The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  One idiot cop thought the crowd had started shooting, and fired back. His bullet hit a young black man in the shoulder, and then the world went crazy.

  The crowd began to panic and flee. The cops began firing left and right. Bullets were flying everywhere. One of them hit Carstairs just before he and Jenkins opened the Slipstream. Less than a minute later, nearly 200 people (including dozens of children) were injured and 70 were dead.

  If my father had died in Sharpeville, Jenkins could have simply made a Rewind, popping back to Carstairs’ transport coordinates from the day before, and pulling him back to the lab to reset long before a single bullet was fired.

  But Jenkins didn’t know my dad was dying when he yanked him back through time to bleed to death on the lab floor at the feet of his eight-months-pregnant wife. Jenkins charged headfirst through a fleeing mob and a hail of bullets to bring Agent Carstairs home, and that’s exactly what he did. None of us ever blamed him. He did everything right.

  But that didn’t make it better. The damage had been done. Not only did my father die, but so did all of those other people. The bullet that killed Agent Carstairs tied a knot between his own permanent timeline and the permanent timelines of all those innocent people in South Africa. The Sharpeville Massacre was real. Jenkins couldn’t save them.

  During the epic Congressional hearing into Dad’s death, Mom wanted Daisey hung out to dry for criminal incompetence. But of course his rich dad paid off all the right people, so the evidence was deemed “inconclusive” and Daisey was quietly let go with a giant severance package and half a dozen offers for jobs in the corporate sector. Mom and the rest of the devastated agents were left to pick up the pieces.

  Leo and I were born just six weeks later and she refused to take any of her maternity leave beyond what was medically required. She brought us to the office with her. The new Director tried, with increasing urgency, to send her home to either mourn or raise two newborns in peace and quiet, but she would have none of it. “I am mourning,” she told him once. “This is how I do that. I am honoring the work my husband died for. I am not sitting on my sofa staring at family photos and crying into my brandy.”

  No one ever mentioned it again.

  * * *

  “Agent Bellows, Director Gray has shared your most recent field report with the committee, and we’d like to ask you some questions,” said Holmes, snapping me back to the present. He paused, politely, as though waiting for me to assent to further questioning — like I had any choice — so I nodded for him to go on.

  “Agent Grove, as you know, is still in unconscious and under medical care, so no field report has been filed on the 1968 Chronomaly,” said the Director. “The committee would like to hear, in your own words, what happened and what you saw.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” I said. “Or, if I did, I don’t know what it was.”

  “You were right on top of it,” said one of the congressmen — Fletcher, Democrat, Oregon 1st, said the catalog of useless data in my head.

  “I know.”

  “And nothing looked out of place?”

  “Look,” I said a little defensively, “I’m an apprentice. I’m in training as a desk agent. Do you want to talk about math? I can talk to you about the math. But the people stuff, that’s not what I do.”

  “The HIO readings were astronomical,” said the Director. “If a Chronomaly is so massive that it causes a Slipstream Incongruity, there must have been some sign of it. We’ve been over the footage from your micro-cam several times and have been completely unable to detect what the event might have been. Anything you can tell us — anything unusual that you might have spotted — would help tremendously. We know the spike was within about thirty seconds of the moment you transported out with Grove, and definitely inside that building, but that’s as narrow as we can close in.”

  “Believe me,” I said, “if I had seen anything I’d tell you. I wanted to find it too. I don’t like math problems I can’t solve.” This amused him, and he smiled at me as he refilled my now-empty water glass.

  “Agent Bellows,” said another congresswoman I didn’t recognize, “what would you say if I asked you to tell us in one sentence what caused the Third World War?”

  I was startled at the change of subject, and thought for a moment. It was a tricky question, and my brain began doing the thing it does when I have to sift through my mental library of historical data to put facts in order.

  “Well,” I began cautiously, “The simplest one-sentence version would be to say that it officially began with the Chinese bombing raid on Washington D.C. in 1982.”

  “But the truth is more complicated than that?”

  “Almost always.”

  “So what would you say if we asked you your real opinion?”

  “In more than one sentence?”

  “In as many sentences as you need.”

  “We’d be here for hours,” I explained. “It wasn’t a straightforward action/reaction. It was a big messy tangled knot. The U.S. economy, the ‘68 Republican Convention, Communism, Ronald Reagan —”

  “And Nixon?” said the man at my elbow, and I turned to him in surprise. He smiled at my expression.

  “You weren’t expecting that,” he said. I smiled back.

  “I wasn’t, to be honest,” I admitted. “President Nixon is mostly only of interest to historians these days. He’s a footnote, mostly of significance because Reagan was his Vice President before being elected in 1976. Ask any high school student about him and that’s the only thing any of them will know.”

  “You’re a Nixon specialist, I’m told. You studied him in-depth at the Academy.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What kind of politician was he?”

  “Stubborn,” I said. “Taciturn, a little grumpy, but solid. Stable. No nasty baggage, you know? No secret mistress, no drugs, no gay rumors, no mob ties. He was Quaker. He didn’t drink that much. He didn’t swear. He didn’t sleep in the same room as his wife. Just very self-contained. Thoroughly unexciting from most people’s point of view.”

  I went on, “But I’ve always found him fascinating. It’s always seemed to me — and this is my personal opinion, by the way, not my professional one, so feel free to ignore it — that something about his personality seemed…I don’t know. Too crafted. Like someone trying to keep their true self very contained. But of course there’s no evidence that he had any more of a secret dark side than the average politician.”

  Another voice spoke up from the far end of the table.

  “Agent Bellows, do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do,” I said, her serious voice causing me to tense up for no clear reason I could think of. “Adeline Ondwudiwe. Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s an honor to meet you.”

  “Thank you, Agent Bellows. Now, I need to ask you a tremendously important question, so please think carefully about your answer. Is it your considered opinion, as an expert scholar of mid-20th century history — which I understand, from your record, that despite your young age you certainly are — that the course of history would have been changed significantly had Richard Nixon not served out a second term?”

  “You’re asking about the war, aren’t you?” I felt suddenly cold. She nodded.

  For some reason my eyes drifted back to Director Gray, and he nodded too. This wasn’t theoretical. Something was happening. The strange tense energy in the room suddenly coalesced around this one single question and I realized what they were asking.

  The penny dropped.

  “You’re not on the Time Travel Committee,” I said, turning to Congressman Holmes as the truth dawned on me. “You never have been.”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  “What you are, I believe, is the chair of the House Intelligence Committee.”

  “Right again.”

  “So you’re not here so much as a congressional specialist on time travel as you are the guy responsible for overs
ight of Homeland Security and the CIA.” He didn’t say anything, just nodded again, confirming my worst fears. I looked from him to the Director to Speaker Onduwidwe and back. All three of their faces had the same expression.

  “You can’t possibly be thinking what you’re thinking,” I said, perhaps more accusingly than I meant. “You can’t possibly. It’s insane. No one has tried this in sixty years. The last time somebody tried to redirect a historical event of this magnitude, it messed up the timeline for generations. The whole reason our jobs exist is to repair errors caused by First-Gen agents with this exact crackpot idea.”

  “Crackpot or not,” said my mother, who I had literally forgotten was there, in a repressive tone that made me slink a little lower in my seat, “it’s actually a bit more complicated than that.” She slid a handheld screen across the table to me. “Take a look.”

  I picked it up and looked at the screen and said the first thing that popped into my head.

  “Holy Shit.”

  They all looked awkwardly at each other, startled and a little flustered at my poor manners. All except my mother, who nodded serenely like I had given the correct answer to a question she already knew. She hit a button below the table and the chart I was seeing on the handheld appeared on the screen behind us.

  “Tell them what they’re looking at, Regina,” she said, and I stood and walked over to the screen to show them.

  “Okay. Look at this,” I said, pointing. “This horizontal axis here, this represents the course of history as past events unfold. This vertical axis represents the significance of those events, as measured by how many people they impact. So in places where some major historical event occurs, you’ll see a spike. Everybody with me?”

  They nodded.

  “Okay, so let me scroll back and show you the Revolutionary War for comparison,” I said, sliding my finger over the screen of the handheld to roll back a couple of centuries. “Here. You can see a very, very slow buildup over decades before, then an abrupt acceleration.”

  I pointed to the first big peak. “This is 1765, right here,” I said. “The Stamp Act. Americans begin to rebel against the Crown in earnest. It keeps ramping up, and you can note here that the rate of acceleration increases every year. That’s fairly standard. The colonists are angry. They’re frustrated. Something that might slide by their notice twenty years ago sets off a boiling point now. Emotions are running high. The gap between incidents narrows. This is how wars traditionally start.”

  “And this big peak here?” asked one of the congressmen, pointing to the beginning of the steep plateau.

  “1775.”

  “Lexington and Concord,” said one of the others.

  “That’s right,” I said. “The official beginning of the war. So you can see that it spikes here pretty dramatically — ‘shot heard around the world’ and all that — and then stays at a high peak until here. 1783-ish. Treaty of Paris is signed, British troops empty out of the U.S., life goes back to normal.”

  I continued, “Now, amidst the overall trajectory you can see a healthy amount of random scatter — data points all over the map, high and low, throughout the entire war. That’s normal. Even during wartime, the war isn’t the only thing going on in everyone’s lives. Other events are taking place all over the country, some with major significance and some perfectly ordinary.”

  I took a breath. “So you have a trendline here but it’s still knee-deep in ordinary data. That’s what a regular war looks like.”

  I scrolled forward to the Third World War. “Now look at this again,” I said, pointing so they could see. “Do you see it now?”

  “It’s not the same kind of pattern at all,” said the congresswoman sitting next to my mother, who nodded. They all leaned in closer to see.

  “Look,” I pointed. “The irregularity comes out of nowhere. There’s no buildup. It’s just a massive spike.”

  “Higher than any of the other spikes you showed us,” said Holmes.

  “Exactly. This isn’t what a natural crisis point looks like. Actions don’t take place in a vacuum. Nobody just bombs a country for no reason.”

  “So what is that big spike?” asked one of them. I looked at the date and frowned.

  “That’s strange.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not the bombing raid.”

  “It’s not?”

  “It’s ten years before the bombing raid. It’s June 1972.”

  “What happened in June, 1972?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Or, nothing connected to this, anyway. But this spike isn’t the important part. What’s important are these smaller ones.”

  “Why?” said the Speaker. They were all curious now.

  “When you throw a rock in a pond,” I explained, “you get a ripple effect of concentric circles that start strong in the center and then fade out the further they are from where the rock hit. Yes?” They nodded. “That’s what this means. But that’s not what Lexington and Concord look like. Lexington and Concord were simmering for a long time at a higher and higher temperature until finally the tension boiled over. World War II is the same way. Long slow build after World War I, big spike after Hitler starts invading, another big spike after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Action stays elevated for a long time.”

  I paused to make sure they were all with me, then went on. “But what we’re looking at here is one massive, off-the-charts irregularity with decreasing symmetrical irregularities on either side of it. Look, the pattern is pristine. Each subsequent spike decreases on the x-axis by the same ratio. It’s too clean to be natural. Real life doesn’t look like that. And look, the random scatter we saw during the Revolutionary War? Nonexistent here. This pattern can only mean one thing: the timeline is self-correcting. This is the fallout of a massive Chronomaly. Bigger than any I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. A historical event that’s synced properly has a wildly irregular pattern of up-and-down spikes. There’s a random scatter to the coordinates that shows you it was a real-time event. Once the chronology has been altered, though, you see patterns begin to emerge that show the system correcting itself. So what you’re seeing here is the pattern that you would expect to see after a direct intervention. There’s a huge jump, here. That’s the rock that gets dropped into the pond. The ripples spread out from there, forward and back. The levels stay high right around the event and taper off gradually before and after as the system repairs itself.”

  I pointed to the screen. “Look, here. This spike in 1968? That’s Grove and me. Whatever went wrong with the Johnson election, whatever almost trapped us in the Slipstream, it was only an aftershock from a much, much bigger original event.”

  “So what does it mean?”

  “Well, if I’m reading this graph right — and I’m definitely reading it right — this means…” I froze as the true significance of what I was looking at crashed down on me all at once.

  I looked at the Director. He nodded at me soberly.

  “How did we not know?” I said softly to him. “How could we possibly not know?”

  “You did know,” he said. “You just didn’t know you knew. We pulled all these numbers from your field report for Grove. The reason you kept beating your head against the wall to make the pattern fit was because the pattern didn’t fit. It never did. Everyone else chalked it up to crisis point interference. Wars are always messy. You’re the first agent to see what all the rest of us should have seen decades ago.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “The war itself is the Chronomaly.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was never supposed to happen. And look — once you know it’s there, once you know what you’re looking for, you can trace the ripples forwards and backwards, all the way up to — ” I scrolled forward and leaned in to read: “December 2113.”

  I stopped suddenly. “That’s next year.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re still inside the chronomaly fallout,
even now.”

  “We believe so, yes.”

  “That’s why you’re all here,” I said, looking at my mother. “You want to send an agent back to the crisis point to stop a war.”

  “Not just somebody,” she said calmly, and I felt a slow cold terror spread over my body as she and the Director looked at each other.

  No, don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it …

  “You,” she said.

  The last thing I remember was the annoyed look on her face as I slumped to the floor.

  Six

  How to Stop a War That Already Happened

  “Miss me?” said an amused male voice, and I opened my eyes to find myself back in the medical bay, in the exact same room I had just left. The medic grinned at me.

  Calliope and my mother were sitting in the visitor chairs, deep in conversation. Calliope spotted me first.

  “Oh good, you’re awake,” she said, relieved. More audacious than I had ever seen her in my life, she boldly turned to my mother and said, “You took a big chance elevating her stress level so soon after she almost got trapped in the Slipstream.”

  “She’s fine,” said my mother. “Aren’t you, Regina?”

  “Your concern is touching,” I snapped. Or tried to, but it came out “Mmmmmglllfllphhhhh.” My head was fuzzy again.

  “She needs sleep,” said Calliope.

  “I agree,” said the medic. I thanked him silently. “At least four days’ bed rest. No work and no transports.”

  “We don’t have four days,” said my mother. “We’re sending her back out in the field.”

  “Really?” he said. “You want to take that chance? You want to send her into the office of some historical dignitary and have her faint all over the floor?”

  My mother was silent. “I’m not making a suggestion,” he said firmly. “I’m giving an order. On every other floor of this building your word is law, but up here on Thirty-Six the only thing that matters is the patient’s health. Your field mission will have to wait four days.”