“Tire pressure is corrected,” Old Paint announced.
Then Ben took the scrubber spray and anti-virus box out of the pack and handed it to her without a word.
Mom took it and stood up slowly. She walked slowly to the back of the car and I followed her. She put away the leftover emergency supplies. She gently shut the door. The glass nanos were at work on the rear window. It was almost clear again. She walked around the car and Ben and I both followed her. She got to the driver’s door, opened it and climbed in.
“Mom?” Ben asked her anxiously and she waved a hand at him. “I just want to check something,” she said.
She opened a little panel on his dash and a small screen lit up. She touched it lightly, scrolling down it. Then she stopped and leaned her forehead on the steering wheel for a minute. When she spoke, her voice was choked and muffled by her arms.
“My grandpa considered himself something of a hacker, in an old school way. He made some modifications to Old Paint. That’s Grandpa’s voice you hear, when Old Paint speaks. And you know how I told you some people remove the safety constraints from the car’s programming, the ‘do no harm to people’ or bypass the speed constraints? Not my grandpa.” She sat up and pointed at the screen. “See all those red ‘override’ indicators? You’re not supposed to be able to do that. But Grandpa did. He gave Old Paint one ultimate command: ‘Protect logged users of vehicle.’”
She flipped the little panel closed over the screen and spoke quietly. “I should have known. I was a wild kid. Drinking. Doping. So he broke into the software and over-rode everything to make ‘protect the child’ the car’s highest priority. Hm.” She made a husky noise in her throat. “Got me out of a corner more times than I like to think about. I passed out more than once behind the wheel, but somehow I always got home safe.” She dashed tears from her eyes and then looked at us with a crooked smile. “Just programming, kids. That’s all. Just his programming. Despite all his tough talk, it was just his programming to protect, as best he could. No matter what.”
Ben was as puzzled as I was. “The car? Or Grandpa?”
She sniffed again but didn’t answer. She reopened the panel on his dash and accessed his GPS. She was talking softly. “You remember that one spring break, my senior year? Arizona. And that boy named Mark. Sun, sun, and more sun. We hardly ever had to stop at a charging station. That’s where you should go, old friend. And drive safely.”
“Don’t we always?” he asked her.
She laughed out loud.
She got out and shut the door. He revved his engine a few times, and then began to pull forward. We stepped back out of his way, and he moved slowly past us, the deep snow squeaking under his tires. Mom stepped forward, brushing snow, twigs, and leaves off the solars on his roof. He stopped and let her clear them. Then, “All done. Run free,” she told him, and patted his rear view mirror.
When she stepped back, he revved his engine, tooted his horn twice, and peeled out in a shower of snow. We stood there and watched him go. Mom didn’t move until we couldn’t hear him anymore. Then she pitched the packet of anti-virus as far as she could into the woods. “There are some things that just don’t need curing,” she said.
We went back to the City Rents car and climbed in. My sneakers were soaked, my feet were numb, and my jeans were wet halfway to my knees. We ate some peanut butter sandwiches that Ben had packed, Mom gave me another pain pill, and I slept all the way home.
Three nights later, I got out of bed and padded toward the living room in my pajamas. I peeked around the corner. My mom’s chair was rocked back as far as it would go and her toes were up on the edge of the desk. The bluish monitor light was the only light in the room. She was watching a moving dot on a map, and smiling. She had headphones on and was nodding her head to music we could barely hear. Oldies. I jumped when Ben put his hand on my shoulder and gently pulled me back into the hallway. He shook his head at me and I nodded. We both went back to bed.
I never saw Old Paint again. He stayed in Arizona, mostly charging off the sun and not moving around much once he was there. Once in a while, I’d get home from school and turn on the computer and check on him. He was just a red dot moving on thin lines in a faraway place, or, much more often, a black dot on an empty spot on the map. After a while, I stopped thinking about him.
Ben did two years of community college and then got a “Potential” scholarship to a college in Utah. It was hard to say goodbye to him, but by then I was in high school and had a life of my own. It was my turn to have spats with Mom.
One April day, I came home to find that Mom had left the computer running. There had been an email from Ben, with an attachment, and she had left it as a screen saver. He’d gone to Arizona for spring break. “This was as close as I could get to him,” Ben had written. The scene had been shot under a bright blue sky, with red cliffs in the distance. There was nothing there, only scrub brush and a dirt road. And in the distance, a station wagon moved steadily away, a long plume of dust hanging in the still air behind him.
THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS
Paul Cornell
Paul Cornell lives in Faringdon, Oxfordshire, England. He is a writer of SF and fantasy in prose, television, and comics, and has been Hugo Award–nominated for all three. He’s the winner of a BSFA Award, an Eagle Award, and a Writer’s Guild Award. He’s written three episodes (two of them Hugo finalists) of the modern Doctor Who, and many titles for Marvel Comics, including Captain Britain and MI-13, and is the creator of Doctor Who character Bernice Summerfield. His first novels were Something More (2001) and British Summertime (2002). His first urban fantasy novel, London Falling, was published in 2012, and the sequel, The Severed Streets, will be out in the United States in early 2014. He has published more than a dozen short stories.
“The Ghosts of Christmas” was published at Tor.com. What if you could see your own future but not change it? or your own past?
IT WAS BECAUSE of a row. The row was about nothing. So it all came from nothing. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say it came from the interaction between two people. I remember how Ben’s voice suddenly became gentle and he said, as if decanting the whole unconscious reason for the row:
“Why don’t we try for a baby?”
This was mid-March. My memory of that moment is of hearing birds outside. I always loved that time of year, that sense of nature becoming stronger all around. But I always owned the decisions I made, I didn’t blame them on what was around me, or on my hormones. I am what’s around me, I am my hormones, that’s what I always said to myself. I don’t know if Ben ever felt the same way. That’s how I think of him now: always excusing himself. I don’t know how that squares with how the world is now. Perhaps it suits him down to the ground. I’m sure I spent years looking out for him excusing himself. I’m sure me doing that was why, in the end, he did.
I listened to the birds. “Yes,” I said.
* * *
WE GOT LUCKY almost immediately. I called my mother and told her the news.
“Oh no,” she said.
* * *
WHEN THE FIRST trimester had passed, and everything was still fine, I told my boss and then my colleagues at the Project, and arranged for maternity leave. “I know you lot are going to go over the threshold the day after I leave,” I told my team. “You’re going to call me up at home and you’ll be all, ‘Oh, hey, Lindsey is currently inhabiting her own brain at age three! She’s about to try to warn the authorities about some terrorist outrage or other. But pregnancy must be such a joy.’”
“Again with this,” said Alfred. “We have no reason to believe the subjects would be able to do anything other than listen in to what’s going on in the heads of their younger selves—”
“Except,” said Lindsey, stepping back into this old argument like I hadn’t even mentioned hello, baby, “the maths rules out even the possibility—”
“Free will—”
“No. It’s becoming clearer with every advance we
make back into what was: what’s written is written.”
Our due date was Christmas Day.
People who were shown around the Project were always surprised at how small the communication unit was. It had to be; most of the time it was attached to the skull of a sedated rhesus monkey. “It’s just a string of lights,” someone once said. And we all looked appalled, to the point where Ramsay quickly led the guest away.
They were like Christmas lights, each link changing colour to show how a different area of the monkey’s brain was responding to the data coming back from the other mind, probably its own mind, that it was connected to, somewhen in the past. Or, we thought only in our wildest imaginings then, in the future.
Christmas lights. Coincidence and association thread through this, so much, when such things can only be illusions. Or artifice. Cartoons in the margin.
How can one have coincidence, when everything is written?
* * *
I ALWAYS THOUGHT my father was too old to be a dad. It often seemed to me that Mum was somehow too old to have me too, but that wasn’t the case, biologically. It was just that she came from another time, a different world, of austerity, of shying away from rock and roll. She got even older after Dad died. Ironically, I became pregnant at the same age she had been.
* * *
WE WENT TO see her: me, Ben, and the bump. She didn’t refer to it. For the first hour. She kept talking about her new porch. Ben started looking between us, as if waiting to see who would crack first. Until he had to say it, over tea. “So, the baby! You must be looking forward to being a grandmother!”
Mum looked wryly at him. “Not at my age.”
“Sorry?”
“That’s all right. You two can do what you want. I’ll be gone soon.”
* * *
WE STAYED FOR an hour or two more, talking about other things, about that bloody porch, and then we waved goodbye and drove off and I parked the car as soon as we were out of sight of the house. “Let’s kill her,” I said.
“Absolutely.”
“I shouldn’t say that. I so shouldn’t say that. She will be gone soon. It’s selfish of me to want to talk about the baby—”
“When we could be talking about that really very lovely porch. You could have led with how your potentially Nobel Prize–winning discovery of time travel is going.”
“She didn’t mention that either.”
“She is proud of you, I’m sure. Did something—? I mean, did anything ever … happen, between you, back then?”
I shook my head. There was not one particular moment. I was not an abused child. This isn’t a story about abuse.
I closed my eyes. I listened to the endless rhythm of the cars going past.
* * *
THE PROJECT WAS created to investigate something that I’d found in the case histories of schizophrenics. Sufferers often describe a tremendous sensation of now, the terrifying hugeness of the current moment. They often find voices talking to them, other people inside their own heads seemingly communicating with them. I started using the new brain-mapping technology to look into the relationship between the schizoid mind and time. Theory often follows technology, and in this case it was a detailed image of particle trails within the mind of David, a schizophrenic, that handed the whole theory to me in a single moment. It was written that I saw that image and made those decisions. Now when I look back to that moment, it’s almost like I didn’t do anything. Except that what happened in my head in that moment has meant so much to me.
I saw many knotted trails in that image, characteristic of asymmetric entanglement. I saw that, unlike in the healthy minds we’d seen, where there are only a couple of those trails at any given moment (and who knows what those are, even today?), this mind was connected, utterly, to … other things that were very similar to itself. I realised instantly what I was looking at: What could those other things that were influencing all those particle trails be but other minds? And where were those other minds very like this one—?
And then I had a vision of the trails in my own mind, like Christmas lights, and that led me to the next moment when I knew consciously what I had actually understood an instant before, as if I had divined it from the interaction of all things—
The trails led to other versions of this person’s own mind, elsewhen in time.
* * *
I REMEMBER THAT David was eager to cooperate. He wanted to understand his condition. He’d been a journalist before admitting himself to the psychiatric hospital.
“I need to tear, hair, fear, ear, see … yes, see, what’s in here!” he shouted, tapping the front of his head with his middle fingers. “Hah, funny, the rhymes, crimes, alibis, keep trying to break out of those, and it works, that works, works. Hello!” He sat suddenly and firmly down and took a very steady-handed sip from his plastic cup of water. “You asked me to stay off the drugs,” he said, “so it’s difficult. And I would like to go back on them. I would very much like to. After.”
I had started, ironically, to see him as a slice across a lot of different versions of himself, separated by time. I saw him as all his minds, in different phases, interfering with each other. Turn that polarised view the other way, and you’d have a series of healthy people. That’s what I thought. And I wrote that down offhandedly somewhere, in some report. His other selves weren’t the “voices in his head.” That’s a common fallacy about the history of our work. Those voices were the protective action that distances a schizophrenic from those other selves. They were characters formed around the incursion, a little bit of interior fiction. We’re now told that a “schizophrenic” is someone who has to deal with such random interference for long stretches of time.
“Absolutely, as soon as we’ve finished our interviews today. We don’t want to do anything to set back your treatment.”
“How do you experience time?” is a baffling question to ask anyone. The obvious answer would be “like you do, probably.” So we’d narrowed it down to:
How do you feel when you remember an event from your childhood?
How do you feel about your last birthday?
How do you feel about the Norman Conquest?
“Not the same,” David insisted. “Not the same.”
* * *
I FOUND MYSELF not sleeping. Expectant mothers do. But while not sleeping, I stared and listened for birds, and thought the same thought, over and over.
It’s been proven that certain traits formed by a child’s environment do get passed down to its own children. It is genuinely harder for the child of someone who was denied books to learn to read.
I’m going to be a terrible parent.
* * *
“WILL YOU PLAY with me?” I remember how much that sound in my voice seemed to hurt. Not that I was feeling anything bad at the time; it was like I was just hearing something bad. I said it too much. I said it too much in exactly the same way.
“Later,” said Dad, sitting in his chair that smelled of him, watching the football. “You start, and I’ll join in later.”
* * *
I’D LEFT MY bedroom and gone back into the lounge. I could hear them talking in the kitchen, getting ready for bed, and in a moment they’d be bound to notice me, but I’d seen it in the paper and it sounded incredible: The Outer Limits. The outer limits of what? Right at the end of the television programmes for the day. So after that I’d see television stop. And now I was seeing it and it was terrible, because there was a monster, and this was too old for me. I was crying. But they’d be bound to hear, and in a moment they would come and yell at me and switch the set off and carry me off to bed, and it’d be safe for me to turn round.
But they went to bed without looking in the lounge. I listened to them close the door and talk for a while, and then switch the light off, and then silence, and so it was just me sitting there, watching the greys flicker.
With the monster.
* * *
I WAS STANDING in a lay-by, watching the
cars go past, wondering if Mummy and Daddy were going to come back for me this time. They’d said that if I didn’t stop going on about the ice cream I’d dropped on the beach, they’d make me get out and walk. And then Dad had said “right!” and he’d stopped the car and yanked open the door and grabbed me out of my seat and left me there and driven off.
I was looking down the road, waiting to see the car come back.
I had no way of even starting to think about another life. I was six years old.
* * *
THOSE ARE JUST memories. They’re not from Christmas Day. They’re kept like that in the connections between neurons within my brain. I have a sense of telling them to myself. Every cell of my body has been replaced many times since I was that age. I am an oral tradition. But it’s been proved that a butterfly remembers what a caterpillar has learned, despite its entire neurological structure being literally liquidised in between. So perhaps there’s a component of memory that lies outside of ourselves as well, somewhere in those loose threads of particle trails. I have some hope that that is true. Because that would put a different background behind all of my experiences.
I draw a line now between such memories and the other memories I now have of my childhood. But that line will grow fainter in time.
* * *
I DON’T WANT to neglect it.
I’m going to neglect it.
I don’t want to hurt it.
I’m going to hurt it.
They made me this way. I’m going to blame them for what I do. I’m going to end up being worse.
I grew numb with fear as autumn turned to winter. I grew huge. I didn’t talk to Ben or anyone about how I felt. I didn’t want to hear myself say the words.
In mid-December, a couple of weeks before the due date, I got an email from Lindsey. It was marked “confidential”:
Just thought I should tell you, that, well, you predicted it, didn’t you? The monkey trials have been a complete success, the subjects seem fine, mentally and physically. We’re now in a position to actually connect minds across time. So we’re going to get into the business of finding human volunteer test subjects. Ramsay wants “some expendable student” to be the first, but, you know, over our dead bodies! This isn’t like lab rats, this is first astronaut stuff. Anyway, the Project is closing down on bloody Christmas Eve, so we’re going to be forced to go and ponder that at home. Enclosed are the latest revisions of the tech specs, so that you can get excited too. But of course, you’ll be utterly blasé about this, because it is nothing compared to the miracle of birth, about which you must be so excited, etc.
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