By the way, the fiftieth-anniversary thing had no scientific significance. It was a bit of theatrical razzle-dazzle to build public anticipation and impress the financiers who bought into my father’s supposedly game-changing new form of high-end entertainment.
But for it to be a viable business, my father had to actually prove people can safely time travel. Enter the chrononauts.
For security and safety purposes, the prototype time machine is programmed for a single, fixed destination: Lionel Goettreider’s basement laboratory in San Francisco, California, on July 11, 1965. The tau radiation trail leads there and only there. This should prevent a miscalculation that sends the chrononauts to the wrong era. The prototype is like a gondola strung between two alpine peaks—you can’t just use it to go wherever or whenever you want. Once the experiment is successful and the path between 2016 and 1965 is accurately mapped both in space and in time, further exploration will be possible. But until mission launch, it’s still just a very expensive untested theory—so the chrononauts need to be ready for anything.
It’s a six-person team, apparently the ideal number for this kind of mission. Psychologically, it’s large enough to feel like a unit but small enough to cultivate reasonably intimate individual bonds. Each of the six is painstakingly trained in multifaceted survival. Not just physical, but cultural. Let’s say something does go wrong and instead of five decades in the past, they travel back five centuries, or five millennia. The whole team needs to be acutely familiar with the on-the-ground conditions of whatever era they may find themselves in.
There’s an abort protocol to slingshot them back to the present, but it takes crucial seconds to engage regardless of mortal threat. There is of course an automatic rebound function that activates in the event of a catastrophic systems failure so, even if the whole team dies, the technology itself isn’t lost in the past, wreaking unknowable consequences on history.
Obviously it makes more scientific sense to send back an inanimate object or a trained animal. But there are two problems with a more cautious approach. First, my father wants to knock everyone’s socks off right out of the gate, and sending a team of people back in time is way cooler than, like, a robot drone or a bunny rabbit. Second, the margin of error is so minute when you’re mucking about in space-time that you want nimble human minds making considered decisions, so if anything unexpected happens nobody accidentally triggers a calamitous change to the timeline. That would be bad.
Almost anything could go wrong. You need people who are resolutely calm under pressure and can survive in unpredictably lethal situations. Six chrononauts, each among the most impressive individuals alive.
Which is why it was totally absurd that I was involved in this mission.
10
I guess now is as good a time as any to mention that my mother, Rebecca Barren, died four months ago in a freak accident.
Yes, despite the many technological marvels of my world, people still got killed for no good reason. People also acted like assholes for no good reason. But, sorry, I’m trying to tell you about my mother, not my father.
Like a lot of high-impact thinkers, my father needed everything that didn’t involve his big brain managed for him. Of course, most of these functions could be automated, but my mother embraced a handmade quality to our family life that could be seen as tactile and quaint and also could be seen as neurotic and sad. Like, if she didn’t personally fold my father’s clothes, clean his study, serve his food, he wouldn’t be able to unlock the mysteries of time travel. And it’s entirely possible she was correct. Because he did unlock the mysteries of time travel, and within a few months of her sudden death, everything was a total disaster.
They met at the University of Toronto. My father’s parents had emigrated from Vienna to Toronto when he was nine years old, and he never lost an Austrian clip to his vowels. My mother came from Leeds on an international exchange program to continue her undergraduate degree in literature and never lost her British ability to reflexively vector herself within rigid class dynamics.
My father was a graduate student in physics and my mother noticed him around campus, always wearing mismatched socks. She wanted to know if it was a fashion choice above her station or the mark of someone with more important things on his mind. One day, she walked up and handed him a gift—a box of one hundred identical socks. He had no idea who she was. They were married within a year and slotted themselves into their respective lifelong roles—my father was the lighthouse, my mother the keeper who wound the clockwork, polished the lenses, and swept all those rocky steps.
My father had a wife who was more like a mother. And I had a mother who was more like a sister. My father’s reputation propelled him up through the scientific community, but it cocooned my mother from any honest, vulnerable friendships. She had a role to play—midwife to my father’s genius—and she couldn’t admit to anyone that she felt hollow, lonely, full of dread.
Except me. My mother would tell me everything. I was her confidant, her simpleton therapist, a forever ready ear to her bottomless reservoir of anxious chitter-chatter. My father’s job was to change the world. My mother’s job was to create a warm, soft nest for him to preen in. My job was to listen to my mother talk, endlessly, so she didn’t have a nervous breakdown while suppressing anything consequential about herself in case it spoiled my father’s expansive mood of cosmic contemplation.
My mother’s comfort was books. Not the immersive virtual storytelling modules the rest of us enjoyed—actual books, the paper-and-ink kind that nobody made, let alone wrote, anymore. Her leisure time was spent reading words written in a previous era. Before she met my father, she’d imagined a career surrounded by books, teaching them, editing them, maybe even writing them.
I should clarify that my father never requested any of this. Part of his blissfully unaware state of grandiose self-importance is that he noticed none of it. He somehow found a spouse who would naturally wear herself down into a ball of gray wool. She became the comfortably downy socks that were always clean and ready in his drawer whenever his feet felt cold. As far as he knew, the house just made them to order.
And then, four months ago, while she sipped a coffee and read a novel on a patch of grass outside my parents’ housing unit, a malfunctioning navigation system caused a hover car to break formation, careen out of control, and smear half of my mother across the lawn in a wet streak of blood and bone and skin and the end of everything.