Unhappenings (20 page)

I felt my forehead. Warm, tacky. Great. I managed to stand.

“What’s your name?”

“Graham,” I said. It was a reflex, and I almost corrected myself. Then I remembered how surprised he was that day he came to arrest me, to see that I was Nigel Walden. We talked for about two minutes, long enough for him to see that I was not in any danger, or presenting any to others. I dropped a few details about being an MIT student, hoping that in the half-light of the street lamps it would be less obvious that I was twenty-five, not nineteen. He let me go with some sort of cliché fatherly advice.

I found a coffee shop and considered ordering something hot until I remembered I had no access to my 2092 money anymore, and my 2144 money probably wouldn’t read. Instead, I went to the bathroom, cleaned myself up, calmed myself down, and said, “I would like to go back to my apartment now.” That time it worked.

t took nearly a year, but Una finally caught up with me.

“Hey, stranger.” I found her waiting for me in the lobby of my building, at the end of the day. She had evidently been chatting with Wendy.

“Hey, yourself. What took you so long?”

“Is this a friend of yours?” asked Wendy.

Una smirked. “Something like that.” The taunt had a predictably melancholic effect on Wendy, with whom I still felt unresolved.

“Cousins,” I amended.

“Oh!” said Wendy, in a respite from her little funk. I wondered how long this was going to be an issue. “Have fun!” she added cheerfully as we walked out.

“Where are we going?” A lot had happened to me since the last time I had seen Una at any stage of her life, and I wasn’t entirely sure I was up for a new adventure.

“Anywhere we can get a sandwich,” she said. “I’m famished. Also: cousins?”

I sighed. “Don’t ask.”

Una gave me a wide-eyed, curious look, and glanced back over her shoulder. “Security desk girl? Seriously?”

I didn’t care for that. “What’s wrong with security desk girl?’

I thought it a simple question, but Una pondered it. “Oh. Yeah. Well, nothing technically, I guess.”

“Whatever the hell that means. It’s moot anyway. I called it off before it went anywhere. Can we not talk about it?”

“Sure,” she said. We walked in silence for a bit before she asked, “How long has it been since you saw me?”

“Close to a year. You?”

“Four years.”

I tried to assess her age. She seemed early twenties. “That was the time I named you Una.”

She nodded. “I kind of grew up since then. We have a lot to talk about.”

We stopped at a bagel shop. I ordered coffee, Una ordered a sandwich, and we found a booth.

“How did you even find me?” I asked. “I thought this far in the future I might have dropped off your radar.”

“It’s still my past,” she said.

“Point taken. Hey, I figured out how to make the thing in my arm work.”

“I know. Actually, it figured that out, but I guess it amounts to the same thing. Jumping here severed the link between our modules, so it grew itself a nervous system and latched onto your spine. I should probably remember to warn you about that when I finally give it to you.”

“You won’t remember,” I said. “Can I assume that’s what the God-awful pain in my arm was?”

She winced. “Yeah. That’s supposed to be done under an anesthetic. Sorry.”

I shrugged. “I survived. Are you here to take me back?”

“What? No. No, where and when you go is up to you now.”

“So, you’re just here to visit?”

She thought for a moment. “Yeah, I guess so. Sort of. I just… I got my assignment.” She stopped there.

“I don’t know what that means,” I said. I had gotten used to reminding her when she told me something she thought I already knew. Living out of sync with her was like that. Evidently at this age, she wasn’t quite as used to it herself.

“Really? Two years of jumps and fixes and I never once told you why?”

“Nope. Are you going to tell me now?”

“Oh, wow,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah.” She took a bite of her sandwich, and I gave her time to collect her thoughts. “My job is to fix things in the time stream that have been changed. I think I can tell you that much.”

“That much I already worked out. I take it you haven’t started yet?”

She gave me a sheepish look. “No. My first jump is today. I’m supposed to be on it right now.”

“But you came here instead? Why?”

“Because I’m nervous. You and I were friends, and then we kind of weren’t. I knew a lot of things I couldn’t tell you, and there was this other version of me taking you on time trips, and she knew things even I didn’t know, and she scared me, and now I’m her, and I know those things, and it makes me feel like the jumps I made to you when I was a kid were a horrible idea, and now I have to go back there, and I can’t say any of this stuff to you when I get there and it’s already making me crazy.” She stopped there, and fidgeted.

“You’re here for advice. You want my help with this.”

She nodded.

“Oh, my,” I said. “This is new.” I leaned across the table and took her hand. “Listen, every time you jumped in and whisked me away somewhere was a total adventure for me. You should know I puked the first few times, but once I got past that, it was just a ride. I was always delighted to see you, and we always got along.”

She nodded again, but she was biting her lip.

“All right, there’s also this: I have met a lot of versions of you at a lot of different points in your life, and I know there’s something dark coming. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know how much you know about it right now, but I do know that it’s not going to be a thing for me during those two years. I’m sure there will come a time when things are not going to be as pretty as they are right now between us, but that’s in both of our futures, and hopefully a long way off.”

After a beat, she said softly, “I don’t know what it is either. Not yet. But I know it’s coming.”

“Well, it doesn’t come when I’m at MIT, so go have fun with this.”

“Thank you.” She smiled, and squeezed my hand.

“You’re welcome, Athena. Now quit playing hooky and go do your job.”

Her smile faded, and she slowly pulled her hand back.

“I thought I was still Una. Am I Athena now?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you didn’t like Una.”

“I didn’t. Why Athena?”

“Because it turns out time travel is my baby. That’s why I’m here. This is my big project, even though I don’t understand it yet. And you were my first visitor from the future, using a technology I made happen. It was like you sprang fully armored—”

“Right out of your head,” she finished. Hearing her say it out loud, it suddenly seemed like an incredibly insensitive and egocentric joke. I was better off calling her Susan.

“If you don’t like it—”

“No,” she interrupted. “It’s good. It’s a good name. Better than Una, anyway. You can call me that for now.”

She got up, hugged me, walked out, and blipped into my past. I wondered which of our trips was this first one she was about to take. She never seemed new at this. Then I reflected on this conversation and wondered how much of that bravado was a result of the talk we just had. It felt entertainingly recursive. But that was well before I learned not to be entertained by causality loops.

n December, nearly a year after I first arrived, I finally ventured out to the local public library. I was curious what library science looked like in the future. Like most of my experiences, it turned out to be more like my home time than unlike it. The terminals in the main stacks were arranged differently, presumably to satisfy whatever ergonomic sensibilities were the norm at that time, and every screen was embedded in the polished wood tables and lecterns I had come to find so pleasing to the eye. Apart from screen placement and aesthetic concerns, there was nothing to set this experience apart from what I would have seen in 2092. If anything, the most striking thing about it was how different it was from every other 2144 environment I had been in so far; being a library, none of the terminals were voice activated. Seeing all those fingers brushing against all that glass in near silence was ironically nostalgic.

Contrary to the predictions of every futurist for the last hundred years, books were also still around. They were of course oddities, and as with my library back home, secreted away in an obscure and rarely visited chamber. Nevertheless, I was amused to discover this print collection to be even larger than the one I used to frequent in 2092 when I needed quiet time. I was also delighted to discover Athena there waiting for me. It had been three weeks since I sent her off to my college-aged self with plans to escort him on time travel errands. When I came in the room, her back was to me, and her blonde hair was draped down the back of a black leather biker jacket, quite a change of pace from the usual denim. She appeared engrossed in a book. I walked up and tapped her on the shoulder.