I don’t know how long I stood there, but eventually my body shook so hard with coarse sobs that I had to sit down. I held the pocket watch in my hands, rubbing the cool metal with my fingers.
About six weeks ago, we were doing a training simulation on the time machine’s emergency boomerang protocol, establishing how fast we could engage it manually if a calculation error stranded us in outer space. Penelope successfully rescued the whole team on every try. I managed to get everyone killed, several times. In the debrief, Penelope told me that instead of thinking of it as a single mortally important procedure, she’d break it down to a series of individual tasks, one per second, and count them down in her head while she did them, each second a discrete unit of time, like an old watch ticking out the moments in a steady rhythm.
The next day, I brought in the pocket watch I’d found in that abandoned town with my friends and showed it to her, like a puppy bringing its master a ball. I explained that it didn’t work but maybe I could get one of the technicians to repair it for me.
“Don’t do that,” Penelope said. “Either they’ll be pissed off that an understudy is wasting their time or they’ll be worried that if they say no you’ll tell your father.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Yeah, of course.”
“Give it to me,” she said. “If I tell them to do it they won’t even think of it as a favor.”
I handed her the pocket watch and never mentioned it again. I figured if she even remembered this conversation, it would hardly be a priority for her.
The pocket watch ticked in my hand, seconds into minutes into hours, as I sat there thinking about what it meant that Penelope had gotten it fixed but had never returned it to me. I put it back in her locker and shut the door. I opened my locker, took off my clothes, unsealed the gel pack, and put on my skin suit. I knew what I had to do.
I would be what she could not—first.
41
There’s still so much about where I come from that I haven’t told you.
The air. It’s not like here. It has this buoyant, effortless quality, like being on a boat in a vast lake, not the ocean with its seaweedy tang, just a clean, sweet emptiness. No one bothered burning carbon past about 1970, so there was no acrid, oily residue in the atmosphere. It’s the kind of thing you notice only when you’re used to something else, like a freshwater fish dropped into the sea, its gills ragged with saline burns.
Botanical engineering, I mean, you have no idea. Homes made entirely of trees that organically filter your air, generate electricity through natural breakdown cycles in the soil, and grow fresh fruit and vegetables on your kitchen walls. They weren’t exactly commonplace, but you could rent one for a vacation. Some people lived in them all year.
So many social anxieties were gently eliminated because whenever you met someone new you could just run a quick scan and get correlated data on whether you’d be better suited as friends, lovers, spouses, or strangers. And it’s not like you had to do what the data suggested. Lots of people ignored it with sometimes lovely and sometimes fraught results. You could even find out if the person you were considering had a history of ignoring the assessment data and if it had worked out for the better or for the worse.
I could go on indefinitely, listing stuff that may seem quasi-cool or terrifyingly technocratic depending on your personal slant—but you get the point.
Or maybe you don’t get the point: the banal everyday wonder of it all. I never thought about the air I breathed. I never vacationed in one of those tree houses. I found the data profiles helpful, but my favorite gadget was this pheromone detector that emitted a soft ping when the woman you were interacting with gave off a puff of attraction hormones, so you knew she was at least interested enough to keep talking to you . . .
Even this, composing a narrative one word at a time and pretending that I don’t know how it ends—it’s weird for me. Unless you’re a bespoke novel enthusiast like my mother was, someone who enjoys being led by the hand like a child through a hedge maze, where I come from most narrative entertainment is at least passively interactive, using the same neural tracking technology that lets your virtual environment simulator ease you out of your dreams in the morning. Every story is uniquely personalized, your desires, fears, anxieties, quirks, and kinks shuffled into the prestructured plot, like a skeleton around which your own weird little brain grows a one-of-a-kind body.
Déjà vu is crucial to the narrative palette, the uneasy sensation that you’ve heard the story before but can’t quite place it. That strange, vibrating discomfort is one of the richest pleasures of our storytelling and it’s almost entirely absent here. Here, people complain when they think they know where a story is going. As if plot is what really matters. In this world, the same words are always in the same order, set there according to the personal eccentricities of the author. I don’t like the feeling that this story is about me. In my world, every story is always about you.
I’m sorry, I know, I’m like a bad date who spends the whole time talking about their ex and insists it’s so you can get to know them better, rather than that they just can’t let go. I don’t want this part of my story to be over, but it’s time.
42
The countdown clock read—00:00:00. It was all out of time.
There were six berths in the Chrono-Spatial Transport Apparatus, one for each member of the standard chrononaut team. Wearing my skin suit, I settled into the berth predesignated for Penelope or her contingency associate—me. I could lie and say I had a moment of remorse or at least pause, but I was way too deep in shock.
I was operating on instinct, but not for self-preservation. I wanted revenge, I see that now, although at the time I would’ve called it justice. Which is hysterical and melodramatic, I know, but I was in a hysterically melodramatic state of mind.
If I could have, I would have gone back just far enough to save Penelope’s life. Half a day was all I needed. Unfortunately, the time machine doesn’t work like that. It may be the single most advanced piece of technology engineered by the human mind, but it’s still just a prototype. Even if I knew how to reprogram its spatiotemporal navigation code, which I don’t, the apparatus was deliberately built with only one destination.
So, no, I couldn’t save Penelope. But I could finish what she started.
I was going to do something my father couldn’t take away from me. I would be the first human being to travel back in time. Even if I was sued or arrested or, I don’t know, executed—I mean, is it illegal to time travel?—it would be a permanent achievement. No matter who else did it, I’d always be the first.
Considering these were possibly my last moments alive, I didn’t linger the way I might have if I’d been thinking rationally. But I wasn’t thinking rationally. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was conducting a practiced series of tasks, initiated in sequence without hesitation, counting them down by the second, in a steady rhythm, just like she taught me. It turns out, during those hundreds of hours of training simulations, I had been paying attention to more than just Penelope.
The time-travel apparatus has a three-part access procedure—genetic scan, elaborate pass code, and a big red button. Biological, intellectual, physical.
I activated the time machine.
There are no specific visual or auditory phenomena associated with time travel. But my father was concerned that the early adopters of the technology would feel let down if there wasn’t some sort of razzmatazz. It was scientifically pointless, pure showmanship. As if just going back in time wouldn’t be cool enough for the high-end consumers my father’s financiers planned to attract.