Joint Temporal Task Force HQ
Shoshone Mountains, Nevada
January 22, approximately 13 MY BCE
Nathan heaved a deep breath and steadied himself by gripping the back of a conference room chair. The soft leather responded to his touch as though it shrouded still living flesh. Outside, swirling snowfall obscured distant peaks, lifeless and gray. The faces around the table all turned toward him. Their eyes showed only a merciless inspection.
Haversham spoke again. “We don’t have much time, Nathan. We’re here to help you. Or at least reassure you.” She waved an open palm toward the chair he was leaning against. “Please. Sit.”
He dug his toes into the thick carpet and wished again he’d stopped to put on his shoes back at the hotel. Back in 1933. He slid into the chair. “Okay. I’m sitting.” The scent of coffee and the sight of pastries made his stomach rumble.
The woman sitting next to him pulled the platter with the food toward him and whispered, “It’s all right, son. Help yourself.”
He muttered, “Thanks,” and took a bite out of an offered pastry. He gave her a grateful look. She had pointy ears and smelled like sour milk. Who were these—people didn’t seem right, but creatures seemed wrong, too. At least the apple fritter tasted like the ones from Donutland back home.
Haversham leaned back in her chair and tented her fingers. When she spoke, a tinge of wistfulness misted her voice. "I'd forgotten how young you were, Mr. Hilbert."
That made him stop with the apple fritter on the way to his mouth for second bite. "How young I was. You mean the last time you saw me? When you told your Russian henchmen to kill me?"
Sudden dismay clouded her eyes. "Kill you? When did this happen?"
"Yesterday. At that church. Ambrose Chapel. You wore what looked like a Red Army uniform from an old movie."
She seemed to relax a bit. "That Haversham. You're safe from her. We've isolated her timeline so it can't impede on ours."
He put the fritter down and glared at her. "So, you're saying that wasn't you?" He didn't believe her.
"It was another instance of me. What I might have been if I'd made worse choices. Bad choices." Her eyes seemed to go somewhere else for a moment, or perhaps sometime else. But then she continued. "She's from another thread of my personal timeline. Surely you understand. Threaded timelines were your idea—your contribution to this." She waved her hands at the room.
"Yeah. Well, if you reject the idea of Deviations, it's kind of obvious."
An elderly man sitting across the table quirked an eyebrow at him and sniffed. "Obvious to you, perhaps. It was still a brilliant insight. No one else made it." His shoulder-length white hair and full beard hid his face, but something about him looked familiar. His voice didn't help—a head cold added a nasal overtone. He paused to blow his nose, then continued. "It took the rest of the organization a while to catch on." He sniffled. “Sorry. My nanodocs haven’t killed this novel virus just yet.”
Nathan frowned and inspected the old duffer, on the edge of recognition.
The woman sitting next to him, the one who had offered him the pastries, spoke, "We had to reconcile the evidence of Deviations against Mr. Hilbert's revolutionary ideas. Not surprising there was resistance, Holger."
Nathan was sure he'd never met anyone named Holger. It must be one of those chance coincidences, where the man reminded him of someone. It didn't matter, anyway. He glared at Haversham. "You all keep changing the subject. Why should I trust any of you?" He paused for a deep breath to control his rising anger. "The only one I trust is Haakon. Why isn't he here?"
Haversham glanced at the one named Holger, who gave a slight shake of his head. Nathan's face heated at the silent exchange, and he tried to not shout at them. "Dammit, what are you hiding from me?"
Haversham kept her voice calm. Soothing, almost. "We're not hiding anything, Mr. Hilbert. Nathan." She chewed her lower lip. "That idiot Becquerel was going to kidnap you and abandon you once again in the Pleistocene. We saved you from that. Or at least Agent Corbett saved you."
"Maybe." Nathan didn't want to concede anything to these people. "But if you did, you didn't do it for me. You had your own agenda. You just want to use me."
The woman sitting next to him touched his hand. "Nathan, you are important to us. Haakon is important to us, too. Many timelines branch from the thread they share in 1933. Your realization that we're all joined by a common past led to cross-timeline cooperation and, eventually, to today, to this council. We owe you a debt. We pay our debts, best we can."
"So just friggin' explain things. Don't keep secrets."
Haversham spoke again. "Not secrets, Nathan. Uncertainty. We can't see what will happen to you, just what might happen. If an outcome is possible—has non-zero probability—then there will be a thread where it happens. All possible outcomes are not only possible, but certain, at least in one timeline. Things are even more complex—entangled, if you will—near a Deviation."
Despite himself, Nathan had to admit that she made sense. He just hadn't had time to think through the implications of threaded timelines. He wondered if this must be what Schrodinger's cat felt like, both dead and alive. Except that he still couldn't quite accept the basic premise, despite everything. "Deviations again. I still think that whole idea is crap. You have to accept Deviations to believe that large scale events aren't stable under small perturbations."
Haversham's expression showed relief, as if discussing technicalities was somehow preferable to the truth. Maybe she was right. Nathan always felt more grounded when arguments turned to the details. Haversham said, "You mean the butterfly effect, right? That small changes like a butterfly's wings in the Himalayas can change the weather in Chicago? It's counter-intuitive, I know, which is why we didn't think of it. The math for chaos theory didn't even exist when we did our original experiments. Deviations looked like the best explanation for our results."
That was the kind of detail Nathan could wrap his arms around. He nodded. "Yeah. I get chaos theory and the weather. That's well-established. But those butterfly wings can't change the climate in Chicago, for bog's sake." He pointed to his nose. "Suppose I want to scratch my nose. I could do it now." He paused for a beat. "How about now? Or now?" He scratched. "Do we get a new thread of time for each decision about scratching my friggin' nose?"
Haversham smiled. "Yes. Our experiments proved that. Yours would have, too, if you'd continued them. But it turns out most such threads are ephemeral. They get reabsorbed into to the stable equilibrium, and the timeline itself doesn't change. Your example is like the ocean foam on a beach. It can't disrupt the wave."
"So, we're back to Deviations are nonsense." Nathan let his frustration show in his voice.
"Not nonsense at all. They exist. Each timeline certainly has broad expanses of stability, places where small perturbations dissipate like foam. It's at the boundaries between timelines where things are unstable. Times and places like the Viking at Stamford Bridge, where small Deviations can change the course of history and generate a new timeline, or timelines. Permanent ones, that don't dissipate."
Nathan frowned. That was his idea, after all. "So, you're saying the times when Deviations happen are like strange attractors?"
Delight showed in Havesham's expression, and she nodded. "Yes! The local boundaries between time-like threads behave somewhat like strange attractors. Under your leadership, the scientific team here has—"
The man across the table—Holger?— blew his nose and coughed. "This is all interesting, but it's not why we're here today. Can we get down to business?"
Haversham hesitated for a beat before responding. "Of course. I apologize, Holger. We're all grateful to you for your joining us despite your indisposition."
The old duffer snorted. "So get on with it."
"Indeed." Halversham turned to Nathan. "Bloomsbury in 1933 is one of those 'strange attractors' you mentioned. You recently met Leo Szilard. Do you know who he was?"
Maybe she'd finally give him the details he needed. Nathan answered, "I think so. A physicist from the last century?" Nathan tried to remember the chapter in the history of science course he'd taken as an undergraduate. "He had something to do with Einstein, maybe?"
Haversham said, "In your timeline, yes, he was a minor figure—Einstein's promising student who tragically died young." She leaned forward. "In other timelines—mine and Holger's, for example—he survives. He's the first to get the idea for neutrons setting off a chain reaction. He gets that idea in Bloomsbury, in 1933. Later, he was instrumental in jump-starting the project that led to the US having an atomic bomb in 1945, four years earlier than in your timeline."
Holger muffled a sneeze and swiped his nose. "That four years is critical. Without the bomb, the US was bogged down in the war in the Pacific. With that, and without the threat of the bomb, the Russians were able to infiltrate, and then dominate, all European governments except for Portugal. Your timeline and mine have little in common after 1945."
Nathan stared at Holger. The man really did look familiar, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. Maybe he'd met another instance of him, one in his own timeline.
Before he could consider the implications of that, Haversham spoke again.
"As I said earlier, Bloomsbury in 1933 gives rise to many different time-like threads. At least three are represented on this Council."
"What?" She wasn't making sense. Nathan asked, "If you can cross from one thread to another, how can they be stable?"
The pointy-eared woman next to him answered, "The threads join in their shared histories. That's why this facility is thirteen mega-years in the past. It's before humans and the other apes diverged genetically." Her ears wiggled.
This was too much. Nathan held his head in his hands and stared at the table. "So it's possible from here to go forward to any future thread?"
Pointy-ears answered again. "Precisely. But to get here, you had to travel using a Timepiece from your thread. The least-energy solution is to engineer that timepiece to return along its original thread and not follow another. The only exception is near a boundary between threads, where a mis-tuned Timepiece can theoretically slip across to the wrong thread."
Haversham, her voice suddenly gentle, added, "That's how you and Haakon met, Nathan. His broken Timepiece sent him to your timeline in Iowa, not to his."
Realization sent needles prickling down Nathan's back. "That means Haakon and I can never have a future together." It wasn't a question—he already knew the answer in his gut.
Holger leaned back in his chair, his face pale and impassive. Sweat gleamed on his brow and a trickle ran down his temple.
Haversham answered. "You can have a future together, but it has to be in the past, in facilities like this one and elsewhere. But for that to happen, you both have to make the right decisions back in 1933 Bloomsbury."
Maybe there was hope after all. "What do I need to do?"
The bald, troll-like person spoke for the first time. Nathan suppressed a hysterical giggle at his high-pitched, silky voice. "Listen, barefoot boy. This isn't about your love life. This is about making sure our future, the future that leads to this facility, has a non-zero probability. If you've been listening, which I sincerely doubt, we've given you enough information to achieve that goal."
Holger glared at the man and seemed about to speak, but Halversham held up her hand, palm forward. "Kolsch-yur, that's enough. Mr. Hilbert has proven his mettle." She turned to face Nathan. "The boundary between timelines is chaotic, Nathan. We can't predict what you or Mr. Sigurdson will encounter or must do. We can say that at least one timeline has a happy ending for you that leads here. All it takes is for that timeline to have positive probability. If it can happen, it will happen, at least in one possible future out of all the threads. It's up to you to find the path to get here."
Irritation blazed in Nathan's cheeks. They hadn't told him anything he hadn't already more or less figured out. "Why bring me here, then? To piss me off?"
She shook her head. "We're not cruel. We brought you here to give you hope, and to empower you to make informed decisions in the events that you will face on your return to 1933. You now know there are choices that lead to you and Haakon together, and choices that do not. Those same choices lead to us, to this Council. Use what you've learned here and choose wisely." She nodded to the pointy-eared woman who stood and opened the conference room door.
When Corbett entered, Halversham spoke to her. "It's time to return him to 1933. Our work here is done. Godspeed, Mr. Hilbert."