Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins)

by Rysa Walker

  The list of anomalies continues to scroll upward, with an occasional blue check mark to break up the black-and-white monotony. We watch for nearly a full minute. I keep thinking it has to stop soon. Finally I can’t take any more. I reach out to pause the list again. It’s at 796 and the little bar on the side of the window suggests that we’ve barely scratched the surface.

  “Are those all casualties?” Lorena asks.

  I can’t make myself touch the screen again. Alex is the one who eventually reaches forward and clicks a name.

  Willis Martin Parry’s two obituaries are side by side. The Willis on the left was an old man when he died in 2025. He was survived by five children, twelve grandchildren, twenty-one great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandson. The article on the right shows the picture of a young man in uniform. Sgt. Willis M. Parry died in combat in Vietnam in August of 1975, when he was twenty-two years old. He was survived by his parents, a sister, and a fiancée.

  “That date,” Jack says. “It’s wrong. Jarvis, when did the last US soldier die in the Vietnam conflict?”

  There’s a long pause.

  “Oh, sorry,” Jack says. “I didn’t know it was set for just your voice.”

  “He’s not.” I repeat the question anyway, thinking maybe something is wrong with the system.

  “Apologies, mistress. I’m attempting to reconcile conflicting data from an external source.”

  “Explain.”

  “My local data set indicates that US involvement in the Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975. But when I checked for updates from external historical archives, the date given is November 19, 1975.”

  Alex taps a menu at the top of the display. A summary appears with four categories.

  Deaths: 32,714 (Significant: 692)

  Erasures: 1,110,563 (Significant: 22,342)

  Additions: 1,107,224 (Significant: 21,905)

  Alterations to Historical Events: 543 (Significant: 17)

  When Alex clicks Erasures, we see a list of names with links to birth certificates. In some cases, there’s a biographical profile instead. The same is true for the Additions category.

  “I . . . don’t get it,” Jack says. “Are these more people who died?”

  “Not exactly,” Lorena says. “Think back to the two obituaries for Willis Parry. The offspring listed in the first one were never born. They didn’t die. They just never were. And the fiancée of Sgt. Parry probably married someone else. Any children she had from the new union wouldn’t have existed if Parry had lived. Both of those categories are multiplied by several generations.”

  “And he’s not even one who’s marked as significant,” Alex says. “Wonder what criteria they used to determine whether someone gets one of those little blue check marks? Seems like that would be pretty arbitrary.”

  “And what constitutes an alteration, let alone a significant one,” Lorena says. “You’d think that many changes to the cast of characters would be reflected a bit more in the story line.”

  Jack shrugs. “Maybe. But very few major events in history can be laid firmly on the shoulders of one individual. A war might be averted due to a certain leader in power, but the more likely scenario is that it’s just delayed a bit. And you both know from your work that major discoveries are built on the research of many different people. A brilliant scientist might push the work along a bit faster, but someone else would probably make the same breakthrough eventually.”

  “And yet, somehow, I managed to wreak havoc without even interacting with a musician. Beginner’s luck, I guess.” I center the CHRONOS key in my palm.

  “Wait!” Jack says, grabbing my hand.

  “I can fix this, Jack! All I have to do is go back and tell myself not to stop in 1957. To come straight back here. We’ll get hit with those weird memories again, but—”

  “Yes,” he says. “I agree that you have to go back. But let’s think this through. Figure out the best time for you to stop yourself. I mean, it’s not like there’s a huge rush.”

  “What? Over a million people dead or erased because I decided to check out that stupid stable point. How can you . . . Oh.”

  He’s right. There’s no reason to rush in, aside from my eagerness to fix this and get it off my conscience. Those people won’t be any more or less dead or erased if I fix this twenty minutes or twenty days from now, although I suspect the list of erasures and additions might grow a bit. Plus, things could get far more complicated if I make some sort of blunder on the first try. I need to get this right.

  And then I need to destroy this device. Both of the devices.

  Lorena reaches forward to tap the link for Alterations to Historical Events.

  Alex gives her a sideways look. “That seems like a bad idea. Madi’s going back to undo anything that was changed, so . . .”

  He doesn’t stop her, however, and when she opens the section labeled Scientific Advances, his eyes are crawling all over the data as greedily as hers.

  “No reason we can’t at least look,” Lorena says. “Maybe get some ideas.”

  “Except those ideas belong to someone else,” I counter. “So it seems a bit unfair.”

  “Why?” Alex says. “Once you undo the damage, these people will probably never be born.”

  Jack snorts. “That’s technically true, I guess. Hard for anyone to accuse you of stealing from a person who doesn’t exist.”

  It occurs to me then that the same thing could be said for works of art, music, and yes . . . literature.

  I laugh and they all turn to look at me. “Oh, it’s nothing, really. I’m pretty sure I just solved the mystery of James L. Coleman’s exceptional productivity as a writer, as well as the whole plagiarism question. And it’s not an answer my thesis committee is going to believe.”

  Jack seems to be following my line of thought, but Lorena and Alex are giving me blank looks, so I explain further. “My great-grandfather was publishing books from a different timeline. Books written by authors who were never born. Or who took a different path for some reason. He just made a few mistakes, and that cost him the trust of his daughter and very nearly destroyed his career. So you might want to think carefully about possible plagiarism charges before you go rifling through those files.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Lorena says. “There are still variants of cancer that we can’t cure. RJ’s aunt died from one of . . .” She trails off, her eyes widening. For a moment, she just sits there, her finger poised hesitantly above her comm-band. Then she taps it. “Call RJ.”

  Nothing happens. She taps again. “Call RJ.” There’s still no response of any sort, so she takes the band off and shakes it. “It must be dead. Damn it. I’ve barely had it a year. You call him, Alex.”

  “Okay.” Alex looks a bit nervous, but he makes the call. When RJ’s face pops up above Alex’s wrist, a collective sigh of relief fills the room.

  “Hey, Alex! What’s up, man? I haven’t heard from you in ages. Don’t you ever leave the lab?”

  “RJ?” Lorena steps closer to Alex, so that she’s within range of his camera. “Are you almost home?”

  He frowns. “Umm. Yeah. I’m at home, in fact. Have we . . . met?”

  The color drains from Lorena’s face and she looks faint. I get up and pull her toward a chair while Alex makes a lame excuse, telling his cousin that he’ll call him back.

  As soon as he cuts the connection, Lorena rushes back to the terminal. “How do you search on this damn thing?”

  Alex pokes a few spots on the display experimentally, and finally comes up with a search bar. “I don’t think it’s finished compiling the list. But I’ll try. What do you want me to—”

  “Why doesn’t he know who I am? Something must have changed for him.”

  “Okay,” Alex says. “But I’m not sure how to search for that.”

  “Some event must have altered the past three years,” she says. “Erased his memory.”

  I wince wh
en she says erased and exchange a look with Jack. He looks as sick as I feel.

  “Alex,” Jack says, “search the erasures. What is your middle name, Lorena?”

  She turns away from the display and stares at him for a moment. Her expression is more resignation than realization, so I think she had already reached the same conclusion but just wasn’t quite to the point where she could admit it.

  “It’s Ann,” she says. “Lorena Ann Jeung.”

  Alex sighs and selects Erasures from the menu. Then he types in Lorena’s name. It takes a moment, but her information pops up, along with a picture from a few years ago. It’s an article from the Georgetown University data bank, profiling several new postdoctoral fellowship recipients.

  He quickly types in his own name, but gets no result. No erasure notice for me or for Jack, either.

  Lorena sinks back into the chair. “Well, I guess there’s no point in searching for Yun Hee,” she says in a flat, emotionless voice. “If I’m not in this reality, she certainly couldn’t be. And I can’t fault RJ. How could he remember a wife and daughter who don’t exist?”

  “You exist,” Alex says. “Just not in this timeline.”

  “You remember me, though. Don’t you? You were at our wedding.”

  Alex nods. “Yeah. But I’m under the CHRONOS field. I’m in the reality where you exist.”

  “Does this mean there are other versions of us walking around out there?” Jack asks. “Just as oblivious as RJ?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex admits. “I guess it’s possible. Or we might be in the overlap—the envelope, I guess you could say?—where two bubble universes touch. Every time Madi uses that device, it emits chronotron particles. The area around the house emits them, too, but they’re more diffuse.”

  “So what happens if Yun Hee or I step outside this . . . field?” Lorena asks. “If we go outside of this bubble?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex repeats. “But I really don’t think that’s something we want to put to the test.”

  Yun Hee chooses that moment to let out a wail from the suite at the end of the hallway, loud enough that we hear her even without Jarvis chiming in to inform us that the baby is awake. I guess she wanted to let us know that she does indeed exist. Or maybe it’s her way of letting us know she objects to being indefinitely confined to this house.

  “Do you want me to get her?” Alex asks.

  Lorena shakes her head as she gets up. “She’s tired. I’ll try to get her back down.” There are tears in her voice, and I reach out to touch her arm as she passes me.

  “I’m going to fix this, Lorena.”

  She jerks away and then turns to face me. “Yes. You are going to fix this. And then I am going to personally destroy that abomination, along with any others there may be, and we will not be continuing this research. This is . . . playing God.”

  I nod, even though I can’t help but remember that she wasn’t nearly as upset about the situation until we found out that she was one of the casualties. Okay, no. That’s not fair. She was upset, but not so rattled that she couldn’t be pragmatic and look for a silver lining in the massive dark cloud of over a million deaths or erasures.

  Jack slips an arm around me and pulls me close once she’s gone. “You’ll fix this. It’s all going to be okay. We just need to figure out the best time for you to make contact. So you can tell yourself not to go.”

  I think for a moment. “The most straightforward path would be to blink into the stable point in 1957 a few seconds before I arrive. The location is hidden behind a hedge. I can just tell myself to jump straight back to here. That would keep me from interacting with Lennon. We’ll have this block of time, from the moment I arrived until I leave again, as overlap. But if experience holds, she—or one of us, at least—will vanish. Alternatively, I could go back further, to before I do any of these jumps, and tell myself to stay here this morning. Take a nap. Go for a swim. But then all of us have overlapping memories. Finally, I could just jump back and intercept myself at Nora’s. I set a stable point in her front room. Or at least, I think I did.”

  My brain feels foggy, and I wonder if this is a side effect of the time travel. I glance back down at the key, and yes, I see a stable point showing the bay window that looks out over Nora’s patio. “Yeah. I set it. But I’m a little worried about Nora. If I start acting differently that morning, after my conversation with me, would that give Nora double memories, too?”

  Jack and I both look at Alex as I finish the question. He throws up his hands in frustration.

  “I. Don’t. Know,” he yells. “Okay? Yes, I get it. I’m the only temporal physicist in the room, but the research I’ve done and read about is all theoretical. It’s mostly equations, for God’s sake! I really don’t have much more of an idea than you do about how all of this plays out in practice. Maybe I would understand how all of this works twenty years from now, which seems to be around the time that we’re supposed to make this discovery. Maybe, by then, I would have a team of researchers. Funding. Safety protocols. Because, as Jack noted, scientific breakthroughs are rarely made by one person. So again, I don’t know. You’re the one with the practical experience, so your guess is as good as mine. Probably better.”

  It’s really not like Alex to totally lose it, and he looks a little contrite by the time he reaches the end of the rant.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “None of you asked to be in the middle of this mess.”

  The three of us are silent for a moment, and then Alex speaks again, this time in more measured tones. “Actually, I did ask to be in the middle of this. I’ve spent the last seven years in school working toward the goal of one day creating something like that device. I wanted to be part of the discovery. But if this is what we get from time travel . . .” He nods toward the display, which is still scrolling upward. “It’s not worth it. So go fix it. Then we’ll turn the key and my research over to Lorena and let her blow it to bits.”

  “Agreed. I’d prefer to avoid confusing Nora, if at all possible, though. She’s eighty, and she already jokes about being forgetful. So I’ll try the first option. If it doesn’t work, if for some reason my simply being in 1957 did this, then I’ll intercept myself when I was at Nora’s house.” I stop, grimacing as a new thought hits me. “Although, I was in Liverpool briefly that first day when I tried out the stable points. Long enough to realize I was really in the past and not exactly dressed for the era. I blinked straight back, but if me simply being in 1957 did this, then I may have to go back to the very beginning. Before I pulled any of you into this.”

  “How about we cross that bridge when we get there?” Jack says. “If we get there. You’ll need to come back to see if things are still . . . broken, right?”

  Truthfully, I think there’s a very good chance I’ll feel another one of those oh-so-fun blasts to my equilibrium if the timeline changes back. But I give him a nod and what I hope is a brave smile as I center the key in my palm.

  “Madi?” He tilts my chin up to break my eye contact with the key and then kisses me. Not a quick goodbye peck on the lips, but a full toe-curling kiss that, for one brief second, takes my mind off the apocalypse I’ve created. When he pulls back, he says, “You’ll fix this.”

  The certainty in his voice brings tears to my eyes. I squeeze them tight and then look back at the interface to pull up the Liverpool stable point—the one for short people who don’t want to get poked by pointy leaves—and then set the time for thirty seconds before my previous arrival. As soon as I arrive, I step out of the stable point and crouch down below the line of sight, so that Earlier-Me doesn’t see a doppelgänger in the frame and decide not to jump in. The marching band is still playing badly, and I can hear the noise of the crowd gathered near the sidewalk.

  Half a minute later, Earlier-Me arrives, again scraping my cheek on the holly leaf. Again cursing under my breath. But this time, I startle because someone—me—reaches out to grab my arm.

  “Shh!” I clap one hand
over Earlier-Me’s mouth, because I can tell that she’s a hair’s breadth away from screaming. Even with the racket of the marching band, someone would hear a scream, and who knows what kind of impact that might have.

  “You need to abort,” I tell her. “Jump back home now.”

  To my credit, Earlier-Me doesn’t argue or even ask why. She just centers the key in her palm and pulls up the stable point. I don’t know if she’s getting the same looping sensation that I am. Maybe not, since this is the first time for her. I try to keep my eyes averted, and it helps a tiny bit.

  “Wait!” I say, when I realize that this me won’t have the same information when she arrives that I had. “Tell them you were nearly hit by a truck. John Lennon was on that truck. He wasn’t hurt. Neither was I—or you. We didn’t talk to him or interact in any way, but it . . . broke something. Now go.”

  She nods and pulls up the interface, and then I remember about the second stable point. “Wait, wait, one more thing.”

  Earlier-Me gives me an exasperated look, and then follows my instructions for setting the location.

  “Is that all?” she asks.

  I nod mutely, and she blinks out. Once she’s gone, I pull up the display. Jack and Alex are at the computer, exactly where they were when I blinked in. This feels like a bad sign, especially coupled with the fact that I haven’t felt that gut-punch sensation. Then Earlier-Me joins them.

  Too late, I realize that I might have been able to spare them the full impact of the double memory by having her jump in later. But I really don’t know how this works, and that seems like more of a risk, so maybe it’s just as well.

  Since I want to spend as little time as possible in the same room with myself, however, I scan forward to about a minute before I jumped out to intercept her. The look on their faces tells me that nothing has changed, but, like Alex said, none of us really knows exactly how this works. Maybe everything will magically be okay when there’s only one of me left in that library.