So, a team of psychologists was commissioned to figure out how to make people feel emotionally engaged with the experience, and what they came up with was a melodious hum and a softly oscillating glow of warm light.
Those psychologists were good at their jobs. When that hum and glow started, all my grief and anger and shock lifted away. I felt grounded and hopeful and free.
And I realized with absolute clarity that this was a terrible fucking idea.
But it was too late. The stupid goddamn hum and stupid goddamn glow would’ve been a fantastic thing to have experienced, like, right before I engaged the device, instead of right after . . .
I felt a tightening in my brain, as if it was contracting like a snail into its shell. I had the ungainly sensation of slipping on ice, free-falling to a hard landing that never came, suspended in the moment when balance loses to gravity. My blood felt heavy, thick, the veins and arteries bowing like wet towels on a clothesline. My fingernails and toenails tingled and flexed like they were growing at a shocking rate, curling into loops of chalky keratin. My eyeballs pulsed, filling up with the wrong kind of light, the viscous syrup inside them starting to boil. Strange tastes flickered across my tongue—sour tea, rotten lemon, sweet grass, Penelope’s lips. The hairs on my head seemed to burrow inward, piercing my skull and knitting into the dendrites. Or maybe the dendrites were burrowing out, worming from my scalp like the delicately fibrous skin of a starfish.
It felt deeply, deeply weird.
And then I was gone.
43
SUMMARY—Chapters 1 to 42
Tom Barren lives in the world we were supposed to have. The technological utopia envisioned by the optimistic science fiction of the 1950s became possible when, in 1965, a scientist named Lionel Goettreider invented a radical new kind of energy production—clean, robust, boundless. Fueled by the Goettreider Engine, scientific advancement massively accelerated. In 2016, everyone has everything they need to live happy, comfortable lives. With all everyday functions automated or synthesized, most people work to develop the only thing that matters anymore—entertainment.
Like almost everyone else in the world, Tom works in a lab. His boss is his father, Victor Barren, a genius pioneer in a cutting-edge field—time travel. The science itself is radical and brilliant, but to secure the corporate financing and government authorization to realize his experiments, Victor has packaged it as high-end tourism.
Following the accidental death of Tom’s mother, Rebecca Barren, Victor offers Tom a job out of guilt and pity. Their father-son relationship has long been strained because Victor was always so busy with his important research and Tom was always so busy being a chronic disappointment.
Tom is assigned to train alongside Penelope Weschler, the team leader of the first mission back in time, so he can take her place in the unlikely event that something insurmountable goes wrong with her.
Tom soon falls head over heels for Penelope. He assumes she has no interest in him because she generally ignores him. But Penelope is much more troubled than anyone realizes. She’s just very good at hiding it.
The night before the mission, Tom and Penelope have a quiet encounter at a reception hosted by the project’s financiers. They sleep together. It’s kind of the best night of Tom’s life.
But the next morning turns into the worst day of Tom’s life. At the routine pre-mission medical screening, Penelope finds out Tom got her pregnant, which automatically takes her off the roster. Since Tom is her official replacement, she accuses him of doing it on purpose. Victor, furious and embarrassed that his life’s work has been threatened by his own son’s irresponsible actions, lashes out at both of them and postpones the mission. Humiliated, her hard-fought professional accomplishments in tatters, Penelope does something horrible—she kills herself.
The project is indefinitely shut down. The lab is abandoned until the legal mess can be resolved. In shock from grief about Penelope and churned up with anger at his father, Tom decides to complete the mission himself. He sneaks into the lab and activates the time machine.
44
Materializing in the past, there’s this initial synesthesia, my senses scrambled, touch into taste into scent into sound into sight into touch, and then everything contracts in on itself, like gelatin setting in a mold. Although my father’s invention makes time travel feel instantaneous, it comes with a visceral kick that makes a routine teleport to the moon seem like a foot massage. I just became history’s first time traveler, but I’m not really feeling the grandeur of the moment because I’m trying so hard not to throw up 2016’s breakfast onto 1965’s floor.
I take a few seconds to get steady on my feet and orient to my surroundings, and that’s when it hits me—I’m in the actual laboratory where the future was born. The whole building has of course been maintained as a permanent museum exhibit, with the original Goettreider Engine still in operation in the windowless 500-square-foot basement lab in section B7 of the San Francisco State Science and Technology Center. But visiting it in my time is not the same, obviously, as being here.
I can smell the industrial cleaner wafting up from the chipped tile floor. The lighting, incandescent bulbs under metal cages, warm and steady, casting every surface with a coppery glow. The machinery is state-of-the-art for the time period but looks adorably archaic, like watching heart surgery conducted with sharp sticks.
And there’s the Goettreider Engine itself. It’s thick and clunky compared to the sleek, refined iterations that, in the last weeks of his life, Goettreider designed to be constructed posthumously. The housing is dull steel, hand-tempered by Goettreider to fit his specifications. The absorption coils are wound up in thick rolls of springy filament. The gauges have actual arrows wobbling in their dials and the indication counters have tiny numbers punched into metal rings that revolve around an axis point. The gears look comically large and cumbersome and the venting stacks might as well be Victorian-era chimneys belching smoke. The key component, the Radiometric Pulse-Field Emitter, is the only thing that looks remotely modern—because its innovative form, with the graded angles and undulating petals and interlocked segmentation, became so influential on contemporary style, spilling from the lab into architecture, industrial design, fashion, art, cuisine, everything really.
Standing in the room looking right at it, the machine that changed the world looks hilariously handmade. It’s a miracle Goettreider got any reaction from the assembled observers other than eye-rolling condescension.
Goettreider’s work was considered vaguely interesting from a theoretical perspective but not exactly promising. A bureaucrat with just enough authority to approve minor grants had taken a shine to Goettreider because he’d filled out the administrative funding forms in fastidious detail and the bureaucrat was a man who appreciated neat paperwork above all other virtues.
The Goettreider Engine itself is quite compact, but the venting shafts and thick clusters of coolant tubes fill up the space, ready to gear down the device if it malfunctions and safely release any accumulated energies—so the Engine doesn’t erupt in, for example, a fury of global destruction.
As I get my bearings, I realize I’m not alone in here. Someone is hunched over a notepad, scribbling equations with a pencil. I recognize the notepad before I recognize the man because I’ve seen it in an impenetrable display case in the Goettreider Museum—it’s the notepad in which Lionel Goettreider wrote his final calculations before he switched on the Engine.
Which means the person currently writing down those famous figures with a half-chewed yellow pencil is Lionel Goettreider.
45