Her copilots, just as well trained and keening with tiny flames of envy at how far ahead of them she’d always ranked, relieved Penelope of her duties. They had to abort the mission, at no small expense, because her unpredictable presence endangered everyone. Just like that, Penelope, the best of the best of the best, became a threat.
Strapped into an observation seat for the abrupt return home, she watched the Earth loom below her, lacquered blue and swirled with meteorological haze. Her eyes burned with tears. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen and she would never see it again, even if she didn’t know it yet.
Back on Earth, her mental capacities returned to normal, she understood her career as an astronaut was over. She’d planned to spend decades off planet. Instead, she got to experience less time in space than a tourist who splurged for a Sunday afternoon jaunt through the thermosphere on a discount shuttle. The same brain that made her the perfect astronaut made it impossible for her to do the job.
This would’ve crushed most people. But Penelope wasn’t most people. After a few months swimming deep into a gravity well of spiraling depression, and refusing any pharmaceutical intervention in case it affected medical qualification for another endeavor, she found a new ambition to fuel her talent for punishing rigor.
If she couldn’t be an astronaut, she’d be a chrononaut.
8
I leave my condo on the 184th floor of a 270-floor tower connected to seven other towers by a lattice of walkways, with a transport hub at the base of the octagonal complex. My father pulled some strings because the building is owned by the same property conglomerate that manages my parents’ housing unit, so at least my place faces away from Toronto’s densest building clusters and I have a decent view of Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment biosphere preserve in the distance, the spires of downtown Buffalo glinting morning sunlight along the arced horizon.
A lot of people take their own vehicles to work but, seriously, three-dimensional traffic sucks. Whatever the cool factor of a flying car, it’s mitigated by the gridlock hovering twenty stories above every street.
I prefer to catch a transit capsule on one of the layered tracks that run through the city. Each capsule is a sleek metallic pod that opens like a clamshell, and inside is a padded bench, with screens and speakers to jack in your entertainment interface. The capsule takes you wherever you need to go on the citywide transport system, although each capsule also has a retractable hover engine to travel short distances off grid.
I get to work twelve minutes late, which is typical for me. My boss is too soured on pretty much every aspect of my life to get worked up about chronic tardiness. Because my boss is my father.
The sign outside the building says THE CHRONONAUT INSTITUTE. I find this unbearably cheesy but, since all my father’s employees revere him, I’m clearly in the minority. Nobody else would even consider rolling their eyes at that stupid sign when they come to work at the lab. They’re way too busy rolling their eyes at me.
One thing I should make clear—just because I work at a lab, that doesn’t make me smart. Where I come from, everybody works at a lab.
All the banal functions of daily life are taken care of by technology. There are no grocery stores or gas stations or fast-food joints. Nobody collects garbage from a bin at the curb or fixes your car with, like, tools in a garage. The menial and manual jobs that dominated the global workforce in past eras are now automated and mechanized, and the international conglomerates that maintain those technologies keep busy tinkering with minor refinements. If your organic waste disposal module malfunctions, you wouldn’t call a plumber, even if plumbers still existed, because your building has repair drones at the ready. A lamplighter with a jug of kerosene and a wick on a pole has as much relevance to contemporary life as tailors and janitors and gardeners and carpenters.
Places like bookstores and cafés still exist, but they’re specialized niche businesses aimed at nostalgia fetishists. You can go to an actual restaurant and have a chef prepare your meal by hand. But the waiter who serves you is essentially an actor playing a role on a set in which you’re also a performer, an immersive live-action narrative spooling out around you in real time.
In the absence of material want, the world economy transitioned almost exclusively to entertainment—entertainment is both the foundation and the fuel of modern civilization. Most of us now work in labs imagining, designing, and building the next cool innovation in entertainment. It’s the only thing you really need in a world where almost nothing is asked of you. Other than paying for that entertainment. The newer and shinier and wilder it is, the more it costs.
If you’re a scientist driven to crack uncrackable codes and break unbreakable ground, nobody beyond a few chronically underfunded government agencies is all that motivated to finance that code cracking and ground breaking. But if you can somehow frame it as the newest, shiniest, wildest entertainment around—there’s no limit to the financing you can rake in.
Which is why my father, widely considered one of the world’s top-tier geniuses, has devoted his career and reputation to, basically, time-travel tourism.
“Time travel” is not an investment draw. But you add the word tourism to it, the promise of a ceaseless flow of customers lining up to pay to visit whatever era of life on planet Earth they want to see with their own eyes, well, then the money pours in. And so—chrononauts.
9
My father’s experiment, set for July 11, 2016, will send the first human beings back in time to witness the moment the original Goettreider Engine was switched on, using the Engine itself as an anchor in time, its tau radiation signature tracing the Earth’s trajectory through space to July 11, 1965, fifty-one years earlier.
The year 2015 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Activation of the Goettreider Engine, which was obviously a big deal—every city on the planet competed to outdo the others with their local celebrations. The collective blood pressure of the Danish people ratcheted dangerously high as they seized the opportunity to remind the world that even though his great scientific discoveries were made in the United States of America, Lionel Goettreider was born in Denmark. But the marquee event happened at the Goettreider Museum, built up around the original San Francisco State Science and Technology Center, its drab cement walls and squat windows preserved inside a modern edifice—a spectacular crystalline whorl that refracts sunlight in the day and moonlight at night.
On the morning of Saturday, July 11, 2015, standing on a dais with the Goettreider Museum perfectly poised behind him for every media report, Victor Barren kicked off the semicentennial celebration by publicly announcing that the world’s first time-travel experiment would occur exactly one year from that moment—at 10:00:00 A.M. on Monday, July 11, 2016. He gestured to a large clock on the dais and began the countdown: 31,622,400 seconds, 527,040 minutes, 8,784 hours, 366 days. It would be the greatest experiment since, well, the Activation of the Goettreider Engine. And once the appropriate government safeguards had been satisfied, the technology would become commercially available to the public, with licensed chrononaut facilities allowing anyone and everyone the chance to safely travel in time. People freaked out in anticipation. My father’s time machine was assured to be among the most successful products ever launched.
This is how Victor Barren made himself the star of the Goettreider Engine’s fiftieth anniversary.
Transported to the Chrononaut Institute in Toronto, the big clock continued its countdown, as if the precise moment my father would take his place among the giants of science was a mathematical inevitability. All that was required was for that clock to run out of numbers.