All Our Wrong Todays(25)

Time traveling to see the creation of my world isn’t just a scientific experiment or a historical curiosity. It’s also a murder investigation. It means witnessing the birth of the future and the death of the person who made it possible.

I’ve always appreciated the fact that this towering visionary died because he underestimated himself. Had the Engine not proved to be so epochal, Goettreider would’ve been a catastrophic failure.

What makes an artistic depiction of the Activation interesting isn’t the reactions of the Sixteen Witnesses—they’ve become formalized over time—it’s the expression the artist chooses to put on Lionel Goettreider’s face in the moment he unleashes his invention on the world. Skeptical? Awed? Distracted? Amused? Jealous? Angry? Thoughtful? Frightened? Detached? Concerned? Excited? Nonchalant? Harried? Weary? Cheeky? Wise? The artist’s choice in this telling detail says everything about the piece.

The real reason my father wanted to visit this specific moment was to observe Goettreider’s face right before he switched on his invention—to see if he recognized that expression from the mirror. Basically, to find out if Victor Barren and Lionel Goettreider are as alike as he thinks they are.

I’m curious too. Because they turned out to be more similar than my father anticipated. Geniuses who miscalculated something essential, with unforeseen consequences that ended everything they knew and changed their world.

For Goettreider, the tau radiation that killed him was the fatal flaw. For my father, it was me. I was the fatal flaw.





40


I walked through the empty lab to the chrononaut changing area, where there were private vestibules for disrobing and lockers for our personal items. I opened Penelope’s locker. There wasn’t much inside. Her skin suit was sealed in its sterile gel pack to ensure nothing contaminated it prior to the trip back in time that she would never take. A spare uniform was folded neatly on the shelf next to a pouch of extra hair elastics for her usual ponytail. And something else—an antique pocket watch.

I don’t know how long I stood there, but eventually my body shook so hard with coarse sobs that I had to sit down. I held the pocket watch in my hands, rubbing the cool metal with my fingers.

About six weeks ago, we were doing a training simulation on the time machine’s emergency boomerang protocol, establishing how fast we could engage it manually if a calculation error stranded us in outer space. Penelope successfully rescued the whole team on every try. I managed to get everyone killed, several times. In the debrief, Penelope told me that instead of thinking of it as a single mortally important procedure, she’d break it down to a series of individual tasks, one per second, and count them down in her head while she did them, each second a discrete unit of time, like an old watch ticking out the moments in a steady rhythm.

The next day, I brought in the pocket watch I’d found in that abandoned town with my friends and showed it to her, like a puppy bringing its master a ball. I explained that it didn’t work but maybe I could get one of the technicians to repair it for me.

“Don’t do that,” Penelope said. “Either they’ll be pissed off that an understudy is wasting their time or they’ll be worried that if they say no you’ll tell your father.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Yeah, of course.”

“Give it to me,” she said. “If I tell them to do it they won’t even think of it as a favor.”

I handed her the pocket watch and never mentioned it again. I figured if she even remembered this conversation, it would hardly be a priority for her.

The pocket watch ticked in my hand, seconds into minutes into hours, as I sat there thinking about what it meant that Penelope had gotten it fixed but had never returned it to me. I put it back in her locker and shut the door. I opened my locker, took off my clothes, unsealed the gel pack, and put on my skin suit. I knew what I had to do.

I would be what she could not—first.





41


There’s still so much about where I come from that I haven’t told you.

The air. It’s not like here. It has this buoyant, effortless quality, like being on a boat in a vast lake, not the ocean with its seaweedy tang, just a clean, sweet emptiness. No one bothered burning carbon past about 1970, so there was no acrid, oily residue in the atmosphere. It’s the kind of thing you notice only when you’re used to something else, like a freshwater fish dropped into the sea, its gills ragged with saline burns.

Botanical engineering, I mean, you have no idea. Homes made entirely of trees that organically filter your air, generate electricity through natural breakdown cycles in the soil, and grow fresh fruit and vegetables on your kitchen walls. They weren’t exactly commonplace, but you could rent one for a vacation. Some people lived in them all year.

So many social anxieties were gently eliminated because whenever you met someone new you could just run a quick scan and get correlated data on whether you’d be better suited as friends, lovers, spouses, or strangers. And it’s not like you had to do what the data suggested. Lots of people ignored it with sometimes lovely and sometimes fraught results. You could even find out if the person you were considering had a history of ignoring the assessment data and if it had worked out for the better or for the worse.

I could go on indefinitely, listing stuff that may seem quasi-cool or terrifyingly technocratic depending on your personal slant—but you get the point.