All Our Wrong Todays(26)

Or maybe you don’t get the point: the banal everyday wonder of it all. I never thought about the air I breathed. I never vacationed in one of those tree houses. I found the data profiles helpful, but my favorite gadget was this pheromone detector that emitted a soft ping when the woman you were interacting with gave off a puff of attraction hormones, so you knew she was at least interested enough to keep talking to you . . .

Even this, composing a narrative one word at a time and pretending that I don’t know how it ends—it’s weird for me. Unless you’re a bespoke novel enthusiast like my mother was, someone who enjoys being led by the hand like a child through a hedge maze, where I come from most narrative entertainment is at least passively interactive, using the same neural tracking technology that lets your virtual environment simulator ease you out of your dreams in the morning. Every story is uniquely personalized, your desires, fears, anxieties, quirks, and kinks shuffled into the prestructured plot, like a skeleton around which your own weird little brain grows a one-of-a-kind body.

Déjà vu is crucial to the narrative palette, the uneasy sensation that you’ve heard the story before but can’t quite place it. That strange, vibrating discomfort is one of the richest pleasures of our storytelling and it’s almost entirely absent here. Here, people complain when they think they know where a story is going. As if plot is what really matters. In this world, the same words are always in the same order, set there according to the personal eccentricities of the author. I don’t like the feeling that this story is about me. In my world, every story is always about you.

I’m sorry, I know, I’m like a bad date who spends the whole time talking about their ex and insists it’s so you can get to know them better, rather than that they just can’t let go. I don’t want this part of my story to be over, but it’s time.





42


The countdown clock read—00:00:00. It was all out of time.

There were six berths in the Chrono-Spatial Transport Apparatus, one for each member of the standard chrononaut team. Wearing my skin suit, I settled into the berth predesignated for Penelope or her contingency associate—me. I could lie and say I had a moment of remorse or at least pause, but I was way too deep in shock.

I was operating on instinct, but not for self-preservation. I wanted revenge, I see that now, although at the time I would’ve called it justice. Which is hysterical and melodramatic, I know, but I was in a hysterically melodramatic state of mind.

If I could have, I would have gone back just far enough to save Penelope’s life. Half a day was all I needed. Unfortunately, the time machine doesn’t work like that. It may be the single most advanced piece of technology engineered by the human mind, but it’s still just a prototype. Even if I knew how to reprogram its spatiotemporal navigation code, which I don’t, the apparatus was deliberately built with only one destination.

So, no, I couldn’t save Penelope. But I could finish what she started.

I was going to do something my father couldn’t take away from me. I would be the first human being to travel back in time. Even if I was sued or arrested or, I don’t know, executed—I mean, is it illegal to time travel?—it would be a permanent achievement. No matter who else did it, I’d always be the first.

Considering these were possibly my last moments alive, I didn’t linger the way I might have if I’d been thinking rationally. But I wasn’t thinking rationally. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was conducting a practiced series of tasks, initiated in sequence without hesitation, counting them down by the second, in a steady rhythm, just like she taught me. It turns out, during those hundreds of hours of training simulations, I had been paying attention to more than just Penelope.

The time-travel apparatus has a three-part access procedure—genetic scan, elaborate pass code, and a big red button. Biological, intellectual, physical.

I activated the time machine.

There are no specific visual or auditory phenomena associated with time travel. But my father was concerned that the early adopters of the technology would feel let down if there wasn’t some sort of razzmatazz. It was scientifically pointless, pure showmanship. As if just going back in time wouldn’t be cool enough for the high-end consumers my father’s financiers planned to attract.

So, a team of psychologists was commissioned to figure out how to make people feel emotionally engaged with the experience, and what they came up with was a melodious hum and a softly oscillating glow of warm light.

Those psychologists were good at their jobs. When that hum and glow started, all my grief and anger and shock lifted away. I felt grounded and hopeful and free.

And I realized with absolute clarity that this was a terrible fucking idea.

But it was too late. The stupid goddamn hum and stupid goddamn glow would’ve been a fantastic thing to have experienced, like, right before I engaged the device, instead of right after . . .

I felt a tightening in my brain, as if it was contracting like a snail into its shell. I had the ungainly sensation of slipping on ice, free-falling to a hard landing that never came, suspended in the moment when balance loses to gravity. My blood felt heavy, thick, the veins and arteries bowing like wet towels on a clothesline. My fingernails and toenails tingled and flexed like they were growing at a shocking rate, curling into loops of chalky keratin. My eyeballs pulsed, filling up with the wrong kind of light, the viscous syrup inside them starting to boil. Strange tastes flickered across my tongue—sour tea, rotten lemon, sweet grass, Penelope’s lips. The hairs on my head seemed to burrow inward, piercing my skull and knitting into the dendrites. Or maybe the dendrites were burrowing out, worming from my scalp like the delicately fibrous skin of a starfish.