Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins)

by Rysa Walker

  He waves a hand dismissively. “Richard told me. What I want to know is, was that the only time you saw the girl? You’re sure you didn’t interact with her on one of your earlier jumps? Maybe in 1963, in . . . What was the name of that place in South Carolina?”

  “Spartanburg. And no, there’s no way. She mentioned that she’d never been out of Tennessee until her sister’s graduation from Antioch. And the only other time I’ve been to Memphis was 1956. She’d have been a little kid.”

  I know that I should tell him the part about Toni getting a double memory. And I will tell him if I have to. It’s just that I’m not entirely sure what the consequences might be for her. I don’t really think they’d send someone back through time to kill her or lock her up or anything—although I guess I can’t entirely rule that out if there were major changes to the timeline. That sort of decision would be made by the government, not by CHRONOS, and I can easily imagine them taking a utilitarian stance and making sacrifices for the greater good.

  But King was only supposed to live three more years. Most of the major civil rights legislation was pretty much a done deal by this time. Did his death result in more racial tension? The Watts riots in Los Angeles are later that summer, in early August. Maybe this made them worse. Maybe the riots spread to other cities.

  Angelo sighs. “Okay, then. I’ll admit I was hoping that we could find some way to connect the earlier events, but apparently not.”

  “What earlier events? And what kind of impact are we looking at?” I ask, dreading the answer.

  “Level five,” Rich says. “The Vietnam War goes on for six more months.”

  “What? Just because King died early? That doesn’t—”

  “It’s not just King,” Angelo says. “That’s why all three of you are here, rather than me simply going back and telling you to skip that jump to Antioch. We’ve got four early deaths of significant individuals between March 24, 1965, and August 19, 1966.”

  “That’s the date of the last Selma march. I haven’t—”

  “I know you haven’t been there. A sniper picked off five people—three women and two men—in the area they were using as a stage, including”—Angelo flicks his eyes, searching for something on his retinal display—“an author named James Baldwin. Also a singer, Mary Travers.”

  “I know who Baldwin is,” I say. “He wrote The Fire Next Time and If Beale Street Could Talk. But I’ve never heard of this Mary . . .”

  “Travers. She was with Peter, Paul, and Mary,” Rich says. When I shake my head, he adds, “‘If I Had a Hammer’? ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?”

  “I thought ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ was Dylan?”

  Rich sighs. “Dylan wrote it. Well, he sang it, too, but radio stations didn’t play him much in the early sixties. Peter, Paul, and Mary brought protest music to middle-class whites. College kids. You’ve definitely heard of the fourth victim . . . John Lennon. And it happens at the concert in Memphis.”

  I sit there silently for a moment, trying to come up with some logical chain of events that might result in the killing of those four people—King, Baldwin, Lennon, and a folk singer whose name I don’t even recognize. I’m about to make the rather obvious point that it’s probably the Klan or a similar group when I remember something important that I haven’t told them about the Antioch trip.

  “There were five other agents at Antioch. Watching as King died.”

  Angelo frowns. “But you were the first to make that trip.”

  “Exactly. They’d have to be from a later cohort. And get this. One of them was a kid.”

  “A kid?” Katherine says. “You’re sure? Maybe it was just someone who’s kind of short, like me.”

  “No. A boy. Twelve years old, at the very most.”

  “That’s . . . troubling,” Angelo says. “On several levels, but mostly because it suggests that we don’t manage to fix this. I’m not willing to accept that as a possibility. The reason I had Aaron change your return time was to get a head start on figuring out what went wrong. Since the three of you are currently researching this time period, you’re my first choice to investigate. If we need more people on it, I’ll pull Timothy and Evelyn in, but obviously the fewer people who know about this, the better. And we’ve already got questions coming in from above.”

  He doesn’t have to clarify that. We all know that there are exactly two buildings in the United States that are under a CHRONOS field. We’re inside one. The other is the White House.

  “Shouldn’t Saul be here, too?” Katherine asks. “He’s working with us on the Memphis jump, and—”

  “Saul is on a training mission,” Angelo says. “And as he noted in one of the scrums, training comes first.”

  I’m not sure if Katherine catches the sarcasm in his voice, but Rich definitely does. He and I exchange a look. Training might usually come first, but it definitely doesn’t come before a level-five fuckup. Saul isn’t here because Angelo doesn’t trust him.

  “So what’s the plan of action?” Richard asks, cutting off Katherine, who was about to protest further. “Do we split up and each take one of the events, or—”

  “No. I want all three of you together as much as possible. You’ll need some research time to figure out where we should focus first, so I’m sending you back twenty-four hours, directly to the isolation unit. Come up with a plan of operation. Since I obviously can’t jump back, I’ll send instructions back to myself and join you there about . . . two hours ago, so you can brief me. I need to keep a clear head, and that will give me as few conflicting memories as possible. My goal is to get the three of you back into the field ahead of the regularly scheduled jump.”

  “Can you give us an idea of the impact?” I ask. “I mean, I know level five is serious, but . . .”

  Angelo gives me a grim look. “There are significant timeline changes. That’s all I’m authorized to say, but given the current political climate, failure to fix this would cost us our funding. They’ll shut us down, maybe even retroactively.”

  “They’d erase CHRONOS?” Katherine asks.

  He shrugs. Katherine looks a little pale, because we all know what that means. Every person in this room—hell, every person in this building—was genetically enhanced for their specific job within the organization. If the government erases CHRONOS, goes back and keeps it from ever being formed, that would effectively erase all of us. Oh, we’d still exist in some form, but all of our memories and a huge chunk of our personalities and physical attributes would be different, so for all intents and purposes, we wouldn’t be the same people.

  I have a hard time accepting complete erasure of the organization as a credible threat, since it would change things in the timeline as a whole. History curricula for the past few generations would be very different, for starters. And who knows how many other decisions might have been changed by that knowledge?

  But shutting CHRONOS down? Maybe even sending back a message not to bother with the genetic alteration on the last few cohorts of trainees? That’s believable.

  The three of us follow Angelo back to the jump room, where only a single tech, Aaron, is on duty. I know Aaron pretty well because we play in the same virtual rugby league. He gives me a sympathetic smile, and I can tell he’s worried. How much does he know about what’s going on? How much does the rest of the support team at CHRONOS know?

  “I have you guys at the first three stations,” Aaron says. After we take our places, he adds, “You’ll go straight to isolation. Let the crew there know if you need anything.”

  I’ve never been to the tank, as the isolation unit is generally known. I expect it to be tiny and stark, like a jail cell. But when we arrive, I see that it doesn’t look all that different from the quarters that Rich and I share. A little larger, maybe, with two extra bunks. The equipment at the research station is a major upgrade, too. It looks a bit like the system they have down in the archives.

  “Wow.” Katherine runs her finger over the top of the console, an
d a holographic globe shimmers into view. “A SimMaster 8560. Morgen and Saul were talking about this model at dinner a few weeks back. They said it was still in the R and D stage, though. Not due out for at least three years.”

  “Could be an experimental model,” Rich suggests.

  “Maybe. But it looks like a finished product. Morgen Campbell would sell what’s left of his tiny, shriveled soul to get his hands on this.” She glances over at Rich and me. “You’ve seen Campbell’s setup, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve played at the Club a few times,” Richard says, but I shake my head.

  Even though it’s considered an honor to be pulled into Campbell’s clique, I’ve never wanted to be part of the select group of pet historians who gather at the Objectivist Club for simulation tournaments to test out classic historical hypotheticals. What if there had been tanks or fighter planes during the American Civil War? What if Hitler had died in jail? What if the US had used nuclear weapons on the USSR before the Cold War began? What if the Genetics War had started five years later?

  The official name of the game, which has been popular for a few decades, is Temporal Dilemma, but most people refer to it generically as “time chess,” because there are several different copyrighted versions. It’s nothing at all like chess, aside from the fact that playing—or at least, playing well—requires a good deal of strategy. Time-chess leagues are organized at every age level once you begin school. Most of the school groups that come to our Q&A sessions are time-chess fans. My father, who played in high school, says it’s an excellent tool for teaching history, economics, and related fields. The fact that he enjoyed playing so much is probably why he was willing to cough up a substantial bribe to be sure one of his two offspring was given the CHRONOS gene.

  Around here, though, people don’t even call it time chess. It’s just The Game. My aversion to it is partly because playing it means I’d have to interact with Morgen Campbell, Saul Rand, and others like them on a regular basis. It also seems like a massive circle jerk, designed to inflate egos, since Campbell awards prizes to those who prove his pet theories true.

  The biggest reason I steer clear, however, is that The Game itself seems like a perversion of our entire mission. We study history. We don’t change it. I’ve always been a little suspicious of historians who spend too much of their spare time fantasizing about breaking the prime directive of CHRONOS.

  Most of the retired historians play, though. I guess it’s kind of a substitute for being in the field. Most of the technical staff play, too. But the majority of the current historians don’t, so I suspect I’m not the only one who feels that it’s kind of a conflict of interest with the day job. I know that Angelo agrees with me. You can read it on his face anytime conversation turns toward The Game.

  “Saul is really good,” Katherine says. “As you probably already know. I don’t play in the league myself, but I’ve been watching him practice and play for the past few years. Sometimes, I make copies of his simulations when he’s not around.” She smiles slyly. “And I’ve beaten his score more than once, although if either of you tell him that, I’ll deny it and then murder you.”

  I snort. “My, what a fragile ego Saul Rand must have.”

  Katherine rolls her eyes. “He’s still a better player than I am. But if he knew I’d beaten him even once, he’d get all competitive. The Game is important to him, and it’s not really important to me. I don’t think it’s healthy for partners to compete in that way.”

  I get a vivid flashback to Timothy’s green eyes lighting up with amusement as he and Evelyn joked about Katherine being genetically programmed to be more submissive. He would, no doubt, consider this statement Exhibit A for his side of the argument.

  But I push that aside to focus on the real issue. I’m about to ask why we even need a gaming system right now, let alone someone with expertise, when it clicks. This is how they expect us to figure out what mistake could have resulted in a level-five emergency.

  A game. Admittedly, a very complex game on a beyond-state-of-the-art system, but it still seems like a pathetic tool set for solving a level-five disaster.

  Rich scans for something on his retinal display. “I’ve only played standard simulations. Out-of-the-box stuff. Usually you make a change and the system calculates the probability of outcomes, but that isn’t really going to help us in this case. Do you know if we can set it to work backward? So that we provide current information and it isolates what set the chain of events in motion?”

  “Sure.” Katherine taps a control box on the right side of the display. “You just need to enter the changes and set the system for backward induction. Do we have the new data?”

  “Syncing with the system to send it now,” Richard says.

  I pull up the new file in my in-box, which must be the one he’s sending to the simulator. The file is labeled simply Anomalies, and it’s massive. Results are organized into global, regional, and national sections, then states, territories, and local units. There are subcategories for political, cultural, economic, scientific, demographic, and physical data at each level. That last category seems a bit strange, so I open it out of curiosity. It’s fairly small, with annual figures for things like air quality, ocean temperature, and frequency of natural disasters, among other things, stretching back to 1960. Some figures are marked to indicate missing data and extrapolations, but it’s largely complete. Most of the main categories are broken down into smaller units—for example, the political section for the United States shows a list of twenty-three persons who held a specific national political office in the old timeline but either never existed in this offshoot, or else never won the election. When I click on the link and add in the data for states and territories, the number increases to 248.

  “Well, the president is still the same, except for two earlier elections,” Rich says, so I guess he’s scanning through the top-level changes, too. “I wonder what would have happened if this event changed the current occupant. I mean, the White House is under a CHRONOS field. The president is under a key even when she travels. So would the old-timeline president have vanished, or been protected because of the CHRONOS field?”

  Katherine and I both groan.

  “Richard actually enjoyed Temporal Conundrums,” she says, referring to everyone’s least favorite class. “Be glad you didn’t have to deal with him in the classroom. We’re all sitting there agonizing over these headache-inducing problems, and Rich is piling on the complexity, asking questions even the teacher preferred to avoid.”

  Richard grins. “When I retire from fieldwork, I’m going to teach that class.”

  She presses her lips together primly. “Mm-hmm. And if you do, we’ll all awaken one morning to the tragic news that the heads of the entire third-year class simultaneously exploded when you presented your special twist on Gödel’s time-block theory. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have passed the Conundrums final without your help, so I’m very thankful for your geeky side.”

  Rich’s smile fades a bit. I suspect he’s thinking that Saul doesn’t have a geeky side, other than his obsession with The Game. And maybe wishing he didn’t have a geeky side, either, which makes me both sad and exasperated at him.

  “Do either of you know anything about previous level-five events?” I ask.

  Richard shakes his head. Katherine makes a little face that suggests she knows something but isn’t sure she should talk about it.

  “Come on,” Rich says. “If you know something, we need that information, too.”

  “It’s not anything I know for certain,” she says. “Just something Saul and Tate were talking about a few months ago, when we were moving Saul’s things over to the new quarters. They were joking around about retractions, although I didn’t get the sense Tate thought it was all that funny. Anyway, Saul said there was a level five during the first generation of agents. They had to send a massive team back to some village in France. He said they had to kill seven people. But that’s all I know, and .
. . he could have just been . . . you know . . .” She leaves us to fill in the blank and wanders over to the display. “Whoa. Look at this.”

  Rich and I join her. A window at the top is scrolling through the categories being loaded into the system, but that’s not what she’s talking about. She’s pointing to a line at the very bottom of the window, which shows the copyright date as 2308.

  “Interesting,” I say. “Looks like someone in procurement cheated and jumped forward a few years to fill the purchase order. Naughty, naughty.”

  Technically, that’s not allowed. In fact, if you believe the textbooks we used during our classroom training, it’s not even possible. The equipment is, supposedly, locked to prevent travel to any time after 2160, when the first time-travel device was patented.

  “Of course,” Rich says, “Angelo just authorized Aaron to send us back twenty-four hours, so they’ve obviously decided that this situation warrants a bit of rule breaking. I just wonder if it really matters whether we have a top-of-the-line sim system.”

  Katherine shrugs. “It will shave a few minutes off each round. Whether that’s important depends on how many rounds we have to go through before we can draw some conclusions. Either way,” she says, nodding toward the progress wheel hovering in front of the globe somewhere over the Indian Ocean, “we might as well relax for a bit, because we’ve got at least an hour before we can start. I slept in this morning. Angelo’s message woke me, so I didn’t even have a chance to shower. But . . . you might want to go first, Tyce.”

  I glance down and realize that my jacket is still caked with mud from the parking lot at Antioch. There’s also a reddish-brown splotch on my pant leg, and the fabric is stuck to my knee where I scraped it.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Good point.”

  Once I’m clean, I pop a bandage on my knee and check the closet, hoping it’s equipped with one of the newer fabricators like they have in costuming. That way, I can go ahead and order something that would be suitable for the 1960s and not have to bother with changing. But the system is unfortunately a basic model that spits out the generic shirt and pants we call CHRONOS scrubs. I guess that’s all they figured we’d need while in the tank. Not like we’re going to be hosting a soirée.