The gap year, p.12
The Gap Year, page 12
The moment it entered the field, the drone’s lights went out, and it moved forward sluggishly, as if pushing through water instead of air. It drifted, slower and slower, into the center of the bubble, and came to a stop, hovering there somehow despite its inactive repellers.
“What’s it doing?” Anna put down her phone and reached forward to prod the little drone, but then pulled her hand back quickly before Indy had to stop her. “I know, I know!” she mocked. “No monkey paws in the dangerous machinery.”
Indy made a quick gesture with her muzzle, oblivious. “Just a moment, let me figure out what’s going on here. It’s not behaving like it should.” Indy stared into space, sending the spy-drone commands through her collar. She looked at the drone expectantly, but nothing happened. “Hmph. You try giving it some commands.”
Anna picked up her phone again and told the drone to return to its starting place. But the drone’s control app was red-tinged, showing that it had lost the connection.
Indy glanced at Anna’s screen. “That’s what my collar says too. But that doesn’t make sense. We walked into the bubble back home, and nothing strange happened. Plus, it’s only three feet away!” She got up and padded around the mini-henge, observing it from all sides.
“Wait a second. I’ve got an idea.” Anna got up and walked over to the workbench where they’d assembled the mini-henge, returning with a thin metal bracing rod that they’d used to hold some parts in place during construction. She held the rod out cautiously, making sure to keep her hand well outside the grayish field, and poked it against the hanging drone.
The spy-drone moved sluggishly. Anna could feel it trying to move back toward the center of the field, but not very forcefully. She pushed harder, until the drone slowly slid out of the field on the other side of the mini-henge, where it fell to the floor of their makeshift lab with a clatter. After a few seconds, its lights came on again, blinking as it restarted itself.
A few seconds later, the spy-drone was responding to Anna’s commands again as if nothing had happened. She flew it around the lab a few times experimentally, but it seemed unaffected by its time in the field.
“Huh. That’s really weird,” Anna said. “What do you think happened to it?”
“I have no idea.” Indy looked thoughtful. “Let’s try sending it in again, and see if it’s repeatable.”
“Good thinking. Once more for science, little buddy!” Anna flew the spy-drone back into the field, slightly faster this time.
Exactly the same thing happened. The drone’s lights died, it slowed down, and it came to rest in the center of the field. And this whole time the mini-henge behaved normally, its field perfectly steady on her phone’s control screen.
Anna tried out a hopeful look. “I’m sure we’ll figure this out.” She sagged as she exhaled. “I’d feel a lot better if it had just worked, though.”
“We should design a more systematic set of experiments.” Indy’s expression was neutral, but disappointment was clear in her voice. “Varying some of the conditions may give us a clue what’s going wrong. And honestly, things like this rarely work on the first trial.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “This is pretty normal, for science.”
Anna poked the drone back out of the field again. “Let me try one more thing before we run out of power.” She waited for the drone to reboot, then shot it back toward the mini-henge at greater speed.
The drone’s lights went out again, but this time it was moving too fast for the field to stop it. It slowed down as it went through, but it slid out the other side and skittered across the floor for a foot or so before coming to rest. It cycled through a reboot just as it had before, and it was functioning again in a few more seconds.
“Huh. Okay, I guess that doesn’t tell us much.” Anna looked back at Indy sheepishly. “Maybe systematic experiments would be a good idea.” The mini-henge’s field winked out as the power cells ran down, and Indy set them to recharge for the next shot.
They spent the next few days shuttling between chores and sleep with Leitus, Helene and Iole at the cottage, and grimly working through experiments in their hidden lab up on the mountain. By the end of that time, they had a pretty good idea of what their little henge was doing, but they still didn’t know why.
Anything they put into the field bubble experienced a huge temporal slowdown, running about five hundred thousand times slower than normal speed. At that rate, a minute inside the field would seem like a year to those outside. If they flew or pushed a drone into the field during operation, the drone would glitch and shut down. But if they parked a drone in the henge before turning the field on, it would continue to work afterward, though its lights would become invisibly dim from outside the field. Then when they turned the field off again, the drone’s internal clock would be behind their lab clock, but otherwise it would be perfectly normal, seemingly unaware of anything having happened.
Living plants placed in the field seemed unaffected. Insects could crawl into the field, but then they’d come to a stop until the field was shut off, and continue their crawl unharmed. It was baffling.
After a week, they finally figured it out. Instead of trying to set the mini-henge to open onto the future, they set it back into the past. Their current past, weird as that sounded.
At first, nothing seemed to change. But as they turned the year further and further back, the field bubble started to brighten and clear, losing its grayish color. Once they had set it back two hundred years, they could see through the portal fully, just as they’d been able to see through the full-sized henge back in her father’s lab, and drones could fly through the bubble with no effect. The portal in their little henge showed their own mountainside, as it had presumably appeared two hundred years ago. It looked not much different than it did today, though perhaps less grazed by sheep.
“The field seems to be working perfectly. I just don’t know why we can’t set it to view our original time.” Indy growled in frustration. “Even if you can’t set it closer than two hundred years to your current time, that shouldn’t prevent us from setting it twenty-eight hundred years forward.” She got up to pace around. “We still hadn’t done a comprehensive set of future-time experiments like this back at the lab, so we never saw this stasis effect. The math seemed to rule out future viewing, and quick checks confirmed it didn’t work, so it wasn’t a priority. And for the past, we thought it was a viewing portal only. There wasn’t supposed to be any way to affect anything through it. It should be completely undetectable on the non-projector side.” Indy sat down from her pacing and looked at Anna. “I’m not sure what to try next. We can go through more possible settings to try to learn what’s going on, but it could be a long process.”
“Have you tried searching our nets?” Anna asked.
“There’s no point!” Indy got up to pace again, her voice short with frustration. “This was our own cutting-edge research, remember? I know more about it than anyone in the world besides your father.”
“That’s totally true,” Anna said, palms raised defensively. “But remember, the whole time we’ve been back here, we’ve had your collar and my phone trying to sort out all that data my dad sent us. We’re still not quite done, but what if our nets decoded something useful that we haven’t asked about yet?”
“Hmm.” Indy looked thoughtful. “I’m co-author on all our papers, so I don’t know what there could be that I don’t already know about. But it can’t hurt to check.” Indy gazed off as she accessed her collar. “So far, everything’s been straight copies of existing data. Mateo didn’t have much time to set up the transfer, and we already know it dragged in large amounts of unintended data. And the transmission most likely got cut off in the middle of something when we were thrown back here, though we haven’t seen that part of the data stream yet.” Indy’s collar lights winked in a complex pattern. “Hold on, still looking.” Her tail raised and began to wave slowly. “You’re right, I found something! Search for both of our names together, and you’ll see it.”
Anna hurriedly searched for the names “Anna” and “Indy,” changing to “Indiana” when the first didn’t work. And there was a hit! She opened it with a trembling finger.
“It’s a message from Dad!” Anna said. It looked only partially written, and it had apparently never been sent, but it was addressed to the two of them. She had just started reading it when she heard Indy say, “Oh, no.”
20
“What? What!” The bottom dropped out of Anna’s stomach as she tried to read faster.
The beginning of the message said, “Anna, I love you. Indiana, please take care of my daughter. Notes below, calling you now.” The rest of the message looked like handwritten rough notes, hastily pasted in. He must have written them the night before their cancelled lunch appointment, or while he was at that government lab he had called from right before they got sent back.
Anna tried reading the notes, but it was all impenetrable abbreviations and math. Occasionally a word or phrase was underlined for emphasis, like “Temporal rollback?!” But she had no idea what to make of it.
“Indy, what does all this stuff mean?” She looked at the big hybrid, who was standing with her head hanging low, mouth clamped tightly shut. “Indy?”
“It’s bad news.” Indy’s voice was quiet and flat. “Our original temporal theory was right after all. Just incomplete. It really is impossible to travel in time, either forward or backward.” She raised her head and looked at Anna, ears laid back against her skull.
“But… if we can’t travel in time, how’d we get back here?” Anna asked. “We’re in the past!”
Indy inhaled deeply, then exhaled, her tail curled under her body as she spoke. “Imagine time is like a coral reef. The living layer at the surface is like the present, building up moment by moment. The dead, rocky part inside is the past. You can’t change it, but if you cut into the reef, you could see what the surface used to look like. And the future hasn’t grown yet.”
She looked off to the side. “Now, imagine you trimmed off the outer surface of the coral, carefully following every little crevice and bump, removing precisely the last 2800 years’ worth of growth. Afterward, fresh coral polyps from the ocean start landing on the exposed surface again, so now it’s growing just like it was before.” Her mouth tensed. “It would be like time restarted itself from some point in the past. Like the trimmed-off part never even happened.”
“But that still doesn’t explain how we got here,” Anna said. “We’re from the future, and you can’t travel through time, you said.”
“Technically, Mateo’s notes are saying that a tiny bit of the present, containing the two of us and everything inside the field bubble, got grafted back onto the past during whatever happened when we got thrown back here.” Indy lay down on the floor of the lab. “But the timeline that led up to our existence is gone. And the future from this point onward is the only future there is. We can’t travel forward into it, because it hasn’t happened yet.”
Anna felt suddenly nauseated, and sank to the floor as the realization struck her. They were not only stuck in the past, the future they had come from didn’t even exist anymore. Everything and everyone either of them had known was gone.
“How could this happen?” Anna asked in a small voice. “What could do this?” All the hopes she’d built up over the last few optimistic months were draining out of her, leaving only emptiness behind.
“Mateo’s—your father’s notes were a work in progress. I don’t think he knew. That new instrument at Mauna Kea saw something happen out in space, and he put the pieces together somehow in time to warn us. To save us.” Indy sat up and leaned against Anna. “He didn’t know whether it was some natural phenomenon, or something else. He didn’t have time to figure it out before it hit them.”
Tears ran unnoticed down Anna’s face as she thought of the last time she’d seen her mother Helena, at a hurried breakfast in their kitchen in El Paso, so far in the future. The thought that she’d never see her mother and father again sat hollowly in her chest. It was such a terrible revelation, she almost didn’t know what to feel. At least now we don’t have to worry about messing up the future, came the thought from some dark corner of her mind. And as an only child, I was really only close to my parents, so— She drew a sharp breath and turned to Indy. “Oh, Indy, I’m so sorry! Your sire and dam, and…”
“Littermates,” Indy added. “Cousins. Boyfriend. Everybody.” She lay back down, resting her muzzle on her paws. “Would you mind if we just… stayed here for a while?”
Anna slowly lay down beside her friend, on the hard floor of the lab beside the now-dark mini-henge, and silently cried for her whole world.
21
For the next several days, Anna hardly felt like she was connected to the world at all. There was always plenty of work to be done, so she and Indy still headed out with Leitus to move sheep, helped Iole around the cottage, and did all the other normal daily tasks that had become part of their lives here. The two of them had taken on a role in Leitus’ and Helene’s lives that would be sorely missed if they just stepped away and disappeared. So they moved forward, a few hours at a time, and tried to cope as best they could.
But the grief of what they had discovered lay unspoken between her and Indy every moment. Indy grew snappish and critical, and spent much of her time alone, out watching the sheep even when there was no herding to be done, her fur growing shaggy from constant exposure to the elements. Anna often found herself simply numb, unable to process what had happened to them. During the day, they would throw themselves into their chores, trying to keep their minds occupied. But at night, in front of the cottage’s warm hearth, they huddled together in their spot on the floor, silently reliving the realization that they were trapped here forever, and that there was no home for them to go back to.
Leitus and Helene must have noticed a change in them, though they seemed too respectful of their guests’ privacy to ask uninvited questions. Iole also seemed to sense that something was wrong, and she went out of her way to try to make their lives easier where she could, even preoccupied as she was with her own troubles with Neleos’ family.
Sometimes, Anna would trek back out to their secret lab alone. Their mining-drones still buzzed with activity, but now they were building up feedstock for an unknown future, just going through the motions like Anna and Indy themselves. Their experimental mini-henge lay abandoned on the floor where they had left it. Anna felt like she should be doing something. Anything. But it wasn’t clear what. So after a while she’d turn out the lights and go back to the cottage, still sunk in depression.
Finally, though, she had an idea. Maybe it would end up being a dumb waste of time, but she badly needed a task to keep her mind from constantly dwelling on everything she’d lost.
She’d come to realize that winter was a bad season for personal hygiene in ancient Greece. For the first few months after arrival, she had bathed the same way their hosts did. The stream they got their water from went over a short, narrow waterfall a little way below the cottage, and then widened out to form a natural pool that one could bathe in. But once the season turned to winter, nobody particularly fancied the idea of splashing cold water on themselves out of doors.
Of course, you could carry water from the pool back up to the cottage one jug at a time, heat it at the hearth, and use it to take a kind of sponge bath. But that was so much trouble that people usually just bathed less often in the winter. Which was really starting to gross her out.
Indy was unsympathetic. “Just don’t wear so much cloth wrapped around you, and you won’t smell so rank.” Her own sanitary habits mostly consisted of daily swims across frigid, muddy streams in pursuit of unruly sheep, and the occasional roll in dry grass. She wasn’t exactly clean, but she at least wasn’t that smelly. Which was more than Anna could say for herself. It felt like she had dirt seamed into her skin that would never come out.
So Anna decided to do something about it. She talked through a few alternatives with Alixa, entered a fab order, and picked up the resulting small bundle the next time she visited their dark and lonely cave. Then she went down to the waterfall one cool, late-winter afternoon and set to work building a hot tub.
Anna had fabbed two things: a heater pipe and a rock molder. The heater pipe was just a metal pipe, about a foot long and two inches across, which would heat water passing through it up to a nice hundred degrees or so whenever its hidden sensor detected your presence.
The rock molder was a common landscaper’s tool that looked something like an ice-cream scoop. It would let Anna carve easily through the crumbly limestone of the Greek mountainside with the scoop end, and then pack the tailings into place with the handle, which subtly re-formed them to look like natural rock again. Indy had fabbed the rock molder earlier to disguise the door to their cave, so Anna had only had to re-fab a human-style handle onto it.
Alixa had drawn up the hot tub plans to fit a location slightly to the side of where their natural waterfall tumbled down to feed their bathing pool, and Anna had made sure they were straightforward enough that she could follow them by hand. Programming their beetle-drones to do the work would’ve been easier, but Anna couldn’t risk having a huge swarm of them running around in the open. Plus, the whole point of the exercise was to give her something else to think about besides their desperate situation, so the harder it was for her to build, the better.
With the rock molder, Anna quickly carved a deep slot into the stony ground, leading from the stream over to a dry limestone shelf six feet above the ground beside the pool. She placed the heater pipe carefully into the lower end of the slot, so that water diverted from the stream would flow through it and out onto the shelf, where it cascaded down in a narrow shower. Then she packed rubble back over the slot using the molder’s handle, careful to make it look natural, and went to work carving out a tub below.
