Riggin led her down clean white corridors with displays on the walls that ran scenes of the outdoors, or shimmering colors like Earth’s Northern Lights or swirling blobs from Grampa’s old lava lamp. Some of the outdoor scenes were strange, with weird animals and humanoids. She began to suspect many of these were real images of places she never heard of or could even imagine.
Riggin’s tablet had vanished, and Olivia wasn’t sure where. She’d been too busy staring at everything. Now he was ticking off a list with his fingers.
“Let’s see. Future, time travel, consent to listen to a job proposal. Ah, you haven’t asked me what the future is like.” He gave Olivia an expectant look.
“You said you can’t tell me anything.”
“About your future. This is our future, long after you have passed, I’m afraid.”
“Okay then,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “What’s the future like?” She recalled the versions from movies and TV. “An apocalyptic wasteland? A Big Brother dictatorship?”
“Why do so many of you arrive expecting that? No, exactly the opposite. We solved all the problems. All of them. Humanity is at peace, living in freedom and justice. You’ll be glad to know that the troubles of your century will pass and the world’s going to be all right. Everybody gets along now.”
Olivia laughed. “Wow, when you lie to little kids you sure go big.”
“It’s not a lie. In fact, it’s become a major problem! We’re so used to the better world our ancestors gave us that we’ve lost some vital abilities.”
“Like?”
“Like the ability to endure and survive hardships and trials and innovate solutions on the fly and come out of them on the other side. We’ve evolved something important out of ourselves in the span of just a few generations. We call it ‘grit.’”
“Like dirt?”
“No, like tenacity. Bravery. Gung ho. Adaptability. But more than all those. It’s a combination of a lot of different things. We need the help of people we know had the grit to make it through a difficult task. More than once, even. We’ve done almost fifty of these missions in the past seventeen years.”
“Seventeen?” Olivia marveled. They need help from past people. And not just anyone, but people they know by name. They called for me through their little time portal tunnel.
That means that I do something worth knowing.
No wonder they can’t tell me what it is. What if I don’t like what I do? Is it too late to change my mind?
She glanced back down the corridor.
“Yes, seventeen years ago, a race of advanced beings that we call the Gift Givers came to us, and they gave us the sally ports. A kind of teleportation technology that can work across vast distances. They allow us to leap through space, across galaxies and light years—all in an instant. We built Edge Station One around the first sally port they gave us. You’re walking beneath a tube of history.”
Olivia giggled. “A tube of history? That’s how you’d describe some amazing deep space travel thing?”
Riggin rolled his own eyes, but she could tell he was fighting a smile. “Anyway, right away we sent out big ships to far planets with hundreds of colonists aboard … and we lost contact with all of them. We only found out why a few years after that, when we stumbled onto one. All the adult colonists had died.”
“Whoa,” Olivia said, taken aback.
“In order to go through the sally ports or the shorter-range t-ports we designed using the Gift Giver technologies—and the time ports we later invented—you still have to be growing.” Once more Riggin looked at her expectantly.
Oh. “So that’s why you need kids to do the missions. Because we’re not done growing yet.”
“Exactly. Some think it has to do with the growth of the brain stem, specifically … and others say the prefrontal lobes. A short-range t-port jump—like between places on Earth or to the Moon—will give any adult a massive headache. More than one—or say a jump to Mars—will knock them out. A deep interstellar jump? Fatal.”
A chill ran down Olivia’s spine, and after a few seconds all she could say was “Mars.”
Then she shook her head. “That’s why I had a headache on arrival, isn’t it?”
Riggin nodded, looking pleased. “Precisely. A large leap, like one through time, will give someone who’s still growing a headache, but it doesn’t kill them and rarely knocks them out.”
They rounded the corner, and a large archway ended in a massive conference room ahead of them. Olivia could see more doctors and more kids there, and she stopped walking abruptly. What if they don’t like me?
What if they do? Her heart pounded. What if I can’t handle any more change?
Riggin stopped a few steps ahead of her. “What’s wrong?” he demanded, frown returning.
“Nothing,” Olivia mumbled, cheeks heating up. I hope no one can tell that I’m …
She held herself taller. Just like Dad said. Shoulders back, chin up, and no one will know.
Olivia Ann Becker swept into the conference room ahead of Riggin. It looked just like the one at her dad’s office, with fourteen chairs around a big oval table. The only difference was that the seats and table and floor were pristinely white, and the walls were one entire screen of beautiful, shimmery rainbow light. The future must have really good bleach, she thought—mostly to avoid thinking about all the people who were now staring right at her.
There were three doctors in clothes just like Riggin’s—long white tunics with short sleeves and cropped pants and comfortable shoes. There were also three other kids and what looked like a floating trash can.
“Mad-Doc!” One of the kids said with a grin, sliding fluidly out of his seat and waving as he approached them. He was dressed in a gray jumpsuit with an hourglass patch on one shoulder. His black hair was closely cropped and tightly curled. His skin was very dark, and his smile was very bright.
“Everet.” Riggin said blandly, offering the young man his hand. “Olivia, this is Everet Un Revis.”
“This is her, then? Olivia Ann Becker?” He sounded so excited as he thrust his hand out toward her.
Olivia held tight to the strap of her duffel bag, looking at the hand with a faint frown. “So, I wind up doing something special, right? For you to know my name? For him to want to shake my hand like he’s meeting a celebrity?”
Everet’s smile faltered and he lowered his hand, looking at Riggin.
“I told you,” Riggin started, “We can’t—”
“Tell me, because it might change my future. I know.” Olivia sighed.
Riggin pointed at the chairs. “Sit. Please. Both of you.”
Everet was back in his chair in no time. Olivia shrugged her duffel off of her shoulder and dropped it next to her seat, perching on the edge of the chair.
A couple of other youths sat at the table, clearly not of this time and certainly not dressed for it. One was olive-skinned and muscular and tough-looking. He wore a stained toga and seemed to be around Olivia’s age. He smiled at her. The other—a black-haired girl wearing a bright yellow sarong—looked back at her shyly but with a glitter of curiosity in dark eyes.
Riggin mentioned there were other … yanks. These must be them. I wonder where—and when—they’re from.
“All right. We call this meeting to order or whatever,” Riggin said blandly.
Another doctor walked over. She was a stately older woman with a kindly face. She reminds me of Mom, Oliva thought, the knot of worry loosening a little.
“Hello. I’m Doctor Serena Mep Cee, director of Interstellar Operations. Just call me Dr. Cee.” She smiled at them. “I thought we might start with introductions.”
Riggin snorted.
“That is Doctor Riggin, but everyone here calls him Mad-Doc. He came up with the idea of using the t-port technology to build the time portals that pulled you to us, which was the spark to Operation Hourglass.”
“Operation Hourglass? I know what an hourglass is!” The boy in the toga had spoken, leaning forward. “How does one use it to alter time?” He had a broad and genuine smile. His hair was a light brown-and-blond mix that reminded Olivia of amber honey. She felt captivated, however, by his eyes. They were the rich green-blue of sea glass.
Riggin covered his face for a moment, then sighed. “It’s also the word for a tactical maneuver.”
“And you are its creator?” the honey-haired boy asked.
“No. Serena, please,” Riggin said, each word clipped short.
Dr. Cee cleared her throat. “Right, then we can begin with you, Leonidas. This is Leonidas of Paxi, from Greece in 252 BCE.”
“Wow. Like Alexander the Great?” Olivia asked eagerly. One thing she and Dad did, after Mom died, was watch history shows during dinner.
Leonidas bowed his head. “A great man. He passed before I was born.”
Olivia was distracted by watching the boy’s lips shape sounds that sure seemed like Greek to her … yet she was understanding it all. This is crazy—I’m really in the future! There was no arguing with this evidence. And she realized she had been staring, so she hurried to say something.
“Alexander is dead? I’m sorry for your loss. So, who rules Greece?”
What stupid remarks!
“No one, I’m afraid. Alexander’s generals took different lands to lead, and they do not agree on much. There are great wars for the mainland all the time. We hear news of it. But I am from a small island called Paxi, where there is not so much trouble. We have little to conquer and little to steal, and we make a good life for ourselves.” He smiled that toothy smile again.
Great, a country bumpkin.
“And this here,” Dr. Cee continued, “is Najwa Saputra of the island of Java, 1881 CE.”
Najwa—a small slip of a girl—was dressed in brilliant, eye-catching colors. A soft green tunic made all of lace covered her top half, with a sarong of yellow and red wrapped around her lower half and draped up over her shoulder. Her long black hair lay loose down her back. Her eyes were large and dark and intelligent, though she hadn’t said a word this entire time. She still didn’t. Najwa only smiled.
“You can talk to them, Najwa, the same way that you spoke to me earlier when I told you what was happening.”
Najwa nodded, clearly gathering some courage.
“Still, I am not sure if this is a dream,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. And again the sounds were in some other language, yet Olivia understood.
Great. A country bumpkin and a wallflower …
… and me? Who am I to judge them? This is some messed-up stuff! How are we supposed to help anyone?
“It isn’t a dream,” Dr. Cee said with an encouraging smile.
Najwa smiled back, turning to the table. “I am very pleased to be here. I have never left home before.”
Dr. Cee began anew. “Mad-Doc, why don’t you introduce—”
“Olivia Ann Becker, from 2021, Calimesa, California, United States of America,” he broke in. “I had the distinct trial of greeting and explaining things to her. I am told that usually it’s easier with 21st century kids, but that hasn’t been my experience.”
Olivia felt her face turn red, and she turned in her seat to glare at Riggin. “Maybe you were just bad at explaining it!”
Dr. Cee covered her mouth with her hand, hiding a smile. “Ah, I see why D’Alembert suggested you handle her orientation.”
“He said the simulations indicated a higher success rate if I did,” Riggin groused.
“Well, that just leaves …”
Everet stood up, waving hello to the yanks. “My name is Everet Un Revis. I was born in 2333, here in your futures. It was a few years after the Gift Givers came.”
“So you always knew that you’d have to hop to the stars?” Olivia asked, curious.
Everet grinned as he sat back down.
“Not really. It took us years to figure out the technology, and years more to figure out how unprepared we were, and a few years after that to reach this point. We’re hoping that we’re near the end of our needing to yank heroes like you out of your times. We’ve run dozens of missions all told, all different kinds, and we’ve been training ourselves for a decade to try and get our grit back.”
“Training?” Najwa asked. “Like an apprenticeship?”
Dr. Cee’s brows lifted. “You know, I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
Riggin sighed. “I still maintain that we do have grit, we just don’t know how to use it. All the kids who go with Hourglass teams come back different. Look at—”
“Not now, Mad-Doc,” Dr. Cee interrupted gently. “This is a briefing.”
Everet cleared his throat. “My job on the mission will be to provide you with the perspective of this time. I’m here to help and guide you, and handle most of the technology that we’ll be using … and that we’ll be up against.”
Olivia frowned, tapping her fingers on the table. Add a know-it-all to the mix and we have a recipe for disaster. They can’t expect this to work.
“Wonderfully spoken, Everet.” Dr. Cee said. “You’ve all been told where you are and how you got here, but now we’re going to tell you why. Giotto?”
The floating trashcan glided forward. It was the same shape and size as one of the big round disposal bins in a restaurant, with a head made out of a paint can and two cameras arranged like eyes on the top. It was painted a sparkling white with vertical blue lines in a decorative design on the bottom and along the trim. Closed hatches and ports and doors covered its body.
“Hello,” it said—he said?—in a lilting, almost feminine voice.
That’s the voice from the tunnel in the park, the voice that brought me here! Olivia realized with a jerk.
“The pillar speaks!” Leonidas said, eyes wide with awe.
“I am not a pillar; I am an Artificial Intelligence or AI. I go by the name Giotto.” A hatch opened and a tentacle came out and waved at them. “I have participated in fourteen missions so far and have been specially programmed to aid you in the upcoming fifteenth.”
“Fifteenth for you,” Olivia mumbled.
“Correct, that is what I said.”
Wow, so much for sarcasm. Olivia rolled her eyes and leaned forward on the table. “So, are you going to tell us what you need us to do?”
“Of course.” Was she imagining the faint smug note in his voice? Could robots be smug?
“In the recent years of discovering and restoring contact with lost colonies, and in the wake of negotiations with other species, we have decided that we should expand our colonies once more with young volunteers. With brave teenagers willing to carry Earth’s destiny to other worlds.” The table flickered and the lights in the rest of the room dimmed. Suddenly holograms were floating above the surface of the table, showing half a dozen planets all in a row. Leonidas leaned forward, lifting his hand to touch one—but it passed right through. He and Najwa gasped, and both of them leaned back in their seats.
“Do not be alarmed,” Giotto said calmly.
“They’re just pictures,” Dr. Cee told them. The assurance didn’t seem to make much difference to the two.
Giotto let out a little whir to get their attention before he spoke again. “We had a list of ten planets, but only enough volunteers to populate three. Our scientists and researchers and leaders were working on narrowing the list down when we received a missive from an alien race that self-identified as the Kunder.”
“The Kunder,” Olivia repeated, eyes widening. Aliens! Actual aliens just speaking to people. She’d heard the future people talking about them, but for them to have a name, and—a face? “What do they look like?”
“Good question,” Riggin said shortly.
Dr. Cee sighed. “We don’t actually know. The message from the Kunder was that they would agree to meet with us in peaceful trade negotiations after we established that we can offer something they want. A particular mineral they call unakite. They were even so kind as to tell us which of the ten planets possessed this unakite in vast quantities.”
The holograms faded one by one, except for a beautiful globe with a mottling of purple-red land and blue-green water all over it, covered with great swaths of clouds. The clouds moved sluggishly in the image, scudding over the surface below.
“This,” Dr. Cee said expansively, “is that planet. We’ve taken to calling it Noros. That’s an ancient term from Europe for … well, cloudy.”
“It is that,” Olivia said dryly, watching the land disappear beneath the projection’s clouds, which crashed together, broke apart, then faded away into tendrils of nothing. It was mesmerizing.
“The international laws of space travel thus far established between the races of Humans, Devlin, and K’lugu dictate that the first to populate a planet become the owners of said planet,” Giotto went on, “The Kunder have agreed to concede the planet to us if we establish the mines and agree to trade with them. Apparently they do not know how to do this for themselves, and our offers to teach them went entirely ignored.”
“As far as we can tell,” Dr. Cee said, “they’re hiding something. We just can’t tell if it’s weakness or strength.”
“Does it matter?” Olivia asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if they’re weak then you can help them build up their strength and make an alliance. If they’re strong, then you gain a powerful ally. So … it doesn’t matter either way, right? What matters is whether they mean us good or bad … or even understand what we mean by good.”
Olivia wasn’t as sure of herself after explaining. It made sense in her mind.
“It’s just like when my family and I moved to California. I had a new school and I didn’t know anyone, and this girl came up to me and asked me to sit with her at lunch. I didn’t know her, but either way I’d have an ally.”
“And did it work out?” Everet asked, leaning over the table with interest.
Olivia shrugged. “Yeah, Emiko is my best friend, and it turns out she’s super smart. She had to move away last year, though.”
“Why?” Najwa asked.
“The wildfires in the mountains.”
Najwa’s eyes grew wide and round. “Oh.”
Dr. Cee cleared her throat gently.
“Good observation, Olivia Becker. That is the conclusion our diplomats came to as well. Whatever else, we’ll have an ally. It is difficult to find those in this galaxy. At least so far, surprisingly enough.”
“So you sent some of your youthful volunteers to this magnificent treasure world? To Noros?” Leonidas asked, reaching toward the hologram again.
“Yes, and they landed. However, they were supposed to activate a t-port on the planet surface.”
“Let me guess,” said Olivia. “They didn’t get around to it yet.”
“Smart kid,” Riggin remarked.
“You’re right, Olivia Becker,” Dr. Cee said. “They didn’t. We tried to contact them via the colony ship’s communications systems as well, and we got … well, we got a response. Giotto?”
“Playing Noros Communication Receipt 0001,” Giotto whirred.
“—an’t get through with—cation tower. We crashed on the planet surf—took moderate damage. Stores of food are—ores of seeds intact …” The message popped and crackled like it was full of static, like something from the early 1900s and not from the far distant future at all. Olivia’s eyes were wide, as were Leonidas’s and Najwa’s.
“Voices cast through great distance,” Leonidas commented. “As in the legend of Circe, the sorceress.”
“This is not magic; it’s science,” Riggin snapped. But Leonidas only shrugged with an expression Olivia knew well—one that said: whatever. She gave a soft laugh, then grinned when the Greek boy winked at her.
The transmission paused and continued.
“We lost the—roke in the crash. Storms are garbling your—cations.” Then it fell silent.
Everet, Dr. Cee, and Riggin all looked solemn and quiet. Of course. They’ve heard all this before, Olivia realized. They were here when it was sent.
“Clearly they are having communication difficulties,” Everet finally explained. “The planet is not just cloudy, it is full of storms, and that likely led to the crash, which caused damage to their ship. We don’t know how badly, and they haven’t been able to get anything else through to us since.”
“It turns out that the storms aren’t quite the same as the ones on Earth,” Dr. Cee added. “They create electromagnetic waves that bounce around the atmosphere, as best as we can tell.”
Everet chimed in. “We don’t know how they managed to get that message out in the first place.”
Olivia felt a growing pit of worry. I don’t think I like where this is heading.
“What we need from you,” Riggin said flatly, stepping to the head of the table, “is to deliver the equipment they need to the planet surface. A rudimentary t-port and a stronger communications tower. Or else, if necessary, evacuate the expedition and bring them home.”
“That’s it?” Olivia asked slowly.
“That’s it.”
“Which brings us to the part where you all either accept the mission or go home.” Dr. Cee said, folding her hands behind her back.
“You know I’m already on board,” Everet said with a smile.
“Yes, Everet, you signed on the moment the simulation predicted you’d do well,” Riggin said dryly.
“I should like to go to this planet of Zeus’s lightning and see how it compares to the storm-tossed shores of my home,” Leonidas said, bringing his fist to pound once on his chest. “I shall be a soldier for you, descendants of my descendants, and carry out your mission to the stars.”
Najwa lifted her hand tentatively.
“Yes, Najwa?” Dr. Cee asked.
“I … do not know how to fly. But if you can teach me, I will help. Perhaps this travel through space is more … is more like sailing? There is much water on this Noros, and my family lives on the sea.”
Dr. Cee smiled at her. “Your knowledge of living near and working on the water is one reason why we chose you. Don’t worry, we’ll teach you how to fly.”
Najwa beamed. All eyes turned to Olivia now.
Okay. My options are to go into actual outer space, visit an alien planet, and drop stuff off like a pizza delivery driver … or go home to all that I ran away from.
“Okay, I’m in on one condition,” Olivia said firmly.
Riggin groaned, brow beetling into a frown. “A condition?”
“Yeah, a condition. I want you to tell me what town my grandparents live in. In the year 2021. That’s it. You can find that out, right? You have all this information on me, after all.”
Riggin and Dr. Cee exchanged looks.
“Mad-Doc …” queried Dr. Cee.
“It’s one town name. We can have her write it down herself,” he said flatly.
“I don’t think that’s—”
“Serena, the simulation said—”
“All right! All right.” She looked at Olivia. “All right. We’ll look it up.”
“Okay, I’m in,” Olivia asserted. “When do we start?”