Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

“And where does the smelting come in?” My head was exploding from all this news on top of my migraine, but thankfully C.L. liked to explain everything.

“You need a metal alloy to unlock it. After I saw Morehshin use her multi-tool on the canopy, I realized we’d been using the wrong tools. I mean, not simply the wrong tools, but also in the wrong places. The interface isn’t gone; it’s more like the user-friendly part of it eroded away. Like when you wear the letters and numbers off an old keyboard. You can still type, but finding the right button is a crapshoot. Except this isn’t a keyboard—it’s an incredibly complicated mechanism that controls physical properties of the universe that we don’t yet have names for. I was thinking that maybe the Machines aren’t really for time travel—”

Morehshin cut them off. “Obviously they haven’t found a decoupling switch yet. Neither have we, in my time. But they are getting somewhere. That time when we landed in the Ordovician—the reboot fixed it then, but I don’t think that will keep working much longer.”

“It won’t,” C.L. confirmed. “Photonic matter emissions are through the floor.”

“Why do these anti-travelers have to go back at all?” I wondered. “Can’t they destroy the interface from their present?”

C.L. sighed in exasperation. “Tess, he has to go back to a period when the interface was still visible, but not underwater, so he can mess around without drowning. So basically that’s the Hirnantian. You know—right before the gamma ray burst that scoured the Earth’s surface, causing a rapid-onset ice age that killed millions of species in the ocean?”

Anita was nodding as if that explained everything. “It makes sense.”

“So what do we do when we tap back?” I looked from Morehshin and C.L. to Anita. “We don’t know how many of them there are.”

“I have an idea.” Morehshin had a smug tone.

“What’s that?”

“Go back and kill him. Like Hugayr told us.”

“First of all, no, we aren’t killing anyone.” My voice wobbled as I tried to convince myself. “And second, who is ‘him’?”

“They don’t know how to send multiple people through at once,” C.L. broke in. “It’s probably only one going back. Maybe two at most.”

“Couldn’t we overpower him and drag him back up to 2022?” I was getting desperate. “Sabotaging the Machine is illegal, and C.L. has digital evidence of what he’s done.”

Anita was dubious. “Do you really think the Academy would buy it? I think at most they’d send him back up to his time.”

“I could take him back to his time,” Morehshin said reluctantly. “What he’s doing is still a crime in the Esteele Era. It was one of the last American democracies before the hives.”

C.L. perked up. “Would you do that? I could leave evidence for you in the subalterns’ cave.”

“How can we be sure you won’t kill him?” I asked.

“You can’t. But you can be sure he will kill us and our daughters if we do nothing.”

“All right.” I nodded. “We’ll go back and make a… citizen’s arrest. We can knock him out or immobilize him, and tap you guys back up.”

“Are you still prepared for this to be a one-way trip?” Morehshin was grim.

I thought about Beth and Soph, both alive; and I imagined Aseel, using the music business to make the world safe for women’s bodies. My neck was a burning knot of pain. There was nothing left for me here, but there were billions of other people who needed the Machines to keep our histories open to revision. I nodded at Morehshin. “We’ve already talked about the risks.”

C.L. and Anita nodded too.

We walked to the AGU together. Luckily one of Anita’s students was scheduling slots on the Machine, putting in her Long Four Years, and she got us in quickly. As we left, she bowed slightly and whispered, “Safe travels, Daughters.”

When we got into the chamber, one of the techs was mopping the floor. “I must warn you that the Machine seems to be covering people in mud and snails.”

C.L. nodded curtly. “Like I said. Situation is getting worse.”

We arranged ourselves around Morehshin, the floor still wet beneath our shoes. The tech positioned three small tappers around us, cotton-padded hammers poised to bang out a pattern in the rock. When our knees were covered with warm water, Morehshin used her multi-tool to access another part of the interface I’d never seen before. It looked like a jar of mud and darting lights, hovering in the air roughly where the ring once was. She reached into the jar, hand completely disappearing into the mud, and I could see blue flashes between her fingers.

Rain swarmed around us, full of fat hot drops and freezing bullets of hail, and we held each other in the void that meant history was still mutable. I concentrated on my friends, and how their breathing felt next to mine. We seemed to spin slowly, like a drifting asteroid or a diatom in the ocean’s water column.

And then we emerged on the knife-edge of a continent, encircled by two enormous, floating parentheses of heavily oxidized rock the color of rust. The salty air was dry and thin, but breathable. Over our heads hung a translucent dome made from pearlescent oil and water, their colors oozing into and around each other in psychedelic patterns. It was shocking and beautiful and unnamable. Had someone actually built such a thing? Would we ever understand it?

Morehshin was unimpressed. “That’s where I think the decoupling settings are.” She gestured at a segment of the ring. “But they’re hard to find because mechanisms tend to move around inside.”

C.L. knocked on the floating rock and whistled appreciatively. “It feels so solid.”

I touched one with my fingertips. It felt like a warm igneous rock, slightly powdery with rust. I ran my hands underneath it, and felt nothing but a bumpy, wind-smoothed surface. The structure was levitating because of something that I couldn’t perceive. Abruptly, a light purple stain appeared in the air at eye level.

“Don’t touch that!” C.L. and Morehshin yelled simultaneously.

“What the hell?” C.L. peered at it more closely and gently prodded one shimmering edge with their finger.

Morehshin joined them. “Looks like part of the system for choosing a direction. Whatever. For now, we need to… fast-forward. Have you done that before?”

Nobody had. We returned to the group hug position.

“Ready?” Morehshin twiddled her fingers in the oily water overhead and the patterns swirled into a throbbing spiral. The purple stain flashed pink. “Stay together!” Outside, the landscape changed fluidly, shadows lengthening and shortening as algae blooms turned the water emerald, then red, then a luminescent yellow only visible in the long nights of winter. We were traveling rapidly into the future, watching the continent erode and sprout rough scabs of lichen around us.

“I didn’t know we could do this!” C.L. was wriggling to get a better view.

“Keep an eye out for the Comstocker so we know when to stop.”

“Now!” Anita yelled. Everything solidified and I could see the remains of a crude rock forge several feet away. We filed out carefully, Morehshin palming her multi-tool, and took in the scene. There were deep, precise cuts in the floating rock, and footprints everywhere on the sandy ground.

In the distance I could barely make out the blue-gray bulk of a glacier creeping up the barren continent from the South Pole. We were in a slightly later phase of that ice age C.L. mentioned, when sea levels sank and the Machine stood on dry land, subject to the weathering that eventually erased the visible parts of its interface.

On the beach below, the Comstocker’s entire operation was in plain view. Curtains of seaweed were spread out to dry next to a shadowy cave entrance, and farther away was a garbage pile of shells and armor plates from Ordovician fish, clams, and squid. A man emerged from the mouth of the cave, completely naked, dragging a large net bag. From our perch, his features were a blur.