Authors: Matthew Johnson
Jacob watched the future fade from view as he triggered the relay. He was not sad to see it go; it was a bad one, like a Beckett play come to life. It wasn’t hard to imagine Vladimir and Estragon bickering in this wasteland, or Hamm and Clov playing tug-of-war at the end of the world.
Outlines were like that, often as not. It was his job to find out how they got that way, what chain of events had led to the particular doom each future embodied, and to bring back anything that might help ensure the survival of the present. He did not, as much as possible, talk to the people. They didn’t really exist, after all; that is to say, they wouldn’t.
The cool white of the forecasting room opened up in front of him as the cage finished reeling him in. There was a momentary sense of dislocation and he stood still, trying not to let the chaos of the room pull him off balance. Displays were holocast onto every wall, giving reports from the forecasters; the line men who tried to pull it all together were running from display to display, synthesizing the data into a recommended path of action to be whispered into the ears that could make things happen; the dispatchers were deciding to which lines the next wave of forecasters would be sent. Jacob glanced at the display in front of him:
*** -342/3h/+7 POLAR COOLING OPERATION LEADS TO MASSIVE TSUNAMI IN PACIFIC—APPX 13M RIP *** +479/8l/+2 ENERGY SHORTAGE DUE TO INTERRUPTED GROWING SEASON IN MIDWEST NA—APPX 2M RIP ***
None of that would be felt down here, of course, even if it was allowed to happen. The forecasting facility was insulated, both by its location and its routines, from the chaos that had made life outside so unpredictable. Jacob unhooked his datapad from his belt and coded it to send his data, expecting out of habit to see it come up on the display. The displays, though, showed only the Probables, lines weeks or days away. A Probable that looked good was nurtured, steered to carefully. Outlines existed only to be looted. Ten or more years in the future, Outlines were so far away on the probability curve they were always shifting, as insubstantial as soap bubbles. You could go into the cage a hundred times and not reach the same Outline twice.
A fresh-faced man in what passed for normal dress outside walked by on the way out of the next cage over. “Hey, Delacroix!” he called, and Jacob recognized him: Collins, a Short. “Find the Good One today?”
Jacob nodded and gave a perfunctory laugh, but said nothing. There was no answer to that question. That was the joke. If you ever did find the Good One, you’d never come back to Now.
“Coming to the game tonight?”
“I don’t think so,” Jacob said.
“You sure?” Collins asked. “Couple new Shorts joining today. Easy money.”
Jacob smiled, remembering the ritual of fleecing new forecasters—after a while in the job, you got so used to watching probabilities that you counted cards almost unconsciously. “No, you have fun. I’ve lost the touch.”
“That’s right,” Collins said. “I always meant to ask—why’d you give it up? Short work, I mean.”
“Got tired of seeing people I know,” Jacob said.
Collins looked briefly puzzled, shrugged; half-aware, maybe, that Jacob had left his sentence unfinished. “Well, have a good one,” he said, bustled off somewhere. Shorts were always in a hurry. They had a right to be, Jacob supposed; they were saving the world, after all, even if it was only for a few days at a time.
Jacob felt suddenly disoriented, watched a coffee cup in a nearby tech’s hand unpour itself. As he steadied himself a half-dozen other minor corrections unspooled, time knitting itself back together as some past forecaster’s report altered relative Now. When he had started out his brain, like everyone’s, had rebelled at the corrections, refused to see them; now they barely made him miss a step. He keyed his datapad and a blue dotted line was holocast onto the floor in front of him, leading down the corridors scrawled with running forecasts to where his apartment was now.
He opened his front door, and saw the stark white walls before they sprang into life, holographically painted with his choice of artwork. He had been into Great Masters for a while now, walls gallery grey. Most people these days liked kinetic paintings, but he preferred art that stood still. The room’s control panel appeared on the wall when he snapped his fingers, and he keyed it to play music while his dinner heated up. He sat down to listen as the violins stirred the air, wondering, not for the first time, if the seasons could possibly have been as beautiful as Vivaldi made them sound.
Another day, another future. Jacob held in a yawn as the cage ripped a hole in time and dropped him through it. Everybody in Now, from the forecasters to the dispatchers, took themselves so seriously it wouldn’t do to seem bored. Well, he’d put in his time, and Long work—quiet, easy on the nerves—was meant to be his reward.
It was his nose that first registered something different. As the cage anchored him in this Outline, twelve-point-four years from Now, he smelled something strange—a warm smell, not dry-baked and dusty, but alive. Though he had never encountered it before, it was familiar: there was a hint of flower-scent to it, and rain. He had never smelled it, but he had heard it just the night before. It was spring.
He took a deep breath, held it for a long moment before releasing it and opening his eyes. The sky was full of light—real sunlight, overflowing with wavelengths the rad-filters and stratoshields in Now never let you see—dotted with white and grey clouds. He was in the middle of a small park; grass, yellow and green, stretched away for a dozen metres in each direction. Two- and three-storey buildings all around were standing, intact, and alive with music and voices.
Calm down, Jacob told himself. He had seen this before. He had read Ibn Khaldun describe it, in one of his textbooks:
At the end of a dynasty there often appears some show of power . . . it lights up brilliantly just before it is extinguished, like a burning wick the flame of which leaps up brilliantly a moment before it goes out.
These were certainly less depressing than the ruined futures, and more likely to yield valuable artefacts—he himself had brought back the battery trees that now covered nearly all of Now’s arable land and provided most of its energy—but all of the initially promising timelines were no less doomed, and it never took him long to find the seeds of destruction in them. After that it was just a matter of waiting out the hours or days until the other end of the hole opened and he could be reeled back to Now. Taking one more whiff of cut grass, Jacob set out to explore this Outline.
“A retrohistorian,” the introduction to Practical Retrohistory said, “has a few basic tools: documents, testimony, artefacts.” Jacob normally did most of his work with documents, but today he was beginning to understand the lure of artefacts. First, clothing: the beige coveralls he wore let him blend into most lines, even Outlines, but people here wore mostly solid reds, yellows and greens in woven cloth. Most of them walked, but some drove small vehicles that glided along the ground on skate struts. Jacob watched as one stopped and the owner got out, leaving it without apparent concern for its safety; a few minutes later two more people got into it, without any fuss from them or passers-by. Looking closer, Jacob could see that the struts were arranged in an open, back-pointing V, with a small wheel on a strut and chain held just above the ground where the struts met. A moment later the wheel lowered to the ground and, turned by the chain, sent the car gliding off gracefully. Trying to figure out the technology behind its operation—he had seen exhaustless vehicles in another Outline, apparently run on broadcast power, and had wanted to get his hands on one—Jacob watched the vehicles move past like skaters on a frozen pond. It was only when a boy of about ten slipped past him on the sidewalk on what looked like a stiff strip of tinfoil that he realized the skates on the cars were simply frictionless. Resolving to pick up one of the children’s strip-boards, Jacob moved on.
He paused at a park—there were small ones every few blocks—where a concert was going on in a bandshell, but as he got closer he couldn’t tell who were the performers and who the audience: nobody seemed to stay one or the other for long, instruments handed off between songs or even verses. The people near him spoke what was recognizably English, but the ones closer to the music carried on conversations in a sign language he couldn’t fathom. As he listened and watched their conversations, Jacob was struck by the lack of stress or anxiety. They strolled in sunlight without fear of skin cancer, hugged and kissed on meeting without concern for disease or disgrace. None of them were in a hurry.
Feeling overwhelmed, Jacob decided to retreat to documents for a while. It did not take long to find a library, an old red stone building carefully preserved and restored. This was where the cracks would appear: examination of weather patterns, employment statistics, medical reports—even, sometimes, just reading the newspapers—always exposed the empty core underneath the façade. He had imagined, with all the music and activity outside, that this line’s people might have neglected their technology; inside, though, while he saw row on row of books he also saw terminals that looked enough like those of his time for him to recognize them. Casting a regretful look at the books—real, paper books—he picked up one of the terminal sets and went to sit at a carrel at the back of the room, then linked in his datapad and uploaded a dozen bots that would seek out the information he wanted. Once he had the data he could feed it into his simulations, start guessing just how this world would end. After a few minutes, though, nothing had come back. Starting a manual search, he found—nothing. Concert listings, poetry, cartoons, but nothing—nothing—that referred to anything before the present moment.
“It’s the Good One, isn’t it?”
Jacob turned around with a start, saw a woman standing behind him. She was somewhere in her twenties or early thirties, with straight black hair cut short and skin as pale as his; she wore grey duracloth overalls and a red vinyl jacket, closer to what he wore than to what he had seen outside.
“Sorry?” he said.
“The Good One,” she said again, smiling. “The one we’re all looking for.”
He waved a hand over the terminal, tuning the display invisible. “Do I know you?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“Call me Rachael,” she said. “I’m a Short.”
“Jacob. Long,” he said, held his hand out tentatively; she gave it a squeeze. “Shorts always work in pairs. Where’s your partner?”
“We don’t do that anymore.” She turned her head away fractionally. “There aren’t enough of us.”
“We shouldn’t be talking.”
“Why not?”
“If you’re a Short, that means you’re from after my Now. Any contact could cross-contaminate our timelines.”
She cocked her head. “You’ve been outside—seen this world. Doesn’t that seem like an acceptable risk, to get all this?”
Acceptable risk. There was no such thing, not anymore. That was why they were needed: the world was too dangerous to leave to chance. Years of blind meddling had left them without any kind of margin of safety, hanging by their fingernails to a world always an inch from Armageddon. Any miscalculation or misstep could lead to millions dead; no-one envied the forecasters whose job was to weigh lesser against greater tragedies, save a billion people by letting a million die.
“What makes you so sure this is all worth having?” he asked. “I’ve seen a dozen Outlines that looked like paradise . . . at first.”
“So what’s wrong with this one?” Rachael asked.
“I don’t know,” Jacob said after a moment. The main trap in tracing a line’s development was post hoc, ergo procter hoc: thinking that because a thing happens after another, the first is necessarily caused by the second. This line, though, was like an embodiment of that—a world full of causeless effects. He waved his terminal visible, glanced over to where his simulations were running. “I haven’t found it yet.”
“Maybe that’s because there’s nothing to find,” she said. “Listen, how much time do you have?”
“About two days.”
She crouched next to him, looked him in the eye. “I’ve got a little less than that. Whichever of us is right, this is a puzzle one person can’t solve alone in that amount of time.”
“We can’t—”
Rachael put up a hand to stop him talking. “You’ve been outside. You’ve seen the people here. I’m telling you—this is it.” He read her face, saw no deceit in it. Of course, all forecasters were skilled actors; Shorts especially. “If we do cross-contaminate, how much more corrupted can our own lines get? Even if we each get erased from history, is that really much worse than going home?”
He thought for a moment about everything he had experienced since arriving: the ever-present music, the carefree people, the smell of the air. “All right,” he said. “What have you found?”
“Nothing, that’s the problem. I mean, everybody’s happy, nobody’s worried, but nothing makes any sense—like, their movies are all in sign language, but nobody can tell you why. It shouldn’t work, but it does—and they don’t find anything odd about it at all. It’s like they don’t even know how good they have it.”
Jacob considered the question for a moment. “Maybe they don’t,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe we’re not finding what’s wrong because the information isn’t out there.”
Rachael frowned. “You still don’t believe this is it, then. The Good One.”
He shrugged. “Does it matter? Whether we’re asking what went right or what went wrong, we need the same information.”
“Okay, fine,” she said, annoyed. “So if it’s not out there, where is it?”
Jacob looked around quickly. “Just because the people here aren’t worried doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be afraid of. It could be someone’s doing a really good job of hiding it from them.”
“Suppose you’re right. Whatever’s wrong, or right, with this line, somebody’s keeping it a secret. Who’s possibly capable of hiding something that big?”
Jacob smiled, let a little Humphrey Bogart creep into his voice. “Why, we are, sweetheart.”