“It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” I say.
I reach out my hand and a slight tremor ripples across his face. He’s the anxious one. He takes my hand and shakes it. I’m shaking Lionel Goettreider’s hand.
He gestures for me to follow him inside. I notice he walks oddly, both stiff and fluid at the same time. Encircling his legs are these diaphanous wire-thin bands at six-inch intervals down to his ankles.
“They help me walk,” Lionel says. “I won’t bore you with the details but it involves subtle electrical stimulation of the muscles coupled with oscillating balance wedges and low-grade gravity manipulation. My own design. Everything here is.”
The levels of the house—it’s built directly into the cliffside, much longer than it is wide, so each room has an outrageous view of the South China Sea—are connected by rotating escalators with a flexible tile surface, so a man of limited mobility can get around without sacrificing style. We sit on a pair of armchairs that partially deflate and then subtly harden to fit our bodies. I try wiggling around but it’s impossible to find a more comfortable sitting position than the one the chair has made for me.
Lionel taps a touch screen on his modal chair and a robot bartender hovers up on a cushion of circulating airflow, pouring us each a drink from one of several tiny nozzles. The bourbon it squirts out is ecstatically good, smoky and sharp. I want to hug the adorable robot. Seeing these nonchalant displays of technology so seamless they’re practically magic, I kind of feel like crying. This is the first place I’ve been since I got to this degraded mirror of the world that reminds me of home.
“Let’s get this out of the way, in case you’re planning to deny it,” Lionel says. “You were there. July 11, 1965. The day my experiment failed. I saw you in the lab, for just a moment, looking more or less exactly as you do right now.”
“That’s right,” I say. “I was there.”
Lionel softens, like it’s a relief to finally know for sure he’s not delusional. I recognize that expression because it’s on my face too.
“I’ve waited to meet you for a very long time,” Lionel says.
“How did you know I time traveled to your lab?”
“It was the only reasonable answer,” he says.
“You have a different definition of reasonable than most people,” I say.
Lionel looks out the window at the sea below the cliffs. He sips his bourbon, squints as the liquor scours his tongue.
“The experiment should’ve worked,” he says. “I had accounted for everything. All possible errors. My calculations were accurate. But something went wrong. Something unaccountable. Something preternatural. Also, I saw you with my own eyes. Even factoring in possible visual or cognitive distortion from the energies released by my device, I knew I was seeing something real. Someone real. And then there were the readings. The faintest trace of an unknown type of radiation. I salvaged the detection equipment from the wreckage of my lab and went to work figuring out what it could be. The problem was it didn’t exist. Until I turned it on again.”
“Turned what on?” I say.
“The device, of course.”
“You activated the Goettreider Engine?”
I can see he’s about to ask what the Goettreider Engine is, but the very fact that I have a name for it seems to answer a long-standing question. He smiles. He’s clearly not a man who smiles much.
“I wondered what your people called it,” he says.
“My people?” I say.
“The people of the future. Isn’t that where you’re from?”
“I’m from the present,” I say. “Just a different present. Another timeline. One where your experiment didn’t fail. In fact, it succeeded beyond even your most expansive projections. Your device, what we call the Goettreider Engine, fueled a technological revolution that transformed the world.”
“That’s why I built it,” he says. “That was my dream.”
“Your dream should’ve come true,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Well, yes and no. The morning after the accident, I left the hospital and snuck back into my lab. I knew once someone had a chance to think clearly, they’d destroy my device and I couldn’t let that happen. Not until I understood what went wrong. I planned to substitute an earlier prototype in the wreckage, a decoy no one but me could recognize as a fake. The lab was a ruin, but the device was intact. And the battery, of course. I’d constructed a high-yield battery to store any power generated during the experiment. When I checked, it was full. Which meant that even in failure, my device, what you call the Engine, it worked. The building’s electricity had been shut off, the whole place closed down. It was only luck that the experiment happened on a Sunday, when the offices upstairs were empty, just seventeen people injured instead of hundreds. But the battery had stored more than enough energy to power up the device. I salvaged as much of the equipment as I could and ran a full diagnostic before turning it back on. I found a serious flaw in the design. It would’ve caused a radiation surge that may well have killed everyone in that lab if the device had operated properly the first time. I worked all day and night to correct it, expecting any moment to be shut down by the authorities. But no one came. They were waiting for test results to ensure the building wasn’t dangerously irradiated. It gave me time to fix the device and activate it again. This time, of course, it operated flawlessly. It still does.”
“Wait,” I say, “the Engine is on? Right now?”
“I switched it on two days after the accident and never switched it off,” he says. “It’s been running nonstop ever since.”
He taps the touch screen and the chair inflates, tilting to gently place him on his feet. An escalator takes us down three levels to a thick steel door that retracts to reveal a concrete room.
Inside it, surrounded by ducts and tubes and cables, is a Goettreider Engine.
A lot of the components have been updated and streamlined, but its familiar design is intact. I can feel it working, a dense, undulating field of pure energy that asynchronously rotates around the primary absorption coil. From the side it appears as a sparkly halo, Saturn-like. But I know without needing to see it directly what it looks like from above.
A whorl.
106
The Engine is so glorious it’s hard to look away. Lionel stands next to me, vibrating with pride and curiosity.
“Is it amazing?” Lionel says. “Your world?”
“Yes,” I say.
“That’s what kept me going,” he says. “After the accident. After the failure. I don’t even know how I managed to avoid a total system meltdown. I’ve gone through the chronology of events countless times and by my calculations turning off the device midsequence should’ve been . . . cataclysmic.”
“It was me,” I say. “You couldn’t see me, but I intervened before it was too late.”
“You pushed me away?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “And turned it back on.”
“I thought I felt a hand shove me, but it was all so chaotic, it could’ve been compressed force waves. The energies unleashed were unpredictable.”
“Where I come from,” I say, “every schoolkid knows the sequence of events from that day. It’s the pivot point of human history.”
“It’s hard to hear what should’ve been,” he says. “Even though, like I said, it’s what kept me going. All I ever wanted was to make the world better, but instead I almost ended it. Looking back, I must have shut down some essential part of myself to get through it. But it also gave me the clinical detachment to make sense of what made no sense. Two pieces of data. One, that the radiation signature emitted by the device after it was turned on was somehow detectable before it was turned on. Two, that I saw you there, wearing unfamiliar clothing and clearly not expecting to be seen. I theorized you had an invisibility field around you that was somehow destabilized by the energy spiking from the device.”