Asimov's SF, September 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  It was the worst attack I'd ever had. I shouted, I flailed. I cowered at ghostly tormentors and broke everything that could be broken in assaults on invisible enemies. Chen-chi weathered it all with remarkable aplomb, locking herself in an adjoining room during the violent parts, gently coaxing me closer to sanity when I needed to hear a human voice, sitting quietly when I needed peace. When I finally reached the crying stage she held me: arms wrapped around my chest from behind, head pressed against my back, as if we had done this a thousand times, as if she had walked me through a lifetime's worth of flashbacks. We knelt like that for a long time, an island of warmth on a bare concrete floor spewed with wood fragments, shattered glass, and the remains of any furniture that human hands could splinter. When I was able, I lay down and slept.

  Sometime after dawn, after I had watched Clarise's mother die for the fiftieth time and the memories had finally begun to disperse, I lifted my head and saw Chen-chi across the room. She was kneeling in a streak of pale light from the window, face pressed against her hands, shoulders heaving. I thought, for an instant, that I should go to her, console her, lessen whatever burden could make a teenager weep like a saint mourning the sins of the world. But my limbs were too weak, or my soul was, and I returned my cheek to the concrete.

  * * * *

  "It is possible to travel backward through time,” Chen-chi said the next afternoon. We were sitting at a battered wooden table in the basement apartment she had brought me to, eating muffins from a nearby bakery.

  "Through time,” I said warily.

  "Yes, but only as a sentience net. You've heard of tachyons?"

  Tachyons. Subatomic particles that travel faster than light. “Yes,” I said.

  "It is possible to create a set of coherent relationships between individual tachyons, similar to quantum entanglement. And it is possible to initialize these connections based on the emissions of the human brain."

  I wondered where a girl her age had picked up that kind of vocabulary. “You're telling me you can create a copy of the mind?"

  "More like a snapshot. A sentience net can't think, can't act, can't do anything really, because there's no physical support structure."

  "But it can travel backward in time, because it's made of tachyons."

  A ghost of a smile crossed Chen-chi's face. “You're just as smart as you will be forty years from now. Yes. The tachyons travel faster than light: send them a far enough distance, and they'll return to their point of origin before they left it. If conditions are favorable, the net can then induce a response in neural tissue."

  It wasn't hard to see where this was going. Time-bandits. A mind from the future overlaying itself on a mind in the present. It explained . . . some things about the past twelve hours, I supposed, although it didn't explain Chen-chi's preoccupation with me. She was not overt about it. But those dark, expressionless eyes had followed me all morning, studying my face when she thought I wasn't looking.

  I gestured with my muffin. “And you're one of these . . . these minds from the future?"

  I didn't realize how skeptical I sounded until Chen-chi grinned, the first truly human expression I'd seen from her. “I told you that you wouldn't want to hear my explanation on an empty stomach."

  "And I—” I had been intended as a target, clearly. A hapless victim for some rampaging mind from the future. Not hypnosis, not memory suppression. Usurpation. If Chen-chi could be believed.

  Chen-chi's smile had vanished. “We knew it was risky,” she said in a carefully uninflected tone. “Merging a sentience net with the upstream mind is a tricky business. The process requires emotional resonance between the host mind and the sentience net, as well as the visual stimulus patterns. The text in that fortune cookie was deliberately designed to anger you. But we only accounted for anger, not for the flashbacks. You'd resolved the last of those memories decades ago, you see, so it didn't occur to any of us that—"

  "And what would have happened to me? After you bastards were done hijacking my body?"

  "Don't act so huffy. You volunteered for this, you know."

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  "Yes, you. Eugene Gutierrez. When the RCIA planned this stunt, it was you they went to first, and it was you who agreed to take point on the mission. You ran the psych gauntlet. You initialized the sentience net, mimicked the emotional state, chose the trigger—the fortune cookie was your idea."

  I felt like the floor was spinning away from me. The rampaging mind from the future was . . . me? My future self, traveling back to pick up its own past body? My vision was blurring. I reacted the way I've trained myself to react to panic attacks: with iron control. If I snap on the facade fast enough, no one else can tell what's happening to my heart rate. I modulated my indrawn breath to keep it from sounding ragged and willed my voice to hold steady.

  "You must have me confused with some other Eugene from the future,” I said, pushing away from the table. “I don't do undercover work anymore."

  Why on earth would my future self agree to this temporal jaunt? Was it some sort of glory game, challenging the past by plunging back into active duty? Was my future self insane?

  "Eugene,” Chen-chi rose and followed me to the far corner of the room. She placed a hand on my back with disturbing familiarity. “I know how hard this is for you. But you had good reasons for your choice, and—"

  The door exploded.

  Fire, smoke, and shrapnel sliced through the room, along with a spatter of wood fragments. The door hadn't been locked, but I supposed the hazy figures in the hallway hadn't wanted to tip us off by trying to open it. My ears rang with the echo of the explosion. I became aware of a knifing pain in my thigh.

  I very much wanted to roll my eyes up into my head and spend the next two weeks in a coma, but my body was already pulling Chen-chi to the ground once again. Any decent field agent would have hit the floor ahead of me. Whatever her role in this mess was, it wasn't as a combatant.

  I sized up the playing field. Three spooks in the hallway. Likely a fourth posted at the window Chen-chi and I had entered through last night. Judging from the scene in the restaurant, their objective was to kill, not capture, which meant their next likely move was—

  A hand grenade lobbed through the shattered doorframe.

  I rolled, pressed my shoulders into the cement, and swung my feet upward. I felt a satisfactory thud against the top of one shoe and the grenade arched back toward the doorway. It detonated as I finished rolling to the inside wall. Chen-chi had had the sense to scramble behind the overturned table. Chunks of shrapnel embedded themselves in the wood.

  I charged the doorway. Granted, it was a risk, but the clumsy grenade attack hinted that these guys weren't much better trained than Chen-chi. I caught two of them still pulling themselves up from the floor. The third had taken the brunt of the explosion; I gauged the amount of spatter and decided he was no longer a threat.

  The spooks held guns, but moved like people who'd never been trained to use them. I took out the larger of the two, then turned to the final, smaller opponent, which turned out to be a woman. We wrestled in the smoke, but not for long. I twisted her arm behind her back and pinned her against the wall. My free hand was prepared to strike.

  The smoke began to clear and I finally got a good look at my opponent. The clothes were unfamiliar—black jumpsuit and combat boots—and her auburn hair was pulled away from her face, but the teal blue eyes and the delicate jawline were unmistakable. I released her and stepped back, stunned.

  "Clarise,” I said.

  She stared at me, eyes wide, mouth half open in astonishment. Then she kicked me in the groin and pelted up the stairs.

  I didn't try to follow. I waited until the worst of the nausea faded and Chen-chi had moved to stand beside me. I turned my head and asked in carefully modulated tones: “Chen-chi, why is my daughter trying to kill me?"

  "It's complicated."

  "I'm a quick study."

  We weren't glaring at each ot
her. Not quite.

  * * * *

  We scrambled out the basement window and sprinted down the alley. The thigh wound I'd taken during the assault made every step an agony. We were only a few streets away—near enough to hear the sirens of police cars arriving to investigate the explosion—when the leg gave out entirely.

  I tumbled against Chen-chi, and she helped lower me to the pavement. I pulled the ripped cloth of my pant leg aside to reveal a fist-sized chunk of wood wedged into my muscle tissue. It must have blown into the room when the door exploded; poor luck that it happened to strike my leg sharp end first. I leaned against the rough brick of a building and steadied my breathing. The wound was deep, but not life-threatening. Good. I'd be able to walk in a few minutes.

  "I think,” I said to Chen-chi, “that you had better tell me more about this mission."

  She glanced uncertainly along the empty street. “I don't think this is the place or time."

  "It'll do."

  Chen-chi nodded and seemed to be searching for a place to begin. “We're here for the same reason anyone travels through time: To change the past.

  "This city is home to an underground mafia. Clarise has been a member for years, but you never guessed it. She's helping the group develop some very dangerous technology: pinpoint singularities, experimental weapons. In a few days, one of those experiments will go terribly awry."

  Chen-chi paused. When she spoke again, her voice sounded hollow, as if all the emotion had been strangled out of it.

  "My parents died in the explosion. Half of the city died with them. Clarise . . . lived, but she couldn't forgive herself for her part in the accident. She, um . . . she committed suicide a few years later. I'm sorry."

  I stared. Chen-chi was speaking again, but I didn't pay attention. All I could see was Clarise—Clarise dressed in black combat boots, teamed up with a gang of hoodlums. I didn't know whether to be heartsick or enraged by her betrayal.

  How long had it been going on? Since high school, probably. Back when she started going to “parties” but came home sober. Back when she started talking about her new friends, but never brought them by the house. She was good fodder for a group like that; idealistic, athletic, stubborn as hell. But why would she run with that crowd when she knew what kind of havoc they wreaked, when she'd seen herself what years of fighting terrorists had cost me?

  "Why didn't we go farther back?” I asked Chen-chi suddenly. Another fifteen years—what were fifteen more when you'd already traveled forty? I could still see those gorgeous eyes, teal blue like Clarise's....

  "And save Emmeline? You tried. You argued with the mission coordinator for weeks. I was afraid you'd kill him over it. But we were out of time, Eugene. We had weeks, perhaps only days, before our research location was compromised. And then there was the question of contamination. HQ was almost too hesitant to chance the intervention we're trying now.

  "But Eugene, you can't imagine it. If you think the world's ugly today, it's even uglier forty years downstream. The gang lords gained leverage off the explosion. They kept learning, kept trying different things . . . in the end they took the White House, fractured the union. It's been war on our own turf for decades now. If we can stop it, if it can be prevented..."

  I waved my hand to shut her up. I didn't want to hear any more. All I could think of was Emmeline, bleeding, those lovely eyes turned glassy—and those bastards laughing.

  I gritted my teeth and used my pocketknife to cut away the lower leg of my trousers. The material was flimsy, but long enough to slice into rough bandages, and relatively clean. It would do until I could get back to the medical kit I kept under my bed.

  I didn't dare remove the impaled wood, not without the right equipment to stop the blood flow. The best I could do was to secure it against jostling. Chen-chi's voice cut across my thoughts as I struggled to loop the cloth around my thigh. “Eugene, we need to figure out what to do."

  I let go of the bandages. My hands were shaking too badly to tie them anyway.

  "Figure out what to do?” The wall behind me felt reassuringly solid as I leaned my head against it and looked askance at the teenager. “What kind of half-baked, non-informed time traveler are you? No good in a firefight, no good finding a hideout, no clue what to do next—do we have an SOP or not?"

  It was the first time I'd seen Chen-chi look hurt. “My job was to deliver the triggers and lay low until the work was done. I was the only one who had a past moment specific and traumatic enough to snare the sentience net without an external visual. Make it back, deliver the triggers, that's all I was supposed to do. I'm doing the best I can, Eugene. I wasn't cleared on the mission stats."

  "Well, ‘the best you can’ is pretty dang lousy. You nearly got us killed, letting us get tracked to the basement apartment."

  "You weren't in much of a state to make decisions at the time. What do you expect me to do?"

  "Be smart!” I said, and closed my eyes to ward off an impending headache.

  Chen-chi was silent for thirty seconds.

  "Do you have a weapons stash?” I asked.

  Chen-chi shook her head. “Jo-jo was going to arrange weapons at the rendezvous, but something went wrong after I delivered his activation trigger. The downstream gang lords must have gotten wind of our plan and sent a message back to the here-and-now. They don't know how to initialize a sentience net, but they might have gotten a text message through to the singularity generator when it was brought online a few days ago."

  Chen-chi paused as though trying to gauge the likelihood of her theory. “Anyway, they shot at Jo-jo. We got separated, and I hid in the crowd. I didn't think they knew about me. But I suppose they were following me, waiting until I activated you."

  "Clumsy,” I said. “Letting yourself be trailed like that. This Jo-jo . . . where can I find him?"

  "He runs a machine shop across town. I planted his trigger last week, but with the rendezvous and agent identities compromised, he's gone into hiding."

  "Was there a back-up rendezvous?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "Let me guess. You don't know the details.” This teen was really getting on my nerves. “Well, it looks like we're stuck. Jo-jo will have to do the best he can on his own, and you and I will go our separate ways and lie low till the whole thing blows over."

  "You can't do that,” Chen-chi said. It wasn't a plea. It was an unadorned statement of fact, spoken with more confidence than a teenager—or even a time traveler in a teenager's body—had a right to speak anything.

  "Why not?"

  "Because Jo-jo might hurt Clarise."

  I froze. Of course. If Clarise was mixed up with this crowd, then she was likely to be on-scene during the fighting. And this Jo-jo, whoever he was, wouldn't halt the mission just because she was in the kill zone. I wouldn't, if it was someone else's daughter.

  Slowly, I turned my head toward Chen-chi. “You'd better help me patch up this leg."

  Chen-chi worked in silence, stone-faced, wrapping the cloth with cool professionalism. I wondered whether her future self was a physician. That might explain why she was here with no useful knowledge about the mission. But it didn't explain how she knew so much about me.

  A few things were beginning to come clear, at least. Our attackers hadn't known who I was—or even where—until Chen-chi attempted to activate me. That meant Clarise hadn't tried to kill me, in particular. From her perspective, she had just been attacking two unnamed agents from the future.

  My future self's motivations also began to make sense. This mission wasn't a glory jaunt. It was a last-ditch effort to save my family. I hadn't even known it needed saving.

  "Chen-chi,” I said after a while, “Who are you to me? The future me, I mean. The one who didn't make it back."

  Chen-chi's hands paused in their work. “Does it matter?"

  "Damn straight it matters! You know everything about me. Even things I never told Clarise. So were you my psychologist, or some kind of mind-rapist, or what?"
/>
  Chen-chi pulled the bandages taut. “I was your wife."

  Images rushed me like a brick wall: Emmeline in a yellow ski hat demonstrating the snowplow for a group of students. Emmeline grinning as she snatched my textbooks and backed off with them, telling me to lighten up and go on a date with her. Emmeline bleeding. Emmeline laughing.

  Emmeline's grave. A simple square marker and a vase of purple flowers. A viciously cheerful sun denying the collapse of the universe.

  "My wife is dead,” I said.

  Chen-chi tied off the bandage. “Yes, well, so is my husband. So you and I are stuck with each other."

  I exhaled. Slowly, heavily. “All right. Tell me one more thing. How much do our enemies know about the mission?"

  "Not much, I think. They didn't know where to find you until I tried to activate you. I don't think they know what we plan to do. They just know that we're here and that we're a threat to them."

  "Well. At least they're as badly informed as we are."

  Chen-chi almost smiled.

  * * * *

  Five hours later Chen-chi and I crouched behind a bookshelf in the basement of a university library. We'd risked a detour by my apartment for the med kit and an undamaged pair of trousers. There had been no sentries posted, so either Clarise hadn't told them who I was, or they didn't think I'd dare to go there. My thigh still throbbed, but it would do.

  The books in this section of the library were musty, leather-bound, and frequently stood askew. Through cracks between them, I watched Clarise sitting in a pool of light at the microfilm readers. She sat in direct profile to us, hair down and twisted over one shoulder, her left hand meticulously twirling the knob of the machine. She paused frequently to scribble notes on a pad of paper.

  It would have looked like an innocent late-night study session if Chen-chi hadn't told me that in two days, in the neglected conference room behind the microfilm readers, a 60-terajoule explosion would take place. My daughter was playing lookout for what would soon become the deadliest terrorist organization since Al Qaeda.