The soldier stepped backward with an unexpected bashfulness. “I gotta get to it. But I’m gonna remember meeting you forever.” He left, shutting the office door behind him.
As Philip sat back down at his desk, the phone rang again. “Hello, Sidney.”
“Don’t burn your mouth on the tea. Let it cool.”
She disconnected.
He nibbled at the cake (which was, to be honest, quite good: not too sweet, the frosting rich and dark) and drank the tea while he listened to the clamor outside: Okay, on one. Lift. Go. Move it. We want to be out of here by ten o’clock, like we were never here. Get Evie in here to switch out the security recordings and fudge the logs. Come with it. Move move move! Get her into the dry ice. Get—what the fuck we don’t need this now. Get him away from here: give him the cover story, scare him to death.
Was Sidney even English? Philip suspected she wasn’t: they were probably exploiting the American instinct to hear a female voice that sounded like a BBC newsreader as one of prim authority that ought not be questioned. They probably wanted him to take off his shoes so he wouldn’t run, or do something stupid: even if he wasn’t really immobilized, they wanted him to think he was, and wanted him not to mind. The cake and the tea probably had mild tranquilizers in them or something, for all he knew. If anything, he was not as concerned about what in the hell had just happened not half an hour before; he was not even too worried about the possibility of bull-necked military types and people in hazmat gear rummaging indiscriminately around his laboratory. He was content to wait, to let the causality violation device be someone else’s problem for once.
The phone rang. “Hello, Sidney.”
“Mr. Cheever is about to knock on your door. He is going to take you to a safe place. Alicia Merrill is on her way from the Netherlands: we’ve sent a plane for her. She didn’t have much time to pack, but we’ve provided her with a suitcase full of necessities: she’ll be okay. She should arrive in Stratton by this evening. Then we’ll go from there.”
“Thank you, Sidney.”
“No, thank you,” Sidney replied, and Philip could have sworn he heard her accent slip a little, revealing something midwestern beneath the surface. “It’s been a pleasure, Philip. Goodbye.”
As she hung up for the last time, Philip answered the knock on his office door to see Mr. Cheever, immaculately dressed in a navy-blue suit and powder-blue tie, offering his hand in greeting and, Philip suspected, congratulations.
“It’s good to see you,” he said. “Everything’s okay. Come with me.”
The next time Philip saw Mr. Cheever, thirty hours later, was when he appeared at the door of the hotel suite in which he and Alicia had been installed. “You,” Alicia said, walking around Philip as he opened the door, standing between him and Mr. Cheever, “have kept us imprisoned here for a day.”
“You’re not imprisoned,” Mr. Cheever said, stepping past them both and seating himself in the center of the couch in the suite’s living room.
“When I go to get ice, from the ice machine, a man in a suit stops me after I’m five feet out the door. He’s got a suspiciously heavy pocket. He says he’ll get the ice for me. I want to get my own ice.”
“I want to see my son,” Philip said.
“He’s fine: he’s being looked after. You’ll see him soon. You’re not imprisoned.” Not looking at either of them, Mr. Cheever opened his briefcase.
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” Philip said. “Though, to be fair, I can see how past events might pose a serious problem of appearances—”
“We know you haven’t done anything wrong.” Mr. Cheever removed a manila folder from his briefcase. “We’ve looked at the tapes. A body comes out of the machine, but a body doesn’t go in. That’s one thing we can’t explain. Here’s the second.” From the folder he extracted two documents and laid them out next to each other on the coffee table in front of him. “We disinterred Rebecca Wright’s body last night. By which I mean the first one.” He tapped one paper. “The DNA matches, a hundred percent. But here’s what’s even weirder.” He tapped the other paper. “Our forensics team wanted a second confirmation of the…similarity of these two bodies. The first body shows the expected signs of decay as well as the trauma from the automobile accident that caused her death. But there’s something really strange about the teeth. Their enamel is…it’s just gone. And there’s no evidence of any tool being used to strip it away. It’s just vanished, as if it was never there.”
As Alicia and Philip seated themselves in chairs opposite him, he said, “What we seem to have here are two…instances…of the same person: more or less identical, except that one instance has had its teeth mysteriously altered. None of this makes sense at all. That ought to be impossible.”
He looked at them in confusion and, Philip thought, horror. “Shouldn’t that be impossible?”
“You two told me last night that you have a theory about how causality violation might work, one that means there wouldn’t be any evidence left behind that it did work,” Mr. Cheever said. “But here we’ve got evidence that something happened. And you also said that causality violation is subject to principles of conservation of mass and energy. A body that leaves a particular point in spacetime has to return to the place it left.
“But here we have two instances of the same body. The same mass. That can’t be right. Can it?”
“Humans are different,” Alicia said.
“What do you mean?”
“Be quiet and let me think.”
They sat silently, while Alicia thought. Mr. Cheever got up to use the suite’s coffeemaker; once it finished brewing, he poured himself a cup, sipped at it cautiously, grimaced, and placed a call on his phone, mumbling so that Alicia and Philip couldn’t hear. A few minutes later, one of those guys in heavy-pocketed suits arrived, bearing three mugs of steaming joe on a silver platter, along with a few sugar packets and a tiny glass bottle of cream, stopped with a cork. He placed the platter on the table, nodded at Mr. Cheever in greeting, and retreated.
“Humans are different,” Alicia announced, after a half hour. “They’re different from the robot we sent into the device in important ways. First: because humans are sentient, and can make a conscious decision to alter history. Arachne is too rudimentary to be able to do that. That’s one thing. It’s important, given that we’re dealing with an experiment whose intention is to violate the normal order of causes and effects.
“Second: the mass of a human isn’t constant. Humans aren’t just masses: they’re patterns of information that organize masses. Atoms are constantly leaving your body and being replaced: as you breathe, and eat, and expel waste, and slough off dead skin. Your hair grows, and you cut it, and more hair grows back in the same pattern. Most of it, anyway. Same goes for your fingernails. But this is also true for your muscles, and your blood, and your brain, and your bones. With an important exception, none of the molecules present in your body right now has been there for more than a few years.
“So it’s not quite correct to say that we have two instances of the same person. What we have here are two masses that were organized by the same pattern.
“The theory still holds. We have a person who, in a previous version of history that is now erased from the record, went backward in time. Suppose she corresponded with a prior instance of herself. The same pattern: same identity, same personality, same childhood memories. But the time-traveling version is several years older than the earlier version. They are two different masses.
“The future instance of the time traveler does…something. We don’t know what. Acts in a certain way; gives a tiny piece of advice. Exercises her ability to cause an effect. The future instance of the time traveler says or does something that leads to the death of the past instance: either deliberately, or accidentally. We can’t know.
“When the past instance of the time traveler dies, the pattern that holds her mass together dissolves and cannot be re-created. Which naturally means that
the future instance of the time traveler must also die, or, more accurately, must be wiped out of existence. But the laws of physics still have to be satisfied. A mass that leaves a certain point in spacetime has to return to the place it left.”
“A proposition. In the history in which we’re now living, in the moment just before the second instance of Rebecca’s body appeared in the causality violation device, the particles that composed it were scattered everywhere: in a rock quarry in Pennsylvania, in a loaf of bread for sale at a grocery store in Detroit, in a water reservoir in Newark. Then, the causality violation happened, and those particles were…translocated. They became part of what, in our history, we see as Rebecca’s second instance. How did this happen?
“That body that showed up in the causality violation device. I don’t think calling it a corpse is the right word. I don’t even think calling it Rebecca is the right word. It’s wrong to say that it’s dead, because from our perspective that body was never alive: all of us here agree that Rebecca Wright died in an automobile accident, years ago. That second instance is just a…failed homunculus. A shape. An inert mass. The result of the universe pulling a little sleight of hand in order to correct its balance books. But because of a unique set of events that took place in a prior version of history—one in which Rebecca lived to the present day, entered the causality violation device, traveled backward in time, and somehow brought about the death of her younger self—we were able to watch that sleight of hand happen. We saw it.
“And the reason that the enamel has disappeared from the teeth of the past instance of Rebecca is that tooth enamel is nearly the only part of the human body that doesn’t constantly replenish itself. The molecules that make it up couldn’t be in two places at once: they had, so to speak, to make a choice. And they chose the future instance.
“I realize this is an extraordinary claim,” Alicia finished. “But you must admit that we have the required extraordinary evidence.”
A day after their conversation about Alicia’s explanation for what Mr. Cheever, and the other heavily beribboned military types who were constantly tromping in and out of the physicists’ suite, had come to refer to circumspectly as “the phenomenon,” Mr. Cheever arrived with two lunch boxes: a couple of sushi rolls for Philip and Alicia, along with Styrofoam cups of miso soup. As usual, he sat in the center of the suite’s lone couch, while Philip and Alicia pulled up chairs to the coffee table between them. For his own meal, Mr. Cheever produced an orange, which he began to peel with a paring knife he pulled from a worn leather sheath that he kept in his pocket: though the knife had clearly seen much service, it still cut cleanly.
“Philip, we want you to publish a paper,” Mr. Cheever said as he kept his eyes on the physicists. His hands continued to peel the orange as if of their own accord, the rind unspooling in a perfect spiral. “We are already working on the content. But you will be the sole credited author.”
“What, exactly, is this paper meant to state?”
“In this paper, you will report the results of your attempts to create a causality violation. You will conclude that to do so is impossible. I feel certain that the paper will be published in a prominent place. It would be best if it’s the last article you write.”
The curled rind dropped to the table, leaving the orange naked.
“Oh, hell no,” said Alicia. “Oh, hell no. You’re not taking that away from him. You’re not taking that away from me.”
“Wait,” said Philip, his heart sinking. “Let’s hear him out.”
“Look,” said Mr. Cheever as he placed the unsheathed paring knife on the table. “It’s clear that the history of the world has been altered in some way, small or large. But we don’t know what the history was like that was, as you call it, overwritten. Maybe it was better than this one, or worse. Or better for some people but worse for others. We can’t know. We have speculations, but they’re only that. But whatever happens, the existence of this thing, behaving in the way that it does, presents a severe existential problem. We think it’s better that no one know that this device exists.
“Human behavior—of individuals, of families, of nations—is predicated on accountability to the future, but it is also predicated on the persistence of memory. We act as though we may not be able to evade the consequences of our actions. And it is our memory of our past that forces this, if nothing else. A woman who does good will always remember the results of that goodness, and will choose to do more good. Or she spends a week in jail, but the memory of her time in prison lasts for the rest of her life. Do you see?
“But if this device functions as you believe it does, then a time traveler would not even carry a memory of past versions of history from one to the next. If he would not have the reward that comes from knowing that he has somehow made the world better by altering history, he would also be free of the guilt of knowing he has made things worse. And a person who had access to time travel would act with impunity, committing crimes in plain sight with the certainty that the memory of his crimes would be obliterated by changing history—not just in his mind, but in all minds. Can you imagine what would happen if the wrong person got hold of this technology? If the wrong nation got hold of it? If multiple nations with different ambitions got hold of it? History would constantly be rewritten in an attempt to advantage one faction or another, and we would always be unaware of the changes. All we would know is that our own history would be anarchy and chaos.
“Given that, we believe that the knowledge that time travel is possible is best suppressed. We’d much prefer it if humanity believed that time travel could not, in fact, happen; we certainly don’t want people to know that, in a sense, it already has. I wish I could forget it myself—I wouldn’t have lain awake last night wondering what Rebecca Wright’s previous version of history had been like, or those of any time travelers before her.
“There may have been dozens, you know? Hundreds of prior iterations. She was just the first one who managed to leave behind proof.”
“That’s one of our speculations, by the way. That the prior version of history that this one overwrote was horrible. Complete geopolitical mayhem; half of New York City is underwater. The United States is headed toward civil war, or ruled by an artificial-intelligence construct, or some such other thing. Real end-of-days stuff. That the instances of ourselves who existed in that history figured out what we have: that the invention of the causality violation device was the cause. That in that prior version of history, Rebecca did not die in a car accident. That she went back to the past on a mission, as a volunteer, well aware of her sacrifice.”
“Both of you will be made whole,” Mr. Cheever said. “We can’t make a one-to-one restitution for the intangible benefits you’d get from publishing a positive result. But we can ensure you’ll be well taken care of. Dr. Steiner, you’ll receive an ample pension; Dr. Merrill, we feel certain that there’s a prestigious position available for you in the United States. You deserve a top-tier spot on the merits, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be our privilege to…smooth the way for you.”
“I’m quite happy in Delft, thank you,” Alicia said. “And I intend to return as soon as possible, if we’re done here.”
“We hope we can convince you to be content in the country of your citizenship,” said Mr. Cheever, his index finger running along the timeworn handle of the paring knife before him. “I suspect that, given what you are known by some to know, free and easy foreign travel may become…difficult, for you.”
“The device,” Philip said. “What are you going to do with it?”
“I know how this sounds. But you’ll have to trust us. We’ll take possession of it. We’re going to dismantle it; when we do so, the wormhole will close, making this the final version of history we live through. Then we’re going to box up the device and forget about it. Lose it somewhere; burn the records. It’ll end up in a warehouse right next to the Ark of the Covenant.”
Alicia sat back in her chair, her eyes closed,
slowly shaking her head. “We are getting owned on this,” she said. “Absolutely fucking owned.”
Mr. Cheever popped an orange slice into his mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. Then he picked up the paring knife and sheathed it.
“This is true,” he said, with no small amount of compassion. “You are, as you say, ‘getting owned.’ But it’s in the best interest of humanity. You and Philip have discovered the rare truth that it is inarguably best not to know. For this you have my sympathy, as well as my genuine admiration.”
Alicia, Philip, and Sean return to the house late; for Philip it has been a satisfying, but very long, day. Tomorrow is a school day for Sean, and Alicia asks him conspiratorially if he wants her to call in sick for him. He says he’ll be alright: he hasn’t done his homework yet, but it’s always super easy, it’ll take like five minutes, he can do it on the way to school.
Sean has a habit of not looking Alicia in the eye when he speaks to her. Alicia does not like this, but also does not know what to do to convince Sean that she has the authority that is a mother’s by right. He resists her attempts to get him to see her as anything more than a friend of the family. She sometimes thinks that she and Philip should have had a real wedding after she returned from the Netherlands to take up her position at IAS, even though neither of them wanted to deal with the expense and the fuss, and were happy to settle for signing a form in front of a registrar while a couple of close friends watched. But in retrospective that was perhaps needlessly furtive, and might have cemented the idea in Sean’s mind that she was some sort of usurper.
Alicia had known Rebecca, Philip’s first wife, though not that well—she’d never been in her company when Philip wasn’t there. But she knew her to have been a good person. She had no intention of replacing her, or even trying; someday, perhaps Sean would understand that.
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