload some equipment from the trunk, which is why she didn’t park in the lot, but it turned out that the woman who got out of the car was not Alicia. She seemed familiar to him, but he couldn’t quite place her—hadn’t she come this way before?

  Whoever it was, she was dressed in running clothes, like Alicia often was on weekends. But Terence couldn’t get why this woman had Alicia’s car. And when she badged into the building, the ID showed up on Terence’s monitor as Alicia’s, too. Why would Alicia loan whoever this was her car and her ID? Terence had this quickly blooming feverish itch at the back of his brain, like you get when your instinct is trying to tell your reason that you’re being hustled.

  Terence was on shift this morning with the Brazilian lady, and when he looked at her she just gave him this blank look and a shrug, like she wasn’t expecting this job to require more than sitting behind a desk. The woman was bypassing security and heading straight toward the entrance to the lab, with the ease of someone who knew where she was going. Who on earth was that?

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” Terence said, and the woman turned, giving Terence the first clear look at her face. She smiled and said, “Hello! Everything’s okay,” and then continued on toward the lab. Then Terence knew he was being hustled, and the penny dropped. It was that woman who’d gotten in here before, drunk with that other woman who’d been going out with that one guy for a while. The wife of that physicist who’d died in the car accident a while back.

  “No no: excuse me, ma’am,” Terence said, rising, and then Rebecca broke into a run, shouldering the door to the lab open, heading down the corridor, toward the machine.

  There was only one person in the chamber that held the causality violation device, a young guy who was sitting at a desk, peering intently at his laptop’s screen
. He looked up startled when Rebecca burst into the room, breathing heavily. “You,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Adam?” the kid said, as if uncertain.

  She pointed at the hulking column of machinery in the center of the room. “What are you doing with that?”

  “I’m running the double-slit experiment,” Adam said. “You aren’t here about that, are you?”

  “Sure I am,” Rebecca said as she approached the CVD.

  “Well, what we’re seeing here isn’t that interesting yet. We need to do another couple of runs before we have enough data to look for a variance in the diffraction pattern, and then it’ll be days before we can process—hey, what are you doing? You get away from there! Alicia said no one’s supposed to go inside there!”

  Rebecca yanked open the door to the device just as Terence entered the room, with Carson, who’d come in from another office, just behind. “Ma’am! Stay away from that!”

  “Everything’s okay,” said Rebecca.

  “I’ve already called the cops,” said Terence, who, for a painful moment, was feeling his total lack of power in this situation: the magic of a badge could only go so far before it needed to be backed up by a weapon. “Think about it: where are you going to go?”

  Hell: maybe it doesn’t work, Rebecca thought.

  She remembered what Alicia and Carson had told her, about the rules that would govern the machine’s behavior. If the machine worked, and it allowed her to leave, she would have to return to this moment in time, to this exact place.

  But it couldn’t be as simple as that, could it? There had to be a way to cheat that, if you were committed enough to do what needed to be done.

  Was she?

  She looked into Carson’s eyes. She thought of Sean waking up now, finding the house empty, going to the room in which he’d recorded the history of another world, and opening the door.

  Hell: it’s got to work. No other option.

  “I don’t know where I’m going to go,” Rebecca said.

  She entered the device, shut the door, and consigned herself to darkness.

  CODA

  EXTRAORDINARY EVIDENCE

  Everything is as it should be; all is in its place. This is what Philip Steiner thinks.

  When he wakes, the opposite side of the bed is empty, as it always is in the morning. He stretches beneath the sheets, clenches and unclenches his toes, rolls out of bed, drops to the floor, and knocks out a quick set of push-ups. These days he stops at thirty. Most men Philip’s age can’t knock out thirty push-ups. His morning routine used to involve bringing his muscles to failure, doing reps until his triceps gave out and he unceremoniously crashed to the carpet, but he’s decided there’s no point in that anymore. And he’d been able to see the evidence that his body had begun its long, slow slide toward senescence in the trend line of his daily maximum repetitions, sloping downward.

  It is satisfactory to know that you are stronger than most men your age. It is nice not to have that lingering ache across your chest all the time.

  Philip moved out of Stratton a couple of years ago: he now lives in a cozy home on one of Princeton’s green, secluded side streets, away from its tiny but bustling downtown. Here the only early-morning noise is that of landscapers hired by neighbors. At autumn’s end they are not content to let leaves decay and return to the soil in their own time: the leafblowers start their engines at eight sharp, daily. But most of the families around here have two incomes in order to make the mortgage: the few adults who remain behind to hear the din carried on the morning air are nannies and au pairs; people who are somehow able to eke out a living working at home; and those, like Philip, who are at long last easing into retirement.

  Shrugging into a wrinkled polo shirt and putting on a pair of faded jeans, he goes out to the garage, where his bicycle waits propped against a wall. This is the second part of his newly dialed-down regimen: a ride past the Theological Seminary and along back roads to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he will have breakfast.

  In the IAS dining hall the fellows have quietly segregated themselves by general discipline. Physicists are seated nearest the end of the buffet line: after they load up their trays they sit right down at the first chair they reach and start eating without a word. Chemists must walk past the physicists to find a table; biologists have to walk past them both. There are a few humanities types at IAS, too, a couple of historians and even a writer of short stories that regularly appear in the New Yorker: when they do come for breakfast, which isn’t often, they tend to sit alone in the corners of the hall, where the dust is thick and the light flickers.

  Philip does not sit with the physicists, though he supposes he is entitled to, if he wishes. He sits in the balcony that overhangs the floor of the dining hall, with the physicists’ wives and partners, and watches the fellows from above. He brings with him a copy of Ulysses, along with a second volume, a collection of annotations of Joyce’s novel, keyed to page and line number. He reads a few pages a day while he eats his regular meal of scrambled eggs, turkey sausage, and black coffee. The reading is slow, but he enjoys it, though he’s never spent much time reading novels: Ulysses is not a story, so much as a system of the world. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Joyce would have made a good physicist, Philip thinks: he has that same yearning to make sense of existence that the best physicists do.

  Occasionally, Philip peers over the railing at the long rows of diners below. While the fellows of other disciplines are dressed more casually, the physicists wear tweed jackets, and dark coats, and neatly ironed shirts, and solid-colored ties; even now, in the way they dress and groom themselves, they silently pay tribute to their predecessors of the Atomic Age, the heyday of physics in the public imagination. Amid the men is a single woman, holding court. Her black top displays bare biceps that flex as her hand gestures gloss her monologue. This is Philip’s wife, his second wife, Alicia Merrill. She is an IAS fellow while he is not; her name is on the card that Philip presents to the cafeteria’s cashier when he wants his breakfast.

  Alicia is aware that Philip bikes out to the Institute for breakfast after she arrives there at seven; she knows they eat at the same time, and that he eats in the balcony. But she has never invited him to join them. Philip figures that the reason why is best not to know. He sometimes considers inviting himself into the group, but he can imagine the collective stinging look that would appear on the faces of the other physicists, and he fears that the same look would appear on Alicia’s face as well.

  Or perhaps she just wants to leave him alone with Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus.

  He is content to sit in the balcony. He likes observing from a distance the workings of the field in which he once played a daily part. He enjoys reading the copy of Ulysses that Alicia had given him years ago. Only now has he made the time for it, and each day it reminds him of all the things and people he failed to make time for, and how little time he has remaining. Even if he lives for decades more, decades are not enough.

  Though Philip and Alicia are happily married, he still thinks of his first wife, Rebecca, every day. He still wears the mechanical wristwatch she gave him, which now runs nine hours slow.

  You rarely ever know that the last words you say to someone will be the last. Philip had been at the lab when the phone rang and derailed his train of thought, the line of code he was typing left half finished. He was short with Rebecca when he answered.

  “Hi, honey,” Rebecca said. “I have something to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Sean’s gotten into some trouble at school. And I’ve got to go pick him up.”

  “Good. Because I’m busy.”

  “I know, honey.”

  They listened to each other breathe in silence for a moment.

  “Okay, then,” said Rebecca. “I gotta go.”

  “Goodbye,” said Philip.

  “I love you.”

  “Goodbye,” said Philip.

 
; Two hours later he got the call about the accident.

  “No father wants or expects to bury his own daughter,” Woodrow Wright said, leaning on the pulpit as if he feared his legs would give out. “But I can tell you this: that I am deeply, deeply proud of Rebecca. That she made a split-second decision to save the life of her son, turning the wheel of her vehicle so that her side of it would be impacted by an oncoming car instead of his. She gave her life in the exercise of that greatest gift that God grants us—the ability to change the trajectory of history.”

  Sitting next to Philip in the front pew, Sean fidgeted uncomfortably: he could feel the eyes on him of the mourners seated behind him, as if their gazes were trying to drill into his head.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Woody said. “But for a brief and precious time, our souls can bind ashes together, and give them a shape and the will to act.

  “May I ask you to honor my daughter’s memory?

  “May I ask you never to be content with simply being? May I ask you always to strive, to change, to do?”

  Philip found the wake exhausting—the endless expressions of sympathy from those who had no common frame of reference for his grief—and eventually, when the last few stragglers were sitting in the living room of Rebecca’s parents’ house, talking shop, he retired to the kitchen to do some dishes. He was not habitually a doer of dishes—plates, he thought, were best disposable—but he wanted to do something with his hands, and he wanted not to worry about whether he had the correct expression on his face.

  As he scraped congealed cheese with a sponge, he sensed rather than heard Alicia appear in the kitchen doorway. “It was a nice funeral,” she said. “As nice as funerals can be, I guess.”

  “Yes,” said Philip. “It certainly was.”

  “We didn’t need the God stuff, though. In the eulogy. To explain why she did what she did. She did it because she was good, and brave. You don’t have to introduce the idea of God into it to make sense of that.”