Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

I thought about the time a cop stopped us on the street to ask Heather if she was “legal,” and demanded to see her driver’s license. When he saw her Iranian last name, Sassani, he asked where she was from. She lied and said the name was Italian. He apologized profusely, muttering something about how he should have known that her “olive skin” was Mediterranean, not Mexican. We laughed about all the intricate layers of racist bullshit at the time, but it wasn’t funny now.

Lizzy turned on the overhead light. “What’s our proof? A bruise?” Heather’s makeup was smeared, and despite her shaking hands, she’d managed to pull a giant, furry sweater over her stained dress. “Look at her. Does she look like she’s been attacked? I mean, anybody can have a bruise like that. Maybe it’s a really giant hickey. Can you imagine the cops believing her against him?” She gestured at Scott’s white body, its fluids slowly leaking away.

I was being ripped into two versions of myself. One knew Lizzy was wrong. One knew she was right. And one of those versions had to die.

“Okay, so where do you think we’ll get rid of him?” Soojin sounded dubious.

“Woodbridge Lake. We can drive right up to that spot where there are no houses.”

There was a secluded place where we went to get stoned by the artificial lake at the heart of the Woodbridge subdivision, hidden from the street by a small rise in the carefully manufactured grassy hills.

“The water’s so shallow, though. Wouldn’t he stick out?” The words popped out of my mouth before my brain caught up. I guess I was doing this.

Lizzy thought we should make it look like a sloppy murder, something that Scott’s friends would do in a drug-fueled haze. Dump the body in the lake, no frills. Somebody would find him in the morning. If anyone asked, we’d say we had no idea what Scott had been up to. We’d been watching Lethal Weapon 3, and then we went to Bob’s Big Boy for fries. Lizzy outlined our lie while driving down the freeway. Nobody talked as she took the exit and followed narrow, townhouse-encrusted streets to the lake. Scott’s body made a farting noise and the smell got worse.

Heather stayed in the car while we dragged Scott to the water’s edge. She’d read in a true crime book that shoe prints are like fingerprints, so we went barefoot in the cool dew of the grass. We wrapped concert T-shirts around our hands to cover our prints. Lizzy tugged the body out into the water, hiking up her skirt to wade through the muck that softened the lake’s cement bottom. Scott was a lump of pale pink in the middle of an oily, spreading stain. When she emerged, a piece of algae clung to the place where she’d repaired her fishnet stockings with the thin wire from a twisty tie.

“Some poor jogger is going to find him tomorrow.” My voice sounded weird and my mouth throbbed like it did when the orthodontist tightened my braces.

“Yeah. Gross.” Lizzy shrugged.

Soojin started to shiver with more than cold. “C’mon, you guys, let’s go home.”

Back in the car, we cleaned most of the blood off ourselves with a pile of prepackaged wipes that Lizzy’s mom had left in the glove compartment for emergencies. Heather’s sweater covered the splatters on her dress, which she vowed to burn. Soojin took off her bloody stockings and wadded them into a baggie. Somehow, I’d managed to stay pretty clean. That left the horrific mess in the back seat.

“Don’t worry about that. I can deal with it.” Lizzy sounded utterly certain, and completely calm. It was why she was our decider. She always seemed to know what to do, even in the worst situations.

“Really? Are you sure? Can I help?” I knew I should offer, even though I wanted desperately for her to say no.

“It’s going to be fine. In the immortal words of Lynn Margulis, ‘We are the great meteorite!’” Lizzy glanced at me, smirked, and started the car. I cracked a smile for the first time in what felt like a thousand years. Lizzy and I were obsessed with that PBS series Microcosmos in middle school, watching it over and over. We loved when the famous evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis got all philosophical about how humans transform global ecosystems, her voice lowering to a portentous whisper: We are the great meteorite.

Thinking about Microcosmos made everything feel normal again. When we got to the curb next to my house, I opened the front door quietly and crept upstairs to take a shower. It’s exactly what I would have done if I’d been coming back from the movies.

Looking at my fluffy yellow towel through the tropical flowers on my shower curtain, I tried to convince myself that the whole night had been a hallucination. The hot water was washing everything away: blood, mud, smells, weapons, words. Everything except Glorious Garcia, singing. Maybe if I thought about Grape Ape hard enough, the sound of her voice would replace the images encoded by every memory-clogged cell in my brain.

My parents remained asleep down the hall, and I tingled with relief. Setting down my damp toothbrush, I stared at my face in the steamy mirror. An unremarkable white girl looked back: hazel eyes, skin heat-blotched red from the shower, shoulder-length brown hair that my mother called “dirty blond.” Did I look like a murderer? I peered more closely, relaxing the muscles of my jaw and lips. I knew from years of practice how to look innocent when I was guilty. Shrugging at my serene expression, I combed my hair and thought about those stupid, frantic seconds when I demanded that we go to the police. High on weed and horror, I’d almost forgotten that there was something more awful than being arrested for murder. It was what my father would do if he found out I’d broken the rules.

Flin Flon, Manitoba-Saskatchewan border (1992 C.E.)… Los Angeles, Alta California (2022 C.E.)

I stood inside a vast hangar, ceiling so high that it sometimes generated its own puffs of cloud and misty rain. The floor was pure Canadian shield bedrock, a piebald of red and gray veined with white, covered in a few patches of hardscrabble lichen. Here, the Earth’s crust had endured virtually unchanged for over 3 billion years, studded with metal deposits and ambiguous Cambrian fossils. The five known Machines had all been found in places like this, their control interfaces embedded in rock that originated before life evolved on land.

Facing me was a row of refrigerator-sized server racks connected by fat wires to bulky CRT monitors on desks, cameras on metal stalks, and something that looked like the severed head of a traffic light whose color signals had been replaced with atmospheric sensors. Travelers in the process of leaving or arriving lined up outside the processing booth on the opposite side of the hangar, their voices nearly indistinguishable from the nearby hum of the servers. A professor wandered past the equipment, trailed by a clot of excited students and postdocs. They had come to watch the Machine startup sequence.

A couple of techs typed on rugged keyboards, booting up the six tappers arranged in a circle around me. Half a billion years ago, these Machines had a sophisticated command interface made from what geoscientists called the ring and the canopy, but now all that was left was the rocky floor. The tappers, invented in the nineteenth century and refined in decades since, were crude, limited versions of what those old interfaces must have been. They looked like low steel tables punctuated by dozens of pistons, now moving up and down in a test pattern. Essentially the tapper was a reconfigurable set of padded hammers—much like those inside a piano—that would bang out a pattern on the rock. That pattern programmed the interface, and the interface would open a stable wormhole between the present and the traveler’s chosen destination in the past. With these humble devices, we manipulated the fabric of the cosmos.