“Nev?”
Maddy Barnett was waiting in the elevator when the gleaming steel doors opened.
“Everything alright?”
Nev froze, heart pounding after her frantic escape from the Phys Unit. She tried to slow her gulping breath as she stepped into the elevator. Maddy wrinkled her pert nose at the stench of fear filling the confined space. Nev had to use all her will power to resist looking over her shoulder for the biotech. The doors closed, the elevator lurched downwards, and she felt something unclench in her abdomen. Just a little.
“Oh. Hey, Maddy. Yes, I’m fine. Great, actually. How’s it going?”
“Everything on our end is going well. I hope you’ll be ready for the alpha launch next week. It’s been a little while since we’ve gotten an update.”
I’ve been here seven goddamn days a week, burning the midnight oil for months, Nev’s brain shouted at Maddy. Except, Nev realized, maybe she hadn’t. Not in this timeline. Whatever she was going to do in the days, weeks, months to come as she kept sliding backwards in time, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be business as usual. Now that her Hail Mary had fallen on deaf ears, she had to come up with a new plan. A fresh exit.
“Nev?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry about that. My team has been working hard on rollout. I think we’re still on target.”
“You think?” Two perfect vertical lines appeared between Maddy’s immaculately threaded eyebrows. Who did this woman think she was? Nev reported to Kusuma, not to marketing.
“I’m confident,” Nev said. “I guess we’ve just been so busy, I haven’t had the chance to file a status report. I’ll have that in your folder by close of business, promise.” Wow, she’d never lied about business deadlines before, but then again, she’d never been free of the consequences before.
“See that you do,” Maddy said, as the doors opened onto the eighth floor, where Qbito’s Biz Units were clustered. “And, for God’s sake, Nev, stop dressing like a teenager. You’re a unit leader. Act like one!” The elevator doors had already shut again before Nev could think of a halfway decent retort. A whiff of expensive perfume lingered behind. The elevator hummed back into motion and Nev noticed that the button for the sixth floor, programming and product development, was helpfully illuminated. Thanks, Maddy.
Maybe Maddy had a point. Kusuma had given her the brush-off. So had Anissa. Deinstallation was a bust. Nev was on her own. She hadn’t really applied herself to ironing out whatever monster bug in the code was responsible for the Glitch. Once she had realized the issue was in the temporal code, she’d begun to doubt her own ability to fix it. But she’d never been one to shy from a challenge before. How many rusted out old machines had her dad dredged up from the junkyard and set her to work on when she was a kid? She’d brought old vacuum tube amps, cathode ray televisions, and 3D printers back to life, without instructions, or even formal schooling, all on her own, because her father threatened her with a whupping if she didn’t. If she could make it work as an eleven-year-old, when all she had was a screwdriver, a soldering gun, and fear to run on, surely she could tackle this problem with the powerful combination of supercharged espresso, a masters from Stanford, and existential terror?
Plus, she missed her Memeron chair.
But first, caffeine. The sixth floor was mostly empty, as expected. Late morning on a Sunday was probably the quietest moment of the week. Everybody was drone racing in Mission Dolores Park or eating their way around the globe at the ceegee street food market nearby. Or they were home sleeping, catching up on all the hours of REM they’d missed pulling late nights during the week. Or most likely, they were playing the newest game release, Patriot Day, downloading the freshest skins. Whatever, Nev was glad to have the place to herself. Except—
“Darian?”
Anissa’s replacement was standing at the La Pavoni again, head tilted to one side, seemingly perplexed by the vast array of buttons along its front. He jumped an inch in the air at the sound of his name, turning to face Nev with a petrified look in his eyes.
“Sorry,” Nev said in as gentle a tone as she could muster, remembering their previous encounter at the La Pavoni when she’d terrified him into triggering his SavePoint. She didn’t want to see what would happen to her if he used it again while he was standing mere inches away; another battle against invisible concrete was more than she could handle. Nev gave Darian a small smile and watched with relief as the fear in his eyes dropped by several gradients.
“Can I help you with that? It’s kind of confusing.”
“You wouldn’t mind?”
“Not a problem,” Nev said, stepping up to the machine.
Darian’s shoulders went slack. He laughed with evident relief.
“To be honest, this is the first time I’ve been brave enough to go near that beast. I thought I’d wait until the weekend when no one was around before I tried to figure it out.”
Nev was about to make some joke about their previous run-in at the La Pavoni before she remembered that it hadn’t happened yet. Huh, she thought, as she gave Darian a quick tutorial on the machine’s workings. She’d attributed his excessive friendliness last time they met to his cheerleading background, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe they had established some sort of bond today that bore fruit in the future. And maybe it would be helpful to have Darian on her team, after all. He knew something about temporal engineering, even if he’d only been at Qbito for a couple of weeks. Then again, whatever rapport she established now wouldn’t exist the next time she saw him. If Nev was going to get help from Darian, now was the time.
“So, how’s Qbito treating you? How are you finding the Temporal Unit?”
“It’s great, really great. I feel blessed to have been hired.”
Nev nodded in response as she contemplated the fork in the road ahead. Should she gain Darian’s friendship by following his lead, putting her years of maternal bible instruction to service, and mirroring his positivity? Or say something cynical, cut through the bullshit, and bond through shared skepticism? If she made the wrong choice, she might have to risk undoing it with her SavePoint again.
Nev didn’t like either option. Thankfully, there was a third way. Buy Darian’s trust, or at least his undying gratitude.
Anissa had helped her hack her account a few months back, disabling the 24-hour control limit that normally prevented users from looping. SavePoint 1.0 beta testers had figured out quickly that, if they triggered the device at just the right interval, they could relive the same five seconds over and over again. For a few of them, it became a tunnel to madness, a way to chase and catch their dragon of choice, whether pleasure, pain, or simply pharmacological oblivion. Excessive loopers were prone to developing cerebral aneurysms, which ended up costing the company a few million slush fund dollars to hush up.
Then again, in more responsible hands, it was a nice trick to have up your sleeve. And, bible thumper though he might be, Nev was certain Darian would be grateful for the opportunity to catch whatever dragons he’d been chasing. Bottle the Holy Spirit. Worth a try, anyway.
“Cool, cool. So… anyone showed you yet how to hack the looper control on your account?”
Darian’s eyes bugged out of his skull.
“Wait, I can do that?”
Bingo.
“Well… you can’t. At least, not on your own, because you can’t access the user account scripts. But if we work together, if I supply the user account password and you supply the temporal engineering passwords, then yes, we can.”
Darian looked around the kitchen, as if checking for hidden cameras or microphones.
“Don’t worry, Darian. No one’s watching us.” (Nev wasn’t sure that was true, but she was pretty sure that if anyone was watching, they weren’t too worried about a little in-house self-hacking.)
“Come on, let me show you my pod.”
The SavePoint 2.0 alpha data team pod was entirely empty. Nice as it was to have the place to themselves, Nev felt a wave of annoyance at the slackers she’d hired. With the boss distracted, apparently they weren’t putting in the hours. If she remembered correctly, when she’d lived through this day the first time, she’d definitely spent the afternoon with at least one or two junior coders. Once Nev finally got herself moving forward in time again, the whole team would be getting a talking to. She’d channel Christina’s most righteous fire and brimstone sermonizing style. But for the moment, she had to play the role of Cool Nev, and get Darian on board.
“Excellent, we’ve got the place to ourselves. Pull up Andy’s Memeron,” Nev said brightly, gesturing beside her as she sat down to a glorious whirring of gears.
Darian dutifully sat down, awaiting further instructions like a robotic pet.
Nev pulled out two old-fashioned keyboards, placing one before each of them. She then used her viz to log into the SavePoint codebase, while tapping a dummy password into the keyboard in front of her. Darian made a point of looking in the other direction while she typed, but best not to take any chances.
“Now it’s your turn,” she said. “Log into the temporal processing server, then I’ll be able to run the hack.” She turned away to give Darian some presumptive privacy, opening a little home-brewed viz app designed to record the sound of keystrokes and extract inputted text. She watched the probabilistic model reveal the most likely keystrokes as Darian typed next to her. By the time his fingers had stopped, his password floated before her in acid green lettering: “T4rryT0wn-L3V1T1CU$-gW3nd0L1nE-&bDsM”. Interesting. You could learn a lot about someone from their passwords. She blinked, closing and saving the app’s output to her password database, then turned back to face him.
“Okay,” she said. “We’re in. Now all you have to do is run this code…” she found LoopSkip.app in her viz library, and flicked it at him, enabling a single-use permission, “…and I’ll get a prompt to validate on my end. Then you should be good to go.”
She watched as Darian ran the app on his viz, then validated his access to the codebase. He smiled—a handsome, confident smile that momentarily dispelled the aura of awkwardness and repression that normally surrounded him like a raincloud—and reached a hand up to touch his nose. At the last moment, Nev realized what he was doing, and darted her own hand out to grab his finger.
“Ow! Wha-what was that for?” He sounded hurt and confused. The cloud was back.
“I’m sorry, Darian, I just—it’s best not to try looping inside of Qbito’s offices, okay?” She was riffing, but Darian was too close for comfort, and she’d say or do whatever was necessary to prevent another microglitch from happening. “Kusuma looks the other way when we hack on our own time, but the company doesn’t need the liability if its own coders can’t follow basic safety protocols in the office.” Wow, that sounded pretty legit.
Darian nodded gravely. “Yes, I understand. I’m so sorry, Nev, I’m just excited… this is maybe the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I’ll bet. “Heh, believe me. I can relate. But save it for the really fun stuff. You know.” She looked at him frankly. “The safety protocols are there for a good reason. You can blow a capillary, put yourself into a vegetative state if you loop too much.”
He nodded again, sweat beading his brow.
“I’m serious. The chances are pretty low if you take it easy, but don’t overdo it, okay? You don’t want to incur some damage you can’t undo.”
He nodded, putting on a serious face. “Yes, I understand. Thanks, Nev.” Then he smiled, seemingly in spite of himself. The raincloud receded again, for a moment. “This is the greatest day of my life!”
Maybe mine, too, Nev thought. If the password she’d just swiped would give her access to fix whatever was causing the Glitch, she might actually be able to start living her life again, in the right direction. Seeing the smile on Darian’s face also made her feel a little less guilty about abusing his trust. “You’re a user,” Anissa had told her. “You created this situation.” Well, maybe she had, but she was doing her goddamned best to find her way out of it. And if young Darian could manage to use his newfound powers in moderation, not only was Nev doing no real harm, she was actually helping him. When used correctly, looping could be an interesting path to self-actualization.
“Well,” Darian said. He seemed to have returned to his base state of awkward shyness. “I should, uh, probably be getting back to…” He half stood up, and the Memeron clicked and whirred, seemingly undecided about whether he was staying or going.
“No,” Nev said, surprising herself. “No, I mean, you don’t need to go yet. Tell me something about yourself. I know you were a cheerleader, right?” He sat back down, and she felt the guilty burn in her chest subside a bit more.
He grimaced. “Yeah. USC. Trojan for life.” He did something with his fingers—presumably a team gesture. “I was actually captain junior year. Then…” he sighed, letting the air out slowly through puffed cheeks. “Well, I took a bad fall, spent half of my senior year in traction and PT.”
Nev furrowed her brow sympathetically.
“But, you know. It’s all good. That semester in bed was when I got really serious about physics. Read everything I could about loop quantum gravity, spatial-temporal dynamics, all the stuff we use here. It’s kind of amazing, what we do. Especially once SP2 launches, right?” He smiled at her encouragingly, but she didn’t take the bait.
“Well, tell me more. Like, where are you from? What got you into cheerleading? And applied physics?”
“Oh. Well, I dunno. The usual, I guess. I was the smart kid in my class, never much good at sports, though I always loved gymnastics. Grew up in Westchester.” Nev shrugged and shook her head. “New York suburbs. Really nice place. My parents are both doctors. My dad works at a hospital in the city, my mom’s got a family practice.”
“Wow, two doctors. You must have been really healthy.” And really rich.
“Heh, heh. Yeah. I mean, I guess I was. Am. Like I said, I wasn’t really into sports or anything. Actually… the reason I got into cheerleading was for a girl.”
“Ohhhh… Do tell. Was she, is she the Love Of Your Life?”
“Heh. No, no, no, no. It’s not like that. I mean, I liked her a lot, but Gwen didn’t really like me that way. But, anyway, I’m over that now. I’ve got, um, other stuff in my life, other people. And she did introduce me to cheering, so.” Darian looked around him, then stood up decisively. “Well, Nev, it’s been really great. Thanks for, uh, showing me how to use the coffee maker, and for, well, for everything. You’ve changed my life. Really.”
“Hey, Darian. It was my pleasure. Glad to help out however you need it. If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know. Seriously, any time.”
“Thank you so much.” Darian extended his hand awkwardly, and Nev shook it. Then he pirouetted with surprising grace, and walked out of the room. He might not cheer any more, but Nev had to admit, he was still in very good shape.
Nev turned back to her desk, stowing the dummy keyboards back in a drawer, then pulling up the SavePoint 2.0 alpha code in one viz window, and the temporal processing code in another, unlocking it with Darian’s password. But before she could get into her flow, something odd happened. She suddenly realized that the code was unintelligible to her. The closer she looked at it, the harder it was to read. It was as though each character on the page was simultaneously itself, and a superposition of every other possible character, a blur of probabilities that obstinately refused to settle down in its syntactical bed. And she wasn’t so much sitting any more as floating, looking down through the viz at a bubbling cauldron of code soup.
For a moment, Nev even worried she might puke all over her desk. Then, with every synapse she could muster, she focused, directing all of her mental energy at a single character on a single line of code. She squinted through the viz, willing the character to resolve itself into anything definite. An ê or an 8, or a {—it didn’t matter which, as long as it was something. After what seemed like an eon, she felt something move, just slightly, like an enormous cube balanced on a single corner, pivoting by a single degree. Then, all at once, it was as if she could feel the entire wave function collapsing, and she came crashing down to Earth, through an ocean of code, landing with a springy thump back in her Memeron chair. She focused on the character again. It was an i.
Another microglitch, despite her her assault on poor Darian’s finger in her efforts to prevent one. They were getting more frequent, Nev thought. And more severe, maybe.
She sat there, breathing in the silence, for ten or fifteen minutes, eyes closed, feeling tiny electrical twinges all up and down her nervous system. Come on, Nev. Now or never. Do or die.
Nev opened her eyes. The alpha code and temporal code were still hovering in her field of vision. Each window was clearly legible, ready and waiting for her. The alpha code was substantially close to completion; she could probably get it into executable shape by the end of the day again. But the deeper she dug into it, the more she noticed changes from the original version she’d already completed. Strange syntax. Stems from other codebases. It was alright, she could work with it. Work around it.
There was something so peaceful about being alone in the room with the alpha. It hadn’t even been a week, as Nev reckoned it, since the last time she’d had the chance to get elbows deep into pure code, but she realized very quickly how much she’d missed it—how much she needed it to maintain her emotional equilibrium. In the years after Faith had died and before she’d escaped to California, Nev’s laptop had been the one place where she felt safe, and in control. In fact, it was the one thing in life that had made any sense at all. Now the Glitch had taken even that small comfort away.
Nev’s fingers flew over her virtual keyboard, and the hours flew by beneath them. It was late afternoon, and her third coffee was beginning to wear off, when she reached the point where she had picked up the code on Zero Day. She was at the home stretch. Primed to finish the SavePoint 2.0 alpha code. Congrats, hot stuff, she toasted herself.
But Nev’s feeling of victory was short lived. Almost at once, two hideous thoughts descended on her, bringing back with a rush the queasy feeling she’d experienced after she’d hacked Darian for his password this morning.
First, what the fuck was she doing? What was the point of completing the SavePoint 2.0 alpha again, when there were so many good reasons not to? For one thing, she knew from experience that she’d wake up again yesterday, with all of her hard work undone, like it had never happened to begin with. For another, this thing was dangerous. Executing the SavePoint 2.0 alpha code was the reason she’d gotten stuck in the Glitch to begin with. This time around, the code was different, somehow, but God knew what would happen if she tried to execute it. Could she get stuck inside of a second Glitch inside of the first Glitch? What would that even mean? Jesus, Nev. Sisyphus much? You’ve just spent the entire afternoon repeating your own worst mistake. Figure it out, already. She had to learn to start thinking about consequences.
Second—and, if anything, this was even more unnerving—Nev realized why the code seemed different. It was hard to pin down, because whoever did it had done a great job of covering their tracks, but the entire program was riddled with hooks into another code base. It was almost like finding out that there was a trap door in the basement of your house, leading to a whole other house that you could see into but couldn’t enter for some reason. This was Kusuma-level code, foundational Qbito stuff. Gospel. That bald bastard. Nev realized he definitely knew more than he’d let on when she tried to tell him about the Glitch.
She was halfway to the door of the office, heading back up to the C-suite pod to confront him, when she realized he wasn’t here. He’d spent most of the month before launch at some kind of ashram, an Esalen on steroids (or ayahuasca, more likely) in an undisclosed location. No vizzes, no phones. No SavePoints, even. How convenient.
As Nev stood in the dim, polarized afternoon light, wondering what to do next, Jared’s dorky selfie wiggled itself into her periphery, interrupting her thoughts, such as they were. She glanced at it in spite of herself, opening the message in her viz. A picture appeared in her sightline, an oversaturated snapshot of eggplant slices coated in panko crumbs on a hardwood cutting board, next to a laser-engraved Japanese nakiri and a bottle of ’42 Sonoma Zinfandel with a handwritten label. The accompanying text read,
Nev’s stomach growled.