All Our Wrong Todays(29)

These are some of the things you notice when you’re standing right in front of the most important person in human history and he can’t see you because you’re cloaked with a disruption field that warps photons around your body, rendering you invisible to camera and eye.

But here’s something I hadn’t considered: scent.

Lionel Goettreider’s nose crinkles. He inhales sharply, his eyes darting around the lab. He smells something out of place. I take a step back, jarred, because what he’s smelling is—me.

It’s inconceivable that my father could’ve neglected something as elemental as smell, but then I remember—I’m supposed to be immaterial. My molecules should be disembodied, intangible, and, consequently, unsmellable. But I neglected to go into the defusion sphere before coming back in time. That means, despite my invisibility, I can touch things. Not even deliberately. The molecules of my body can interact with the molecules around me. If I was immaterial, the volatilized airborne compounds swirling off of me would safely pass right through the olfactory receptors in Lionel Goettreider’s crooked nose. But I’m not immaterial.

My whole life, everyone waited for me to do something spectacular. To prove I was my father’s son. Well, I finally did it—it just turned out to be spectacularly stupid.

I have made a very, very bad mistake.

As I step away from him, I bump into a console, jostling the mug of coffee sitting on it. The oily black liquid inside sloshes over the rim. A runny finger of coffee slides down the white porcelain, trailing onto the console’s green-gray metal surface.

Goettreider sees it too. The crinkle in his nose spreads to his eyebrows, those glabellar creases folding even deeper. Coffee pools around the base of the mug. He picks it up, wipes away the liquid with his hand, and dries it on his starched white lab coat. He looks around, troubled.

I don’t know if the emotional trauma of Penelope’s suicide kept me from facing the defusion sphere or if I’m just a total goddamn idiot—and the fact that the time-travel apparatus could even be activated without confirming my immateriality points to a major oversight on my father’s part, the realization of which would give me much more enjoyment if I wasn’t trying so hard not to freak out.

I look for a spot I can stand where there’s no chance I’ll touch anyone or anything. But the problem isn’t just deliberate action. My body is a maelstrom of autonomous responses, heat, hormones, gases, chemicals, radiation. I try to formulate a plan but my thoughts are a toxic fizz of regret, panic, and self-loathing, as if someone shook up a bottle of carbonated soda and uncapped it inside my brain. My mind feels weirdly doubled, trebled, quadrupled, like some sort of cognitive stutter or echo or—I guess this is what fear feels like. I’ve clearly led a sheltered life because it’s hard to muster the focus to put one foot in front of the other.

My mind was failing me, as it had so often in my life, but this time there was nobody to rescue me from myself. No grim-faced mother knocking on the door to steer home her sexed-up runaway. It was very much like the moment you realize you’re no longer dreaming, that you’re awake in your bed and it’s time to get ready for work. Except in this case my job is to get the hell out of the past.

There’s a nook to one side, created by two consoles that don’t quite meet in the back corner. Moving as silently as possible, I wedge myself in there to catch my breath before this all spins even further out of control. I step over a leather rucksack with its brass buckles left unlatched, shoved out of the way. Inside it is a gift-wrapped box with a satiny bow on top. I recognize the rucksack as Goettreider’s own bag—the association with him ensures they’ll never go out of style. But the present inside is a detail I’ve never noticed in any of the simulations. It’s good to focus on the little things instead of the big picture. Which is that I just came very close to total disaster.





47


The main problem with effectively modeling the cognitive impact of time travel on a human subject is nobody’s ever done it before.

You might wonder why my father couldn’t just do a trial run, you know, send the chrononauts back a minute, or an hour, or a day, take some readings, crunch some numbers, confirm it’s at least moderately safe? It would still be time travel—isn’t that dazzling enough?

Well, no, obviously not. A few of my father’s more prudent advisers brought up these questions from time to time. But they were curtly dismissed as lacking the boldness necessary for such a groundbreaking endeavor and encouraged to peddle their caution at someone else’s lab.

I come from a world where the impossible is commonplace. So my father’s legacy-defining experiment can’t just be successful. It has to be dramatic. A showstopper. The kind of confident, visionary statement no one will ever forget. It’s a mission to witness the most important scientific experiment in human history, because that’s the kind of direct comparison my father wants made to him. His goal is to ensure the names Barren and Goettreider are mentioned in the same sentence as often as possible.

And here I am, actually witnessing history, fulfilling my father’s self-aggrandizing dream—but my disappointing catastrophe of a brain is spoiling even this, my one big chance to make a permanent mark, getting lost in cul-de-sacs of tangent and memory and jargon. It’s hard to believe I spent months training for this, side by side with Penelope, close enough to smell the lilac and orange blossom in her hair because we sat downwind from the overcranked air-conditioning vent. My thoughts loop into themselves, adrift and hollow, a malfunctioning navigation system, like the one on the hover car that killed my mother.