by Claire Davon
Time travel sounded great to those who didn’t know better, but the truth was that it was problematic to get around in most times. Everything was unfamiliar, their dress, their haircuts, their way of speaking, even if the native tongue was English. Currency lost its value quickly and it was tough to get the right amounts in the right years if you needed to stay somewhere.
Difficult, but not impossible. Fiona thought again about Rogald, the Liberator whose younger version they had accidentally stranded in time. She didn’t know how the older version of the man had gotten the clothes, the currency, any of the items necessary for his younger self to fit into the 1950s. For that matter, she wondered for the seventy five thousandth time in the weeks since it happened, why he had insisted that it had to happen. Rogald was a Liberator, the group dedicated to altering the time stream if they felt it benefited things, whereas the Guardians, the group Sonder had been a part of, believed in no deviations. It was a curious departure for someone who believed as Rogald did to insist that things not be changed, especially when it affected his life so much.
“Do you think we’ll see Rogald again?”
Sonder’s lips twisted and he shrugged. “He’s a Liberator, with the same access to equipment the Guardians have. We will see him again. Our destinies appear twined, as if we are all part of this.” He paused, his face twisting. “Do you know why he had to stay?”
She shook her head in the negative. She had left the boy Rogald there, in an unfamiliar time and place, and walked away. It haunted her.
“Fiona, the man Rogald is, the Liberator that he is, is because of what occurred. If he hadn’t gone to the 1950s then he wouldn’t have been in Virginia when Hurricane Camille happened. If he hadn’t been, then he wouldn’t have been selected for the Liberators and he wouldn’t be the Rogald we know.”
She felt a wash of guilt flow over her body. “If I hadn’t stupidly taken him with us the first time, before the Commander changed it, and we tried to fix it, then he could have been a normal kid in the 2010s, enjoying his modern life. I stranded him, Sonder.”
“Let’s say you did. Let’s say you left him in Santorini when we ran. Then what?” She cocked her head, absorbing Sonder’s words. “If he had remained there then everything else would have changed. Remember what Illiria said?”
“She said that she’d run the calculations and none of the outcomes were good.” Fiona admitted, feeling some of the tension relax from her shoulders.
He nodded. “It would have been a complete change, not only for Rogald but for the Liberators. He’s a key member of their team. If he weren’t there then think of what would change. He wouldn’t have been chasing us when we first discovered you. The other Liberators would not have been interested. They wouldn’t have followed us to the country, and you wouldn’t have gone to the Event and seen it for yourself. That made you understand the danger in a way words and pictures never would. You wouldn’t be who you are now without Rogald. You may have been taken back and left in Brookline and made to forget. You may have been killed by the Commander, or Illiria, in an effort to fix the time stream. All of those effects are possible. It may seem like a paradox, kale mou, but everything is intertwined. If we hadn’t had jumped with him then he wouldn’t have become a Liberator, and if that hadn’t happened, well…” Sonder spread his hands. “It had to happen because it already happened. Fiona, do you see?”
She nodded, the paradoxes swimming in her mind. The past affected the future affected the past affected…
Sonder was looking at her with no expression on his face, but she saw emotion behind the mask. His hand tapped a pattern on his thigh, a movement that did not seem conscious.
“Time to go, Fi,” he said. “We need to move before the Commander picks up our trail. My belt has been on too long as it is.”
The picture of his tract home in Arizona still beamed across the wall. It was a clear image, easy to visualize. She fixed it in her mind and focused on the date he gave her in late 2078. It would be a day after he had gone to Alaska for his birthday.
“Let’s do this,” she said.
Chapter 2
Fiona wasn’t sure what she expected from the future, but she hadn’t thought that it would be hard to tell one time frame from another.
The house that Sonder occupied in Tucson in 2078 looked the same as any set of tract houses in her time. It was your basic thousand foot starter home, with clapboard siding, no chimney and landscaping that suited the Southwest. There was a handful of desert plants and scrub, filled in by rocks and a line of brick that appeared to be an attempt at hardscaping in between. It looked just like all the other houses along its block and no different than hundreds of other blocks in other cities in her time.
The air was hot and dry and had that scent of the desert. He had given her a date of August, right in the heart of summer. She had never been to Arizona but she’d always been told that it was a “dry heat.” At a hundred and ten degrees, she didn’t care how “dry” it was, it was plain hot.
“Let’s get inside,” Sonder said, glancing around at the street. There was nobody outside – no surprise on a day that felt like a furnace – but he clearly wanted to be out of sight.
Keys, she thought, but he solved that by stepping up to the door and waving his hand over a small keypad set to the right of the front door. She heard a snick of a lock releasing and then the door clicked open. She saw the lights beyond the door brighten as if also summoned by the released lock. So there had been some changes in sixty years.
They stepped inside to a house that was as bland on the interior as it was on the outside. The furniture was minimal and had a modular feel to it. There was a picture of a mountain on the living room wall of an unknown peak, and not much else in terms of decorations. The floors were engineered wood and looked slick and artificial. Judging by the neat piles and semi-vacuumed rug, it appeared that the younger Sonder had made a small effort to tidy before he went on vacation, but the entire house looked like it could use a good dusting.
She felt a stab of fear, although the house did nothing to engender it. She was out of time, and her element. Fiona had known it was possible to jump forward, she had seen the evidence of it, but it was one thing to know it in theory and to do it in reality. She now understood why she had stuck to jumping in her past. Time and people continued to spin into the future, without her and without a care, world without end. Until the Event, that was.
That brought her back to reality. They were here because Sonder had told her about a devastating earthquake in Chile ten years in his past. It resonated with her the same way that the disasters the Voice had shown her had so they wanted to check it out. It made sense to use his future/past home as their base. It was familiar to him and would make it easier to maneuver.
“What if one of your neighbors asks why you’re back? Do you have any friends checking on your plants, your pets, your…” She trailed off, hoping that the curiosity and nascent jealousy didn’t show.
He shrugged. “I doubt my neighbors even knew I had gone. It’s been a while but I don’t remember anyone standing out. I have nothing to watch, Fiona, and no need for a person to visit. In this day and age we get little mail, which is good because the Postal Service is one step away from going under. My friends know I’m gone and they won’t be expecting me. If anyone does turn up because the lights are on but my car isn’t here I will tell them…something. We have very little chance of changing my time stream here.” He paused. “My memory of the trip to Alaska is still solid so we haven’t altered anything. We are fine.”
“Okay.” Looking around, she saw a sleek computer, looking more like a tablet or laptop than a desktop, sitting unobtrusively on a bar/eating area next to the open plan tiny kitchen. It didn’t appear to have any wires or other electronics, except for a power cord, and Fiona wondered how it worked. It didn’t look that different from her day, but who knew.
Her hands itched to look around, to see who Sonder was before the accident. Then s
he paused. The accident.
“When does it happen?” she asked, spreading her arms. His eyes darkened and his hair waved as he bobbed his head. She wanted to smooth back the brown locks and hold him against her. After a moment, she acted on that impulse, crossing the room to him and putting her arms around him. Sonder accepted her embrace, his arms closing against the small of her back and pulling her against him. They stayed that way for a minute, nothing echoing in the room except the beat of his heart and the harsh rasp of breathing.
“About two years from now,” he said and she heard something scrape across his words, a sorrow that was deep and abiding. “This life wasn’t much, but it was okay. Being back here is strange. I didn’t think I would feel nostalgic, but I do. I’ve never looked back. I’ve never felt the pull of ‘what if’ that so many of us feel. But now, standing here, I get it.” He pulled back and looked at her and his face was solemn. “I wouldn’t change anything, but I understand why some try to alter their timeline.”
Tilting her head up, Fiona pressed a kiss against his lips and felt him soften. Something inside her belly eased when his body loosened against hers.
“You’ll have to tell me how that worked out for them,” she said and watched his eyes flicker. “I’m glad you don’t want to change yours.” She waited, but he said nothing more. “Why don’t you get that thing running,” she said, pointing to the tablet on the bar, “and let’s see what we can find out about the quake in Chile.”
#
The laptop booted up with the same wave of his hand that Fiona had seen at the door. She wondered what had been programmed in – palm print, eye scan, fingerprints? If all identification was done at such a personal level it would make her ability to move in these times limited. As a person with no such records, it would be difficult to get around. If she needed to be here for any length of time she’d have to go back and plant something earlier.
To her surprise, Sonder fished around in a file next to the computer and pulled out a sheet of paper with codes written on it. They looked like passwords. Well, she speculated, after all this time he was bound to forget a few passwords. She could barely remember the few she had and kept them on a note in her SmartPhone. Speaking of which…Fiona took her phone out of the small purse she’d strapped around her waist for the trip. She was unsurprised to see it was out of power. Could it even function sixty years in the future? They may be in a future world, but she was as helpless as if she were in the 1800s.
Fiona looked around. The lights, which automatically went on and off as they moved from room to room, were soft and glowed from many sources. She didn’t see any lightbulbs as she knew them, and decided that energy efficient bulbs, or the 2078 form of them, had caught on. The house had a prefabricated look, more plastic than wood or drywall.
“Computer,” Sonder said. She half expected to see Scotty from Star Trek when he said it, as if the giant 1960s version of a modern computer in the series would suddenly beep and buzz. Instead his tablet flashed to life, and an unfamiliar operating system came up. It prompted him for a password, which he entered after running his finger down the piece of paper, stopping halfway down. Paper was still being used, another surprise. She’d thought they would have had a true paperless society by now, with everything run electronically.
“Go to news, archive,” Sonder said and Fiona blinked. Voice recognition could also be a problem. She couldn’t sneak into a place, or time travel into it, since once she got there she couldn’t use anything. She could get anywhere and anywhen she wanted, but after that she would be hobbled. She’d have to think about this problem and how to solve it. Fiona was confident it was something the Guardians and Liberators knew how. One point for them.
Sonder’s email flashed up in another program she didn’t recognize. Fiona didn’t want to ask what had become of the programs of her day. Just like Ozymandias, they had thought they were eternal. A scant sixty years later, they had been replaced. Unless this unfamiliar screen was the modern day version of a familiar program that Sonder recognized, but Fiona didn’t.
Using the virtual keyboard that had appeared when Sonder turned the computer on, he typed a password in the air just above the plastic of his bar area. It was long and she was sure very hard to decode.
She looked around again. The kitchen was all built in modular furniture as well, with sleek appliances. It looked more like the Jetsons than it had any right to and she half expected to see Astro pop out from behind the bar.
“No flying cars, though,” she said, not even realizing she was speaking out loud.
Sonder was typing furiously, screens appearing and disappearing as he did so. After a moment she realized he was cycling through websites.
The flashing of websites slowed and then stopped, landing on a scene of fire and wasteland that could have been the Event. Devastation lay around them, trees and buildings destroyed, the ground broken in spots as if a giant hand had pushed it up. Cars lay where they had flipped over, looking like giant beetles. People also lay motionless on the ground, unmoving.
“What is it?” she asked again, trying to focus on the website. No question it was a bad disaster, but he had said that the Chile earthquake had been one of the worst in his history. That was why they had come here, to get their bearings and go to that quake to study it.
“Here is the quake, just as I remembered. The Chilean earthquake of 2072 was an 8.0 on the Richter scale. It spread mass devastation throughout the region, but little loss of life. It was huge, but it happened at sea in the middle of the night. If it had been in Santiago, or in the day hours, it would have killed thousands, maybe millions. Because of the timing and the placement, the annihilation was mostly limited to property. Many died, but it could have been much worse.”
“That’s why we’re here.”
He nodded. “I thought that it was going to be gone, replaced by something else. It all felt wrong for a moment. It’s fine now.” He looked at the computer. “Quakes have slowed the planet down by a few microseconds one at a time, as well as shifted the Earth on its axis by a tiny amount. I wonder if that is part of this.” His expression was far away and then he turned back to the computer and resumed web surfing.
Fiona looked at him with a worried countenance, wondering if someone had tried to mess with the time stream. Sonder was still flipping through websites, but slower now, his frantic motions ebbed. Whatever had gripped him in that moment seemed to have passed.
He worked with the computer a bit longer and then frowned again. Fiona saw past the bar that the kitchen lights dimmed, but there was a soft shine, as if they were awaiting his footsteps to burst into life again.
There was a noise overhead like the whoosh of a glider. It seemed to come from very high up. Fiona tilted her head.
“What’s that?”
Sonder looked up. “Oh, that’s a plane. Those are different in my time. Some of the transatlantic flights go so fast you can land in Asia a few hours after you leave New York. They’re expensive, though. I think that’s one going to Los Angeles.” He rubbed his left wrist and for the first time Fiona noticed a small scar. It was just a thin white line and had never drawn her attention before, but the way Sonder’s thumb was playing over it made her look closer.
She saw a port on the computer with a cable, something that looked like a USB, but male, designed for output jacks and not the ones she was used to.
“Sonder?”
He shot her a quick glance. “I mentioned the chips. We have the ability to jack in directly,” he said, angling his wrist as if doing so. “Many of us have implants in our wrists that allow us to access data through stored information in a chip under our skin. Remember what I said about the ‘mark of the devil’ earlier?” He sighed, and there was a wealth of regret in that sound. “The Guardians removed it when I joined them, like they do for any of us with the implants. There’s too much on the. It would be too easy for computers of our time to recognize us. I didn’t realize how much I missed it until now. It sav
es a lot of time.”
Fiona shuddered, feeling a bit like the 2078 version of Future Shock had just smacked her across the face. It felt wrong to have something implanted on you that could control you, or identify you. Then again, in her day there were microchips that identified lost pets, and she supposed this wasn’t much different.
She pointed to the piece of paper. “Is that why you’re using that?”
Sonder glanced at it. “Yeah. I like to have a hard copy of my data in case the network goes down. My friends laugh at me but it worked.”
She wondered if that had been his idea or if somewhere in his subconscious he had known, or had it suggested to him. Was it possible that a Guardian or a Liberator had befriended the younger Sonder, knowing that one day he would be plucked from this time stream to join their ranks? Her mind whirled.
The computer blared to life. “Incoming mail. Priority incoming mail.”
They both turned back to the computer, the shrill electronic voice startling them.
“Does it always do that?” she asked and saw Sonder frown.
“Not usually. Hang on.” He went back to the virtual keyboard and typed in another URL, consulting the sheet of paper again as he did so. Email was another thing that seemed to have survived the test of time. Things were changing so fast in her era that email programs she had started with had become obsolete five years later. It seemed unlikely that any of them would still be around. She would check, though, for the hell of it, when he was done. If he had a power cord she could use, anyway. If she could remember any of her passwords, that was.
Sonder’s email came up, a string of unread bold lines greeted them. Still similar, she decided.
