Time Travel for Love and Profit Read online

  The fact that Serrafin taught her students to take their ideas seriously made it especially easy for me to talk with her about Dirk Angus. Instead of saying, “In theory, my app should do this, but instead, it’s doing that,” I could say, “My timeship is pulverizing my life in a cosmic blender and I don’t know why,” and she’d calmly nod like that was the sanest sentence a girl could ever utter.

  Serrafin’s eyes darted over the picture of the snake.

  I said, “So you know how I went back in time while the rest of the universe kept going?”

  She nodded.

  “My new theory is that my timeship app folded time and poked a hole in it, but it didn’t pull the rest of the universe through the hole with me. The snake didn’t swallow its own tail. It only swallowed me.”

  “So your wormhole in time is more of a snake mouth,” she said.

  “Exactly. My time machine should work correctly if the universe swallows itself through the wormhole in the quantum foam inside my body. The snake has to swallow its own tail.”

  “Fascinating. So you began by shaking open a hole in the cosmic foam, aided by a planet-wide simple harmonic oscillation, thanks to the internet of things.”

  “Right. Talking toasters and self-guided delivery drones, united for the advancement of science.”

  “Okay. Let’s set aside the ethical issues here, for the moment. Now, you want to extend the impact of your timeship universally. You want to magnify its resonance. Theoretically, it’s an idea worth pursuing.”

  “It is?” I asked. I mean, I knew it was—I hoped it was—but I sorely welcomed outside confirmation that being inspired by an optical illusion wasn’t a symptom of some time-warp illness I’d contracted in the quantum foam.

  “Of course it is.” Mrs. Saint Johnabelle removed her eyeglasses and half smiled. “Do you know, Nephele, that I’ve often wondered whether our entire universe might be located within a wormhole? Or perhaps a black hole.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “You’ve often wondered that?”

  “Mathematics suggests all manner of interstellar oddities,” she said. “Your imagination is the limit.”

  “So you think maybe we’re lost between two places,” I said. “Born into a black hole, living our whole lives inside a tunnel. And when we die, we go out the other side. Like light from a white hole.”

  Serrafin’s half-smile turned into a wide grin. All at once, I had a vision of Serrafin as a teenager surrounded by math books, grinning about wormholes. I wished I’d known her then. I wondered if she’d ever felt as alone as I felt. Full of ideas so thrilling you want to share them with the whole world, and knowing that if you do, you’ll be ridiculed. I wished I could figure out a way to ask.

  Serrafin stood. “I admire how seriously you’re taking your thought experiment, Nephele. It feels very vivid. By the way, how did you like Star Trek? I keep meaning to ask.”

  I’d sort of been avoiding getting back to her on that. I mean, I’d watched a few episodes months ago, when she’d lent me her DVDs, but that show is…How can I put this? Totally implausible! The acting is cringe-y, and for some reason, everybody is wearing a wetsuit. Plus, the rules of space and time are constantly changing. My life was less of an illogical soap opera than that spaceship.

  Don’t get me wrong: I love science fiction. Books, television, movies, whatever. But I’d hoped Serrafin had given me something that would genuinely help me—something based on the actual laws of physics.

  Then again, now that I was drowning in space-time quicksand, I probably needed to pay more attention to science that made zero sense.

  Mrs. Saint Johnabelle was looking at me with a mischievous glint in her eyes, like we shared the password to paradise.

  I said, “Phenomenal,” and tried to look stoked.

  “Right?” she said, and sighed.

  * * *

  —

  After lunch I went into the hallway and saw Vera leaning against the green lockers, kissing Youki Johnson.

  Kissing. Youki.

  Vera. Youki? Youki, Vera? Youki?

  Fact: Youki Johnson looked like Superman and, yes, he was very intelligent. But he wasn’t Superman! He used his powers for evil when he could have been saving the world. And plus—Vera was kissing someone. Even if it was Youki, I couldn’t help it. I was jealous.

  I was walking toward fourth period, wondering whether Dr. Carissa Silk had ever been jealous of her former best friend who had left her for dead in a ditch, when I noticed Wylie Buford wandering in my direction, scrolling on his phone. When we made eye contact, I smiled and waved maniacally, like I always did nowadays when Wylie caught me looking at him, and like always, he forced a smile, turned around and ran the other direction.

  Before I had a chance to kick myself for continuously freaking out the one person who wasn’t supposed to be freaked out by me, I spotted Marla, the new Wylie, the freshman with the Berkeley sweatshirt. As usual, she was read-walking. Snickering and reading as she walked. She wasn’t even looking up; she was so used to everybody going around her. Which they did.

  Maybe it was all the rest I’d gotten over the holiday break. Maybe I was feeling confident from my lunch with Serrafin. I stayed put and waited for Marla to bump into me.

  Which she didn’t. When she was about seventeen centimeters away, she dodged me without taking her eyes off her book, The Merriest of Murders. I scooted to get back in her path.

  Now Marla looked up.

  “Whatcha reading, Marla?” I asked.

  “A book, you idiot,” she said, walking around me.

  Wow.

  Okay: Marla was definitely not the new Wylie. Maybe she was a misanthrope. She wasn’t laughing to herself because her murder mysteries were amusing. She was laughing because she was, like, amused by murder.

  I was so over this year. Thankfully, Serrafin had given me the thumbs-up on my snake-mouth theory, so I felt confident about developing equations inspired by that theory to rebuild my timeship. The missing memories were a side effect I could relegate to the…I want to say “the toilet of history.” That seems harsh—but honestly? That’s what I wanted. I wanted this stinky, poopy, accidental side effect of my failure to disappear forever into the sewer of science-gone-wrong. I figured I could have Dirk Angus 2.0 fully coded and ready to launch in three weeks.

  Soon my first time-travel screw-up would be a distant memory—and I’d be the only one who remembered that memory, which would be absolutely fine.

  * * *

  —

  Did I say three weeks? Make that eight months.

  Late in the afternoon on the last day of summer, I walked down the winding trail through the cypress grove that led to the empty beach. When I got to the sand, I put my hands in my hoodie pockets and listened to the ocean’s roar. The background of my whole life was that shushing noise, that sound like the breath of the planet. I loved walking over wet sand, lifting slick seaweed with my sneaker toe. I loved the way the light glinted off iridescent spiral shells and watching baby hermit crabs scuttle through the tide pools in their portable cabins. The ocean was always in motion, always making something new. Full of life, and death, and whatever happened in between. The ocean was the friend who didn’t remember me, but hadn’t forgotten me either.

  It had taken a lot longer than I’d expected to upgrade Dirk Angus, but ever since my New Year’s Day revelation that to truly go back in time, I needed the universe to swallow itself along with me, I’d felt oddly happy. Happy discussing my “thought experiment” at lunch with Serrafin. Happily absorbed in my new set of equations; happy swimming through my second freshman year as a total unknown.

  Fairly happy, anyway. Happier than I’d been before, for sure.

  I mean, yes: Mom and Dad were still missing an entire year of memories, and whenever I encountered their brain holes I felt like I was sliding dow
n a crumbling cliff.

  But soon they’d go back to normal.

  Meanwhile, I’d become a space cowgirl. I was a genuine scientist in the middle of a groundbreaking experiment. I hadn’t made it to the past yet, but I’d definitely made it somewhere, and I wasn’t going to quit until I got where I was meant to be.

  I sat facing the ocean on a bleached log near a burned-out fire pit, adjusted my backpack and opened my timeship app. “We’ve got this, Dirk Angus 2.0,” I said. My hair blew in my face as I typed in my destination: my first first day of freshman year, two years ago.

  Dirk Angus could only send me through time, not space; in the morning I’d still be on the beach. Last year I’d fallen asleep immediately after emerging from the wormhole, and hadn’t woken up until the next morning. I assumed that would happen again, and didn’t want to risk being gone when my parents got up. I wanted to wake up before they did and walk home. That sounded peaceful to me, strolling home from the beach at the crack of dawn. I looked forward to feeling some peace. I programmed my phone’s alarm to go off at five-thirty a.m.

  “It’s been a trippy ride, eh, Dirk? Our wacky relationship? But everything is clicking now,” I said. “Just like that scene in Thirsty for Thrills when you and Sheena Firestorm make out on that threadbare rope bridge above the nest of scorpions and poisonous cacti. Ready, set…”

  I bit my lip, said a prayer to the math goddesses and pressed GO.

  * * *

  • • •

  There is a sonic boom. The forest sprouts a brassy halo and dims with a silver flare. The sun rises. The sun sets over the ocean in a blinding flash. The sun rises, searing pink and hopeful while the blue earth spins. The sun drops like a bomb, smashing the day, and rises like a rocket, attacking the night. The sun rises, sets, rises, sets; the earth spins, the sun rises sets rises sets risessetsrisessets….

  Thousands of voices like colorful ribbons twine into an effervescent braid, a song that vibrates so hard it shatters my own throat and sears my veins.

  I am dripping and reconstituting, sucking myself back together like a cloud after a storm.

  I rise from the ocean, a girl.

  I feel like I’ve been here before.

  • • •

  I woke up on my belly, my cheek pressing into the damp sand. Electronic chimes pealed quietly. When my head stopped spinning and my eyes focused, I turned off my alarm and watched the gray waves, kissed by the early-morning sun, sweep the wet shore and slide back out again. The ocean whispered, Good morning, Fi; good morning again, and I smiled. I felt as cool as an echinoderm, like a starfish or a sea cucumber, quietly shimmying across the ocean floor. As happy as a clam buried in the sand beneath high tide, deep down where no predators could reach me. This time I’d made it back for real.

  I stood and stretched my arms above my head. “I am a supernova!” I yelled, and the ocean roared back, and a great blue heron with its long, curving neck swerved past me toward the cliffs. I shook out my rubbery limbs and found the path through the cypress trees that leads up to Highway 1.

  I couldn’t wait to be home.

  As I walked, I rolled my stiff shoulders. I had exploded in an iridescent rainbow; I remembered it. I had erupted like a volcano; I felt my own heat. I had blasted apart and reassembled; I felt the remnants of a tingly song, painful and sweet, in every one of my blood cells, in my eyeballs and my elbows and my teeth.

  I was also drowsy, but it was a lovely drowsy. I was ready to get on with my life. I said in my flirty New Zealand accent, “Dirk Angus, we are superstars,” and started to take my phone out of my pocket.

  But no; I didn’t want to see the date. I’d confirm my success the fun way.

  I crossed Highway 1 and started running up the hill toward home, where I could check the kitchen table. After a few steps, my whole body flinched and I stumbled. My legs felt numb, like I was in shock from splashing in a freezing cold sea—yet I wanted to keep running. I remembered this from last year, the giddy sensation of being simultaneously exhilarated and exhausted. I decided to slow down a little.

  For the rest of the walk, I imagined founding my own start-up—but not to get rich and waste money on parties while the people around me struggled to pay rent. My company would use time travel to heal the earth.

  Naturally, we’d start with the ocean. I’d read somewhere that every nine minutes, a hundred metric tons of plastic makes its way into the ocean. And those plastics never entirely break down. Most seabirds have stomachs full of plastic. If we went back in time and stopped plastic from becoming part of every single thing—shopping bags, toys, clothes—we could begin to restore the ocean’s food web. How amazing would that be? As I passed a clump of sunflowers, their heads seemed to nod in agreement.

  I was so glad I’d failed the first time around and gotten New Nephele out of my system. Acting sassy and spunky had been a terrible idea. Orr-ee-bull! It seemed so obvious now. Oona Gold had said to remake your life in your true image, not to pick someone else’s image and try to become that. My aggressively weird talent for math was exactly the thing that was going to make people love me.

  After a few minutes envisioning the boy who would kiss me when I won the Nobel Prize—his grin would be roguish yet genuine, and he’d be into rhombicuboctahedrons the way other people are into the Golden State Warriors—I walked up our warped front porch steps, unlocked the front door and sashayed down the hallway and through the archway that led to the kitchen. I said, “Hello, kitchen table!”

  The kitchen was silent.

  The table was green.

  Gold light poured through the window over the sink and pooled in a puddle on the floor. The radiator clicked quietly. I stared at the green table for so long it turned red. Everything turned red.

  “Morning, Fi!” called Mom, and I turned to look. At the top of the stairs, my mother was finger-combing tangles out of her hair, which glinted with silver streaks. Silver hair? Had she had that yesterday? “Up early, dressed and everything!” she said. “First day of freshman year. You must be so excited.”

  Behind Mom, Dad appeared. Devil beard. They started to come downstairs.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  My heartbeat was pounding louder and faster and taking up too much space, like a jackhammer. I fumbled to pull my phone out of my pocket and unlocked it: it was the next day. I yelled, “Where is my birth certificate?!”

  My mother stopped halfway down the stairs and swayed like her feet were planted in ice. My father’s body twitched like a squid tossed live on a grill.

  I yelled, “You guys!” and ran up the stairs and grabbed their arms, afraid that they’d tumble down. Mom’s wrist felt cold and bony. Dad’s arm shook, which made my arm shake. This was bad.

  “Dad?” I said, feeling the tremor from Dad’s body rumbling inside me, a tremor of terror taking my organs hostage and assuring me that I had made a grave mistake. I didn’t know what to do. I heard myself stammering the same questions that had stumped me last year—the questions that had come back stronger than ever to stare me down and let me know that the universe was ready for a fight. “Where are my medical records? How old were you when I was born? Where are the photographs of me from last…” It hit me that I could not remember a single photograph that my parents had taken of me the previous year. “Why do we never take photographs of each other? Why is our entire family malfunctioning?”

  Dad’s free hand moved, which startled me. In a nerve-racking slow motion, he stroked his devil beard and said, “Cameras don’t understand my face.”

  Mom’s voice was unusually high-pitched, like she was singing a breathy lullaby. “I took pictures of you on a daily basis from birth to kindergarten. After that, I may have slacked off a bit.”

  I looked in my father’s eyes. I was afraid to push him, but I had to know how deep this brain hole went. I had t
o know exactly what I’d done. I said, “Dad, what year was I born?”

  Dad froze. As in, stopped moving altogether.

  “Dad?” I said. He was looking at me, but when I leaned to the left, he was still looking in the same spot.

  I couldn’t believe it. My modifications to the code had done nothing. Nothing, that is, but drill two new quasars in the quantum foam inside my parents’ brains—and paralyze my father.

  I was no child prodigy; I was evil.

  “Fi?” said Mom. I looked into her turquoise eyes and silently pleaded for help. But how could my mother help me? I was the one who needed to help her! “Fi, where did your father go? I didn’t see him leave.”

  I looked at Dad, then back at Mom.

  Mom couldn’t see Dad.

  Mom started to say something else, and then she froze.

  I rubbed Mom’s cold wrist, looking frantically for her pulse. When I found it, I almost wept. “It’s okay, Mom,” I said, although it was anything but.

  A minute passed. Two minutes.

  What do I do? What do I do? I had to call 911. And say what?!

  Suddenly, Dad was locking arms with me; Mom’s hand slid into mine. She was leading us downstairs.

  “How kind of you to escort us to breakfast,” said Dad. At the bottom of the stairs, Dad tweaked my chin and followed Mom into the kitchen. Mom opened the refrigerator and took out a basket of raspberries. I stopped in the archway and watched them. Was that it? Was the spell broken?