But I still show up in 2016 with a crazy story about time travel.
Temporal drag is in full effect—my existence in 1965 demands that I’m born in 1983 to receive my consciousness in 2016. My mom’s parents were from northern England and survived World War III. My father’s parents never moved from Austria to Canada, so he grew up in the ruins of Vienna. They met in a hospital in Geneva. My father had lost both legs trying to stop a suicide bomber at the Voltaire Museum and my mother had gone blind after irradiated ash dusted her eyelashes while she hid out in an Alps ski resort that had been crushed by an avalanche and abandoned. She was halfway through Great Expectations when her sight winked out. A clerical error assigned them to the same room and they got to talking. My father offered to read my mother the rest of the novel out loud. It took three days to finish it. Afterward, they made love.
She never knew what he looked like. He died the next day because the sex was strenuous enough to dislodge a wedge of shrapnel in his aortic valve. My mother named me Victor and took me to Argentina to start a new life. Or she tried to anyway. She died on the ship, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean—cancer, everywhere.
Orphaned at sea, I was quasi-adopted by the ship’s captain, a man named Hathaway, because he thought his wife back in Australia could use some companionship. She was a sweet lady, Marigold, and I have some nice early memories of her before she was murdered by raiders when I was nine.
My semi-feral adolescence in the Australian outback really wasn’t too bad, considering the planet’s ecosystem was in free fall. Everything in the ocean was dead. Reptiles were doing okay but birds and large mammals were extinct. The soil was toxic. When it rained, you had to hide under something sturdy because the drops burned your skin. The moon was starting to look like a reasonable option for resettlement. Except with the global economy dismantled and all functioning nations in a state of perpetual war, nobody was building spaceships.
At age seventeen I enlisted in the New Pacific Army, a strained military pact between China and Australia, who shared control of Antarctica and used it as a stable base to launch skirmishes against the South American Republic. The New Pacific Army was big on rigorous testing to determine every individual’s place in the social machinery and I was directed to Research and Development, which meant I got to study science and engineering instead of just learning efficient ways to kill people. I mean, the end goal was to innovate more efficient ways to kill people, but still—books were involved.
I was enjoying a steady rise up the ranks when I collapsed on July 11, 2016, cursing and seizing up. When I came to, I spouted off a lunatic story about traveling back in time to witness the original accident that triggered the apocalypse.
Scientific inquiry in the New Pacific Army was reasonably open to inexplicable phenomena, which I guess happens when your world is devastated by an unexplained phenomenon, so my superiors dutifully sent my story up the chain of command. A politically powerful general, Antares Liong, was intrigued—he thought time travel could be a way to defeat his enemies before they became his enemies. I was assigned to a clandestine group tasked with building a time machine.
Eventually, my colleagues were all executed for failing to invent time travel. My status as the visionary who inspired the program saved me from a bullet, but I got another kind of death—I was frozen in a cryogenic chamber until time travel could actually be invented. I assumed this would be never, so as the cold pulled me into a dreamless sleep, I considered it about as happy a death as the world could offer.
Did someone eventually figure out time travel, thaw me into consciousness, and send me back to 1965? I don’t know. That part isn’t in the memories that are swallowing me whole. I could’ve been on ice for a week or 10,000 years. All I know is that everything I believe to be true is under siege by a new reality insisting with volume, clarity, and force that what’s supposed to happen is—Lionel pulls the lever, the device switches off and goes into meltdown, and I don’t stop him.
The apocalypse already happened. Someone sent me here, not to prevent the end of the world, but to witness its beginning.
130
Now I understand. It’s always been a causal loop.
The plan was for me to reset the timeline back to my 2016 by ensuring that Lionel’s experiment succeeds as it should have. But what I tried to explain to Lionel before he sent me here, what he refused to accept even after everything that happened with Ursula, is that time travel is very bad at fixing mistakes. What it’s very good at is creating even worse mistakes. My world can’t be brought back. When I traveled to 1965 the first time, I erased it, permanently. That reality is gone forever and there’s no time to mourn it. The only thing that matters now is making sure the Goettreider Engine doesn’t malfunction and destroy half the planet.
So I have a very simple goal—stop the apocalypse.
And my only chance is to act exactly the same way. In fact, any attempt to act differently will cause the horrific timeline that’s currently sluicing into my brain. Lionel’s experiment must fail, but fail safely. When he panics and turns off the Engine, I have to be ready to switch it back on before it goes into meltdown.
I thought John’s reality was the worst-case scenario. But Victor’s reality is so much worse, devastatingly worse. It turns out John’s 2016 is the best I can hope for. And its likelihood is dwindling by the second.
I have to take control of this body. But even with fifty years to prepare, I didn’t plan for this—for Victor.
We’re in this brain together, so I know what he wants, just as he knows what I want. Victor gets to be born only if the apocalypse happens. In his timeline, nobody prevents the Engine from melting down. I need Tom to pull up the lever—and Victor needs to stop him from doing that. Whoever succeeds gets to exist.
Right now, in this moment, both timelines are equally possible.
Fuck.
I feel like I’m swimming through a corrosive sludge of memories and impulses and beliefs, Victor’s mind flooding mine the way the Pacific Ocean filled the glass-bottomed crater that the meltdown scooped into the Earth. Sorry, will scoop into the Earth in . . . just under thirty seconds.
Lionel has already activated the Engine. I’ve already moved my position to get a better view. In a few seconds, the energy plume will hit me. My invisibility field will fail. Lionel will see me and pull down the lever, switching off the Engine. It will overheat, the harmless energy plumes turning destructive. The observers will scream as the room around them is destroyed. Jerome will save Ursula but lose his arm. I will shove Lionel to safety and pull up the lever, just as my damaged time-travel apparatus triggers the emergency function that sends me back to the future.
All of that has to happen in the next twenty-one seconds.
Which means I have twenty seconds to save the world.
131
T wenty. The first energy plume erupts from the Engine’s absorption coils. The Sixteen Witnesses react in shock, delight, fascination. Tom doesn’t know the rest of us are in his mind, but because he’s distracted by the Engine I have an opportunity to wrench away control. But before I can take over, Victor attacks, pulling me into the layered walls of memory. They look solid, but they’re gummy and pliant like a membrane and we fall into one, a quicksand portal to another time.