My plan was that, on arrival, I’d take control of my own consciousness in 1965 the way I had John’s consciousness in 2016—two versions of me simultaneously inhabiting the identical point in space-time, my current mind steering my earlier self to trigger the emergency return function on the time-travel apparatus before the Goettreider Engine is even turned on.
But the plan immediately goes sideways. I arrive, yes, inside my own body, but I’m woozy and addled. I can’t think straight, let alone stop myself—the Tom I was on my first trip to 1965—from making the exact same choices in the exact same sequence as last time. I don’t know if it’s because I’m inside my own earlier mind, but I can’t seem to grip the cognitive wheel. I can only observe my actions, unable to alter them.
Did I live through fifty years of stasis just to watch myself make the same disastrous mistakes? If I fail, I know my sanity can’t survive another try. I’ll come undone. I may have already come undone.
I’m trapped in my own mind, watching myself blunder forward in time, unable to stop him, me, us.
I guess this is probably how John feels about me.
There’s a reference in those earlier chapters to a “tickle” in the back of my mind telling me—Tom, the previous Tom—to stay concealed behind the crowd instead of repositioning to get a better view. Now I realize that “tickle” was me—the current me, goddamn it’s hard to get the pronouns right—straining with all my cognitive power to seize control of Tom’s—the other Tom’s—consciousness before he slips from his hiding spot into Lionel’s line of sight. And there’s not much time. Lionel is moments away from turning on the Engine.
I’ve got to get myself out of the path of the energy plumes that are about to erupt from the Engine and disrupt my invisibility field, triggering the whole chain of events I came here to stop. But I can’t. I’m a powerless observer in my own mind.
Picture a room. Four walls, one with a big, wide window through which you can see the outside world. The room’s walls are made of memories, layered over each other like panes of stained glass, an infinitely dense story of a life. This is Tom’s mind in 1965.
Now drop an identical room into that room. This is my mind returning to 1965 for the second time, inhabiting the same body. The walls are made of my memories and there’s another big window, but this one looks out at the first window.
And there’s a third room inside the second room inside the first room—John’s consciousness inside my consciousness inside my earlier consciousness, like nesting dolls. That room is made of John’s memories and, for now, he’s locked in there.
I’m simultaneously trying to get my scrambled mind back on an even keel, keep John locked away, and take over my earlier consciousness before the disaster I’m here to prevent plays out in its original sequence.
The bad news is it’s not working.
The good news is I spent five decades trapped in my own mind, so I’ve developed an array of cognitive tools with which to maneuver my consciousness to the forefront.
I see Lionel pull up the lever and activate the Engine. In a few seconds those glittering plumes of energy will spike out across the room, dazzling the witnesses and disrupting my invisibility field. My best chance, probably my only chance, to grab hold of this mind and get us out of here is while Tom is distracted by the experiment. The timing will have to be perfect, but I think I can do it . . .
Which is when the whole back wall of the room—it’s a metaphor, sure, but it’s also how it feels when it happens—explodes in a frenzy of brick and plaster, and something thick and black gushes in, threatening to drown all of us in dank, oily memories that I’ve never known before but which stick to everything they touch and burrow in roots of alarming solidity.
They’re a stranger’s memories, but this mind is their home too. These memories belong here just as mine do. Memories of a timeline where things go much, much worse.
129
This is how the apocalypse starts.
On July 11, 1965, Lionel Goettreider tests an experimental power source for a group of colleagues at a research laboratory in San Francisco, California. But while the device is gearing up to full operation, he is startled by the inexplicable appearance of a ghostly observer and abruptly switches off the machine, causing it to malfunction. Destructive energy erupts in fiery plumes. The lab is wrecked. Goettreider and his sixteen colleagues are incinerated. The observer—sorry, I don’t know why I’m describing the events as if I’m not part of them, but the memories flood into my mind with such velocity that it’s easier to be detached and reportorial about them than it is to absorb their sheer propulsion—the observer, me, I’m flung into a brand-new future as the time-travel apparatus overloads.
But the meltdown continues. A crater 2,000 miles across is carved into the Earth. It burns so hot the bottom is crystalline glass a mile thick. Since San Francisco is on the coast, half of the crater gets punched into the Pacific Ocean, causing tsunamis and earthquakes that decimate vast tranches of the eastern coasts of Asia and Australia. California is gone. Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, South Dakota, most of North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and about half of Texas, three-quarters of British Columbia and the lower halves of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Durango, and Coahuila de Zaragoza are seared into a rough arc of emptiness that quickly fills with seawater. Hawaii is obviously gone. Fiji, Tonga, the Cook Islands, gone. Japan is gone. Taiwan is gone. Papua New Guinea is gone. The Philippines are gone. Indonesia is gone. Malaysia is reduced to a quarter of its landmass. The North Island of New Zealand disappears but the South Island survives. Costa Rica and Panama more or less disintegrate. Earthquakes destabilize countless cities as tectonic spasms rend the planet’s surface.
The massive redistribution of global ocean levels, plus some warping effect on the Earth’s magnetic fields thanks to the unprecedented energy release from the meltdown, causes a polar shift—basically, a radical repositioning of the magnetic poles. The magnetic South Pole shifts a little under 1,000 miles to the middle of the Indian Ocean. The magnetic North Pole ends up in Hudson Bay. What’s left of Canada and the northern United States is sealed in a tomb of ice half a mile thick. The land under Antarctica is suddenly livable, virgin territory, desolate but untouched. So of course everyone invades it to claim it as their own.
That is, everyone who isn’t lobbing volleys of nuclear missiles at one another. The United States descends into a second civil war following a military coup that seizes the country’s nuclear arsenal and fires on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under the belief, despite contrary evidence, that the San Francisco explosion was the first strike of World War III. The Soviets claim innocence, but with a third of the United States vaporized and another third encased in ice, no one’s thinking clearly. Both the United States and the USSR are rendered uninhabitable for generations.
With the global weather system in chaos due to the polar shift, entire ecosystems collapse. Desperate survivors mass-migrate, trying to escape the undulating hurricane clouds of radioactive ash spreading across the planet. China seizes what’s left of Asia, insisting they’re uniquely poised to manage the cataclysm. Europe and Africa collapse into dozens of civil wars within individual countries. Australia tries to sit the whole thing out but that just makes them an easy target when China comes for them. South America declares an emergency political unification and ends up as the closest thing to a haven of stability, although nobody’s safe from the rancid clouds wafting down toxic ash.