A Contemporary Asshat at the Court of Henry VIII

by MaryJanice Davidson, Camille Anthony, Melissa Schroeder

  And I noticed something I wouldn’t have thought possible: the lab was strangely beautiful, like how the Christmas tree looked when you ran out of one kind of lights (white, plain) and had to add a different string (colored, blinking) halfway through. At first you thought it’d be a mess, but then you see the modified chaos and step back a little and … it’s nice.

  “Are you okay?”

  I looked at the one who’d asked—the fellow who’d been squabbling with Karen—and replied, “I have no idea. Back from what? What’s going on? And unrelated to anything that just happened, you have booze here, yes?”

  As it happened, they did.

  Chapter Seven

  I was always terrible at science. Any science. All science. I didn’t even like science fiction. So everything Dr. Warren told me was soaring over my head.

  “This is incredible,” he kept saying, “you’re incredible, I can’t believe this!” Before I could ask, he slopped more vodka into my ginger beer.

  “So it was a mistake?” This, out of all the scientific jargon, was the part I kept going back to. It sounded so … anti-climactic. “An accident?” Like taking a right instead of a left? Or dropping a glass? Or inventing the cure for polio? Wait, that was on purpose …

  “It sounds insane, right? We weren’t even trying to invent time travel!”

  “What were you—”

  “Matter transition! Not—” He made a gesture that encompassed me (sitting across from him in what I assumed was the break room) and the open doorway behind me (which led to the lab I’d fallen into). “Not what we got.”

  “Matter transition?” Argh, science. “Do you mean teleporting?”

  “Something like that. We thought we were sending matter somewhere else—”

  “You were,” I pointed out.

  “Yes!” He nearly shrieked it, because he was an excitable fellow. Cute, too, which wasn’t relevant, but I wasn’t a stone. Mussed brown hair, and he needed a haircut because he was constantly shoving his shaggy bangs out of his dark eyes. He had long lashes that are always wasted on men, and was pale—which I’d expect from a lab geek—but not sickly. He was about six feet tall, with great forearms.

  Yes. I admit to having a thing for muscled, slightly hairy forearms. Especially when the owner of said slightly hairy forearms has unbuttoned his cuffs and pushed them to the elbow while gesturing wildly and peppering his chit-chat with “I can’t believe you made it back alive, you’re wonderful!”

  Except, because he was from New York (state and city, if I had to guess), it came out “yuh made it back uh-live, yuh won-dah-full!”

  I giggled; I couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry,” I said at once. “It’s been such a long day.” Understated understatement. “A strange, long day with too many surprises and not enough grain alcohol. And it’s been some time since I’ve heard an Ameri—”

  “New York.”

  “Ah-ha! I mean, oh?” I forced a casual cough: ack-kack! “Are you from the United States? I definitely didn’t notice you were dropping your Rs all over the place.”

  He grinned as he shoved his glasses (black horn rims that only Buddy Holly and tall, cut scientists could pull off) up. “Sure you didn’t.” Sure yuh dint. “I like yours, too. I keep hoping you’ll say ‘you betcha’ or ‘oofta’.”

  “I. Will. Die. First.” Thanks to the classic Fargo TV show (and the older, classic-er movie), my Midwestern twang was actually considered desirable in some circles. This never—repeat, never—failed to send Lisa into hysterics.

  (“We sound like farmers with head colds!” she’d shriek, pointing at whomever made the mistake of complementing our accents. “And you know it! You know it and think it’s cute, oh my good God that’s hilarious!”)

  “Listen.” Warren (“Naw, not Dr. Warren. Just Warren. Because I hate my first name.”) had leaned forward and squeezed one of my hands. I realized I was still sticky from the Coke I’d lost when I fell through time. Jumped through time. Collapsed into time. “I’m just so glad ya made it back. I can’t tell ya how exciting this is for us. I’ve got so many questions.”

  “You’re not the only one. Can we—” I cut myself off as one of his mad scientist colleagues—Karen, the tiny blonde dwarfed by her lab coat (and the one who had told Warren to have marital relations with his mother)—hurried in with what looked like a ream of legal paper.

  “Hello again,” she said. “Sorry you had to wait so long.”

  Was I waiting? I thought it was just that I hadn’t left yet. “For …?”

  Warren leaned forward. “For the paperwork,” he said quickly.

  “It …” I trailed off as she dropped the paperwork in front of me—thud! “It almost sounds like you think I’m going to be filling all this out. I’m going to share something with you: I hate paperwork.” When Warren opened his mouth, I added, “Don’t say ‘everyone does’ or ‘I hear you’ because you mildly dislike paperwork. I. Hate it.” Like plague. Like famine. Like when they censor the sex out of a movie but not the over-the-top violence.

  “We can—you won’t have to do it by yaself.”

  I squinted. “Jesus, what font size is that? Eight?” I must have sounded pretty aghast, as they both winced. “And it’s single-spaced? Single-spaced?” Apparently, I escaped persecution in the 16th century only to be blinded in the 21st.

  “Ah. Well …”

  “You see the irony, right? You guys have invented time travel but haven’t mastered electronic documents?”

  “A task for another day.” Karen coughed into her fist. “For, um, legal purposes—”

  I could feel my eyebrows trying to climb off my forehead. “Legal purposes? Involving accidental time travel? So there’s precedent? I don’t think there’s precedent.” There’d better not be precedent. “I can honestly say that when I left home this morning I didn’t think I’d fall into the 16th century and then need a lawyer.”

  “Oh no-no-no,” Karen hastened to assure me. “It’s just—we need—”

  I’d managed to squint through the first paragraph and almost laughed. “You’re trying to get me to sign non-disclosure agreements.”

  “An NDA, yes, for your protection and—”

  “Yours, I imagine,” I replied dryly. “First, when anyone in Corporate tells you the non-dis agreement is for your protection, they are lying. Second, why does a random think tank in the wilds of the London suburbs need legal protection?” I looked up at both of them. Warren, who seemed pained, and Karen, who seemed a combo of thrilled and terrified. “Oh.”

  They just looked at me.

  “I see.” And wished I didn’t. My dazed relief was starting to shift into anger. “How many have you lost?”

  Warren took a breath. “We think—we think three. Not counting you.”

  My eyebrows arched so fast and so high it actually hurt a little. “You think?”

  Again, the Doctors Frankenstein traded a glance. Then they turned their attention to me, and I saw it in their faces in a way I hadn’t noticed before: they were scared. Actual certified geniuses were frightened and tiptoeing around me—literally. Even though I’m back, I don’t think my troubles are over. And they don’t, either.

  I sighed. I had a trick for dealing with non-dis agreements, so I’d just employ it. As for the rest of it … “You should just gird your panties and tell me.”

  “Okay. Well.” Warren freshened my juice with extra booze, because he was a god among men. “Here’s the situation.”

  Chapter Eight

  Man has long invented things by mistake.

  Which is why I’m a part-time time traveler and potato chip connoisseur.

  The pacemaker, penicillin, bubble gum, X-rays, maxi pads, potato chips … all screw-ups. (In the case of the latter, a delicious screw-up.) Which brings me to the Information Technology for Culture and History, and yes, that spells I.T.
C.H.

  To make a long story slightly less long, a gaggle of physicists and researchers and experts in quantum mechanics decided to put their mad scientist brains together to form one gigantic mad scientist brain and solve that pesky “how come we can’t teleport like they do in Star Trek?” problem. Because, as Warren explained to me, teleportation was the new alchemy.

  “But alchemy was a failure. No one ever figured out how to turn metal into gold.”

  “Well, yeah,” he admitted. “But they sure had fun trying to make it work.”

  Wasting fortunes and lifetimes on the impossible = fun, apparently.

  “And we’re not all about work here. We stream sci-fi flicks on Fridays! And the company retreats are amazing. And there’s the sundae bar. We get great funding.”

  Warren took my bemused expression for interest and went on to explain, “At first, we could only teleport information. But then we had a real breakthrough involving something-something quantum entanglement. And that of course led to something quantum teleportation, and at first we were worried about something something, but that turned out to be a minor problem, and it was ultimately moot because wormholes something but worth the trouble ‘cuz it led us to something something.” I must have looked glazed, because he paused. “Not going too fast for you?”

  “Not at all,” I lied.

  “Great! So anyways, we knew we were on the right track with the something quantum something. Or so we thought! But we were actually sending things back in time.”

  Was I a ‘thing’ now? “But you weren’t getting the things back,” I guessed.

  “Exactly!” He beamed, which I didn’t deserve. I wasn’t getting it, not really. “I don’t have to tell you we were getting damn discouraged. But we kept at it, y’know? We figured ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’”

  “Like when Tesla kept teleporting top hats and cats.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Next Friday, stream The Prestige. And in response to ‘what’s the worst that can happen’, stream The Fly.”

  “Even now, we’re still figuring it all out. There’s so much we don’t know!” That part I understood. “Opening the first slide was like knockin’ over the first domino.”

  “Except they’re dominos that sometimes scoop people up and dump them in the past.”

  “Well. Yeah.”

  “And I’m the only one who rode the domino back.” I made a mental note to use another analogy, because the domino thing was dumb.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “So would you say it’s Terminator time travel or Back to the Future time travel?”

  “What?”

  “Please tell me it’s not a Twelve Monkeys scenario,” I fretted. “Or—oh God!—Groundhog Day.” The thought of reliving any single day of my adolescence, or my senior prom, over and over made me break out in goosebumps. “If it’s Groundhog Day, be prepared for me to have a severe freak out.”

  “No, I—we—” He trailed off and shook his head. “Well, I’m not sure. Definitely not Groundhog Day, though. But listen, I’ve gone into this about all I can until you … you know.” He nodded at the ream of paper with my name on every page. “So if ya could—”

  “Yes, we should talk about that.”

  “And we can! I’ll answer as best I can once you—”

  “Shush.”

  Warren blinked his baby browns at me. (His peepers were the exact color of a Godiva milk chocolate open oyster, which under less weird circumstances would have been distracting in all the best ways.) He’d been expecting any number of reactions—hysterics, shock, vows to hire a platoon of lawyers, perhaps a fist to the nose—but not that one. “Did you just shush me?”

  “First, I’m not blindly signing these.” I tapped the pile and briefly regretted biting my fingernails last night. “I’ll be taking this home and reading every page.” And giving myself another migraine. “And from what I’ve skimmed, I can tell you right now I won’t submit to a physical or lab tests of any kind.” I’d spent years avoiding doctors (as well as Wisconsin Child Protective Services), and it was a habit I wasn’t inclined to break. Especially when I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “But—”

  “It’s my fault,” I said kindly. “That you think this is a debate. It’s not. I’m explaining what I will and won’t do. It’s not a discussion. It’s a list.”

  “But—”

  “Fine.” That was a new voice, from a redhead who was built like a fire hydrant: short, blocky. Possibly full of water. He was pouring himself a cup of coffee. From his post-gulp grimace, a bad cup of coffee. “That’s fine.”

  “Ian, we—”

  “She’s not our employee or our prisoner or our property, Warren.” This in an exasperated tone that immediately endeared him to me. “We can’t make her do a thing. We certainly can’t make her sign anything. We should consider ourselves lucky if she doesn’t sue.”

  Fat chance. A lifetime of avoiding authority figures and, by association, lawyers pretty much guaranteed I wouldn’t sue. No need to share that, though.

  Plus my new hydrant-shaped friend had a Scottish accent, so I could have listened to him talk all afternoon. Speaking of afternoon … “How long?”

  “Sorry?”

  “She’s wondering how long she was gone,” Smartguy McRedhead said. He turned back to me, blinking hazel eyes, under which were a pair of spectacular under-eye bags that were so dark he looked like he’d been punched (twice). The think tank gang had been working hard and skipping naps, no question.

  In fact, I was just now noticing how they were all various degrees of rumpled, and/or pale, and/or haggard. Trying to bring people back from the past via a gate you accidentally opened and can’t control must be exhausting. “Don’t worry, lass. That particular drop was only an hour or so. Oh. Apologies.” He stepped up to our cozy (and sticky—somebody really liked making a mess with their sugar packets) table and extended a hand he could palm a basketball with. “Dr. Ian Holt.”

  “Joan Howe. So you can tell how long I was gone, but not who else disappeared, and you can’t control where the—the slides, you called them? You can’t tell when they’ll open, or where they’ll dump people or when they’ll bring them back or even if they’ll bring them back.”

  He shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

  “No, making a soufflé that doesn’t collapse on itself is complicated.” And I’ll have you know I perfected the art of the elusive soufflé in just under seven months. “This? All this?” I gestured to him, Warren, their colleagues, the breakroom. “It’s impossible.”

  He shrugged again, and showed me a rueful smile. “We’re living in the age of impossible.”

  “No, you are. I’m just an innocent bystander who wasn’t paying attention to the construction going on and fell into a manhole.” How does that happen to the same person literally and figuratively? (It wasn’t all bad. The City of St. Paul cut me a nice check.) “How do you know when someone goes missing?”

  “Missing person reports.”

  I just looked at them.

  “I know how inadequate that sounds.”

  “Not sounds. Is.”

  “The first slide opened just over two weeks ago. We’ve been working around the clock ever since. Which is why we were so relieved to see you show up safe and sound.”

  Sound might be inaccurate. “So you hear ‘local woman goes missing’ and write that name down somewhere—”

  “Wow,” Warren said, looking glum. “Sounds really bad when ya put it like that.”

  “—but what are you doing to get the others back?”

  “Everything we can,” Warren said, and he was so earnest I believed him. Of course, later I found out “everything we can” meant “we’re utterly clueless”.

  But that was a lesson for another day.

  The res
t of my “visit” was anti-climactic. My brain was buzzing with everything I’d seen and everything they’d told me, and also the caffeine (I’d switched from booze to my elixir of life). They all wanted to get back to whatever it was they were doing before I fell into their lab and I wanted to go home.

  “We can’t make you keep this quiet, of course,” Ian said. “But we’d sure appreciate it, lass.”

  “Who’d believe me?”

  They saw the sense in that because they nodded in unison. “We’ll be in touch.”

  He probably hadn’t meant that to sound vaguely ominous. “Er—why?”

  “To pick up our NDA if nothing else,” Warren teased. “And to make sure the teleportation process didn’t give you a tumor.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Sorry, bad joke.”

  “Yes, it was.” And now I had something new to worry about: the possible side effects of time travel while taking new medication, followed by booze and paperwork and Cokes with lots of ice.

  They walked me down a long corridor that would have been a mezzanine in any building not engaged in perfecting time travel. I realized that half the lab—which I was now looking down on—was underground, for science-esque reasons that were beyond me. We came into a pleasant, comfortable lobby filled with natural light and an abundance of plants that wouldn’t have been out of place in a bank lobby. They even had a receptionist, and the walls were covered with Employees of the Month and pictures of everyone at various retreats. Because when they weren’t meddling with the space/time continuum, they were big on team-building exercises.

  We all shook hands and into the cab I went. I’d need to pick up my car, preferably before I had my nervous breakdown. I looked out the back window, but they’d scurried inside, and the building was fast receding. (Well. The building wasn’t receding. Obviously. Just the cab, just me. But that’s how it felt. And looked.)

  So that was that. An exciting interlude that was already starting to feel like a dream. Not a bad dream, but one you kept thinking about. And one that was definitely over.