Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins)

by Rysa Walker

  “No. There’s nothing I can think of that she could tell me that’s worth stressing out a ninety-year-old woman in her final days of life. That’s why she left the diaries in the first place. So that I’d know everything. So that I wouldn’t have to risk jumping back and screwing something else up.”

  So she could die in peace, I think.

  Or at least, that’s what I assume. Alex said earlier that even if she wasn’t wearing a key, the house must have been under a CHRONOS field when the time shift happened for Kate. Otherwise, he claims, the Anomalies Machine wouldn’t exist and some of the books in the library would be different. That hurts my brain a little, but I guess it makes sense. If Jack and the others felt something when the timeline changed in 2136, it was probably even stronger in 2089. And it was far from the first time shift she’d experienced, so Kate would have certainly known what was happening. From what I’ve read in her diary, she felt the time shifts even before she was under a key. She just didn’t know what they were.

  All of that had me leaning away from making the trip anyway, but the thing that clinched it was Kate’s final diary entry. Her final final entry, written several years after the one I read last week, where Kate said she was going to London to visit Nora and leaving the key behind. That she was done obsessing over things she couldn’t change. I’m certain that one really had been the final entry in the diary before the time shift, because I flipped to the back. No, I’m not one of those readers, at least not with fiction. It simply stood to reason that she might have left a message at the back, some sort of specific guidance for the unlucky fool who inherited the key.

  And then today, this new entry was there. Targeted at me, although not by name. Confirming Alex’s belief that Kate had felt the time shift.

  “If I can’t figure out what happened on my own,” I tell Jack, “then I may have to reassess. Or maybe I’ll go in search of this Other-Kate person and ask for her help.”

  Jack starts to get up and join me on the bed, but then thinks better of it and slides over, patting the spot next to him on the couch. He’s right. We’ve moved past most of the tension of the past few days, but him sitting next to me on the bed would still be a bit awkward, more because I don’t trust myself than because I don’t trust him. I’m feeling miserable. So is he. It would be all too easy to rush in, to seek comfort where we can find it.

  But it is nice to feel his arm slip around my shoulders when I sit down. Nice to lean my head against his chest and feel his heartbeat against my cheek.

  “You don’t have to convince me, you know. Alex and I have been the ones trying to talk you out of visiting her. Interacting with family just seems . . . risky.”

  What he’s saying is true, although it’s been mostly Jack trying to talk me out of going. Maybe it’s the curse of knowing more than any of us do about the mechanics of time travel, but Alex spends a lot of time second-guessing himself. One minute, he’s stressing out about the many conundrums and quandaries that might be unleashed if I interact with Kate Pierce-Keller, and the next he’s handing me a list of important questions that I should ask her when I go.

  “You mentioned seeing your dad through the stable point you set at Nora’s.” Jack hesitates, probably trying to think of a tactful way to ask the obvious question.

  “Yes. I was tempted. Very tempted. To be honest, the one thing that pulled me back from the brink was knowing that you were here. And then . . .”

  “And then you discovered I’m a duplicitous asshole who has been deceiving you,” he says.

  “Something like that.”

  “I wish I could use that key so that you didn’t have to,” Jack says. “But if I could, I know I’d still be tempted to go back. To see if there was any way to save my mom. Or even just to see her again. Even though it was fifteen years ago. Even though that hole is no longer gaping. So I know it must be agonizing for you.”

  “It’s a little less tempting now,” I admit. “Given that I know it’s possible to thoroughly fuck up the timeline. But there’s still a part of me that holds that back in reserve. If I can’t fix things, then why not go back, get him to a cardiologist? Roll the dice again. Because this timeline kind of sucks.”

  A faint ding sounds, and Jarvis says, “A delivery has arrived for Master Jack.”

  Jack laughs and turns to me. “Seriously?”

  I give him a wicked grin. “Hey, I’m not going to change his programming, but I don’t want the rest of you to feel left out.”

  “Well, in this case, I get the last laugh,” Jack says. “The package is actually for you. And I’m pretty sure you’re going to hate it.”

  Lorena and Yun Hee are in the living room when we go downstairs. I’m glad to see them outside of the suite where they’re sleeping. It isn’t tiny by any means, especially now that it’s just the two of them. But it’s not like Lorena can take the baby outside for a walk around the neighborhood. At least they can take advantage of the common space in the house. Yun Hee gives us a mostly toothless grin when she looks our way. She’s standing up, holding on to the edge of the coffee table as she watches a dancing rabbit on the wall screen.

  The box Jarvis mentioned is on the delivery pad outside. When I bring it in, Lorena says, “Jack picked what he thought you’d hate the least out of the options, and I guessed at your size. Jarvis said it should fit based on your previous purchases.”

  I hadn’t even thought about what I would wear when I finally make these jumps to the 1960s. Inside the box is a navy skirt and a blouse, with tiny flowers in varying shades of blue, along with matching shoes, tights, a purse, and accessories. I’ve seen enough photographs in the past few days to know it’s the height of fashion in the mid-1960s, but it’s truly not me.

  Jack grins when he sees my expression. “See. I told you you’d hate it. You should have seen the other options. Seriously, this was the least offensive of the bunch.”

  “The blouse is fine,” I say. “But I’m wearing pants and shoes I can run in. Not the trainers I wore to Estero, but definitely not these fake leather things. A pair of jeans and basic flats won’t get me burned at the stake in 1965. And I don’t need a purse. The CHRONOS key will be around my neck, and anything else I need for the hour or so I’m there to observe each event, I can stash in my pockets.”

  “Maybe,” Jack says. He goes over to the hall closet and pulls something from his coat as I stash the skirt and tights back into the box. “You’re right about wearing something you can run in. We don’t know what you’ll be up against. But even though this is pretty small, I’m not sure how well it will fit in a pocket.”

  “What exactly is it?”

  The gray object takes up most of his palm and looks more like one of those old-fashioned remote-control devices than what I suspect it is—a weapon. It’s not like anything I’ve seen for personal defense. I’m not even sure it’s legal. It looks more like something you see in VR games that have military or police elements.

  “I went to pick this up from a friend of my dad’s the day you were helping RJ and Lorena move,” Jack says. “The night before, I called my father and said there were some people tailing you. That I suspected they were planning to kill one or more of you to stop the research. His head nearly exploded, because even though he’s convinced now that speeding the research up may be our best hope, there’s a part of him that I’m pretty sure still thinks preventing the research is a good thing—”

  “By killing us?”

  Jack makes a slightly sick face. “I told you he was utilitarian. Lethal force would never be the first recourse for General John Merrick, and he’d make every effort to resolve the issue short of that point, but yeah. It would be on his list of possible options, if all else failed. Anyway, I asked him to get me a weapon.”

  “And he just agreed?”

  “Of course. The man has been trying to put a gun of some sort into my hands since I was eight years old. He probably danced a fucking jig after we ended the call, happy that the wayward son had
returned to the fold.”

  I take the gun—if you can call it that—from him, examining it cautiously.

  “It’s not on right now. See the tiny red X? But I can show you how to use it. I have a couple of targets we can set up in the basement. The thing makes a popping noise, and there’s a bright light when you fire it, so we probably don’t want to do it up here where there are windows.”

  “But this isn’t historically accurate. They had actual guns, with bullets, back then. What if I’m caught with this thing in 1966? If me simply being in the same place as John Lennon back in 1957 somehow broke the timeline, I can’t even begin to imagine what sort of impact me being caught with an electrolaser weapon in the mid-1960s might have. It was a good idea, though—as much as I hate it, I’m probably going to need something. Maybe the gun in Grandpa James’s desk still works.”

  “There’s a gun in his desk?” Jack says.

  Lorena chuckles softly. It’s the first time I’ve heard anything close to a laugh from her since the time shift. “Why are you surprised? Alex found a decades-old banana peel in one of those desk drawers.”

  “Good point,” he says. “You should have seen it, Mads. It looked like some sort of alien spawn. The only reason we know for certain it was a banana peel is because Lorena snipped off a bit and ran a chemical analysis.”

  We leave Lorena and Yun Hee to the antics of the dancing rabbit and head to the library. Alex is in his usual spot, encircled in his own personal data cave.

  “When did you last eat?” Jack asks him as I rummage through the desk in search of the pistol.

  Alex doesn’t look away. “Um. Earlier today. I think. When I made coffee.”

  “So, a granola bar. Nearly fifteen hours ago.”

  “I’m busy,” Alex says. “I’ll eat later.”

  I find the gun and a box of cartridges under a stack of papers and place the gun on the desk. It’s a squared-off black pistol with pearl grips.

  “This was mentioned in one of the diaries,” I say. “I think it was Kate’s.”

  “That thing is ancient.” Jack picks it up and inspects it, looking at an inscription along the side. Automatic Colt Calibre 32 Rimless Smokeless. On the reverse, it reads, Browning’s Patent. Apr.20.1897, Dec.22.1903.

  The ammo box is stuck to the bottom of the desk drawer. When Jack tries to pull it out, the box crumbles and shells come tumbling out. I ask Jarvis for info on the model, and we find out that it was manufactured into the mid-twentieth century.

  “Yeah,” Jack says, looking at the thing dubiously. “So it might be only two hundred years old, rather than two hundred and thirty. I don’t know enough about this thing to be sure it’s safe. We’d need to find an antique-firearms dealer and . . .” He shrugs and hands the gun back to me. “You’d be as likely to end up killing yourself.”

  “Got it.” I place the gun back inside the desk. “Looks like I’ll be carrying your mini laser gun or whatever it is. You said you have targets?”

  Jack nods and we’re about to leave, but Alex waves us over. “Come look at this. Both of you. You won’t have any idea what you’re seeing, but I need to show someone.”

  Coming from anyone else, that last sentence would be insufferably rude, but Alex is simply stating a fact. I have no clue what we’re looking at as we approach his computer station, and I can tell from Jack’s expression that he doesn’t, either.

  “It looks like . . . bubbles?” I say. “When I was a kid, I had this wand thing that Nora bought me. It was sort of a mesh pattern, and when you dipped it in the soap solution, it would make dozens and dozens of bubbles. They weren’t exactly different colors, like the ones here, but some of them overlapped a bit, like these two.” I point to two bubbles that share a side, creating something that looks a bit like a three-dimensional Venn diagram, although the clear bubble is slightly larger and slightly more oblong in shape. “And those over here,” I add, pointing to a second pair.

  Alex nods. “Good. You’ve homed in on the important part. This is a close-up of my representation of the chronotron pulses emanating from a twenty-kilometer radius around DC.” He scrolls out briefly, revealing that the portion we were seeing was just a small section of a much larger grid of bubbles. They look more like grains of sand when he zooms out.

  “That’s thousands,” Jack says.

  “Hundreds of thousands, technically. Just over two hundred thousand.”

  “When did these pulses occur?” I ask.

  “In every time. Well, okay. Not technically. The first one is in 1608.” He zooms in to the extreme upper-left sector, and we see four bubbles. “This cell is 1600 through 1610, but all four occurred in 1608. The key thing of historical note in this area in 1608 was a visit by some European explorer, John Smith. Then, if we go all the way over to here . . .” Alex zeroes in on a square near the extreme bottom right. “This is April 27, 2305. There are twenty-three pulses that day. Prior to that, there had been twelve to twenty-four pulses twice, or occasionally three times, a week. Almost always twelve at a time, and always precisely on the hour. They were—or, I guess, will be—morning people. Out at ten a.m., back at eleven. If there was a second group, they usually went out earlier. After that we have a tiny flurry of pulses here and there”—he clicks a few squares and I see blue bubbles, some lime green, and a few deep green—“and then nothing at all between 2307 and 2385. I still haven’t checked the years after that.”

  “What do the colors mean?” Jack asks. “Did you assign them? They seem kind of random on some dates, but those last few—”

  “It’s part of the information that I pick up in the pulse,” Alex says. “Both the color and the size, although I did choose to graphically represent them as bubbles. I’m a visual thinker. And spatial. Seeing things in three dimensions always helps me.”

  “Really,” Jack says, glancing around at the multiple screens. “I would never have guessed.”

  Alex gives him a slightly confused look, the sarcasm lost on him. “I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that before. Anyway, no. I don’t think the color is assigned randomly, because . . .” He types in the year 2136. There are maybe twenty-five large orange bubbles, along with a few tiny aqua dots so small that he has to zoom in again for me to be sure they’re even bubbles.

  Jack laughs. “Yep. That’s the color I see the light. So I’m guessing this is a graphic representation of my ability with the key versus Madi’s?”

  “That’s my guess, too,” Alex says. “Good thing you’re going into this with a strong self-image, Jack. Although to be fair, I think the size is more a reflection of the pulse surge than of ability, and these dots are just from you activating the diary’s CHRONOS field. Each of the larger bubbles represents a time jump. And some of those squares had hundreds of bubbles. From about 2250 to the point where things begin tapering off, there were sometimes three thousand in a single year. But no overlapping bubbles. The only overlaps I saw that occurred in the DC area were the two Madi noted—”

  “Which were both orange, the same shade as I see the key. Well, one side was orange. The other was clear. So what are the clear bubbles?”

  “Hold on,” Alex says. “Let me finish. There are the two that you noted. Both of them originated on November 4, 2136.”

  “That first day I was experimenting with the key.”

  “Yes,” he says. “And there are two others, both in 2304. The first is June 19, 1965.”

  When he drills down to that year, and then that month, and then that day, there are twelve bubbles. Only one, which is sort of a violet shade, has a twin. He opens another date. This one has twenty-three bubbles. The lone double bubble is violet on one side, and the other is clear. Again, both of the clear bubbles seem slightly misshapen, instead of the perfectly round globes scattered elsewhere on the screen.

  “Can you tell where the purple jumper was going?” Jack asks him.

  Alex shakes his head. “No. Or at least if you can, I haven’t figured it out yet. There could be something el
se encoded and I’m just not picking up on it. What I can do, however, is isolate the locations of all the jumps that individual took. It’s only a few hundred.”

  “Only?” I say.

  “Yes, I know that’s a lot. But I picked a few dates out that may interest you. March 24, 1965. June 19, 1965. And several jumps to August 19—”

  “1966,” the three of us say in unison.

  “Can you tell the end point of the jump?” I ask.

  “Not directly,” Alex says. “It’s just a surge in the location from which the jump originates. But we’re assuming round trips, and we know the location of the anomalies. So I ran the same sort of scan for the three cities and . . .” He spins his chair to grab one of the holoscreens and flips it toward us. “We have a pulse leaving each of those cities on the same day the anomaly occurs there. Occasionally, it’s more than one pulse, but one of them is always that purple shade.”

  A surge of relief flows through me. Apparently, Jack feels it, as well, because he says, “So none of this is Madi’s fault. Well, aside from whatever role she plays in creating this technology. But it’s not something she did on those jumps.”

  “Probably not. Although, I can’t entirely rule it out, since her jump was chronologically the first, in terms of both origin and destination, to attract this tagalong pulse.”

  “Okay, you lost me,” Jack says.

  “Her year of origin was 2136, and theirs was 2304. Her first destination was 1957, and their earliest destination with a hitchhiker was 1965.”

  I look back at the display, at the bubble overlapping with the violet one. “But what are they? The clear bubbles?”

  “I’m not sure,” Alex says. “It’s like something latched on to you. Not on to your body,” he amends, probably picking up on my shudder. “It latched on to the signal from your key.”

  That’s not really much better. “Did it make the return trip, too?” I ask, glancing around the library. I know he said it was just a pulse, but still . . .