One Second Per Second Read online

  “I’m Jane Galois, the shift director. This is Boris Zhivov.” I look up with a start.

  “Zhivov?” I say. He nods. This little shit is the Director of TMC, or at least he will be. I’d met him once years ago (years from now) when he visited the site. This is the same guy? I suppose that before thirty added pounds, an expanding forehead, and a jawline victim to gravity, this could be him. Director Zhivov did make some decisions only an schmuck could make, so now that all pieces together. It occurs to me that I’m judging the young Zhivov on nothing he’s said, and just on how he looks. Well, that’s Joad Bevan for you. Am I supposed to say nothing to him about who he is? There are no rules about that because bigger rules should prevent the question from even arising.

  “You’re convincing, Joad Bevan,” the woman says. “Anything to add?”

  “How about a song?” I say and slide my iPhone across the table.

  TEN

  They allow me to look around. Some things are as they were (as they will be) and some are not. I peer through the control room window and where there had been a wall-sized monitor, there are now four large TV screens positioned to share the world map. There’s a single red light illuminated somewhere in central Europe. What luxury. That’d be a hell of a good day where I’m from. One light! The big chair is occupied by a lean, gray-haired man in a golf tee-shirt and he’s transfixed on the four monitors, despite the little action they’re showing. The consoles now have hard controls rather than touch screens but are laid-out about the same. I think these old consoles were still there when I started work.

  It gets me thinking to when I first entered this place, fifteen years from now. Bess had been confused by why, after working for years toward an escape from Risley, that I was so eager to return. There was a cover story for all TMAers about the site being there as an academic enterprise for detection of exotic fundamental particles. I convinced Bess that this excited me so she found a research job at Washington State University and Risley became our home. It all seems an age away, in one direction or the another.

  I remember my first day. My heart had pounded with the excitement of being there, of being one of the elite. But the exhilaration I had felt was also part relief, having successfully gone through the grueling process of vetting. It’s not that I was worried about anything they might turn up in my background, but I’d been warned that some pretty strange things could disqualify me: things like being a sci fi reader or having been involved in role-play games. Go figure. But I guess I’d ticked all the boxes despite the occasional Asimov. Most of the vetting had taken place before I even knew I was in the running. I’m still not sure how I got singled-out. A PhD in theoretical physics at 21 and a few well received papers in the field of particle phenomenology must have had something to do with it. I’d asked my boss, once I felt comfortable with it, what if I hadn’t wanted the job after all that vetting? He’d replied you mean what if you’d wanted a job with more interesting science or more relevant to the benefit of mankind?

  I recall the smell on that first day, which in hindsight I think was just the plastic furniture. But on that day, my identity changed. I was no longer Joad Bevan, physicist, but now Joad Bevan of TMA, and that went everywhere with me. Standing in a grocery store, at a road crossing or in an airport line, I thought to myself, even though no one knows it, here’s stands Joad Bevan, TMA.

  On day one I had received a dump of technical reports and papers, was pointed to a cubicle, and given the instruction learn that. It scared the feces out of me. To come up to speed in a field about which you have zero knowledge is scary, but when that field borders on the incredible, it’s terrifying. In my time I had read a lot of papers sent by what we used to call cranks. These are amateurs who send their profound ideas on fundamental physics to established theoreticians, despite the fact that their knowledge of physics comes mainly from Star Trek or from a popular book or two on gee-whiz science. Now, reading these papers, they were so out-there that it was sometimes tough not to lapse into the mindset that I was reading crank literature. But whoever wrote these papers, they were no cranks. I was assigned a couple of staff to answer questions, and I had a lot.

  After a few weeks I was set my first task and my terror level ratcheted. I was told to renormalize a quantized tachyonic field theory on a curved spacetime manifold. It was a stupefyingly scary project and I knew that my assured abject failure would get me thrown out on my ass. I knew it’d expose me as a fake who was way out of his league. Yet, I got it done, and in less than a month. I could exhale.

  ELEVEN

  There’s some fascination with me around the cubicles and there are guarded attempts to draw me into the ambient, amicable banter. Of all the differences between the now now and the future now, it’s the easy and cordial chitter-chatter. What sullen, arrogant, and suspicious shits we had become. But why? I find myself irritated by the banter, the good-humored ribbing, and the general friendliness of it all. A few of them try to wheedle from me facts about the future, about their future. Galois and Zhivov deflect most of them with mild admonitions. I assure one happy and garrulous woman that all charges against her were ultimately dropped. Her face falls and I give her a nah, kidding look.

  The rest of the afternoon is technical talk. Not necessarily about the problem at hand, but general chemo-tachyonics. There are things I know that they don’t, but not that many. After all, by 2021 we were standing on the shoulders of giants, but with the rising influence of the temporal logicians and the restrictions they were handing down, future TMAers wouldn’t be so much standing on the shoulders of giants as being trapped under the feet of hobbits.

  Of all the shift staff I recognize no more than two as younger versions of the team I know, three if you count Zhivov. Physics, especially on the theoretical side, is a young person’s sport and TMA staff turnover is high, yet I still would have expected to see more familiar but rejuvenated faces. Retirement from TMA is a tricky matter. We enter the job with exhilaration and pride and then exit our short careers having been battered down by the monstrous responsibility of keeping the one second per second rule while not really understanding the apocalyptic price of failure. Then getting out is as grueling as getting in, when it’s made clear that if a word of your old job is leaked, then woe betide you and all things dear to you. When you retire, you sign a piece of paper and then TMA wields its shady power to get you placed in a new job suitable for the husk of a TMAer. And this is the career that chose me, except that my career has placed me in a temporal quagmire and I’ve responded to it by breaking most of the rules I can remember.

  I look around until exhaustion hits me. Onsite accommodations are perfunctory: army cot, stocked fridge, filled food cupboard, microwave oven, a Formica-surfaced table and a school chair. These rooms are still used in my time, set up for anyone who needs to pull an all-nighter and in need of a power nap. My head touches the pillow and it’s morning.

  TWELVE

  “And it came to pass that the awaited one appeared.” The voice is male, but it’s soft and in a high register. This is a more Messianic start to a day than I’d expected. Galois had escorted me back into the meeting room which now contains Zhivov and a man I haven’t met. I sit.

  “This is Ram Prasad,” Galois says. I do a double take but try to disguise it with a stretch of my neck. Give me a break is what I’m thinking. Today’s shocks to the system have already begun. Ram Prasad is/was the stuff of legend–Einstein-league–except that only the inner sanctum would have heard of him. But within TMA, Ramesh Prasad was Einstein and Edison rolled into one: unparalleled theoretician, but also brilliant practician and inventor. Not many physicists have ticked either of those boxes, and a vanishingly small number have ticked both: Isaac Newton, Enrico Fermi, then Ram Prasad is the list I’d make. I look at Galois who is smiling back.

  “An honor to meet you,” I say feebly. “I’m Joad Bevan.” I hold out my hand and Prasad looks at me, as if wondering why I’d think the occasion called for that, but he obli
ges me with a brief, limp grasp.

  “I know who you are,” he says. “So tell me what you’ve learned.” What have I learned? When? From whom? I look to Galois and Zhivov but they offer no help.

  “Are you asking me how I got here?” I say. There’s impatience in Prasad’s face.

  “I know how you got here.” He points to the sheets of paper in front of him. “I’m asking what you’ve learned. You’ve just gone through something you’ve never been through before. What did you learn from it?” This is the sort of question that usually gets a smartass answer from me, but Prasad’s ass is much smarter than mine and I make an exception.

  “I don’t know what you’re asking me,” I say. Prasad sighs. Galois and Zhivov remain no help and seem embarrassed on my behalf. Prasad consults the notes in front of him. He gives me a look that says, okay, then I’ll spoon feed you my questions if that’s what I have to do.

  “You noted that in 2021 you found yourself in a park where you expected there to be a shopping mall: where there had been a shopping mall that very morning.” Prasad is reading through the glasses perched on the end of his nose and then looks up above them, directly at me. I nod. “Must have come as a surprise.”

  “To put it mildly,” I say. You have a powerful grasp on the obvious is what my reply to anyone else would have been.

  “Any observations about that?” Prasad looks as if he’s rooting for me to give the right answer and to stop embarrassing myself, as if he’s doing his very best for me. How lucky I am, I think. I never got a chance to make a fool of myself in front of Ram Prasad when he was alive, but now fate is giving me a second chance.

  “Are you asking about the temporal logic of it?”

  “If you want to look at it that way,” he replies dismissively. ”I’m just asking you to think rationally and tell me what you have concluded given your recent experiences, Dr. Bevan.” This is a level of mortification I’m unused to. “There were people in the park,” he says, consulting the notes. I nod. “And did they seem shocked, astounded, seized by wonderment?” My neck warms by twenty degrees.

  “No, they didn’t,” I reply. “But I was shocked and astounded.”

  “Ah,” says Prasad to his imbecilic student who at last seems to have inched forward his side of the conversation.

  “And why would that be?” I ask on his behalf. “Why would they just take the existence of the park in their stride, while to me, it’s a park that came out of nowhere?” Prasad’s expression is one of thank god for that. “What’s different about them? About me?” I feel a cynical grin from Zhivov yet when I turn to him, there’s only rapt attention.

  “And the answer?” Prasad asks. I shake my head. I don’t know the answer. “I was at the tachyon detection array when it was blown up. Is that what–”

  “Why would that make a difference?” Prasad asks. I have no answer. “I don’t know why that would make a difference.”

  “Think about your timeline–” Galois says.

  “No Gallie,” Prasad interrupts. “Let Dr. Bevan from the future figure this out. Someone thought he was TMA material. Unless recruitment standards plummet by 2021, he can think this through for himself.” At this Prasad shifts his notes aside. “But no rush. Let’s move on.” I lean forward into whatever discussion is coming next, but it seems Prasad’s announcement was a sign to get rid of me while serious conversation could begin. Zhivov escorts me from the meeting room and closes the door behind me. And there I stand: a man who has disgraced himself in front of the greatest scientific mind of the late twentieth century.

  THIRTEEN

  I relive that meeting a dozen times. I entered as the Messiah (for reasons I’ve not been told) and exit the simpleton. My mother had a way with words, and there was a word that, as far as I know, only she used for the type of off-the-scale embarrassment I had just experienced. It was shitten. I feel truly shitten. For several days there’s no relief. I’m so used to treating temporal logic with scorn, as does my whole tribe of tackychemists, I hadn’t been thinking clearly about the questions Prasad had posed. What should have occurred to my befuddled mind is that everything has changed. His question wasn’t about theoretical temporal logic, the sort that TLs spend a career jerking off to. He wanted an opinion on what was now actual experimental temporal logic. I had lived it, yet all I could do was drool, slack-jawed, and admire the mystery. But the fact of the matter is that I still can’t answer his question. Why would I be the only one who knows that that Risley park wasn’t meant to be there while the kids playing in it and the families walking through it gave no hint of bewilderment. What’s special about me? And then, what’s it like for one of those oblivious people in the park? Does having a history that’s suddenly altered cause no sensation? I can’t think this through. Maybe it takes a Ram Prasad. Not being the smartest one in the room is a new sensation for me, and I don’t like it.

  For the following days the meeting room door stays shut. Prasad, Galois and Zhivov are sequestered in there with the occasional TMA staffer visiting. I spend my time milling around the cubicle area or pressing my nose to the control room window. I’m of no use to anyone. You’d think a guy from the future would have some value, but beyond trying to wheedle out of me information about their future lives, there was no interest in me. I even considered garnering a little attention by stirring up interest in the plot lines of future Friends.

  I watch the shift directors rotate through the big chair. There’s the lean, ex-military-looking grayhair. He’s a hypercritical, sarcastic bastard who takes pleasure in making his team feel stupid. He’d fit right in in 2021 TMA, but here, he’s the exception to the rule. Another shift director is an amiable older guy whose belt is lost beneath an overhanging belly and whose thin wisps of sandy hair bounce with every stride. Galois is the third shift director but she’s hidden away with Prasad and Zhivov, so her deputy sits in the chair. The deputy is a waif of a woman lost in her baggy shirts and jeans who wears thick-rimmed, black eyeglasses that conceal her features but for a long, slender nose and a thin-lipped, unsmiling mouth. She seems sharp as a tack, and not a spare word exits her.

  By the standards of the TMA I know, there’s little action in the control room. Maybe one green light per day. Some days none at all. I start to spend more time in my quarters, just sitting on my bed and listening to the radio. In an act of compassion, someone had brought a TV into my room. It’s unsettling to think that another copy of me may be watching exactly the same TV shows a few miles away. I am truly useless, it seems, unworthy even of being told why I’m being kept waiting, and for what.

  FOURTEEN

  Galois stands outside the open door to my room. This hasn’t happened before. Her hair is let down, framing her face and resting on her shoulders. I realized I had looked at her for too long. She sees the TV before I can fire my remote.

  “Is it the one where Rachel shows up wearing her wedding dress?” she asks with plausible interest. It is, but better not to acknowledge it.

  “It’s nice to receive a visit, I say. “By anyone,” I add.

  “Want to go for a ride?”

  “I want to do anything that’s gets me out of this tin hut,” I reply. I follow her and we’re soon seated in her maroon, beat-up Volvo wagon.

  “Thanks for being patient,” she says after a couple of miles.

  “You’re thanking me for being something I’m not,” I reply. We cross miles of desert and eventually enter the outskirts of town.

  “How familiar is it all?” she asks. “Is it as you remembered it?” We’re southbound toward the center of Risley, to the extent that one big suburb has a center.

  “Sort of. There are things I’d forgotten I’d remembered.” I see the ice cream parlor where my friends and I used to congregate after school to exchange outrageous and false stories of sexual adventure.

  “I guessed there’d be things you wanted to see,” she says. We exchange a glance and she smiles. I notice for the first time the soft, musical timbre of her v
oice. Maybe it’s a voice she doesn’t use when Prasad and Zhivov are in earshot.

  “There are. But more than that, I want to know what happens next,” I say. I’ve surprised myself by getting back to business because I was enjoying that moment in which the steel cords under my skin were beginning to melt. “Are you going to help me make all of this right?” She raises her eyebrows at this but doesn’t reply, and no more is said until we turn the corner onto Walla Walla Street.

  I see that the shingles on my single story house have a fresh coat of yellow paint. There are two boys in the front yard behind the chain-link fence playing catch. They’re wearing swimsuits and catchers mitts, and they’re laughing hysterically as they try to outrun the rotating sprinkler while making their catch. I take a deep breath. One of them is me. My little brother Tom is the other. Galois pulls in to park on the opposite side of the street. We’re both so lean; no, we’re plain skinny. Tom screams as my pitch forces him into the sprinkler spray. I laugh with joy and exhilaration.

  “Thank you, Jane” I whisper.

  “Everyone calls me Gallie.” Gallie, I echo distractedly, without turning. “This must feel very weird.”

  “It feels like Christmas Carol when Scrooge visits himself as the young man without a care.”

  “Does that make me the Ghost of Christmas Past?” I’m about to reply when a woman steps out from the house, sits on the front steps and joins in the laughter. Her hazelnut hair is pulled into a ponytail and she’s wearing a pale green tank top, khaki shorts and is barefoot. She puts on a blue baseball cap and pulls her ponytail through the back. How did I forget that? That was her favorite Mariners cap. She’s so young. Why do I never remember her this way? “She’s beautiful,” Gallie says and I nod.