Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

Maybe my edits had altered something fundamental. I bought thirty minutes of slow airline internet and poked around in UCLA’s legal databases, looking for changes to the Comstock Laws. Nothing obvious. Abortion was still illegal, and doctors were barred from providing information about birth control in most states. I checked Nexis for 1990s news stories. Everybody who had been dead the last time I was in 2022 was still dead.

Was I suffering early effects of merging conflict dementia, caused by my meetings with Beth? A terrifying possibility. But then something more disturbing occurred to me. Maybe the Comstockers were making progress in their efforts to disable the Machines. My visit to the cave might have been a cosmic bug, the result of their sabotage. I needed to talk to the Daughters right away.

Wandering through the Space Age glory of LAX, I texted Anita. Want to grab a drink? I’m here for a few days then it’s back to the nineteenth century.

Hell yes. Hipster gin bar tonight?

Neither of us could remember the actual name of the gin bar, partly because we’d insisted on calling it “hipster gin bar,” and partly because it was in one of those old buildings with preserved historic signs that advertised defunct newspapers. The place was quiet on weeknights, and we met up at a cozy table in the corner whose fake Victorian chairs were far more comfortable than the real thing. The gin was better too.

I drank a shot and enjoyed the brief hot tingle in my fingers and nose. “I think those Comstockers are affecting the behavior of the Machine.”

Anita raised her eyebrows. “What happened?”

I told her about the cave and the algae.

She looked puzzled. “I’ve definitely had some strange visions in transit, but usually they’re sort of abstract colors or smells or sensations.”

“Sure—I have too. But never anything that left a physical trace, like the algae. We need to get more data from the Machine facilities, to see if it’s a widespread phenomenon.”

“Yeah, we should call a meeting.”

A flurry of texts, and we were set to meet tomorrow in one of the more battered conference rooms in the geology building. By then I’d have some preliminary results on the algae question, too.

Anita and I spent the rest of the evening catching up on news about the latest horrible memes on Instagram. It turned out some billionaire had paid hundreds of operatives to run a conspiracy campaign proving that women who’d had abortions were now giving birth to fish because “they had ruined the bodies God gave them.” Gory, doctored pictures of naked women surrounded by dead fish were spreading fast. Some flak at Instagram said it was impossible for their algorithm to eradicate it, but the company was working on “making social media safe for everybody again.” Venting about politics with Anita was making me feel normal. Things were terrible, but at least I was trying to do something about it.

The algae turned out to be cyanobacteria, one of the oldest life forms on the planet, and also one of the most common. It would have filled the oceans at the time the Canadian shield was forming, over half a billion years ago. The techs in Slack had a preliminary hypothesis about it. Given that the five known Machines were all built into shield rock that formed beneath the primordial seas, they thought it made sense that the Machine might sometimes spit up cyano along with water. At this point, they said, six other travelers had emerged from the wormhole covered in ancient ocean microorganisms, all in the past week.

I turned this over in my mind, wondering whether people up and down the timeline were experiencing similar anomalies.

We’d called this Daughters meeting to talk about my news, but that went out the window when Enid told us what she remembered. Berenice had been deleted from the timeline, but Enid reverted it. She held Berenice’s hand tightly as she described the would-be killer, a man with a mark that put his home time hundreds of years in the future. I noticed Enid carefully avoided explaining how exactly she’d saved her future girlfriend. In my bloodthirsty frame of mind, it was easy to fill in the gaps.

“Tess, you were the only one who remembered Berenice.” Enid reached out to squeeze my arm tearfully.

I shook my head, wondering at the lost memory, a spray of neurochemicals from an undone time. This was how historical revision worked; only travelers present at the time of the edit would remember the previous version. Now I recalled nothing but the timeline with Enid’s revert. Still, something about the scenario seemed off. I had to say something.

“Berenice was killed around the same time I saw those Comstockers at the Grape Ape show. Otherwise I couldn’t have remembered her.” I was thinking out loud, and Berenice nodded for me to continue, red hair flopping in her eyes. “That doesn’t seem like a coincidence anymore. We may be dealing with travelers from the twenty-fourth century, doing coordinated edits in 1893 and 1992.”

“Makes sense to me,” Berenice said. “Those were transitional phases, heavily revised. The spooky part is that I can’t find any records of these guys coming through the Machines in ’92. It’s possible they had a cover story, though. Or they came through in the past and reached ’92 by living in real time.”

“I bet they were in real time,” Shweta replied.

“Or they made up a legit reason to be here, the same way we would if we were doing edits.”

We debated for a few minutes, and then C.L. broke in. “I know we have a lot to discuss, but I wanted to say that I’m so glad you’re here, Berenice. I can’t imagine the Daughters without you.”

“It’s true.” Anita’s voice was rough with emotion.

“You are the best, Berenice.” Enid embraced her partner fiercely.

C.L. brought out some cupcakes they’d made with representations of atoms printed on the icing and we took a moment to celebrate a world with our friend in it.

At last I got around to describing my experience falling out of the wormhole, and C.L.’s eyes widened with excitement. They unsuccessfully tried to wipe a streak of blue buttercream off their cheek before jumping in. “Okay, this is going to sound weird, but it almost sounds like you were in an archive cave.”

All of us stared at them. They were referring to the as-yet-unexplained phenomenon that drew geoscientists from all over the world to Raqmu in Jordan. There were hundreds of these caves, dug into the soft sandstone of the city’s canyon walls. Somehow, they could prevent written documents from changing with the timeline. Raqmu was home to records of all the times we’d forgotten throughout history—some cut into stone and hide, others in densely printed books and digital storage. Now that I thought about it, C.L. was right that the place I visited looked a lot like some of the smaller archive caves, especially the ones devoted to minority history.

C.L. continued to muse. “What if the Comstockers really are sabotaging the Machines and this is the first sign?”

I nodded eagerly—this confirmed what I’d been thinking.

C.L. met my eyes and spoke again. “Maybe the Machine took you briefly to Raqmu? As you know, I’ve been studying the Machine at Raqmu, and I’ve found—”

Abruptly, the door to our conference room banged open. A woman stood there, her short black hair mashed up on one side like she’d been sleeping on it. Her skin was dark brown, and her eyes bright blue; she wore a vibrant Hawaiian shirt over a gray technical jumper. Before she spoke, I knew she was a traveler.

She settled heavily into the last remaining chair, looking at each of us in turn. “Daughters of Harriet. I’m Morehshin.” Her accent was unfamiliar but easily understood. “I have come from the future. I will give anything, even my life, to help you.” She withdrew something small from her sleeve and set it on the table. It was almost impossible to look at, but with great effort I perceived what seemed to be a spherical globe of water throbbing and rolling slowly on the fake wood grain. Had she brought this thing with her from the future, despite all the limitations we thought we understood about how the mechanism worked?