All Our Wrong Todays(10)

14


I mentioned there are two reasons I was assigned to be Penelope’s understudy—my father’s condescension and pragmatism. Plus the deathbed promise, which I guess makes three reasons.

But there’s a fourth reason too: Penelope and I were genetically compatible for the defusion sphere. It’s a machine that infuses your body with a molecular immateriality field, allowing you to physically move through objects and vice versa. So, if you launch back in time and accidentally land in the middle of some object, large or small, it’ll pass harmlessly through your body or you through it. Chrononauts remain immaterial the whole time they’re in the past. They can touch nothing and nothing can touch them.

The immateriality field lasts a maximum of fourteen minutes. Beyond that, your molecules drift apart and, well, you die. From the moment you’re decorporealized, you have fourteen minutes to return to the defusion sphere before you come fatally unglued.

Because the fourteen-minute window is so strict, the six chrononauts all require their own defusion sphere, so they can be simultaneously rendered immaterial prior to engaging the time-travel apparatus. But it’s extremely complicated to calibrate a device that requires precision at the molecular level. It’s also very expensive.

What helps with both calibration and cost is if you put only genetically compatible people into the same defusion sphere. Recalibrating to accommodate major genomic inconsistencies takes several days. When my father’s invention is brought to market, they’ll need a more efficient way to make time-travel tourists immaterial in the past—but that’s a problem he doesn’t need to solve just yet.

As it happened, Penelope Weschler and I were highly genetically compatible. It’s the kind of thing that might come up on a cell-donation program if your fetal stem cells had accidentally been corrupted during cryogenesis and you developed some eukaryotic biomolecular illness. Or on a dating profile if you were looking to start a family but faced reproductive challenges. Our respective chromosomes naturally lined up like zipper teeth. It made it quick and easy for the technicians to recalibrate Penelope’s defusion sphere when her contingency associate needed to use it.

They told me that, of all the understudies, I required the least recalibration to my assigned chrononaut. It was without a doubt the only criterion at which I excelled, because of course it was the one that didn’t require me to try. I simply had to . . . exist.





15


The actual experience of being immaterial is totally bizarre. You strip off all your clothes and put on these skintight, well, skin tights. Like, tights made out of skin. Fortunately not someone else’s skin. The suit is genetically engineered from your own harvested skin cells. Don’t think about it too much—it’s super-gross. Because the defusion sphere codes to your genetic sequence to ensure your molecules can be properly knit back together on reconstitution, it’s either wear the skin suit or time travel naked.

So, you’re wearing basically a leotard made of your own skin, but dyed blue-black to look cool. You’ve got skin boots and skin gloves and a skin cap that covers your head to prevent loose hairs from accidentally materializing inside your brain. You look like you’re about to do a luge run.

There are around seven octillion atoms in a human body. That’s a lot of goddamn atoms to disassemble, shoot back through time and space, and reassemble in perfect order. But biological entities have a major advantage over inanimate objects. They’re not discrete particles. Those 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms are spinning around in the thirty-seven trillion cells of the human body and each of those cells comes with its own architectural blueprint. Unlike stone or metal or plastic, a person is made of 37,000,000,000,000 maps of themselves.

You just have to program a quantum computer to read the map.

If you’re my father, you realize that when sending a person back in time, your best bet is to have everything you send with them actually made of the same genetic material as that person. That means employing a cutting-edge bioengineering team to forge some dark, dark magic in their plasmic vats and grow a personalized organic computer to integrate into every skin suit. A central operations node links via wires made of neural axon fascicles to a dozen coordination points, each a microscopic bundle of repurposed brain cells firing off simple electrical impulses.

Yes, when you travel back in time it’s wearing a suit of skin threaded with nerves to a dozen tiny brains. An organic computer system built for one purpose—to return you from the past to the present, safe and whole.

You step into the defusion sphere, a pearlescent white orb with a hatch that closes seamlessly, and the machine powers up with a low-gauge basso profundo hum. You get goose bumps everywhere. Your orifices dilate. Your nose and mouth feel dry and smoky, like a phosphorescent match got struck inside your throat. Your bones feel hollow, the blood frothy in your veins and arteries. Your eyeballs seem more buoyant in their sockets, as if they might float up out of your skull like helium balloons if they weren’t tethered in by your optic nerves.

And then you’re a ghost. People can see you, but you can pass through anything solid. You can’t talk—immateriality does something wonky to your vocal cords—but you can see and hear just fine. Scent is weird. Even if you’re smelling something right in front of you it seems like a faint whiff caught on a breeze from miles away.