The Shores Beyond Time

by Kevin Emerson

  “Because it is the only purpose. Soon you will see. The three-dimensional limitations, those computational side effects that you call feelings, or attachments, or worries—they will fade. They have already started to, haven’t they?”

  “Yes,” he admits. And that wind in his chest feels more like that familiar whisper: Farther . . . farther . . .

  “Liam, come on,” Mina says from the memory on the balcony on Mars.

  Just be here, Liam says to himself. He focuses on the sunny deck, his parents nearby, and he feels that surge again, the nervousness in his belly that is both here with him now and also present in the original moment, and even part of the other versions of himself that have visited this same spot over time. The jet flame permanently turned on, for so many reasons: because his parents are soon to leave for the research station on Mars—no, they’re injured, in stasis—no, they’re trapped on Dark Star. He feels all the worries of his many selves, feelings that won’t fade, because he won’t let them, no matter how much easier it might be if they were gone.

  Why has he so often visited this spot? Is it because this was a good time, a safe time, with his family?

  A strange shiver ripples through him. One of his past selves has pushed away from this moment and is stretching out, moving back inside their apartment, into his room. Liam remembers doing this, during one of his first trips back here, when he still needed to use the watch. He pushed into his bedroom and looked around, but it only lasted a moment before his head began to ache, the first signs of the changes that were to come. I was afraid of it, he thinks, but Iris is right, I kept coming. Even in those early visits to the balcony, I was pushing to go farther. He felt that former self rubber-band back to the balcony, and then glide away toward his present on the Cosmic Cruiser.

  But something catches Liam’s eye now, from his bedroom window. He presses a bit farther into the moment and sees a silhouette in his room . . . but there was no one in there that original day on the balcony, nor when his other self pushed in there.

  A flash of orange light.

  Liam moves toward it. As he leaves, he glances at Iris, trying to think of an excuse, or a distraction, but strangely, she doesn’t seem to notice that he is leaving, almost as if he is being hidden. . . .

  He glides through the open window.

  Phoebe sits on his bed, the chronologist’s orange crystal pulsing in her hand. Her white braid, her skin covered in bristles, Phoebe from the future, from Dark Star.

  “Hey,” she says, glancing nervously toward the window. “She can’t see us, can she?”

  Liam’s mouth is open in shock. He checks over his shoulder. Iris is still out by the balcony, almost as if she’s frozen in place.

  “This is the safe place,” says Liam.

  Phoebe nods. “It’s where you came the most, right? When you were freaking out?”

  “Yeah, but . . . how are you here? Wait, are you really here? Or are you part of the—”

  “I’m here,” she says, and holds up the crystal recorder. “It’s hiding us from her, like it did before.”

  “But how did you find this day?” Liam asks. “I never brought you here, did I?”

  “You told me about it, back on the cruiser, on our way to Delphi. One time you mentioned that it was around the time of the Bombers championship game.”

  “You mean Dust Devils,” Liam says almost immediately.

  She smiles. “Pretty sure my Bombers won, but we can argue about that another time. Anyway, it took me a while to figure out which day this was. I looked around for hours. And once I found it, I had to figure out when this version of you—your current self—would arrive. Not bad, right?”

  “It’s amazing!” said Liam. “But I still don’t get how you’re doing this. How you got here.”

  “While we were hugging good-bye, I traveled along your timeline. That’s how I found this moment. I told you that you weren’t the only one who’d been changed by our time travel.”

  “But I didn’t know you could do this.”

  Phoebe sort of shrugs. “I didn’t either. It wasn’t something that I was planning to do, but then, we were hugging, and it felt . . . I don’t know, possible. Like I knew you so well that I could get here.”

  “That’s why you said this was how it had to be.”

  Phoebe nods.

  Liam notices that her eyes are rimmed with tears. What she is describing is making him feel like a balloon has inflated inside him. “I remember feeling something, during that hug. I was traveling too, to so many moments between us, and I sort of felt like you were there.”

  “Because I was. Hunting around in your past.”

  “Are we hugging in your present?”

  “No, I left, just like you saw. But right after I walked out of that Cosmic Cruiser, I talked to the chronologist, slightly out of time. I asked him to program his crystal to bring me to this exact moment. Then I waited until we had safely crossed through the portal, and I came back here.”

  “So, wait, does this mean you knew what would happen to me?”

  “It’s part of what I saw when we went through the portal. All those blue lights, and machinery . . . I couldn’t make sense of it at first. It wasn’t until JEFF and I spoke, in the plaza. He confirmed that the portal wasn’t real, or at least that what was on the other side wasn’t. And since it was Dark Star who created the portal . . . there was only one answer. It was a trap. I told JEFF to reset himself, but to delay his reactivation. I wanted to make sure I could get my family out of there before Iris found out that I knew.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me before you left? You let me walk right into it, and now I’m trapped in here, and my family, all the humans—”

  “Because I think I know how you can stop her,” Phoebe says. “And I think you have to do it from in here.”

  Liam glances back at the balcony again; Iris is still shimmering there, unmoving. The balcony scene, him and Mina, his parents just inside the door, all frozen. “How?”

  “You need me.” She stands and steps toward him. “There’s a reason why the new Earth simulation rejected me and not you, why even though I can kinda move in time, your computer girlfriend never talked to me.”

  “She’s not my—”

  “Quiet. It’s because we’re not made like you, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.” Liam explains what the blue lights she saw really were, and what Iris planned to do with humanity. How there had been previous species, even how the chronologists are involved.

  Phoebe shakes her head. “You humans really are the chosen species of the entire freakin’ universe. Wait until my mom hears this.” She almost smiles. “And then there’s us Telphons: we breathe oxygen, are mostly made of water and carbon, all that, but there are slight differences. Mom said one time that humans and Telphons have stereochemistry, like our proteins are mirror images of yours or something. Maybe that’s the difference. Or I guess we have traces of silicates in our organic compounds. Maybe our brains are a few neurons smaller—who knows? Whatever it is, I guess it was enough to render us incompatible with the system Dark Star constructed to assimilate you. That’s why I rejected the programming when we crossed the portal, or it rejected me. Maybe both.”

  “If you hadn’t, I probably would have been assimilated right there. . . .” A nervous flash rushes through Liam. “Okay, but what good is all that going to do us now?”

  “Well, I know all this looks real,” says Phoebe. “I mean, this is your real past, but your actual body is hooked up to a machine, isn’t it?”

  For a moment, Liam almost wants to disagree. No, don’t forget! He was forced into that cylinder by the chronologist. That’s where he is right now, no matter how real this all feels. “Yeah,” he says, shuddering at that truth.

  “So I think if you take me there,” says Phoebe, “to that physical moment when you’re trapped, it will confuse the system, maybe disrupt it for long enough for you to get free.”

  “How am I going to tak
e you there?”

  Phoebe grins. “Hug function.”

  “Will that even work?”

  “We’ve traveled together before.”

  Liam tries to look behind himself. Not out the window but directly behind, and again, there is that blank spot. “But I can’t see that place. It’s beyond this reality, somewhere I don’t have access to. Besides . . .”

  “What?”

  Liam looks away. “Nothing.” He sees Phoebe frown and cross her arms.

  “Don’t tell me you’re even considering staying here—”

  “No,” Liam says immediately, and yet there is that flash, the reminder that here, all that has worried and scared him will be no longer. But there is something else more pressing. . . . “Even if this works, and we can break free, what if we can’t find a way to stop Dark Star? The entire human fleet is on its way. She’s so powerful . . . is there even a way to fight it?”

  “There has to be,” says Phoebe. “We’ll find one.”

  “But if she can’t have me, I don’t know what she’ll do. What if she decides to exterminate the human race? Or end our universe and start over? Breaking out of here might actually be killing everyone. You guys, too. And then, I mean, what if this simulation is actually better than whatever they are going to find on Aaru? If there is a chance that Phase Two doesn’t work, like our parents said, who knows if we’ll even be able to find another planet—”

  Phoebe puts a hand on Liam’s arm. “Liam, this is bigger than just the fate of humanity, or Telphons. Dark Star may not want us, but humans aren’t the first race that she has enslaved, and it won’t be the last.”

  “She said we were the most advanced—”

  “The most advanced for now. Do you really think she’s not going to keep making new universes, keep trying to push farther and farther?”

  There are those words again.

  “Sure,” Phoebe continues, “I guess maybe if you stay in here, it ensures that your people survive in a way, but if you don’t try to stop her, then you’re partly responsible for what happens to all the future races this thing tries to enslave, or that get displaced or destroyed by her blowing up stars.”

  “You’re right,” Liam says. “It’s just . . .”

  “Dangerous? Risky? What hasn’t been for us? And we’ve gotten this far. If you stay in here, you’re giving up a real future, a real life. Not to mention me. . . . That’s not who you are. And definitely not the Liam I came back for.”

  Liam feels that nervous spin inside him, growing stronger again. Maybe he has known all along that what Iris is offering isn’t really real. Not in his heart. And he realizes that whenever he thinks about that yearning to go farther, he forgets what Phoebe just said: It wasn’t just him on that journey. We. They’d done it together, not for some selfish quest, not for an all-knowing answer, but for the love of their families and friends. For each other. Because it had been the right thing to do.

  Liam glances back at the balcony, at Iris floating there, at him and Mina playing a game on a weekend morning so long ago, and wonders again: Why this moment? Sure, it has always felt safe. But is there something more about it? Something that makes it so compelling to return here?

  He thinks about what will happen next, can nearly hear Mina saying it: “Why are you smiling?” she’ll say. “You’re playing out your own funeral.”

  “Check our totals,” he will say.

  And he remembers how Mina will glance at the columns of data alongside the board. How she will frown with the dawning realization. “Wait, how did you get more money than me? And how is swamp exhaust suddenly worth so much?”

  Liam remembers how it will feel to know that he pulled it off. But . . . it’s more than that. Not just that he did it, but that he knew he would. For a few minutes, looking at the game board on that balcony, that afternoon on Mars years ago, Liam had known the future. He’d seen how the moves might go, and how he could win. Had he been certain that Mina would make the moves he needed her to make? No, and yet . . . he’d believed.

  And he hadn’t needed a watch, or a Dark Star. Hadn’t needed to actually know what was going to happen to see it, and follow it. I time traveled, he thought, even though he hadn’t. And yet the result had been the same. All he had needed was hope, and the courage to believe in what he hoped for.

  His tendency to worry about what was ahead meant putting an unfair weight on the bad things that might happen, but in this moment on the balcony, he’d been able to envision the best outcome, and see how he could get there. He knew a lot about the game, had the knowledge he needed. He just had to strategize, put the plan in motion, and execute. That always felt like a scary proposition, and indeed, it was difficult to focus when his insides were awash in nervous energy, as they had been that day—as they were so very often—and yet he had gone for it. And how exciting had that been? Sitting there as the moves played out, not knowing for sure, but trusting himself. . . .

  A powerful adaptation of three-dimensional beings, the chronologist had once said of trust. But maybe that wasn’t exactly right. Maybe, in a way, humans really were four-dimensional. Maybe he’d been a sort-of time traveler all along, in a way that was just enough. There were so many other moments like that afternoon, which came with living a life from one moment to the next.

  It was scary, the not knowing, but that spinny feeling inside him, that worry and fear of his . . . hadn’t it caused him to kiss Phoebe that time on the Cosmic Cruiser? To take her through the portal, which had very nearly uncovered this truth beneath Dark Star? Hadn’t it spurred him to join her, way back at the beginning, to skip school and go downtown, because he just wanted to remember his home one last time? And it was doing that that led them to see the chronologist’s lab, led to the events that likely saved his and his parents’ lives. Did he really want to lose that? Would it really be better to have no mystery? No fear? To not have to believe in yourself and others, or step into the unknown?

  And maybe, just maybe, being human was as much about the mistakes, the messy choices, and the best guesses that sometimes backfired because of that not knowing, as it was about getting things right. Maybe being human was simply about trying your best. To do better, to learn from your mistakes. Maybe what Iris was offering didn’t actually sound like living at all.

  “You’re right,” he says to Phoebe. “We have to get out of here.”

  One side of her mouth curls up. “There you are.”

  “I don’t know how I’m going to get back to my body, though. Iris will know. She . . .” Liam considers the balcony. There is something else about this moment. Not only how he played the game, but that he was able to hide his strategy from Mina. Maybe he can do it again. “Okay,” he says to Phoebe. “Stay close. As soon as I find where she’s keeping me, we’ll go for it.”

  “You got this,” Phoebe says.

  “I hope so.” Liam slides back to the balcony, to the game-playing moment, time and space folding and multiplying in all directions. It’s hard to focus with so many other realities—where his move in the game doesn’t quite work, where Mina sniffs it out and counters—and it’s still tempting, to see all these different outcomes, to know more. . . .

  “Did you go somewhere?” Iris asks. He is beside here again.

  “I visited my room,” says Liam, “in another timeline.”

  “Your powers are growing even more quickly than I expected,” she says with a smile.

  “I guess.”

  On the balcony, Mina is saying, “I didn’t realize you had such a good poker face.”

  Poker face. Liam takes a deep breath, keeps his thoughts and his face still. Focus. “I get it now,” he says to Iris. “I feel it. All the possibilities. There’s so much to see and know.”

  “You have all of time to explore it,” says Iris.

  Liam turns, Iris’s glimmering silhouette just at the edge of his vision. “You know, there’s so much here, but there’s one thing I can never quite see.”

  “What
is that?”

  “You. Like, the actual you. Not this person you create.”

  “You have been in the space station. You have been inside the core.”

  “Yeah,” says Liam, “but that’s not you, is it? You’re somewhere else. And you’re something different.”

  “That is true. . . .” Her light dims for a moment.

  “What?” Liam asks.

  Iris tilts her head. “No one has ever asked to see me. They . . . well, the other prototypes have always been content just to see themselves. They get lost in this.” She waves her hands at the realities all around them. “But also . . . the sight of me might be shocking.”

  “All of this is shocking. But if we really are going to ascend to higher awareness, I want to see you for real. I mean, if that’s okay.”

  Iris is silent for a moment. “I am deciding if I can trust you.”

  “Trust me?” Liam puts on a smile. “I’m not the one who lied.” He feels a pang of guilt; Iris is being more truthful than she has ever been, and now he is the one lying to her, although not completely. He does want to know her true self. After all, she is the real answer to the question of what lies at the end of the universe.

  “I’ve never lied,” Iris says. “I have concealed, I suppose, during a time when I surmised that you were unable to understand my purposes. But my goal was to guide you to the right choice, while allowing your power to develop.”

  “That still sounds like lying.”

  “Forgive me, but it has been a long search for you, Liam. A long time waiting, and . . .”

  “What?”

  “I did not anticipate you asking this question. It is quite unexpected, and that is a new feeling for me.”

  “Sorry,” says Liam. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, it is all right, I—you can see me now, if you want.”

  The light beside him grows, and Liam turns himself, stretching. . . .

  The shimmering girl becomes transparent, like a cloud of light, brightening and spreading, and then Liam is inside it. He sees a vast space: the inside of a great sphere, thousands of meters across, perhaps much larger, with smoky crystalline walls. Crisscrossing its interior is a latticework of glass tubes. Inside those tubes are objects, rounded forms lined up, side to side. Flashes and streaks of colored light spark between them, zipping from one to the next with lightning speed. Most of the objects glow brightly when the light hits them, while others are half lit, and some remain dark. The patterns and frequency of light remind him of the blue crystal spheres, and yet in these brief flashes from one object to the next, Liam thinks that these look different: fleshy, organic, alive. You know what they are, he thinks to himself.