A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (25 page)

“Thanks. I feel welcome.”

“Where did we leave off, last time you were here? Oh, I remember. Were you able to talk with Marielle Brant?”

“Oh, yeah. We met after work and talked really quietly on back-to-back benches.” She paused, remembering her impression of the missing clock tower. Should she mention that? Maybe later. “I don’t think anyone observing could have told we were having a conversation. You were right, the word ‘Vashon’ was enough to let her know I was contacting her on your behalf.”

“Good. I thought it would be.”

“We also figured out a way for her to signal me if she had something to share, or vice versa. I offered to talk to someone on her behalf—I was thinking Royce—but she implied that he couldn’t help. I’m still wondering if I should go to him anyway, though.”

“I think she’s probably right. He most likely has very little influence, and if word got back to the blackmailer that he knows about her troubles, it could cause her more difficulties. She’s been told not to talk to anybody.”

“It might not be a good thing for Royce either,” suggested Lexil.

Dr. Seeback agreed. “You’re right. It might hurt Royce’s ability to be useful there. I think he’s had to back off a lot to be able to keep his position on the board. He plays the part of a benign, grandfatherly adviser, respected mostly because he seldom offers an opinion.”

“So I won’t go to him.” Too bad, she thought. There really was nothing she could do to ease the pressure on Dr. Brant.

“You can still help her by passing messages to us,” said Lexil. “But remember, anything we do together here will probably not have been done at all once we fix the timestream. That applies to any contact you have with her, also, because you wouldn’t have met with her if you hadn’t talked to us first.”

“I was talking to Kat and Marak about that just yesterday,” Dani said. “We had some ideas, but I said I’d ask you about them first.”

“What did you tell them about me?”

“Just that you worked with Dr. Seebak. I wasn’t sure what they knew about, well, about whose son you are.”

“They don’t know anything about that, unless Royce told them. I don’t know what he’s mentioned,” said Dr. Seebak.

“Thanks for being cautious, Dani,” said Lexil. “I really appreciate it.”

His smile was so warm, it was almost tangible. It felt like a hug, and Dani fought a sudden impulse to hug him back, to hold onto him and tell him he mattered to her. She wondered at herself. She barely knew him. Why was she drawn to him this way?

Lexil was oblivious to her inner conversation. “What did you want to ask me?”

Dani gestured to a chair, asking wordlessly if she could sit, and Lexil picked up a notebook from the seat to make room for her. Focus, girl, she told herself. She cleared her throat. “We were talking about all the evidence we’re gathering on the blackmail activity at the institute. It’s pretty pointless if we can’t access it in the restored timestream, so we were wondering whether some of the investigations might have been done there too.”

“Nothing will have been done that would depend on us meeting you; we know that. I wouldn’t have gone to find you if you hadn’t been trailing time disturbance ripples wherever you went. In the restored timestream, we…won’t have met.” He held her gaze for a few seconds, then glanced down at the notebook with an attempt at nonchalance that didn’t quite ring true. “This notebook, for example.”

“What’s in the notebook?” She decided to ignore the hidden emotion, whatever that was about. It was too much to think that he was drawn to her too, despite Kat’s teasing about the moonlit walk. She had no illusions of romance here. Lexil was fascinated by Dani-the-time-disturbance, and nothing more.

He was flipping through the notebook. It looked ordinary enough on the outside. Among all the other notebooks visible in the lab—most of them in a pile around Lexil’s work area—this one wasn’t anything special. It was a nondescript gray with a black binding. The only thing that marked it was his name on the front cover, and the words, “Timestream Data.”

“Most of what is in here is about the ripples and blips that have occurred since your event. A few pages in the beginning are about things that stemmed from other disturbances, but almost everything you see here will not exist in the original, ‘right’ timestream. I presume that the other Lexil will have done other research in the meantime—he’s pretty obsessed with research, to be honest—but it won’t be the same stuff that’s in here.”

“What all have you discovered directly as a result of ‘my event,’ as you call it?”

“The biggest thing is that the VAO converters can actually remove objects from the timestream. Evidence that it needs to be stopped.” He laughed wryly. “I’ve got all that really vital stuff boxed in red penstrokes, for all the good it will do when it’s gone.”

“So none of that will be available after we fix it.”

“Right. Remove the original disturbance, and you don’t have the evidence that it causes any damage, so there’s nothing to write in my notebook.”

“Okay, so we lose that. What won’t be lost?”

He thought about it. “We will still have our sensors, and much of the evidence from past ripples. Kat and Marak’s non-meeting wasn’t the first incident; it was just the one that caused the biggest changes.”

“And the Dani that hasn’t been alarmed by Jored’s absence will still have data files from Anders, ideas from talking with Kat and Marak, and the research the high school kids are going to be doing tomorrow. I think all that would have happened even if I hadn’t met you two.”

“We could check some of those events to see,” Lexil said.

Dr. Seebak had been listening quietly to their conversation. “You young people work on that. I’ll get back to my research over here.” He dove back down among his screens and notebooks.

“I can’t check on your meetings with Kat and Marak. Whenever you meet with them, there are ripples.”

“Because I always played with Jored when I saw them.”

“That would do it. So we can’t assume or confirm any information you might have gained from those visits. But let’s try the meeting with the high schoolers. When did it happen?” He sat down opposite the viewwall, waving at it to bring up the time ripples view. A few quick strokes and he had zeroed in on the school.

“I met with them yesterday, from 10 o’clock till a little before noon.”

Lexil narrowed the third axis to that interval. There were no blips, only a very faint green shimmer. “Looks good. That meeting would have happened anyway.”

“Okay, so, if my other-timestream self would know some of this, I’ll know it when I get there too, right?”

“Yes, you should.”

“But anything I’ve learned from you and anything I’ve researched because of conversations we’ve had, I won’t remember. Which brings me to the idea Kat and Marak and I had. We were thinking that when we do the restoration, I could stay inside the observation box with some key pieces of information and…”

Lexil was shaking his head, but it was Dr. Seebak who stood up and spoke. “You must not!” he said, urgently.

Dani blinked. “Why not?”

“While we were experimenting yesterday, something a little unexpected happened.” Lexil gestured toward the opposite corner of the lab. “I should show you our setup later. We were working on replacing objects that had been removed from the timestream. At first, we kept the environment exactly the same, whether the object was there or not. The only things we changed were the time settings: the beginning of the replacement and the duration. But when we got that part figured out—”

“You solved it? Does that mean we can definitely repair the timestream?” Dani caught her breath, wanting to make sure she had heard correctly. Yesterday, she’d been talking with Kat and Marak, tossing around ideas about how to make the investigation move forward after the timestream repair. They’d kept it matter-of-fact, casually accepting the possibility of a miracle. Given that, it was hard to explain the lump she now felt in her chest. As she realized it would actually happen, an unexpected feeling of yearning flooded over her. She would get to see Jored again, hear his giggles, hold him in her arms.

Dr. Seebak had walked over to join them. He put a hand on her shoulder. “He found a way to make it happen, Dani.”

Lexil nodded. “The only thing left is to automate it, so it can be done on your machines with a simple installation program.”

She closed her eyes, overwhelmed with gratitude.

They gave her a moment to recover. That was nice of them, but she wanted to know more. Lexil had said something unusual happened. Would it interfere with getting Jored back? Would it complicate things? “Lexil, what were you saying? What was the unexpected thing you going to tell me about before?”

“Well, we started making changes to the environment, keyed to whether the object was there or not. We wanted to simulate the circumstances that surrounded our real problem. Let’s go back there so I can show you.”

As they walked back to the corner of the lab, he continued. “I set up a mechanism that would eject a marble through a slot, but only if the object was resting on this plate during the time interval I had specified in the program. It worked.”

They had reached the experimental set up. Dani was amused by the multiple spray paint patterns on the panels arranged against the wall. They almost looked artistic. There were several dozen, some with full spray patterns, some with empty spots in the center. One had a scorched area, with parts if it burned completely through the panel. She pointed to it. “Is this the unexpected one? It looks a little alarming.”

“No, we solved that one. Good thing, or it would have been alarming indeed. You’d have had a burned padlock, and maybe a burned gate as well! That only happens when the object is sent back to a time where it already exists.”

“What’s the concern, then?”

“The concern is with the time ripples. We wanted to find out what happened to a secondary object—or person, but we didn’t try that—that had been displaced because of the first object’s existence or non-existence. We placed the object on this plate.” As he talked, he pointed. “Its weight triggered this mechanism here, and the marble was released through this slot, to fall into this cup.”

“Okay.” Dani was following fine, so far.

“We left it there, then used your technique”—he handed her a copy of the research paper she had helped with—“to blank it from the timestream.”

As she took the paper, she noticed that it was heavily underlined and highlighted. “Glad I could be of some assistance!” she said.

“Oh, no doubt! Excellent work, by the way. Not sure what part of the research was yours, but it’s pretty impressive to have your name on a paper like this as an undergrad.”

“I was right in there, in the thick of it.”

“Good job! Anyway, the marble was in the cup when the object was there. Later, when we blanked the object, the marble was up above, unreleased from its initial position. After I restored the object, the marble was back in the cup again.”

“Sounds good, so far. What’s the catch?”

“Just to change things up a bit, we moved the release mechanism over here, so the marble would be released into the chronetic shielding of the time sensor device—same environment as your observation boxes, at the institute.”

“And?”

“Initially, the marble was in the cup, inside the shielding. After the blank, it was up above, behind the slot. But when we replaced the object, we found two marbles, one in the cup, and one up above.”

“Oh! Because the marble inside the shielding wasn’t affected by the change you made when you replaced the object.”

“Exactly. And it turned out that both marbles were altered in their basic structure, although we aren’t exactly sure how. Something to do with the Law of Conservation of Matter. They each only half-existed, in a sense. When we measured their masses, each was only half as massive and half as dense as it had been before.” He looked at her earnestly, and he spoke very deliberately. “If that were a person in the box, we have no idea what could come of the duplication. We wouldn’t want that to happen to you.”

“Probably not a good way to lose weight?” She made an attempt at levity.

“Dani, don’t.”

“Not funny?” She looked at him sheepishly.

“Look,” he said. “I’m just going to be blunt with you, no matter how you may feel about it. You can’t take this lightly. You’re going to be doing something that could be dangerous, and a lot depends on it. Jored’s existence. The integrity of the whole timestream. It’s a big deal, okay?”

“I know that!” She wasn’t trying to make it seem less important. What had made him so sensitive all of a sudden? Wait. What was this he was saying?

“…already fighting this sense of loss because I won’t know you—won’t remember even meeting you!—after we do this thing. I know you feel nothing for me, but I keep hoping, if you keep yourself alive, we might encounter each other in the other timestream too. We might have time to get to know each other, to see if…if…” He stopped suddenly, looking uncomfortable. “I really didn’t mean to say all that.”

“Uh…I don’t know how to respond to that.” A sense of loss? Apparently, she had been wrong about him being attracted! But here he was, saying anything they found here was bound to end, and in the same breath saying he didn’t want it to.