Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Read online

  “A little out of date, but I follow.”

  “Excellent. Like those, it is a rather popular pastime to create and cultivate a false reality of that sort with various starting criteria to see how it develops. But therein lies the real reason for my visit.”

  “I was wondering when you’d get to that.”

  “In a controlled simulation, we can completely eliminate uncertainty because we set the initial conditions. We cannot create a one hundred percent perfect simulation of our own reality because we don’t have those initial conditions. But we’ve been getting very close. Close enough to start using time travel technology with enough confidence to begin correcting some of the mistakes of the past.”

  “Mistakes… If it happened, it’s not a mistake, right? It happened. That’s the way things were supposed to go.”

  She drummed her fingers on the table. “Right now your head is filled with all sorts of misconceptions about the flow of time. There is no predestination, there is no ‘way things are supposed to go.’ Time is a road. There’s an easiest path, and it’ll tend to follow it, but if we need it to go somewhere else, we build a bridge. I’m a bridge builder, Justin.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense. Wouldn’t you be destroying the timeline?”

  She slumped in her seat and cupped her face in her hands.

  “Forgive me, Justin, but every time we speak, I forget just how close to the release of the Back to the Future series you are. Between that and Star Trek, humanity ended up with very cold feet about time travel for generations…”

  “Every time we speak? This is the first time we’ve met.”

  “First time for you, third time for me. Let’s stay on topic. You were worried about timelines. For you, that’s not a problem. You’ll just be living out life as it unfolds. For everyone downstream, yes, things will change, but the only real evidence of it will be a delta picked up by our differentiator back home. We’ll all just sort of be in the new future. Or we won’t. Big changes sometimes cause a significant shift in population, but the whole point of the simulations is to minimize negative consequences. To date, we’ve seen less than a 0.001 percent instance of lives erased or significantly diminished by our alterations. So for the overwhelming majority of the human race, the worst result is a little bit of memory duality, but that’s easily dismissed.”

  “You’re losing me. Memory duality?”

  “Oh, sure. People who remember things the wrong way, or both ways. Of all the things that would have a physical basis, who would have thought the Mandela Effect was one of them.”

  “What’s the Mandela Effect?!”

  “Justin, we don’t have the time and I don’t have the inclination to fill in all the blanks. But… you’ve got the Chem Archive by now, right?”

  “The what?”

  “No, huh?” She twiddled her fingers. “Wikipedia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, good. Look it up when we’re through here. Fascinating stuff. But again I digress. The task I have for you is very small. A trifle, really.”

  “What is it?”

  “On August 3rd, at 4:13 pm, you need to be at the following address—”

  “Wait. August 3rd. I’ve got another job interview on August 3rd at four pm.”

  “I am aware of that, Justin.”

  “You screwed up one job interview to talk to me, and now you want me to screw up another one?”

  “You can reschedule.”

  “It took me three months to get this slot on the calendar! There’s no way they’ll be able to fit me in until after all the good positions have been filled.”

  “Justin, if there was any other way, believe me, I wouldn’t have even come to you. But we have run tens of thousands of simulations. We’ve gone as far back as the seventeen hundreds and as far forward as… a year I’m not allowed to tell you has occurred for me. You’re our best shot at this.”

  “What is it that I’m supposed to be changing?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  He clenched his fists. “Of course you can’t.”

  “Justin, you couldn’t possibly understand it if I did tell you. It involves political parties that don’t exist yet, technology that’s only been theorized… But it is an event that has had profound impact upon my present and thus your future, and correcting it will allow humanity to flourish in a way that otherwise would not be possible.”

  “Why does it have to be me then?”

  “Because, and I’ll understand if you don’t believe me, but you are, bar none, the most influential individual of your era.”

  He stared at her flatly.

  “I know, I know. It doesn’t feel like it. And not to be a killjoy, it might never feel like it. We’re not talking about fame, at least not within your lifetime. But when it comes to being in the right place at the right time, no one for fifty years in either direction can hold a candle to you. It all comes down to something our techies call ‘Inflection points.’ They’re four-dimensional points in spacetime. Technically they’re ten-dimensional points, but let’s not go too far over your head. The key is that they are the moments in time and the positions in space where the curvature of history’s flow changes. Some of them are obvious and beyond our direct control—the specific virus that mutates into a super-plague. Most are astoundingly innocuous. They’re scattered all throughout history and all throughout the universe, but your worldline traces out a beautiful constellation, weaving near easily a dozen of them that we know about.”

  “Why me?”

  “Why anyone? Why anything? It’s just the way it worked out. And continues to work out, despite changes. I suppose if you’re the sort to believe in fate, then this would be its fingers at play.”

  The waiter finally arrived and set down a cappuccino in front of her and a mocha latte in front of him.

  “Ah, lovely.” Ruby took a sip. “I sometimes forget how delightful non-synthesized caffeine can be. But, the coffee has arrived, and we’ve had our chat. What is your decision?”

  “What’s in it for me?

  “Future generations will remember you with profound reverence.”

  “A fat lot of good that does me now.”

  Ruby sighed. “You know, there is a very narrow band of human history in which securing one’s legacy is not among the most motivating things in life. Not so long before you were born, and not so long after you die, people would move heaven and earth to get something done if there was even the chance it would mean they’d be remembered. In your defense, you live more or less at ground zero of the most self-centered era of humanity. In the pre-industrial period, life was brief, knowledge was scarce. Few knew any but the greatest names of myth and history. In a world where even conquerors and kings could be forgotten within decades if their deeds were not sufficiently grand, the very thought that in centuries people would still utter your name would be a profound reward. Not long after what you’d call modern times, the expansion of humanity to the stars and the resulting explosion and segmentation of the population began to reassert the value of making a personal contribution to the good of the entire society. And not long after that the advent of time travel and the resulting discovery of just how mutable the timeline is and how small an act could be the difference between a utopia and a dystopia has taught people to think of both the universe and the flow of time in a holistic manner. Anyone could be the lynchpin of a golden era, and most would give their lives to be remembered as such.”

  “And all I have to do is miss an interview that could be the difference between a pitiful career and a spectacular one.”

  “Think of the big picture, Justin! And besides, you don’t even know if you would have gotten the job.” She sipped her coffee. “You’d need some sort of insight into the future to be sure about it…”

  “…Well?”

  “I can safely say, whether I showed up or not, and whether you do as I say or not, you do not get that job. Of course, you’ve got no reason to believe me, but I’d
like to underscore that it took a considerable amount of convincing and a good deal of additional manipulation to get clearance to tell you that and ensure your role in history would still be secure. Plus—and this is utterly unprecedented, mind you—I’ve been given permission to give you prior knowledge of three sporting events. The precise score and outcome of each. Keep in mind, these outcomes are simulated in the version of history where you did your part, so it won’t work out unless you do as I’ve requested.”

  “Are there any limits on what I can do with that information?”

  “None.”

  Justin considered this new information. “Okay. What will I be doing on August 3rd at 4:13 pm…?”

  On the fateful day, Justin checked his watch as he paced from the bus stop toward his predestined destination. He’d intended to show up early, but traffic was such that he turned the corner and slipped through the door at precisely 4:13 pm. The place hardly seemed like the sort of establishment upon which the fate of humanity would hinge. It was an ice cream shop. A pretty decent one—he’d been here once before—but if he’d been asked to imagine an ice cream shop that would alter the course of history, he would have at least pictured someplace with in-store seating. As it was, the place was little more than long freezer case, one of those fancy frozen stone counters, and some employees in old-school paper hats.

  Ruby’s voice echoed in his memory.

  You are going to order a large peanut butter swirl milkshake…

  He waited on line and glanced about, trying not to look nervous. Even though there was a 90 percent chance this whole thing was a waste of time, the way the timing lined up had eroded his skepticism somewhat. When he placed his order, the ‘ice-cream artist’ glanced at the freezer case.

  “That’ll be just a minute, sir. You can wait at the end of the counter,” she said.

  They’ll be out of vanilla ice cream and have to get a fresh container from the back. The clerk will do so personally, thus necessitating one of the others to cut her break short to handle the cash register.

  Justin leaned against the wall and watched as a scruffy teenager irritably stepped out of the back after thirty seconds. A whiff of cigarette smoke suggested what he’d been doing prior to being summoned. The next three people ordered chocolate ice cream rather than wait while the first clerk deployed fresh tub of vanilla. Justin glanced at his watch, then out the plate-glass window.

  When the fourth person places their order… Well, you’ll know it when you see it…

  A woman paced into view across the street and paused to check her phone. A moment later, a second woman with a hood pulled forward to obscure her face, approached from behind and snagged the woman’s purse. There was a brief struggle, during which the victim of the theft cried out for help and the perpetrator’s hood fell back. She finally snapped the buckle of the purse and ran off with it as a police officer rounded the corner.

  “Hey,” remarked the replacement clerk, “that was Charline! I went to high school with her! Man, I always knew she was screwed up…”

  Once the clerk makes his observation, you can take your milkshake and go. That clerk will eventually be interviewed by police, his testimony will prove sufficient to bring the case to trial, and those involved in the trial that would otherwise have been elsewhere will initiate the shift in history that will facilitate the desired future. Enjoy your creamy treat.

  He stared at the milkshake that, if this whole bizarre event was true, would shape the future. The reality of what had until now seemed utterly unreal drifted like a cloud over his thoughts. Everything had played out precisely as he’d been told it would. He supposed it could still have been staged, but why? What was to be gained by hiring dozens of actors, manipulating traffic, and faking a crime just to convince him that time travel was real and that he had some critical role in human development? Rather than even attempt to come to terms with the myriad of impossibilities wrapped up in the circumstances of the confection he held in his hand, he simply discarded the troubling thoughts and took a sip.

  As he stepped out of the ice cream parlor, one last realization floated into his mind. If all of this was true… then he had some bets to place…

  Eight months later, Justin’s life had been only slightly derailed. All three games Ruby had given him insight into had ended precisely as she suggested, though only one of them was even remotely a long shot, so the total payoff for the gambling endeavor weren’t “quit your job and buy a yacht” money. They had been enough to outfit him with some high-end engineering software and equipment for use in his down time. And he would need it, because of the five engineering firms he’d hoped to find a position in, only the second to last on his list of hopefuls had any interest in him. Worse, it was entry-level. Rather than heading up his own team and developing his own projects, he’d be picking through the schematics dropped on his desk by the bullpen of other engineers, weeding out flaws and tuning up designs. It was a setback, but a minor one. He’d already started to make a name for himself. It wouldn’t be too much longer before he was back on track to the life he’d envisioned.

  On his lunch break, he liked to sit in the ‘green space of the futuristic industrial campus,’ which was what the company brochure labeled a strip of grass flanked by park benches in front of the cafeteria. The quadrangle had a peculiar size that reeked of something mandated by the county to satisfy zoning requirements, but on a day like this it beat sitting under the high-efficiency LED lighting in the cafeteria. A little fresh air helped him think, and people tended leave him alone when he was outside, so he got plenty of good brainstorming done while eating his tuna on rye.

  Today, as if in response to his quiet appreciation of solitude, a woman’s voice broke his concentration.

  “Excuse me, sir, but is your name Justin?”

  He shut his book and took a deep breath. That voice was awfully familiar.

  When he turned, he found himself face to face with the same woman who had interrupted his five-year plan the previous year. She looked different, though. She was much younger, maybe even still in her teens. And even at a glance, she lacked the easy confidence and subtle charisma of their prior meeting. In fact, she looked downright anxious. In one hand, she held a crumpled Goodwill bag, and unless she had some very curious tastes in fashion, the outfit she wore was purchased there. It was a sun dress, but so ill-fitting and faded it may as well have been a muumuu.

  “I realize you don’t know me,” she said sheepishly, “but if I could just have a word with you—”

  “Oh, I know you,” he grumbled.

  “We’ve met before?” she said, genuine confusion on her face.

  “Yeah, you’re R-”

  “Oh, hup hup hup, no!” She put her fingers in her ears and blurted. “Ruby Tuesday!”

  “Yeah… What was that all about?”

  “You were about to tell me something that I already told you in your worldline, except I didn’t tell you yet in my worldline, so I would have learned it from you after you’d learned it from me. Basically we risked creating one of those loops where information had no origin point.”

  “Oh. That… that wouldn’t create one of those world-destroying paradoxes, would it?”

  “What? No. It would just make a little loop that fouls up the simulations. We have to hard code an exception for each one of those or it’ll cause our simulators to lock up. It’s a huge hassle, and creating one is a big ding on your record. You screw up your first mission, they don’t let you do a second one. It’s one of many reasons why time travel is so rare. But we have met before, yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I suppose that stands to reason, what with your worldline passing through so many inflection points. So learning that from me via you probably isn’t fouling things up too badly.”

  “You said we’d meet three—”

  She clapped her hands on her ears. “La-la-la! What did I just say! No second-hand information please! Please don’t tell me anything that I tol
d you.”

  “Right, right. Sorry.”

  “The good news is, I’ve probably filled you in on how and why this is all happening.”

  “Not so much how, but she gave me the lowdown.”

  “Good, good.” She took a shaky breath. “I wasn’t entirely certain how I would convince you to believe me. They mostly picked me because I’m so skinny. The less mass, the easier and cheaper the transfer. We had some training in persuasion, but it wasn’t my strong suit.”

  “Is that why you always seem to show up in, uh, thrifty outfits?”

  Ruby glanced at her outfit, then the bag in her hand. She wadded the bag up a little tighter.

  “Uh… I can explain that. I’m allowed to explain that. But can I ask you for two real quick favors first?”

  “What?”

  “Can we get somewhere away from prying eyes?”

  “Of course.”

  “And… can I have the other half of that sandwich?”

  “You want my sandwich?”

  “Again, it’s a mass thing. They had me on a liquid diet for six weeks before transfer. I’m famished.”

  “Seems like they hadn’t worked the kinks out of the time travel thing. You weren’t starving last—”

  She clapped her hands over her ears.

  “Right… Let’s hang out in the smoking area behind the chemistry lab. No one ever goes there.”

  “Are you sure?” she said, slowly taking her hands away. “It could be really problematic if we’re observed.”

  “Oh, I’m sure. It turns out while the building’s designers didn’t see the problem with putting a smoking lounge behind a building that works almost exclusively with volatile chemicals, the smokers sure do.”

  Ruby clutched her half a sandwich and nibbled in slow, reverent bites, as though she was trying to make it last an hour. On the way, he bought her a bottle of iced tea. As badly as she’d botched his life the first time she showed up, he couldn’t help but feel sympathy for this much more vulnerable and high-strung version of her. He leaned against the cool bricks of the chemistry lab’s wall and finished his share of the meal as she finished hers.