There was nothing for me to pack, but I wanted to have a body cleanse and reconstitute my clothing. It was in my bedroom that I saw it—a strand of Penelope’s hair. It was enough to have a genetically accurate android sex doll incubated, with supple skin and warm insides and an indulgent artificial intelligence. It would do anything I wanted whenever I wanted and it would look just like her.
And if that route proved too pliant, not spontaneous enough, I could log on to a hookup site and find a willing stranger to come over wearing digital makeup—a real-time image projection virtually applied to her face. She could look like anyone I wanted, she could look like a tiger or a dolphin or a goose if that’s what turned me on, but she’d be a living, unpredictable human being who found this role-play fulfilling for her own curious reasons.
Or I could scan an image of Penelope into one of the countless dating algorithms and find a woman who looked as much like her as possible and say whatever I needed to say to get her to fall for me and use black-market pheromone supplements to hormonally bond us and maybe even steadily undercut her self-confidence to the point where she’d think the cosmetic surgery was her idea and I could marry her and we could have a kid and I could live to old age with a simulacrum of the life that dissolved before me.
What I’m saying is, there was a moment there where other options presented themselves. Not wise options. Unwise options. Weird, twisted, self-destructive options. But options with consequences limited to my immediate emotional radius. I could’ve kept it personal.
But I didn’t.
Maybe, with enough time, I would’ve just moved on. Dug a hole and buried it and built something new on top. But that’s not the kind of time I had in mind.
38
It was eerie in the lab. Since I typically arrived late and left early, I was used to it being conspicuously busy. But now the place was empty.
My father conceived his time-travel apparatus to be elegant in design and simple in operation. Even an idiot could use it. Or a profoundly disappointing son.
If you build a machine that requires fifty people to make it work, what happens if something goes wrong during a trip to the past? Let’s say the team is incapacitated and their lives, the future of the project, the future of everything, depends on an injured or disoriented survivor clumsily firing up the emergency boomerang protocol to return them to the present? No matter how ornately complex the machinery and absolutely precise the calibrations, the apparatus itself is easy to use because it might have to be.
No alarms went off when I was scanned for entry. Like I said, authority didn’t work that way where I come from. No one would break into the lab for nefarious purposes. We didn’t have corporate competitors or scientific rivals. My father was a pioneer in a field with few peers. And those he did have, he hired to work for him.
Even outside the arching hangar-like room that housed the time-travel apparatus, there was no extra security. The assumption was that no one would choose to pass through the sliding doors into the cool, antiseptic air and stand in front of this machine that cost trillions to construct and was expected to generate quadrillions in revenue unless they had a good reason. When the facility was built, the current circumstances—the project on hold, the team leader dead, my father’s legacy in tatters—were not among the long-term projections.
And yet here I was.
The Chrono-Spatial Transport Apparatus isn’t that big, considering what it does. A central axial construct linking six oval berths hung with shiny metallic rigging and flanked by glowing instrument panels, thrumming with possibility.
I powered it up.
A machine that’s never used is like a baby that will never be born.
39
Lionel Goettreider didn’t live to see the future he invented. He and the Sixteen Witnesses to the original experiment were dead within three months, killed by the unexpectedly massive amounts of tau radiation that surged from the Engine when it was first switched on. Goettreider didn’t anticipate just how powerful his invention would turn out to be. Or how lethal for those in attendance.
It didn’t matter what expressions were on those famous faces at the moment the future erupted from Goettreider’s device—skeptical, awed, distracted, amused, jealous, angry, thoughtful, frightened, detached, concerned, excited, nonchalant, harried, weary, cheeky, or wise—they were all fatally irradiated. Hematopoietic degradation leading to aplastic anemia, irregular cell division, genetic warping, gastrointestinal liquefaction and vascular collapse, catastrophic neurological damage, coma, prayer, death.
Goettreider himself was the first to die. Moses on the border of the promised land. The others followed, one by one, martyrs for science.
If there’s a religion where I come from, it’s self-sacrifice at the altar of discovery. Lionel Goettreider gave his life so the world could blossom into a paradise beyond his imagining. The fact that his sacrifice was accidental is considered poetic.
Going back to July 11, 1965, was pragmatic, because the radiation trail left by the original Engine is a tether to our past, bread crumbs made of semidegraded atoms tracing a connect-the-dots path to the exact coordinate in space and time at which my world was born. But that same atomic string is also a trail of blood, or poison, or poetry, because it’s the same radiation that killed Goettreider and the Sixteen Witnesses.
That’s what makes the original Goettreider Engine different from any other, why it’s the one we can follow through time and space, the one with the fatal flaw, fixed in subsequent models thanks to the unwitting sacrifice made by those seventeen people in the holy temple of our glorious future.
Time traveling to see the creation of my world isn’t just a scientific experiment or a historical curiosity. It’s also a murder investigation. It means witnessing the birth of the future and the death of the person who made it possible.
I’ve always appreciated the fact that this towering visionary died because he underestimated himself. Had the Engine not proved to be so epochal, Goettreider would’ve been a catastrophic failure.
What makes an artistic depiction of the Activation interesting isn’t the reactions of the Sixteen Witnesses—they’ve become formalized over time—it’s the expression the artist chooses to put on Lionel Goettreider’s face in the moment he unleashes his invention on the world. Skeptical? Awed? Distracted? Amused? Jealous? Angry? Thoughtful? Frightened? Detached? Concerned? Excited? Nonchalant? Harried? Weary? Cheeky? Wise? The artist’s choice in this telling detail says everything about the piece.
The real reason my father wanted to visit this specific moment was to observe Goettreider’s face right before he switched on his invention—to see if he recognized that expression from the mirror. Basically, to find out if Victor Barren and Lionel Goettreider are as alike as he thinks they are.
I’m curious too. Because they turned out to be more similar than my father anticipated. Geniuses who miscalculated something essential, with unforeseen consequences that ended everything they knew and changed their world.
For Goettreider, the tau radiation that killed him was the fatal flaw. For my father, it was me. I was the fatal flaw.
40
I walked through the empty lab to the chrononaut changing area, where there were private vestibules for disrobing and lockers for our personal items. I opened Penelope’s locker. There wasn’t much inside. Her skin suit was sealed in its sterile gel pack to ensure nothing contaminated it prior to the trip back in time that she would never take. A spare uniform was folded neatly on the shelf next to a pouch of extra hair elastics for her usual ponytail. And something else—an antique pocket watch.