Erasing Time

by C. J. Hill

“Yes,” Sheridan and Taylor said together.

  “You used the search function?”

  “Yes,” Taylor said, and Sheridan was content to let her speak for both of them. Taylor knew more about computers.

  “Imagine time as one big database,” Jeth said, “and think of yourself as one word somewhere in a billion-page document. The search function can find that word and pull it out of those billions of pages. That’s what the Time Strainer does. It finds a specific life and brings it forward in time.” He held up his hand, then let it fall back to the table. “At least it was supposed to. Perhaps the search function on your computer didn’t always work correctly. You wanted the word can and got the word scanned instead. Do you understand?” His gaze bounced between Sheridan and Taylor. “Our scientists don’t know why this happened. They’re at the Time Strainer right now trying to get the right man.”

  Well, so much for Echo’s hope that the first failure would make the scientists wary of using the machine again. They didn’t seem to care who they accidentally zapped into the future. She hoped that next time they got nothing but a swarm of angry bees.

  Taylor went back to rubbing her temple. “What will they do if they find him?”

  “They’ll ask for raises,” Echo said, then added, “Actually, they’ll probably do that anyway.”

  Jeth ignored his son. “Tyler Sherwood will help our scientists with biology work.”

  Sheridan decided to return to her original question. “So when are they going to send us back?”

  Jeth’s eyebrows drew together, as though he wasn’t sure why she hadn’t understood his first explanation. He spoke slowly to her. “Back in your time, were you familiar with the freezer?”

  “Yes,” Sheridan said, and felt reasonably certain she could answer for herself when the machine involved was no longer a computer but a kitchen appliance.

  “And sometimes you put vegetables in and saved them for later.”

  “Yes.” Sometimes it had been vegetables, although more often it had been ice cream or frozen pizza.

  “When you took a vegetable out later—even much later—it was preserved, just as it had been when you put it in?”

  Sheridan nodded.

  “But if you had wanted to, you couldn’t have returned it to its harvest, could you?”

  “No.” She choked out the word, and it seemed to take all of her effort, all of her energy.

  “Our technology preserved your matter and brought it into the future, but we can’t return you to the past.”

  Sheridan began shaking then, violent tremors she couldn’t control. Her family, her time period—everything was gone, erased. In one moment it had disintegrated into dust. She thought of her mother running to her bedroom. Had she seen Taylor and her disappear?

  The pain came next. Sheridan felt like her middle was being cut in half. She bent over until her cheek touched the cold, smooth surface of the table.

  Taylor said, “Get a blanket for her.” Only it sounded far away, and Sheridan wondered why Taylor said it, since blankets wouldn’t help anything.

  Taylor was saying other things now, very fast, and some of them sounded like swearwords, but that couldn’t be right. Taylor didn’t swear. Taylor was always in control. Always smart. Which was why Taylor had gone into shock at the beginning of this whole thing. She’d understood what it meant and had gotten her breakdown out of the way so she could be back in control. Now she stood there yelling like she wasn’t grieving. As though she hadn’t lost everyone in the world too.

  The med came toward Sheridan, and he carried not a blanket but a shot. Taylor was still yelling at him, and the words were most definitely swearwords.

  Sheridan pushed herself up from her chair and took dizzy steps backward. She wanted to find the scientists and demand they make this right. How could they build a machine that snatched people from their time period without creating a way to put them back?

  Echo was beside her even though she hadn’t seen him get up from his chair or cross the room. His tone was low and soothing. “It’s all right.”

  He took her hand, but she yanked it away. “This is not all right.” She stepped backward from him. “What is your definition of all right, that you could possibly think any of this is all right?” She took another step away. There was nowhere to run, though, no way to escape from what had happened. She was going to cry, sob probably, and she didn’t want to.

  Echo took her hand again. Instead of leading her back to the table, he pulled her gently into his arms. It was almost an embrace. “The med has no reason to hurt you.”

  He had said the same thing to Taylor, and this time Sheridan heard what he was actually saying. A phrase of her father’s came to mind, and she said it out loud—not as a compliment, but as an accusation. “A lie doesn’t sit comfortably on your tongue.”

  Echo tilted his head down, checking her expression. He had no idea what she meant.

  The medic was almost to them. Sheridan tried to break from Echo’s grasp. “You didn’t say the medic wouldn’t hurt us, only that he has no reason to do it. You know he might, and you don’t like lying about it.”

  She couldn’t free herself from Echo’s arms. He pulled her closer, holding her in place so the medic could give her the shot.

  “I’ll do what I can to protect you,” Echo whispered into her ear. “I’m not lying about that either.”

  She felt the prick of pain in her neck and then felt nothing else.

  chapter

  5

  The second time Sheridan awoke, she didn’t open her eyes right away. She kept them closed and listened. Men were talking on the other side of the room.

  She struggled to make sense of their accent. They rolled their r’s, and the vowels were mixed up, like someone had randomly switched them.

  “Et es batarr theese wa,” someone said. It is better this way. “Orra way no et well werrk.” Something … we know it will work.

  Another voice said, “Pues, way no wet te axpact ahora.” Something, we know what to expect … something. What did orra mean?

  “Tharr halth es bueno.” Bueno meant “good” in Spanish. The other Spanish words clicked into place in her mind. Ahora meant “now.” Pues was one of those words like well that people threw into sentences when they were thinking about what else to say.

  A man, angrier than the other two, said, “Bet et desnt materr ef way kent feend Tylorr Shaerrwood.”

  So they still hadn’t found Mr. Sherwood. He didn’t know how lucky he was.

  The voices went on, and she strained to follow them. She could only figure out that the first two men wanted to convince the third man that the experiment wasn’t really a failure. Finally Sheridan heard the swish of a door, and then silence.

  They’d left.

  She opened her eyes and saw Echo sitting on a chair near her head. His bright blue eyes studied her. “Were you able to understand any of it?”

  She blinked back at him. “What?”

  “I could tell you were awake.” He pointed up to a lighted screen above her bed. “When you listen, your brain activity goes way up.”

  Sheridan sat up and glanced at the screen, at lights that flickered and moved but made no sense.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Kidnapped.”

  He gave her a sympathetic smile. “Besides that?”

  “Fine, I guess.” Her grief was still there, strong and throbbing in her heart, but she kept it in check. She didn’t want to break down again.

  “According to the scientists,” he said, “your cells should stabilize soon.”

  Her gaze snapped back to him. “My cells are unstable?”

  He shrugged. “You were a stream of energy for four hundred years. It takes a while to adjust to being matter again.”

  She froze, afraid to move in case quick action would cause her to explode.

  “You look great, though,” Echo said. “I mean, you’ve reconfigured nicely.” He cleared his throat and motio
ned to the screen. “According to the computer, your health statistics are all good.” And then, as though he were offering her a consolation prize, he added, “While you slept, the med devirused you and fixed your vision problem.”

  Sheridan’s hands went to her face. Her glasses were gone. She didn’t comment on it. She’d just realized Taylor was nowhere around. “Where’s my sister?”

  “With Jeth in an Infolab. She’s learning about what’s happened in the last four centuries.”

  Still reconfigured then. Sheridan slowly pushed the blanket off her lap. Her muscles seemed to be working properly. “What will happen to us now?”

  “We want you to work at the Wordlab with us, but Jeth hasn’t proposed the idea yet. He’s waiting until the scientists are in a better mood.”

  Wordlab? She didn’t ask what that was. She didn’t want Echo to think she had agreed to any of it, didn’t feel like being grateful for his help. He wasn’t one of the scientists who’d brought her here, but he was a part of the future, and that was enough to make her resent him.

  It wasn’t logical or fair, but there it was.

  Echo didn’t notice her silence. He gazed at her like she was a fascinating painting.

  Sheridan took a moment to study him back. Despite the blue hair, he was handsome in a DC Comics sort of way. He had a sort of Superman look to him: square jaw, straight nose, rugged shoulders. But there was also a seriousness about Echo, a depth to his blue eyes that couldn’t have been captured in comic book form.

  “Do you have any questions?” he asked. “Taylor couldn’t ask them fast enough.”

  Before the medic had given Sheridan the shot, Echo had told her, “I’ll do what I can to protect you.” Had he meant he’d make sure the medic didn’t hurt her? Or maybe he meant the scientists. Did she need protecting from anyone else? Somehow she couldn’t bring herself to ask him; not while the resentment was still thick inside her. Instead, she focused on his sleek blue hair. “When did people start color coordinating their hair with their outfits?”

  “Fashion changes quickly. But not everyone alters their hair color. Some people keep their born shade.”

  She reached over and touched the glossy blue moon on Echo’s cheek. She expected some of the blue to come off on her fingers. It didn’t. It felt exactly like normal skin.

  She ran her finger over it again. “Is this a tattoo?”

  “A skin dye. It stays on until we use a retracting agent to remove it.”

  She dropped her hand from his face, suddenly embarrassed to have touched him. “Do women do that to their hair too—dye it, shape it—and paint colors on their faces?”

  Echo laughed, and she was somehow surprised that it sounded exactly like a laugh from her time period: warm, deep, and completely human. “Would you expect women to have more moderation? The sex that wore corsets and girdles and plucked their eyebrows out?”

  “A simple yes would have done.”

  “Oh.” He was still smiling. “Then, yes.” He motioned to the door. “We can go find some women here at the Scicenter if you want to see them.”

  Seridan shook her head and sighed. What fashion guru had decided that using your face for a coloring book looked good?

  When she didn’t speak, Echo said, “If you don’t have any more questions, then I have one for you.” He leaned back in his chair, surveying her again. “In your century, what was it like to be an identical twin?”

  It was ironic that his first question was one she’d been asked frequently in her own time period. “It’s hard to tell, because I’ve never been anything else.”

  Her answer brought another smile to his lips. “I should have asked the question differently. I used to say the same thing to people.”

  Sheridan straightened. “You’re an identical twin?”

  “I was,” he said. He opened his mouth to say more but didn’t. Instead, he swallowed and looked away.

  She knew then that his twin had died. Probably recently. She knew because if Taylor had died, she would have felt the same pain she saw flash through his eyes.

  She leaned toward him. “I’m sorry.” It wasn’t a hollow phrase, thrown between them to ward off the awkwardness of silence. She felt it—felt a connection to him through their losses. His twin, her family. Her resentment for him thinned and vanished.

  He nodded but didn’t elaborate about his brother. “What I meant to ask was how the rest of your society treated you.”

  She could have gone on and on about that but knew Echo would understand the longhand for what she said in shorthand. “Growing up, we got lots of attention, which would have been nice except that people also treated us like we were one-half of the same person. Like, in third grade Taylor made some girls angry, and so they got mad at me too by default.

  “Sometimes it was hard to share everything. And we’re still constantly compared. Taylor’s the smart one, the outgoing one, and the daring one.” Sheridan didn’t say, but mentally added, The one guys like first. “I’m the responsible one, the quiet one.” The one who always gets hit up for favors. The one who guys like after Taylor has turned them down.

  Echo took all of this in. “When someone calls Taylor’s name, do you turn around?”

  “Of course. For most of my life there was a good chance they were really calling me and just couldn’t tell which one I was.” She gave a sheepish shrug. “Even now that Taylor has completely changed her look, I still do it.”

  “Do you sometimes know what she’ll say before she says it?”

  “Yeah, but that’s easy. If it’s arrogant or snarky, Taylor is going to say it.” Sheridan tilted her head. “Do people here in the future still think twins have a mystical psychic bond?” That was one of the annoying things about being a twin. People were always so disappointed to learn she and Taylor couldn’t read each other’s minds.

  “Twins almost never happen,” Echo said. “The medical workers prevent it.”

  That seemed odd. “How?”

  He shifted in his seat, hesitated. “People in Traventon want superior children, so the Medcenter specialists select the best genes from the population and use those to create babies. Technicians are only supposed to put single, healthy embryos into women, but they made a mistake in our case.”

  Sheridan frowned. “Doesn’t anyone want to have their children the natural way?”

  “And risk having inferior children? No. At age eleven, girls undergo a surgery that prevents accidental reproduction.”

  Sheridan stifled a gasp. She was long past age eleven. “No one will make me have surgery, will they?”

  He looked uncomfortable, which probably meant yes. “The government will decide. They control everything that affects Traventon.”

  “Everything? What happened to democracy?”

  She had asked the question rhetorically. He didn’t answer it that way.

  “Democracies didn’t last long after your time. It was too hard for average people to make decisions about policies. So now the government educates a select group of people and appoints them to positions.” He tilted his head at her, questioningly. “You must have seen it happening. Democracy was already declining during your time.”

  Sheridan wanted to protest this fact but couldn’t. She didn’t know enough about Congress or the democratic process to tell whether it had been in decline. Which, she realized, might be proof Echo was right.

  It couldn’t be good that democracy was gone. In fact, it could be very bad.

  She felt a prickle of fear, and with it an urgent desire to see her sister. Sheridan got off the bed. “Can we see Taylor now?”

  “If that’s what you want.” Echo stood, took Sheridan’s hand, and led her to the door. Perhaps it was customary in this society to hold hands, or perhaps he was afraid she’d run away. Whatever the reason, she was glad for the warmth of his fingers intertwined with hers. It made her feel more secure in this strange place.

  They left the room and went down the white hallway. Sheridan’s foots
teps made a tapping noise against the floor, like a gavel slowly pronouncing a judgment. She wondered how long it would take until everything stopped feeling so surreal, like it was happening to someone else.

  She sneaked a glance at Echo’s profile. He was tall, handsome, and holding her hand. Definitely surreal.

  If he had gone to her high school, what type of person would he have been? Her first thought was: one of the popular jocks, the kind of guy cheerleaders doted on. But the underlying seriousness in Echo’s eyes wouldn’t let her pin him to that group and leave him there, mindlessly enjoying his adulations.

  He had stepped in front of her when the black-clad men had pointed weapons at her. He’d said he would do what he could to protect her—and he didn’t even know her.

  Echo caught her looking at him, but she didn’t turn away like she normally would have. “When you said you’d protect me, who did you mean from?”

  “Anyone you need protecting from.” He gave her a smile, and it felt like a prize. “Did you have someone in mind already?”

  “Yes. Everyone who totes around needles.”

  He ran his thumb across the back of her hand. “You’ll be fine now. No need for more needles.”

  She was a long way from fine but didn’t say so.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked. “There’s a foodmart here in the Scicenter.”

  Sheridan shook her head.

  He gave her hand a squeeze. “The food isn’t bad here. A lot is similar to what you ate.”

  “I don’t think I could eat anything right now.”

  Echo looked at her for a few more moments—still studying her, she supposed. “They say people in your time kept animals to kill so they could eat their flesh.”

  And apparently people in 2447 were strict vegetarians.

  He was not going to understand the lure of pepperoni or cheeseburgers, or her personal favorite, bacon. She didn’t feel like she had the energy to explain protein needs to him, but lies didn’t sit easily on her tongue either.

  She chose an answer that didn’t implicate her. “My family lived on an acre of land, and we had two horses.” She hadn’t thought to miss them until now, and it hit her with a stab of pain. Breeze and Bolt were gone too. “We also had a dog named Georgie. We never would have eaten any of them, though.” Georgie, however, had caused the death of a few stray sparrows, at least one mouse, and whatever it was they put in Alpo.