A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (29 page)

“That’s good timing,” Dani answered. “I can hide while everyone else is leaving.”

The waiter stepped out from behind the counter. He made his way through the tables toward them.

“Looks like our order,” said Kat. “Shall we forget about this, and enjoy this last lunch?”

Dani nodded as the waiter served them their sandwiches.

“I wonder if you’d do me a favor,” Kat said.

“Of course. What do you want?”

“Will you tell me more about my son?”

SEEBAK LABORATORY, Vashon Island, WA. 1735, Tuesday, June 13, 2215.

After work, Dani called to confirm that Lexil had the device ready, then went straight to the tube stop. The rush hour crush of riders there ensured that her car would be filled on the trip to Vashon. Seven of them boarded with her.

Wait, seven? She frowned. Tube cars only held six people. When had they put this larger car into the rotation? It didn’t look all that new.

Maybe she was just being more observant than she usually was. Her senses were heightened by the realization that this timestream had only hours left before it dissolved into the other. She noticed little things that would normally escape her. Quick glances between fellow travelers communicated in seconds. The precise duration before breaking eye contact and the way they sat at angles to avoid facing each other spoke volumes without words. The ride, they all knew, would be a silent one. One of her companions wore a faint scent of a perfume that smelled of spring bouquets. Another had a scuff on his right shoe. A third tapped his knee nervously to some internal rhythm.

Would any of these things have been true in the real timestream? Would any have been different?

By the time she got to the lab, the evening felt surreal.

Lexil felt it too; she could tell. When he opened the door, his usual smile was replaced by a solemn expression. With a nod and a gesture, he invited her in and they walked back toward his work area.

Doc looked up to acknowledge her arrival, but remained silent. A common awareness left their thoughts unexpressed, but nevertheless understood. Their sense of the magnitude of this thing they were doing fought words and invited only silence.

The truth that none of them would say was that nothing they did tonight, aside from acquiring the device, could have any real significance. It would all be erased in less than twenty-four hours. There was no point to experiencing relationship, furthering friendship, or—as much as two of them might want it—encouraging intimacy. Nothing mattered except this work they were engaged in.

She hated that part.

Then she remembered Jored, and felt ashamed. In just a few days, she had gone from thinking about him constantly to being almost willing to relegate him to warm memories, memories that she shared with no other person in the world. Her conversation with Kat at lunch had helped her feel his loss again. Truly, she would do anything to save her little bud.

All these thoughts tumbled through her head as she followed Lexil through the lab, no more than a few steps behind him. Suddenly, she hit her knee on a small table that inexplicably sat where he had walked seconds before. She stumbled and dropped her worktablet and all her papers.

“Ow!” she said involuntarily, breaking the silence and rubbing her knee.

Lexil turned. “What happened?”

She picked up her things and gestured toward the table. “Was that there a moment ago?”

“No! I would have had to walk right through it.”

Suddenly, Dani remembered the way the furniture was moved in her apartment, the changes she thought she had seen in the clock tower, the extra seats in the tube car.

Lexil was already checking the monitors. “It’s accelerating. The disturbances are small, but they are happening much more frequently. And when they are noticed, as this one was, they cause more ripples.” He made some quick projections. “This could become unstable. The damping forces aren’t powerful enough to keep up.”

“Unstable? What would that mean?”

“Causality could be completely flipped on its head. That table was there, but nothing caused it to be there. Imagine if that sort of thing were to happen to you so often that you start expecting it. Now imagine that it happens to everyone, and it’s not just tables, but rooms, houses, office buildings.”

“That would cause a lot of confusion.”

“And it might also affect natural features like lakes, hills, islands, continents.”

She stared at him. “Are we talking about the end of the world?”

“Could be.”

How could they be talking about this so calmly? The surreal feeling persisted, insulating Dani from the hugeness of it all. “How much time do we have to work with?” she asked.

“Probably months. Worst case, a little less than a month,” he said.

She swallowed. “But no big deal, right?”

He stood up and put his hands on her shoulders. “Dani. We get do-overs, remember? We’re going to fix this. We’re going to figure our way through any difficulties. What would happen to this timestream in the next several months is just theoretical. It’ll never happen.”

He kept his hands on her shoulders, searching her expression, until she nodded. “I know. I just don’t have any experience with saving the world.”

He grinned. “You and me both. C’mon. Let’s go get that device. And then, I think, dinner will be ready, if you care to join us.”

“I hadn’t even thought about eating.” She realized she wasn’t hungry. “Honestly, I think I’m too wound up to eat. I’ll go in and give my apologies to Doc, but then would you mind if I just saw myself out?”

It was hard to explain, but she had to narrow her focus to just the job that lay before her. So much depended on her success the next day. Her emotions had been wrenching her back and forth, and she couldn’t afford that kind of ambivalence any more.

His expression showed that wasn’t at all what he was hoping. “Okay. If you’re sure?”

She nodded.

“I’ve got the device in the library. What time are you going to be using it?”

“Just after lunch. We need to make sure all the scanners are back online.” She followed him to retrieve the device. They walked around a big world globe. Had that been there before?

“Kat will be coordinating with the guy who is going to call in the bomb threat?”

“Yes. She wondered if you and Doc would like to come to their place, since none of you can actually be inside the institute with me. She invited her uncle too.” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t see that it matters where people are when I run the program. Everything will change anyway.”

“True, but it might be good to have us all together, in case something unexpected comes up. Here’s the device. Take care of it. We don’t get a second chance,” His tone was somber as he handed it to her. He caught her eyes and held them. Was he talking just about saving the world? Or was he talking about the two of them? Second chance, funny. They wouldn’t even get a first chance.

“You think I don’t know that? What do you think is making me so nervous?” She realized she had snapped at him. She softened her tone. “Hey, I’m sorry. I just think I need to be alone for a while tonight.”

He opened his mouth and then closed it without saying anything. Finally, he nodded, and she brushed past him to find Doc in the kitchen.

“Hey, Dani. Are you going to join us for dinner?” he asked cheerfully. He was chopping fresh cilantro.

“No, Doc. I just came to say goodbye, and thanks for everything.”

He put down his knife and ran his hands through the rinse-and-dry near the sink. “You’re leaving? Come here and give an old man a hug.”

She set down her belongings and returned his hug. It was big and warm and comforting, but just for a few seconds. Then it was done. She sighed.

“Are you all right?” Doc searched her expression. “Do you want to talk about it?”

No. No, she didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to ignore it. She wanted to do her job, and do it well, and save the whole world somehow. And in the process, never see this delightful old man and his adopted son again.

Change the subject. Talk about something else. She glanced around. Lexil’s notes lay near her hand. She patted them. “Lexil made copies of his notes for me. I want to read them, but I can’t help thinking how useless it is to learn anything. If only we could take what we know and transfer it to the other reality!”

Doc raised his eyebrows. “You’d have to stay in the observation box while the insertion program was running. You’re not—”

She shook her head. “No, no. I’m not stupid. But if there was some way—” Her gaze lit on her copy of Lexil’s notes. That gave her an idea. Could it work?

“There isn’t, Dani. It’s too dangerous. Don’t even think about it.”

“Okay, but what if it wasn’t a person?”

He looked up at her sharply. “What do you mean?”

She pointed to the notes. “What if it was, say, a stack of papers? If we left these in an observation box for the other Lexil to find, would he—and the other you—understand what they meant?”

Doc pursed his lips and squinted one eye while he thought. Then he nodded. “That could work. And our other selves would most certainly be able to understand it. We just wouldn’t understand where they came from. Which parts did he copy?”

“The parts that show that matter is being removed from the past.”

“That is a wonderful idea! It gives the other timestream, the right one, a fighting chance.”

“What do you mean? Is it in danger too?”

“Yes, of course. If the procedures continue as before, it’s only a matter of time before something important is removed, and the timestream is diverted again. But in another such occurrence, there might not be a Dani to notice the difference.”

The lighting changed subtly. The wall color switched from gray to a soft yellow.

“We need to leave it here,” she said, “in one of your sensor boxes. Whichever one you would notice first.”

“We check them all every day. Anything inside their domes would be obvious immediately. This will work! It has to!” He frowned. “Of course, opening a sensor dome will affect the readings slightly. You’d have to do it quickly. Get Lexil to show you how.”

She gathered up the notes and her worktablet and went to find Lexil. He had left the library. Probably in the lab. The globe had moved over by the window. Now that she knew what was going on, the changes weren’t so alarming.

She glanced outside. A tiny bird banked its wings to land on a branch that, abruptly, wasn’t there any more. It fell several inches before recovering enough to fly off and find another perch. The changes were definitely accelerating.

Would the notes be enough to warn the other Lexil of this danger? Why not spell it out? She found a pen on a table. Her handwriting was rough, unpracticed, but she could certainly leave a message. What should she say? “Hello from another reality”? No. “Your world has been changed, and changed back, based on the observations in these pages.” Better. She wrote that.

What else? “RIACH must be warned.” No. That was too broad. The message might go to people who wouldn’t understand or who wouldn’t act. Who in RIACH would care and have the power to do anything about it? Kat’s Uncle Royce? Dr. Brant? No, neither of them had the kind of pull to stop anything, from what she could tell. It was the blackmailer who would need to be stopped, and it would take someone outside the institute to do it. Marak. Marak would follow the data through to the end. And he’d need the financial information too. “Contact Marak Wallace and Detective Tom Rayes to stop this,” she wrote.

There. That should do it. She started to put the pen down, but then, smiling, she scrawled one more line, down near the bottom of the page. It couldn’t hurt.

She went to find Lexil.

WALLACE HOME, Lower Queen Anne, Seattle, WA. 1145, Wednesday, June 14, 2215.

“Things are crazy out there,” said Lexil, as he and Doc arrived at the Wallace house. “We came in the helicar. When I stepped out, a parrot flew by my nose. Oh, and your irisscan has disappeared.”

“What?” Kat asked. “A parrot?”

Doc nodded. “The changes to the environment caused by the disturbances are accelerating. Good thing we’re doing this today. In another day or two, we might not recognize things, much less be able to count on them staying in place.

“How’s Dani?” Lexil asked. “Have you heard from her?”

“She called on one of her mandatory breaks,” said Kat. “Everything is on schedule at the institute. She’ll be eating in the cafeteria. She’s just waiting for the threat and the evacuation order.”

Doc cleared his throat. “Dani said you invited Royce.”

“Yes, I did.” Kat nodded. “I wanted to include him, since he was the first one to take all this seriously. I’ve talked with him a few times in the last few days. He’s been very interested in how our investigations of the timestream differences have been coming along. He was horrified to learn that the institute’s equipment was responsible for the shift, and he was relieved to hear you were helping. He thinks very highly of you.”

Lexil looked around. No Royce. Well, they had arrived fifteen minutes before lunchtime. Probably wasn’t here yet. “When will he arrive?” he asked.