“What time is it?” he asks.
Before I can even check my watch Ruby answers, “It is currently four-oh-six.”
“And what time is the sun supposed to set?” Nik asks.
“Five twenty-eight,” Ruby says.
“Then what’s the deal with that?”
I join him at the window and find out why his jaw is practically unhinged from his mouth. Not because I hit him. Even though the snow hasn’t stopped, the clouds have thinned out, just enough to see the sun setting on the horizon.
BROKEN ARROW OF TIME
The ballroom is still coming together—a lot of half-set-up furniture and wires spilled across the floor—but this was the only place it made sense to do this.
We have the core security team: me, Allyn, Nik, plus a whole bunch of TEA agents in their standard-issue blue shirts, milling about like someone is about to serve free cupcakes.
There are most of the summit players, all of whom bring their own crews, and for MKS, that means nearly twenty people. Plus Reg and Cameo, a few other folks I don’t recognize, clearly not from the hotel. They carry the self-serious air of midlevel bureaucrats. More TEA, probably.
No Kolten though, or Warwick, so I guess Axon doesn’t require a seat at this table.
We’re assembled in a loose circle around a white guy standing on a chair. He has wild hair and thick plastic-framed glasses, his paisley button-down tucked tight into a pair of mustard khakis. He’s the kind of person I would have taken seriously if not for the fact that he’s also wearing a bow tie. Some things are hard to forgive.
Everyone in the room is talking, the din of it filling the space, and the man on the chair puts his hands up and says, “Okay, okay,” and everyone quiets down.
“So here’s what’s happening…” he starts, his voice trembling a bit.
“Introduce yourself,” says Allyn, standing at my shoulder, mildly annoyed.
“Right, sorry.” The man adjusts his glasses, looks momentarily confused about where he is. “I’m Adrian Popa, chief science officer for the TEA. So here’s what we know. The uh, the sun was due to set tonight at five twenty-eight p.m., but obviously it did so more than an hour early.”
He pauses for effect, or out of nervousness.
“There’s a TEA office about ten miles from here,” he says. “When we tried to confirm our data over there, they reported something entirely different. The sun hadn’t started setting yet.”
Murmurs from the crowd.
“And no radiation spikes from Einstein, correct?” Allyn asks.
Popa closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Not…exactly. There have been, uh…ripples that have made it impossible to calibrate our instruments correctly. That’s why we’re grounding flights. It’s like fog conditions are so great we can’t see through them. Though I guess most airlines can detect through fog so maybe that’s not the best analogy. But, after what happened with the Aztec incident…”
He stops himself, his hands hovering in the air, almost like he’s going to clap his palm across his mouth. Allyn winces, then tries to hide the fact that he winced.
Uh-oh.
“What Aztec incident?” someone calls from the crowd.
Popa looks at Allyn. Allyn looks at the floor. Then he waves his hand. Go ahead.
“There was an expedition three days ago that was meant to visit Tenochtitlán in fifteen nineteen, during the reign of Montezuma, shortly before Cortés arrived. We…overshot. The trip arrived during the Spanish siege of the city.”
“And?” comes the same voice from the crowd.
More looks between Allyn and Popa, before they both admit defeat. “Two people died. A steward and a client.”
The crowd erupts. Allyn looks like someone bought him a dog, gave him long enough to fall in love with it, and then shot it in front of him.
I’m speechless, which for me, is pretty damn rare. I can’t believe they managed to keep the news of that under wraps. They must have gone into a hard lockdown. I sort of don’t blame Allyn for playing this close. Besides a dump truck full of money hanging in the balance for control of this place…something like that has never happened before.
The early days of time travel were rough, and in total five people died before they really nailed down the process. Turns out you can’t cross your own timestream, which is a lesson we learned pretty hard. One of the first test “pilots” went back to visit himself as a kid. Not to interact, just to watch himself play on a playground. Soon as he saw himself, he had a brain aneurysm, and the kid had a seizure. Some kind of grandfather paradox feedback loop. It was not a good day.
But the time radiation only affects people who spend too much time in the stream, like me. The occasional trip isn’t supposed to be dangerous.
Since the tourism aspect was introduced, only three people have died. One woman suffered a heart attack in the field, but that wasn’t related to the travel burden. A man succumbed to a disease that shouldn’t have been fatal, but he’d paid his doctor to falsify his medical waiver, covering up an underlying condition that left him immunosuppressed. And another guy got killed looking for Jack the Ripper, presumably by Jack the Ripper, but no one is really sure about that.
This, though, this is all very terrible.
Drucker steps up, stern but not surprised. She knew about it. “What’s the prevailing theory? What do you think is happening here?”
“Look…” Popa takes a deep breath. “There are a lot of things we still don’t understand about time travel. For example, why we can go backward but not forward. We know time conforms to the block universe model that…” He pauses, sees that he’s losing the room. “Okay, think of it like this. Time is like a pond. When you drop a pebble in a pond it creates ripples. The ripples are temporary. It’s not long before they dissipate. When we move through time, we create some ripples.”
“And?” Drucker asks.
“What if we dropped something in that was too big and too heavy? What if what we’re doing…” As he’s sounding this out I can see Allyn in physical pain. “What if we’re splashing all the water out of the pond?”
Popa seems like he wants to say more, rubbing his hands together, licking his lips, but he picks that as his ending point.
“Okay, okay, hold on,” Teller says, appearing at Drucker’s side. “The past happened. Nothing can change that. I find it very hard to believe we could do something that would actually create a problem.” He looks at Drucker. “I have spoken to expert after expert and they’ve used a lot of big words I don’t understand, but it all always comes down to one thing: the timestream fixes itself. It always has.”
“Right, but…” Popa starts.
“Excuse me,” Teller says, his hand up. “I’ve spoken to dozens of experts. They’ve all told me the same thing.”
A bold claim from a guy who got into Harvard because his dad agreed to renovate half the campus. This is the guy Drucker wants to hand the reins to?