Time Travel for Love and Profit Read online

  Mom says she first noticed it when I was three years old. My bedroom quilt is white with patchwork stars made of black and blue diamonds. One day, I told her, “There are 4,320 diamonds.” Mom said, “What?” I said, “There are 4,320 diamonds in the stars. If we had 392,050 diamonds, we could cover the whole house with stars,” and she spilled a box of macaroni on the floor.

  My own first memory of being different from the other kids was in kindergarten. While the rest of the class sat on the circular carpet counting how many pennies were in a nickel, I did my own set of calculations. When the teacher called on me, I said, “This carpet is approximately 7.3 square meters.”

  The teacher scrunched her nose like I’d used an off-limits word, like butt crack or fart. “Who told you that?” she asked.

  “Nobody,” I said. “It’s only a rough estimate.”

  “Lying is naughty, Nephele,” she said. “And we don’t teach the metric system in this classroom.”

  I told her that if what she meant by “metric system” was the International System of Units, I, like most scientists, preferred it, and that I was telling the truth, and recited the formula for calculating the area of a circle, along with the first thirty decimals of pi.

  She looked at me like I was a talking koala bear.

  Meaning, she looked scared of me. Which scared me. After school, I asked Mom, “Am I scary? Like a monster?” And she called the principal. I don’t know what they said exactly, but I started spending part of every day with a tutor from the University of California named Starla. Starla had purple hair, a belly button piercing and several toe rings (Starla preferred to tutor in bare feet). Supposedly, Starla was teaching me geometry. In fact, she mostly talked about her boyfriend, Rob, a “smoking hot slob” who was “totally inconsistent” and “a master of the mixed message.” Starla had a very sophisticated social life; it contained many logical contradictions. As for geometry, she was decent. She got most things more or less right.

  Fast-forward to second grade. By that time, I was reading college-level math books like comic books. Calculus? Number theory? Algorithms? Bring ’em on.

  Math made me happy. Like, insanely happy. I loved seeing the patterns all around me. Math described the waves of the ocean, the light of the constellations, the rings of the redwood trees. Math made sense to me the way nothing else did. I felt like I knew how to communicate with the universe. I understood its language.

  As for the language of my fellow humans?

  I didn’t think much about it. I had Vera.

  When Vera and I met in first grade, we had the exact same sense of humor. I would pretend to fall down, she would pretend to fall down. She would be a rat and chase me, I would be a rat and chase her. We both hated sparkles. Our friendship was meant to be.

  In middle school, Vera and I ate lunch together every single day. After school, we’d go to one of our houses to continue the epic saga of Amazingland, our imaginary city where the laws of physics didn’t apply. We’d be weightless and jump on my bed until it broke. Pretend we were trapped inside a two-dimensional cave and slither like slugs across the floor.

  We laughed so hard. Vera was quiet, but her laugh was loud, like…I don’t know. A broken blender or something. Her laugh made her self-conscious, but I liked it.

  After I finished my third reading of Time Travel for Love & Profit, I set it on the floor beside my bed, feeling uncertain. I didn’t need a book to teach me how to build a time machine, but I did wish Oona Gold had been more specific about how I was supposed to “tap into the fabulousness of the future me” to “gut-renovate my pathetic now” other than by subscribing to a series of online videos for $49.99 a month (card will be charged automatically at the end of each billing cycle).

  I curled up under my star quilt and looked toward my bedroom window, which was open a crack. My white curtains fluttered, and I inhaled the chilly salt breeze.

  Well, the first step in gut-renovating my life was building my time machine. That, I was excited about. It would be an epic mathematical challenge. The thought of all the formulas I’d need to cook up made my mouth water. For the first time in months, I couldn’t wait to wake up the next morning.

  The more I thought about it, the more excited I got. The practical applications of a successful time machine would be endless. It wouldn’t just fix my social life; it would be a mind-blowing scientific achievement. Humanity itself could get an epic do-over. We could undo global warming and save the ocean, its kelp forests and coral reefs. Prevent sea levels from rising and destroying creatures’ habitats; reverse the epidemic of lethal storms.

  Time travel wouldn’t save just me. It might just save the planet.

  And when it did?

  The world would have Vera Knight to thank. Which was, I decided, perfectly fine. When I became a popular, highly kissable mathematician whose discovery had changed the course of human history?

  I’d be more than happy to share the credit.

  * * *

  —

  That night, I dreamt I was walking on a gust of wind, folding an inflating balloon. In the morning, I woke up laughing like a maniac. I was dying to tell someone about my time machine, and given the circumstances, that someone would have to be Chicago.

  I threw on my usual T-shirt, hoodie and jeans, shoved my long mess of black hair into a bun and checked myself in the mirror. Same eyes as gold as a bat, same three-millimeter gap between my two front teeth, same ears sticking out like a dog who is listening carefully. I raised my thick black eyebrows at myself and ran downstairs.

  I was running out our front door when Mom yelled, “Fi! Where are you going?”

  I spun around. “Bookshop.”

  Mom was sitting at the green kitchen table with a speckled mug of coffee, reading a magazine called Modern Axe Worker. With her wavy red hair and wide turquoise eyes, I used to pretend my mother was a mermaid Dad had met on the beach. Actually, she’s a freelance tax consultant. According to Dad, Mom’s talent with numbers saved the bookshop when it almost went under. “She was magic,” said Dad. “I had to marry her.”

  Mom asked, “What about breakfast?”

  Breakfast would have been nice, now that I thought about it. But I had to build a time machine that would save me from my future self, and I didn’t want to waste a single second. I said, “The clock is ticking on my destiny, Mom. Toast is eternal.”

  “Well, at least take some fruit,” said Mom as she tossed me an orange.

  I covered my face. The orange thunked on the floor and rolled into the vestibule. “What was that?” I asked.

  “Sorry, sugar,” said Mom.

  I yelled, “See you later,” leapt over the spherical object and sprinted out the front door.

  I skipped down our warped red front porch steps and ran down the hill past my neighbors’ wind-battered houses and overgrown yards. At the bottom of the hill I pulled up my hood and turned onto Highway 1.

  To Redwood Cove locals, Highway 1 is just another road we take to work or to pick up groceries. To the tourists snapping photos, Highway 1 is a giant living postcard. The roller-coaster ride of twists and plunges, built into the rocky cliffs beside the Pacific Ocean, ribbons all the way up the California coast. On any given day you might see surfers catching gnarly waves, schools of leaping dolphins or spouting whales silhouetted against a blazing sunset. Near Redwood Cove, wildflowers ramble along the edges of forests of coastal redwoods, the oldest, tallest trees in the world. Some live for hundreds of years. Some for thousands. Many people put driving all 650 miles of Highway 1 on their bucket lists, the things they want to do before they die. I think bucket lists are morbid, gruesome and hopelessly romantic.

  I walked toward Main Street, inhaling the minty scent of eucalyptus trees until my chest felt warm and my head buzzed. Swollen flower buds were packed so dense with energy I could almost hear them ready to sin
g out. I felt the cheeps and gargles of birds prickling my skin. Baby birds, mama birds, hunting and mating birds, their songs created a geometry in my brain, the place where the world became patterns, and patterns became glorious numbers. Numbers that would build me a time machine.

  I went into the Big Blue Wave and breezed past Dad, who was lugging a crate of records onto the checkout counter. As I clomped up the wooden stairs to the second floor, I looked over my shoulder. “Seven thousand albums, weightless in the cloud! Every song title, alphabetized!”

  Dad shook his head. “Nephele Ann, the music is in the grooves. It’s in the heft.”

  Then he muttered the word “digitize” and made the face.

  Chicago hangs on the second floor of the bookshop in a black metal frame on a blood-red wall. Her full name—her title, actually—is Chicago, 1955. She’s a picture of two women walking past each other in opposite directions on a sidewalk that looks nearly white against a city that looks nearly black. But the way they’re lined up, you see one two-headed woman, walking in both directions simultaneously. Half of her has one foot in the air, like she’s heading home to cook dinner. The other half looks less rushed. Like she’s thinking, or daydreaming, or remembering something she lost. Around her, the atmosphere is hazy; the sky bleeds into the ground. I liked to imagine that if I stared long enough, other creatures would step out of the mist. Dad told me that the photographer who took the picture was named Harry Callahan, and that he was dead. Which was hard to believe, because Chicago felt so alive.

  Below Chicago, there’s a carved wooden table with stuff for hot beverages, plus some melty mugs Mom crafted in her ceramics phase. I grabbed a mug and tore open a packet of green tea. “So I’m walking on a gust of wind, folding an inflating balloon.”

  “Hello to you, too,” Chicago answered.

  I sighed. “Aren’t we beyond chatting?”

  “Chatting is what normal people do,” she said. “You should practice.”

  “Who’s normal, Chicago? You? Whatever. How are you?”

  “Same as always,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Stupendous,” I said. “Now I feel normal.”

  I started talking to Chicago after Vera dumped me. Something about the photograph of the two-headed woman made me feel better. She was a freak; I was a freak. Chicago made me feel less alone.

  “So I’m walking on a gust of wind, folding an inflating balloon,” I repeated, “and I realize I’m walking through a tunnel. Only it isn’t a balloon I’m folding, and it isn’t the wind I’m walking on. It’s time. I’ve got it, Chicago.”

  “Got what?” she said. “An overactive imagination?”

  “No,” I said. “A blueprint for my time machine.”

  Stories about time travel tend to share a basic premise: if you could fold the fabric of time to make two points touch, poke a hole there and pass through it, you’d come out on the other side. That is, at a different point in time. The question is, can you fold time? Or is time folded already, and you just have to find the place where now meets then, and go?

  I loved this question. It made me think about how time connects with itself every day. You see this person, you remember that conversation. You hear this music, you remember your father doing that silly dance. You inhale a scent that knocks you back to someplace you visited once, long ago. Time is folded into all kinds of shapes inside our heads.

  “So you’re going to build a spaceship out of balloons,” said Chicago.

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to build a smartphone app out of code. A timeship app, let’s call it.”

  Real time-travel research shares more or less the same premise as science fiction. But instead of setting off on thrilling adventures in rockets and falling into tragic love stories with people who’ve been dead for centuries, time-travel researchers spend their days working on mathematical equations.

  Math is the heartbeat that gives life to tons of amazing scientific discoveries. Isaac Newton used calculus to show how the planets orbit the sun. Albert Einstein’s equations describe how gravity warps the fabric of space and time. Ada Lovelace wrote calculations for the world’s first computer program.

  Now it was my turn to use math to make scientific history. My dream had given me a theory about how time travel could work mathematically, and it boiled down to two of my favorite words:

  Quantum foam.

  Have you ever looked through a microscope and screamed? You think you’re looking at some eensie-weensie, harmless little eyelash, and instead you see wriggling Demodex mites with claw feet and fangs, and it hits you that your whole face is a universe, a landscape teeming with minuscule organisms eating and making out and laying eggs and oozing and living and dying on you like you’re an organic farm.

  Sorry. Not trying to ruin your face for you.

  I’m just saying.

  Now imagine you can shrink and hike around the landscape of your terrifying face with your magnifying glass, studying the atmosphere, and you find even teensier organisms squirming with life—bacteria and fungi and viruses—and you shrink again to investigate those, and then again, and again, until you’re a bazillion times smaller than the nucleus of a hydrogen atom.

  You’re floating in the infinitesimal mathematical bubble bath known as quantum foam.

  And it’s chaos. A spinning maze of warped funhouse mirrors where the only thing you can count on is uncertainty. Some scientists believe that at such a small scale, space and time follow their own rules, fizzing and popping frantically, like bubbles in root beer. In the foam, math gets freaky—which is, of course, why I’m kind of in love with it.

  Quantum theorists believe that quantum foam is everywhere. In outer space. In your living room. In your brain. And in my dream, I could mold it, stretch it, inflate it—and fold it, and poke a hole in it—creating a tunnel through time.

  In theory, it was beautiful. Now all I had to do was write the equations: the equations that would form the backbone of the code for the world’s first time-travel app.

  “So your time machine is gonna be an app?” said Chicago.

  I put my hand on my heart and sighed. “Isn’t it elegant? In an instant, my humble smartphone simultaneously de-encrypts every wireless device on earth and harnesses their power to measure the state of the quantum foam, then sets up a resonance that effectively folds time and shakes open a wormhole in it—”

  “Hang on! You’re going to power your timeship with a bunch of strangers’ shoe-shopping stereos and thinking thermostats and self-driving cars?”

  “I know it sounds nuts, but when you get a billion artificially intelligent appliances working on the same project—trust me, Chicago, you can do some serious…well, I don’t want to use the word ‘damage,’ but—”

  “Where are you even drilling this wormhole? The North Pole? What happens when some poor penguin stumbles in and lands in a dinosaur’s dinner bowl?”

  “That won’t happen!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the wormhole will be located in the quantum foam inside my body! I think I’ll drill it right behind my belly button.”

  Chicago struck me as looking particularly thoughtful, her foot lingering mid-step, like she’d paused to seriously consider this. After a few seconds, she said, “Which is…safe?”

  “Well, I mean, naturally I’ll program the app to concentrate me with enough negative energy density that I don’t disintegrate when I’m sucked through the wormhole and pop back out again—”

  “In the same place, at a different time,” said Chicago. “Like you’re turning yourself inside out.”

  “It’s beautiful, Chicago, isn’t it? And the whole thing happens instantaneously. Nobody will even lose their internet connection.”

  In fact, my time-travel solution was more than elegant. To me, it felt inevitable.

&
nbsp; “And you can make this happen with a bunch of numbers and symbols,” said Chicago.

  “If I described it to you mathematically, it would bore both your heads off,” I said. “Although it’s not boring. It’s so not boring. Anyway, I don’t know all the details yet—the equations will take me a while to work out, and the coding will take the rest of the summer. Of course, I’ll need to figure out how to synchronize the topology of hyperspace across devices, not to mention the issues I’ll have with electromagnetism—blah, blah, blah—the point is, it’s totally doable! The crucial thing now is that I give my timeship app a name.”

  “Clearly, the name of the app is the most important part,” said Chicago.

  I said, “I agree wholeheartedly.”

  Yes: I was aware that having conversations with a black-and-white photograph was aggressively weird. But I needed Chicago more than ever now. Sure, I could’ve told Mom and Dad that I was inventing a time machine. My parents would’ve been happy for me. They’d have hugged me and told me they believed in me. Because they did believe in me.

  But they’d never believe me.

  When you’re destined to do something that’s widely considered impossible, you need one person to believe you unconditionally, even if you have to invent that person yourself.

  “I can’t wait to see what name I pick,” I said. “I’ll bet this is what it feels like to be pregnant.”

  “I’m not going to respond to that,” said Chicago, and I headed for Romance.

  * * *

  —

  I was sitting in a beanbag, sipping tea and flipping through the pile of books I’d gathered from the Romance section for timeship app name inspiration. The character names in Romance are far superior to the ones in Science Fiction. I mean, who wants to name their baby Astralflork or Mxylprlf 782?

  After a couple of hot-and-heavy hours evaluating the biographies of potential candidates, I had a short list: Dr. Carissa Silk, Thor Jackson, Friar Ubu, Antonio de la Noir, Soleil Zesati and Candy Buttons. All of these names had their strengths; all of them had their limitations. Dr. Carissa Silk sounded like someone who wore lacy pink lingerie and a stethoscope. Which is, in fact, exactly what she does in her book, The Sordid Sacrifices of Dr. Silk; her healing methods are highly unorthodox. Unorthodox was a plus, but the lingerie uniform seemed needlessly provocative for my purposes. I wasn’t quite sold.