I thought briefly that my reflection might bring too much attention to Rosie, and therefore Jonah, but it seemed unlikely. For one, the only record that she had died was in the original manifest from Earth Before. Any Elder—if they even noticed—would assume the original records had been incorrect and corrected by one of our many trips.
The next two reflection topics were harder, but after three hours I managed to get the table comp to accept as unique contributions the devolving of humanity into a more animalistic state in the face of imminent death and the idea that the majority of the girls chose to have control over how they died.
Everyone else’s eyes were still trained on their comps, fingers nudging observations and typing reflections, with the exception of Oz, who had finished and left an hour ago. He’d probably been sitting alone in his room being boring and ruminating on these reflections since we’d gotten back from New York, wondering if one might be his ticket into the Hope Chest. Aside from his unauthorized trip to England, of course.
I got up and stretched, shaking out the kinks in my legs and neck as I paced the floor, searching for the single red dot roaming outside the Archives, which would have to be Oz’s. The more nonchalant I acted, the more Analeigh’s suspicious gaze burned between my shoulder blades.
When I finally found Oz, he wasn’t in the mess hall or the gardens or the dormitories. His dot disappeared from the travel chamber, then blinked a moment later in Canada, 1934 CE.
What in the System was that boy up to? Whatever it was, he could have used a handy dandy chip like the one Jonah handed me.
My Historian training, coded into my DNA as deeply as my attraction to Caesarion, demanded to know why he’d interfered in England. He changed something. I just didn’t know what. Or why.
If I cross-checked the places he’d gone, maybe a common thread would show up.
A quick press of his dot displayed bio data, and another punch pulled up a two-week history, which I transferred to my locked file before I slid back onto my stool across the table from Analeigh. I ignored her stare and after a moment, she heaved a sigh and returned to her reflection.
Two thousand years ago, someone would have had to flip through volumes upon dusty volumes of actual books to piece together a connection between thirteenth-century Mongolia, eighteenth-century London, and twentieth-century Canada. A thousand years ago, computers could have attempted the search, but the user still had too much influence as far as entering parameters.
I knew he’d gone to see James Puckle, inventor of the Puckle gun, in 1714. That was a start.
I punched in the dates and asked the table comp to find any historical connections, then picked at the chipped polish on my fingernails while it processed. Strange anachronisms, like fingernail polish that didn’t last longer than a few days, filled society in Genesis. Vanity was generally frowned upon, so even though we could time travel, contemporary travel faster than the speed of light, and manufacture vitamin-packed synthetic food, things like the polish, hair dye, and makeup had never been improved. We could probably invent a way to permanently change the color of our nails or hair if the scientists committed a couple of days to the project.
I frowned at my hands. Sometimes I wished they had done the nail polish.
The table comp beeped twice and then displayed a short list of possible connections between the three times and places, giving me a simple, glaring answer. All three were instrumental in the development of guns and ammunition.
The Chinese had invented gunpowder, and it had been introduced to the Western world during the Mongolian invasions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1934, John Garand of Canada had developed the first assault rifle. It said nothing about the Puckle gun being invented in 1717 even though it had been in the Archives the other day when I’d followed Oz—it had only displayed for me during the observation.
And now it was gone.
The memory of him shoving that woman right into James Puckle flashed through my mind. My fingers trembled as I pulled up the man’s biography with a few punches. Nothing about his inventing a gun. He’d married a woman named Mary and had children, which matched the information the glasses had given me the other day. Then he’d married again, only … I felt sure his second wife’s name hadn’t been Elira. It had been something English.
A click on the second wife’s name brought up nothing but their wedding photo. It was the woman from the street, the one Oz had shoved into Puckle’s path.
There was a paragraph on why their union had been recorded—she had been a Muslim from the region that would become Albania, and their union had changed Puckle’s rather rigid, vocal outlook on Muslims as mortal enemies of his own beloved Catholic Church.
There had to have been more about Puckle in the Archives previously, about why and how he’d invented that machine gun. Violence and weapons were one of the five major contributors to our evacuation from Earth Before, so anything related to firearm development would have been cataloged.
Oz’s actions had apparently wiped it from the record.
Because of his interference, Mr. Puckle had met Elira instead of Nice Catholic Girl, and it had erased the desire to create advanced weaponry from his mind.
Cold fingers made of fear gripped the back of my neck. How many other things had changed because that gun had never been invented? It seemed like it should be a good thing, slowing down the progress of weapons development, except it didn’t matter now. That wasn’t the reason Historians were allowed access to the past—not to change it or try to repair mistakes. We couldn’t fix history. All we could do was make sure fatal errors didn’t happen again here in Genesis.
Oz had heard the same lectures as the rest of us all of these years. His father was an Elder, for Pete’s sake. What did they know that the rest of us didn’t?
I swiped the search results away, pecking with my fingertips through files on the development of weapons, unsure what exactly I was looking for until I found an early reflection by Minnie Gatling. For the first time, I realized she and her sister descended from the Gatlings, a family instrumental in the development of guns in America. My instinct insisted that information and Oz’s travels might be connected, but my feeble human brain struggled to connect the dots.
Minnie wrote this particular reflection after visiting a shooting in a Colorado movie theater—it was a trip we no longer took as apprentices because the spray of bullets was unpredictable and hard to map. A Historian overseer had been shot during an observation trip about twenty years ago, and though he hadn’t died, we now observed either a shooting at a Columbine high school, in an Australian shopping center, or on the Gaza strip for our lesson on weaponry in the hands of civilians.
Young Minnie’s reflection made it clear why she’d been chosen to oversee—the writing was concise, the scene laid out with a keen eye—but her reflections came off perfunctory. She wasn’t the ideal reflector, being unwilling to delve beneath the surface the way Oz loved to do.
“It is an interesting development that weapons meant for military defense and armed militia have found their way into the hands of private citizens, and in a world that no longer requires one to regularly defend their person, family, or nation. So many wish to blame the machinery itself, which I think is incorrect. My own ancestor was instrumental in the development of the Gatling gun, and some of our contemporaries have hated me on his behalf, but it’s not the weapons that pose a threat. It is, and always has been, the nature of humanity that’s at fault.”
Hated her? Hate didn’t happen in Genesis. Did it?
I paused and looked over my shoulder, sure one of the Elders would show up any second, ready to hand out a sanction for snooping. No one came, though, and I remembered that I was a Historian, too. Maybe just an apprentice, and maybe off on a tangent that had nothing to do with today’s assignment, but our Elders encouraged exploration and knowledge. We could spend as much free time in the Archives as we could stomach. Oz practically lived in here, a fact that would have inspired annoyance a week ago. Now, I was thinking he had reasons for holing up that went beyond taking the nerd recluse lifestyle to the extreme. Feeling more confident, I returned to Minnie’s reflection, interested to see where her argument was headed.