Sven opened his door, and gave me a relieved hug.
“You’re six weeks late, but you made it!”
He ushered me in and shut the door.
“I was shooting for April second, but you know these Crystals. I guess mid-May is close enough for government work.”
“I had faith in you. Did you stop the asteroid?”
“I think so. Soon as Ariyl shows up, we’ll check.”
On Sven’s big screen TV, I saw the all-too-familiar tangerine clown ranting at a no-robes Klan rally in the Florida Panhandle, but now he was doing it behind a lectern with the presidential seal. A line about shooting immigrants got big, braying yucks.
“I see history is back to abnormal,” I said.
Sven muted the cacophony.
“When I woke up this morning, the 2016 election had shifted back. And all the Rachel Maddow shows I DVR-ed, that showed Hillary as president, also shifted back to the shitstorm that I lived through since 2016.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard Sven use profane language. I guess even the Greatest Generation can be pushed to its limit.
“I still don’t get it, Sven. Why did changing history alter what the DVR recorded, but not what your brain recorded?”
“Digital data is just physics, but human memory is consciousness. As an observer...”
“Okay, okay, don’t tell me about Schrödinger’s Cat again. Look, I have an idea: why can’t you and I run all this by Stephen Hawking? I mean, as a hypothetical. You’re a well-known physicist, and we could really use the help of the world’s greatest genius.”
Sven looked regretful.
“I guess you could still do it, but not with me. Hawking died in 2018.”
“Aw, damn. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Well, you could always go to his Time Travelers Party,” said Sven with a twinkle.
“I saw that episode of his show,” I said, chuckling. Then the brilliance of the idea hit me.
“Sven, you’re seriously saying I should...?”
“First you should watch a certain soccer match from June twenty-eighth, 2009. I have it on my DVR.”
“I can see you’ve been working on this idea. Explain it to me.”
“Later. It’s a beaut. But my point is, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the six weeks I just lived through never happened. And I believe this proves I’m right about the Single Changeable Timeline. I’m now the only person who remembers the Hillary Clinton presidency.”
“Well, it was nice while it lasted.”
“No, it wasn’t. The country was in a constitutional crisis. Of course, we are in this timeline too, and the same guy is causing them both.”
“Uh-oh. What did I miss?”
“The White House is now defying subpoenas. It’s Nixon in May 1974 all over again. Only with a right-wing Senate and Supreme Court, I’m not sure we’ll have a happy ending this time.”
I dropped down on his sofa, utterly deflated.
“Why do I even bother fixing the timeline? History is broken, Sven! And it wasn’t time travelers who did it.”
He put a comforting hand on my shoulder.
“Ehh, don’t give up hope. This putz was always going to be the turd in the country’s punchbowl, whether he got into office or not. Maybe him as president is better.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Think of it like ‘tough love.’ You have to let America hit bottom before we learn why you don’t vote for a party led by a mobster.”
He went to his DVR and clicked on the local newscast for today.
“By the way, David, you made the international news roundup.”
He clicked on the broadcast and fast-forwarded to a (fortunately) terrible security cam video of me dropping off John King at the emergency room in Sydney. Thanks to wearing my tricorn hat low, my face was partly obscured, but not enough to fool Sven.
“Good thing nobody in Australia knows your face,” said Sven. “But I recognized you right off.”
AUSTRALIA: POLICE SEEK “PIRATE” WHO DROPPED OFF INJURED BOY read the onscreen title.
“You can tell it’s me,” I realized, feeling sick.
“Don’t worry, you caught a break. They only ran it once before the news was bumped for an all-night freeway chase.”
Sven froze the picture.
“Now, tell me who this boy is!” Sven asked.
I had explained just about everything when Ariyl materialized in the living room.
“Hi! So, who’s president?” she asked.
“Putin’s pal,” I sighed.
“Then it worked!” she said.
“What worked?”
“I finally got to Zwickau on the morning that you met Kati Brumbach. I stopped you from meeting her.”
“But I still remember it.”
“Of course. But she won’t. Instead of June second, she met Max on June first, just like she was always supposed to.”
“And that one day’s difference changed an election 116 years later?”
“It’s what we call the Butterfly Effect.”
“That’s what we call it, too,” said Sven. “I’m sorry you had to do that.”
“I know,” winced Ariyl, guiltily. “It really sucks for you guys. But I can’t get N-Tec back if history is different.”
Then Ariyl turned and saw John King and me, in freeze-frame on Sven’s TV.
“It’s John! Is he going to be okay?” she asked.
Sven clicked PLAY and the newscaster’s voice-over resumed.
“Doctors say the boy will fully recover, and be fitted with the most advanced prosthetic leg. But at present, the boy known as ‘John Doe’ is suffering from complete amnesia.”
John’s name was no longer King, and never would be again. He was wearing hospital pajamas and managed a brave smile for the camera.
“Authorities released this video in hopes of locating his family. Police are searching for that mysterious man in a three-cornered hat who dropped him at the hospital and then vanished.”
Sven froze the playback on John’s smile.
Ariyl hugged me and gave me a big kiss.
“We did it!”
I wasn’t so sure.
“What did we do? We saved his life, but we also robbed him of every memory he ever had.”
“Well, you had to,” said Sven. “If he told them he was a boy pirate in 1717, they’d clap him in a nuthouse. I’d say amnesia is preferable.”
“Yeah, but you like Here Comes Mr. Jordan.” I said.
“One of my favorites!” said Sven. Seeing Ariyl’s puzzled look, Sven explained: “Classic film. A boxer named Joe Pendleton gets taken to Heaven by an angel...”
“This sounds like It’s a Wonderful Life. What is it with you people and angel movies?” Ariyl asked.
“We don’t like the idea of dying,” I told her.
“Oh,” she said.
“Anyway, it turns out to be a mistake,” said Sven. “Joe Pendleton’s supposed to live another fifty years, but his old body is cremated, so the head angel, Mr. Jordan, finds him a new body. But Joe tells his manager pal Max that he’s Joe in a new body, and then Joe falls in love with a girl in this new body, and then Joe’s body has to die again, but there’s a third body, this other boxer named K. O. Murdoch...did I mention that Murdoch gets shot by gangsters?”
Sven was clearly losing the thread of the story.
“Well, uh, the point is, Joe finally gets a body he can grow old in, but Mr. Jordan takes away his memory of everything, because you can’t have people walking around knowing angels exist. But in the end Murdoch hires Joe’s old pal Max as his manager, and he meets the girl he met when he was in his second body, and she kind of senses he’s a good guy, and they fall in love again.”
“Aww! That sounds darling,” said Ariyl.
“Yeah, well I hate that movie,” I groused.
“I thought you liked angel flix,” she said.
“Not this one. Joe Pendleton gets erased. He doesn’t die and go to Heaven like everybody else. He ends up in the body of K. O. Murdoch with no memory of his previous life as Joe. He thinks he’s Murdoch! The Joe Pendleton who grew up and lived his life and was friends with Max and fell in love with the girl...that guy permanently ceases to exist!”
“I think you’re reading too much into a sweet little fantasy,” shrugged Ariyl.
“It’s not a fantasy. If you ask me, it’s a horror movie.”
Sven came over to me with his finger holding his place in a book.
“David, John King died in that shipwreck,” said Sven. He showed me the book cover: it was about pirates. Then he opened it to the page on the wreck of the Whydah. I read the paragraph he tapped:
“In 1984, aquatic archaeologist Barry Clifford found the wreck of the Whydah. One of the artifacts recovered was a small black leather shoe with a silk stocking and the fibula bone of a young child.”
“I read this book years ago,” Sven said. “This history has not changed. To rescue John King, you had to leave behind part of his leg. But you also left behind his old life. You had no choice.”
I sighed.
“It’s just that I know the terror that kid felt when he woke up...and couldn’t remember anything about his past.”
Ariyl slipped an arm around my waist and gave me a comforting squeeze.
“Maybe he’ll meet somebody nice, like you did,” she said.
Sven put his hands on our shoulders.
“You two did a wonderful thing. You gave that young boy a new life in a new century,” said Sven. “Don’t feel guilty about that. Feel good.”
He opened the door to what had been his office on my last trip. It was now furnished as a bedroom, with all my photos and fencing trophies. A California-king mattress took up most of the tiny room.
“Awww!” Ariyl cooed.
“Sven, you didn’t have to...”
“Yes, I did. You kids need your privacy.”
Ariyl kissed Sven on his forehead.
“You are wonderful, professor. David, I’m really beat. Let’s go to bed.”
“Yeah, let’s get some sleep.”
“Eventually,” she laughed, sweeping me up in her arms, carrying me into the room and kicking the door shut.
But the poor girl was so tuckered out, she could barely make love for an hour and a half before she fell asleep.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep a wink. I went back out to find Sven watching Maddow on DVR with his headphones on. When he saw me, he took them off.
“Am I interrupting?” I asked.
“Not at all. Actually, I wanted to talk to you. Is she...?”
“You could touch off a cannon next to her head.”
“Good. First off, did you find any trace of Dylila?”
“No. After we check on the asteroid, she’s our next project. Ariyl thinks she might have gotten the same amnesia I did. Apparently it’s a thing that happens to time travelers, kind of like divers get the bends if they come up too fast.”
Sven nodded, but he had a skeptical look.
“What?” I prodded.
“Look, you can tell me to mind my own business...”
“And it wouldn’t do one bit of good,” I smiled.
“You know that dram of Ludlo’s you brought back, that went with you to so many time periods...?”
“Yeah. You were going to video the hologram projections for me.”
“And I did.” He paused, embarrassed. “Some of the dram footage wasn’t of historical events, or of you. Some of it is from March 2018, of Dylila and Ariyl talking.”
“Are you saying you bugged Ariyl and Dylila?”
“No. Not intentionally. I mean, that afternoon I was playing around with the voice commands. You know, turn that little red light on or off, and so on. I told the dram to follow Ariyl around. I just meant around the apartment, but the dram took me literally. It went out with them when they drove to that biker bar.”
“Aw, Sven...!”
“David, you know I’m a civil libertarian! I don’t believe in spying on people. I didn’t know where the dram had gone, and when I downloaded it later, I didn’t know what I was watching until...well, I heard them talking.”
“About what?”
“About things I don’t think they’d tell you,” Sven said.
“You know, Sven, for an old guy, you tap dance really well.”
“I don’t want to interpret what I heard. You should make that determination for yourself. I loaded the files on your laptop. I marked them A&D.”
“And what if I don’t believe in eavesdropping?”
“Then you’ve overheard an awful lot of historical figures by accident.”
“That was eavesdropping for survival. This would be spying on the woman I love.”
“I respect that. But let me add one caveat: time travel is unspeakably dangerous technology, as you’ve seen. It behooves you to find out everything you can about the people you travel in time with.”
“Sven, you’re more than just my neighbor. You’re like the wise old grandfather I never had. You’re my mentor. You’re my friend. I love you, man.”
“But I’m a nosy old bastard who’s already interfered in your life once.”
“It’s just that I love and trust Ariyl. She’s risked her life for me more times than I can count. How could I spy on her?”
“All right, I understand. Well, I have six weeks of current events to catch up on.” He put back on his headphones and began scrolling through his DVR.
I stood on my principles for the better part of an hour before I caved and opened the video files.
The first file was a cut-down edit of that soccer match.
The second file Sven had edited from local newscasts about the Calabasas biker bar riot: reportage, witness interviews...and body cam footage from the arriving police.
If you loved Cloverfield, you might be able to bear watching angle after angle of jerky POV shots of cops attempting to take down Dylila and Ariyl, only to wind up on their backs filming the ceiling, or flying across the room then the picture breaking up into snow. The angles weren’t good enough to ID either woman, but they didn’t need to be: the police sketches were excellent. But I more or less knew all this.
The third file, labeled “A&D-03-2019” began with a lot of nighttime driving—it seemed the dram had been shut out of the car, so it simply recorded the car’s journey to the bar. I fast-forwarded until the car arrived, Ariyl and Dylila got out, and the dram followed them into the bar.
I was now watching the prelude to the riot.
The dram recording was a lot smoother than the body cam footage, and it must have had a sophisticated algorithm that positioned it to feature its subject (Ariyl) and include relevant detail: in this case, her drinking companion, Dylila.
The women got their Long Island Iced Teas at the bar, then repaired to a booth.
This required them to run a gantlet of leers, whistles, catcalls, and blunt propositions from the regular patrons, that culminated in a thoroughly inappropriate collision with a burly biker his friends were calling Skull (as in “She likes you, Skull!” from one biker mama), who walked into her torso with palms raised and fingers splayed.
“Oops,” he said, I can see you’re a real handful,” he grinned.
“You have no idea,” said Ariyl. Then she coughed in his face. “But I have this really bad cold, and I don’t want to give it to you.”
Disgusted, Skull grabbed another diner’s napkin to mop the spray off his face.
“Come on,” Ariyl said to Dylila, pulling her along.
Already knowing how the evening would end, with motorcycles hurled onto the highway and the floor thoroughly mopped with bikers and cops, I found the ladies’ restraint ominous.
Sitting down at a far booth, Dylila and Ariyl surveyed the clientele.
“You’re in a rather peaceful mood tonight,” observed Dylila.
“I’m too worried to play,” said Ariyl. “What if we don’t figure out this ice age?”
“It would mean no more N-Tec. Six thousand years of scientific advance stopped cold. Literally. Our world lost.” Dylila took another pull on her drink. “But if so...maybe there’s another way for history to go.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at these people. Their world’s dying and most of them don’t know or don’t care. Choking on their own carbon. Eating their own microplastic crap. Starting the Sixth Extinction. But who gives a shit as long as they can ride their toys on weekends?”
“But this is what led to N-Tec. This is what led to our world.”
“But what does our world lead to? An ice age.” She finished her drink. “Or maybe, we take charge, and rewrite history.”
“Into what?”
“You tell me, Ari. What did you love about Rome?”
Ariyl got a dreamy look.
“Everything. Awesome buildings. Amazing food. I love their clothes!”
“And how did Empress Ariyl run her empire?”
Ariyl smiled recalling it.
“I told them no slavery. No cruelty. Women in power. And I could do my Katie Sandwina act at the Colosseum anytime I wanted. I was gonna show them some real juggling.”
Dylila snickered.
“And what then?”
“We were gonna give ’em science. And vegetarian pasta. See if they could treat the world better.”
Dylila put her hand on Ariyl’s.
“Well, why not do all that?”
“Because something went wrong. Another global winter.”
“Then we find out what, and fix it, girl! Those thousands of years of butchery, Ariyl. Murder, rape, slavery, extinction. We can do better than that. You know we can. They can’t stop the two of us. We’re like gods compared to these schmoes.”
“Yeah...but what if all there is, is that Single Changeable Timeline, and we make it worse?”
“Honey, don’t hand me pre-Change physics. We’ve already created multiple worlds. We’ve seen them. We can revisit them. We could pick and choose the future we want from any point in the past. Anywhere history went wrong.”
A chill went down my spine watching this. I thought Dylila accepted Sven’s Single Changeable Timeline theory. Obviously not.
“But so far every one of them leads to a dead world!” exclaimed Ariyl.
“Then we revisit and see what went wrong. Trial and error. Honey, we can stop the Sixth Extinction. It doesn’t have to happen.”
“That’s what you said about Lincoln. I just want to get our world back, Lila. That’s all. I want to see my parents again.”
Dylila squeezed Ariyl’s hand.
“Sometimes, you got to leave home to grow up.”
Then she leaned over and kissed Ariyl on the mouth.
It was a real long kiss.
It might have gone on longer, but Skull leaned over their table.
“Well, well. Looks like your cold cleared up. Guess there’s no reason I can’t have some of that sugar.”
“Get lost,” Dylila advised him.
“I wasn’t talking to you, Aunt Jemima,” growled Skull, pulling a knife.
“Whatcha watching?” asked Ariyl, coming out of our bedroom.
I slapped down the laptop screen.
“Old movie.”
“You and your flat-flix,” she smiled, shaking her head.
“Hey, put me down!” squawked Skull’s voice from my laptop. There was an envelope in the way and the lid wasn’t all the way shut.
I lifted the screen in time to see Dylila holding a frantically thrashing Skull over her head with one hand. She twirled him twice, then shot-putted him across the room into the racks of liqueur bottles behind the bar. There was a mighty crash—
—as I closed the file and shut the lid again.
“That sounded familiar,” frowned Ariyl.
“The Spoilers. Classic western with an epic saloon fight. I’ll show it to you sometime.”
“David, I can’t sleep. I have to know about the ice age.”
“Okay. Let me put on some clothes.”