CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Date
“And look at these calculations right here. It’s like the accelerometer is out of alignment.” Motega and Alina were working late in the lab, scrunched together at Alina’s desk. They took turns at the computer, Motega driving for now. “You think it could have been calibrated wrong?”
Alina stared at the computer, pulling her face back with her hands. “Oh, I don’t know, Motega. Even if that’s the case, how do you explain the inner dimensional folding effect? There’s just so much data to go through here.”
They had been working nearly non-stop since they got started in the morning. The machine had been built to need very little power and to last a long time, with its own atomic battery backup. For 87 years it had been collecting data, mostly at an aggregate level, so there wasn’t a lot of need for storage space. The two Terabyte hard drive they used was more than enough.
Motega could see Alina was starting to succumb to fatigue. He looked closer; her eyes looked droopy and sunken. “Alina, where’s your glasses?”
He caught a flash of a smile before she hid it. “I got contacts the day of The Event,” she said, blinking her eyes. “What do you think?”
Motega smiled and nodded. “You look nice.”
“I think I’m going to have to call it quits for tonight,” she said. “Can we pick up again tomorrow morning? I feel like I haven’t slept in a week.”
“Sure, no problem. I’m getting tired myself. Go ahead and go back to the motel. I’ll shut down and lock up here.”
“Okay,” she said, standing up and collecting her things in her purse. She took her phone off the desk — just three metal bands, it was so strange — and slipped it on her fingers. “I’m concerned about Cecilia, too. I tried calling earlier. Couldn’t get ahold of her.”
“Have you heard from her at all since yesterday?”
Alina shook her head. “I talked to the Sheriff, the one from 2099, Joshua. He said Dravin and Cecilia had come to him demanding a working phone. He gave each of them a phone like he gave us, got them registered, and a line of credit going. It’s strange Cecilia wouldn’t call.”
“Maybe she can’t,” Motega suggested, immediately regretting giving Alina another reason to be concerned.
“I wonder where they are,” Alina said.
“Knowing Dravin, probably doing everything he can to get his power back.”
“Well, I’m going back to my room and try calling her again. Good night.”
“G’night.”
The door closed behind her and he returned to his computer readouts. He felt like the answer was just there, at his fingertips. The QED was still transferring data to the machine and its set of hard drives. It wouldn’t be done for another day.
The door to the Quantum Entanglement Device itself stood propped open. The device ridiculed him in its silent majesty, refusing to give up its secret. How did you do it? he thought, looking at the machine. And can you send us back? He already knew the answer to the second question, yet still he wished it was possible.
The machine had suspended their molecules in an inner, curved dimension where they were apparently also safe from aging. Of course, the molecules of one’s body themselves didn’t wear out. The buildings wouldn’t erode if they just sat there. It’s the interaction between the different elements that made things age, an interaction that was prevented when they were protected by entangling and switching places with molecules from... somewhere else.
Motega shut down the computer, stood up, and walked up to the machine, his hand drifting to the big red button. What if...? The machine taunted him, begging him to press the button. There was no going back, but if he could rig the device to switch off after a certain length of time, what if they could travel even farther, to the most distant future?
He forced his hand back to his side. Even if it were possible, it would be wrong. This whole thing, his whole screw up, was wrong. He stepped out of the little room and slammed the door to the device.
Motega walked over to his office, picked up his briefcase, and placed it on the desk. He hesitated, his fingers at the clasps of the case. With a deep breath, he opened the brief case, reached inside, and picked it up: his backup plan.
He turned the concussion grenade over in his hands. I should do it, he thought. Destroy the device right here.
He trekked back across the room and opened the door to the QED again. Squeezing the trigger carefully, Motega pulled out the pin. He waited. The grenade wouldn’t blow up until he let go of the trigger, of course. He pictured how he would do it in his head. Toss the grenade in, shut the door, and run out of the building. Would he have enough time? What if he didn’t make it? What about Alina?
Motega replaced the pin in the grenade and let go of the trigger. Not yet, he thought, once again looking at the device. They still had so much to investigate. Figure out what happened, then he could destroy the device.
He returned to his office and placed the grenade back in his briefcase. He shut it, snapped the clasps closed, and spun the dials to mix up the code.
Not today.
***
It was dark over the cemetery, while the rest of the world seemed to be glowing. Kevin hesitated at the tall iron gate, the word Mapiya in big iron letters over the arch. In some ways the world seemed different, and it could never go back to the way it was, but here at a graveyard Kevin knew that much was still the same. Men still died and were forgotten, eventually, by all but the great gnarled trees that watched over their grave.
A long path went through the graveyard in a circle, ending up back at the beginning. Kevin walked the path, eying the stones. The plots were mapped out by family. Tucked away somewhere back in the corner, it felt like, Kevin finally found his family. They were all laid out there together, starting with his wife and his son. He knelt in front of them, fighting back tears as he moved his hand across the name of his wife.
He hadn’t planned on crying. They had been dead a long time. The time for mourning passed decades ago. But it wasn’t that long for him.
As his walls broke down and he gave in to the sadness, a shadow moved to the right. He brought his guard back up, wiped the tears from his face. Joshua walked up and stood behind the graves.
“It’s something else, you know?” Kevin said. “Kneeling beside the grave of your wife and son, both gone for decades, but I remember them alive, well, and happy just yesterday.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Joshua said. The words were hollow and standard. You say them to anyone who just lost a loved one, but there was something sincere to how Joshua said them.
“How did you find me?” Kevin said, looking up.
“Same technology they had in your time,” Joshua said. “Your phone has a GPS. I’m in law enforcement. It’s trackable.” Kevin nodded. Of course. “I’ve spent my share of time in this cemetery, as well. I’ve stood there a number of times.” He walked down the row a few grave stones. “But most of my time was here.” To Joshua’s side the rest of the row was empty, future plots for the Hunter clan.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Kevin said, and he meant it. There was nothing special about his place here, he realized. Kevin stood up.
“Look, I know you’re just trying to do your job,” Joshua said. “Just trying to help out. But what you did today, showing up at the library like that, was unacceptable.” Joshua let that sink in. Kevin didn’t reply. “You’re not the Sheriff anymore. I’m going to see what I can do for you — you are family, after all — but there’s a lot going on right now. I need you to stay out of the way.”
Kevin nodded. As frustrating as it was, he was Sheriff once, so he knew where Joshua was coming from. Still, he shot a glare at the Sheriff. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay out of your hair. You won’t see me again.”
He turned and walked away. The words were as cutting as he meant them to be, but he walked with a shadow of regret, though he didn’t turn back.
***
“Come on, this way,” Eric said. Heaven grabbed his hand, slid off his bike, and followed him across the road. The sun had set about an hour ago and it was getting dark, only a sliver of the moon to light the way.
They crossed someone’s lawn. The house was dark and Eric led her around the side. “Are you sure this is okay,” she said excitedly.
“It’s okay, I know them,” Eric said.
The house was two stories, the back side overlooking the lake just west of North Mapiya. The first floor had a large double-paned glass door in the back stepping out onto a concrete patio. A cast iron fire pit sat in the middle of the patio surrounded by high back Adirondack chairs.
The yard sloped down toward the lake. Halfway down, to one side, they had cut into the hill to provide a flat surface for a large trampoline. Down at the edge of the lake they had two wooden docks. Eric took them across the longer one. The family here had one speed boat and one larger fishing and entertainment boat; you could probably call it a yacht at that size, Eric figured.
“What’s that term?” Heaven said, gaping at the boats. “How the other half lives?”
“Yeah, they’ve certainly got money.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Heaven said with a hand to her belly. “But that would be because of those tacos, not this.”
“Heh, that bad huh?”
Heaven nodded. “They were a little slick going down.”
“You can sit down over here.” He brought her to the end of the dock. Two more Adirondack chairs looked out over the lake. Heaven sat down and Eric fetched a couple of bottles from a nearby chest. “Chase it down with one of these,” he said, handing her one of the bottles. “Next time we can try the Chinese place.”
“Soda?” she said. “Sorry, you call it pop up here, don’t you?”
“Up here? Where are you from? I didn’t notice much of an accent in your voice.” Eric sat down in the chair to her right.
Heaven took a long swig of the soda and nearly spit it out. “Ugh, this is kind of nasty.”
Eric raised an eyebrow, then nodded, popping open his bottle, as well. “I suppose they’ve probably changed the formula since 2012,” he said, taking a sip himself. “You’ll get used to it.”
Heaven took another sip. She wasn’t so sure. She set the soda down on the arm of the chair. “Missouri,” she said.
“Need a tissue?”
“No, you asked where I was from,” she said, slapping him. “I’m from Missouri.”
“And no accent?”
Heaven shrugged. “Grew up with TV as a babysitter, I guess. The TV has changed quite a bit, I noticed.”
“Yeah, it’s built in the table now,” he said, taking another swig and finishing off his soda. “Let’s see. Beginning of the Century, 3D was beginning to get popular. You ever see any 3D movies?” Heaven shook her head. “They weren’t really three dimensional. Just images overlaid on top of each other and offset to trick your eyes.
“I think you had some limited holographic technology back then. I can’t remember. These are true projections of actual three dimensional images.”
“Like, you could make objects?” Heaven said, confused.
“Still just light and color, but you can look at holographic projections from any angle. It actually takes up real space. Like my phone here.” He squeezed his left hand together to make his phone appear. “Our television is built on the same technology, but it didn’t start to be mass produced until the 50’s, and then only at the theaters.”
“The 50’s?” Heaven echoed. It sounded odd to hear her future referred to like that. “To me ‘the 50’s’ means 1950s. That’s so weird.”
Eric chuckled. “I guess I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“South Mapiya, where I met you. What did it look like in your time?”
Eric blew out a puff of air. “Nothing. No, not nothing, I guess. A wasteland, like it had been in a nuclear blast, but without an explosion.”
“What does that mean?” Heaven wondered.
Eric shook his head. “I’ve thought about that, too.” But he didn’t have an answer for her.
She laid her head back on the chair and gazed up at the sky. The sparkling points of light glittered in their reflections on the water. “The stars still look the same,” she said. “That’s one thing that’s pretty constant, I guess. There’s less than I remembered, though.”
Eric looked up with her. “We’re pretty close to the cities,” he said. “And the suburbs continue to be built up. More light pollution near the cities these days, I suppose.”
“There’s no going back, is there?”
“Not if what I read in the paper this morning is right,” he said. “The reporter talked to one of the scientists working on the experiment that I found. According to him it was a one way trip forward. You weren’t even traveling, more like, suspended in time.”
Eric looked down at his soda. “Though it would be nice to go back, wouldn’t it?” he said in a sad tone.
“Don’t know that there’s much for me to go back to,” Heaven said. Maybe exploring the future can even bring some spice to my dreary life.
“I was just wishing this machine did have a way back,” he said. “Maybe I could jump back a few years, treat my dad better. He had encephalitis and he got confused sometimes, fatigued more often, but I still can’t believe he’s just gone.”
“You can’t think that,” Heaven said, getting a bit irritated with him now.
Eric took in a deep breath and let out a long sigh. “I know, I know. Keep your head up. Remember the good times. All that crap. But I’m an orphan now. Do you have any idea what that feels like?”
“Oh, please,” Heaven said harshly. She stalked off to the end of the deck, wishing there was something she could hit. Do you have any idea what that feels like? She wanted to scream. She turned and faced Eric. “You... you don’t even know,” she yelled at him.
“What?”
One part of her mind kind of felt sorry for him and knew she shouldn’t be yelling at him, but she just wanted to let it all out, all the frustration, the pain. “You haven’t been paying any attention to me, have you?” she said, knowing with that rational thought that that wasn’t entirely true. “At least you had parents. At least you had a mother for most of your life and a father until yesterday.”
She started pacing. It felt good to yell, now that she was doing it. “I haven’t had parents my whole life,” she said. She started to notice tears on her cheeks and she realized the real problem. “No one ever came for me.” She sat down, going from anger to shock as fast as the anger came. “All my life, family after family came. They never picked me.” She paused, remembering the faces of the parents that would come to the orphanage, looking on the girls playing in the yard from the safety of a window on the second floor.
“I’m so sorry,” Eric said. “I didn’t mean to—”
Heaven barely heard him. “It’s like we were in a zoo,” she said, choking up. “Watching us. Is she pretty enough? Does she play well with the other girls? I was always alone and when they looked at me they just shook their head.” She looked at Eric, embarrassed at letting go like this, but also searching, begging for someone, anyone, to share her pain.
Eric worked his mouth. He seemed not to know what to say. What do you say to someone as messed up as me? “I can’t change any of that for you,” he said with a nervous laugh, tears welling up in his eyes, as well. “Obviously. But I can be your friend. I promise that I will always be here for you.”
“Thanks,” she said, sniffing back her tears and reaching out to hold his hand. He knew exactly what to say. It struck her as a bit unrealistic, childish even, to make a promise like that to someone he just met yesterday, and in the most extraordinary of circumstances, but she ignored it. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. Really.”
“Well, I mean it,” he said. He added a smile. “And we will never go back to that taco place, either. I can also promise you that.”
That made her laugh and broke the tension. “I’ll hold you to that. Oh, man, look at me, I am such a mess,” she said, trying to wipe the tears off her cheek. “I’m sorry. None of this is your fault.”
“It’s okay. You can talk about it, or anything, anytime.”
She laid her head back again, closing her eyes, a crooked smile spreading across her face as she began talking:
“I have a mother,
and she’s very sweet.
During the fun times,
she always tickles my feet.
“When I’m down,
or drowning in self-doubt,
all I have to do is call her name,
and she will let me out.
“We have been there for each other,
always through thick and thin.
When there is a secret that I didn’t know,
she would let me in.
“She will never leave my heart,
no matter what she does.
She’s my one and only,
she’s my one true love.”
Heaven stopped talking and opened her eyes. “I thought you said you didn’t have a mother,” Eric said.
“I don’t,” she said. “That was a poem written by Ailie Pearson. I memorized it. It makes me feel like, I don’t know. It seems silly to say. When I close my eyes and recite it, it makes me feel like I really have a mom. She’s just right there and I can almost picture her.”
She let go of Eric’s hand and reached into her pocket to pull out a crumpled 4x6 photograph. “I don’t know why, but I don’t have a picture of my parents. But I do have this.” She handed the picture to Eric, a man standing in front of Mount Rushmore. “I think he’s my Uncle. I’m not sure. I was on my way to the Black Hills to find him.” He gave the picture back and she put it away. “It seems silly, now that I say it out loud. And it’s not like that’s possible, anymore. If he was there, he is long dead now.”
“Having a dream isn’t silly, Heaven,” Eric assured her.
“So what’s your dream? Football?”
“Nah. That’s just for fun. I used to think I knew. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m just scared of taking a risk.”
“It’s worth the risk,” she said. “Whatever it is. Look at me. I’m 17 and I ran away from my foster home,” stole a motorcycle, cheated at cards, “and came across the country searching for a dream. That’s freedom, and it’s the only thing I have left.”
“Hmm, and look where it got you.”
She shrugged, glancing at him with a sly smile. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem so bad here.”
A light flashed on behind them. They looked over their shoulders to see the silhouette of a man bathed in light back at the house. “Oh crap,” Eric said, now in a hushed tone. “We’ve got to go.” He quickly grabbed the soda bottles, tossed them in the lake, and grabbed Heaven’s hand, leading her back down the dock.
“I thought you said you knew these people.”
“I do. I didn’t think they were home. They don’t want me on their property.”
The silhouette shifted in the doorway; he could see them. “Get out of here,” he yelled. “I’m calling the cops.”
When they hit solid ground Eric broke into a run, Heaven pushing to keep up. They were long gone before the home owner even picked up the phone. Eric drove them back on his bike to Chevelle’s house.
When he brought the bike to a stop and they got off, she wrapped Eric in a tight hug. “Thanks for everything,” she said. She let go and smiled up at him. “And yes.”
“Yes?”
“I will go to the dance with you.” He smiled back.
The door to Chevelle’s house opened and a man and a woman dressed in black suits stepped out. The man held out a badge, shining brightly in its blue holographic light. “IIA,” he said. “I’m Agent Barnes and this is Agent Marshall. Inside. Now. Both of you.”