The Future of Another Timeline

^THIRTY TESS

Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory (1894 C.E.)… Western Gondwana Coast (447.1 mya)

I was relieved to be back in Raqmu after a month at sea and on trains. There were more established commercial routes to Raqmu than there were to Flin Flon, but nineteenth-century travel was always exhausting. Morehshin and I settled into the rooms Anita had kept in the scholars’ quarter during our absence, and I made some muddy, rich coffee for Anita and me while Morehshin rained a small lunch out of her multi-tool. Suddenly, C.L. burst through the door. “I’m glad you’re back because I’ve done another analysis, and we are in deep shit.”

C.L. had dyed their hair bright green, to match their nails. They looked older.

Anita was surprised. “How long have you been working on this?”

They scratched behind an ear. “I got an extension on my field season work, so I guess about a year in travel time, give or take. Mostly in the past. But I am about a month ahead of you in the present. I had to go back once in a while to use the computer cluster in the geology lab. Sorry about that.”

That wasn’t too bad; it meant we had to avoid them for our first month back, to prevent merging conflicts.

“What did you find?” Morehshin asked.

“They are very close to wrecking the mechanism that keeps the wormholes open on both ends. I have the data right here.” C.L. patted their chest.

“You memorized it?”

“No, of course not. That’s insane. I uploaded it to my shirt.”

Now Morehshin was excited. “You figured out an interface hack!”

C.L. beamed. “That’s right. There’s no way to bring tools or computers through the time machine, right? The interface only permits clothing and implants. That’s how Morehshin brought the multi-tool—she can absorb it into her body. At least, that’s my hypothesis.”

“You’re right.” Morehshin opened her hand and the multi-tool emerged from it, growing like a bubble in tar before taking on solid form. I had no idea she could do that.

C.L. continued their infodump. “So I have a friend who got me this prototype of a smart shirt that Alphabet is making—basically there are wires woven into the fabric, connecting the CPU and sensors and memory, so it’s part of my clothing. All I have to do is output to a mobile device, which is why I got this implant.” C.L. tapped their eyebrow. “I can save all my data and read it locally using ultra-wideband. The cool part is that it’s great for fieldwork anywhere, not just during time travel, right? I’m going to use it for this project I’m doing with carbon dioxide in Antarctic meltwater because my shirt runs Fuchsia OS, and one of my labmates wrote a great API for gas chromatographs. Hey, did you guys know I finally got a National Science Foundation grant for that? It’s going to be—”

Anita waved her hands. “Okay, okay, C.L.—we can talk about your funding later. Get to the point.”

“Right. I’ve been taking photonic matter levels on the Machine at several critical points in the timeline. Each change is registered instantly on the other Machines, as far as I’ve been able to determine. So that hypothesis about how Raqmu affects the other Machines—my data suggests it’s correct. There’s a very real possibility that destroying the machine at Raqmu will destroy time travel completely.”

“Oh shit.”

“Also I figured out what the Comstockers are trying to do. I traveled closer to the divergence and found a campsite with a stone forge. They’re making steel blades to re-create a part of the old interface controls, from when the Machines had a console with buttons. That’s why they’re randomly cutting into it—to activate a trigger. Basically, there’s a setting that decouples the interface from the wormhole. Probably for maintenance or something. Anyway, the result is you’ve got a wormhole and an interface, but they don’t connect.”

“And where does the smelting come in?” My head was exploding from all this news on top of my migraine, but thankfully C.L. liked to explain everything.

“You need a metal alloy to unlock it. After I saw Morehshin use her multi-tool on the canopy, I realized we’d been using the wrong tools. I mean, not simply the wrong tools, but also in the wrong places. The interface isn’t gone; it’s more like the user-friendly part of it eroded away. Like when you wear the letters and numbers off an old keyboard. You can still type, but finding the right button is a crapshoot. Except this isn’t a keyboard—it’s an incredibly complicated mechanism that controls physical properties of the universe that we don’t yet have names for. I was thinking that maybe the Machines aren’t really for time travel—”

Morehshin cut them off. “Obviously they haven’t found a decoupling switch yet. Neither have we, in my time. But they are getting somewhere. That time when we landed in the Ordovician—the reboot fixed it then, but I don’t think that will keep working much longer.”

“It won’t,” C.L. confirmed. “Photonic matter emissions are through the floor.”

“Why do these anti-travelers have to go back at all?” I wondered. “Can’t they destroy the interface from their present?”

C.L. sighed in exasperation. “Tess, he has to go back to a period when the interface was still visible, but not underwater, so he can mess around without drowning. So basically that’s the Hirnantian. You know—right before the gamma ray burst that scoured the Earth’s surface, causing a rapid-onset ice age that killed millions of species in the ocean?”

Anita was nodding as if that explained everything. “It makes sense.”

“So what do we do when we tap back?” I looked from Morehshin and C.L. to Anita. “We don’t know how many of them there are.”

“I have an idea.” Morehshin had a smug tone.

“What’s that?”

“Go back and kill him. Like Hugayr told us.”

“First of all, no, we aren’t killing anyone.” My voice wobbled as I tried to convince myself. “And second, who is ‘him’?”

“They don’t know how to send multiple people through at once,” C.L. broke in. “It’s probably only one going back. Maybe two at most.”

“Couldn’t we overpower him and drag him back up to 2022?” I was getting desperate. “Sabotaging the Machine is illegal, and C.L. has digital evidence of what he’s done.”

Anita was dubious. “Do you really think the Academy would buy it? I think at most they’d send him back up to his time.”

“I could take him back to his time,” Morehshin said reluctantly. “What he’s doing is still a crime in the Esteele Era. It was one of the last American democracies before the hives.”

C.L. perked up. “Would you do that? I could leave evidence for you in the subalterns’ cave.”

“How can we be sure you won’t kill him?” I asked.

“You can’t. But you can be sure he will kill us and our daughters if we do nothing.”

“All right.” I nodded. “We’ll go back and make a… citizen’s arrest. We can knock him out or immobilize him, and tap you guys back up.”

“Are you still prepared for this to be a one-way trip?” Morehshin was grim.

I thought about Beth and Soph, both alive; and I imagined Aseel, using the music business to make the world safe for women’s bodies. My neck was a burning knot of pain. There was nothing left for me here, but there were billions of other people who needed the Machines to keep our histories open to revision. I nodded at Morehshin. “We’ve already talked about the risks.”

C.L. and Anita nodded too.

We walked to the AGU together. Luckily one of Anita’s students was scheduling slots on the Machine, putting in her Long Four Years, and she got us in quickly. As we left, she bowed slightly and whispered, “Safe travels, Daughters.”

When we got into the chamber, one of the techs was mopping the floor. “I must warn you that the Machine seems to be covering people in mud and snails.”

C.L. nodded curtly. “Like I said. Situation is getting worse.”

We arranged ourselves around Morehshin, the floor still wet beneath our shoes. The tech positioned three small tappers around us, cotton-padded hammers poised to bang out a pattern in the rock. When our knees were covered with warm water, Morehshin used her multi-tool to access another part of the interface I’d never seen before. It looked like a jar of mud and darting lights, hovering in the air roughly where the ring once was. She reached into the jar, hand completely disappearing into the mud, and I could see blue flashes between her fingers.

Rain swarmed around us, full of fat hot drops and freezing bullets of hail, and we held each other in the void that meant history was still mutable. I concentrated on my friends, and how their breathing felt next to mine. We seemed to spin slowly, like a drifting asteroid or a diatom in the ocean’s water column.

And then we emerged on the knife-edge of a continent, encircled by two enormous, floating parentheses of heavily oxidized rock the color of rust. The salty air was dry and thin, but breathable. Over our heads hung a translucent dome made from pearlescent oil and water, their colors oozing into and around each other in psychedelic patterns. It was shocking and beautiful and unnamable. Had someone actually built such a thing? Would we ever understand it?

Morehshin was unimpressed. “That’s where I think the decoupling settings are.” She gestured at a segment of the ring. “But they’re hard to find because mechanisms tend to move around inside.”

C.L. knocked on the floating rock and whistled appreciatively. “It feels so solid.”

I touched one with my fingertips. It felt like a warm igneous rock, slightly powdery with rust. I ran my hands underneath it, and felt nothing but a bumpy, wind-smoothed surface. The structure was levitating because of something that I couldn’t perceive. Abruptly, a light purple stain appeared in the air at eye level.

“Don’t touch that!” C.L. and Morehshin yelled simultaneously.

“What the hell?” C.L. peered at it more closely and gently prodded one shimmering edge with their finger.

Morehshin joined them. “Looks like part of the system for choosing a direction. Whatever. For now, we need to… fast-forward. Have you done that before?”

Nobody had. We returned to the group hug position.

“Ready?” Morehshin twiddled her fingers in the oily water overhead and the patterns swirled into a throbbing spiral. The purple stain flashed pink. “Stay together!” Outside, the landscape changed fluidly, shadows lengthening and shortening as algae blooms turned the water emerald, then red, then a luminescent yellow only visible in the long nights of winter. We were traveling rapidly into the future, watching the continent erode and sprout rough scabs of lichen around us.

“I didn’t know we could do this!” C.L. was wriggling to get a better view.

“Keep an eye out for the Comstocker so we know when to stop.”

“Now!” Anita yelled. Everything solidified and I could see the remains of a crude rock forge several feet away. We filed out carefully, Morehshin palming her multi-tool, and took in the scene. There were deep, precise cuts in the floating rock, and footprints everywhere on the sandy ground.

In the distance I could barely make out the blue-gray bulk of a glacier creeping up the barren continent from the South Pole. We were in a slightly later phase of that ice age C.L. mentioned, when sea levels sank and the Machine stood on dry land, subject to the weathering that eventually erased the visible parts of its interface.

On the beach below, the Comstocker’s entire operation was in plain view. Curtains of seaweed were spread out to dry next to a shadowy cave entrance, and farther away was a garbage pile of shells and armor plates from Ordovician fish, clams, and squid. A man emerged from the mouth of the cave, completely naked, dragging a large net bag. From our perch, his features were a blur.

“Everybody get down so he can’t see us.” Morehshin lay on her stomach and peered over the edge. Then she poked C.L. “Can you use that implant to see distance?”

C.L. nodded and tapped on their shirtsleeve. “He doesn’t look good.”

Even from this far away, I could see that his pale skin was blistered and his hair was patchy. “Looks like he has no protection from the sun, and he’s been here awhile.”

The man waded into the ocean and wandered away from shore, the waves lapping no higher than his shoulder. Ducking into the water, he scooped up something fist-sized and stuck it into the bag.

“What’s he doing?”

“Looks like… hunting.” C.L. made a twisting motion with their arm, activating some mechanism in the shirt. “He’s got some… snails and trilobites? They love these shallow oceans, and we know from the fossil record that there were hundreds of species. He must be eating them.”

Sure enough, he returned to land and started a small fire with the seaweed in a pit outside the cave. He went inside and returned with a clay pot, filled it with ocean water and a few snails and trilobite legs, then set it in the glowing coals. He wandered in and out of the cave, finally emerging with a loose gray tunic covering most of his body and something that glittered in his hand.

“It’s a knife,” C.L. breathed. “Must be one of the tools he smelted.”

Hunkering down next to the fire, he pulled another trilobite from the bag, worked its legs off with the knife, and slurped tiny bits of meat into his mouth. Trilobites are distantly related to arachnids, but they looked like stubby green lobsters.

“Wonder if it tastes like lobster or spider?”

“Shut up, Tess,” Anita hissed.

“We can take him. Let’s hide up here and wait.” Morehshin bared her teeth in a feral smile, palming her multi-tool.

That’s when a woman emerged from the cave, also in a tunic, carrying an infant in her arms.

“Oh, what the fuck.”

“Goddamn it.”

Nobody knew what else to say for a minute.

“How did she get there?”

“Morehshin?” C.L.’s eyes were trained on the woman. “She looks exactly like you. But her hands…”

Morehshin made a strangled noise that was somewhere between a sob and a growl. “He must have… taken a queen.”

“She has no hands.” C.L. looked blankly at us.

“Is that your sister?” I was astonished.

“Yes. There are many in my line. They must have sent her back to meet him. For breeding… to make workers.” Morehshin’s expression shaded from horror into abjection, and she scrabbled away from the view. Standing up, she stumbled against the floating rocks, leaned over, and threw up profusely into the Machine. Then she gasped like she’d been punched.

Anita and I ran to her, while C.L. kept watch on the beach.

“Look! It’s another layer to the interface!” Morehshin pointed overhead, her disgust forgotten. A hole was opening in the canopy over Morehshin’s soggy offering. A shaft of bright light shot out, and abruptly the Machine’s rocky floor absorbed her vomit, chunks and all.

“Another layer?” C.L. practically careened into us and waved their left hand. “I’m recording. Can somebody else keep watch on the Comstockery?”

“I will.” Anita went back to the ledge.

Morehshin poked a finger into the shaft of light and it emitted a noise like a distant wind chime.

“Oh yeah!” C.L. kept waving their hand. “Light sensor?”

The chiming continued as Morehshin swirled her finger in a tiny clockwise circle.

C.L. could not stop the running commentary. “Must have been traces of DNA in the vomit. Or some kind of amino acid? What do you think, Morehshin? I can’t wait to write a paper with ‘barf-activated interface’ in the title.” They emitted a weird giggle. “Everybody will call it BAI.”

“No.” Morehshin said it distractedly, half to C.L. and half to herself. “This is some kind of safety menu.” She plunged her hand all the way in, and the light prismed into rainbows. A tiny green bolt of lightning forked up Morehshin’s arm, following the contours of her elbow, reminding me of the way she’d interrogated Elliot. She sucked in her breath. “Oh… this explains a few things.”

“What did you do?” C.L. cocked their head. “I registered a bunch of high-energy particles. It’s like… you let in a bunch of cosmic radiation.”

Morehshin made a distracted noise and the light shut off. Her hand glowed yellow where it had touched the safety menu. “Those are the controls that prevent weapons from traveling in the Machine. They also filter—”

Before she could finish, Anita interrupted. “The Comstocker is climbing up here and he has a broadsword.”

By the time the man heaved himself over the lip of the cliff, we were ready. But when Morehshin hit him with green light from the multi-tool, he laughed.

“It’s you bitches again, is it?” Under the ragged hair and blisters, I recognized Elliot, at least fifteen years older than when we’d last seen him at Sherry’s. Morehshin threw a ball of lightning out of the multi-tool and it fizzled on contact with his chest. “Can’t fool me twice. I’m immune now.”

There were Neolithic ways to knock him out too. We circled Elliot warily, and C.L. picked up a flat rock from the ground. Anita tried to grab his arms from behind, but he drew the sword, whirling it dangerously close to her head. His aim was terrible and shaky. Still, at close range, he was dangerous. Broadswords are glorified clubs, and he was angling to break bones or smash skulls.

“You’re outnumbered, Elliot. We’ve destroyed Comstock’s political career and… we know how to repair the Machine.” I hoped he believed me. “If you come with us, nobody has to get hurt.”

“You are on the wrong side of history.” Elliot lunged forward with the sword and would have brought it down on my shoulder if Morehshin hadn’t yanked me out of the way. But that left a break in our circle, and he ran through it toward the interface.

Morehshin tackled him as he reached the levitated rocks, and they fell in a furious tangle of limbs on the Machine floor. Elliot wriggled away and levered himself upright by gripping the damaged stone, jamming his sword into one of the grooves. The sword in the stone. A black sphere materialized in the air beneath the canopy, and C.L. let out a howl. They charged head-first with the rock, knocking him and the sword away from the interface. Moving faster than a starving, sunstroked person had any right to, Elliot swept his legs under C.L., bringing them down hard. He scrambled up and planted a knee on their chest, holding the sword point-down over their face.

All of us froze. And then, behind me, a baby started to scream.

I turned to see the woman with no hands, the queen, elbows locked around her baby. She wore Morehshin’s face and snarled a rapid stream of words I couldn’t understand.

“No!” Morehshin held out a hand and stepped forward.

Elliot’s face was slack with shock, and his hands trembled on the sword. The woman positioned the baby’s neck near her mouth and bared her teeth as if she were going to bite through an artery. Then she screamed more words.

Morehshin answered in the same language. I caught a word that sounded like “sister,” but with the vowels shifted slightly. The woman narrowed her eyes and started to sink her teeth into the sobbing baby’s neck.

Elliot stood up, releasing C.L. but keeping the sword clutched tightly in both hands like a baseball bat. C.L. crawled away from him, panting.

“You have no idea how to use the interface,” he hissed. “When my brothers complete their edit, I’m going to shut it down for good. Comstock will stop your pathetic slut shows and the queens will rise.” He turned to the woman and said something in her language using an equally condescending tone.

Her face twisted in spite. She yelled something that was unmistakably a curse and threw the baby at his chest. It had to be one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it took all of us by surprise—especially Elliot. He dropped his sword to catch the infant, and in that moment my two histories resolved themselves into one. I was no longer holding myself back to honor the memory of a lost friend. I was nothing but a bloodthirsty animal. And I knew how to kill. I sprinted forward, grabbed Elliot’s weapon where it had fallen, and drove it into his spine. As the blade scraped against bone, there was a crunching noise. A bloody metal tongue stuck out of his belly. The man fell to his knees and a grin cut across my face as I watched him dying. C.L. snatched the baby out of his arms before he slumped over.

Elliot spoke to me through teeth covered in blood. “Doesn’t matter if you kill me. More will come. I’ve set up a colony here, with workers—”

I kicked him in the jaw. “Fuck off, drone.” It was a curse Morehshin used, and I liked the way it felt in my mouth. Elliot’s blood oozed into a preternaturally circular puddle under the curving stones of the interface.

The baby was hiccupping and gasping in C.L.’s arms, Morehshin and her twin were embracing, and I couldn’t stop looking at Elliot’s impaled body. I hadn’t killed anyone in a long time, but my feelings were different now. This wasn’t a chaotic spree murder, rash and wrong. I wasn’t trying to burn down Irvine, or get revenge on men and the stolen authority that sustained them. This time, it truly was defense. I had made a calculation: him or all of us. Queens or people. Maybe, sometimes, death was the only answer.

Anita came to stand beside me, looking silently at Elliot’s body. Now his blood was dribbling upward into the stone. It reminded me of what happened with Morehshin’s vomit. Were bodily fluids the secret key to operating higher levels of the interface?

“Thank you for saving my life.” C.L. held the infant out to Morehshin’s sister, who crossed her arms and shook her head. “Don’t you want your baby?”

Morehshin cut her eyes at C.L. “That man forced her to bear his worker. She’s done with that job.”

Disturbed, C.L. cuddled the baby close to their chest, buttoning the mewling bundle inside their data shirt.

After conferring with Morehshin, the woman led us to the beach down a twisting path cut through sandstone that glowed like cheap blush wine. In hundreds of millions of years, these rocks would form the valley walls at Raqmu. I wondered where the archive caves were in this era. “This is Kitty,” Morehshin said over her shoulder. “I can translate for her.”

“What does she know about the Comstockers’ mission?” Anita asked.

Morehshin and Kitty had an exchange in their shared language. “Kitty thinks Elliot has been here for several years, but she’s been here only eighteen months. She was sent from my present to grow workers born in this time, so they couldn’t escape into the future. This is the only one so far.” Morehshin gestured at the baby C.L. was cradling. “She knew Elliot would never let her kill the child, because his job was to set up a colony. After there were enough workers, she was going to be queen for a group of men who could turn the Machine on and off to preserve their rights.”

“Can you ask Kitty what he was doing, making those cuts in the stone?” C.L. asked.

Morehshin and Kitty got into a long conversation, and Morehshin didn’t bother to translate until we’d reached the dying embers of the cooking fire on the sand. “It’s what C.L. suspected. He had a theory that those rocks were the remains of a much larger structure, and he was trying to re-create part of it. Some kind of metal lever or button?”

Morehshin had translated merely a fraction of what Kitty said. But at that moment, my body still jangling with adrenaline and emotional turmoil, I was too jacked up to ask more questions. Suddenly I was extremely hungry. Boiled snail sounded better than the feast we’d had at Sherry’s.

Kitty gestured for us to sit down around the fire, and the general consensus was that we should have a meal before deciding on our next move. As we ate, Morehshin used the multi-tool to build hands for Kitty. Gently wringing particles out of the glowing device, she assembled a translucent scaffold of bone, fibrous tendons, and finally a layer of green muscle beneath deep brown skin. Kitty reached out her forearms, and Morehshin pressed the right hand into place. The seam between artificial hand and biological arm emitted a red glow as they knit together. The look on Kitty’s face reminded me of Morehshin’s back in Manitoba, when I suggested she drink some coffee.

“Queens are not supposed to have hands. They get in the way of breeding.” Morehshin tinkered with Kitty’s new fingers, and said something to her in the language I suspected English would become. Nodding, Kitty gently plucked a sliver of pale trilobite meat out of a cracked leg and ate it. Morehshin nodded. “I think that’s working,” she said. Kitty attached the left hand herself.

The sun touched ocean, and Anita sighed. “Let’s get a good night’s sleep, and make a final assessment in the morning before we go back.”

Morehshin translated for Kitty, who agreed. She showed us into the cave, where she and Elliot had created beds with thick mats of seagrass. At last, she accepted the baby from C.L. for nursing. Everything reeked of the Ordovician ocean, a mixture of salt and seaweed, but I had gotten used to it. I stared out the mouth of the cave at the unfamiliar positions of the stars in the sky, and fell asleep without realizing it.

In the morning, Kitty and the baby were gone.

After we’d searched the beach, calling and calling, we gave up and climbed up to the Machine. I ran a finger over the semicircles of red rock, hovering beneath a nacreous blister of fluid. “Could she have used it to get away?” Anita asked.

“She could, but not the baby. A child born now couldn’t travel to the future with her.” C.L. fiddled with the settings on their shirt.

“Maybe she knew how to change that filter on the interface?”

“Maybe.” C.L. looked grimmer than I’d ever seen them. “Or maybe she exposed her baby. Left it in the ocean for the squids.”

Morehshin said nothing, and I wondered what she knew. Ultimately it didn’t matter. We had work to do, gathering as much data as possible before going back to give the Daughters of Harriet our report. The official report, from the Applied Cultural Geology Working Group, would come later. We had to decide what information to keep to ourselves.

I tossed Elliot’s body over the cliff’s edge before we left, still penetrated by his own sword. Let the next great man find him, and witness what we had done.