Nev’s eyes fluttered open. The sauna was dark, and moonlight twinkled purply through the stained-glass windows, glinting off the stones embedded in the ceiling. Her head was pounding, and despite a lingering queasiness, her stomach growled loudly enough to scare the scorpions that came out at night in the desert. Another microglitch. Maybe the worst one yet. Airin was right, things were disintegrating quickly. Everything solid was turning to quicksand.
Nev stepped out into the clear night sky. The sun was fully descended, which put the time after eight o’clock, but clearly before 11:33. She checked her viz. 8:47. She needed to find Kusuma quickly. It didn’t look like she’d be driving home that evening. In the futurepast, she would have to remember to program a bot to initiate a driverless return of the Newmobile the following day. Come to think of it, she’d better schedule a driverless return of the EZ-5 for the day following her impromptu trip to Esalen. She didn’t need creditors hassling her pastfuture timeline.
Another sonorous growl. Can’t do this on an empty stomach. Nev had to find something to eat. She checked the palapa, but even the table that held the tea service had been folded up and stowed away. She set off along the path leading from the saunas, dimly illuminated by blown glass solar lights spiked into the dirt every yard, and soon arrived at another signpost which pointed one way towards the guest huts and another way towards the cafetería. It did look classier with the accent, although as Nev recalled, the dining accommodations at Thyme Springs were as bare bones as the tubs and cabins.
First food, then an inspection of the guest cabins.
The screen door opened with a squeak, as Nev stepped inside the brightly lit dining hall. Only a few guests lingered at the long communal tables. A quick check turned up no bald heads. It was possible that Kusuma wasn’t at Thyme Springs, that Nev had been too hasty to connect the dots, which were no more than disparate points in a patternless data field. But if so, she was only doing what humans did, making constellations out of stars in the night sky. This trip might turn out to be a bust, another false positive. Nev couldn’t help wishing she was miles away, dining at the Park Chalet, while staring into the night sky of Airin’s eyes.
Longing surged through her veins. Why couldn’t Kusuma have invented a transporter instead of a rewind device, something that would let her beam herself to Airin, wherever they were? Without SavePoint she wouldn’t be stranded in this god-forsaken desert trying to save the world. But if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, as Mama used to say (one of her few aphorisms that wasn’t King James approved). Point of fact: Kusuma had unleashed SavePoint on the world—with Nev’s vital assistance—and if she wanted Airin to enjoy the future that Nev had ratfucked herself out of, she needed to stay focused and hunt down Kusuma, wherever he was hiding. Nev had wasted so many years living just for herself. She only had a short time now to live for Airin, and she was going to try her damndest to make things right. But first, dinner.
Esme and another uniformed worker were hovering around the bowls and steam trays laid out along the buffet table at one end of the room, lifting the remains of the dinner service onto rolling carts like the one she’d used to distribute towels. Nev walked over to see whether there was any food left. She spied a trio of shriveled samosas in one of the steamer trays, wrapped two in a catering napkin, and popped the third into her mouth. Esme and the other worker continued their activities, ignoring Nev’s sudden appearance, which was just as well since she wouldn’t have been able to talk with her mouth so full. She was halfway out the door when she saw Mr. Pollock walking up.
“New girl! Where’ve you been? Toilet’s clogged at Cabin 12.”
Nev swallowed back five different responses, none of which would have been very helpful.
“On my way,” she said, hastily stepping onto the path to the cabins and escaping into the darkness before the manager reached her.
Popping another samosa into her mouth, Nev made a mental note to save Cabin 12 for last in her hunt for Kusuma.
If he was here at Thyme Springs, was he more likely to stay in a bare bones eco-cabin like the one she’d shared with Anissa at the retreat? Or would he lodge in one of the two chrome-clad Airstreams that served as the resort’s luxury accommodations? Money was limitless for Kusuma, and she knew for a fact that he’d sprung for the ‘full package.’ Nev had no doubt he could buy the whole damn resort if he chose. It was merely a question of taste. Judging from his office, and his grooming standards, Kusuma’s preference for a clean aesthetic verged on filling the clinical criteria for a sensory-integration disorder. Nev thought of the smooth surface of his obsidian desk, his tight fitting tagless tee-shirts, his clean shaven head.
The cabins, as Nev recalled, had rough, splintery walls, and deep divots between the planed floorboards. The Airstreams, then.
Nev snuck up behind the first of the two trailers. On one side, the trailer opened onto a semi-circular wooden half deck, shielded by a canopy that stretched out from the roof. An electric faux fire pit and a couple of wooden benches made for a pleasant place to sit outside on a warm night. The other side of the trailer was nothing but dirt and rocks. No one was sitting outside this evening; the dim illumination coming through the curtained windows overlooking the patio suggested that whoever was staying there had already retired inside. Nev snuck closer to the back side of the trailer. There were two long windows above head height, close to the roofline, that were not curtained. Just standing on her tiptoes didn’t give Nev enough of a vantage point to see inside. She looked around the ground behind her, found a small boulder, and—praying to the scorpion gods to leave her be—began pushing it closer to the trailer. She gave up after ten feet, but that was close enough so that when she climbed on top of it, she could just peer inside.
Two middle-aged women were sitting on the floor. One was heavy, with wavy, bleached blonde hair hanging limply along the sides of her face. The other one was almost anorexically thin and dark skinned, with close-cropped hair and winking, multicolored LED earrings running up the sides of each ear. Both were completely naked. They sat cross-legged on faded woven mats, facing one another, knees nearly touching, moving their lips inaudibly. Nev strained to hear what they were saying, curious despite herself, but couldn’t make out the words. As she watched them, however, she could tell two things: First, they were speaking in complete unison, lips and tongues moving simultaneously as though choreographed. Second, they weren’t repeating a phrase; either they were reciting something very long, or somehow extemporizing in perfect synchronicity.
Suddenly and without warning, both women swiveled their heads to face Nev through the window, without breaking their stream of vocalization or moving a muscle below their necks. At first, she was so transfixed by their perfectly matched lips that she didn’t notice anything else, but then something tugged at her attention, and she saw their eyes. They were almost entirely black, as though the pupils had expanded and swallowed up the iris, whites, and capillaries. She stumbled and slipped off her boulder, twisting an ankle as she landed on the dusty ground beside the Airstream. She could no longer see or hear the women inside, but somehow she could still feel their void eyes fixed on her, the apian buzz of their song tickling her inner ear.
Nev’s heart was in her chest. She felt a rising panic she hadn’t known since long-ago games of hide-and-seek with Faith after dark in the junkyard. Without thinking, she dashed up the steps to the second Airstream, pulled open its spring-hinged door, and flung herself inside, wedging the door shut behind her and willing her breath to slow as she leaned hard against it.
She was alone, wonderfully alone. No sound of footsteps outside, no zombie scratches at the door from the hideous yin yang twins and their empty stares. No SpringKeepers come to eject her from the property, no Mr. Pollock telling her to deal with a vomit situation in the Silent Temple. She flopped over to the sofa, which was surprisingly comfortable, and gulped for air, trying to scrub her visual memory of the horror show she’d just witnessed.
After a minute or two, she was sufficiently calm to look around and get her bearings. She was in a small living room area lit by warm, yellowish string lights surrounding the curvilinear contours of the Airstream’s ceiling. In addition to the couch, there was a small table with a beautiful blue and brown batik cloth draped over it, and a wooden bench lined with some similarly decorated cushions. To her left was a kitchenette, with a pleasant combination of classic fixtures and ultramodern appliances. Beyond that was a short hallway with two doors, presumably a bathroom and bedroom. It was spotless and empty; if anyone had stayed here recently, the SpringKeepers had done a great job of tidying up afterwards.
Since there was no chance of returning home that night, Nev figured the Airstream was as good a place as anywhere to blip out. She wouldn’t be spotted, would leave no trace either yestermorrow or futurepast. It was a shame she hadn’t found Kusuma, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t tried. One way or another, she’d get the founder’s code. The alternative was too confusing to contemplate. For now, the only thing that would make the final hour or two of September 3rd even cozier would be a proper drink. No kombucha, no deionized water. Just alcohol, and maybe a dash of something sweet. She stood up and headed over to the kitchenette. There must be a bottle stowed somewhere.
“Saya senang perjalanan Anda telah membawa Anda ke tempat dan waktu ini.”
The shock of hearing a familiar voice so close at hand, saying something so totally incomprehensible, was more than Nev could handle. She leapt up with a shriek and dashed behind the small kitchen island, hoping against hope that he hadn’t seen her. The room was silent. After a minute, she risked a peek over the counter, sure that Kusuma was looming over her with a knife, ready to sacrifice her to some ancient god she’d never heard of. Instead, he was sitting on the couch, legs crossed, dressed—thankfully—in his customary canvas pants and form-fitting black tee. He extended a hand to the cushioned bench across from him.
“Come on over and have a seat.” Shades of the naked sauna creep made Nev hesitate, but she bit back her fear in the interest of killing the Glitch, and headed over to join him. She quickly checked the time: 11:07. Close to reset, she had to work fast. She sat gingerly on the batik cushion, waiting to be snapped up like a fly in a pitcher plant.
In the dim, pleasant glow from the string lights, Kusuma looked almost normal. Almost. Like so many of the other patrons she’d encountered at Thyme Springs, his pupils were so wide she almost couldn’t make out his irises. The memory of the two women in the next Airstream over sent an aftershock of panic through her veins, but she felt surprisingly safe in Kusuma’s presence, and managed to quell her tremors before speaking.
“It’s… nice to see you, Mr. Kusuma. I bet you’re wondering—”
“Nev.” He raised a hand, gently. “I told you to call me Noel.”
She scanned her mind back quickly over both versions of the timeline. She’d always called Kusuma by his last name, and he’d never invited her to do otherwise. At least, not until the day before the Glitch, when she’d tried and failed to warn him. But that was almost three weeks in his future.
“Noel, then. I don’t… when did you…?”
“Do you know what I’m doing here, Nev? At Thyme Springs?”
Fucking around with other rich people in the desert.
“You’re on a retreat, right? Harmono-temporal Industries?”
He smiled, a little too indulgently. “Quite the opposite. I’m not retreating, I’m plunging in. Plunging into the allness of once, the singularity of ever.” Nev sighed. “And, no, it’s not Harmono-temporal. It’s Temporoharmine. Temporo meaning—”
“Time. Yeah, I know that.”
“Yes.” He gave her a curious look. “Yes, you do. And harmine, also known as telepathine, a naturally-occurring substance in a plant native to this region called ayahuasca. It inhibits certain enzymes in the body, which in turn are responsible for deanimating specific neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin.”
He watched placidly as she processed the information.
“So… you’re high off your ass on ayahuasca and living in a trailer?”
He laughed, seemingly delighted by her précis.
“Yes, yes that’s it. Precisely. I am high. Off my ass. And I have been for over a week, and I will be for almost three weeks. Until shortly after the equinox. When we are scheduled to launch the SavePoint 2.0 alpha. But those specificities…” he waved away invisible gnats. “They don’t mean anything, Nev. As I believe you know.”
Okay. Cards on the table, then. She was never one to be coy.
“So, Noel, you remember our meeting in your office? Three weeks from now?”
“When you will try to warn me about the SavePoint catastrophe, and I will remind you not to neglect the details. Yes, I ‘remember.’” He put the final word in scare quotes. “But words like that mean nothing to you and me. We are no longer fettered by the evolutionary mechanism that constrains us within an artificially linear temporality. It’s nothing more than a vestigial artifact, as useless as the webbing between our toes, or faith in gods. Time is not directional. The difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations of the world; its orientation is merely a contingent aspect that appears when we look at things and neglect the details. Rovelli, 91. Amirite?”
Nev wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but she only had a few minutes left to get the code, so she did her best to keep him talking.
“Yes, right, I guess, but that’s not true of everyone. Not yet. Amirite, Noel?”
“‘Yet’… you are so bound by the tyranny of grammar, Nevaeh. I implore you, free yourself of expectation, of regret. Be the sum total of yourself, no more and no less.”
“Okay, yes, I hear you, Noel. I do. I really do.” He smiled and nodded. She tried to slow her heart, slow the pace of her speech. Eyes on the prize, Nev. Get the code. “But… but Noel, I’m worried about what will happen if we upgrade SavePoint without warning everyone. I mean, what’s happening to me, what’s happening to us… Don’t you think it’s unethical to force millions of people into the Glitch, which is what I call the—”
“Yes.”
“—the situation that… wait… you mean yes, you know that’s what I call it, or…”
“Yes, I agree. It’s unethical. It would be disastrous, for all of those people, and for Qbito. It can’t continue. The alpha must not launch. But it would also be unethical for me to betray my own company, to destroy my own creation. And that is why I put you in charge. As I will tell you at our next meeting, I have absolute trust in you to handle these challenges.”
Mingled confusion and relief swirled into knots in Nev’s stomach, exhausting and exhilarating her. She checked the time on her viz. 11:32. Shit.
“Okay, then, Noel. Listen carefully. I really need you to give me the founder’s code, because without that, I can’t—”
“Nev. You really don’t understand, do you? I have already given you everything you need. And you have already accomplished your task. From a certain perspective.”
“From a ‘certain perspective?’ From what perspective? Noel, give me the fucking code. I don’t have time for mystical bullshit zen koans right now. This is serious. The future of the world—”
**Series complete. LoopID?QT.43.33.23.03.09.2045**