Shadows Out of Time

Every Path Taken NICHOLAS KAUFMANN

“Can a human brain continue to function outside the body?”

In her seat in the lecture hall, Emily Bannerman looked up from her laptop, her curiosity piqued by the strangeness of the question one of her classmates had asked.

Professor Vaughan, a bearded, slightly balding man in his late forties with a taste for the argyle sweaters that seemed to be the unofficial faculty uniform at Vermont’s Middlewood University, had just wrapped up his lecture. “As an organ, the brain is only three pounds of tissue, but it’s responsible for everything that makes you you.” As he spoke he aimed his laser pointer like a magician wielding his wand at the SMART board behind him, where a detailed cross-section of a human brain was projected on the screen. “It houses all your memories, everything you’ve learned, your hopes and dreams, everything you love and hate. In essence, you are your brain, and your brain is you.”

Next to Emily, her boyfriend Sean thumbed a text message covertly into his phone and hit send. It appeared silently in a window on the screen of her laptop. Can I come over again tonight? She glared at him, annoyed at the intrusion, but he grinned and his gray eyes flashed. Those sharp, inquisitive eyes were the first thing she’d noticed about him, and they were still hard to say no to. She nodded, then forced herself to focus on the notes she’d been taking. She couldn’t let herself get distracted. It was important she pass Professor Vaughan’s pre-med neuroscience class. She’d kept her nose to the grindstone all year making sure her grades remained good enough to get into a decent medical school after graduation and she wasn’t about to let it slip now.

Professor Vaughan glanced at his watch. “We’ve got a few minutes left. Are there any questions?”

The students in the lecture hall looked at each other as though daring anyone to delay their escape. No one ever asked questions.

And then she heard it.

“Can a human brain continue to function outside of the body?”

But when Emily looked up from her laptop, Professor Vaughan was still looking expectantly at his students, and the students were still looking around in the hopes of being dismissed early. It was as though no one had spoken.

“No questions? All right, then,” Professor Vaughan said, switching off the SMART board. “For next time, read chapter six in Brain, Mind, and Behavior. You’re dismissed.”

Emily frowned. She could have sworn she’d heard a voice. A woman’s voice.

I can’t see anything. Everything is dark.

I try to blink, but I have no eyes.

I try to listen, but I have no ears.

It’s as if I don’t exist. But I do. I’m here. I’m real.

Where am I? Is anyone else here? These are the questions I want to shout, but I have no mouth.

As a senior faculty member at Middlewood, Professor Vaughan had his own office far from the faculty building the other teachers had to share. It was inside a small stone cottage that sat at the far end of the student parking lot, a private office he’d decorated with shelves of books, framed degrees, and an antique, single-lensed brass microscope from the 19th century that Emily thought was beautiful in its simplicity. She felt bad about taking up the entirety of the professor’s office hours after the lecture, but no other students came by and Vaughan didn’t seem to mind. She’d been taking notes on her laptop all through their discussion but had stopped halfway through when she noticed the door in the wall. Now she couldn’t stop looking at it. Every time she looked up from her computer at Professor Vaughan, she found herself sneaking peeks at the door, squinting at it, trying to figure it out.

It was a perfectly ordinary-looking door. There was nothing special about it, except for the fact that she could have sworn it had never been there before. What’s more, she couldn’t figure out where it could possibly lead. There was nothing on the other side of the wall except the little cottage’s stone exterior. If she were to open that door, it would lead directly outside, but even that didn’t make sense. There was only one door into this building. There had only ever been one door.

“Miss Bannerman, are you paying attention?”

“Yes, of course,” Emily said, turning back to him. What was wrong with her? She needed to focus. Except she was sure she’d never seen that door before.

“Good.” Professor Vaughan leaned forward, elbows on his desk, fingers laced together. “Anyway, this project I’m talking about could be a very important opportunity for you. You would receive extra credit for it, obviously, but it’s also the kind of addition to your C.V. that medical schools find very appealing in candidates. When I was presented with the opportunity to bring in students from my class, I thought of you immediately. You’re one of my brightest pupils, Miss Bannerman. I’ve seen how hard you work to keep up your GPA. I think you’ve got a good mind — the right kind of mind for this project. If you’re interested, of course.”

She was. She’d always had a strong intellectual curiosity, driven since a young age to understand the world around her, how things worked, how things connected. It was why she was pursuing a medical degree. There was so much to learn about the human body, and especially the human mind, which often seemed to her as boundless and infinite as the cosmos itself. And Professor Vaughan was right, this did sound like something that could give her an edge when she started sending out applications.

“What exactly is the project?” she asked.

“I can’t divulge much at this time,” he said. “There’s a nondisclosure agreement you’ll have to sign, and then I can fill you in. I just need to know if you’re interested, and then we can make an appointment to get started.”

“I am, absolutely.” Her mind sorted through all the exciting possibilities. There was no shortage of topics to study in the field of neurology, or diseases to better understand, from cerebral palsy to autism, Rett syndrome, neurodegeneration…

“Excellent,” Vaughan said, leaning back in his chair. “However, I must ask you not to mention this to anyone. Best to consider the NDA already in effect, all right?”

“No problem,” she said. “I can sign it right now if you want.”

“Not yet. I’ll contact you when we’re ready to begin.”

He pushed his chair back and stood up, indicating that their conversation was over. Emily gathered her belongings, rose, and slung her backpack over her shoulder. On the professor’s desk was a framed photo showing a pretty, brown-haired woman smiling for the camera while two small boys clung shyly at her legs. Vaughan’s family, she supposed, although it was hard to imagine her stodgy, sweater-wrapped professor chasing after two little boys—

“Good day, Miss Bannerman,” he said, interrupting her thoughts. He was holding the office door open, letting in the cool air from outside.

As she turned to go, her eye caught the door in the wall again.

“Professor,” she ventured, “where does that door go?”

He looked at her for what seemed like a beat too long and smiled thinly. “Nowhere. It’s just a small closet for the heating pipes. Why?”

“No reason,” she said, but she thought his answer was odd. She could imagine an access panel in the wall to reach the pipes, but a door?

“You’re a liar!”

Emily straightened. The voice had sounded close, as though it were in the office with them, but nobody else was there.

“Is something the matter, Miss Bannerman?”

“No, everything’s fine.” She gave a quick smile and hurried out. She’d heard a voice, she was sure of it. The same woman’s voice she’d heard in the classroom. The same voice apparently no one else could hear.

I’m cracking up, she thought. She wouldn’t be the first premed student to buckle under the pressure. But something about the voice seemed so real.

That night, in her dorm room, with her roommate gone for the night, Sean kissed her passionately and backed her onto her bed. “I’ve been thinking about this all day,” he said.

“Hold on,” she told him as he kissed her neck. “I have to tell you something. Professor Vaughan asked me to work with him on a new project. He wouldn’t tell me what it is, though.”

He looked up at her. “Yeah, he asked me, too. Something about the brain, I think. I’m supposed to drop by his office tomorrow to sign something.”

“Tomorrow?” she asked. That was fast. Why hadn’t Professor Vaughan asked her to come back tomorrow, too? She felt a little irritated that he’d already made plans for Sean to sign the papers but not her. But then Sean started kissing her again, and any disappointment she felt was quickly forgotten.

What’s left of my body if I have no eyes, no ears, no mouth? Do I have any physical form at all?

Now that the shock of finding myself here has passed, I’m starting to remember bits and pieces. The body on the table, the hypodermic needle, that grotesque, inhuman thing hiding in the shadows…

Oh God, this can’t be real, can it?

Emily expected Sean to come see her right after his meeting with Professor Vaughan. She was eager to hear all about the mysterious project they would be working on. Even if he’d signed the NDA, she knew she’d get the information out of him eventually. Sean was never very good at keeping things from her. She waited all day, checking her phone for text messages and emails. She ate lunch and dinner alone in the dining hall, waiting for him to show. By nine o’clock that night, she sent what had to be her fifteenth text.

where r u? seriously, r u ok?

She stayed awake as long as she could, clutching the phone like a lifeline, but no reply came. She drifted off toward dawn, woke again just a couple of hours later, and immediately checked her phone. Still nothing.

What if he was sick? She imagined Sean in his bed, wrapped in covers, sweating with fever, his phone somewhere out of reach. But a visit to his dorm room revealed a bed that hadn’t been slept in, and Sean’s roommate hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t come to her room, and he hadn’t returned to his own. So where was he?

In the lecture hall, Emily sat beside Sean’s empty seat. Professor Vaughan stood at the front of the hall, reading the students’ names off his attendance sheet. Emily glanced around nervously. Was Sean sitting somewhere else? Why would he do that?

Her mind was a thousand miles away when Professor Vaughan called her name. He had to say it twice before she replied. “Here.” He checked her name off, then moved on. Emily focused, listening for the name Sean Walsh, both anticipating it and dreading it as Vaughan moved through the alphabet.

“Prisha Vidyarthi.”

“Here.”

“Jacqueline Wright.”

“Here.”

Emily stiffened. He’d skipped right past Sean’s name. That wasn’t something he would do by mistake. Sean had disappeared yesterday, the same day he was supposed to meet with Vaughan, and today the professor had purposely omitted Sean’s name while taking attendance. He had to know where Sean was, or what had happened to him.

After class, Emily got stuck in the swell of students exiting the lecture hall. By the time she made it outside, Professor Vaughan was gone. She checked her watch. His office hours didn’t start for another hour, but this was too important to wait. She hurried through the student parking lot to Professor Vaughan’s office and was about to knock on the door when his raised voice came from inside, making her pause.

“But you don’t need another,” he said. “You have me, don’t you? You promised!”

A harsh, buzzing whisper came in reply, startling her. She took a step backward.

Professor Vaughan’s voice came again. “I’ve done everything you asked. Why do I have to wait?”

More buzzing came in reply, but it sounded different this time. Lower in tone and volume, like a conspiratorial whisper, or a warning. A moment passed, and then the office door opened slightly. Vaughan filled the gap in the doorway, a thin smile creasing his face. He didn’t look surprised to see her.

“Hello, Miss Bannerman.”

“Oh,” she said. Her hand was still lifted in anticipation of knocking, and she lowered it slowly. “How did you know I was—?”

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“It’s about Sean,” she said. “I can’t find him anywhere, and he won’t answer my texts. I know he had an appointment with you yesterday. Did he show up?”

“He did.” Professor Vaughan sounded colder than usual, annoyed by her interruption. But what had she interrupted? What was that strange buzzing she’d heard? “Unfortunately, Mr. Walsh had very disappointing news. He told me he was dropping out and returning home immediately. A family emergency.”

She blinked in confusion. That wasn’t possible. He would have told her. Besides, she’d been to his dorm room and all his belongings were still there. She looked up at Professor Vaughan, who blocked the entrance to his office like a bouncer who didn’t want her in the club, and realized he was lying. It wasn’t even a very good lie. It was easily disproved, the kind of lie that someone who didn’t have much practice at lying would tell.

Another realization struck her then, worse than the last one. Professor Vaughan was lying because he knew something. Because he’d done something. Panic made her chest go tight, but she couldn’t let on that she knew he was lying.

Despite her efforts, he must have seen it in her face because he opened the door wider and said, “Why don’t you come inside?”

“Um, no thanks, I really should get going…” She hated how shaky her voice was, how scared she sounded. She wished her feet would move.

“I insist.” Professor Vaughan took her by the arm and pulled her inside. He closed the door behind her, and she watched with a lump in her throat as he locked it.

“I was just wondering about Sean, that’s all,” she said, her voice rising with fear. “It’s — it’s not important, really.”

She felt tears well up in her eyes. He was going to kill her, she was sure of it. He’d killed Sean, and now it was her turn.

“I suppose we can move up the time frame,” Professor Vaughan said. “They certainly won’t mind a change in schedule.”

“What?” She’d half-expected him to strangle her, but he walked to his desk instead. “What schedule?”

He opened the desk drawer and pulled out a gun. Emily gasped and froze where she stood. Oh God, I was right, he’s going to kill me! Tears welled up again and spilled down her cheeks. She knew she should scream for help, it was the first thing they taught in every self-defense class, but the only sound she could squeeze out was a choked sob. Even if she could scream, who would hear her? They were all the way at the end of the parking lot. He could shoot her right here and no one would know.

“I’m sorry, Miss Bannerman,” he said, coming around the desk toward her. “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.”

She took a step back, her breath hitching in her throat, her hands raised defensively.

“When they first came to me, I was as scared as you are now,” he said. “They looked so…inhuman. But I learned very quickly that they’re intelligent, sophisticated. Their knowledge and technology are light years ahead of ours.” He chuckled. “I suppose that’s apt, considering how far they traveled to come here. But they’re scientists, just like me. It turned out I had no reason to fear them.”

Fear who? It sounded like he’d gone crazy. Was that why he’d killed Sean? Was that why he was going to kill her, too? He turned away from her to look at the picture of his family on the desk. She didn’t give herself time to think twice. She spun and reached for the lock on the door.

“Don’t,” Professor Vaughan said.

She flinched, put her hands up, and turned back to him.

“Did I ever tell you what happened to my wife? To my children?” he asked. Emily glanced at the framed photograph, the smiling woman, the two young boys. “It was five years ago. We were driving home after eating dinner in town. I swerved to miss a deer that had wandered into the road, but I lost control of the car.” He closed his eyes against some awful memory he was reliving. She thought about knocking the gun out of his hand or trying to grab it, but she didn’t have the courage, and then his eyes were open again. “I was the only survivor.

I walked away with nothing but a few cuts and bruises. The doctors said I was lucky, but I didn’t feel it. I went to church every day after the accident, looking for comfort, for answers, but there weren’t any. Everyone said it was a miracle that I survived, that it was an act of God, but what kind of god would kill my wife and two innocent children? I decided if something this terrible, this wrong, could happen, maybe there was a way to undo it. I read ancient texts that very few people have ever read, tomes filled with powerful, forgotten science and rituals, looking for a way to fix it, but nothing worked. I prayed to gods whose names you’ve never heard, but my pleas fell on deaf ears.”

He looked at the gun in his hand as though he were contemplating turning it on himself. She got the sense it wasn’t the first time.

“And then they came, dropping out of the sky like an answer to my prayers. They told me there was a way to change what happened. A way to go back and save them. They told me about a temple at the very center of the universe. Arneth-Zin, the place where all the timelines converge. Within that temple is a sentry, a watcher, someone who’s seen all of time unfold, everything that ever happened or will happen. Someone who’s studied the pattern of time, who knows where the seams are, and who can open those seams and drop me back in so I can change the course of events. So my family can live. They promised to take me to Arneth-Zin, and in return all I had to do was help them collect specimens to bring back to their world. Human specimens.”

Okay, so he really was insane. She could only wonder what he’d done with Sean. Or with his corpse. The thought made her cry again, but Professor Vaughan mistook it for fear and tried to calm her.

“Don’t be frightened, Miss Bannerman, they require living specimens, not dead ones. This gun is only my insurance policy. I have no intention of using it so long as you don’t try to run away. You have nothing to fear from them. They only want to learn. Their scientists and scholars are interested in trading cultural information, but transporting specimens to their world is a problem. Their bodies are perfectly constructed to withstand the cold, airless expanse of space, but our bodies would never survive the trip. Luckily, it’s not our bodies that interest them, it’s our minds. Our knowledge, our philosophies, our cultural memories. All they need are our brains.”

He went back behind the desk and took a syringe out of the drawer. It was already filled with a strange, glowing orange liquid. He pulled the protective cover off the needle with his teeth and spat it out. He came toward her with the syringe in one hand, the gun in the other.

She took a step back, her arms raised in front of her as if she could fend him off. “Don’t hurt me. Please.”

“I assure you there will be no pain,” he said. “They’re truly gifted surgeons, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Their understanding of neuroscience is centuries ahead of ours. They can remove your brain safely and easily. They can keep your brain alive to transport back to their world, where I’m told if you cooperate with them you will be given a new, artificial body.”

She looked desperately for an escape route and saw the door in the wall, the one she’d been so fixated on before. There was no way she could unlock the main door in time, but if the door in the wall wasn’t locked it was her only chance. Maybe it really was just a pipe closet and she would only be cornering herself, but she had to try something. At the very least, she could put something solid between herself and this raving madman. She sprang for the door and grabbed the handle.

“No, don’t!” Professor Vaughan yelled.

She pushed the door open and ran through, but only made it a few steps before the shock of what she saw rooted her in place.

It was a large, brightly lit room, but how could it be here? There was no space in the wall for it, no addition to the outside of the building. She saw an array of strange, humming machines linked by elaborate webs of cords and plugs. On the far wall, shelves were filled with gleaming metal cylinders in neat rows, each about a foot high, their faces marked with three strange, triangular sockets. A vacant space on one shelf marked where a cylinder was missing from the collection.

Sean’s naked body lay on a surgical table in the middle of the room. She nearly collapsed at the sight. The top of his head had been removed, his cranium neatly and bloodlessly opened by an instrument far more advanced than a simple bone saw. She let out a scream when she saw his skull was empty, like a hollowed-out fruit.

Behind her, the professor spoke. “I told you I would deliver the smartest minds in my class, and I’ve kept my end of the bargain. Now take me to Arneth-Zin!”

He wasn’t talking to her. There was someone else in the room. She turned slowly. A dark shape stood partially hidden in the shadows behind the open door. It was the size of a man, but nothing else about it resembled one. She saw a segmented, crustacean shell that sported numerous insectoid appendages, all of which ended in sharp, pointed pincers. On its back was a pair of thin, bat-like wings. Its head was a hideous fleshy mass covered in writhing antennae, which split open and let loose a piercing, angry shriek.

I remember reading about a professor at McGill University in the 1950s who experimented with sensory deprivation. He discovered that prolonged isolation led to anxiety, hallucinations, and madness. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, floating in the dark, but I’m starting to wonder how much time I have left before I lose my mind. Not much longer, I think. It’s already taking everything I’ve got just to stay focused, to keep reminding myself who I am.

But then…something happens.

I feel a collision of sorts. I’m jolted, my sense of balance knocked off-center. On instinct I put out my hands to brace my fall, but I have no hands and there is nothing to fall against.

The impact does more than send me reeling. It shatters my mind into a blazing white supernova, fracturing my consciousness into innumerable pieces and scattering them to the winds of time. I’m back in Professor Vaughan’s lecture hall. I’m back in his office. I’m back in Sean’s arms. I’m a little girl. I’m being born. I’m back in every moment of my past, every second of my history, all at once.

It’s overwhelming, all of it piling up to crush me under its weight. I’ll go mad if I don’t find some way to control it. The supernova is still there in my mind, like an anchor, and as I concentrate on the fiery white void, I discover I can focus on a single moment instead of all of them at once. I reach through the white, and like a miracle I find myself back in that moment, reliving it, but I still remember. I remember everything.

Emily stood before Professor Vaughan’s office door, listening to his voice inside and the harsh, buzzing whisper that came in reply. She understood what those sounds were now. The creature behind the door in the wall. That was how it communicated, making its promises to Professor Vaughan in return for handing over her and Sean. But she’d been given another chance, a do-over, and this time she wouldn’t be caught by surprise. She could stop what had happened to her, make it so that it never happened at all. She just had to make sure things went differently this time.

She pounded on the door. She heard the professor whisper to the creature, give it time to disappear back into that impossible room off the side of the building, and then he opened the door.

“Hello, Miss Bannerman.”

“Oh. How did you know I was—?” She heard the words she’d spoken before, an echo reverberating through time, but this time would be different. This time she wouldn’t cry or freeze up. This time she’d have the upper hand.

Emily pushed past Professor Vaughan into his office and walked right to his desk.

“What are you doing?” Vaughan demanded, hurrying after her.

She opened the drawer, pulled out the gun, and pointed it at him. She wanted him dead for what he did to Sean, what he did — or was about to do — to her, but she hesitated. Her heart jackhammered in her chest. She’d never shot anyone before. Could she do it?

He put his hands up, his Adam’s apple bobbing at his throat. “Miss Bannerman, whatever it is you think you’re doing…”

At the sound of his voice, that pompous, condescending way he called her Miss Bannerman, she had her answer. She pulled the trigger, and the gun jumped in her hand with a loud bang. Professor Vaughan fell to the floor in a spray of red. She ran to the door in the wall and pushed it open.

The room beyond was just as it had been before, with its strange machinery and shelves full of cylinders, with one missing. She understood those cylinders’ dark purpose now. Sean’s body was on the surgical table, his head open and empty, his brain removed and housed in the missing cylinder. She thought of him floating in darkness, a bodiless consciousness just as she had been, or still was, and very nearly forgot the creature hiding behind the door. Emily turned just as it emerged from its hiding place, its head splitting open in that terrible shriek. She pulled the trigger, and the shot blew off a chunk of its eyeless, antennae-laden head, revealing spongy, fungoid flesh within. She screamed, not with terror this time but with righteous fury, and pulled the trigger again and again, blowing off more pieces.

She didn’t feel the sharp object piercing her from behind, so when the long, pointed tip of a pincer came out of her stomach, she stared at it in confusion. There was a harsh buzzing sound at her back, and she realized another creature was in the room, one she hadn’t seen. The gun dropped to the floor. She would have dropped, too, but the pincer through her middle held her upright. It would take a long time to die from this kind of wound, she knew. Long enough for them to harvest her brain, just as they’d done before. She’d failed.

I can see again, though not with my own eyes. Those were left behind on another world. These eyes are artificial, a device with two glass lenses that’s plugged into one of the sockets in my cylinder. Through these lenses, I can see the alien world that Professor Vaughan’s creatures have brought me to. Through a second attached device, one with a metal disc on top, I can hear them speak to each other. They call themselves Mi-Go, and this strange, technologically advanced planetoid at the edge of our solar system is called Yuggoth. Since I arrived, I’ve learned Yuggoth is merely an outpost, not their home world. I don’t know where their home world is, and I get the sense the Mi-Go haven’t seen it in a very long time. Some of them wonder if it still exists.

They communicate in insect-like buzzes and clicks, which the hearing device translates for me. There’s nothing poetic about their language. They speak with cold objective specificity, making no use of allegory or metaphor. Vaughan was right to call them scientists. They’re methodical and precise.

I’ve learned from their conversations that something went wrong on our journey from Earth to Yuggoth. The Mi-Go who was carrying my brain cylinder passed through a spatial anomaly, a disruption in the space-time continuum, and came out the other side insane, or so the others think. When we arrived on Yuggoth, they had to force it into hibernation because it was frightened and confused. It claimed to have been displaced in time, that it was reliving its many thousands of years of life, experiencing every moment of it simultaneously, although with its present-day memories and knowledge intact.

But they’re wrong; that Mi-Go wasn’t insane. It’s happening to me, too. I felt us pass through the anomaly and mistook it for a collision. The anomaly is what broke me into pieces and scattered me throughout my past. That’s how I was given this second chance.

I have to try again. There has to be a way to change what happened. I concentrate, reaching into the blazing white supernova in my mind, and I go back.

After Professor Vaughan’s office hours, Emily slung her backpack onto her back and looked at the framed photo on the desk. Vaughan’s family. The ones whose deaths had set him on his insane quest for Arneth-Zin and its all-seeing watcher. She hated them for dying in that car wreck. If they’d lived, none of this would have happened. She and Sean would be fine. They both would have become doctors. Maybe they would have married and started a family.

Maybe they still could.

“Professor,” she asked, just as she had the first time, “where does that door go?”

“Nowhere,” he replied. “It’s just a small closet for the heating pipes. Why?”

“No reason.” The words were another echo through time, spoken by a weaker, more naïve Emily who didn’t share her current resolve. It infuriated her. Professor Vaughan infuriated her. The Mi-Go infuriated her.

“You’re a liar!” She hurried to the other side of his desk, opened the drawer, and pulled out his gun.

“Miss Bannerman, put that down!” Professor Vaughan started toward her.

This time, she didn’t hesitate. She took great enjoyment in shooting the smug bastard. He dropped to the floor in a spray of blood. She stepped over him and opened the door in the wall. The room beyond was the same as she remembered, but the surgical table was empty. They hadn’t gotten Sean yet. There was still time.

The Mi-Go wasn’t behind the door this time but fussing with some machinery. It turned toward her in surprise, and she shot its spongy head to bits. A second Mi-Go moved swiftly toward her from the corner, but she was ready for it this time. She shot it, too — just as a hypodermic needle pierced the side of her neck. Professor Vaughan, his argyle sweater splashed with blood where the bullet had hit him in the shoulder, injected the glowing orange liquid into her veins. She crumpled to the floor. Her sight dimmed as she began to lose consciousness, but not before she saw four more Mi-Go loom over her. Together, they lifted her off the floor and brought her over to the surgical table. She’d failed again.

I ’ve refused to answer the Mi-Go’s questions about Earth. They don’t like that. Their interviews have become more like interrogations, with machines that cause me pain if I resist. I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.

I have to keep trying. I must find a way to change the past. I reach through the white.

“In essence, you are your brain, and your brain is you.” Standing at the front of the lecture hall, Professor Vaughan glanced at his watch. “We’ve got a few minutes left. Are there any questions?”

Maybe I can trip him up, Emily thought. If she let him know that she was on to him, maybe it would spook him. Maybe it would be enough to make him call it off. She raised her hand.

“Yes, Miss Bannerman?” Professor Vaughan said.

“Can a human brain continue to function outside of the body?”

Vaughan’s face fell. He looked surprised and confused. She had to bite her lip not to smirk in triumph.

“That’s an interesting question,” he said. “Yes, I suppose a brain could exist independently of the body. It would need to be protected, of course, without the skull to shield it.”

“Like in a cylinder of some kind?” she asked.

Vaughan’s mouth went tight. She could see his jaw muscles clenching under his skin. “Yes, I suppose that could work. There would be no circulatory system to feed it oxygen, so it would need to be submerged in an oxygenated solution to keep it from starving. But I’m afraid the technology necessary to keep a human brain alive outside the body hasn’t been discovered yet.”

Bullshit, she thought.

Professor Vaughan glared at her, the surprise on his face melting into suspicion and anger. “Does that answer your question, Miss Bannerman?”

“Perfectly,” she said.

“Actually, I’m glad you brought it up. If you’d be so kind as to stay after class for a few minutes, I’d like to discuss it with you further. I know of a special project you might be interested in.”

She barked out a laugh. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

Some of the students gasped. Others tried to stifle their laughter.

Sean leaned over in his seat beside her and whispered, “What are you doing?”

Sean! The sight of him alive again, his brain still in his head, made her want to throw her arms around him and never let go.

When they left the lecture hall, Emily noticed Professor Vaughan glaring at her from within the crowd of students. She’d definitely touched a nerve, but would it be enough to change the course of events?

“Try not to piss off the professor, okay?” Sean said. “He emailed me earlier about working with him on the project, and I’m going to do it. I’d be a fool not to.”

“Don’t,” she said, grabbing his arm. “You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Just promise me you won’t, okay?”

“But this could be something really good for me.” He broke away. “I have to get to class. I’ll come by tonight.”

Emily didn’t go to Professor Vaughan’s office hours this time. She couldn’t stand to see that man again. Instead, she stayed in her dorm room and waited for Sean. The moment he arrived, she blurted out the truth to him. She told him she’d already seen what was going to happen to him, to both of them. She told him about Professor Vaughan and Arneth-Zin and the Mi-Go.

“It sounds like you had one hell of a nightmare,” he said, sitting on the bed. “But I would be stupid to turn down an opportunity like this just because you had a bad dream.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” she insisted. “It’s real. It already happened to us, but now I’m back and I can change it. I can make it so it doesn’t happen.”

He stared at her like she’d lost her mind. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, you’re back?”

“Sean, don’t go to his office tomorrow,” she said. “They’ll cut your head open and steal your brain—”

He stood up. “Come on, you can’t be serious.”

“Come with me. Tonight,” she said, her voice growing shrill in desperation. She grabbed his arm. “We’ll get in my car and just drive. He won’t be able to find us.”

“You mean leave school?”

“I don’t know how else to keep us safe. I’ve tried everything else I can think of, I shot him twice, I shot the Mi-Go, but—”

Sean yanked his arm out of her grasp. “Stop it. I don’t know if you’re on something or if this is some kind of joke, but I’m not in the mood.” He opened the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Emily chased after him into the hallway. She grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back. “Sean, no! We have to leave! It’s the only way!”

“Emily, stop!”

“We can’t let them take us!” she shrieked, tugging at him, desperate to pull him back.

“Get off of me!”

He pushed her angrily, hard enough to make her let go of his arm, hard enough to make her fall. She stared up at him from the floor, tears streaming down her face. Up and down the hallway, students came out of their rooms to see what was happening.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but you’re acting crazy!” Sean noticed the other students watching and put up his hands. “You know what? I just can’t deal with this right now.” He walked away.

“Sean!” she screamed after him. “Sean, promise me you won’t go to Professor Vaughan’s office tomorrow! Promise me!”

He didn’t turn around. She collapsed against the wall, sobbing. She could feel the other students staring, but she didn’t care. She’d failed again. Sean would still report to Vaughan’s office in the morning. He would still wind up on that surgical table.

She couldn’t save him, but maybe she could still save herself. She grabbed her car keys and ran to the student parking lot. Half the lamps were out, leaving wide, dark pools of shadow across the lot. She glanced nervously at Professor Vaughan’s stone cottage, but no lights came through the windows. He wasn’t there. She hit the unlock button on the key fob, and her car gave a comforting chirp. Just as she reached for the driver’s side door, someone grabbed her from behind, putting a hand over her mouth to stifle her scream, and pushed her against the car so she couldn’t turn around.

Professor Vaughan’s voice hissed in her ear, “That was some stunt you pulled in class today, Miss Bannerman. But I promise you, whatever you think you know, the truth is far more extraordinary than you can imagine.” She struggled as she felt a hypodermic needle pierce her neck. “Stop fighting, I’m doing you a favor. You have no idea what a unique opportunity I’m giving you. To see an alien world. Experience an alien culture. You should be thanking me.”

It’s bad enough I’m a victim of Professor Vaughan’s obsession and an unwilling subject of the Mi-Go’s studies, but to be given the power to change the past and still not save myself from this fate is maddening. It’s as though every choice I make brings me to the same end. Every path leads to the Mi-Go. What’s the point of being given a second chance if nothing changes?

I miss Sean, whose cylinder is being kept somewhere else. Occasionally, I hear the mechanical voices of other brains speaking in other rooms and wonder if one of them is him. I haven’t spoken to him or heard his voice — his real voice — since we were last together at Middlewood.

I wish I’d never gone through that damn anomaly. I wish I’d never been tormented with this useless ability to reshape the past.

Maybe that, at least, is something I can change for the better. One last time, I reach through the white.

She didn’t have a plan. She couldn’t stop the Mi-Go who carried her brain cylinder from flying through the anomaly. But if she tried hard enough, could she reject the splintering of her mind? If she were prepared for it, could she force her consciousness not to scatter back through her timeline?

She was back in the darkness of the cylinder when she felt the Mi-Go pass through the anomaly again, but she was powerless against it. Her mind was already splintered, and this time the anomaly only splintered it further, supernova upon supernova, fracture upon fracture, thrusting her backward through her past again, but also forward into a jumbled patchwork of horrific imagery that her mind couldn’t — dared not — collate. Each of these splinters fractured again and again, a mosaic of moments from the entirety of her life, until she was everywhere and everywhen, past and future, on Earth and on Yuggoth and then finally—

Somewhere else.

Emily stood upon an arid plain of sand. Before her, a stone structure sat half-buried, its timeworn walls decorated with strange, angular carvings. What remained of its massive spires rose toward an alien yellow sky where three moons hung like staring eyes. In the distance she saw enormous towers, the remains of an ancient, deserted city. Scattered among the crumbling buildings were huge, soaring monoliths of black stone, rising high above the towers and emanating a peculiar sense of dread. She found she couldn’t look at them long before her discomfort became overwhelming and she had to look away.

She was surprised to discover she was back in her body. Or a body. It couldn’t be hers. Hers was wherever Professor Vaughan and the Mi-Go had left it on Earth, after pillaging her skull. Or maybe her body was gone, burned or dissolved in acid so there would be no evidence. The body she wore now was solid, real, but it was clearly artificial, something the Mi-Go had constructed to house her brain. She patted her arms, her stomach. It didn’t feel like metal or plastic, it felt like flesh, or something close to it.

She didn’t know where she was in her timeline. Her future, it seemed. But what was this place?

There was no door in the half-buried structure before her, only an immense archway leading inside, built for someone much bigger than her. If she wanted answers, this looked like a good place to start. She stepped through the archway and found herself in a passage whose walls had been carved with the same strange designs as the exterior. The passage opened onto a titanic chamber, its soaring, vaulted ceiling rising so high that it disappeared into the shadows. At the center of the chamber was a circular dais surrounded by five stalagmites, each a dozen feet tall, bending inward like enormous ribs, and made of the same black stone as the monoliths outside. Atop the dais was an immense throne, hewn from ancient rock, and upon it sat a colossal skeleton. Its massive skull, brown and cracked with the passage of time, resembled a large, smooth boulder. It had no mouth, no eye sockets, no ear holes, just a flat expanse of bone.

A dark, oblong object rested on the throne beside the dead giant. Curious, she pulled herself up onto the throne and sat beside the giant’s huge, elongated femur and oddly spiked patella. The object seemed to be a long sliver of that same black stone, and while the giant could have easily held it in one hand, she had to lay it across her lap to examine it. But the moment she touched it, a web of energy burst to life between the five black stalagmites, surrounding her. It took the form of thousands upon thousands of strands, crossing each other to form a grid, and within the countless squares of the grid were moving images. She saw an Earth occupied by lumbering dinosaurs. She saw the raising of the pyramids, the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the continents drowning under massive floods as long-lost islands rose from the ocean’s depths. She saw other worlds, too, other forms of life that weren’t human or Mi-Go — barrel-shaped creatures with wings like fans, coneshaped entities with snaking limbs, polyp-like monstrosities that phased in and out of the material plane. She saw civilizations rise and fall on countless worlds. All of time played out before her.

She put it together then. All the clues were there. This was Arneth-Zin, the temple at the center of the universe where all the timelines converged. This was where Professor Vaughan had wanted to go so desperately that he’d sold her and Sean to the Mi-Go like lab rats. The dead giant beside her had to be the sentry he’d spoken of. The watcher of Arneth-Zin — blind, deaf, dumb, and long dead. She almost laughed at the irony. It had seen and heard nothing of the timelines that played out in the grid. It couldn’t tell anyone its secrets. It couldn’t send Professor Vaughan back in time to save his family. Vaughan had destroyed Emily’s life, put her through unimaginable horror, for nothing.

She discovered that if she concentrated while touching the shard, she could guide what she saw within the grid. At her command, the grid filled with images from her own life. The choices she’d made. Every path she’d taken. She saw a group of six Mi-Go winging through space, carrying two cylinders, Sean’s brain in one, hers in the other. She watched as a burning red ribbon streaked and twisted across space until it struck the Mi-Go carrying her cylinder. The spatial anomaly. The moment that had untethered her consciousness from linear time and ultimately brought her here. She couldn’t bring herself to look beyond that. She didn’t want to relive her time on Yuggoth. If the Mi-Go had given her a new body, it meant at some point she’d stopped resisting and had cooperated with them. She couldn’t watch herself do that.

She watched her family instead, her mother and father and kid sister, none of whom knew what happened to her. She saw them get the news that she’d gone missing, and later, when the authorities gave up the search and declared her dead, her family’s grief was so powerful she wanted to cry along with them. Only, she couldn’t. The Mi-Go had built this body for her, and they didn’t understand human emotional responses like crying.

She watched Sean’s timeline, too, until it became too painful. She couldn’t bear to see his empty-skulled corpse on that surgical table again.

She didn’t know how much time passed as she sat upon the dead sentry’s throne. Days? Weeks? There was a delicious irony in the fact that time had lost meaning for her. Her artificial body didn’t age. She didn’t need to eat or drink or sleep, so she never had to take her attention off the grid.

Eventually, two Mi-Go entered the temple. One carried a brain cylinder, the other a variety of mechanical equipment. She watched as they placed the cylinder on the floor and hooked the equipment into the three sockets: the lenses for eyes, the metal disc for hearing, and a speaker box for speech. Their job complete, the Mi-Go left.

“Hello?” a scratchy, electronic voice came out of the speaker. Rows of lights blinked on the side of the box in time with the words. “My name is Professor Joseph Vaughan.”

Vaughan. So he’d finally gotten his wish. She jumped down from the throne. As soon as she let go of the shard, the web of images between the stalagmites vanished.

“Great sentry of Arneth-Zin, I’ve come a long way and beg you to have pity on me,” Vaughan said. “I beseech you to open the seams of time and let me return to the point where I lost my wife and children. Please, give me the chance to set things right.”

She squatted over the cylinder, making sure the lenses could see her face clearly. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

“What — what do you mean?” Even in his artificial electronic voice, she could hear confusion and fear. Good. He deserved to be afraid. “Aren’t you the sentry?”

“No,” she said. “It’s me. Emily Bannerman.”

Vaughan said nothing.

“Surely that much time hasn’t passed,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” he said. “You know me? We’ve met?”

Emily let out a bitter laugh. He didn’t remember her. That was how little she’d mattered to him. He hadn’t cared who she was or what future he was stealing from her when he gave her to the Mi-Go. She’d been nothing but a means to an end. His ticket to Arneth-Zin.

“This can’t be happening,” he said. “Tell me you understand the pattern of time! Tell me you know where the seams are!”

She shrugged. “I’m as in the dark with this time-travel shit as you are. I can only change my own timeline, not anyone else’s.”

“You — you can change your timeline?” Vaughan’s electronic laughter came through the speaker, an eerie, grating sound. “I knew it, I knew it was possible! You must show me how!”

She supposed she could. She could consult the grid for the whereabouts of the spatial anomaly. He could find a way to pass through it as she did and gain the ability to change his timeline. She could even teach him how to control it so it didn’t overwhelm him.

But why would she help the man who’d done this to her? “Sorry,” she said. “If it’s any consolation, I know how you feel.”

She undid the latches at the top of the cylinder.

“Stop. What are you doing?”

“I understand you better than you think, Professor Vaughan. I know what it’s like to have someone you love taken away from you. I know what it’s like to carry that terrible emptiness inside. You want nothing more than to be with them again. I can help with that.”

She lifted off the lid. Inside, Professor Vaughans’s brain was suspended in a thick, viscous liquid.

Vaughan’s voice came through the speaker pitched with new hope. “So you will show me how?”

“No,” she said. “But I can reunite you with your family another way.”

She reached into the cylinder and pulled out his slippery, spongy brain. Just three pounds of tissue, as he’d pointed out in the lecture hall a lifetime ago, and yet it housed everything that was Professor Vaughan. She tore it to pieces with her bare hands, throwing chunks of shredded gray matter across the floor until there was nothing left of it. She dumped the solution out of the cylinder, then bashed it and the rest of the equipment against the temple wall until they were mangled and unrecognizable. After that, she felt a lot better.

What she hadn’t told Professor Vaughan, what that horrible, selfish man didn’t deserve to know, was that she did understand the pattern of time. She’d understood it from the moment she discovered the watcher of Arneth-Zin was blind, deaf, and dumb. The truth was that there was no pattern. There were no reasons, no secret designs, no answers to the philosophical questions that plagued man and Mi-Go alike. It didn’t matter if you were a student or a professor, a victim or a perpetrator, if you lived your life with love or forgot the names of the people you stepped on as soon as you were done with them — in the end there was only entropy and decay, chaos and tragedy, as though the universe had nothing but disdain for the life that inhabited it. And in an ancient temple on a dead world where all the timelines converged, there was a lone sentry whose job, for reasons that were unknowable, was to stand witness as it all withered and died.

Emily climbed up onto the throne, took hold of the black shard, and watched the grid of time blink back to life. Every path had led her here, guided by that same pitiless universe, as if it had decided Arneth-Zin had been without a watcher long enough.

Why had she been chosen? Was there some kind of intelligence behind it, something beyond even the vast eternity playing out before her, or was she fooling herself into thinking there was any reason at all? Maybe she was nothing more than a leaf blown by random, feckless winds. Did it matter?

It was something she’d have an eternity to ponder.