2347 A.D.
Edge Station One
Did I swallow a penny? Olivia wondered. It would explain the metal taste in her mouth—but not the massive headache at the back of her skull that throbbed dully with every beat of her heart. She lay very still, eyes closed tight. As far as she could tell, she was lying on something soft and solid, like a plush rug. Light glowed through her eyelids. All around her was the soft hum of electronics. Except the breeze felt fresh, so she was outside.
Unless I’m not. At least the smell of soot from the wildfires is gone.
Footsteps circled her slowly.
“Are you awake yet?” a man’s voice said above her, the words clipped and surly.
“No.”
The man sighed. “I’m Riggin. Doctor Riggin. Good to know that you understand me. That means your Broca translator is working. Are you planning to lie there forever?”
“You’re some kind of kidnapper who hit me over the head in a park. I’m not going anywhere with you.” Olivia couldn’t think of another explanation, since it did not appear to be aliens. Maybe they used one of those flashbang grenades on me, like in the movies?
“I am a scientist,” the voice replied. “I did not kidnap you. I can put you back in your own time right now, if you want.”
Olivia lay stubbornly quiet on the floor, even though she really wanted to open her eyes and look at where she was. Back in my own time? Does this mean … no, that’s impossible.
There was a rustle, and she could tell that Doctor Riggin had knelt down beside her. When next he spoke, his voice was gentle.
“Are you all right? Do you need medical attention?”
“What’s a broccoli translator?”
Doctor Riggin barked out a laugh. “A Broca translator. It’s a little machine we’ve put in your brain—atop the left temporal lobe—to help translate our language for you, and your language for us. No one’s really up to date on Ancient English anymore.”
“Ancient English?” She opened her eyes at last and pushed herself upright. She was on a rug. A plush gray rug, in a room with padded white walls. There was a strange doorway behind her, plain and metallic and empty, and a pitch-black window opposite. Another more normal-looking gray door stood in the wall between, but it had no handle or noticeable switch.
Padded walls. Is this a mental hospital or something?
It was only she and Doctor Riggin in the room, and he—did not look like what she expected. While his voice sounded tense and a little raspy, he was very sleekly groomed. His hair, dark and curly, laycropped close to his skull and peppered with gray. He tapped away on what seemed like a smart tablet, but it was as thin as a clipboard. He did, she had to admit, look like a doctor. Well, maybe even an alien doctor. He wore a long white sort of tunic and short cropped pants. The white shoes—with no company logos—looked like the sort that nurses and doctors wore back home.
Wherever home is.
“What did you mean when you said you could put me back in my own time?” she asked.
“We time-yanked you to the future. Welcome to the year 2347.”
Olivia couldn’t help but laugh. “Really funny. 2347. If it were 2347, I would be dead.”
“Technically, you are. That’s why it’s relatively safe to use a certain kind of time travel. We’re not crossing your timeline, so the risk of paradox is greatly reduced.” Doctor Riggin kept his eyes on the tablet.
Olivia stared at him from the floor for several moments. The motions of the man’s mouth and the sounds he made did not quite match the meanings she got when he talked, like a song or movie that was dubbed over. Oh, they were similar to English, but she didn’t consciously know what he was saying. The translator? She reached up and felt a small bump just above her left ear.
“Drop the time travel crap. You kidnapped me and did some kind of weird experiment on my brain, and put me in a padded room—”
“That’s in case someone comes out of the yank too quickly, or panics. It’s happened. Look, we’re going to explain all the details to the lot of you. I’m just supposed to help you adjust by covering the basics here.”
“The basics of time travel. Because that’s super basic. Riiiiight.” Olivia folded her arms over her chest. “What’s next, you roll out a blackboard with a hundred equations on it?”
Riggin threw his hands up. “Mad-Doc, take the one we’re yanking from the twenty-first century, they said! She’ll be the easiest one! We’re so shorthanded and she’ll grasp the concepts quicker than the others! Pah.” He knuckled a temple.
“I want to go home right now,” Olivia said, standing up. The weight of her duffel bag tugged at her shoulder.
Wait, what kind of kidnapper leaves you with your stuff?
Something wasn’t adding up.
“You can’t go home until that headache fades.” He pointed the tablet at her, showing the outline of a human skull with colored textures. One patch at the back throbbed in exact tempo with her pain. “Don’t even think about lying to me and saying it’s gone.”
She touched the back of her head. “Okay, but as soon as it’s gone, I want to go home.”
“You can. We just have to explain why we brought you here, and then you get the choice of helping us or not helping us.”
“You brought me here … to help you? I’m a kid and you’re an adult scientist! And where is here, anyway?”
“All right, enough! We’re talking in circles. I’m tired of it. If you aren’t going to take me at my word, then you had best take a look for yourself.” He swept over to the black window and tapped on it twice.
The black vanished, letting light pour into the room and over the floor. Bright, brilliant sunlight—except that Olivia couldn’t tell where the sun was. She stepped over to the window in awe, looking up at a crystalline blue sky, and then down at a city. Tall buildings in brilliant colors were laid out among neat paths and gray roads, and there were vehicles that looked like flying golf carts drifting along them. There were bicycles, too, though their balloon-like tires were yellow and not black. Neat flower beds and patches of grass were growing everywhere. Olivia could see what had to be a robot watering the lawn at the foot of the building she was in.
The strangest part was that the buildings all seemed to lean in. At a distance, the sky cut them off abruptly, like it was … It’s curved! And the shadows. They go in all different directions, as if the sun were spread out across the whole sky!
“This is a movie set, isn’t it?” She asked in awe.
“What? No! Why would you think that?” He leaned down to look from her perspective, brow furrowed.
Oliva pointed. “The sky’s not right. This is like … inside.”
“Oh, well, you’re correct about that. This is Edge Station One. We’re in space.”
“We’re in—” Olivia tried to focus on one thing at a time. “You built a city inside a space station?”
“No, we built it around a sally port. That’s like building a city near a river or seaport in olden times. The sky is actually the wall of the sally port, with some modifications. UV screens, that sort of thing. And then we built an outer shell, a big cylinder, to rotate around the thing so—”
“So you can have gravity? Like on television!”
“Well … yes. So we can have gravity. Those fictions of the twenty-first century got some things right, I suppose.” He turned away from the window. “So, do you believe me yet? About the future?”
Olivia surprised herself, because she did. It was just too fantastic to believe anything else. “Oh my gosh, I’m in the future! What happens in my time? What happens in the next ten years to me?”
Riggin stiffened from head to toe, finger freezing over the screen. “Wha—I can’t tell you that!”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t stay here forever. You have to go back. And when you do, we can’t risk you acting differently than you did before, so we can’t tell you anything about your own time!”
Olivia felt her face flush. “Why would I even want to stay in your dumb future time with space stations and robots?”
Riggin glared at her, but then he started to laugh. “Ah, now I get it. Olivia Ann Becker, you remind me of myself. All right, we’re past step one. You believe me. Step two, translator. Installed.”
She touched the bump behind her ear again.
“The nanites were injected through there, and we’ll deactivate them before you go home. Now, we’ve skipped ahead a few steps, so you know that you can’t stay. Let’s cover the rest.”
I can’t believe they injected things in me without asking! Except Olivia suddenly remembered the voice from the tunnel: “Olivia Ann Becker. Would you consent to consider a proposition for an adventure?”
All right then. They did ask, in a way.
And I said “okay.” So that counts as consent. And I can’t “consider a proposition” without understanding the language. Fair enough.
Still, this had better be good!
She nodded at Mad-Doc Riggin.
“Okay, hit me.”
He blinked at that expression for a moment, till his own Broca must have translated, causing a brief smile.
“Okay then. This is Edge Station One. We’re out near the border of our solar system, near Neptune.”
“Neptune.” It was her turn to blink. “Okay, go on.”
“We brought you here to assist in a mission that we believe only you can help with. We’ve got an AI simulation that ran every possible match and you have the highest chance of success.” He smacked a hand against his tablet. “So, we’re going to take you now to meet the others and hear the assignment. After that, if you don’t want to help?” He gestured at the empty door frame. “You can walk right through that door, and none of this will have ever happened.”
Olivia stared at it, holding tight to the strap of her duffel bag. Her head felt like it was stuffed full of angry bees with all of this new information buzzing around.
“What if I asked you to turn it on right now? What if I asked to go home without hearing the mission?”
“I suppose,” Riggin said slowly, “that we’d open the door and let you go through. It’s happened, a couple of times.”
Yeah, right. “But how? There’s no buttons.”
The scientist gestured at the wall. “Technicians are on the other side. It’s less overwhelming that way.”
“I’ll take your word for that,” Olivia shrugged. “Anyway, my headache is gone now. I bet that medical tablet will confirm it.” He glanced down, waved the tablet at her head and nodded. “It’s gone.”
“Okay then. Open the door.”
Riggin’s brows rose toward his hairline, but he looked up at the ceiling. “Well, you heard her. Open the door.”
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the doorway went gray inside. The color wasn’t consistent. It was sort of misty, like a fog. Like the smoke in the air back home, she thought.
“There you go. I just have to deactivate your Broca translator and you’re free to go.” He pulled a small device from his pocket and stepped forward.
Olivia stepped out of his reach and turned her back on the door leading to her own time.
“Nah, I think I’ll stick around.” After all, she now knew that they really would send her back if she wanted to. Any time she wanted to!
Riggin sputtered, hand still in the air. “Did you just make us turn on an expensive and powerful piece of scientific equipment for no reason?”
He reminds me of my dad, she thought sourly.
“There was a reason,” Olivia said firmly.
“There was,” a polite and tinny voice agreed from the ceiling. Olivia nearly jumped out of her skin, looking around for the source or at least an intercom speaker. She couldn’t see one.
“D’Alembert,” Riggin said, as the door to her own time went empty once again. The name fell heavily from his lips. The look on his face was strange and bitter-sweet. Then it was gone, and he went back to his business-like frown.
“Who?” she asked.
“D’Alembert is our command AI. He helps us run everything here. What is it, D’Alembert?”
“The others are all pre-briefed and have agreed to hear the proposed mission. They are waiting on the two of you in the conference room.”
Riggin frowned at Olivia, pointing at her with his tablet. “Great. We’re last. This is because you are so stubborn.” He lifted his gaze to the ceiling. “You told me the twenty-first century yanks were easier, D’Alembert.”
“They are, Mad-Doc.”
“Not in my experience.”
“Yanks?” Olivia asked.
D’Alembert answered her. “Yanks is one informal term we use for those we have pulled forward—or ‘yanked’—through time and space to assist us.”
“Oh, yeah. Thanks, Mister Ceiling Robot.”
“You are welcome, Miss Becker. And D’Alembert is fine.”
She grinned up at the ceiling. “I didn’t know that AI could have a sense of humor.”
Riggin sighed heavily. “Can we go now, please?”
The second, more normal-looking door in the wall opened up in a more normal way, by sliding as in some familiar scifi show. It was reassuring. Riggin didn’t wait but led the way through it. Olivia straightened her shoulders, adjusted her duffel—and followed.