Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

I raised my hand and waved back. Lizzy pulled her headphones down until they circled her neck and we walked awkwardly toward each other over the solidified remains of a great eruption.

“Hey.” She fiddled with the headphone jack, not meeting my eyes.

“What’s up?” I tried to sound casual.

“Taking a walk. Listening to Grape Ape.” She snuck a glance at me.

“That’s cool.”

We continued in this vein for a while, balancing on the rail, talking about summer vacation and college plans. We had both gotten into the dorms at UCLA, but different ones. There was a chemistry class that we both had to take first quarter, and we debated whether it would be easy or hard.

At some point the conversation stopped feeling strange and started to feel the way it used to. There was nobody else who wanted to talk to me about science, and I missed it.

“You seem really good.” Lizzy screwed up her face as she said it, like she wasn’t sure.

I thought about my parents, no doubt seething at home, planning how they would punish me. “Yeah, I’m good. Is everything okay with you?”

Lizzy looked down, hair falling into her face. “I mean, yeah. I miss you. I wish we could hang out again. I know you’re still mad and stuff.”

“I’m not mad. I’m like…” I tried to put it into words. “I feel like we did something evil.”

“What?” Lizzy let out a laugh. “Those guys were evil. We did the world a favor.”

“You can’t just kill people. It doesn’t change anything. It’s like how you can’t go back in time and kill Hitler or whatever, because he’s replaced by Bitler or Zitler. Another person takes his place and World War II happens anyway. Like we learned in geology about time travel.”

“Well, when we killed those guys they went away permanently. They can’t fucking molest other girls.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, because it was true.

Lizzy continued, her cheeks flushed. “I don’t get why you are so upset. I mean, I was there when you had that abortion. Why should that be illegal? Guys like those shitty assholes we killed made it illegal. Because they want us to be helpless and scared of them.”

“I can’t believe you are making that comparison. Murder is wrong, Lizzy.”

“Oh yeah? Is rape wrong? Is it wrong to take naked pictures of girls for a ‘look book’? Who is stopping those guys? The cops don’t care. We have to do it.”

“No, we don’t !” I yelled it right into her face, and felt my arms flailing in the air like random punctuation marks.

“Heather was raped right in front of you, Beth!” Lizzy’s voice rose in fury. “How can you ignore reality and act like nothing is wrong?”

I remembered my father’s hand on my arm and my mother’s silence. This was too much. I whirled around and started back along the tracks. “ Fuck you! ” I yelled over my shoulder, meaning it and not meaning it at the same time.

“Beth! I’m sorry!” Lizzy ran up to me from behind, sobs jagged between her words. “I know I’m fucked up but I promise I’m not going to kill anyone else. I miss you so much. Can’t we act like none of this shit ever happened and… I dunno… go to a show or something?”

I turned around and looked at her, my best friend since elementary school, her face torn up by something I felt too. Without thinking, I grabbed her hard in a hug. We sobbed on each other’s shoulders and it felt sweet but also poisonous, like drinking blackberry liqueur to get wasted. But what the hell was I supposed to do? Go home to my parents? At least Lizzy wasn’t pretending to be something she wasn’t. Plus, it was true that she’d stopped killing people. I hoped.

“I’m so sorry, Beth. So sorry. Please don’t be mad at me anymore.” Lizzy was mumbling wetly into my shirt and I still couldn’t say anything. Finally I let go of our hug because my nose was running and it was getting gross.

“I’m not mad. I really want to believe that you won’t do it again, but I still don’t totally trust you. Do you understand?” I untied the flannel shirt from around my waist and wiped my face with it.

She kicked the rubble listlessly. “Yeah, I get it. But do you get… my side of this? Do you understand how bad those men are?”

I put my damp hands on her skinny upper arms, now covered in goosebumps. “Yes. I really do. But we don’t need to kill anyone.”

She nodded, her mouth quirking into a wicked grin. “Maybe we could go smash the shit out of some dudes in the mosh pit.”

I had to smile back. “That sounds like a plan.”

“I have the car. Wanna go now?” She hooked her thumb vaguely in the direction of the place where the tracks crossed Culver Drive. I paused, considering. I didn’t want to go home. We could go out tonight, and see how it went.

“Sure. Let’s get a paper and see who’s playing.”

“ Yes! ” Lizzy jumped up and down and hugged me again. Then she turned serious as we started walking toward Culver, balancing on the rails. “You really are my best friend, Beth. I don’t want to lose you.”

“Yeah.” Even as I said it, skepticism was sharp in my gut. Maybe she meant it, but Lizzy was also using her decider powers on me. She knew what I wanted to hear.

For the first time in my life, I wished I could use a Machine. I wanted to skip over everything in my life between this moment and the day I would become a real geologist, studying deep time. Of course that’s not how the Machines work, but that didn’t stop me from fantasizing about it.

Excerpted from data logs compiled during the summer 2022 field season, retrieved from the Subalterns’ Archive Cave in 2024. A formal version of these logs was included as appendix A in C.L. Khojaeva, “Vacillations in Raqmu Time Machine Performance Are Anthropogenic,” Nature, vol. 624 (2023).

FORMAL RESEARCH PROPOSAL

In this research project, I’ll be attempting to measure a possible perturbation in the Machines caused by human interference. Specifically, I’ll investigate the connection between the rock interface and the wormhole.

There have been multiple reports, from Gilani, Berman, Callahan, Gupta, and others, of anomalous activity in the Machines, including travelers arriving wet, contaminated with cyanobacteria, diatoms, small invertebrates, and sediment dating back to the Ordovician period or possibly earlier. Lopez et al.’s survey of historical records shows similar but rare occurrences dating back to our earliest written sources five thousand years ago. My hypothesis is that the recent unusual activity may be linked to human-caused disruptions in the connection between the wormhole and interface.

Sumner and Zhang suggest that we can analyze the strength of the connection between the interface and the wormhole by measuring various kinds of exotic matter emissions. Here I’ll be taking readings of photonic matter emitted at the instant of wormhole opening. Sumner and Zhang provide data on typical emissions levels from an open wormhole, and that will be my baseline. Photonic matter has the additional advantage of being easily detected by sensors in the instruments I’ll have on my body.

By sampling photonic matter emissions over a 500 million–year period using the Raqmu Machine, I will determine whether there are weaker and stronger connections when the wormhole opens. I will also speculate about what causes these vacillations.

In terms of methods, I’m capturing one random sample during each 200,000-year segment.

FIELD NOTES

Brendan Chow is going to be my tech for most of this research, sending me back for each sample and handling readings at Raqmu. I’ve trained myself to tap out the standard return-to-present sequence as described in Hanniford and elsewhere.