All Our Wrong Todays(70)

I can see he’s about to ask what the Goettreider Engine is, but the very fact that I have a name for it seems to answer a long-standing question. He smiles. He’s clearly not a man who smiles much.

“I wondered what your people called it,” he says.

“My people?” I say.

“The people of the future. Isn’t that where you’re from?”

“I’m from the present,” I say. “Just a different present. Another timeline. One where your experiment didn’t fail. In fact, it succeeded beyond even your most expansive projections. Your device, what we call the Goettreider Engine, fueled a technological revolution that transformed the world.”

“That’s why I built it,” he says. “That was my dream.”

“Your dream should’ve come true,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “Well, yes and no. The morning after the accident, I left the hospital and snuck back into my lab. I knew once someone had a chance to think clearly, they’d destroy my device and I couldn’t let that happen. Not until I understood what went wrong. I planned to substitute an earlier prototype in the wreckage, a decoy no one but me could recognize as a fake. The lab was a ruin, but the device was intact. And the battery, of course. I’d constructed a high-yield battery to store any power generated during the experiment. When I checked, it was full. Which meant that even in failure, my device, what you call the Engine, it worked. The building’s electricity had been shut off, the whole place closed down. It was only luck that the experiment happened on a Sunday, when the offices upstairs were empty, just seventeen people injured instead of hundreds. But the battery had stored more than enough energy to power up the device. I salvaged as much of the equipment as I could and ran a full diagnostic before turning it back on. I found a serious flaw in the design. It would’ve caused a radiation surge that may well have killed everyone in that lab if the device had operated properly the first time. I worked all day and night to correct it, expecting any moment to be shut down by the authorities. But no one came. They were waiting for test results to ensure the building wasn’t dangerously irradiated. It gave me time to fix the device and activate it again. This time, of course, it operated flawlessly. It still does.”

“Wait,” I say, “the Engine is on? Right now?”

“I switched it on two days after the accident and never switched it off,” he says. “It’s been running nonstop ever since.”

He taps the touch screen and the chair inflates, tilting to gently place him on his feet. An escalator takes us down three levels to a thick steel door that retracts to reveal a concrete room.

Inside it, surrounded by ducts and tubes and cables, is a Goettreider Engine.

A lot of the components have been updated and streamlined, but its familiar design is intact. I can feel it working, a dense, undulating field of pure energy that asynchronously rotates around the primary absorption coil. From the side it appears as a sparkly halo, Saturn-like. But I know without needing to see it directly what it looks like from above.

A whorl.





106


The Engine is so glorious it’s hard to look away. Lionel stands next to me, vibrating with pride and curiosity.

“Is it amazing?” Lionel says. “Your world?”

“Yes,” I say.

“That’s what kept me going,” he says. “After the accident. After the failure. I don’t even know how I managed to avoid a total system meltdown. I’ve gone through the chronology of events countless times and by my calculations turning off the device midsequence should’ve been . . . cataclysmic.”

“It was me,” I say. “You couldn’t see me, but I intervened before it was too late.”

“You pushed me away?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “And turned it back on.”

“I thought I felt a hand shove me, but it was all so chaotic, it could’ve been compressed force waves. The energies unleashed were unpredictable.”

“Where I come from,” I say, “every schoolkid knows the sequence of events from that day. It’s the pivot point of human history.”

“It’s hard to hear what should’ve been,” he says. “Even though, like I said, it’s what kept me going. All I ever wanted was to make the world better, but instead I almost ended it. Looking back, I must have shut down some essential part of myself to get through it. But it also gave me the clinical detachment to make sense of what made no sense. Two pieces of data. One, that the radiation signature emitted by the device after it was turned on was somehow detectable before it was turned on. Two, that I saw you there, wearing unfamiliar clothing and clearly not expecting to be seen. I theorized you had an invisibility field around you that was somehow destabilized by the energy spiking from the device.”

“That’s right,” I say.

“But that meant you came from somewhere well beyond the technological capabilities of the time. Only one explanation resolved both data points.”

“A time traveler,” I say.

“A time traveler, yes. Which meant the experiment was not just a success but a triumph, significant enough to justify coming back in time to witness it. Had my experiment succeeded, my plan had been to leave the device running, conceivably forever, so I assumed you pinpointed the exact moment in space and time by following the unbroken radiation trail from the future to the past.”