by Walker, Rysa
“I . . . don’t know. Can any of these clones use the CHRONOS key? I mean, to jump with it?”
“Oh, no,” she says, shaking her head emphatically. “We can only see the light and read the diaries. That’s why they need three of us, and truthfully, I think they could use four or five. One would probably be enough, though, if she could just zip from place to place and time to time. Although Zeta—she was in the trio before me, the only one who ever entirely left the fold—said that was one of the reasons that Prudence Alpha, the original one, lost her marbles near the end, so I’m kind of glad I can’t use it. On the other hand, it would have made travel so much faster both as a Sister and once my commitment was up. And you know how I love to travel. Maybe once all of this is over, we can take another trip! The mountains are always nice in winter.”
“Maybe.” I take a deep breath and try to pull her back on topic. She’s always been flaky, but I think it’s gotten worse in the year since I last saw her. “So, you spent a period of time as Prudence, and then you were free to do whatever you wanted?”
She nods. “Although my case was a little different. Normally, we’re allowed to just go on with our lives after the twenty years are up, but later, when they learned that I had a daughter who was only a few years older than your father, they pulled me back in to see if Mila and I could ensure that you’d be able to fulfill your destiny even if there was outside tampering. That’s a very good thing in retrospect, don’t you think? And then now, they’ve put me under this key and pulled me back in so that I could be here, which is a very good thing for me, because I’ve got an odd second set of memories now. Which don’t include any of the other Pru Sisters, but then none of them would have been under a key, would they? So maybe I don’t exist outside of it. Or maybe I do and—”
“Could we go back to the part about me fulfilling my destiny?” I say, beginning to feel a little queasy at the loops and turns in her train of thought.
“Yes. Your destiny.” She gives a philosophical little shrug. “Without you, there is no CHRONOS. Without CHRONOS, there are no Cyrists. And without the Cyrists, there would be no you. It’s the circle of life.”
“That’s not what people usually mean by the circle of life, though. And you just said that there would have been some version of me even without Cyrist interference.”
A tiny frown creases her brow. “Interference is such a judgmental word. Insurance is really more accurate. The Cyrists—at considerable cost, I might add—provided insurance that the plan would be fulfilled. Because prophecy is all well and good, but if you fail to act on the prophecy, then what is the point? Things can obviously change in any iteration of the timeline, and the Templars didn’t wish to leave something so important to chance. What if some tiny aberration in the gestational environment meant that the gene wasn’t expressed at all? And so, a plan was devised to bolster your inheritance on your mother’s side as well. Which is where Mila came in. I expected her to simply stay with the man until she was pregnant, but the poor baby was never exactly fond of the Cyrists, I’m afraid. And I guess she got that from me to some extent, because I was more than happy to shed my Pru duties as soon as the Templars decided the bloom was no longer on the rose, if you follow my drift. And yet some of the Sisters seem loath to let it go. How can that be, do you think, when we’re supposedly identical?”
“I don’t know,” I say again, and try to lead her back toward the questions I need answered. “You said Mom is okay. Could we call her?”
Again, she responds with an airy wave of her hand. “Mila is okay, Madi. Somewhere. Somewhen.”
I don’t find that at all comforting, but I stick to the topic. “So, you’re saying the Madison Grace in the books isn’t me at all. She had a different mother.”
“Different mother,” she says, “but probably a very similar life, since Mila decided to remain with your father. There was some pressure to remove you from your parents entirely, but I told the Templars that it would be unwise. After all, your environment also plays a role in determining your abilities. And see, there’s another puzzle. My Sisters had the same environment as I did and the same genetic makeup. Nature and nurture both the same, and yet . . . we’re different.” She shrugs. “How can you explain that?”
“But at some point, there must have been a version of me that didn’t have the CHRONOS gene at all, right? I mean, it had to come from somewhere. Someone developed it initially.”
“I suppose. But does it really matter?”
“Yes! It definitely matters.”
She gives me one of her enigmatic smiles. “Then keep searching, my love. The answers you require are somewhere within you.”
I open my mouth to protest, but I know there’s no point telling her that these answers absolutely are not within me. Her smile will just grow sad for a moment, and then she’ll flit on to another topic.
“In fact,” Thea says, “I was about to go up to that cozy little room in the attic and meditate. Perhaps you should join me.”
“I can’t. The game, remember? Could you do me a favor, though?”
“Of course, sweetie.”
“Since you can’t get me a copy of this Book of Prophecy, could you jot down anything you can think of from that book—from the “Chapter of Prudence” or anywhere else—that might pertain to what we’re doing here? Or just anything that pertains to me. And maybe the whole Sister Prudence thing, because I’m afraid I’m not really following a lot of what you’ve said.”
I expect her to give me a pout for assigning her homework. That would be a typical Thea reaction. But she positively beams. “That’s a very good idea, Madi! Sometimes when I’m talking it’s so hard to organize everything, and I tend to go off on a tangent, and then we’re talking about something else entirely, and I even forget what the original subject was. It’s a lot easier to write things down. I’ll even send you my journal . . . well, not all of it. But I’m sure there are some sections I can share. I’ll go to my room and start right after my meditation.”
“Oh . . . your room. I guess we need to find you someplace to sleep.”
“No need. I’m in the room with the extra blanket. I get so cold when I sleep. But you might want to tell your friends that one of them left a little blue hat behind. Or at least I think it’s a hat. I found it on the nightstand.” She gives me a hug. “Be careful out there, okay?”
There’s still one more question I really want to ask her, and oddly, it’s the same question Tyson scrawled on his business card to get the attention of that Lawrence Dennis guy—Why are you here? She can’t use the key to jump, and I’m not sure that her mind will stay in one place long enough to count on her to monitor stable points, and yet she showed up moments before the game started. Which means someone told her when we were supposed to begin. I’m not really suspicious of her motives. Thea is self-centered, but in a very open fashion, a bit like a small child. But someone else could be using her, either as a spy or simply as a limiting factor. We had three research assistants here, as well as Jarvis, and we could have left them with substantial research tasks. So what if it took months to complete? They aren’t registered in the system as players, so their time, like Jack’s, is essentially unlimited. I could simply jump forward a few months and collect their answers.
Now, however, Thea is in the system, and she can’t use the key to travel in time. Simply by being in the room and pulling herself in as an observer, she bound everyone in this house to the same time limitations as the rest of us. Although the machine being here might have done that regardless of whether Thea was at the house.
All of that would seem to beg the why-are-you-here question. But I’m worried that it will sound rude, and she seems quite pleased to have a task. So I table the question for the next time we talk.
Thea scurries up the stairs at an impressive pace for her seventy-six years, and I’m left in the odd position of envying my grandmother’s energy. It’s only been thirteen or maybe fourteen hours since I woke up, and I h
ad two cups of coffee at the diner when I was filling Tyson in on the whole Saul-and-the-Cyrists issue. I shouldn’t be dragging like this. What I really want is to pull on my swimsuit and clear my mind with a few dozen laps in the pool, my own personal form of meditation, and then curl up in my bed for a good night’s sleep. But that’s a luxury I can’t afford when the clock is literally ticking. I still need to check in with Lorena about progress on the serum, and I have a whole list of questions for Alex.
And so I trudge up the stairs to the library. Maybe Alex will share some of his buzz beans.
Buzz is the operative word when I open the door to the library. I heard the sound from the stairs but thought maybe it was something that Lorena and RJ were using to get Yun Hee to sleep. It appears to be coming from the vicinity of the SimMaster, which is walled in by four mirrored doors that someone pilfered from the bathroom medicine cabinets, apparently in an effort to restrict what the recording devices inside the simulation machine can see and hear.
Alex is exactly where I expect him to be, inside his nest of displays. Two of them have the bubble grid I’ve gotten used to seeing, but the third is a tangled mass of lines. Nora tried crochet for a few months, after one of her reading-club buddies swore it was a great form of relaxation. Alex’s display looks a lot like the wadded mess of multicolored yarn that I found in her trash bin the next time I visited.
Only two things are different from our usual pattern. First, Alex isn’t looking at any of the displays. Instead, he’s reading a physical book. A fat one, too. Second, he’s now wearing a simple band around his wrist. If not for the fact that the light is amber, I’d have assumed it was one of those old-fashioned neon light tubes that kids used to play with. The only difference is a small metal disk on the side.
“Is that a prototype of the field extender?” I ask.
He looks up, startled. “What? Oh, sorry, Madi. Yeah. I’ve calibrated it to the field that runs through the bookcase, and I’ve been testing how far I can get away from it without the protection wearing off.”
“Is that smart? You might—”
He grins. “I keep the spare CHRONOS key in my pocket. So far, I’ve made it about a hundred meters outside the front gate before this thing buzzes.” He taps the metal disk. “You’d probably be able to see the light go out, but since I can’t see the light, I needed another way to test it. I now have them on RJ, Lorena, and Yun Hee. RJ’s helping me get several more charged to send to all of you as backup. I mean, it’s not like they can go out now, but hopefully, once this stupid game is over. We’ve all been going a little stir-crazy. Especially RJ. He’s always hated being cooped up.”
I hadn’t really thought about it, but that’s one definite advantage I have over my housemates. I can blink out of here, and I’m still protected from any potential time shifts as long as I have a key. Alex and the others have, for the most part, been restricted to the house for going on two weeks.
“Well, one way or another, the game will be ending when that timer goes off.” I nod toward the book in his lap. “Relaxing with a little light reading?”
He looks up from the page, shaking his head to clear it. “Oh, no. This isn’t for fun. It’s actually relevant to our problems. Or I think it might be.”
“I’m joking,” I say as I pull up one of the computer chairs. “What book is it?”
Alex tips the spine in my direction. The Physics of Many Paths, by Stanford Fuller. “I’ve read it before,” he says, “for a philosophy-of-physics class I took back in my third or fourth year. I asked Jarvis to pull up something from the book, and he told me that you had a copy here in the library.”
“Yes. Kate bought it. She mentioned it in one of the diary entries that I read. She said it had something to do with the many-worlds theory—”
“Not theory. It’s an interpretation.”
“Is there a difference?” I ask.
“Yes.”
He hesitates, probably wishing he hadn’t corrected me, because now he needs to figure out a way to explain an almost certainly complicated scientific concept in terms that a literary historian can grasp. I’m about to tell him not to bother, but then he continues.
“In quantum mechanics, theories are mathematical, and that math has to hold up to fairly rigorous tests. But there are different ways of explaining how those theories operate in the real world. An interpretation is basically an application of that mathematical theory to the world we live in. You can have multiple interpretations of the same theory. Does that make sense?”
It kind of does, so I nod, and he goes on.
“Anyway, you were right about it being light reading. This was one of those oddball books that a professor occasionally assigns in addition to the more serious text, mostly to get you thinking about the subject in a slightly different way. Fuller wasn’t a physicist or any sort of scientist. He made his living as a psychic of sorts. My grandmother was a fan.”
“Yeah. Jarvis pulled up an excerpt for me when I saw his name in the diary. He was on TV or something, right? I can’t say it really made a lot of sense to me. But Kate seemed kind of comforted by his theory—or should I say interpretation?”
Alex laughs. “Either is fine in his case.”
I gesture toward the book. “So, do you think the author was a time traveler?”
“No. I think he was what he claimed to be—a seer. A seer and, like me, a visual thinker, although in his case, he was able to visualize without the aid of all these displays. The paths that he talked about were pretty clearly diverging timelines. He even talks about adjacent and intertwined paths, which got me to thinking about Morgen calling this world 47H. I mean, why add the letters, you know?”
Even though I don’t know what he means, I nod. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be another complicated thing for him to simplify, and we don’t really have time.
“Anyway,” he continues, “I was just looking at all of this . . . insanity and trying to come up with some ideas on how to protect our timeline from any future incursions. I can’t even begin to do that until I know where they’re coming from. And I thought I remembered a chapter in the book about blocking off unsafe paths. It was actually unsteady paths, although that may be the same thing, and I can’t say I fully understand what he was talking about, either way. I need to think about it for a bit.”
“Would it help for me to jump back and ask him some questions for you?”
“Maybe. But at this point, I’m not entirely sure what to ask, and . . . he’s not a physicist, so it might require some back-and-forth. I think we’ve got enough to deal with at the moment, anyway. There is one thing you could do, however.” He opens the drawer and takes out a medallion. “Can you transfer a stable point to this?”
“Sure,” I say. “Just hold it up.”
As it turns out, it’s not that easy. The key isn’t activated when Alex holds it. I am, however, able to hold my key in one hand and the CHRO-NOS key in the other hand and tap the backs together to transfer the location.
“What’s this for?” I ask as I hand back the other key. “I mean, what good does it do if you can’t view the stable points?”
“Just something I’m playing around with.”
RJ is standing in the doorway. “Lorena says she may have a test serum for you to take to Jack by tomorrow,” he says. “She had to rush order a couple of compounds and test tubes, and let’s just say that commerce is a bit difficult in this timeline. Neither of us seem to have credits. Thea was able to make the purchase, so I guess it’s lucky she’s here.” He lowers his voice. “She sure does talk a lot, though.”
I give him a sympathetic look. “She really does.”
Alex clearly agrees. “I got a lot more done after I realized that most of her questions are just rhetorical. You can simply nod and make occasional grunting noises, and she’ll take it to mean whatever she wants it to mean.”
“Which is what you do with us all the time,” RJ says, grinning.
“Hey, t
hat’s not true . . .” Alex trails off, probably realizing that his cousin’s comment is very much true.
“Seriously,” I tell them, “kick her out if she’s distracting you at all. Or I can have a talk with her,” I add, although my tone probably suggests that I’m really not all that keen on diving back into Thea’s conversational whirlpool just yet.
“That’s okay,” RJ says. “We’ve been playing tag team dealing with her, although I had to steer her out of the kitchen about an hour ago so that Lorena could focus. We were considering just putting her in a room with Yun Hee and letting them chatter to each other.”
“Thea might enjoy that, actually. She likes babies. I was glad when she headed upstairs to meditate . . . although I’m kind of wondering how she manages to quiet her mind. We were talking for at least five minutes, and all I got was a couple of vague answers to the questions I asked her, peppered with talk about double memories, the circle of life, and Pru sister-clones with Greek-letter names that might not exist anymore.”
“She mentioned that last part to us,” RJ says. “And she may very well have a point on that one. The First Genetics War seems to have started a bit earlier in this timeline, although it’s a little unclear exactly who is fighting whom.”
Alex nods. “All research—not just genetic but pretty much all science—is under the government, with most of the focus on military operations. The Cyrists have had to keep their cloning a bit more low key in this reality. They may not have been willing to take the risk.”
“So, you knew Thea was a clone?” I ask. “Or rather that the Cyrists were engaged in cloning?”
“Me?” RJ says. “No. Lorena, however, says it’s common knowledge in her circles. That’s why the Cyrists pushed hard on that whole religious-liberty exemption to keep the government from taking samples of body fluids. They were worried the government would find out that they have some carbon copies. And maybe a few illegal modifications. Or at least that was the case in our timeline. And Prudence’s face is pretty well known, so there would likely be some people watching out for her to pop up. Or for them to pop up, I guess.”
