The Future of Another Timeline

^FOURTEEN TESS

Irvine, Alta California (1992 C.E.)… Los Angeles, Alta California (2022 C.E.)

I slumped on the shady bench where Beth left me and tried to parse where I’d gone wrong. There was the immediate failure, of course. I hadn’t been prepared to look into the face of an angry teenager and explain why she needed to do something painful to benefit herself in an ambiguously defined future. But then there was my bungling over a week ago, the first time I actually talked to Beth. I hadn’t bothered to change my clothes after racing from the Machine at Flin Flon, through three airports, to that ugly subdivision where Mr. Rasmann died. Of course Beth had thought I was a crazy person and didn’t listen to me.

So now she was a killer, and I knew all too well how that felt. How it was going to feel for the rest of our lives.

I looked up at the towering eucalyptus trees that dominated this part of the UCI campus and took a long, shaky breath. The tangy scent of crushed leaves permeated the air, and a cloud elongated overhead, its body torn apart by air currents. There was an uncanny quiet here, in the nature zone. The Irvine Company had fabricated a plot of wilderness at the core of an academic habitat that was indistinguishable from the malls that surrounded it. Two young women walked by, their hair streaked with blond highlights, upper thighs coyly revealed in the flow of silky shorts from the Express. Flirty, but not slutty. Tan, but not brown. Fuck. I hated this place, where we’d had to choose between artificiality or invisibility.

I never should have come back upstream from 1893. It was a ridiculous extravagance to make the long trip to Flin Flon, and now I was stuck here. This wasn’t an episode of The Geologists, where everybody was always bouncing back and forth between times, despite the difficulty of reaching the Machines before we had airplanes. In real life, if I wanted to see Beth again, I had no choice but to stay in 1992. After that night at Mr. Rasmann’s, I’d scrounged up a dorm room at UCI for visiting scholars. But I couldn’t afford to stay here much longer. My covert visit was definitely in the historical record now, and extending my stay would raise questions in my home time. What the hell was I thinking?

I reached down between my feet, scooped up a stray acorn, and picked at its thick skin. It was useless to be angry with myself. After joining the ritual in Soph’s parlors, I’d felt strong again. Purified. There was no way I was going to leave my past alone. True, I’d missed my chance to intervene after the Grape Ape concert. But there had to be a way to revise that night in Pasadena—the one when I stood on the bridge, looked over the edge, and saw the crumpled, broken body. I dreamed about it every night. I’d wake up in my Chicago boardinghouse, dizzy with nightmares about how I was getting old and might never have another chance to repair myself. Once I was finished with this edit in the nineteenth century, I wouldn’t be in a position to go back to 1992 without raising a lot of questions. I had to change my life now.

Comstock was arriving at the Expo in August, and it would take me weeks to get to the Machine and back. If there were any delays, I might miss my chance to make the edit. But I went anyway. I told Aseel and Soph that I had traveler business, and I told the Algerian Theater performers I had a family emergency in California. When I’d gotten off the CP Line, I’d found passage with a group of Cree trappers doing a run past Flin Flon. My only peaceful nights of sleep came then, in the bush, on the watery road to my past. Once I was at the Machine, it had been easy to convince Wax Moustache to tap me forward to 1992.

And now I was here, feeling almost as shitty as I used to when I was murdering people with my friends.

I stood up and looked at the greenbelt around me. I could invent some semi-legitimate excuse to stay at UCI for the summer quarter, deliver a few guest lectures, and try to talk to Beth again. Or I could get out of here, back to my mission. There was obviously a reason why so few travelers reported editing their own lives, and maybe it wasn’t demon-induced madness or edit merging conflicts. Maybe it was failure.

A clot of students walked past, arguing about the upcoming presidential debates. My editorial efforts were nothing compared to what people did every day to change their own times with something as simple as an election. I needed to forget my conversation with Beth the same way I’d forgotten the night in Pasadena and most of high school. Whenever a memory emerged, I made myself think about something else. I focused on the blank anti-sensation of traveling through the wormhole. Inside its impossible mouth, history was obliterated.

Two days later, I got off the bus at the Flin Flon campus. But as I waited in line, I realized I couldn’t face returning to the nineteenth century quite yet. Talking to Beth had shattered my sense of purpose. I needed to see my friends again. Luckily I had the budget for a flight to L.A. up in ’22, so I told the tech to tap me there. She stuck a floppy disk into her PC tower and consulted an incomprehensibly huge spreadsheet. Everything was in order, and they had an open slot right now. I was going home, to my present.

I walked onto the smooth, damp rock of the interface and knelt, pressing my fingers to stone. I was surrounded by a ring of six tappers, connected to each other by wide, flat cables. A tech behind a row of humming CRT monitors typed a few commands, and the tapper closest to me started to pound out a pattern. Its felt-muffled mallets beat the ground like a bass drum, and then another tapper started, its rhythm complementing the first. A third joined with staccato bursts. Now I could feel the vibrations in my body, and the water rising up my arms and legs. But when the wormhole opened, nothing went the way it was supposed to.

I had a shocking, vivid sense of sliding down water-slick stone in the dark. Then I materialized in a dark, shallow cave, its mouth a perfect rectangle of sunlight. Where the hell was I? This wasn’t Flin Flon, nor anywhere I recognized. Terrified, I stumbled toward the cave entrance, which sucked me back into the wormhole’s familiar nothingness. When I emerged, I was cold and slimy and staring at a tech whose bendable tablet told me I’d reached the Flin Flon Time Travel Facility in 2022.

“You’re the second one to do that this week.” She looked startled.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re completely covered in… is that algae? Are you okay?”

I touched the gooey blobs on my shirt, shivering. Then I flashed back to the cave. “Was there anything else unusual when I came through?”

She checked her tablet for readings. “Nothing that jumps out here.”

“I think I… It seemed like I fell out of the wormhole on my way here. Into a cave. Is there a way for me to get today’s sensor logs?”

“You can, yeah—the Machine sensors have a Slack channel where they output readings.” The tech jotted some notes, then looked up and cracked a grin. “It’s not totally unusual to see or feel strange things in the wormhole, but it’s impossible to fall out.”

“But this…” I gestured at a streak of bright green slime on my arm.

“Yeah, that’s definitely strange, but we’re seeing it once in a while. It doesn’t mean you left the wormhole. I’m going to take some samples.”

We scraped as much as we could into sterile vials, and then I desperately needed a shower. Good thing I’d left a change of clothes in a locker along with my mobile. That was months ago, but only a few hours had elapsed in local time.

I spent most of the flight back to L.A. distracted, staring out the window at wildfire plumes whose white fingers stretched across Saskatchewan and British Columbia. What had happened to me in the Machine? It was like I’d jumped in space as well as time. Could it be that the Machine was treating me differently because I’d changed the timeline? Geoscientists knew the Machines had some way to track the behavior of individual travelers, which is how they prevented us from going back to times we’d burned—or forward to futures we hadn’t yet lived through. Was there some specific reason I’d been rerouted to that cave?

Maybe my edits had altered something fundamental. I bought thirty minutes of slow airline internet and poked around in UCLA’s legal databases, looking for changes to the Comstock Laws. Nothing obvious. Abortion was still illegal, and doctors were barred from providing information about birth control in most states. I checked Nexis for 1990s news stories. Everybody who had been dead the last time I was in 2022 was still dead.

Was I suffering early effects of merging conflict dementia, caused by my meetings with Beth? A terrifying possibility. But then something more disturbing occurred to me. Maybe the Comstockers were making progress in their efforts to disable the Machines. My visit to the cave might have been a cosmic bug, the result of their sabotage. I needed to talk to the Daughters right away.

Wandering through the Space Age glory of LAX, I texted Anita. Want to grab a drink? I’m here for a few days then it’s back to the nineteenth century.

Hell yes. Hipster gin bar tonight?

Neither of us could remember the actual name of the gin bar, partly because we’d insisted on calling it “hipster gin bar,” and partly because it was in one of those old buildings with preserved historic signs that advertised defunct newspapers. The place was quiet on weeknights, and we met up at a cozy table in the corner whose fake Victorian chairs were far more comfortable than the real thing. The gin was better too.

I drank a shot and enjoyed the brief hot tingle in my fingers and nose. “I think those Comstockers are affecting the behavior of the Machine.”

Anita raised her eyebrows. “What happened?”

I told her about the cave and the algae.

She looked puzzled. “I’ve definitely had some strange visions in transit, but usually they’re sort of abstract colors or smells or sensations.”

“Sure—I have too. But never anything that left a physical trace, like the algae. We need to get more data from the Machine facilities, to see if it’s a widespread phenomenon.”

“Yeah, we should call a meeting.”

A flurry of texts, and we were set to meet tomorrow in one of the more battered conference rooms in the geology building. By then I’d have some preliminary results on the algae question, too.

Anita and I spent the rest of the evening catching up on news about the latest horrible memes on Instagram. It turned out some billionaire had paid hundreds of operatives to run a conspiracy campaign proving that women who’d had abortions were now giving birth to fish because “they had ruined the bodies God gave them.” Gory, doctored pictures of naked women surrounded by dead fish were spreading fast. Some flak at Instagram said it was impossible for their algorithm to eradicate it, but the company was working on “making social media safe for everybody again.” Venting about politics with Anita was making me feel normal. Things were terrible, but at least I was trying to do something about it.

The algae turned out to be cyanobacteria, one of the oldest life forms on the planet, and also one of the most common. It would have filled the oceans at the time the Canadian shield was forming, over half a billion years ago. The techs in Slack had a preliminary hypothesis about it. Given that the five known Machines were all built into shield rock that formed beneath the primordial seas, they thought it made sense that the Machine might sometimes spit up cyano along with water. At this point, they said, six other travelers had emerged from the wormhole covered in ancient ocean microorganisms, all in the past week.

I turned this over in my mind, wondering whether people up and down the timeline were experiencing similar anomalies.

We’d called this Daughters meeting to talk about my news, but that went out the window when Enid told us what she remembered. Berenice had been deleted from the timeline, but Enid reverted it. She held Berenice’s hand tightly as she described the would-be killer, a man with a mark that put his home time hundreds of years in the future. I noticed Enid carefully avoided explaining how exactly she’d saved her future girlfriend. In my bloodthirsty frame of mind, it was easy to fill in the gaps.

“Tess, you were the only one who remembered Berenice.” Enid reached out to squeeze my arm tearfully.

I shook my head, wondering at the lost memory, a spray of neurochemicals from an undone time. This was how historical revision worked; only travelers present at the time of the edit would remember the previous version. Now I recalled nothing but the timeline with Enid’s revert. Still, something about the scenario seemed off. I had to say something.

“Berenice was killed around the same time I saw those Comstockers at the Grape Ape show. Otherwise I couldn’t have remembered her.” I was thinking out loud, and Berenice nodded for me to continue, red hair flopping in her eyes. “That doesn’t seem like a coincidence anymore. We may be dealing with travelers from the twenty-fourth century, doing coordinated edits in 1893 and 1992.”

“Makes sense to me,” Berenice said. “Those were transitional phases, heavily revised. The spooky part is that I can’t find any records of these guys coming through the Machines in ’92. It’s possible they had a cover story, though. Or they came through in the past and reached ’92 by living in real time.”

“I bet they were in real time,” Shweta replied.

“Or they made up a legit reason to be here, the same way we would if we were doing edits.”

We debated for a few minutes, and then C.L. broke in. “I know we have a lot to discuss, but I wanted to say that I’m so glad you’re here, Berenice. I can’t imagine the Daughters without you.”

“It’s true.” Anita’s voice was rough with emotion.

“You are the best, Berenice.” Enid embraced her partner fiercely.

C.L. brought out some cupcakes they’d made with representations of atoms printed on the icing and we took a moment to celebrate a world with our friend in it.

At last I got around to describing my experience falling out of the wormhole, and C.L.’s eyes widened with excitement. They unsuccessfully tried to wipe a streak of blue buttercream off their cheek before jumping in. “Okay, this is going to sound weird, but it almost sounds like you were in an archive cave.”

All of us stared at them. They were referring to the as-yet-unexplained phenomenon that drew geoscientists from all over the world to Raqmu in Jordan. There were hundreds of these caves, dug into the soft sandstone of the city’s canyon walls. Somehow, they could prevent written documents from changing with the timeline. Raqmu was home to records of all the times we’d forgotten throughout history—some cut into stone and hide, others in densely printed books and digital storage. Now that I thought about it, C.L. was right that the place I visited looked a lot like some of the smaller archive caves, especially the ones devoted to minority history.

C.L. continued to muse. “What if the Comstockers really are sabotaging the Machines and this is the first sign?”

I nodded eagerly—this confirmed what I’d been thinking.

C.L. met my eyes and spoke again. “Maybe the Machine took you briefly to Raqmu? As you know, I’ve been studying the Machine at Raqmu, and I’ve found—”

Abruptly, the door to our conference room banged open. A woman stood there, her short black hair mashed up on one side like she’d been sleeping on it. Her skin was dark brown, and her eyes bright blue; she wore a vibrant Hawaiian shirt over a gray technical jumper. Before she spoke, I knew she was a traveler.

She settled heavily into the last remaining chair, looking at each of us in turn. “Daughters of Harriet. I’m Morehshin.” Her accent was unfamiliar but easily understood. “I have come from the future. I will give anything, even my life, to help you.” She withdrew something small from her sleeve and set it on the table. It was almost impossible to look at, but with great effort I perceived what seemed to be a spherical globe of water throbbing and rolling slowly on the fake wood grain. Had she brought this thing with her from the future, despite all the limitations we thought we understood about how the mechanism worked?

We all started asking questions at once.

“Where is your mark?”

“What is that thing? Is that a weapon?”

“When are you from?”

“What past do you remember?”

She drummed a military rhythm on the table with her fingers, and the jumper parted over her traveler’s tattoo. “As you can see, I’m from exactly 512 years in your future. I came because my… colleagues and I believe that this era is the last common ancestor of our timeline and one that is strongly divergent.”

“What do you mean, ‘strongly divergent’?” I asked. I had never met a traveler who made these kinds of claims. Usually we talked about editing, not diverging.

“I didn’t come to change a few laws in the United States, or study the price of meat. This is something bigger. I had to come a long way back to make it happen.”

Our conversation about Raqmu and the archive caves was completely forgotten. I’d met future travelers when they gave lectures sponsored by the geoscience department, of course. But none had ever come to find the Daughters of Harriet specifically. If what Morehshin said was true, people still knew about our working group half a millennium from now. A hot, unfamiliar sensation of optimism spread through my ribcage. We had made a difference. Things would get better. Wading through the garbage can of history had actually been worth it.

Morehshin spoke again. “Obviously I’m not going to tell you about the past that I remember. It’s irrelevant anyway, since nothing I remember has happened yet.”

“What’s that?” Shweta pointed at the unidentifiable blob on the table, roving slowly.

“Evidence that I am serious. One thing I will tell you is that there’s a lot you don’t understand yet about the Machines. We can pull certain objects through with us—more than garb. And people. We can travel together, up to five at a time.”

C.L. was excited. “I thought that was one of the hard limits on the interfaces—no simultaneous travel. To stop people from bringing an army through, or maybe to prevent mass temporal abandonment when things get tough.”

Morehshin shrugged. “Your ignorance is not my problem. I’m here because of the edit war. The one you first described in your writing, Anita. In the subalterns’ cave.”

We all looked at Anita, whose face was morphing from disgruntlement to shock. “What… no. I haven’t left anything in a cave.”

“Somebody named Anita from the Daughters of Harriet left a detailed history of the edit war, starting with the Comstockers. Is that you?”

“No… it’s not me. At least, it’s not me now.”

Morehshin sucked in her breath at Anita’s implication. Exposing the future was a major violation, and apparently the taboo still held in this traveler’s present. Nobody was sure what to say next.

I broke the silence. “I’ve been tracking the Comstockers. What can you tell us about this divergence?”

“Nothing. Obviously. I’ve already been foolish with my words. But… we need to kill Anthony Comstock.” She pointed at the blob on the table. So it was some kind of weapon.

“You’re about a century too late for that.” I folded my arms.

Next to me, Anita looked like she’d eaten hot coals. Her voice came out in the clipped phonemes she used for arguing with old, tenured white men at academic conferences. “In addition, evidence suggests that killing and saving individual lives doesn’t affect the timeline. The Great Man theory has been disproven. Only social movements and collective action can change history.”

Now Morehshin looked frustrated. When she spoke, her unidentifiable accent thickened. “You take your sterile pleasure in hell, don’t you?” I got the feeling that she’d translated directly from some nasty future curse. “You know nothing about travel. You haven’t cracked layer one of the Machine interfaces. We have centuries of data demonstrating that we can change the timeline by targeting key individuals.”

Anita glanced at Berenice, and I knew what she was thinking. This traveler could be lying or wrong. Or she could be right. It was true that that we barely understood how history worked. Theories of timeline change went in and out of style; every geoscience student read about the many hypotheses that had been adopted and discarded, only to be adopted again with seemingly more nuance. Clearly the geoscientists of Morehshin’s time were in a Great Man phase. At least her sophisticated Machine techs hadn’t managed to deposit her in the right period. We still had a chance to stop her from killing anyone, and possibly making things worse when a more profoundly devious bastard rose up to take Comstock’s place.

“We have centuries of data too.” C.L. tapped their ancient laptop with a finger, as if all of history lived on its sad little hard drive.

I piled on. “Your data can’t be that great, if you overshot your target by over a century.”

Shweta made a wiping gesture with her hands. “Let’s stop arguing about theory. Can you tell us why you want to kill Comstock? That might help us understand your mission.”

“We believe that he’s the reason for the divergence. He started the process…” She searched for words. “He started misogyny? Does that make sense?”

Now I was really confused. “There was misogyny before Comstock. Can you be more specific?”

“No. I cannot.” Then her face softened. “But I will say that in my time it is worse. Much worse. We are dying out.”

I watched panic and mistrust distort everyone’s faces. Maybe the Daughters weren’t going to fix the timeline after all.

“Humanity is dying out? Like a species extinction?” C.L. sounded intrigued.

“Not humanity. Women. Queen type women who are… on our side.”

“Queen type?” Anita twirled a pen between her fingers. “You mean women with power?”

Morehshin shook her head. “More than power, but also less. You know I am saying too much already. I hope you will help me. This is our only chance.”

I thought about my disastrous conversation with Beth at UCI, and wondered if I’d sounded as crazy to her as Morehshin sounded to me now. Recalling Beth’s rejection, I felt a rush of sympathy for this traveler with her strange curses and stranger story.

“I know how to find Comstock, if you’ll promise not to kill him. I have a better plan. Maybe you can help.”

Morehshin pocketed the thing on the table. “We are all sisters.” She said it like a formal invocation. “Let us act as one.”

“Does that mean you won’t kill him?”

“I won’t kill him. Unless your plan is bad.”

“So what is your plan, Tess?” Anita sounded dubious.

“I told you I’ve been organizing with women in 1893. It’s collective action. For Comstock, there are things worse than death. We’re going to destroy his reputation.”

Morehshin’s snarl became a grin. “His individual reputation?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“I’m harmonized.”

I wondered how Morehshin had studied twenty-first-century English. Probably from flawed historical documents, or incomplete media files left in the archive caves. Sometimes she spoke in perfect idioms, and sometimes she sounded like bad translation software.

I looked at Anita. “I’m going to take her back to 1893 with me. It can’t hurt.”

“What the fuck, Tess. Of course it can hurt. Plus, you can’t take anyone with you anyway.”

“Well, Morehshin says she can take more than one person back. If she’s wrong, then we know she’s a fraud. If she’s right, then we’ve got a valuable ally in this edit war.”

Shweta took a deep breath. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think Tess is right. Berenice was dead, and she’s probably not the only one. We need to do everything we can to stop the edit war and prevent these Comstockers from destroying the Machines.”

Morehshin nodded. “We need to follow this thread back to its beginning. It’s the only way to survive.”

Several other Daughters were nodding too.

We called a vote and it was unanimous. Morehshin would come with me to fight the Comstockers, without using violence. Whether we faced a strong divergence, a plot to destroy the Machines, or simply a melee in the edit war, we were on the same side. Unless Morehshin decided to go all Great Man assassin on me. I glanced at her, registering that her irises had no imperfections in them at all. It was as if she’d been engineered. I looked down at my hands, the knuckles slightly swollen, skin creased. Would I be able to stop her, if Morehshin decided murder was the only way? Then, guiltily, I wondered if I’d actually want to.

We arrived in Flin Flon two days later. I still had official permission to continue research on the Columbian Exposition, and I wrote Morehshin into the meager budget as a research assistant. After the usual flight delays, followed by scheduling difficulties at the Machine, we were in position. Rumor spread quickly that a traveler from the future would be demonstrating new functionality, and several off-duty techs showed up to watch. This was a lot more unusual than a traveler covered in cyanobacteria. Many people didn’t believe group travel would ever be possible. I braced myself for a disappointing plan B, where the wormhole didn’t open and I had to go through alone.

Around us, the tappers thrummed to life, four joining in to beat a light rhythm on the rock. Morehshin put her left arm around my waist and scratched the air overhead with her free hand. A black square materialized beneath her fingers, like she’d revealed a circuit breaker box hidden in the fabric of reality. Instead of switches and buttons, the square glowed with thin strands of rippling fluid. I could hear a few gasps in the room, and I realized that my own mouth was hanging open. Abruptly, Morehshin mashed her hand into the square, and her fingers took on a faint luminescence. I thought of all the rules I’d memorized in school about how the Machine worked. One of the best-known limits was that it never sent multiple contemporaries to the same place at the same time. Trying to send several people sequentially to the same time didn’t work either—it had been tried repeatedly, with occasionally disastrous results.

Morehshin’s arm tightened around me, the floor rushed with silty water, and the air exploded into wormhole nothingness. Then we stood, still touching, in a dark, smoky cabin. We’d made it back to 1893. Together.