A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (22 page)

But so did Dr. Brant.

RIACH LABS, Alki Beach, Seattle, WA. 0830, Friday, June 9, 2215.

When Dani got to the lab, she started working her way down the list of scans on her schedule. Everything went smoothly, so she had time to scan the stone and preview the scenes she was going to show Kat and Marak. She didn’t know how much time they’d have, and she wanted to know the exact settings to use before they started.

That was probably a mistake, though, because soon she was fighting tears as she watched herself chase Jored down the hall, just out of sight, and heard his giggles. She loved the whole family feeling when they all played the matching game. To be able to have a meal like that, one more time, with all of them together!

She was still absorbing every detail of his wonderful little voice and contagious joy when she was startled by a tap on her observation box window. The boxes were clear from the waist up; it was easy to spot which ones were in use. But the doors couldn’t be opened while the scanners were hooked up. The young woman standing outside her box was a stranger to her. She was dressed like a security guard, though, and for the first time, Dani felt uneasy. Had she made her extracurricular activities too obvious?

She carefully disconnected and opened the door. “Yes?”

“You have visitors in the lobby. I was asked to give you a message.”

Relief flooded her. Of course! It was Kat and Marak. “Oh, thank you. I’ll go meet them.”

She headed out of the lab, toward the lobby, chiding herself for being so nervous. Kat and Marak were waiting for her, and soon she would see Jored again.

RIACH LOBBY, Alki Beach, Seattle, WA. 1105, Friday, June 9, 2215.

Kat was peering down the long hallway, waiting for her to come. Marak was gazing at the massive doors. The viewwall that usually showed Dani’s schedule when she entered simply read, “Welcome!”—a message left over from when visitors were the norm rather than the exception. Kat and Marak would have been irisscanned on their way in, and permitted only because Uncle Royce had made the arrangements. Since they were inside the building, they had obviously been pre-approved.

It seemed so odd, seeing them at the institute, but Dani was very happy they were there.

“Which way is the lab?” Marak asked.

Dani led the way down the hall, waiting when they paused at the displays, giving them time to look around. To anyone watching, she was a tour guide. But she wouldn’t mind at all if her friends managed to see something they could use later to help her gather information they needed.

As they walked, she played her role well, pointing out areas as they passed. “These areas are where the researchers work. I pass right by this area every day. There are the scientists’ offices, down that hall back there. Financial services and the directors’ offices are on the second floor. The coffee shop and supplies room are in the other wing on this floor. The cafeteria is in the basement.”

Kat and Marak nodded, smiling at anyone who noticed them. Dani could tell that Marak was making mental notes, not missing a thing.

Finally, they got to the lab. Dani led them to the scanner she had been using that morning. Only one person could use the observation box at a time, but Dani had two objects she could use to show them: the rock and the metal disk. She could borrow the adjacent scanner for this.

“I’m going to put one of these in each chamber,” she told them, “and close the chamber door. When you step into the observation box and close the door, you’ll feel a tickling sensation in your brain as the scanner hooks up directly to your sensory nerves. It will look as if you are there, with the rock or the disk, able to see and hear what is going on at the times I’ve set.”

“Will we still know we’re here?” Kat was a little nervous.

Dani reassured her, “You won’t be all that aware of your surroundings here in the lab, but you can choose to see and hear what is here instead of there, if you want. It’s under your control. If I tap on the window, for example, you’ll hear it.”

She adjusted the settings for each machine. “Okay, who wants to be able to smell the shish kebabs? Only one of you gets to do that. This machine has the metal disk, so you get the full experience here.”

Marak stepped back to let Kat have that spot. Dani hoped Kat wouldn’t be too overwhelmed by it.

“I’ve already set the time frames. All you’ll have to do is tap ‘start’ and it will take over. There are thirty-eight minutes I’ve framed for you, so get comfortable. Sit or stand; the machine doesn’t care. If you need to take a break, for whatever reason, the ‘start’ button will have become a ‘pause.’” You can resume right where you left off when you are ready to go on.

“Can we replay if we want to?” asked Marak?

“That’s a little more complicated. I’d have to give you a short training session first. Just live it like you were there, for now.”

They both nodded.

“Ready? Then step in, get comfortable, close the door, and tap ‘start.’”

Dani pulled a chair over to wait. She remembered the first time she had experienced a scan. She had scanned a stone from a public fountain on a chilly winter day. A commonplace item in an insignificant setting. Still, she had been awed by the whole thing, with the water splashing down around her and the occasional passerby walking swiftly to get out of the cold weather. Kat and Marak were probably equally awed, but their experience would be so much more intense. They would be seeing themselves.

She watched their faces change and imagined what scenes they were seeing. That slightly squirmy look as they saw themselves doing things they knew they hadn’t done. That look of amazement at their first glimpse of the little boy that looked so much like both of them. A taste of joy at his squeals and giggles. Wistful yearning at his hugs. Tears as they reached the end, when Dani had pocketed the items again as she prepared to leave. She could see the viewscreens signaling the end of the session, and still they sat, remembering. She respectfully gave them time to recover before she tapped on their windows. It was almost lunchtime, and the labs needed to be cleared by noon.

Kat emerged from her box and went straight into Marak’s waiting arms. They cried together and Dani found herself crying with them. She passed out tissues, which they gratefully accepted. She hoped they didn’t hate her for putting them through this.

When she had regained a little of her usual composure, Kat turned to Dani and said simply, “Thank you.” Marak nodded in agreement.

That didn’t surprise Dani at all. What surprised her was what came next.

Taking Marak’s hand to give her strength, Kat said, “Do it. Do whatever it takes. Get him back.”

RIACH CAFETERIA, Alki Beach, Seattle. 1230, Friday, June 9, 2215.

Once she found out Kat and Marak’s visitor badges entitled them to a free lunch in the employee cafeteria, she continued her tour by showing them the basement level.

They got to the cafeteria for lunch a little late. Dani looked around for Anders. He should have arrived and bought lunch already. She was puzzled when she didn’t see him. But maybe it was better this way. The three of them had so much to discuss. She thought about sitting at the table where they’d eaten before, but when she started toward it, she saw it wasn’t there. That was odd. Had someone moved it? She glanced around the rest of the cafeteria. Were there other differences? She didn’t eat here often enough to enable her to be sure, but it seemed as if the walls were a different color. Maybe that was due to the timestream change.

Kat interrupted her puzzled inspection of the cafeteria. “Dani, what actually changed everything to this reality? I know it had something to do with that padlock. Marak and I were talking after you left, and he couldn’t remember having seen it at all on the day he got into the garden.”

Dani nodded. “You’ve heard our slogan, ‘It’s not just seen,’ and all that?”

“It’s heard, it’s smelled, and so on,” Marak supplied.

“It’s PastPerfect!” added Kat.

“That’s right. Well, it turns out that it’s not just seen and heard and smelled. It’s used. And the worst thing about that is that it’s used up. Not just for PastPerfect purposes, but for everybody. For those moments of its existence within the time frame in question, it’s just not there any more. It’s erased.”

“We suspected something like that,” said Marak.

“The moments are usually so brief, it doesn’t matter. If someone notices, they’d look again, and it would be there, and they’d wonder about it, but nothing really changes. Sometimes, though, it does matter. It matters a lot. If we erase a key object at the moment it plays a part in an event, major or minor, the ripples begin. And this is not merely an alternate timeline. The object at that moment in time is erased throughout all potential timelines. That’s what I meant when I said used up.”

“What do you mean when you say ripples?” Marak’s eyes had narrowed. He was honing in on everything she said.

“Well, there’s a story behind that word,” said Dani. “I have a lot of things to share with you guys, actually, not the least of which is where I was last night and what I learned there.”

“The moonlit walk?” asked Kat, smiling.

“The moonlit walk, yes.” Dani laughed. “But not just that. The most important thing I want to tell you about is that it might be possible to do exactly what you told me you wanted, back in the lab. Put the world right again. But how do you really feel about that?”

Kat answered slowly. “I said before that it would feel like giving up my memories so some other Kat could have her son back. But as wonderful as those memories are”—she squeezed Marak’s hand—“I watched that other Kat, and she felt like me. This world has felt wrong to me for a long time, in ways that I couldn’t put my finger on. I thought it was just that we really wanted a baby and couldn’t have one, even though we tried so hard. But other people go through that too, and I’d be stupid to think that everybody else’s difficulties were because of some time disturbance somewhere.”

Dani interrupted. “And they aren’t. This is the only one that has occurred of this significance.”

“You can tell that?” asked Marak.

“Yes. I’ll tell you more later. Go on, Kat.”

“When I sat there in that observation box, the things I saw felt right in the same way some of the things I’ve lived feel
wrong
. Not you, Marak. Being with you has always felt right.” She smiled at her husband.

“Likewise, babe. But Dani, I felt the same thing. I wouldn’t feel like I was sacrificing myself for another version of me. I’d feel like I was going back to a life that I was meant to live all along.”

“So I have your blessing to pursue this, both of you?”

“Absolutely,” said Kat.

“You bet,” said Marak.

Just then, Dani looked up and saw Anders at a table across the room. He had probably seen her with company and hadn’t wanted to interrupt. She gestured toward him. “That’s Anders. I want you two to meet him. Finished eating?”

They were, so they picked up their trays and dropped them off on their way over to his table. Kat and Marak hung back to let Dani go first.

Anders looked up, then quickly dropped his eyes back down to his food.

“Anders? Are you okay?”

“Dani, I can’t talk to you,” he muttered.

“What?” she dropped her voice. “Why?”

“Just leave, please. They’re watching me. They have something on my brother, and I can’t let them ruin his life. I wouldn’t care if it was me. You understand?” He looked up at her, just for a second, but she could read the agony in his eyes.

She nodded, then moved away quickly.

She was fuming when she got to Kat and Marak. Kat knew her too well to ask why. Dani would talk when she got some semblance of control back.

Dani was expected to see them past the security gate before she went back to work. They walked through the big doors and let the irisscan check them and open the exit gate.

Finally, Dani spoke. “They got to him.”

“How?” asked Kat.

“They’re blackmailing him with something they have on his older brother. He and his brother are really close. We have to stop this!” She almost growled as she said the last sentence.

“If the time disturbance can be repaired, will that stop it?” asked Marak. “I’m guessing this blackmailing existed in your reality too?”

Dani pondered that. “I can’t say for sure. I know that before everything changed, there were high school kids clamoring to have their privacy protected, Anders willing to dig to see what he could find, and you, Kat, demonstrating outside the institute every weekday, rain or shine. So I think there was some concern, yes. But I don’t know how far it went.”

“Then we have two possibilities,” Marak continued. “Either it didn’t exist, and reality fixed means no more blackmail, or it did exist, and fixing it here won’t have any effect on the correct reality. Either way, whatever we do here won’t help us there. Am I right?”

He was making perfect sense. Dani nodded.

“I have another question, in that case,” said Marak. “Will we remember anything from this reality’s last nine years, and more specifically, from these last three days, if the timestream is repaired?”