by Alan Averill
Yates considers this as he gazes across the desolate brown surface of the Outback. Thousands of custom-built solar panels, their design lifted straight from his ancient black notebook, stretch toward the horizon in every direction. Each one is covered with a thin film invented by Yates some ten years prior: an improvement that allows them to gather more energy than even the most wild-eyed optimist could dream of.
All the years of existence compressed to a single point, he thinks, as the panels go about their work. And only I can see it coming.
Though he is exhausted and crying for sleep, Yates will not allow himself that luxury. This is a day over two decades in the making, and he wants to revel in every last moment. Somewhere beneath his feet, a machine hums quietly as it gathers power. And fifteen hours from now, he will descend into the Earth and flip a switch that will change the world forever. No, he will not sleep now. Not when the end is so very close.
He reaches into the pocket of a tattered lab coat and produces a cigarette, placing it absentmindedly in the corner of his mouth. His other hand dives into a different pocket in search of a lighter but emerges with only a single pistachio shell and the rusted blade of a scalpel. Frowning, he moves to the pockets of his old grey slacks, but these hold only lint. He thinks back as to where he might have left the lighter—on his desk, by his bed, perhaps in the cavity of one of the bodies he was working on last night—and is annoyed to discover that he has no idea where it is. Yates is a man used to knowing all things at all times, and he does not handle failure well.
His thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a door opening behind him, followed by the soft shuffle of feet as they cross the roof and take up position somewhere behind him.
“Good morning, Judith,” says Yates without turning around.
“Hello, Charles.”
“Come to watch the sunrise?”
“Not so much,” replies Judith before reaching into her pocket and producing an old silver lighter. She holds it out to Yates, who studies it for a moment before taking it with the fingers of one wrinkled hand.
“Where did you find this?”
“Next to the coffee machine.”
“Ah, yes. Of course.”
He sparks a flame and lights his cigarette, enjoying the way the smoke burns hot against his lungs. Judith glances at the notebook in his hands and coughs softly. Above them, the sun continues its long march across the sky.
“Is everything ready?” asks Yates after a minute.
“More or less,” responds Judith.
The hesitancy of this answer causes Yates to glance over. “You sound troubled.”
“We have a problem…. Actually, we have two problems.”
“Go on.”
“Takahiro has fled the country.”
“I expected as much.”
“He took the briefcase.”
The cigarette trembles slightly in Yates’s hand, knocking a small piece of ash into the desert wind. He feels a brief flash of rage rise up in his system. “When was this discovered?”
“Sounds like the board has been onto him for a couple of days. They tried to detain him at LAX, but he got away.”
“Do they know what he took?”
“They know he took something, but I don’t think they understand the importance. They want to talk to you about it.”
“When?”
“Now.”
Yates nods. Outwardly, he is the picture of calm, but inwardly he is raging. He wishes he were a lesser kind of man who might gain comfort from violence—if so, it might be nice to grab Judith by the nape of the neck and put out his cigarette in her eye.
“You said there were two problems,” says Yates, staring at his smoking cigarette. “What is the second?”
“It’s Hsu. He wants to turn on the Machine at ten o’clock exactly. I think the others agree with him.”
“Round numbers,” murmurs Yates.
“Hmm?” asks Judith.
“A round number is a way to assign meaning to otherwise random events. I chose to activate the Machine at ten seventeen because it will increase our battery efficiency by one-tenth of one percent. But, of course, the time ten seventeen holds no meaning. It implies randomness. Chaos. The men who control this company are incapable of grappling with such things.”
As he speaks, another image flashes in his mind, this time of grabbing the long red hair that waterfalls down Judith’s back and using it to whip her off the roof. The ground below is hard and flat, but not without small imperfections—she would make a terribly interesting pattern when she landed. Of course, at nearly eighty years old, he no longer has the strength to attempt such a maneuver even if he chose to.
“I will talk to Mr. Hsu directly,” continues Yates with a blank expression on his face. “Perhaps ten fifteen will be enough to satisfy his needs.”
“And if not?”
“If not, then it is no matter. The Machine will have more than enough power to do what we require of it.”
They fall to silence again. Judith takes a ballpoint pen from behind her ear and begins to click it slowly. Yates takes a final drag of his cigarette and tosses it off the edge of the roof, watching it spin and tumble through the air before exploding into sparks on the brown desert floor. When the final bit of red flame coughs and dies, he thumbs open the front page of his notebook and stares at one of his early sketches.
“The Machine has taught us many things,” he says suddenly, “but its final lesson is this: reality is flexible. Ideas that we accept without thinking, ideas that have always been accepted, are just shadows on a wall. We can grant them or take them away as we see fit.”
“What are you talking about, Charles?” asks Judith.
“Never mind. It doesn’t matter now.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“To the board?”
“They seem nervous.”
“They should be. They’ve put far too much power into our hands.” Yates smiles at this, a horrible thing that appears on his face like a demon in the night. “But there is nothing to be done. I will answer their summons, and they will ask ridiculous questions and take up far too much of my time. But at the end of it all, they will go forward with the plan and hope that everything is going to be fine.”
“And is it, Charles? Is it going to be fine?”
Charles pulls the lighter out of his pocket, watching how the sun glints off its silver surface. “Are you a religious person, Judith?”
“Not really, no.”
“I learned long ago that religion is nothing more than an elaborate game of pretend for people who are unable to grasp their own demise. I reject this system. I will not place my future in the hands of chance. This evening is an opportunity for those with cleverness and bravery to find a solution to the puzzle of mortality. You and I, Judith? We will seize this chance.”
“And the rest of the world?”
Yates watches a single brown hawk circle over a spot on the distant horizon and smiles to himself. “Life is selfish,” he says. “The predator eats the prey, the virus destroys the host. The quest for survival is violent and strange, and only the truly heartless can emerge successful…. You ask about the rest of the world? The rest of the world, Judith, can go fuck itself.”
The two of them stand in silence, watching the sun move across a harsh and barren landscape. Finally, Judith turns on one heel and slips away, closing the rooftop door behind her. Charles Yates remains where he is, feeling the wind in his hair and enjoying the last full sunrise of a dying world.
chapter seven
“You look awesome, Sam. Seriously awesome. But you’re like Tokyo-skinny now, and that ain’t good. You should eat a burger sometime. Oh, wait! Shit! We gotta eat. Hold on a sec.”
Tak leans out of the booth and cranes his neck in a futile search for a waitress, while Samira burrows into her red leather bench and smiles. She’d been smiling ever since she emerged from the airport and saw her old friend with a flower in one han
d and a small, metal briefcase in the other. He’d given the flower to her—Because I missed you, he’d said—and promised to explain the briefcase soon.
I’ll tell you everything, he’d said, as they hopped into a pickup and screamed off into the orange Nebraska dusk. Everything. Just lemme get somewhere calm, because it’s gonna take a while. We gotta leave major cities, so I’m thinking we find some diner on a rural highway and get ready. Oh, how was the flight? You do okay?
She’d nodded at this, which was as much of a lie as she could manage. Samira had actually spent the first two hours of the flight scrubbing the mirror of the lavatory with a paper towel and hand soap before the regular drone of the jet engines lulled her to sleep. She’d drifted off in a standing position, face pressed against the gleaming mirror, and dreamed that a cow with no skin was following her down the hallway of her apartment building. Each time she took a step, the cow would scream in pain as a piece of it fell off—by the time she reached her door, the hallway was full of writhing, screaming cow parts, all of them somehow her fault.
But now, holed up in a roadhouse outside Broken Bow, Nebraska, her dreams seem very far away. As truck stops go, this one seems to have joyfully embraced every cliché in the book. The jukebox rests under a picture of a fluttering American flag and belts out Merle Haggard. The smell of potatoes and onions fills the air. And near the front, three large men with even larger asses sit on stools and devour their food in silence. She can feel the men stare at them from beneath the bills of their caps, but it doesn’t bother her. Hell, there’s a Japanese dude and an Iranian chick sitting in a truck stop in the middle of Nebraska. That probably doesn’t happen very often.
“Okay, listen, never mind,” says Tak, abandoning his quest for food. “It’s one thirty in the morning, so there’s probably only one waitress. She’ll be back. We’ll order then. We need food.”
He tosses a hand in the center of the table, and Samira takes it without thinking. Although it’s only been four years since she saw her friend, Tak looks much older. He doesn’t have wrinkles or crow’s-feet or greying hair, but there is a depth to his features that wasn’t there before. She searches his face for other clues to his recent past and finds indications everywhere of a hard, dangerous life. There is a chunk missing from the top of his left ear, as if an angry squirrel decided to take a bite. His fingers, which had once been long and delicate, are covered with calluses and scars. But mostly it’s the heaviness that she sees, the weight of a million deeds haunting him from somewhere behind his eyes. If she didn’t know better, she’d swear she was looking at a soldier freshly returned from war.
“Nice dress,” he says after a minute. “I missed that dress.”
“Thanks,” she whispers, turning her gaze to the faded yellow sundress clinging to her thin frame. “I figured…I guess I wanted to wear something pretty.”
“Hey, what happened?” he asks suddenly, pointing at her bandaged left hand. “Is that a war wound or something?”
“It’s nothing. I was cleaning something, and…yeah. Don’t worry about it.”
Tak seems ready to say more but instead pulls his hand away and snatches the briefcase from its hiding spot under the table. Setting it on the bench next to him, he rubs the top for a few seconds, lost in thought. Then he turns back to Samira, opens his mouth, stops, thinks for a few seconds more, and begins to laugh.
“What?” asks Samira.
“Nothing,” he says. “It’s just…This is all so fucking surreal. I don’t even know how to tell you. I don’t know where to start. I’m afraid you won’t believe me.”
“I’ll believe you.”
“I dunno.”
“Well, I’ll try,” she says. “How’s that?”
He nods and pulls on the neck of his T-shirt, a blue number with the words I HEART OTAKU scrawled across the front. “All right. I know I told you some crazy shit, like ‘you’re gonna die in twenty-two hours,’ but I can’t explain that yet, or it won’t make sense. I have to start at the beginning. Cool?”
“Cool.”
“Good. Okay. So four years ago, I tried to hang myself.”
Samira knows this, but hearing it spoken aloud makes it somehow more real. When she’d received word of Tak’s death, she’d been getting ready to deploy on a second tour of duty in Iraq. There had been no time to attend the funeral, no time even to grieve. Seventy-two hours after learning of her friend’s supposed demise, she was interviewing witnesses of a Baghdad car bombing while men with assault rifles held an angry mob at bay. Tak’s death had become a sad and secret pain that she carried around like a broken wristwatch. And finally faced with it again, she is surprised to find that her first reaction is one of anger. Damn you, Tak, she thinks suddenly. Damn you. You were the last good thing in my life, and once you were gone, nothing mattered anymore.
“Anyway, look,” he continues, “I can tell you’re pissed, and I’m sorry. But what matters is that I didn’t go through with it. Before I could kick out the chair, I got a phone call from a company called the Axon Corporation. Turns out they wanted to offer me a job. And so I figured, hey, what the hell, right? Beats stretching my neck from the chandelier.”
“That’s not funny,” says Samira.
“Sorry…. Anyway, after I agreed, they flew me down to Australia and drove me into the Outback. Like, way into the Outback, hundreds of miles, until we reached this big white building. And then took me underground and showed me their invention.”
“Which is what?”
“It’s called the Machine.”
“That’s a boring name,” says Samira.
“Yeah, well, the guy who built it isn’t what you’d call a creative type. Anyway, this guy, Yates, he invented the Machine, but he couldn’t figure out how to make it work. So that’s why they called me.”
“You?” asks Samira, who is getting slightly annoyed at how long Tak is taking to build up to his obvious dramatic finish.
“Yeah. Me.”
“Why you? You don’t know about science.”
“They didn’t need a scientist, Sam. They needed an explorer.”
“And why is that?”
“Because it’s a time machine.”
Samira stares at Tak for a long time, then decides to look out the window. A few flakes of snow drift through the light of sodium arc lamps before settling on the asphalt of Highway 2. Tak sits still and silent—both rarities for him—and waits for his friend to turn back. When she finally does, the look on her face is one of bemused confusion.
“You’re high,” she says. “Or you’re crazy. But I’m going to guess that you’re high.”
“I’m serious.”
“Come on. Where have you really been?”
“I’m serious,” he repeats. There is a strange expression on his face, as if he both expected her reaction and is somehow disappointed by it. “Sam, I’m dead serious. It’s a goddamn time machine.”
“There’s no such thing as a time machine.”
“Yes. Yes, there is. I’ve seen it. I’ve used it. I’ve gone in the thing hundreds of times. It’s real. It works. I promise.”
“I don’t know how to believe you right now,” says Samira quietly. “I’m sorry, but I just…I don’t.”
Tak shifts in his seat and runs his fingers back and forth through his hair, then checks his watch. “Okay, well, I know it sounds like I’m on crack, but in about six hours, you’re gonna have to believe me.”
“Why?” asks Samira.
“Because. Listen, I’m getting ahead of myself. Can I go back? You need to hear all of this. You don’t have to believe it right now, but you need to listen. All right?”
She nods. Tak starts to speak, then notices a waitress appear from somewhere in the back. Waving his hand wildly, he begins to yell at her from across the restaurant. “Pancakes! Hey, wait! We need, like…” He glances down at his hand, counts his fingers, then puts his tongue between his teeth and closes his eyes. “Nine! We need nine orders of pancakes!
And three pitchers of water!”
The waitress raises her eyebrows. The three men on stools stop eating with their forks suspended in midair. Tak grins. Eventually, the waitress decides he’s serious and wanders back into the kitchen. As the truckers return to their food and commence muttering, Tak spins around and finds Samira staring at him.
“Hungry?” she asks.
“It’s for both of us,” he says. “We need starches and simple sugars. And lots of water. Pancakes and syrup is the best.”
“The best for what?”
“Time travel. Look, I need to just talk for a while. Is that all right?”
Samira nestles herself in the corner of the booth and nods. She should be disappointed that Tak has so clearly gone insane, but in truth, she’s secretly pleased that she won’t be the only one at the table who’s mentally unstable.
“All right, here we go,” says Tak. “So! Axon has a time machine, and they want me to change history to make it more beneficial for the company. You know, buy stock at a certain price, patent ideas and products before rival companies can, that kind of thing. Big waste of a time machine if you ask me, but hey, I’m just the explorer. The hell do I know?”
The waitress comes by with three pitchers of water and sets them down. Tak pours two glasses, shoves one in front of Samira, and drains his in a single gulp. He refills the glass and motions for Samira to drink up. “Anyway, so it was my job to travel through time and start mucking around, but I gotta tell ya, Sam, I was worried.”
“Oh?” asks Samira, taking a sip of water.
“Well, think about it! Time travel is really messy. What if I screw something up? What if I kill my own grandfather, or step on a butterfly, or whatever? The implications of messing around with a timeline are just fucking terrifying.”
“Yeah, I guess I can see that…. I mean, if I believed this.”
“But that’s not how time travel works,” says Tak flatly. He tops off Samira’s water glass and motions to it again. “Seriously, drink that. You’re gonna need it.”
