Empra was sure of it.
She couldn’t remember meeting him, seventeen years and over two millennia ago, but there was footage in archive 12-A11B that proved otherwise. Farway’s friend had sat next to her on the fourth-tier benches of the Amphitheatrum Flavium, had spoken Gaius’s name, had… what? Her feed went dark soon after; next thing she remembered was holding a blue box the same way Burg held her: tight to the chest. Empra had no idea where the object was from, but she refused to let it go, for reasons her mind hadn’t been sharp enough to cut. She’d gripped the corners through labor, cradled its velvet alongside her newborn son. When the Corps officers arrived at the maternity ward to question Empra, she’d hidden the item inside her fist, continued hiding it—in word and deed—during every following interrogation to avoid confiscation. Empra had even kept it from herself—the double who shared her shock, along with her family, her fingerprints, her job, her ex-fiancé horror stories.
Here she was, seventeen years later, holding the box again, fingers fitting into the grooves they’d created during childbirth. Had it really hurt so bad, to leave such deep marks? Memory was a fickle thing—erasing pain, branding the box’s contents into her brain. When Empra cracked the soundless hinges, she knew what she’d find, down to the letter’s letters.
She unfolded the paper gently to spare its ever-tattering creases. Some plucky soul had taken a pen to the former cover of a Corps of Central Time Travelers’ Code of Conduct guidebook, lending the Cs a faint feline quality. The doodles went on—hearts and stars and widening gyres. A crescent moon. A flaming sun with a stick man inside, arms outstretched. None of these meant much to Empra, though she’d spent many hours studying them.
The note on the other side was marginally less mysterious. Its handwriting wasn’t practiced enough to belong to a Recorder, building words too blocky and big. Sentences took up twice the space they needed: Empra—if you’re reading this, it means we’ve succeeded. Mostly. There’s not enough room on this page to explain, but all the answers are inside the chip. It holds your son’s past, and possibly his future, too. Give it to him on his seventeenth birthday.
Here the author had run out of room, no end in sight: period, signature, or otherwise. The y simply leaped off the page, leaving Empra with the sensation that she’d been interrupted. Her train of thought picked up at the same place every read: Who’d written this? How could there be answers inside the chip, when it was incompatible with Central’s technology? Empra had approached dozens of programmers over the years, but none had been able to extract data from its circuits. How could her son have a past before his birth? Was it connected to the Ab Aeterno’s crew splitting the universe in two?
If so… this box could be akin to Pandora’s. Better left shut.
She wanted the best for Farway: the one thing in this world that kept her her, made in his father’s image, filled with her own wanderheart. As a child he’d watched her past expeditions with wide eyes, soaking in ancient cities, dinosaurs, volcanic eruptions, worlds unwired. He’d enrolled in the Academy because he wanted to make these adventures his own, and had worked his tail off to become class valedictorian. Rumor had it the Corps had already set aside his sergeant’s uniform, final exam Sim pending. The future ahead of him was bright enough.
Why complicate it?
It was an oft-thought cycle, one Empra had pondered this very morning. She’d stared at the bed she sat on now, looking over Farway’s birthday gifts, blue box in her hands, unable to let go. Maybe when Farway was eighteen or nineteen or never…
But Gram’s reappearance, today of all days, had rattled her resolve.
There were deeper things than fear at work.
“What the Hades is going on, McCarthy?” Burg filled her doorway like he filled every doorway. He didn’t take pains to distinguish himself from his duplicate, the way the rest of the Ab Aeterno’s crew did through hairstyles and jewelry, but Empra always knew which Historian was hers. There was something about the way he softened around her, surly-old-man performance crumbling in the second act. “Your son’s worried, says you went white as a meal block in the kitchen. Feeling all right?”
She felt on edge, sweat from her fingertips mussing the box’s velvet. “Burg, if you could choose to remember what happened to us the day we left ancient Rome, would you?”
“I suppose so. Yeah.” The Historian was too burly for her bedroom, but he’d maneuvered it often enough to learn smallness. When he reached the bed, he picked up the letter to keep from crushing it. “A person’s got the right to know their history, don’t they?”
The chip looked one sneeze away from disappearing, so Empra held her breath when she stared at it. Her heart slowed to real time. Farway’s past… If someone had gone to the trouble of putting it on a chip, it must have been worth saving. Handing this to her son would be no different from letting him watch her old datastreams. That was all futures were really—stories passed down, lived forward.
History: The roots we did not choose.
Who was she to stop it?
52
… BUT CHOSE US
THE DINING ROOM TABLE HAD BEEN reduced to plates of pizza crust. None of the black market cheese had been harmed by its two-time tumble to the floor. In fact, the entire incident seemed never to have happened. Far’s mother had reemerged from her bedroom with color in her cheeks, placing a new gift on the table before going around and taking everyone’s drink orders. The evening proceeded like most birthday celebrations in a McCarthy household: eating, laughter, the pause between dinner and dessert for embarrassing stories. Imogen shared the one about their childhood petting-zoo visit from Hades—Far had begun that day with a white shirt and went home in a half-eaten yellow rag thanks to a nervous rabbit and a goat kid, forever cementing his dislike for pint-sized mammals. Gram countered with Far’s more recent Sim triumphs. The tale of Far’s birth was told by Burg and both Empras in a rotation that was practically memorized.
The dessert was gelato, chocolate with chocolate chips—Far’s favorite. Aunt Isolde brought out a whole tub of the stuff, but only made it two steps before her daughter cried “Wait! The sparklers!” and disappeared into the kitchen. Light frothed from Imogen’s hands, creating a trail of spilled sparks as she cometed back. Uncle Bert started off the first notes of “Happy Birthday,” and everyone sang.
At the end his mother smiled. “Make a wish. Make it count.”
Far wished he would count. He’d lived his entire life with the feeling it was a size too large. He looked around the table—Aunt Isolde scooping gelato into bowls as Uncle Bert and Aunt E passed them out, Burg holding his mother’s hand, Imogen testing Gram’s Rubik’s Cube, the plates that weren’t there—and felt the possibilities.
could be could be could be